/include disclaimer.std


The thoughts and memes below are not necessarily those held by the 
web page author at any particular time.  Maybe some other time, but
not any particular time.








Words to Live By.



OK, so you're a Ph.D.  Just don't touch anything.





What this country needs is a good five dollar plasma weapon.





People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.





Walk softly and carry a megawatt laser.





The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the
average man can see better than he can think.





For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
                -- R. Clopton





Whatever is not nailed down is mine.  What I can pry loose is not nailed down.
                -- Collis P. Huntingdon






Intolerance is the last defense of the insecure.





For perfect happiness, remember two things:
        (1) Be content with what you've got.
        (2) Be sure you've got plenty.





"A witty saying proves nothing."
                -- Voltaire

"A witless saying proves even less."
		-- I. Jordan





Jone's Motto:
        Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.





Children seldom misquote you.  In fact, they usually repeat word for
word what you shouldn't have said.





Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter.  He'll come in handy if
you run out of food.
                -- Dean McLaughlin.





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





All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.





The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it.
                -- Glaser and Way





Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head. 





"Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense"





Don't hit a man when he's down -- kick him; it's easier.





Beware of self-styled experts: an ex is a has-been, and a spurt is a
drip under pressure.





Insanity is hereditary.  You get it from your kids.





"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence.
There's a knob called `brightness', but it doesn't work."
                -- Gallagher





If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it.
                -- Arthur Kasspe





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.





If at first you don't succeed....remove all evidence that you tried.





Ray's Rule of Precision:
        Measure with a micrometer.  Mark with chalk.  Cut with an axe.






Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.







Rights, Freedom, The Constitution, etc.



If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad,
he should see how bad it is with representation.





What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.





"Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex."

(Where there is no police, there is no speed limit.)
                -- Roman Law, trans. Petr Beckmann (1971)






"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."
                -- H.G. Wells





"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."            
                   -- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801.  




"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit
longer."
                -- Henry Kissinger





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





... 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





"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
                -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759






Democracy, n.:
        A government of the masses.  Authority derived through mass
meeting or any other form of direct expression.  Results in mobocracy.
Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate,
whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion,
prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
                -- U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932),
                   since withdrawn.






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.
                -- Frank Hague (1896-1956)





"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








Dave Barry




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"





        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"





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"





"I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the
kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled
substances being in widespread use.  Back then, there were no
restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we
made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given
powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative
nerve disease."
                -- Dave Barry, "The Snake"






                The Three Major Kind of Tools

* Tools for hittings 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 tool that uses
  any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.)
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"






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?"






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"





        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 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"






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"






"I have come up with a sure-fire concept for a hit television show,
which would be called `A Live Celebrity Gets Eaten by a Shark'."
                -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"






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"








George Carlin




If you take an Oriental person and spin him around several times, does he    
become disoriented?                                                             

                                                                                
If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland       
called Holes?                                                                   

                                                                                
Why do we say something is out of whack? What's a whack?                     

                                                                                
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?                   

                                                                                
If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?                                 

                                                                                
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?                                

                                                                                
When someone asks you, "A penny for your thoughts," and you put your two     
cents in, what happens to the other penny?                                      

                                                                                
Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?                   


Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to begin with.                                                                           

                                                                                
When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?                       

                                                                                
Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who       
drives a race car not called a racist?                                          

                                                                                
Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?                                

                                                                                
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?                           

                                                                                
Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety one?                               

                                                                                
"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language.         
Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?                                

                                                                                
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow         
that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged,        
models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?             

                                                                                
If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP?                 

                                                                                
Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks?                                 

                                                                                
What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?           

                                                                                
I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more     
as they get older, then it dawned on me .. they're cramming for their final exam.                                                                           

                                                                                
I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons       
and forks so I wondered what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?                

                                                                                
Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are       
we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they just put their pictures        
on the postage stamps so the mailmen could look for them while they             
delivered the mail?                                                             

                                                                                
If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are         
the others here for?                                                            

                                                                                
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.                   

                                                                                
Whatever happened to Preparations A through G?                              









Computers & Programming



Usage: fortune -P [] -a [xsz] [Q: [file]] [rKe9] -v6[+] dataspec ...
inputdir





"If just one piece of mail gets lost, well, they'll just think they
forgot to send it.  But if *two* pieces of mail get lost, hell, they'll
just think the other guy hasn't gotten around to answering his mail.
And if *fifty* pieces of mail get lost, can you imagine it, if *fifty*
pieces of mail get lost, why they'll think someone *else* is broken!
And if 1Gb of mail gets lost, they'll just *know* that Arpa is down and
think it's a conspiracy to keep them from their God given right to
receive Net Mail ..."
                -- Leith (Casey) Leedom




        
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 ...





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





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"





From the Pro 350 Pocket Service Guide, p. 49, Step 5 of the
instructions on removing an I/O board from the card cage, comes a new
experience in sound:

        5.  Turn the handle to the right 90 degrees.  The pin-spreading
            sound is normal for this type of connector.





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.





"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







99 blocks of crud on the disk, 
99 blocks of crud! 
You patch one bug, 
Compile it again: 
100 blocks of crud on the disk! 

100 blocks of crud on the disk, 
100 blocks of crud! 
You patch one bug, 
Compile it again: 
101 blocks of crud on the disk!






			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.





        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.





                        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






Eleanor Rigby
        Sits at the keyboard
        And waits for a line on the screen
Lives in a dream
Waits for a signal
        Finding some code
        That will make the machine do some more.
What is it for?

All the lonely users, where do they all come from?







Machine-Independent, adj.:
        Does not run on any existing machine.





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?






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





"Beware the software rot, my son!
The faults that bite, the jobs that thrash!
Beware the broken pipe, and shun
The frumious system crash!"





How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None: "We'll fix it in software."

How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None: "We'll document it in the manual."

How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None: "The user can work it out."






Here I sit, broken-hearted,
All logged in, but work unstarted.
First net.this and net.that,
And a hot buttered bun for net.fat.

The boss comes by, and I play the game,
Then I turn back to net.flame.
Is there a cure (I need your views),
For someone trapped in net.news?

I need your help, I say 'tween sobs,
'Cause I'll soon be listed in net.jobs.

        
If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end.
                -- Bert Whitney





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.






"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"







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
}





/earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can.






[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.






The fortune program is supported, in part, by user contributions and by
a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities.





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...





At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on
the computer.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce
 
---------------------------
Bruce Warrington
American National Can Corp.
Chicago, IL USA
bruce@ancc.com
---------------------------
${opinions} == "my_own" && !those.of.ancc  






At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial
challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
                -- The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985







How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to
Dayton?
                -- Brian Boyle, UNIX/WORLD's First Annual Salary Survey





101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR
        (1)  Scarecrow for centipedes
        (2)  Dead cat brush
        (3)  Hair barrettes
        (4)  Cleats
        (5)  Self-piercing earrings
        (6)  Fungus trellis
        (7)  False eyelashes
        (8)  Prosthetic dog claws
        (9)  Boobytrap for barefoot enemies
       (10)  Stickpin substitute for corkboards
       (11)  Threadholder for miniature sewing kit
       (12)  Mascot for technical school
       (13)  Christmas tree ornament
       (14)  Photograph stand
       (15)  Coatrack for Lilliputians
       (16)  Prison for baby beetles
       (17)  'Bed of Nails' for Lilliputians
       (18)  Corkboard 4-corner paper stickpin
       (19)  Cake decorations
       (20)  B-B holder
        .
        .
        .
        (99)  Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors)
        (100) Killer velcro
        (101) Currency






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




The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity
-- the rest is overhead for the operating system.





Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly
misleading.  Debug only code.
                -- Dave Storer





        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 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"





You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of
supercomputers.
                -- Steven Feiner

You can tell how much further we have to go when C is the language of 
the average applications programmer.
		-- Ian Jordan





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





You have a tendency to feel you are superior to most computers.





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!
        




"The Computer made me do it."





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"





#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





Turnaucka's Law:
        The attention span of a computer is only as long as its
electrical cord.




        
UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on
Tue Nov  5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch).
                -- Andy Tannenbaum





God rest ye CS students now,
Let nothing you dismay.
The VAX is down and won't be up,
Until the first of May.
The program that was due this morn,
Won't be postponed, they say.

        Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
        Comfort and joy,
        Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

The bearings on the drum are gone,
The disk is wobbling, too.
We've found a bug in Lisp, and Algol
Can't tell false from true.
And now we find that we can't get
At Berkeley's 4.2.

        (chorus)





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





   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);

                -- C code which reverses the bits in a word.





On-line, adj.:
        The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a
computer.






                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.





The notion of a "record" is an obsolete remnant of the days of the
80-column card.
                -- Dennis M. Ritchie

...this from the man who gave us the programming language "C", named after
the grade he received after submitting this language as his graduate
class thesis project.
		-- Ian J. E. Jordan





Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of APL, I shall
fear no evil, for I can string six primitive monadic and dyadic
operators together.
                -- Steve Higgins





Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one
instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every
program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.





"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."







Psychology



Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?





Keep emotionally active.  Cater to your favorite neurosis.








Murphy



Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.





Ehrman's Commentary:
        (1) Things will get worse before they get better.
        (2) Who said things would get better?





Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.







Mathematics



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.





If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?





"If value corrupts then absolute value corrupts absolutely"






Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within.





I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(phi)!
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"






In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"





I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"






Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're
guessing.





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 three 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.





"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





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)





A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
        Divided by seven,
        Plus five time eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more.





The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to
chance.





"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."
                -- St. Augustine


"The good mathematician should beware fundamentalist religionists and all
those who make empty prophecies.  The danger already exists that they have
made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the
bonds of ignorance and myth."
		-- Ian Jordan







Hunter S. Thompson



      _
  _  / \                           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"






The scum also rises.
                -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson








Ernest Rutherford



You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than
about 10^12 to 1.
                -- Ernest Rutherford





The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the
`social sciences' is: some do, some don't.
                -- Ernest Rutherford







Definitions



Gold, n.:
        A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution.  It
is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who
immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold
hasn't done anything to them.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"





Commitment, n.:
        Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs.
The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.





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"





Idiot.  n,

	---A member of a large and powerful human tribe whose influence 
on events is significant and far reaching.





Gyroscope, n.:
        A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also
free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each
other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two
mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the
other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus
offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any
torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin.
                -- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary





Aphorism, n.:
        A concise, clever statement.
Afterism, n.:
        A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.
                -- James Alexander Thom





Etymology, n.:
        Some early etymological scholars came up with derivations that
were hard for the public to believe.  The term "etymology" was formed
from the Latin "etus" ("eaten"), the root "mal" ("bad"), and "logy"
("study of").  It meant "the study of things that are hard to swallow."
                -- Mike Kellen





Fairy Tale, n.:
        A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.





Brain, n.:
        The apparatus with which we think that we think.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"





Begathon, n.:
        A multi-day event on public television, used to raise money so
you won't have to watch commercials.






Sweater, n.:
        A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly.






Fog Lamps, n.:
        Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the
fronts of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate that the
driver's brain is in a fog.

See also "Idiot Lights".





Impossible, adj.:
        (1) I wouldn't like it and when it happens I won't approve;
(2) I can't be bothered; (3) God can't be bothered.  Meaning (3) may
perhaps be valid but the others are 101% whaledreck.
                -- Chad C. Mulligan, "The Hipcrime Vocab"





        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





Peace, n.:
        In international affairs, a period of cheating between two
periods of fighting.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"





California, n.:
        From Latin "calor", meaning "heat" (as in English "calorie" or
Spanish "caliente"); and "fornia'" for "sexual intercourse" or
"fornication."  Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex."
                -- Ed Moran





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







Grim




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 BC.





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 Xercies, devoured by mice.
Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in, 
Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin.
                -- Edward Gorey "The Gastly Crumb Tines"





"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."







Logic



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





"Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong."






Larkinson's Law:
        All laws are basically false.





For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they
like.
                -- Abraham Lincoln





"I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure."





This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't.
                -- Hofstadter





Help stamp out and abolish redundancy.





All extremists should be taken out and shot.





Arbitrary systems, pl.n.:
        Systems about which nothing general can be said, save "nothing
general can be said."





Down with categorical imperative!







W. C. Fields



Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on
people.
                -- W. C. Fields






Don:    I didn't know you had a cousin Penelope, Bill!  Was she
        pretty?
W. C.:  Well, her face was so wrinkled it looked like seven miles of
        bad road.  She had so many gold teeth, Don, she use to have to
        sleep with her head in a safe.  She died in Bolivia.
Don:    Oh Bill, it must be hard to lose a relative.
W. C.:  It's almost impossible.
                -- W. C. Fields, from "The Further Adventures of Larson
                   E. Whipsnade and other Tarradiddles"







Christmas



        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.





                '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...





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"





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







Enlightenment & Philosophy



A great many people believe they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
                -- William James





If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you
really make them think they'll hate you.





You are here:
                ***
                ***
             *********
              *******
               *****
                ***
                 *

                 But you're not all there.





A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.





Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life.





"I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance."






"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go
away".
                -- Philip K. Dick





Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier





The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the
combination is locked up in the safe.
                -- Peter DeVries





Reality is a cop-out for people who can't handle drugs.





"Life may have no meaning -- or even worse, it may have a meaning of
which I disapprove."





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.






"Nirvana?  Thats the place where the powers that be and their friends
hang out.
                -- Zonker Harris





"I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very
reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment."
                -- Gotama Buddha





"I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should."
                -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe





What does "it" mean in the sentence "What time is it?"?





Disclaimer: 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.)







Politics & Law



In Seattle, Washington, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon that
is over six feet in length.





When Marriage is Outlawed,
Only Outlaws will have Inlaws.





"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
                -- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)





A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest
man a century.





A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide
who has the better lawyer.
                -- Robert Frost





District of Columbia pedestrians who leap over passing autos to escape
injury, and then strike the car as they come down, are liable for any
damage inflicted on the vehicle.






The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
                -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis







HR 3128.  Omnibus Budget Reconciliation, Fiscal 1986.  Martin, R-Ill.,
motion that the House recede from its disagreement to the Senate
amendment making changes in the bill to reduce fiscal 1986 deficits.
The Senate amendment was an amendment to the House amendment to the
Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the
bill.  The original Senate amendment was the conference agreement on
the bill.  Agreed to.
                -- Albuquerque Journal





There were in this country two very large monopolies.  The larger of
the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-
digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the
8-cent postcard.  The second was responsible for such things as the
transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity
stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative
feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching
systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the
first electrical digital computer, and the first communications
satellite.  Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the
telephone business?





Katz' Law:
        Man and nations will act rationally when all other
possibilities have been exhausted.





A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can
 only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote
 themselves largess out of the public treasury."
               - Alexander Tytler, 18th century Scottish historian




DINGELL: There are places in the world at the present time where we are
         having to artificially propagate oysters and clams.
HOFFMAN: You mean the oysters I buy are not nature's oysters?
DINGELL: They may or may not be natural.  The simple fact of the matter
         is that female oysters through their living habits cast out
         large amounts of seed and the male oysters cast out large
         amounts of fertilization ...
HOFFMAN: Wait a minute!  I do not want to go into that.  There are many
         teenagers who read The Congressional Record.
        




"I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent ability and
25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when the reverse could be
true."
                -- Harry Truman





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"




        
Demand the establishment of the government
in its rightful home at Disneyland.





"Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even
one which cannot be justified on any other grounds."
                -- J. Finnegan, USC.





"Text processing has made it possible to right-, left-, and center-justify
any idea . . . particularly political ideas . . . which could not
otherwise be justified on any other grounds."
		-- I. Jordan, CSC





Mitchell's Law of Committees:
        Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are
held to discuss it.





The true revolutionary's greatest accomplishment is not just overthrowing authority, but
plotting and executing his or her own overthrow once they have achieved it.

I. Jordan







Galileo



"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
                -- Galileo Galilei







Sex




"Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack."






Her locks an ancient lady gave
Her loving husband's life to save;
And men -- they honored so the dame --
Upon some stars bestowed her name.

But to our modern married fair,
Who'd give their lords to save their hair,
No stellar recognition's given.
There are not stars enough in heaven.





An innocent Maid from Penzance,
Decided to take just one chance;
She let herself go
In the lap of her beau -
And now all of her sisters are aunts.





I can feel for her because, although I have never been an Alaskan
prostitute dancing on the bar in a spangled dress, I still get very
bored with washing and ironing and dishwashing and cooking day after
relentless day.
                -- Betty MacDonald





Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts
avoiding you.
                -- The Old Farmer's Almanac





Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have
orgasms?  The answer is yes, they 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"







Bureaucracy



Bureaucrat, n.:
        A person who cuts red tape sideways.
                -- J. McCabe





The optimum committee has no members.
                -- Norman Augustine





When the government bureau's remedies don't match your problem, you
modify the problem, not the remedy.





Rule of Defactualization:
        Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.







Ted Turner



"Either lead, follow, or get out of the way."

		-- Ted Turner






"Nuclear war would really set back cable."
                -- Ted Turner






If I had any humility I would be perfect.
                -- Ted Turner







Wernher von Braun



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





Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
                -- Wernher von Braun







Ideas and Theories



Those of you who think you know everything are very annoying to those
of us who do.





"They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!"





Ideas don't stay in some minds very long because they don't like
solitary confinement.





"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.  If your ideas are any
good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
                -- Howard Aiken





"I didn't know it was impossible when I did it."







"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
                -- Vroomfondel, "Hitchhiker's Guide"





Yes, but every time I try to see things your way, I get a headache.





An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. 





The bigger the theory the better.





You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.





Don't let your mind wander -- it's too little to be let out alone.







Science




A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
                -- George Wald






Westheimer's Discovery:
        A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a
couple of hours in the library.





"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






Login name: jkoch                       In real life: John D. Koch
Directory: /home/jkoch                  Shell: /bin/tcsh
Never logged in.
No unread mail
Project: John last logged out from:deimos
Plan:
+========= "We came in Peace, for all Mankind." - Neil Armstrong ===========+
| |  .    o      __(')__      .                     ___---___        .      |  
|-O-       (')-//__l|l__\\               o       .--\        --.         .  |
| |           \O_\/lol\/_O__   .     .         ./.;_.\     __/~ \.          |
|       .     /O`. [ ]  ;O_L\                 /;  / `-'  __\    . \   *     |
| .          _\__\_[ ]_/__/_/     o          / ,--'     / .   .;   \        |
|_^/\__^--__/'l   l H l   l'\_______/\/\---/\____________---________|_______|
|/\^   ^  ^/_\l___l_H_l___l/_\    ^^ ^ '\ ^          ^   ---   John D. Koch |
|      -- /       '-H-`       \  --  -     -    --      jkoch@astro.umd.edu |
|--  __ ~~~        ~'~        ~~~-   University of Maryland at College Park |
+"Exploration is not a choice, really; its an imperative." - Michael Collins+






I went on to test the program in every way I could devise.  I strained
it to expose its weaknesses.  I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass
stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold.
I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be
absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had
developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case.
Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's
temperature to be less than absolute zero.  I had found an error.  I
chased down the error and fixed it.  Now I had improved the program to
the point where it would not run at all.
                -- George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black
                   Holes and the Fate of Stars"





1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight -- it's not just a good idea, it's
the law!





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





"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.  It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
                -- Johnny Hart





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





A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.
                -- Tennessee Williams





Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
                -- Don Vonada





"Faster, Better, Cheaper."  -- Dan Goldin

"Faster, Better, Cheaper:  pick two." -- Helen M. Hart.

"Faster, Better, Cheaper:  pick one." -- Ian J. E. Jordan.






Murphy's Law of Research:
        Enough research will tend to support your theory.







Ronald Reagan & his administration.



"Power corrupts.  Absolute power is kind of neat"
                -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987





"The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity
that would be clearly understood."
                -- Alexander Haig






Well, I would -- if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them
back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds,
or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive they
they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
                -- President Ronald Reagan, on the MX missile





Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.
                -- Ronald Reagan, famous movie star





[Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.
                -- Edwin Meese III





You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable
doubt.
                -- Ed Meese, on the Hinckley verdict





A general leading the State Department resembles  a dragon commanding
ducks.
                -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981







King George II



I AM MINDFUL OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH AND THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH. I
 ASSURED ALL FOUR OF THESE LEADERS THAT I KNOW THE DIFFERENCE, AND THAT DIFFERENCE IS THEY PASS
 THE LAWS AND I EXECUTE THEM." WASHINGTON, D.C., DEC. 18, 2000

THE LEGISLATURE'S JOB IS TO WRITE LAW. IT'S THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH'S JOB TO INTERPRET LAW."
 AUSTIN, TEXAS, NOV. 22, 2000

THEY MISUNDERESTIMATED ME."
 BENTONVILLE, ARK., NOV. 6, 2000

THERE'S AN OLD SAYING IN TENNESSEE -- I KNOW IT'S IN TEXAS, PROBABLY IN TENNESSEE...THAT SAYS, FOOL
 ME ONCE, SHAME ON...SHAME ON YOU. FOOL ME...YOU CAN'T GET FOOLED AGAIN. [9/17/2002]

"IT ISN'T POLLUTION THAT'S HARMING THE ENVIRONMENT. IT'S THE IMPURITIES IN OUR AIR AND WATER THAT ARE
 DOING IT."



Religion?



God made the world in six days, and was arrested on the seventh.





"Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context."





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.





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).





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"





                Gimmie That Old Time Religion

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!

We will follow Zarathustra,
Zarathustra like we use to,
I'm a Zarathustra booster,
And he's good enough for me!

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!

We will worship like the Druids,
Dancing naked in the woods,
Drinking strange fermented fluids,
And it's good enough for me!


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!

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: 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!





"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







Education



Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem.
Eng.  130 midterm.  Once again no student received a single point on
his exam.  Newell has now tossed five shutouts this quarter.  Newell's
earned exam average has now dropped to a phenomenal 30%





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.





"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"






                        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.





"If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything."
                -- A. L.





Graduate life: It's not just a job.  It's an indenture.





If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to
get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving
the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting
that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.  The
college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious
and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to
rally their jaded spirits.  I would have the studies elective.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure
interest in knowledge.  The wise instructor accomplishes this by
opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for
himself.  The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for
boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson









Other Laws, Principles, etc.



Mophobia, n.:
        Fear of being verbally abused by a Mississippian.





A real person has two reasons for doing anything ... a good reason and
the real reason.





No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it.






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.





Pohl's law:
        Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.





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.





Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.





The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are
correct.
                -- Ralph Hartley





Finagle's Third Law:
        In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct,
        beyond all need of checking, is the mistake

Corollaries:
        (1) Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
        (2) The first person who stops by, whose advice you really
            don't want to hear, will see it immediately.





Law of Probable Dispersal:  
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.  





Hofstadter's Law:
        It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take
Hofstadter's Law into account.





Weiner's Law of Libraries:
        There are no answers, only cross references.





Sturgeon's Law:
        90% of everything is crud.

Jordan's correction of Sturgeon's Law:
	> 90% of everything is crud.





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.





The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the
number of participants.
                -- Adam Walinsky





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.





Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
        The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
to ..... to ........ uh ..............







Economics & Business



Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined
them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?





Neckties strangle clear thinking.
                -- Lin Yutang





The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
choose from.
                -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum







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





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.






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





"You should, without hesitation, pound your typewriter into a
plowshare, your paper into fertilizer, and enter agriculture"
                -- Business Professor, University of Georgia





The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on
weather forecasters.
                -- Jean-Paul Kauffmann
        




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.





Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
                -- John Kenneth Galbraith





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"





Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a
receipt.





Money is the root of all wealth.







Samuel Clemens



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





But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!
                -- Mark "The Bard" Twain





"I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a
week sometimes to make it up."
                -- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"





Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time
to reform.
                -- Mark Twain





The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid
prejudice.
                -- Mark Twain





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.





"A Plan for Improving the English Spelling"                                            
                                                                                       
                                                                                       
        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.                                                       
                                                                                       
                                                        Mark Twain                     







H. L. Mencken



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





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





H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L.
Mencken -- there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
                -- Maxwell Bodenheim







Journalism



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






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.





The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper
                -- Thomas Jefferson


The commercial is the most truthful part of radio talkshows.
		-- Ian Jordan







Not yet classified:


        

Flying saucers on occasion
        Show themselves to human eyes.
Aliens fume, put off invasion
        While they brand these tales as lies.  






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.





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





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!





Question:
Man Invented Alcohol,
God Invented Grass.
Who do you trust?






Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged
demo.




 
"I bet the human brain is a kludge."
                -- Marvin Minsky




      
The makers may make
and the users may use,
but the fixers must fix
with but minimal clues





We're only in it for the volume.
                -- Black Sabbath





"I like being single.  I'm always there when I need me."
                -- Art Leo





"I have the simplest tastes.  I am always satisfied with the best."
                -- Oscar Wilde





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





"Gosh that takes me back ... or forward.  That's the trouble with time
travel, you never can tell."
                -- Dr. Who






... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror,
and you would not have been informed.





HELP!  MY TYPEWRITER IS BROKEN!
                -- E. E. CUMMINGS





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.





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





Of *course* I know it all.  I just can't remember it all at once.





Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction
listen to weather forecasts and economists?
                -- Kelvin Throop III





!ROTINOM RETUPMOC A EDISNI DEPPART M'I  !!!PLEH






If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would
be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call
you to say they had a nice time.  Now you'll be be expected to throw
another party next year.

What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guest wake up
several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've
been indicted for anything.  You want your guests to be so anxious to
avoid a recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning
parties of their own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from
having another one ...

If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless
your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas
through your living room window.  As host, your job is to make sure
that they don't arrest anybody.  Or if they're dead set on arresting
someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ...





Why bother building more nuclear warheads until we use the ones we 
already have?





        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





A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no
responsibility at the other.





i'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be
living apart.
                -- e. e. cummings





               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






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.





It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.
                -- Phil White





Jim Walsh:  "You don't respect your elders much, do you?"

Ian Jordan:  "Yes i do.  I just don't show it."

			(circa 1980)






"I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked me 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.





H:      If a 'GOBLIN (HOB) waylays you,
        Slice him up before he slays you.
        Nothing makes you look a slob
        Like running from a HOB'LIN (GOB).
                -- The Roguelet's ABC





        "I cannot read the fiery letters," said Frodo in a quavering
voice.
        "No," Said Gandalf, "but I can.  The letters are Elvish, of
course, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which
I will not utter here.  They are lines of a verse long known in
Elven-lore:

        "This Ring, no other, is made by the elves,
        Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves.
        Ruler of creeper, mortal, and scallop,
        This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop.
        The Power almighty rests in this Lone Ring.
        The Power, alrighty, for doing your Own Thing.
        If broken or busted, it cannot be remade.
        If found, send to Sorhed (with postage prepaid)."





Who messed with my anti-paranoia shot?





"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





I think that I shall never see 
A thing as lovely as a tree. 
But as you see the trees have gone 
They went this morning with the dawn.  
A logging firm from out of town 
Came and chopped the trees all down.  
But I will trick those dirty skunks 
And write a brand new poem called 'Trunks'. 





        WARNING TO ALL PERSONNEL:

Firings will continue until morale improves.





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.





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.





Es brilig war.  Die schlichte Toven
        Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mumsige Burggoven
        Dir mohmen Rath ausgraben.
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"





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.





Q:  Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together?
A:  To prevent the sensible ones from going home.





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).





Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.  It's already
tomorrow in Australia.
                -- Charles Schultz





Q:  How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A:  Two.  One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub
    with brightly colored machine tools.





The first time, it's a KLUDGE!
The second, a trick.
Later, it's a well-established technique!
                -- Mike Broido, Intermetrics





I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick
and tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this
country are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people
in this country are fed up with being sick and tired.  I'm certainly
not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
                -- Monty Python






        "For I perceive that behind this seemingly unrelated sequence
of events, there lurks a singular, sinister attitude of mind."

        "Whose?"

        "MINE! HA-HA!"







	"I love deadlines--I especially love the whooshing noise they
make as they go by."

					--Douglas Adams