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\Q: What is the smallest part in a LADA?
A: The owners brain.
\Q: Why do LADA's have heated rear windscreens?
A: To keep your hands warm when your pushing them.
\Q: How do you double the value of a LADA?
A: Fill it up with petrol.
\Q: What's pink, 18 inches long, and makes a grown woman scream?
A: Crib death.
\Q: Why won't Mexicans let their children marry Puerto Ricans?
A: Because their children would be to lazy to steal.
\Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but whips and chains excite me!
\Assembly language:
Language of choice for Scrabble players. allows the smallest and
fastest routines to be written in five months instead of one. Extra
points for variable names rich in Q's and Z's.
\Basic:
Language of choice by non-programmers.
\Bulletin board:
Mechanism to allow the socially autistic to masquerade as real people
and communicate with one another by posting clever near-random
commentary on a remote computer.
\C:
Short for "chutzpah", a quality needed before tacling even the more
simplest program with this language. C is also the symbol for the
speed of light, but that has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly
one can learn or use the language. C encourages self-documenting
structured programming through construct such as
(*wnd->func)(*++addr)
which means call the routine whose address is stored in the "func"
part of the structure pointed to by "wnd", and pass to it the contents
of the cell pointed to by the pointer in "addr" after it (the pointer,
not the contents) has been incremented. Or something like that.
\Clone:
An acronym standing for "Copied Low-cost Optimal Non-IBM Equipment".
Often used as a cure for the dreaded Big Blue. Texas, land of
independent self-styled individualists, is current "Siliclone Valley"
where imagination is limited only by IBM.
\Consultant:
Unemployed computer expert.
\Demo:
A method of program testing that tends to isolate numerous
non-reproducible program behaviors. Fixing said abnormalities is
difficult because they only appear when the debugging software is not
loaded, and when severeal potential buyers are watching.
\EISA:
Chinese for "we copied it without duplicating it". Inscrutable
alternative to Micro Channel Architecture, (MCA)>; backed by everybody
but IBM.
\Gang of Nine:
Originally the Gang of None, this is a group of 100+ coming-of-age
companies marked by their new-found willingness to tell IBM jokes in
public, their unwillingness to pay IBM bus royalties. Answer: EISA,
MCA, and Greyhound. Question: name two dogs and a bus.
\Hackers:
A programmer who grew up tapping out Morse Code on a ham radio, and
has never forgiven IBM for not putting a front switch panel on the
original PC.
\IBM:
Standards proposing organization. IBM develops hardware architectures,
and builds slow underpowered prototypes for other companies to improve
upon. See Clone.
\Local Area Network (LAN):
High-tech cousin of the mainframe nominally designed to allow people
toshare information and snoop into personal letters and resumes queued
for the laser printer. True rationale is to (a) sell hardware, and (b)
build data processing (DP) empires. When a DP operation runs smoothly,
it gets no attention from money-laden-management. LAN's purchased by
"technology visionaries" to "increase power and future capacity"
guarantee anomalous problems for years to come. Tech-terrified
managersare told that bonuses "to keep our valuable people" and more
hardware budget are the only solutions to the problems. Blackmail buys
electronic mail.
\Micro Channel Architectures (MCA):
IBM's new bus that carries information in 32-bit packets. The first
bus developed solely by lawyers, it is considered copy-proof (the
theory being that no one would want anything created by lawyers). The
bus is actually 48 bits wide, but the lawyers take 1/3 of anything
they work on. A not-so-subtle attemt to limit the market to IBM.
\Microsoft:
Contract programming house for IBM, and primary sustainer of the clone
market. IBM pays MS to write fancy software, then MS tweaks it a
little, slaps the MS logo on it, and sells it to all the clone folks
so they can keep competing with IBM. There is no truth to the rumour
that former Mafioso procure the IBM contracts for MS. All products are
given generic names (Word, Project, Works, Windows, etc.) to (a)
confuse everybody unless (b) the name "Microsoft" is constantly
repeated. Made the founder $300,000,000+ in one day.
\NeXT:
Experimental computer backed by Ross Perot and powered by charisma.
The main problem is that few homes or offices have charisma outlets.
Name-wise reminiscent of the "The Last One", an old CP/M program
so-named because it was powerful enough to create all your future
application programs (making it the last program you would have to
buy). It was also powered by charisma.
\Novice:
A person who talks about learning Basic, and spend all of his/her time
trying to get into the joke and adult message bulletin boards.
\Ph.D:
A user with more sense than money. Ph.D's generally have elegant
solutions to problems that don's exist. The (top-down, of course)
solutions always work because they have never been programmed. (Stands
for piled high and deep, as in B.S., M.S., Ph.D = bull s..t,
more s..t, etc. ed.)
\A hooker accidently hits on a vice cop who's just about to go off-shift,
he really wants to avoid the paperwork of processing this bimbo now,
preferring to go home and eat his dinner. The hooker says: "Anything you
can name with 3 words, $100..eh?" The vice cop nods, but gives her an
address on a piece of paper and says: "How about tomorrow, this address -
same deal?" The tart agrees, and in fact shows up at the vice cop's house
the following day. The cop hands her $100, shows her his badge and says:
"Paint my house."
\Q: Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?
A: He had no guts!
\Kinky is using a feather, perverted is using the whole chicken.
\You know you've been spending too much time with a computer when your
friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a '++' to fix it.
\Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped desing. Unlike most
automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gage, nor any of the
numerous idiot lights wich plague the modern driver. Rather, if the
driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the
dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's
wrong."
\Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
\Capitalism is the uequal distribution of Wealth.
Cummunism is the equal distribution of Poverty.
\After the quake, you have the
Stanford _piecewise_ Linear Accelerator
\Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.
\The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants;
instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the
variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used
instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies
modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
\Reality is for people who can't handle Science Fiction.
\Forget about searching for the truth, settle for a good fantasy.
\Do unto your data that which you can undo.
\On a clear disk you can seek forever.
\"To be or not to be that is the question.":
any programmer knows the answer $2b or (not $2b) is $ff.
\Q: What is the Brooklyn alphabet?
A: Fuckin' A, fuckin' B, fuckin' C, etc.
\Q: What is the meaning of life?
A: Life is a fatal, sexually transmitted disease.
\A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
-- Herbert Prochnow
\Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start!
\Q: How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?
A:His lips are moving.
\Q: What is the difference between a deag dog in the road and a dead
lawyer in the road?
A: There are skid marks in front of the dog.
\Q: What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a lawyer?
A: An offer you can't understand.
\Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a vampire?
A: A vampire only sucks blood at night.
\The common symptoms of swine flu are: High fever, upset stomach,
occasional cramps and an irresistable urge to fuck in the mud.
\A black boy says to his mother:
"Mom, why do I have the biggest penis in the 2nd grade? Is it because
I'm black?"
She says:
"No. It's because you're seventeen."
\The three stages of man
Tri-weekly
Try-weekly
Try-weakly.
\Reporter to Mahatma Gandhi:
"Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?"
Gandhi:
"I think it would be a good idea."
\Q: What's pink and hard in the morning?
A: The Financial Times crossword.
\English Tourist: Hello. Do you farm around here?
Cornish Farmer: Aye.
English Tourist: Fantastic day isn't it?
Cornish Farmer: Aye.
English Tourist: Have you lived here all of your life?
Cornish Farmer: Not yet.
\Q: What's the most painful part of a sex change operation for a man?
A: The removal of the brain and the widening of the mouth!
\Q: What do you call a LADA with a turbo?
A: A Skoda.
\Q: What's red and silver and bumps into walls?
A: A baby with forks in its eyes.
\Q: What is brown and taps on the window?
A: A baby in a microwave.
\Q: What lies at the bottom of the sea and whimpers?
A: A nervous wreck.
\In the old days in Finland, all young men had to go through some rites
of passage to show that they were REAL FINNISH MEN. The usual set
consisted of three tests: 1) Empty a full bottle of vodka without pause,
2) Go out in the forest to kill a bear with bare hands, and 3) rape a
woman.
When Pekka had reached the age of the rites of passage, he had no
trouble at all with the vodka. He disappeared into the forest, and came
back three days later, with clothes torn and blood dripping from several
wounds. Then he said: "Now where's the woman I have to kill?"
\Fairy tales: horror stories for children to get them used to reality.
\Jury: Twelve people who determine which client has the better lawyer.
\A sailor walks into a bar with a wooden leg, hook hand and an eye patch
over his eye. He and the barman starts to talk:
Barman: "What happened to you?"
Sailor: "Well, a whale bit off my leg, I was in a sword fight and lost my
hand, and then a bird sh*t in my eyes."
Barman: "You don't lose your eye even if a bird sh*ts in it!"
Sailor: "It's easy when you have had the hook for only one week!!!"
\Q: What's six foot long, grey and floats in the ocean?
A: Moby's dick.
\On an airplane (probably in the first class) a man says to the
stewardess "I'll give you $5000 if I can bite your breast." The
stewardess is scared and goes to the captain and tells him about this.
But the captain says "$5000? Why not? Go for it!" So she sits on the
man's lap and he starts undressing her, touching her, fundling her,
kissing her ... (you name it). After ten minutes (or so) the stewardess
becomes impatient and says "Would you please bite my breast now?" But the
man says "Oh no, that's to expensive."
\The latest sports news:
Real Madrid 1 - Surreal Madrid Fish
\Q: What are the four words you don't want to hear while making love?
A: "Honey, I'm home!"
\Q: What's red and climb up a womans leg?
A: A homesick abortion.
\There was this man in a restaurant who had ordered some soup. But the
waiter kept him waiting (what else does a waiter do). The guy sitting
next to him *did* have a dish with soup in front of him on the table, but
he wasn't eating it. So our man takes this dish with soup and starts
eating. When he's almost finished he noticed a dirty hairy comb on the
bottom of the dish, so he pukes all the soup back into the dish.
Says the guy next to him: "That's just as far as I got."
\My wife just got pregnant ... She took seriously what was poked at her
in fun!
\Q: What is green, has four legs and would kill you if it fell out of a
tree?
A: A billiard table.
\Q: What's red and invisible?
A: Bloody Nothing!
\Q. What's red and read?
A: A sentence with a period.
\Jesus is on the ferry across the dead sea when the ferryman says "It'll
be 40 sestetrii (Roman coin) for the crossing."
"Bugger that," says Jesus, "I'll walk."
\Mary and Joseph at the door to the inn:
"Do you have a room for the night?"
Innkeeper: "You've got to be joking - it's Christmas!"
\Children at the front seat cause accidents,
accidents at the back seat cause children!
\A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants
to go.
\If I can be of any help, you're in worse trouble than I thought.
\Q: What's the definition of Australian foreplay?
A: "Are you awake Sheila?"
\1: Did you hear what happened to the guy who couldn't keep up payments
to his exorcist?
2: No, what?
1: He was repossessed.
\Q: What's stiff and excites women?
A: Elvis Presley.
\Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more
easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger
have handled this?"
\Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you
don't think.
\Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and the
instruction afterwards.
\These two strings walk into a bar and sits down. The bartender says, "So
what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quaqg fulk boorg jdk^Cjf
dLkjk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says. "He isn't null-
terminated."
\A cucumber and a tomato meet in a saladbar.
Cucumber: "Gee, how come you look so red?"
Tomato: "I saw the salad dressing."
\The more beautiful the woman is who loves you, the easier it is to leave
her with no hard feelings.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Nothing improves with age.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\No matter how many times you've had it, if it's offered take it, because
it'll never be quite the same again.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex has no calories.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex takes up the least amount of time an causes the most amount of
trouble.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\There is no remedy for sex but more sex.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex appeal is 50% what you've got and 50% what people think you've got.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you are going to get or
how long it is going to last.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Virginity can be cured.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\When a man's wife learns to understand him, she usually stops listening
to him.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\The qualities that most attract a woman to a man are usually the same
ones she can't stand years later.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex is dirty only if it is done right.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\When the lights are out, all women are beautiful.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won't
either.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sow your wild oats on Saturday night -- Then on Sunday pray for crop
failure.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\The game of love is never called off on account of darkness.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused
the trouble in the garden.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Before you find your handsome prince, you got to kiss a lot of frogs.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\There may be some things better than sex, and some things worse than
sex. But there is nothing exactly like it.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Love your neighbour, but don't get caught.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\If the effort that went in research on the female bosom had gone into
our space program, we would now be running hot-dog stands on the moon.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Love is a matter of chemistry, sex is a matter of physics.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\One good turn gets most of the blankets.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\You cannot produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Love is the triumph of imagination ove intelligence.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Never argue with a woman when she's tired -- or rested.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he
couldn't.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\What matters is not the length of the wand, but the magic in the stick.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\It is better to be looked over than overlooked.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation; the other eight are
unimportant.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Smile, it make people wonder what you are thinking.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\There is no difference between a wise man and a fool when they fall in
love.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Never go to bed mad, stay up and fight.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
\Academe: An ancient school were morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy: A modern school where football is taught.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Accuse: To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a
justification of ourselves for having wronged them.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
their hands so deeply inserted into each others' pockets that they
cannot separately plunder a third.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Back: That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate
in your adversity.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Backbite: To speak of a man as you find him; when he can't find you.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Bait: A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind
is beauty.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Beauty: That power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a
husband.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady. In English, a deadly poison. A
striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that
you do not entertain.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Cannon: An instrument used in the rectification of national boundaries.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Cat: A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked
when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely
inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his
neighbour. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as
they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without
individual responsibility.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Education: That wich discloses to the wise and disguises from the fool
their lack of understanding.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Egoist: A person of low taste, more interested in themselves than in me.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Eulogy: Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and
power, or the consideration to be dead.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Female: One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Forefinger: The finger commonly used in pointing out two malefactors.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Guillotine: A machine which makes the Frenchman shrug his shoulders with
good reason.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Hand: A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly
thrust into somebody's pocket.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Happiness: An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery
of another.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Hatred: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Helpmate: A wife, or bitter half.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Incompatibility: In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the
taste for domination.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Influence: In politics, a visionary 'quo' given in return for a
substantional 'quid'.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Intimacy: A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their
mutual destruction.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Labor: One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious posessions.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Liver: A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious
with.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Love: A temporary insanity cureable either by marriage or by removal of
the influences under which he incurred the disorder... It is
sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than the
patient.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master,
a mistress, and slaves, making (in all) two.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worthwhile.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Mine: Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Miracle: An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable,
as in beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four
aces and a king.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Misfortune: The kind of fortune that never misses.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Mouth: In man, the gateway to the soul. In woman, the outlet of the
heart.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Pedestrian: The variable (and audible) part of a roadway.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be nullified on behalf of a
single petitioner, admittedly unworthy.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Price: Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear of conscience in
demanding it.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Politeness: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation
with least harm to the patient.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Rear: In American military affairs, that exposed part of the army that
is nearest to Congress.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Recollect: To recall with additions something not previously known.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Reporter: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with
a tempest of words.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of
God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one's neighbour. In the days of
astrology, it was customary to unload it upon a star.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Riot: A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent
bystanders.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Rope: An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are
mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one's
whole life long.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic
producer from the greed of his customer.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Vote: The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of
himself and a wreck of his country.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\Witch: (1) an ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with
the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in
wickedness a league beyond the devil.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
\If you don't have something good to say about someone.........
let's hear it.
\A house divided.........
is a duplex.
\Behind every big man .....
is a big behind
\The truth always falls on deaf ears.....
at least thats what I've heard
\And the lion will lie down with the sheep.....
but the sheep won't get very much sleep
\Two wrongs don't make a right.......
but three lefts do
\No man is an island........
except for Raymond Burr
\Idle hands are the devils playthings....
busy hands will make you go blind
\A man with no vision......
should'nt drive
\ADA: Something you need to know the name of to be an Expert in
Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA
awareness."
\Bug: An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect.
The activity of "debugging," or removing bugs from a program, ends when
people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed.
\Cache: A very expensive part of the memory system of a computer that no
one is supposed to know is there.
\Design: What you regret not doing later on.
\Documentation: Instructions translated from Swedish by Japanese for
English speaking persons.
\Economies of Scale: The notion that bigger is better. In particular,
that if you want a certain amount of computer power, it is much better
to buy one biggie than a bunch of smallies. Accepted as an article of
faith by people who love big machines and all that complexity. Rejected
as an article of faith by those who love small machines and all those
limitations.
\Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
\Information Center: A room staffed by professional computer people whose
job it is to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
\Information Processing: What you call data processing when people are so
disgusted with it they won't let it be discussed in their presence.
\Machine-independent program: A program that will not run on any machine.
\Meeting: An assembly of computer experts coming together to decide what
person or department not represented in the room must solve the problem.
\Minicomputer: A computer that can be afforded on the budget of a
middle-level manager.
\Office Automation: The use of computers to improve efficiency in the
office by removing anyone you would want to talk with over coffee.
\On-line: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a
computer.
\Pascal: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in
his grave if he knew about it.
\Performance: A statement of the speed at which a computer system works.
Or rather, might work under certain circumstances. Or was rumored to be
working over in Jersey about a month ago.
\Priority: A statement of the importance of a user or a program. Often
expressed as a relative priority, indicating that the user doesn't care
when the work is completed so long as he is treated less badly than
someone else.
\Quality control: Assuring that the quality of a product does not get out
of hand and add to the cost of its manufacture or design.
\Regression analysis: Mathematical techniques for trying to understand
why things are getting worse.
\Strategy: A long-range plan whose merit cannot be evaluated until
sometime after those creating it have left the organization.
\Systems programmer: A person in sandals who has been in the elevator
with the senior vice president and is ultimately responsible for a phone
call you are to receive from you boss.
\Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is
why several of us died of tuberculosis.
\Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word
itself: "Mankind." Basically, it's made up of two separate words -
"mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's
why so is mankind.
\I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they choose a king, they
don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with
some good ideas.
\It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
\I guess we were all guilty, in a way. We all shot him, we all skinned
him, and we all got a complimentary bumper sticker that said, "I Helped
Skin Bob."
\I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is
they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff,
then, when somebody comes up, act like they just woke up and go, "What
was THAT?!"
\The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
\Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite
and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny
plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like
ambition.
\I'd rather be rich than stupid.
\If you were a poor Indian with no weapons, and a bunch of conquistadors
came up to you and asked where the gold was, I don't think it would be a
good idea to say, "I swallowed it. So sue me."
\If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger,
screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man,
I guess I'm a coward.
\I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every
culture, is the story of Popeye.
\When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if
they ever press charges.
\What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to
save a solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.
\We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at
them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.
\Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of
striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.
\I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon
was free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand,
pretending like he's throwing up, is not what I call hospitality.
\To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I guess it
goes back to the time we went to the circus and a clown killed my Dad.
\As I bit into the sweet, tangy nectarine, and tasted the juices running
down my chin, I looked down, and realized that it wasn't a nectarine at
all, but a HUMAN HEAD!
\You know, some white coral, painted brown, and attached to the skull
with some common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.
\I have always wondered way they always refer to toilet paper as facial
quality. I am not going to use it on my face, (although there are
some who think I do anyway!).
\To me, boxing is like ballet except that there's no music or
choreography, and the dancers hit each other.
\In our yodeling class, we discourage new students from yodeling right
off. You see, we *build* to that.
\If you're a horse, and someone climbs on your back, falls off, and
then climbs on again, I think you should buck him off.
\I think a good story would be about a clown who makes people laugh, but
inside he is really sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.
\Anytime something screeches across the room, and latches onto someone's
neck, and the guy screams, and tries to get it off, I have to laugh,
because what *is* that thing?
\Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the
world is not the lion, or even an elephant. It's a shark, riding on an
elephant's back, trampling and eating everything it sees.
\The most dangerous animal in the world is not the tiger, or the shark,
or the elephant... it is a shark riding on the back of an elephant,
trampling and eating everything they see.
\"I don't care who you are, Fatso. Just get those reindeer off my roof."
\"Is there any intelligent life in this planet?"
"No. I'm just visiting in here."
\"Let me think...I wonder if an anvil will drop like an apple?"
-- Tradition tells us these are the last words of sir Isaac Newton
\"Make love, not war."
"I'm married, I do both."
\"So when I die, the first thing I will see in Heaven is a score list?"
\"This calls for a particularly subtle blend of psychology and extereme
violence."
-- Vivian, "The Young Ones"
\"Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
-- Sledgehammer
\"What are you doing?"
"Examining the world's major religions. I'm looking for something
that's light on morals, has lots of holidays, and with a short
initiation period."
\"What is your operation plan?"
"Just get violent, babe. Just get violent."
-- Dempsey & Makepeace
\"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't
believe in God." "I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears,
"but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful
God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
\"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last,
"what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.
-- A. A. Milne, "Winnie the Pooh"
\"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
-- Lewis Carrol
\...and sometimes a piercer drops by.
\355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible
simulation.
\43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr -- Core dumped
\Do me now and I'll owe you one.
\A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than
a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
-- Mahatma Ghandi
\A CONS is an object which cares.
-- Bernie Greenberg.
\A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did
on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
-- Thomas Ybarra
\A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
\A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere,
is having fun.
\A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
-- Carl Sandburg
\A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no
responsibility at the other.
\A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman
out of a divorce.
-- Don Quinn
\A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you have
turned into a pile of dust.
\A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have
enlightened him with ours.
\A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well
as afterward.
\A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from
the poor to protect them from each other.
\A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete
than expexted; a carefully planned project will take only twice as long.
\A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
\A chiseler is a man who goes stag to a wife-swapping party.
\A chubby man with a white beard and a red suit will approach you soon.
Avoid him. He's a Commie.
\A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but
won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-- Bill Vaughan
\A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
-- Herbert Prochnow
\A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working
20 years make.
\A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
\A conservative is a man who believes that nothing \should be done for
the first time.
-- Alfred E. Wiggam
\A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never
learned to walk.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
\A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what
time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it.
\A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper.
-- Dyer
\A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.
-- Edgar A. Shoaff
\A day for firm decisions!! Or is it?
\A day without sunshine is like night.
\A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a
fur coat.
\A diplomat is man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never
her age.
-- Robert Frost
\A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way
that you will look forward to the trip.
\A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about
whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments,
they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor
said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was
made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply
incredible surgical feat."
The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden
itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that,
the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been
an architect."
The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said,
"Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"
\A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
-- Ogden Nash
\A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-- Winston Churchill
\A fool must now and then be right by chance.
\A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block
of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an
elephant.
\A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch
dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.
-- Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature"
\A genius is a queer who can whistle while he works.
-- Bobby Knight
\A gleekzorp without a tornpee is like a quop without a fertsneet
(sort of).
\A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
\A hand in a bird is worth two on 'er bush.
\A hard man is good to find.
\A joke is like watching a woman get out of a car --
sometimes you see it and sometimes you don't.
-- Max Miller
\A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
in than some that do.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie
\A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist, and too rich to be
a communist.
\A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon. Buy the negatives at
any price.
\A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I.
I believe everything positively stinks.
-- Lew Col
\A man needs a mistress, just to break the monogamy.
\A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
\A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
\A mind is a wonderful thing to waste.
\A mushroom cloud has no silver lining.
\A novel approach is to remove all power from the system, which removes
most system overhead so that resources can be fully devoted to doing
nothing. Benchmarks on this technique are promising; tremendous
amounts of nothing can be produced in this manner. Certain hardware
limitations can limit the speed of this method, especially in
the larger systems which require a more involved & less efficient
power-down sequence.
An alternate approach is to pull the main breaker for the building,
which seems to provide even more nothing, but in truth has bugs in it,
since it usually inhibits the systems which keep the beer cool.
\A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
\A nymph hits you and steals your virginity.
\A penny saved is a penny.
\A penny saved is ridiculous.
\A person who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely
called a liberal.
\A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?
And he answered:
It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.
It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.
It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City
to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns
have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.
And that is Fate? said the priest.
Fate...I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.
That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know
what Freight was too.
-- Kehlog Albran
\A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.
-- George Eliot
\A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
\A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis
of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite
series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric
precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from
inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical
accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality
for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly
defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the
information in the first place.
-- IEEE Grid news magazine
\A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today. The results
blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon.
-- Steel City News
\A reactionary is a man whose political opinions
always manage to keep up with yesterday.
\A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket
and rejoices that the system works.
\A rumor has it that rumors are just rumors.
\A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard.
-- Prof. Steiner
\A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.
\A successful [software] tool is one that was used
to do something undreamed of by its author.
-- S. C. Johnson
\A toast to the kisses you've snatched and vice-versa.
\A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse
by blowing first.
\A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene
triangle.
\A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
\A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.
-- Tennessee Williams
\A virgin is chaste.
\A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without
getting nervous.
\A winner never quits. A quitter never wins.
\A witty saying proves nothing.
-- Voltaire
\A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent
to admit, let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact
remains that there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one
reason or another, completely immune to any direct magical spell.
It is for this group of beings that the magician learns the subtleties
of using indirect spells. It also does no harm, in dealing with these
matters, to carry a large club near your person at all times.
-- "The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VIII"
\A woman is like a dresser...some man always goin' through her drawers.
-- Blind Lemon Pledge
\A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social
pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate
woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without
love, without virtue, without sex.
-- Balzac
\A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe
in God.
\AMAZING BUT TRUE...
If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end
across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.
\AMAZING BUT TRUE...
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were
spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
\APL hackers do it in the quad.
\APL is a write-only language. I can write programs
in APL, but I can't read any of them.
-- Roy Keir
\Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.
\About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
-- Herbert Hoover
\Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western
religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of
Western science.
-- Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"
\A woman drove me to drink, and I didn't even have the courtesy to
thank her.
\According to my best recollection, I don't remember.
-- Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo
\According to the latest official figures,
43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
\Achilles' Biological Findings:
(1) If a child looks like his father, that's heredity.
If he looks like a neighbor, that's environment.
(2) A lot of time has been wasted arguing over what came
first -- the chicken or the egg. It was undoubtedly the rooster.
\Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
\Admittedly, there are a lot of things that are better than sex,
and a lot more that are worse; but there's nothing quite like it...
\After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
\After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known
quotations.
-- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
\After an instrument has been assembled, extra
components will be found on the bench.
\After living in New York, you trust nobody,
but you believe everything. Just in case.
\After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access
cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
\Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
-- Friedrich Schiller
\Aide to Raygun: Sir, the poor are outside protesting your budget cuts.
Raygun himself: Tell them they'll have to help themselves.
Aide to Raygun: Sir, the Pentagon wants another $30 billion.
Raygun himself: Tell them to help themselves.
\All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
\All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
importance.
\All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
\All a hacker needs is a tight PUSHJ, a loose pair
of UUOs, and a warm place to shift.
\All extremists should be taken out and shot.
\All hope abandon, ye who enter here!
-- Dante Alighieri
\All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more
specific.
-- Jane Wagner
\All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
\All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
\All progress is based upon a universal innate desire
on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
-- Samuel Butler
\All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
-- E. Rutherford
\All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right
hands.
-- Saint Patrick
\All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
\All the passions make us commit faults; love makes
us commit the most ridiculous ones.
-- La Rochefoucauld
\All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
-- Sean O'Casey
\All things are possible except skiing thru a revolving door.
\All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot;
Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid.
Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small.
Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all.
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
\All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for
fun. Money's just the way we keep score.
\All's well that ends.
\Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back.
\Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.
\Always talk to your wife while you're
making love...if there's a phone handy.
\Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing
that way.
\Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
-- Charlie McCarthy
\Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it.
\An Army travels on her stomach.
\An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine,
but because people refuse to see it.
-- James Michener, "Space"
\An authority is a person who can tell you more
about something than you really care to know.
\An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.
\An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
\An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less
until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
\An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
\An older student came to Otis and said, "I have been to see
a great number of teachers and I have given up a great number of
pleasures. I have fasted, been celibate and stayed awake nights seeking
enlightenment. I have given up everything I was asked to give up and I
have suffered, but I have not been enlightened. What should I do?"
Otis replied, "Give up suffering."
-- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
\Anarchy may not be a better form of government,
but it's better than no government at all.
\And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"
They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of
the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of
the context of our very selfhood revealed."
And Jesus replied, "What?"
\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.
\And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
\And the fully armed nuclear warheads, are, of course,
merely a courtesy detail.
\And the northern lights commenced to glow.
And she said, with a tear in her eye,
"Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow."
-- Frank Zappa, "The Story of Nanook and the Fur Trapper"
\Ankh if you love Isis.
\Anthony's Law of Force:
Don't force it; get a larger hammer.
\Anthony's Law of the Workshop:
Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least
accessible corner of the workshop.
Corollary:
On the way to the corner, any dropped tool
will first strike your toes.
\Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer,
my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any
resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic.
The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold
them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of
the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god
coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism
is beyond the scope of this article.)
\Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a
larger object.
\Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient
to exactly the point of most pressure.
-- Milt Barber
\Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
-- Rich Kulawiec
\Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a
rigged demo.
\Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
\Any time things appear to be going better,
you have overlooked something.
\Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't
the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
-- Robert Benchley
\Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
-- Publilius Syrus
\Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
\Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy from a baby"
has never tried taking candy from a baby.
-- Robin Hood
\Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
\Anything labeled "NEW" and/or "IMPROVED" isn't. The label means
the price went up. The label "ALL NEW", "COMPLETELY NEW", or "GREAT NEW"
means the price went way up.
\Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
\Anytime things appear to be going better, you've overlooked something.
\Apple owners do it with mice.
\Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your
shoes.
-- Mickey Mouse
\Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
(1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
(2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws.
\Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you
imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
\Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
-- Paul Gauguin
\Arthur's Laws of Love:
(1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you
remind them of someone else.
(2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be
delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of
yourself in person.
\Artistic ventures highlighted. Rob a museum.
\As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
\As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.
-- Weisert
\As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
\As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized
that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in
finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
\As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that
there is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
\Assassins do it from behind.
\At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is
not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where
it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest.
-- Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow
\At no time is freedom of speech more precious than
when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
-- Marshall Lumsden
\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.
\Audacity, and again, audacity, and always audacity.
-- G. J. Danton
\Avoid reality at all costs.
\BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of 'Scientific Creationism'.
\Bad men live that they may eat and drink,
whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.
-- Socrates
\Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.
\Bare feet magnetize sharp metal objects so they point upward
from the floor -- especially in the dark.
\Barth's Distinction:
There are two types of people: those who divide people
into two types, and those who don't.
\Baruch's Observation:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
\Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you
think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?
(1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
(2) Advising the President.
(3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
-- David Letterman
\Be braver -- you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
\Be careful when eating bananas. Monsters might slip on the peels.
\Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
\Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and
took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of his
followers. One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and
there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing.
"Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his
commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your
Purpose in Life, anyway?"
Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The
Chinese ideogram for No-Thing.)
Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened.
Primarily because nobody understood Chinese.
-- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
\Before he went off to the wars, King Arthur locked his lovely wife,
Guinevere, into her chastity belt. Then he summoned his loyal friend and
subject Sir Lancelot. "Lancelot, noble knight," said Arthur, "within this
sturdy belt is imprisoned the virtue of my wife. The key to this chaste
treasure I will entrust to only one man in the world. To you."
Humbled before this great honor, Lancelot knelt, received his king's
blessing and took charge of the key. Arthur mounted his steed and rode off.
Not half a mile from his castle, he heard hoofbeats behind him and turned
to see Sir Lancelot riding hard to catch up with him.
"What is amiss, my friend?" asked the king.
"My lord," gasped Lancelot, "you have given me the wrong key!"
\Beifeld's Principle:
The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and
receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when
he is already in the company of:
(1) a date
(2) his wife
(3) a better looking and richer male friend.
\Being ugly isn't illegal. Yet.
\Bend over and take it like a man!
\Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence.
-- Time Bandits
\Better leave the dungeon, otherwise you might get hurt badly.
\Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein
\Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
\Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it.
-- Donald Knuth
\Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of
murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by
their ignorance the hard way.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"
\Beware of the minotaur. He's very horny!
\Beware of the potion of nitroglycerin - it's not for the weak of heart.
\Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted.
Bill Is Inncocent!
\Biology is the only science in which multiplication
means the same thing as division.
\Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic.
\Blessed are the meek for they shall inhibit the earth.
\Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
\Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
\Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier.
\Blore's Razor:
Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier.
\Boling's postulate:
If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it.
\Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom:
Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because
it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.
\Bombeck's Rule of Medicine:
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
\Boob's Law:
You always find something in the last place you look.
\Booze is the answer. I don't remember the question.
\Boren's Laws:
(1) When in charge, ponder.
(2) When in trouble, delegate.
(3) When in doubt, mumble.
\Bradley's Bromide:
If computers get too powerful, we can organize
them into a committee -- that will do them in.
\Brain fried -- Core dumped
\Brook's Law:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
\Brooke's Law:
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool
discovers something which either abolishes the system or
expands it beyond recognition.
\Bus error -- passengers dumped.
\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"
\By doing just a little every day, you can gradually
let the task completely overwhelm you.
\By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact,
it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to
invent.
-- R. Emerson
\By working faithfully eight hours a day,
you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve.
-- Robert Frost
\Byte your tongue.
\CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh..
\Cahn's Axiom:
When all else fails, read the instructions.
\Canada Bill Jone's Motto:
It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
Supplement:
A .44 magnum beats four aces.
\Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
\Cave(wo)men all belong to the same club.
\Celebrate Hannibal Day this year. Take an elephant to lunch.
\Chapter 1
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
\Chaste makes waste.
\Cheer Up! Things are getting worse at a slower rate.
\Children are natural mimic who act like their parents
despite every effort to teach them good manners.
\Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency
they're going to catch you in next.
-- Franklin P. Jones
\Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.
-- Ogden Nash
\Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually
repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
\Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law:
When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
\Christianity has not been tried and found wanting;
it has been found difficult and not tried.
-- G. K. Chesterton
\Churchill's Commentary on Man:
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most
of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
\Clark Kent is a transvestite.
\Coito ergo sum.
\College is like a woman -- you work so hard to get in,
and nine months later you wish you'd never come.
\Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
\Colvard's Logical Premises:
All probabilities are 50%. Either a thing will happen or it won't.
Colvard's Unconscionable Commentary:
This is especially true when dealing with someone you're attracted to.
Grelb's Commentary:
Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you.
\Communists do it without class.
\Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
\Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
-- Gilb
\Confucious say:
fool man climb tree to get cherries; wise man spread limbs.
man who fishes in other man's well often catch crabs.
man who go to bed with sex problem wake up with solution in hand.
man who live in glass house should bathe in the basement.
man who lose key to girlfriend's apartment get no new key.
man who make love on ground have piece on Earth.
man who marry girl with no bust has right to feel low down.
man who pull out too fast leave rubber.
man who screws near graveyard is fucking near dead.
man with hole in pocket feel cocky all day.
woman who cooks carrots and pees in same pot very unsanitary.
woman who ride bicycle peddle ass around town.
Confucius say too much.
-- Recent Chinese Proverb
\Conquering Russia should be done steppe by steppe.
\Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
\Conserve energy -- make love more slowly.
\Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal
it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.
-- Titus Maccius Plautus
\Consultants are mystical people who ask a company
for a number and then give it back to them.
\Conway's Law:
In any organization there will always be one person
who knows what is going on.
This person must be fired.
\Cox's Philosophy:
Life's a bitch, then you die.
\Crime does not pay...as well as politics.
-- A. E. Newman
\Cunnilingus is next to godliness.
\Dammit, how many times do I have to tell you?
First you rape, then you pillage!!
\David was just a shepherd who liked to get his rocks off in leather.
\DeVries' Dilemma:
If you hit two keys on the typewriter, the one you don't want hits the
paper.
\Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also
easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
\Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
\Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
\Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
-- R. Geis
\Death is nature's way of saying 'Howdy'.
\Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
\Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by
the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- G. B. Shaw
\Descend in order to meet more decent monsters.
\Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a
conventional thing to happen to him.
-- John Barrymore's dying words
\Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
\Divers do it deeper.
\Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them.
\Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you.
Their tastes may not be the same.
-- George Bernard Shaw
\Do not drink coffee in early a.m. It will keep you awake until noon.
\Do not meddle in the affairs of the wizards
for they are crunchy and good with ketchup.
\Do not meddle in the affairs of the wizards
for they are subtle and quick to anger.
\Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out if it alive.
\Do something big -- fuck a giant.
\Do something unusual today. Pay a bill.
\Do what comes naturally now. Seethe and fume and throw a tantrum.
\Do you want to visit hell? Dig a *very* deep hole.
\Don't believe everything you hear or anything you say.
\Don't drink when you drive -- you might hit a bump and spill it.
\Don't feed the bats tonight.
\Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep till noon.
\Don't play hack at your work, your boss might hit you.
\Don't remember what you can infer.
-- Harry Tennant
\Don't shoot until you're sure you both aren't on the same side.
\Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice,
Unless you get a good percentage of her price...
-- Tom Lehrer
\Don't speak about Time, until you have spoken to him.
\Don't tell any big lies today. Small ones can be just as effective.
\Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you.
They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
\Down with categorical imperative!
\Draft beer, not people.
\Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
\Drinking might affect your health.
\Drinking potions of booze may land you in jail if you are under 21.
\Drive defensively. Buy a tank.
\Ducharm's Axiom:
If you view your problem closely enough you will
recognize yourself as part of the problem.
\Ducharme's Precept:
Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
\Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production
of great leaders has been discontinued.
\Dungeon expects every monster to do his duty.
\Dust is an armor of poor quality.
\Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice
to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
-- W. Somerset Maughm
\Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends.
\Eat 10 cloves of garlic and keep all humans at a two-square distance.
\Eat the rich -- the poor are tough and stringy.
\Education kills by degrees.
\Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature
to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
-- Bellamy Brooks
\Ehrman's Commentary:
(1) Things will get worse before they get better.
(2) Who said things would get better?
\Einstein rules relatively ok.
\Emersons' Law of Contrariness:
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do
what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
\Enjoy every minute. There's plenty of time to be dead.
\Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain
things which otherwise require harder thinking.
-- Jerome Lettvin
\Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.
-- Menander
\Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman
without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
-- Robert Benchley
\Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.
-- Poor Richard
\Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.
-- Kehlog Albran
\Ever notice that even the busiest people are
never too busy to tell you just how busy they are?
\Every absurdity has a champion who will defend it.
\Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for
which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
\Every program is a part of some other program, and rarely fits.
\Every solution breeds new problems.
\Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure
is no guarantee of eventual success.
\Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
\Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had
to be taught how not. So it is with the great programmers.
\Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the
scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact
wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of
existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to
discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the
problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the
mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all,
one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely
different way...
\Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately,
no one we know belongs.
\Excellent day to have a rotten day.
\Excellent time to become a missing person.
\Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you
recognize a mistake when you make it again.
-- F. P. Jones
\FLASH! Intelligence of mankind decreasing. Details at...uh, when
the little hand is on the....
\Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam
on a picnic without looking to see whether the seeds move.
\Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
-- Nietzsche
\Famous last words:
"Don't worry, I can handle it."
"You and what army?"
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a cop."
\Fie for shame, you lascivious, lewd, lecherous,
libidinous, lustful, licentious, dirty bum!!
\Fifth Law of Procrastination:
Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has
the feeling that there is nothing important to do.
\Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.
\Finagle's Creed:
Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.
\Finagle's first Law:
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
\Finagle's fourth Law:
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve
it only makes it worse.
\Finagle's second Law:
No matter what the anticipated result, there will
always be someone eager to
(a) misinterpret it
(b) fake it
(c) believe it happened according to his own pet theory.
\Finagle's third Law:
In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct,
beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
Corollaries:
(1) Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
(2) The first person who stops by, whose advice you really
don't want to hear, will see it immediately.
\Fine day to throw a party. Throw him as far as you can.
\Fine day to work off excess energy. Steal something heavy.
\First Law of Bicycling:
No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.
\First Law of Hacking: leaving is much more difficult than entering.
\First Law of Socio-Genetics:
Celibacy is not hereditary.
\First Rule of History:
History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.
\Flee at once, all is discovered.
\Flirting is the gentle art of making a man feel pleased with himself.
-- Helen Rowland
\For any remedy there is a misery.
\For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and
wrong.
-- H. L. Mencken
\For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used
for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.
-- Harlan Ellison
\Fourth Law of Applied Terror:
The night before the English History mid-term, your Biology
instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria.
Corollary:
Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do
except study for that instructor's course.
\Fourth Law of Hacking: you will find the exit at the entrance.
\Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
\Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
-- H. H. Williams
\G's Third Law:
In spite of all evidence to the contrary, the entire universe
is composed of only two basic substances: magic and bullshit.
H's Dictum:
There is no magic...
\Gautama Principle:
You cannot cross a river in two leaps.
\George Orwell was an optimist.
\George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but
he also admitted doing it. Now, do you know why his father didn't
punish him? Because George still had the axe in his hand.
\Ginsberg's Theorem:
(1) You can't win.
(2) You can't break even.
(3) You can't even quit the game.
Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem:
Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem
meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's
Theorem. To wit:
(1) Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
(2) Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
(3) Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.
\Give a man free hands and you'll know where to find them.
-- Mae West
\Give me the Luxuries, and the Hell with the Necessities!
\Give thought to your reputation. Consider
changing name and moving to a new town.
\God bless Atheism.
\God gives us relatives; thank goodness we can chose our friends.
\God is Dead
-- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is Dead
-- God
Nietzsche is God
-- Dead
\God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.
\God is a polytheist.
\God is an atheist.
\God is big, so don't fuck with him.
\God isn't dead -- She was never born.
\God isn't dead, He just couldn't find a parking place.
\God isn't dead, He's just trying to avoid the draft.
\God wanted to have a holiday, so He asked St. Peter for suggestions on
where to go.
"Why not go to Jupiter?" asked St. Peter.
"No, too much gravity, too much stomping around," said God.
"Well, how about Mercury?"
"No, it's too hot there."
"Okay," said St. Peter, "What about Earth?"
"No," said God,"They're such horrible gossips. When I was
there 2000 years ago, I had an affair with a Jewish woman, and they're
still talking about it."
\Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad
example.
-- La Rouchefoucauld
\Good day for overcoming obstacles. Try a steeplechase.
\Good day to let down old friends who need help.
\Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
\Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-- George Saunders' dying words
\Gordon does it in a Flash.
\Got Mole problems?
Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23
\Grain grows best in shit.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin
\Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.
\Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly
noticeable in the autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.
\Gray's Law of Programming:
'n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same
time as 'n' tasks.
Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law:
'n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as 'n' trivial tasks.
\Grinnell's Law of Labor Laxity:
At all times, for any task, you have not got enough done today.
\Grub first, then ethics.
-- Bertolt Brecht
\H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach -- administrate.
\Hackers do it bottom-up.
\Hackers do it with all sorts of characters.
\Hackers do it with bugs.
\Hackers do it with fewer instructions.
\Haggis:
Haggis is a kind of stuff black pudding eaten by the Scots and
considered by them to be not only a delicacy but fit for human
consumption. The minced heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, calf
or other animal's inner organs are mixed with oatmeal, sealed
and boiled in maw in the sheep's intestinal stomach-bag and...
[Excuse me a minute. Ed.]
\Hail to the sun god
He's such a fun god
Ra! Ra! Ra!
\Half Moon tonight. (At least it's better than no Moon at all.)
\Hand: A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly
thrust into somebody's pocket.
\Handy Guide to Modern Science
(1) If it's green or it wriggles, it's biology.
(2) If it stinks, it's chemistry.
(3) If it doesn't work, it's physics.
\Hang gliders come down very slowly.
\Hanlon's Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
\Hard reality has a way of cramping your style.
-- Daniel Dennett
\Harris's Lament:
All the good ones are taken.
\Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab:
Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.
\Hartley's First Law:
You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float
on his back, you've got something.
\Harvard Law:
Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure,
temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism
will do as it damn well pleases.
\Have a good meal today: eat a minotaur.
\Having nothing, nothing can he lose.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
\He who enters his wife's dressing room is a philosopher or a fool.
-- Balzac
\He who findeth sensuous pleasures in the bodies of lush, hot, pink
damsels is not righteous, but he can have a lot more fun.
\He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much
a master of the world as he who is ready to die.
-- Giacomo Leopardi
\He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
-- Lao Tsu
\He who trains his tongue to quote the learned
sages, will be known far and wide as a smart ass.
-- Howard Kandel
\He's just a politician trying to save both his faces.
\Hear about...
the doctor that prescribed sex for insommia? His patients didn't
get any more sleep, but they had more fun staying awake.
\Hear about...
the girl with the big wardrobe who started with just a little slip?
\Hear about...
the guy who took a course in exotic lovemaking and announced
that he'd never be able to face his girl again?
\Hear about...
the guy who was an incurable romantic until penicillin came along?
\Heaven can wait.
\Heisenberg may have done it.
\Heisengberg might have been here.
\Heller's Law:
The first myth of management is that it exists.
Johnson's Corollary:
Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization.
\Help! I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory!
\Her kisses left something to be desired -- the rest of her.
\History has the relation to truth that theology
has to religion -- i.e., none to speak of.
-- Lazarus Long
\Hitting is the lingua franca in these regions.
\Hoare's Law of Large Problems:
Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.
\Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when
you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
\Hog Weighing Method:
(1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a sawhorse.
(2) Put the hog on one end of the plank.
(3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again perfectly
balanced.
(4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks.
-- Robert Burns
\Horngren's Observation:
Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
\How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.
\Howe's Law:
Everyone has a scheme that will not work.
\Hugh Hefner is a virgin.
\Humility is the first of the virtues -- for other people.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
\Hummingbirds never remember the words to songs.
\Hungry? There is an abundance of food on the next level.
\Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
to.....to........uh..............
\Hypocrisy is the vaseline of social intercourse.
\I am an atheist, thank God!
\I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country
what it once was...an arctic wilderness.
-- Steve Martin
\I call Christianity the *one* great curse, the *one* great intrinsic
depravity, the *one* great instinct for revenge for which no expedient
is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, *petty* -- I call it
the *one* mortal blemish of mankind.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
\I came; I saw; I fucked up.
\I can resist anything but temptation.
\I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
-- Joe Walsh
\I choked Linda Lovelace.
\I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov
\I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
\I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
\I don't mind arguing with myself.
Its when I lose that it bothers me.
-- Richard Powers
\I don't want to bore you, but there's nobody else around for me to bore.
\I drink to make other people interesting.
-- George Jean Nathan
\I hate it when people call me paranoid. It makes me feel persecuted.
\I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.
-- Kehlog Albran
\I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein
\I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
\I never fail to convince an audience that the best thing they could do
was to go away.
\I own my own body, but I share.
\I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war.
-- Cicero
\I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.
\I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
\I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity
when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such
blasphemous nonsense!
-- George Bernard Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple"
\I smell a maze of twisty little passages.
\I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse
than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.
-- Frank Zappa
\I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
\I want a girl that can swallow my pride.
-- Frank Zappa, "Jewish Princess"
\I wish you humans would leave me alone.
\I wished, I never wished a wand of wishing. (Wishful thinking)
\I wouldn't advise playing catch with a giant.
\I wouldn't mind dying -- it's that business of having
to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.
-- R. Geis
\I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
\I'd like to meet the man who invented sex and see what he's working
on now.
\I'm never through with a girl until I've had her three ways.
-- J. F. Kennedy
\I'm not afraid of work...
I can even sleep beside it.
\I'm not under the alkafluence of inkahol that some thinkle peep I am.
It's just the drunker I sit here the longer I get.
\I'm prepared for all emergencies but totally unprepared for everyday life.
\I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you.
\I've had one child. My husband wants to have another.
I'd like to watch him have another.
\I've told you a million times not to exaggerate.
-- The Young Ones
\If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
-- Roy Santoro
\If God doesn't destroy San Francisco,
He should apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
\If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.
\If God had intended Men to Smoke, He would have put Chimneys in
their Heads.
\If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
\If God had wanted people to give blow jobs, he wouldn't have given
them teeth.
\If God had wanted us to use the metric system,
Jesus would have had 10 apostles.
\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
\If Reagan is the answer, it must have been a VERY silly question.
\If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake
him up.
\If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
\If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.
\If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only
four tellers?
\If it doesn't have recursive function calls, Real Software Engineers
don't program in it.
\If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
\If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
\If men couldn't fuck there'd be a bounty on their heads.
\If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.
\If only I could get that wonderful feeling
of accomplishment without having to accomplish anything.
\If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for
reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
-- Einstein
\If someone had told me I would be Pope
one day, I would have studied harder.
-- Pope John Paul I
\If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input,
an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it.
\If the odds are a million to one against something
occurring, chances are 50-50 it will.
\If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that
will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
\If there is a wrong way to do something, then someone will do it.
-- Edward A. Murphy Jr.
\If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.
If thy dick offends thee, whack it off.
\If voting should change anything, there would be a law against it.
\If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where
we are headed.
\If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
-- Chekhov
\If you are too cute some monsters might be tempted to embrace you.
\If you can believe ten impossible things before breakfast,
then you should join:
The Church of Counterfactual Belief
The Church of Counterfactual Belief has been set up to cater to all who
don't allow demonstrable truth to get in the way of their beliefs. In
addition to creation science and the flatness of the earth, the
following beliefs have been certified by Pope Duane as Church dogma:
that there is a hole in the Earth at the North Pole from which UFOs come.
that pi equals precisely 3.000.
that sex can be enjoyed only by blacks and homosexuals.
that Billy Joe Wilson (Hoopla, Miss.) has successfully squared the circle.
the circle.
that Harry Truman is still president, and doing a fine job.
that pi equals precisely 22/7.
Several other important counterfactual beliefs are presently being
studied, including Reaganomics, A.I., and that the moon landings were
done in a Hollywood special effects studio. These will be the subject
of a forthcoming Papal Bull...
\If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
-- J. Paul Getty
\If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
\If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
\If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S. Truman
\If you disassemble and assemble something a couple of times,
you will have two of them.
\If you drink, don't park. Accidents make people.
\If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will.
\If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
\If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you;
but if you really make them think they'll hate you.
\If you meet somebody who tells you that he loves you more than anybody
in the whole wide world, don't trust him. It means he experiments.
\If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a
procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will
promptly develop.
\If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But
this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine,
is somehow enobled and none dare criticize it.
\If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens
tomorrow!
\If you think nobody cares if you're alive,
try missing a couple of car payments.
-- Earl Wilson
\If you think sex is a pain in the ass, try different position.
\If you want to feel great, you must eat something real big.
\If you would keep a secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.
\Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.
-- Robert Burton
\Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
\Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
-- Jules de Gaultier
\Imbesi's Law with Freeman's Extension:
In order for something to become clean, something else must
become dirty; but you can get everything dirty without getting
anything clean.
\Immanuel doesn't pun, he Kant.
\In Christianity neither morality nor religion come
into contact with reality at any point.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
\In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented
six feet downward and covered with dirt.
-- Blair P. Houghton
\Peter Principle:
In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetency.
\In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables.
\In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble.
-- Alan Perlis
\Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.
\Interfere? Of course you should interfere!
Always do what you're best at, I say.
\Iron Law of Distribution:
Them that has, gets.
\Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
-- Mae West
\Is there a Life before Death?
\Issawi's Laws of Progress:
The Course of Progress:
Most things get steadily worse.
The Path of Progress:
A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.
\It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
\It is a sad commentary on today's society that this fortune has to be
classified as "offensive" simply because it contains the word "fuck".
\It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to
program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in
organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be
self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis
\It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a
pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the
sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
-- Voltaire
\It is bad luck to be superstitious.
-- Andrew W. Mathis
\It is easier for a camel to pass through
the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.
-- Kehlog Albran
\It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than
vice versa.
\It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
\It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
\It is generally agreed that "Hello" is an appropriate greeting
because if you entered a room and said "Goodbye," it could confuse a
lot of people.
-- Dolph Sharp
\It is impossible to defend perfectly
against the attack of those who want to die.
\It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so
ingenious.
\It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the
problem.
\It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
-- Gore Vidal
\It is one of the superstitions of the human mind
to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
-- Voltaire
\It is said that the lonely eagle flies to the mountain peaks while the
lowly ant crawls the ground, but cannot the soul of the ant soar as
high as the eagle?
\It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
-- Hawkwind
\It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
\It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a
warning to others.
\It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the
flag.
\It seems you keep overlooking a sign reading "No trespassing"!
\It takes a brave man to admit his mistakes.
Especially in a paternity hearing.
\It takes a special kind of courage
to face what we all have to face.
\It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn't give up becuase by that time I was too famous.
\It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The
Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.
-- Edith Hamilton, "The Greek Way"
\It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
\It's Fabulous! We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an hour!
-- Macy's
\It's all a matter of life and death, so beware of the undead.
\It's better to be pissed off than pissed on.
\It's not the ups and downs of love, it's the ins and outs.
\It's only by NOT taking the human race seriously that I retain
what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess.
-- Roger Noe
\Jehovah is an alien and still threatens this planet!
\Jenkinson's Law:
It won't work.
\Jesus Saves,
Moses Invests,
But only Buddha pays Dividends.
\Jesus died for your sins. Make it worth his time.
\Jesus was killed by a Moral Majority.
\Johnson's First Law:
When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will
do so at the most inconvenient possible time.
\Jone's Law:
The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to
blame it on.
\Jone's Motto:
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
\Jones' First Law:
Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of
endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an
obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the
importance of their original contribution.
\Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
\Just because your doctor has a name for your condition
doesn't mean he knows what it is.
\Just do it!
\Just once, I wish we would encounter
an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets.
-- The Brigader, from Dr. Who
\Justice is incidental to law and order.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
\Katz' Law:
Man and nations will act rationally when all other
possibilities have been exhausted.
\Keep America beautiful. Swallow your beer cans.
\Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis.
\Kicking the terminal doesn't hurt the monsters.
\Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
-- Muad'dib
\Kinkler's First Law:
Responsibility always exceeds authority.
\Kinkler's Second Law:
All the easy problems have been solved.
\Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A.
\LAGNAF:
Let's All Get Naked And Fuck!
\LISP-programmers say: "Guess how many parentheses are needed to do this!"
Prolog-programmers say: "How can I do it in reasonable time ?"
C-programmers say: "Can You guess what this->program does ?"
Forth-programmers say: "third stack in is what Guess ?"
Basic-'programmers' say: "Where did I goto hell ?"
Fortran- and Cobol-slaves cry: "How can I do this ?"
\Laissez Faire Economics is the theory that if each acts like a vulture,
all will end as doves.
\Large cats can be dangerous, but a little pussy never hurt anyone.
\Large increases in cost with questionable increases in
performance can be tolerated only in race horses and women.
-- Lord Kalvin
\Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.
\Law of Communications:
The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications
between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased
area of misunderstanding.
\Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
\Law of Selective Gravity:
An object will fall so as to do the most damage.
Jenning's Corollary:
The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is
directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
Law of the Perversity of Nature:
You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the
bread to butter.
\Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:
No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats --
approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
\Learn how to spell. Play Hack.
\Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
\Legalize free-enterprise murder: why should governments have all
the fun?
\Leibowitz's Rule:
When hammering a nail, you will never hit your
finger if you hold the hammer with both hands.
\Leprechauns hide their gold in a secret room.
\Let Jesus be your anchor!
So when Satan rocks your boat, throw Jesus overboard!
\Let your fingers do the walking on the yulkjhnb keys.
\Let's face it: this time you're not going to win.
\Lewis's Law of Travel:
The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone,
ever.
\Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
-- Gauguin
\Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
\Life is like a penis: when it's soft you
can't beat it, and when it's hard you get fucked.
\Life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread
you have, the less shit you have to eat.
\Life is the childhood of our immortality.
-- Goethe
\Life is too important to take seriously.
-- Corky Siegel
\Life may have no meaning -- or even worse, it may have
a meaning of which I disapprove.
\Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
\Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations.
\Lisp programmers do it recursively.
\Lisp programmers have to be bound (to-do 'it)...
\Living on Earth may be expensive, but it
includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
\Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been
attempted before.
\Lo! Men have become the tool of their tools.
-- Henry David Thoreau
\Lockwood's Long Shot:
The chances of getting eaten up by a lion on Main Street
aren't one in a million, but once would be enough.
\Logic is a systematic method of coming
to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
\Looking for a monster -- use a staff of monster summoning.
\Loose bits sink chips.
\Lord, what fools these mortals be!
-- William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer-Night's Dream"
\Love at first sight is one of the greatest labor-saving
devices the world has ever seen.
\Love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder.
-- Sigmund Freud
\Love comes in spurts.
-- Devo, "Please Please"
\Love does not make the world go around, just up and down a bit.
\Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the
real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
-- Goethe
\Love is just for now...herpes lasts forever.
\Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes.
\Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
-- Louise Beal
\Love will make you forget time, and time will make you forget love.
\Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what
you're up to.
\Lowery's Law:
If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
\Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology:
There's always one more bug.
\Machines certainly can solve problems, store information,
correlate, and play games -- but not with pleasure.
-- Leo Rosten
\Maier's Law:
If the facts don't conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.
Corollaries:
(1) The bigger the theory, the better.
(2) The experiment may be considered a success if no more than
50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to
obtain a correspondence with the theory.
\Main's Law:
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
\Maintainer's Motto:
If we can't fix it, it ain't broke.
\Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
-- Lily Tomlin
\Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms
with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
-- Samuel Butler
\Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to
somebody else -- unless it is an enemy.
-- Albert Einstein
\Many a wife thinks her husband is the world's greatest lover.
But she can never catch him at it.
\Many nice things suck.
\Many pages make a thick book.
\Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to
get in, and those inside desperate to get out.
-- Montaigne
\Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
-- Voltaire
\Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.
-- R. Drabek
\Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they
translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something
entirely different.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
\Mathematicians do it in groups.
\Mathematicians do it in theory.
\Mathematicians take it to the limit.
\Matter cannot be created or destroyed,
nor can it be returned without a receipt.
\May the Carrier be with you.
\May the Source be with you...always.
\Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.
-- R. S. Barton
\McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom:
If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95.
\Measure twice because you can only cut once.
\Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
\Meet yourself! Commit suicide and type "hack"
\Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core...Oh dammit, I forget!
\Memory flaw - core dumped.
\Micro Credo:
Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift.
\Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get
you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles.
\Miksch's Law:
If a string has one end, then it has another end.
\Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
-- Groucho Marx
\Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
-- Groucho Marx
\Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
-- Russell Baker
\Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
\Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis:
If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and
be implemented it wasn't worth doing.
\Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life.
\Money can't buy happiness -- but somehow it's more
comfortable to cry in a Porsche than in a Lada.
\Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
\Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
\Money is the root of all evil.
\Money is the sixth sense that makes it possible
to enjoy the five others.
\Monsters come from nowhere to hit you everywhere.
\Monsters sleep because you are boring, not because they ever get tired.
\Most legislators are so dumb that they couldn't pour piss out
of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.
\Most monsters prefer minced meat. That's why they are hitting you.
\Most of the bugs in Hack are on the floor.
\Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
-- Frank Zappa
\Most rumors are just as misleading as this one.
\Mr. Cole's Axiom:
The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant;
the population is growing.
\Much ado Nothing Happens.
\Murphy's Law of Research:
Enough research will tend to support your theory.
\Murphy's Law:
If anything can go wrong, it will.
\My girlfriend's favorite erotic position is bending over my credit cards.
\My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
\My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
-- Christopher Morley
\NEWS FLASH!!
Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West
German pole-vault champion.
\Naeser's Law:
You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof.
\Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of
conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the
fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he
is most likely to be creamed?
-- Solomon Short
\Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.
It did not last; the devil howling "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.
\Need money? Sell your corpses to a tin factory.
\NetHack is a fantasy, in fact you're dreaming.
\NetHack is addictive. Too late, you're already hooked.
\Never be led astray onto the path of virtue.
\Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
\Never eat more than you can lift.
-- Miss Piggy
\Never go into the dungeon at midnight.
\Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
\Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
\Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
-- Salvor Hardin, "Foundation"
\Never make anything simple and efficient when
a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful.
\Never mind the monsters hitting you: they just replace the charwomen.
\Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
-- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977
\Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.
\Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
There might be a law against it by that time.
\Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower.
\Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.
\Never trust anybody whose arm is bigger than your leg.
\Never try to outstubborn a cat.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
\Never use "etc." -- it makes people think there is more where
there is not or that there is not space to list it all, etc.
\Never use your best weapon to engrave a curse.
\Never worry about theory as long as the machinery
does what it's supposed to do.
-- R. A. Heinlein
\Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
\Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law:
A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
\Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules:
The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of
the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
\Nirvana? Thats the place where the powers that be and their
friends hang out.
-- Zonker Harris
\No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a
camel -- anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform
effectively under such difficult conditions.
-- Laurence J. Peter
\No good deed goes unpunished.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
\No guest is so welcome in a friend's house that
he will not become nuiscance after three days.
-- Titus Maccius Plautus
\No man in the world has more courage than
the man who can stop after eating one peanut.
-- Channing Pollock
\No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.
-- E. W. Howe
\No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in
the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
\No matter where you stand, no matter how far or fast you flee,
when it hits the fan, as much as possible will be propelled in your
direction, and almost none will be returned to the source.
-- John L. Shelton
\No one gets too old to learn a new way of being stupid.
\No proper program contains an indication which as an operator-applied
occurrence identifies an operator-defining occurrence which as an
indication-applied occurrence identifies an indication-defining
occurrence different from the one identified by the given indication as
an indication-applied occurrence.
-- ALGOL 68 Report
\No, "Eureka" is Greek for "This bath is too hot."
-- Dr. Who
\Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition.
\Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations:
Negative expectations yield negative results.
Positive expectations yield negative results.
\Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.
\Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
\Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none.
-- William Shakespeare
\Not all rumors are as misleading as this one.
\Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly
and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
-- Professor W.
\Not until a program has been in production for at least
six months will the most harmful error then be discovered.
\Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
\Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up.
\Nothing is better than Sex.
Masturbation is better than nothing.
Therefore, Masturbation is better than Sex.
\Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
-- Andrew Young
\Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which
millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
-- Nero Wolfe
\Nothing recedes like success.
-- Walter Winchell
\Nymphs are blondes. Are you a gentleman?
\O'Riordan's Theorem:
Brains x Beauty = Constant.
Purmal's Corollary:
As the limit of (Brains x Beauty) goes to infinity,
availability goes to zero.
\O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
Murphy was an optimist.
\OK, now let's look at four dimensions on the blackboard.
-- Dr. Joy
\Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
\Official Project Stages:
(1) Uncritical Acceptance
(2) Wild Enthusiasm
(3) Dejected Disillusionment
(4) Total Confusion
(5) Search for the Guilty
(6) Punishment of the Innocent
(7) Promotion of the Non-participants
\Ogden's Law:
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
\Oh John, let's not park here.
Oh John, let's not park.
Oh John, let's not.
Oh John, let's.
Oh John.
Oh.
\Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
-- Trotsky
\Old hackers never die: young ones do.
\Old programmers never die. They just branch to a new address.
\Old soldiers never die. Young ones do.
\Oliver's Law:
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
\On Brassieres:
Russian : Uplifts the masses -- Salvation Army : Raises the fallen
American: Makes mountains out of molehills
\On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created jerks.
-- H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow"
\On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli
\Once upon a girl there was a time...
\Once you've tried to change the world you find
it's a whole bunch easier to change your mind.
\One good reason why computers can do more work than people is
that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
\One homunculus a day keeps the doctor away.
\One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.
\One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
their C programs.
-- Robert Firth
\One planet is all you get.
\Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.
\Operation coded OVERKILL has started now.
\Operators mount anything.
\Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
-- Mike Adams
\Osborn's Law:
Variables won't; constants aren't.
\Others look to you for stability, so hide when you bite your nails.
\Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend: and inside a dog,
it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx
\Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket.
\Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated.
\PLUNDERER'S THEME
(to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius)
Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.
If you do the things we say, then you'll soon rule the nation.
Kill your foes and enemies and then kill your relations.
Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.
\POLITICIAN: From the Greek 'poly' ("many") and the French 'tete'
("head" or "face," as in 'tete-a-tete': head to head or face to face).
Hence 'polytetien', a person of two or more faces.
-- Martin Pitt
\Paradise is exactly like where you are right now...
only much, much better.
-- Laurie Anderson
\Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
\Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life.
\Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one.
\Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy
to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.
-- D. J. Hicks
\Pardo's First Postulate:
Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Arnold's Addendum:
Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats.
\Parker's Law:
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
\Parkinson's Fifth Law:
If there is a way to delay in important decision,
the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
\Parkinson's Fourth Law:
The number of people in any working group tends to increase
regardless of the amount of work to be done.
\Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.
\Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
-- Eric Hoffer
\Paul's Law:
You can't fall off the floor.
\Paulg's Law:
In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save.
\People usually get what's coming to them...unless it's been mailed.
\People who claim they don't let little things bother them
have never slept in a room with a single mosquito.
\People who have no faults are terrible;
there is no way of taking advantage of them.
\People will accept your ideas much more readily if you
tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.
\Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
[Confound those who have said our remarks before us.]
-- Aelius Donatus
\Peter's Law of Substitution:
Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after themselves.
\Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny.
\Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
-- John Keats
\Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
-- Don Marquis
\Plastic... Aluminum... These are the inheritors of the Universe!
Flesh and Blood have had their day... and that day is past!
-- Green Lantern Comics
\Pohl's law:
Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
\Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even
where there is no river.
-- Nikita Khrushchev
\Politicians do it to everyone.
\Poverty begins at home.
\Predestination was doomed from the start.
\Press any key to start formatting the hard disk.
\Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
It's on the other side.
\Printers do it by wrinkling the sheets.
\Procrastinators do it tomorrow.
\Prostitution is the only business where you can go
into the hole and still come out ahead.
\Pryor's Observation:
How long you live has nothing to do with how long you are
going to be dead.
\Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill.
Check three friends. If they're ok, you're it.
\Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check
\Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
\Putt's Law:
Technology is dominated by two types of people:
Those who understand what they do not manage.
Those who manage what they do not understand.
\Q: Do you know how to tell a Polack at a cockfight?
A: He's the only one with a duck.
Q: Do you know how to tell an Aggie at a cockfight?
A: He's the only one who bets on the duck.
Q: And do you know how to tell the Mafia is at the cockfight?
A: The duck wins!
\Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is?
A: One per person.
\Q: How can you tell when a WASP is sexually aroused?
A: By the stiff upper lip.
\Q: How do you play religious roulette?
A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck
by lightning first.
\Q: How do you tell if you're making love to a nurse, a schoolteacher,
or an airline stewardess?
A: A nurse says: "This won't hurt a bit." A schoolteacher says:
"We're going to have to do this over and over again until we get it right."
An airline stewardess says: "Just hold this over your
mouth and nose, and breath normally."
\Q: How do you tell that your roommate's gay?
A: When his cock tastes like shit.
\Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. The Universe spines the bulb, and the Zen master stays out
of the way.
\Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb
itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective
reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a
maudlin cosmos of nothingness.
\Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None: "We'll fix it in software."
Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None: "We'll document it in the manual."
Q: How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None: "The user can work it out."
\Q: How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Ten. One to do it, and nine to talk about how gratifying
it was without a man.
\Q: 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.
\Q: How much money do you give to a 900 foot Jesus?
A: As much as he wants.
\Q: If Tarzan was Jewish, and Jane was a princess, what would Cheetah be?
A: A fur coat.
\Q: What can you use used tampons for?
A: Tea bags for vampires.
\Q: What do you call couples that use that rhythm method?
A: Parents.
\Q: What is "SMOORPLAY"?
A: It's what SMURFS do before they SMUCK, of course!
\Q: What's buried in Grant's tomb?
A: A corpse.
\Q: What's the difference between erotic and kinky?
A: Erotic is when you use a feather.
Kinky is when you use the whole bird...
\Q: What's the difference between hard and dark?
A: It stays dark all night.
\Q: What's the last thing that goes through
a grasshopper's mind when he hits your windshield?
A: His ass.
\Q: Where does virgin wool come from?
A: Ugly sheep.
\Q: Why did God invent booze?
A: So ugly men could get laid too.
\Q: Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together?
A: To prevent the sensible ones from going home.
\Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
\Quigley's Law:
Whoever has any authority over you, no matter how small,
will attempt to use it.
\Quote of The Day:
'
\RULES OF EATING -- THE BRONX DIETER'S CREED
(1) Never eat on an empty stomach.
(2) Never leave the table hungry.
(3) When traveling, never leave a country hungry.
(4) Enjoy your food.
(5) Enjoy your companion's food.
(6) Really taste your food. It may take several portions to
accomplish this, especially if subtly seasoned.
(7) Really feel your food. Texture is important. Compare,
for example, the texture of a turnip to that of a brownie.
Which feels better against your cheeks?
(8) Never eat between snacks, unless it's a meal.
(9) Don't feel you must finish everything on your plate. You
can always eat it later.
(10) Avoid any wine with a childproof cap.
(11) Avoid blue food.
-- Richard Smit, "The Bronx Diet"
\Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
\Read the manual before entering the cave -
You might get killed otherwise.
\Reality corrupts. Absolute reality corrupts absolutely.
\Reality is for people who lack imagination.
\Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
\Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity.
-- Alvy Ray Smith
\Rejection:
When you're masturbating and your hand falls asleep.
\Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
-- Anatole France
\Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,
it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
-- Bertrand Russell
\Relying on a dog might turn you in a dog addict.
\Remember, if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat.
\Renning's Maxim:
Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.
\Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what
do you think of Western Civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
\Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Werner von Braun
\Resisting temptation is easier when you think you'll
probably get another chance later on.
\Revenge is sleeping with your enemy's wife.
Sweet revenge is the realization that she's a lousy lay.
\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.
\Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time.
-- Steven Wright
\Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention
Unless the results are known in advance,
funding agencies will reject the proposal.
\Row (3x) that boat gently down the stream, Charon (4x),
death is but a dream.
\Rudin's Law:
If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will
do it every time.
\Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London:
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall
be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind
person shall be deemed to be a cat.
\Rule of Creative Research:
(1) Never draw what you can copy.
(2) Never copy what you can trace.
(3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down.
\Rule of Defactualization:
Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
\Rule of Feline Frustration:
When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly
content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom.
\Rule of the Great:
When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
\Rules:
(1) The boss is always right.
(2) When the boss is wrong, refer to rule 1.
\Run away to fight another day.
\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
\Satellite Safety Tip #14:
If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck.
\Sattinger's Law:
It works better if you plug it in.
\Sauron is alive in Argentina.
\Save a forest -- eat a beaver.
\Save a mouse -- eat a pussy.
\Save energy: be apathetic.
\Save the whales -- harpoon a Honda.
\Save the whales. Collect the whole set.
\Schapiro's Explanation:
The grass is always greener on the other side --
but that's because they use more manure.
\Schizophrenia beats being alone.
\Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.
\Scientists were preparing an experiment to ask the ultimate question.
They had worked for months gathering one each of every computer that
was built. Finally the big day was at hand.All the computers were
linked together.They asked the question, "Is there a God?".Lights
started blinking, flashing and blinking some more.Suddenly, there
was a loud crash, and a bolt of lightning came down from the sky,
struck the computers, and welded all the connections permanently
together."There is now", came the reply.
\Scott's first Law:
No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right.
\Scott's second Law:
When an error has been detected and corrected, it will
be found to have been wrong in the first place.
Corollary:
After the correction has been found in error, it will be
impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation.
\Screw up your courage! You've screwed up everything else.
\Second Law of Business Meetings:
If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you
will pick the wrong one.
Corollary:
If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it wrong, anyway.
\Second Law of Hacking: first in, first out.
\Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.
-- James Thurber
\Self Test for Paranoia:
You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's
your own fault.
\Serocki's Stricture:
Marriage is always a bachelor's last option.
\Sex discriminates against the shy and ugly.
\Sex is dirty, but only if you do it right.
\Sex is low in calories, and *oooh* that aftertaste!
\Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer.
-- Swami X
\Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation...
the other eight are unimportant.
-- Henry Miller
\Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.
-- M. C. Reed.
\Sex is what women have and men want.
\Shaw's Principle:
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool
will want to use it.
\She's fine, upstanding, and wonderful laying down.
\She's the kind of woman you could fall madly in bed with.
\Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you
a man who is playing golf with his boss.
\Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change.
\Silverman's Law:
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
\Simon's Law:
Everything put together falls apart sooner or later.
\Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while
they're alive.
-- John Sloan
\Since we're all here, we must not be all there.
-- Bob "Mountain" Beck
\Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor):
That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to,
or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you
should have gotten.
\Slang is language that takes off its coat,
spits on its hands, and goes to work.
\Slick's Three Laws of the Universe:
(1) Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check.
(2) A quarter-ounce of chocolate = four pounds of fat.
(3) There are two types of dirt: the dark kind, which is
attracted to light objects, and the light kind, which is
attracted to dark objects.
\So far as I can remember, there is not one word
in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell
\So, if there's no God, who changes the water?
-- New Yorker cartoon of two goldfish in a bowl
\Sodd's Second Law:
Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to
occur.
\Sodomy is a pain in the ass.
\Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
-- Ed Howe
\Some people live life in the fast lane.
You're in oncoming traffic.
\Some points to remember [about animals]:
(1) Don't go to sleep under big animals, e.g., elephants, rhinoceri,
hippopotamuses;
(2) Don't put animals with sharp teeth or poisonous fangs down the
front of your clothes;
(3) Don't pat certain animals, e.g., crocodiles and scorpions or dogs
you have just kicked.
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
\Some women are like musical glasses.
To keep them in tune they must be wet.
-- Samuel Coleridge
\Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
-- Lily Tomlin
\Sometimes, you just gotta say "What the fuck."
-- Risky Business
\Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword.
\Speak softly and carry a big stick.
\Speak softly and carry a megawatt laser.
\Speak softly and carry the Staff of Archmage.
\Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman.
-- Dave Millman
\Speed is subsittute fo accurancy.
\Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading:
The visibility of an error is inversely proportional
to the number of times you have looked at it.
\Spelling is a lossed art.
\Stability itself is nothing else than a more sluggish motion.
\Statisticians do it with 95% confidence.
\Statisticians probably do it.
\Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy:
Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have another drink.
\Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
\Stult's Report:
Our problems are mostly behind us. What we
have to do now is fight the solutions.
\Sturgeon's Law:
90% of everything is crud.
\Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting
out of the way before it is understood.
\Success is like a fart -- only your own smells nice.
-- James P. Hogan
\Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring.
\Support wildlife -- vote for an orgy.
\Support your local police force -- steal!!
\Sure he's sharp as a razor...he's a two-dimensional pinhead!
\Surprise your boss. Get to work on time.
\Swipple's Rule of Order:
He who shouts the loudest has the floor.
\Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind
when he has a hole in his head.
\Take a long worm from the rear, according to its mate it's a lot more fun.
\Take everything in stride. Trample anyone who gets in your way.
\Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to
your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms,
and they'll call you crazy.
-- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"
\Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
-- Euripides
\Talkers are no good doers.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
\Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
\Teach children to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when
he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway.
\Teachers do it with class.
\Teamwork is essential -- it allows you to blame someone else.
\Technological progress has merely provided us with
more efficient means for going backwards.
-- Aldous Huxley
\Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe
and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint
on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
\Test makers do it:
(a) sometimes
(b) always
(c) never
\Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones.
\That girl could suck the chrome off a bumper.
\That must be wonderful! I don't understand it at all.
\That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them.
-- Dorothy Parker
\The Abrams' Principle:
The shortest distance between two points is off the wall.
\The Briggs/Chase Law of Program Development:
To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program,
take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one,
and convert to the next higher units.
\The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility
of assembly language with the readability of assembly language.
\The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost would never throw the Devil
out of Heaven as long as they still need him as a fourth for bridge.
-- Letter in New Libertarian Notes #19
\The Fifth Rule:
You have taken yourself too seriously.
\The First Rule of Program Optimization:
Don't do it.
\The Gods don't like competition.
\The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences
The one who has the gold makes the rules.
\The Heineken Uncertainty Principle:
You can never be sure how many beers you had last night.
\The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member
of the group divided by the number of people in the group.
\The Israelites were all waiting anxiously at the foot of the mountain,
knowing that Moses had had a tough day negotiating with God over the
Commandments. Finally a tired Moses came into sight.
"I've got some good news and some bad news, folks," he said. "The
good news is that I got Him down to ten. The bad news is that adultery's
still in."
\The Kennedy Constant:
Don't get mad -- get even.
\The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor,
to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-- Anatole France
\The Leprechaun Gold Tru$t is no division of the Magic Memory Vault.
\The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab
as much as we could with both of them.
-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
\The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to
the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
-- Macaulay, "History of England, I"
\The Real Man's Arctic Breakfast:
Ingredients: one bottle of whisky, ten pounds of raw meat.
Throw the meat to huskies.
Drink the whisky.
\The Real Man's Bloody Mary:
Ingredients: vodka, tomato juice, Tobasco, Worcestershire
sauce, A-1 steak sauce, ice, salt, pepper, celery.
Fill a large tumbler with vodka.
Throw all the other ingredients away.
\The Roman Rule
The one who says it cannot be done should never
interrupt the one who is doing it.
\The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!):
Don't do it yet.
-- Michael Jackson
\The Story of Creation or The Myth of Urk
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null,
and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be
registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried;
and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data
Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening
and there was morning, one interrupt...
-- Rico Tudor
\The Street finds its own uses for technology.
-- William Gibson
\The air is positively magic in here. Better wear a negative armor.
\The beginning of terror is the suspicion of ones own mortality.
The end of terror is the surety of it.
\The best defense against logic is ignorance.
\The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time.
\The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't
reuse time.
-- Merrick Furst
\The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up
in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.
\The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding
bureaucracy.
\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
\The chief cause of problems is solutions.
\The chief danger in life is that you may take too may precautions.
-- Alfred Adler
\The church is near but the road is icy;
the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.
-- Russian Proverb
\The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
-- Elbert Hubbard
\The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
\The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
\The defense attorney was hammering away at the plaintiff:
"You claim," he jeered, "that my client came at you with a broken bottle in
his hand. But is it not true, that you had something in YOUR hand?"
"Yes," he admitted, "his wife. Very charming, of course, but
not much good in a fight."
\The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
-- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
\The devil finds work for idle circuits to do.
\The early worm gets the bird.
\The easiest way to figure the cost of living is
to take your income and add ten percent.
\The economy depends about as much on economists as
the weather does on weather forecasters.
-- Jean-Paul Kauffmann
\The end of the human race will be that it
will eventually die of civilization.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
\The end of the world will occur at 3:00 p.m., this Friday,
with symposium to follow.
\The fact that it works is immaterial.
-- L. Ogborn
\The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
-- Abbie Hoffman
\The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth
of management is that success equals skill.
-- Robert Heller
\The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving
your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do.
-- McCloctnik the Lucid
\The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV
\The goal of Computer Science is to build something that
will last at least until we've finished building it.
\The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.
The goal of nature is to build better mice.
\The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines.
They gave him love and he invented marriage.
\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 die young -- because they see it's no use living if you've got
to be good.
\The greatest lies of all time:
(1) I love you.
(2) This won't hurt a bit.
(3) The Mercedes is paid for.
(4) The check is in the mail.
(5) I was just going to call you.
(6) I've always worn cowboy boots.
(7) I swear I won't come in your mouth.
(8) Of course I'll respect you in the morning.
(9) We have a really challenging assignment for you.
(10) I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
\The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
\The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
-- Albert Einstein
\The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is
flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see.
-- Monty Python
\The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of
its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
\The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats
a strange protein -- it rejects it.
-- P. Medawar
\The idea is to die young as late as possible.
-- Ashley Montagu
\The identical is equal to itself, since it is different.
-- Franco Spisani
\The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.
-- Henry Kissinger
\The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with
the square of the number of participants.
-- Adam Walinsky
\The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching
train.
\The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon.
\The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the
crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no
one has ever been.
-- Alan Ashley-Pitt
\The meek can have the Earth -- rest of us have other plans.
\The meek shall inherit the Earth -- they are too weak to refuse.
\The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the
klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream."
"Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other. "Why?"
"How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?"
\The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
-- R. Bach, "Illusions"
\The more laws and order are made prominent,
the more thieves and robbers there will be.
-- Lao Tsu
\The moss on the tree does not fear the talons of the hawk.
\The most common form of marriage proposal: "YOU'RE WHAT!?"
\The number of people watching you is directly
proportional to the stupidity of your action.
\The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
\The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon.
-- Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over"
\The only thing that stops God from sending
another flood is that the first one was useless.
-- Chamfort
\The only thing we learn from history is that
we learn nothing from history.
-- Hegel
I know guys can't learn from yesterday...
Hegel must be taking the long view.
-- John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar"
\The opossum is a very sophisticated animal. It doesn't even get up
until 5 or 6 p.m.
\The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr
\The past always looks better than it was.
It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)
\The pleasure is momentary,
The position ridiculous,
The expense damnable.
-- Chesterfield, on sex
\The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to
constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every
appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA
statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This
also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
\The probability of someone watching you is
proportional to the stupidity of your action.
\The problem...is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with.
\The quality of a blow-job is determined by the
length of sheet you have to pull out of your ass.
\The revolution will not be televised.
\The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
-- Emerson
\The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Justice Douglas
\The ripest fruit falls first.
-- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"
\The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And littered with
sloppy analysis!
\The secret of happiness is total disregard of everybody.
\The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood
as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all.
The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in
the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in
twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.
"Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached
everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a
fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one --
and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city."
"How?" demanded Fafhrd.
Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know."
-- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar"
\The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
-- Noelie Alito
\The so-called lessons of history are for the most part
the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
-- Max Lerner
\The superfluous is very necessary.
-- Voltaire
\The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling
their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from
the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to
ascribe to the other side a consistency, forsight and coherence that
its own experience belies. Of course, even two blind men can do
enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.
-- Henry Kissinger
\The surest sign that a man is in love is when he divorces his wife.
\The thief
Left it behind --
The moon at the window.
-- Ryokan
\The three most important parts of a stove: lifter, leg, and poker.
\The three sexual positions during preganancy.
During the first four months: Missionary style
During the second four months: Doggie style
And during the last month: Coyote style
Coyote style?
You sit by the hole and howl.
\The time spent on any item of the agenda [of a finance
committee] will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
-- C. N. Parkinson
\The trouble with being punctual is that people think
you have nothing more important to do.
\The trouble with doing something right the first time
is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.
\The trouble with money is it costs too much.
\The truth of a proposition has nothing to do
with its credibility. And vice versa.
\The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
\The universe does not have laws --
it has habits, and habits can be broken.
\The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination --
but the combination is locked up in the safe.
-- Peter DeVries
\The value of a program is directly proportional to the weight of
its output.
\The very first essential for success is a perpetually
constant and regular employment of violence.
-- Adolph Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
\The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts
to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to
be one of the facts that needs altering.
-- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil"
\The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.
-- Jerry Brown
\The wages of sin are high --
unless you know someone who does it for nothing.
\The warning message we sent the Russians was
a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
-- Alexander Haig
\The way to make a small fortune in the commodities market
is to start with a large fortune.
\The world is coming to an end! Repent and return those library books!
\The world's as ugly as sin,
And almost as delightful
-- Frederick Locker-Lampson
\Theft from a single author is plagiarism.
Theft from two is comparative study.
Theft from three or more is research.
\There are many ways to say "I love you", but fucking is the fastest.
\There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or
a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
-- Gloria Steinem
\There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both
plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis;
and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again,
don't we all?
\There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells
and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated
pools here and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving
them parched for wonder. There are also those who believe that if you
stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it will increase your
intelligence.
-- "The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII"
\There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
-- Disraeli
\There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away
from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone
loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor.
\There are three things I always forget. Names, faces --
the third I can't remember.
-- Italo Svevo
\There are three ways to get something done:
(1) Do it yourself.
(2) Hire someone to do it for you.
(3) Forbid your kids to do it.
\There are two sides to every divorce: yours and the shithead's.
\There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make is so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies.
-- C. A. R. Hoare
\There are two ways to write error-free programs.
Only the third one works.
\There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through
a suitable application of high explosives.
\There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
-- Henry Kissinger
\There has been an alarming increase in the number
of things you know nothing about.
\There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself
to be burned for an opinion.
-- Anatole France
\There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not
wave in a vacuum.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
\There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
-- Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977
\There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
-- G. B. Shaw
\There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes.
\There is nothing so easy but that it becomes
difficult when you do it reluctantly.
-- Publius Terentius Afer
\There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
-- C. S. Lewis, "The Chronicles of Narnia"
\There was something about her I liked,
but I couldn't put my finger on it.
\There's a fine line between courage and foolishness.
Too bad its not a fence.
\There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to.
\There's no future in time travel.
\There's no heavier burden than a great potential.
\There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
-- Dr. Who
\There's no real need to do housework --
after four years it doesn't get any worse.
\They make a desert and call it peace.
-- Tacitus
\They told me I was gullible...and I believed them!
\They're only trying to make me look paranoid.
\They're unfriendly, which is fortunate, really.
They'd be difficult to like.
-- Avon
\Things are more like they used to be than they are now.
\Think of your family tonight.
Try to crawl home after the computer crashes.
\Think sideways!
-- Edward De Bono
\Third Law of Hacking: the last blow counts most.
\This fortune cookie is property of Fortune Cookies, Inc.
\This is the Leprechaun Law: every purse has a price.
\This limerick is --SO--FILTHY-- that it would offend you. So I'll put
"di-dah" for the filthy words:
Di-dah, di-dah, di-dah di-dah,
Di-dah di-dah di-dah, di-dah;
di-dah di-dah di-dah?
Di-dah di-dah di-dah.
Di-dah di-dah, di-dah di-fuck.
\This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside,
but to be hurled with great force.
-- Dorothy Parker
\This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't.
-- Hofstadter
\This will be a memorable month --
no matter how hard you try to forget it.
\Those of you who think you know everything are
very annoying to those of us who do.
\Those who can't write, write manuals.
\Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
\Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will
make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy
\Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are
men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the roar of its many waters.
-- Frederick Douglass
\Thou shalt not omit adultery.
\Though a program be but three lines long,
someday it will have to be maintained.
-- The Tao of Programming
\Time is nature's way of making sure that
everything doesn't happen at once.
\To a Real Woman, every ejaculation is premature.
\To be is to do.
-- I. Kant
To do is to be.
-- A. Sartre
Do-be-do-be-do.
-- F. Sinatra
\To be is to do.
-- I. Kant
To do is to be.
-- A. Sartre
Yabba-Dabba-Doo!
-- F. Flinstone
\To be or not to be.
-- Shakespeare
To do is to be.
-- Nietzsche
To be is to do.
-- Sartre
Do be do be do.
-- Frank Sinatra
\To be responsive at this time, though I will simply say, and therefore
this is a repeat of what I said previously, that which I am unable to
offer in response is based on information available to make no such
statement.
\To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and
whatever you hit, call it the target.
\To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
\To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System.
\To err is human, to moo bovine.
\To generalize is to be an idiot.
-- William Blake
\To get something done, a committee should consist of
no more than three men, two of them absent.
\To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-- Thomas Edison
\To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.
\To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.
-- W. Churchill, on Korean War negotiations
\To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job
will take the longest and cost the most.
\To the systems programmer, users and applications serve
only to provide a test load.
\To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question...or is it?
\Today is a good day to bribe a high-ranking public official.
\Today is a good day to die.
-- An apache warrior proverb
\Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
\Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest.
\Too clever is dumb.
-- Ogden Nash
\Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL.
-- Mae West
\Too often I find that the volume of paper expands
to fill the available briefcases.
-- Governor Jerry Brown
\Travel important today; Internal Revenue men arrive tomorrow.
\Trolls are described as rubbery: they keep bouncing back.
\Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
-- Henrik Tikkanen
\Try hacking in the wee hours: you will have more room.
\Try not to have a good time...This is supposed to be educational.
-- Charles Schulz
\Try to be the best of whatever you are, even if what you are is no good.
\Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done,
is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written
in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and
pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer),
defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the
absolutely perfect future.
-- Amrom Katz
\Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance.
\Trying to establish voice contact...please yell into keyboard.
\Turnaucka's Law:
The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.
\Tussman's Law:
Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.
\Twenty percent of zero is better than nothing.
-- Walt Kelly
\Two can live as cheaply as one for half as long.
-- Howard Kandel
\Two is not 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
\Two percent of zero is almost nothing.
\Two things I like the best in life -- hot cars and fast women.
\Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
\UFO's are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist.
\Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb:
Never use your thumb for a rule. You'll either hit it
with a hammer or get a splinter in it.
\Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a
just man is also a prison.
-- Henry David Thoreau
\Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under Communism, it's just the opposite.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
\Under deadline pressure for the next week. If you want something,
it can wait. Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic...
\Unnamed Law:
If it happens, it must be possible.
\Using a morning star in the evening has no effect.
\Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
and paradise is when you have none.
-- Doug Larson
\Vail's Second Axiom:
The amount of work to be done increases in proportion
to the amount of work already completed.
\Van Roy's Law:
An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
\Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
1. If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once.
2. If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points.
\Vidi, vici, veni.
(I saw, I conquered, I came.)
\Vila: "I think I have just made the biggest mistake of my life."
Orac: "It is unlikely. I would predict there are far greater mistakes
waiting to be made by someone with your obvious talent for it."
\Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
-- Salvor Hardin
\Virtue is its own punishment.
\Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously
moving from where you left them to where you can't find them.
\Vote anarchist!
\WARNING from H.M. Govt: Quaffing may be dangerous to your health.
\Wanted: shopkeepers. Send a scroll of mail to:
Mage of Yendor/Level 35/Dungeon.
\War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
-- Charles Edward Montague
\War is menstruation envy.
\Warning: end of file 'fortunes' reached.
\Wasting time is an important part of living.
\Watson's Law:
The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to
the number and significance of any persons watching it.
\We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it.
-- Whole Earth Catalog
\We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which
divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being
correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
-- Niels Bohr
\We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
-- Walt Kelly, "Pogo"
\We are on the verge: Today our program proved
Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
\We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved.
\We can embody the truth, but we cannot know it.
-- Yates
\We can't really be wrong if we're just following Gods orders
You know, He wrote this book here
And in this book He says that He made us to be just like Him
So if we're dumb, then God's dumb (and perhaps a little ugly on the side)
-- Frank Zappa
\We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
-- Vroomfondel
\We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand.
-- James Watt
\We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand
the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!
\We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some
of our best friends are trying to kill us.
\We took some pictures of the girls, but they weren't developed.
\We've just recieved the results of a survey conducted to ascertain the
various reasons men get out of bed in the middle of the night. According
to the report, 2% are motivated by a desire to visit the bathroom, and
3% have an urge to raid the refrigerator. The other 95% get up to go home.
\Wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise.
-- John Heywood
\Weiler's Law:
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
\Weinberg's First Law:
Progress is made on alternate Fridays.
\Weinberg's Principle:
An expert is a person who avoids the small errors
while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
\Weinberg's Second Law:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
\Weiner's Law of Libraries:
There are no answers, only cross references.
\Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter.
He'll come in handy if you run out of food.
-- Dean McLaughlin.
\Were there no women, men might live like gods.
-- Thomas Dekker
\Westheimer's Discovery:
A couple of months in the laboratory can
frequently save a couple of hours in the library.
\Wethern's Law:
Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.
\What I want is all of the power and none of the responsibility.
\What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
-- WOP, "War Games"
\What color is a chameleon on a mirror?
\What fools these mortals be.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
\What good is having someone who can walk on water
if you don't follow in his footsteps?
\What is a magician but a practising theorist?
-- Obi-Wan Kenobi
\What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind.
-- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
\What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
-- Bertold Brecht
\What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do.
\What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is
that there's nothing to compare it with.
\What one fool can do, another can.
-- Ancient Simian Proverb
\What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- Ursula K. LeGuin
\What the fuck, over?
\What the hell, go ahead and put all your eggs in one basket.
\What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn?
-- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
\What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
-- Wittgenstein
\What's another word for Thesaurus?
-- Steven Wright
\What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?
-- The Doctor
\Whatever is not nailed down is mine.
What I can pry loose is not nailed down.
-- Collis P. Huntingdon
\When God created man, She was only testing.
\When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.
-- Charles Merrill Smith
\When God endowed human beings with brains,
He did not intend to guarantee them.
\When a banker jumps out of a window, jump after him --
that's where the money is.
-- Robespierre
\When a female has tears in her eyes the one who cannot see is the male.
\When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,
it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
-- Samuel Johnson
\When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog along to see
the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain
relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
\When all other means of communication fail, try words.
\When are you buttheads gonna learn that you can't oppose
Gestapo tactics *with* Gestapo tactics?
-- Reuben Flagg
\When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America
before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."
-- Vine Deloria, Jr.
\When choosing between evils, I always
like to take the one I've never tried before.
-- Mae West
\When in doubt, use brute force.
-- Ken Thompson
\When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.
-- Dylan Thomas
\When someone says "I want a programming language in which I
need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
\When the blind lead the blind they will both fall over the cliff.
-- Chinese proverb
\When the candles are out all women are fair.
-- Plutarch
\When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical.
-- Jon Carroll
\When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
\When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground.
-- Old Jewish saying
[How come there aren't ever any "New Jewish sayings?" Ed.]
\When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most
insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are
required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and
exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-- George Bernard Shaw
\When we are planning for posterity, we ought to
remember that virtue is not hereditary.
-- Thomas Paine
\When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut.
\When you don't know what you are doing, do it neatly.
\When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure
clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer
to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively.
In a way, the next move is up to him.
-- R. A. Lafferty
\When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
-- Winston Churchill, On formal declarations of war
\When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by
asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't
know the answer either.
-- Edgar R. Fiedler
\When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.
-- The Wall Street Journal
\When you've seen one nuclear war, you've seen them all.
\Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really".
-- Dave Parnas
\Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say
what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
\Whether you can hear it or not
The Universe is laughing behind your back.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
\While anyone can admit to themselves they were wrong,
the true test is admission to someone else.
\While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens,
ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.
-- Boccaccio
\While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.
\While it may be true that a watched pot never boils, the one
you don't keep an eye on can make an awful mess of your stove.
-- Edward Stevenson
\While money can't buy happiness, it certainly
lets you choose your own form of misery.
\While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position.
\While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction
of their correctness never does.
\While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still
very reassuring to know that it's still there.
\Who cares if it doesn't do anything? It was made with our new
Triple-Iso-Bifurcated-Krypton-Gate-MOS process.
\Who needs friends when you can sit alone in your room and drink?
\Who's on first?
\Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
\Why are you wasting time reading fortunes?
\Why be a man when you can be a success?
-- Bertold Brecht
\Why bother building any more nuclear warheads until
we use the ones we have?
\Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?
\Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of
movement unless it was to avoid responsibility with?
\Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?
-- Lily Tomlin
\Why marry a virgin? If she wasn't good enough for
the rest of them then she isn't good enough for you.
\Williams and Holland's Law:
If enough data is collected, anything may be
proven by statistical methods.
\Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as
it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat.
\With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand
miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and
still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no
such thing as progress.
-- Ransom K. Ferm
\Wizards do it background &
\Wombat's Laws of Computer Selection:
(1) If it doesn't run Unix, forget it.
(2) Any computer design over 10 years old is obsolete.
(3) Anything made by IBM is junk. (See number 2)
(4) The minimum acceptable CPU power for a single user is a
VAX/780 with a floating point accelerator.
(5) Any computer with a mouse is worthless.
-- Rich Kulawiec
\Women who want to be equal to men lack imagination.
-- Graffito in a women's restroom
\Work fascinates me...
I can sit and watch it for hours.
\Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
\Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish
and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer
if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and
and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and
and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?
\Writers do it between periods.
\X-rated movies are all alike...the only thing they
leave to the imagination is the plot.
\Xerox does it again and again and again and...
\Xerox never comes up with anything original.
\Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of APL, I shall
fear no evil, for I can string 6 primitive monadic and dyadic operators
together.
-- Steve Higgins
\Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context.
\Yes, but every time I try to see things your way, I get a headache.
\Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably
still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Snoopy
\Yield to Temptation...it may not pass your way again.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
\You are heading for head-stone for sure.
\You are just the kind of bad food some monsters like to digest.
\You are not drunk if you lie under the table. When you
no longer order from there, then you are drunk.
\You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
\You are without a doubt a rogue, a rascal, a villain, a thief,
a scoundrel, and a mean, dirty, stinking, sniveling, sneaking,
pimping, pocketpicking, thrice double-damned, no-good son-of-a-bitch.
\You can create your own opportunities this week.
Blackmail a senior executive.
\You can find sympathy, in the dictionary, right near shit and suicide.
\You can get a genuine Amulet of Yendor by doing the following:
-- more --
\You can get more of what you want with a kind word and
a gun than you can with just a kind word.
-- Bumper Sticker
\You can learn many things from children.
How much patience you have, for instance.
-- Franklin P. Jones
\You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular.
\You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
\You can't carve your way to success without cutting remarks.
\You can't get rid of a cursed plate mail with a can-opener.
\You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
-- Steven Wright
\You can't teach people to be lazy --
either they have it, or they don't.
-- Dagwood Bumstead
\You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
\You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.
\You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.
\You come out of a woman and you spend the rest
of your life trying to get back inside.
-- Heathcote Williams
\You could get a new lease on life -- if only you didn't need the first
and last month in advance.
\You don't have to be crazy to live in this planet -- but it helps.
\You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable
and trustworthy. A pity that it's totally undeserved.
\You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex.
\You have the capacity to learn from mistakes. You'll learn a lot today.
\You hear the fortune cookie's hissing!
\You humans are all alike.
\You know the great thing about TV? If something important happens
anywhere at all in the world, no matter what time of the day or night,
you can always change the channel.
-- Jim Ignatowski
\You know you've been spending too much time on the computer when your
friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a "++" to fix it.
\You may be recognized soon. Hide.
\You never know how many friends you have until
you rent a house on the beach.
\You offend Shai-Hulud by sheathing your crysknife without having
drawn blood.
\You should emulate your heros, but don't
carry it too far. Especially if they are dead.
\You should never bet against anything in science
at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1.
-- Ernest Rutherford
\You should never wear your best trousers when
you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen
\You think Oedipus had a problem -- Adam was Eve's mother.
\You tread upon my patience.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
\You will be Told about it Tomorrow. Go Home and Prepare Thyself.
\You worry too much about your job. Stop it.
You're not paid enough to worry.
\You're going into the morgue at midnight????
\You're never too old to become younger.
-- Mae West
\You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
-- Dean Martin
\You're not my type. For that matter, you're not even my species!!
\You've been leading a dog's life. Stay off the furniture.
\Your fault -- core dumped
\Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret.
\Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
\Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor:
People are always available for work in the past tense.
\f u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd.
\f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmn.
\gy-ro-scope: A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and
also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpindicular to each
other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two
mutually perpindicular 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
\Moses, returning from the mountain, spoke to his people:
"The good news is we got them down to ten."
"The bad news is that adultery is still one of them."
\We have them just where they want us.
-- James T. Kirk
\"I'd rather have Lockheed deliver the mail than ride around in
a plane built by the post office."
\"I figure I'm pretty good with the bullshit but I love listening
to an expert. Keep talking."
\"Money can't buy happiness but it can certainly rent it for
a couple of hours."
\"The meek shall inherit the Earth after we're done with it."
\"Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here."
-- James T. Kirk
\Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from
mediocre minds.
-- Albert Einstein
\Time flies when you don't know what you're doing.
\Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.
\We are the people our parents warned us about.
\Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive.
\Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself.
\How much sin can I get away with and still go to heaven?
\There is intelligent life on Earth, but I'm just visiting.
\Power means not having to respond.
\Never kick a man unless he's down.
\We should forgive our enemies, but only after they've been taken
out and shot.
\The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that
you've got it made.
\I'm not as dumb as you look.
\I'd like to help you out. Which way did you come in?
\Everyone needs belief in something. I believe I'll have another beer.
\How can I love you if you won't lie down?
\You can find sympathy between shit and syphilis in the
dictionary.
\To err is human. To forgive is unusual.
\Only those who attempt the absurd can acheive the impossible.
\I'm not going deaf. I'm ignoring you.
\I'm the person your mother warned you about.
\How can I tell you I love you when you're sitting on my face?
\God is dead and I want His job.
\I can tell you're lying. Your lips are moving.
\Our parents were never our age.
\Nothing was ever accomplished by a reasonable person.
\Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
\In the country of the blind the one eye'd man is king.
\He who laughs last has not been told the terrible truth.
\It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
\When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad I'm better.
-- Mae West
\I'm really enjoying not talking to you, so let's not talk again
real soon, okay?
\He who laughs last didn't get the joke.
\Obviously the only rational solution to your problem is suicide.
\Death is the greatest kick of all. That's why they save it for last.
\I'm not prejudiced. I hate everyone equally.
\I think I could fall madly in bed with you.
\I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with
the lost.
\Yesterday was the deadline on all complaints.
\Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.
\I worship the ground that awaits you.
\The future isn't what it used to be.
\I wish you were a beer.
\I want to live forever or die in the attempt.
\Love means telling you why you're sorry.
\Love your enemies. It'll make 'em crazy.
\Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
\I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
\I'm having a party in my pants. Want to come?
\Why be difficult when with a bit of effort you can be impossible?
\Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.
\A day without fusion is like a day without sunshine.
\Bureocrats do not change the course of the ship of state. They
merely adjust the compass.
\You can get more with a kind word and a gun than
you can with a kind word.
\Don't think of organ donations as giving up part of yourself to
keep a total stranger alive. It's really a total stranger giving
up almost all of themselves to keep part of you alive.
\Drink wet cement: Get Stoned.
\Kite fliers keep it up longer.
\If you don't know what you're doing, do it neatly.
\An easily understood, workable falsehood is more useful than a
complex, incomprehesable truth.
\You have a right to your opinions. I just don't want to hear them.
\Eat a live toad in the morning and nothing worse will happen to
you for the rest of the day.
\Nuke the whales
\Join the Army: travel to exotic distant lands; meet exciting,
unusual people and kill them.
\We'll get along fine as soon as you realize I'm God.
\Life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less
shit you have to eat.
\I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference.
\Those of you who think they know everything are very annoying to
those of us who do.
\It's not that you and I are so clever, but that the others are
such fools.
\If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
\I'm not cynical. Just experianced.
\The torture never stops.
\Ignore alien orders.
\I know you think you uderstood what I said, but what you heard
was not what I meant.
\I don't have a drinking problem.
I drink
I get drunk
I fall down
No problem
\It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.
\I'm for lust.
\Bullshit Detector. When alarm sounds, please re-engage your brain.
\There are no errors in this book, except this one.
\Although our information is incorrect, we do not vouch for it: Satie
\An advertisement offers to make your fortune, instructions sent on
receipt of $1. The reply is -- "Do as we do."
\Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious: Ionesco
\In principle I am against principles: Tristan Tzara
\All generalizations are dangerous, even this one: Dumas fils
\The golden rule is that there are no golden rules: G. B. Shaw
\Every exit is an entry somewhere else: Tom Stoppard
\Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
-- Karl Marx
\The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground: Buddha
\The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on
the flyswatter: Lichtenberg
\At the moment of meeting, the parting begins.
\God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love
God?: Teilhard de Chardin
\I'm still an atheist, thank God: Luis Bunuel
\Substance is one of the greatest of our illusions: Eddington
\No light, but rather darkness visible: Milton
\What is the sound of one hand clapping?: Zen Buddhism
\The handleless axe without a blade: Lichtenberg
\What happens to your fist when you open your hand?: Zen Buddhism
\What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?: Bertolt Brecht
\My reputation grows with every failure: Shaw
\The exception proves the rule.
\Shop sign: We buy anything saleable.
\A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.
\If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense
confusion?: Seng-Ts'an
\The more you know, the less you think you know.
\Mr. X was disappointed to find no suggestion box in the clubhouse
because he would like to put a suggestion in it about having one.
\That mythical island, whose inhabitants earned a precarious living by
taking in each other's washing: Lewis Carroll
\"The candidate had allowed television cameras into his hotel suite to
watch him watch television."
\Where everyone wants to come as early as possible, then necessarily by
far the larger part must come too late: Lichtenberg
\Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em and little
fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum: Augustus de Morgan
\The hour which gives us life begins to take it away: Seneca
\Who shall stand guard over the guards themselves?: Juvenal
\Living means dying: Engels
\What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? An
inconceivable disturbance.
\All modern thought is permeated by the idea of thinking the unthinkable:
Michel Foucault
\A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms: George Wald
\The chicken was the egg's idea of getting more eggs: Samuel Butler
\The day is the same length as anything that is the same length as it:
Lewis Carroll
\Hasten slowly: Suetonius
\Achilles cannot defeat the tortoise if he thinks of space and time: Paul
Valery
\To endure what is unendurable is true endurance: Japanese proverb
\It is in changing that things find repose: Heraclitus
\Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: Alphonse Karr
\There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy: Swift
\We can't leave the haphazard to chance: N.F. Simpson
\When Po-chang was asked about seeking for the Buddha nature: "It's much
like riding an ox in search of the ox"
\He spent his last shilling on a purse.
\I have always taken the tips of my fingers for the beginning of her
hair: Edmond Jabes
\He lifted himself up by his own bootstraps.
\The book above all others in the world which should be forbidden is a
catalogue of forbidden books: Lichtenberg
\It is no good trying to teach people who need to be taught: Aleister
Crowley
\A solipsist is like the man who gave up turning round because whatever
he saw was always in front of him: Ernst Mach
\A banker will lend you money only if you can prove you don't need it.
\What are husbands for, but to keep our mistresses?: George Moore
\Extremes meet: Louis-Sebastien Mercier
\A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows: John
Hall Wheelock
\"Extremes meet," as the whiting said with its tail in its mouth: Thomas
Hood
\One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need money
the most, are the very ones that never have it: Finley Peter Dunne
\A poor man sells his saucepan to buy something to put in it.
\If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make
a wonderful living: Yiddish proverb
\The rich would have to eat money, but luckily the poor provide food:
Russian proverb
\The dearer a thing is, the cheaper as a general rule we sell it: Samuel
Butler
\Money costs too much: Lew Archer
\The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has
got, and not till then: William Ralph Inge
\Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine: Louis
Aragon
\You get the best view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower, because you can't
see the Eiffel Tower from there.
\No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one: Nathaniel Hawthorne
\Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and did not know, when he awoke, if
he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now
dreamt he was a man.
\Coming events cast their shadows before.
\You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are
continually flowing on: Heraclitus
\Tomorrow never comes.
\You cannot step into the same river once: Cratylus
\The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity:
Miguel de Unamuno
\The superfluous, a very necessary thing: Voltaire
\Only the ephemeral is of lasting value: Ionesco
\Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold:
Thomas Hobbes
\The thing that astonished him was that cats should have two holes cut in
their coat exactly at the place where their eyes are: Lichtenberg
\We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it: Dwight D.
Eisenhower
\Isn't the best defence always a good attack?: Ovid
\Another victory like that and we are done for: Pyrrhus
\Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy: N.F.Simpson
\He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser:
Nietzsche
\The child is father of the man: Wordsworth
\The clan of those without a clan: Robert Lebel
\Youth is wasted on the young: G.B. Shaw
\"My friend Jones will vouch for me." "How do we know that he can be
trusted?" "Oh, I assure you he can."
\Can't see the wood for the trees.
\P.S. If you don't receive this letter, it must have miscarried:
therefore I beg you to write and let me know.
\Can't see for looking.
\Trying to define humour is one of the definitions of humour: Saul
Steinberg
\The biter bit.
\When independence of principle consists in having no principle on which
to depend: C.C. Colton
\They must have the defects of their qualities: Balzac
\"Be spontaneous!"
\Who is worse shod than the shoemaker's wife?
\In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he
learns most: Epicurus
\Boredom -- the desire for desires: Leo Tolstoy
\A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears:
Montaigne
\Many would be cowards if they had courage enough: Thomas Fuller
\The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness: Daniel
Boorstin
\The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it: Wilde
\Work expands to fill the time available for its completion: Parkinson's
Law
\Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so: J.S. Mill
\The medium is the message: Marshall McLuhan
\Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow: Wilde
\I'm saying nothing and I'm saying it: John Cage
\Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little: Epicurus
\He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a
pit: Ernest Bramah
\A ring is a hole with a rim round it.
\The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between
the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides: Schnabel
\You were conspicuous by your absence: Lord John Russell
\There is nothing like worrying about the bowels opening to stop them
opening: Dr. Clark Kennedy
\Bad is never good until worse happens: Danish proverb
\Life imitates art far more than art imitates life: Wilde
\Art lies in concealing art.
\How to paint a perfect painting -- make yourself perfect and then just
paint naturally: Robert M. Pirsig
\Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth: Picasso
\An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed:
Constable
\In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false:
Degas
\"When you say `hill'," the Queen interrupted, "I could show you hills,
in comparison, with which you'd call that a valley": Carroll
\Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth: Alan
Watts
\It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
\To Wilde, a book on Italian literature showed a "want of knowledge that
must be the result of years of study."
\If you turn on the light quickly enough you can see what the dark looks
like.
\There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire
absence of thought: Samuel Butler
\The field cannot well be seen from within the field: Emerson
\No region can include itself as well: Whitehead
\Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed:
Southern Californian Oracle
\How can you tell the dance from the dancer?
\Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is
hard to discover and hard to attain: Heraclitus
\The French for London is Paris: Ionesco
\What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? -- They are the
_irrefutable_ errors of mankind: Nietzsche
\God is not all-powerful as he cannot build a wall he cannot jump: Pascal
\If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I
am not I, and you are not you: Hassidic rabbi
\Consciousness is that which it is not, and is not that which it is:
Sartre
\If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I
think I don't know: R.D. Laing
\If you think you're free, there's no escape possible: Baba Ram Dass
\The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else
of the same name: Aldous Huxley
\It was always thus; and even if 'twere not, 'twould inevitably have been
always otherwise: Dean Lattimer
\The word "dog" does not bite: William James
\Much that is inexpressible would be hardly worth expression, if one
could express it: Lichtenberg
\It is as if I were attempting to trace with the point of a pencil the
shadow of the tracing pencil: Nathaniel West
\In Leningrad freezing point is called melting point.
\Include me out: Sam Goldwyn
\This is the beginning of the end: Talleyrand
\Abstainer -- a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying
himself a pleasure: Ambrose Bierce
\Less is more: Robert Browning
\The little I know, I owe to my ignorance: Sacha Guitry
\"I'm so glad I don't like asparagus," said the small girl to a
sympathetic friend. "Because if I did, I should have to eat it --and I
can't bear it!": Lewis Carroll
\ A young and studious monk went his teacher and said,
"Teach me all about the Buddha nature." His teacher pushed him
on the ground. The next day the student returned to his teacher,
saying, "I am wiser today than yesterday. Teach me about the
Buddha nature." The teacher clobbered him again.
This went on for days until finally the young student
could stand it no more. He tearfully left the monastery and
went back to his temple at home. There he told the chief monk what
had happened. The chief monk said, "You are really stupid! That
monk was kinder to you than a grandmother!"
The young student went back to the monastery, and found
his teacher. He threw the teacher on the ground. His teacher got
up and said, "Now I will teach you about the Buddha nature."
\ One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out
of the net! How will it live?" The other said, "When you have
gotten out of the net, I'll tell you."
\ A monk said to Joshu, "Your stone bridge is widely
renowned, but coming here I find only a heap of rocks."
Joshu said, "You see only the stones and not the
bridge."
The monk said, "What is the bridge?"
Joshu said, "What do you think we are walking on?"
\ Some professors asked a monk to lecture to them on
spiritual matters. The monk ascended a podium, struck it once
with his stick, and descended. The academics were dumb-
founded. The monk asked them, "Do you understand what I have
told you?" One professor said, "I do not understand."
The monk said, "I have concluded my lecture."
\ A student said to the chief monk, "Help me to
pacify my mind!"
The chief monk said, "Bring your mind over here and
I will pacify it."
The student said, "But I don't know where my mind is!"
The monk replied, "Then I have already pacified it."
\ A monk said to Joshu, "I have just entered this
monastery. Please teach me."
"Have you eaten your breakfast?" Joshu asked.
"Yes, I have," replied the student.
"Then you had better wash your bowl."
\ A monk asked Nansen, "Is there any great spiritual
teaching that has not been preached to the people?"
Nansen said, "There is."
"What is the truth that has not been taught?"
"Nothing," Nansen replied.
\ A young monk asked his teacher, "What is the true
spiritual nature of life?"
His teacher picked up a bowl of water and threw it
in the student's face, saying "Go wash out your mouth!"
\ If you meet a person on the path, do not greet him
with words or silence.
How will you greet him?
\ A monk, taking a bamboo stick, said to the people,
"If you call this a stick, you fall into the trap of words,
but if you do not call it a stick, you contradict facts.
So what do you call it?"
At that time a monk in the assembly came forth.
He snatched the stick, broke it in two, and threw the pieces
across the room.
\ A monk sat with his three students. He took out his
fan and placed it in front of him, saying, "Without calling
it a fan, tell me what this is."
The first said, "You couldn't call it a slop-bucket."
The master poked him with his stick.
The second picked up the fan and fanned himself. He too
was rewarded with the stick.
The third opened the fan, laid a piece of cake on it,
and served it to his teacher. The teacher said, "Eat your cake."
\ The chief monk at the monastery was looking for someone
to replace him. He called the monks together and placed in front
of them a water bottle. He said, "Without calling this a water
bottle, tell me what it is."
One monk said, "You couldn't call it a block of wood."
Another poured himself a drink.
Just then the cook walked into the room and kicked the water
bottle over. The cook was made head of the monastery.
\ Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream.
One said to the other, "I wish I were a fish. They are
so happy." The other replied, "How do you know whether
fish are happy or not? You're not a fish." The first
said, "But you're not me, so how do you know whether or
not I know how fish feel?"
\ The student Doko came to a Zen master, and said,
"I am seeking the truth. In what state of mind should I
train myself, so as to find it?"
Said the master, "There is no mind, so you cannot put
it in any state. There is no truth, so you cannot train yourself
for it."
"If there is no mind to train, and no truth to find, why
do you have these monks gather before you every day to study
Zen and train themselves for this study?"
"But I haven't an inch of room here," said the
master, "so how could the monks gather? I have no tongue,
so how could I call them together or teach them?"
"Oh, how can you talk like this?" said Doko.
"But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can
I lie to you?"
Then Doko said sadly, "I cannot follow you. I cannot
understand you."
"I cannot understand myself," said the master.
\ Joshu asked the teacher Nansen, "What is the True Way?"
Nansen answered, "Every way is the true Way."
Joshu asked, "Can I study it?"
Nansen answered, "The more you study, the further from
the Way."
Joshu asked, "If I don't study it, how can I know it?"
Nansen answered, "The Way does not belong to things seen:
nor to things unseen. It does not belong to things known: nor to
things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or name it. To find
yourself on it, open yourself as wide as the sky."
\ A master was asked the question, "What is the Way?" by a
curious monk.
"It is right before your eyes," said the master.
"Why do I not see it for myself?"
"Because you are thinking of yourself."
"What about you: do you see it?"
"So long as you see double, saying 'I don't,' and
'you do,' and so on, your eyes are clouded," said the
master.
"When there is neither 'I' nor 'you,' can one see it?"
"When there is neither 'I' nor 'you,' who is the one
that wants to see it?"
\ Has a dog a Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say 'yes' or 'no'
You lose your own Buddha-nature.
\ A wandering monk saw on his travels a gigantic old oak
tree standing in front of the door of a monastery. Under it sat
the chief monk. The traveler called out to him, "This is a useless
tree! If you wanted to make a ship, it would soon rot. If you
wanted to make tools, they would soon break. You can't do anything
useful with this tree, and that's why it has become so old."
The chief monk replied, "Keep your mouth shut! What do
you know about it? You compare this tree to your cultivated trees;
your orange, pear and apple trees, and all others that bear fruit.
Even before they can ripen their fruit, people attack and violate
them. Their branches are broken, their wings are torn. Their
own gifts bring harm to them, and they cannot live out their
natural span. If this tree had been useful in any way, would it
have ever reached this size? You useless mortal man, what do you
know about useless trees?"
\ Two monks went fishing in an electron river. The
first monk drew out his network, and out flopped a hacker.
The second monk cried, "The poor hacker! How can it live
outside of the network?" The first monk said, "When you
have learned to live outside the network, then you will know."
\ What is the vector which is orthogonal to itself?
\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...
\ THE STORY OF CREATION
or
THE MYTH OF URK
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null,
and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be
registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried;
and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data
Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening
and there was morning, one interrupt...
-- Rico Tudor
\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
\Brooke's Law:
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn
fool discovers something which either abolishes the
system or expands it beyond recognition.
\Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
-- Ambrose Bierce
\Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job.
-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
\"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
\"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."
\Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may
revitalize the corner saloon.
\All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
importance.
\Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be
taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.
\Everyting should be built top-down, except the first time.
\"If you have to hate, hate gently"
\Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!
\After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
on the bench.
\A bather whose clothing was strewed
By breezes that left her quite nude,
Saw a man come along
And, unless I'm quite wrong,
You expected this line to be lewd.
\A beat schizophrenic said, "Me?
I am not I, I'm a tree."
But another, more sane,
Shouted, "I'm a Great Dane!"
And covered his pants leg with pee.
\A mathematician named Hall
Has a hexahedronical ball,
And the cube of its weight
Times his pecker's, plus eight
Is his phone number -- give him a call..
\Once sat herself down on a molehill.
A curious mole
Nosed into her hole --
Ms. Vogel's ok, but the mole's ill.
\A pretty young maiden from France
Decided she'd "just take a chance."
She let herself go
For an hour or so
And now all her sisters are aunts.
\A remarkable race are the Persians;
They have such peculiar diversions.
They make love the whole day
In the usual way
And save up the nights for perversions.
\A team playing baseball in Dallas
Called the umpire blind out of malice.
While this worthy had fits
The team made eight hits
And a girl in the bleachers named Alice.
\A wanton young lady from Wimley
Reproached for not acting quite primly
Said, "Heavens above!
I know sex isn't love,
But it's such an entrancing facsimile."
\A wanton young lady from Wimley
Reproached for not acting quite primly
Said, "Heavens above!
I know sex isn't love,
But it's such an entrancing facsimile."
\A widow who fancied a man some
Was diddled three times in a hansome.
When she clamored for more
Her young man became sore
And exclaimed "My name's Simpson not Samson."
\A worried young man from Stamboul
Founds lots of red spots on his tool.
Said the doctor, a cynic,
"Get out of my clinic;
Just wipe off the lipstick, you fool!"
\An architect fellow named Yoric
Could, when feeling euphoric,
Display for selection
Three kinds of erection --
Corinthian, ionic, and doric.
\He hated to mend, so young Ned
Called in a cute neighbor instead.
Her husband said, "Vi,
When you stitched up his torn fly,
Did you have to bite off the thread?"
\In the Garden of Eden sat Adam,
Massaging the bust of his madam,
He chuckled with mirth,
For he knew that on earth,
There were only two boobs and he had 'em.
\Said a horny young girl from Milpitas,
"My favorite sport is coitus."
But a fullback from State
Made her period late,
And now she has athlete's fetus
\Said a swinging young chick named Lyth
Whose virtue was largely a myth,
"Try as hard as I can,
I can't find a man
That it's fun to be virtuous with."
\My back aches, my pussy is sore;
I simply can't fuck any more;
I'm covered with sweat,
And you haven't come yet,
And my God, it's a quarter to four!
\There once was a couple named Kelley,
Who lived their life belly to belly.
Because in their haste
They used Library Paste,
Instead of Petroleum Jelly.
\There once was a freshman named Lin,
Whose tool was as thin as a pin,
A virgin named Joan
From a bible belt home,
Said "This won't be much of a sin."
\There once was a hacker named Ken
Who inherited truckloads of Yen
So he built him some chicks
Of silicon chips
And hasn't been heard from since then.
\There once was a lady from Exeter,
So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
One was even so brave
As to take out and wave
The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.
\There once was a plumber from Leigh,
Who was plumbing his maid by the sea,
Said she, "Please stop plumbing,
I think someone's coming!"
Said he, "Yes I know love, it's me."
\There once was a queen of Bulgaria
Whose bush had grown hairier and hairier,
Till a prince from Peru
Who came up for a screw
Had to hunt for her cunt with a terrier.
\There once was a Scot named McAmeter
With a tool of prodigious diameter.
It was not the size
That cause such surprise;
'Twas his rhythm -- iambic pentameter.
\There once was a young man named Gene
Who invented a screwing machine
Concave and convex
It served either sex
And it played with itself in between.
\There was a bluestocking in Florence
Wrote anti-sex pamphlets in torrents,
Till a Spanish grandee,
Got her off with his knee,
And she burned all her works with abhorrence.
\There was a gay countess of Bray,
And you may think it odd when I say,
That in spite of high station,
Rank and education,
She always spelled cunt with a "k".
\There was a young fellow named Bliss
Whose sex life was strangely amiss,
For even with Venus
His recalcitrant penis
Would never do better than t
h
i
s
.
\There was a young girl from Hong Kong
Whose cervical cap was a gong.
She said with a yell,
As a shot rang her bell,
"I'll give you a ding for a dong!"
\There was a young girl named Sapphire
Who succumbed to her lover's desire.
She said, "It's a sin,
But now that it's in,
Could you shove it a few inches higher?"
\There was a young girl of Angina
Who stretched catgut across her vagina.
From the love-making frock
(With the proper sized cock)
Came Tocata and Fugue in D minor.
\There was a young girl of Darjeeling
Who could dance with such exquisite feeling
There was never a sound
For miles around
Save of fly-buttons hitting the ceiling.
\There was a young lad name of Durcan
Who was always jerkin' his gherkin.
His father said, "Durcan!
Stop jerkin' your gherkin!
Your gherkin's for ferkin', not jerkin'.
\There was a young lady from Maine
Who claimed she had men on her brain.
But you knew from the view,
As her abdomen grew,
It was not on her brain that he'd lain.
\There was a young lady named Clair
Who possessed a magnificent pair;
At least so I thought
Till I saw one get caught
On a thorn, and begin losing air.
\There was a young lady named Hall,
Wore a newspaper dress to a ball.
The dress caught on fire
And burned her entire
Front page, sporting section, and all.
\There was a young lady named Twiss
Who said she thought fucking a bliss,
For it tickled her bum
And caused her to come
.siht ekil gniyl ylbatrofmoc elihW
\There was a young lady of Norway
Who hung by her toes in a doorway.
She said to her beau
"Just look at me Joe
I think I've discovered one more way."
\There was a young man from Bel-Aire
Who was screwing his girl on the stair,
But the banister broke
So he doubled his stroke
And finished her off in mid-air.
\There was a young man named Crockett
Whose balls got caught in a socket.
His wife was a bitch,
And she threw the switch,
As Crockett went off like a rocket.
\There was a young man of Cape Horn
Who wished he had never been born,
And he wouldn't have been
If his father had seen
That the end of the rubber was torn.
\There was a young man of St. John's
Who wanted to bugger the swans.
But the loyal hall porter
Said, "Pray take my daughter!
Those birds are reserved for the dons."
\There was a young whore from kaloo
Who filled her vagina with glue.
She said with a grin,
"If they pay to get in,
They can pay to get out again too!"
\There was an old man of the port
Whose prick was remarkably short.
When he got into bed,
The old woman said,
"This isn't a prick; it's a wart!"
\There was an old pirate named Bates
Who was learning to rhumba on skates.
He fell on his cutlass
Which rendered him nutless
And practically useless on dates.
\ ``It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is
sure to find out next morning it was someone else.'' --
Rogers
\ ``If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.'' --
Chekhov
\ ``The most happy marriage I can picture would be the
union of a deaf man to a blind woman.'' -- Coleridge
\ ``Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as
happy in the arms of a chambermaid as a duchess.'' --
Dr. Johnson
\ ``If a man hears much that a woman says, she is not
beautiful.'' -- Haskins
\ ``A man does not look behind the door unless he has
stood there himself.'' -- Du Bois
\ ``A lover tries to stand in well with the pet dog of
the house.'' -- Moliere
\ ``Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a
confusion of the real with the ideal never goes
unpunished.'' -- Goethe
\ ``In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.''
-- Butler
\ ``A woman may very well form a friendship with a man,
but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little
physical antipathy.'' -- Nietzsche
\ ``Men who cherish for women the highest respect are
seldom popular with them.'' -- author unknown
\ ``Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us
from achieving them.'' -- Dumas
\ ``Nature has given women so much power that the law has
very wisely given them little.'' -- Dr. Johnson
\ ``The great question... which I have not been able to
answer... is, "What does a woman want?'' -- Freud
\ ``Home life as we understand it is no more natural to
us than a cage is to a cockatoo.'' -- Shaw
\ ``Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside
desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get
out.'' -- Montaigne
\ ``For a male and female to live continuously together
is... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural
condition.'' -- Robert Briffault
\ ``Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your
life paying for it.'' -- Baskins
\ A wedding is a funeral where a man smells his own
flowers.
\ A man is not complete until he is married -- then he is
finished.
\ Marriage is a rest period between romances.
\ Marriage is the sole cause of divorce.
\ Marriage is a trip between Niagra Falls and Reno.
\ Marriage is an institution -- but who wants to live in
one?
\ Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of
person your spouse would have really preferred.
\ Marriage is the triumph of imagination over
intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope
over experience.
\ Marriage is not a word; it is a sentence.
\ Trust everybody ... then cut the cards.
\Two wrongs are only the beginning.
\If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
\To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your
principles.
\Exceptions prove the rule ... and wreck the budget.
\Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.
\Quality assurance dosen't.
\The tough part of a Data Processing Manager's job is that users don't
really know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't
want.
\Exceptions always outnumber rules.
\To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is
research.
\No one is listening until you make a mistake.
\He who hesitates is probably right.
\The ideal resume will turn up one day after the position is filled.
\If somthing is confidential, it will be left in the copier machine.
\One child is not enough, but two children are far too many.
\A clean tie attracts the soup of the day.
\The hardness of the butter is in direct proportion to the softness of
the butter.
\The bag that breaks is the one with the eggs.
\When there are sufficient funds in the checking account, checks take
two weeks to clear. When there are insufficient funds, checks clear
overnight.
\The book you spent $20.95 for today will come out in paperback tomorrow.
\The more an item costs, the farther you have to send it for repairs.
\You never want the one you can afford.
\Never ask the barber if you need a haircut or a salesman if his is a good
price.
\If it says "one size fits all," it dosen't fit anyone.
\You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
\The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it.
\Love letters, business contracts and money due you always arrive three
weeks late, whereas junk mail arrives the day it was sent.
\When you drop change at a vending machine, the pennies will fall nearby,
while all other coins will roll out of sight.
\The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.
\Experience is somthing you don't get until just after you need it.
\Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
\Interchangable parts won't.
\No matter which way you go, it's uphill and against the wind.
\If enough data is collected, anyghing may be proven by statistical
methods.
\Work is accomplished by those employees who have not reached their
level of incompetence.
\Progress is made on alternative Fridays.
\No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in
session.
\The hidden flaw never remains hidden.
\As soon as the stewardess serves the coffee, the airline rencounters
turbulence.
\For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
\People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either
of them being made.
\A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
\When reviewing your notes for a test, the most important ones will be
illegible.
\A free agent is anything but.
\The least experienced fisherman always catches the biggest fish.
\Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.
\The one item you want is never the one on sale.
\The telephone will ring when you are outside the door, fumbling for your
keys.
\If only one price can be obtained for a quotation, the price will be
unreasonable.
\"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting."-Alan Dean Foster "To the
Vanishing Point"
\The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe:
\All my life I said I wanted to be someone...I can see now that
I should have been more specific.
\"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -Bill Davidsen
\"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon
\ "Women and cats do as they dammed well please.
Men and dogs had best learn to live with it..."
Alan Holbrook
\"I'm at the corner of Walk and Don't Walk...."
\ Two obviously high-class old ladies are strolling down a city
street when they run across a grizzled, ragged old derelict
lying drunk in the gutter, covered with garbage, sewer water
running all over him. "Hmmmph," sniffs one of the old ladies
haughtily. "Cleanliness is next to godliness. William Shakespeare!"
The drunk opens one yellowed, rheumy old eye, stares at her
balefully, and replies, "Fuck you. Tennessee Williams..."
\A retired dentist who loves to fish. "Open wide," he mutters to
the unseen fish as he waits for a tug on the line. "Now bite down.
This may sting just a little bit."
\"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." -- Sigmund Freud
\"a woman is only a woman,
but a good cigar is a smoke"
\War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of
things. The decayed and degraded state of
moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that
Nothing is worth war is much worse. The per-
son who has nothing for which he is willing
to fight, nothing which is more important
than his own personal safety, is a miserable
creature and has no chance of being free unless
made and kept so by the exertions of better
men than himself.
--- John Stewart Mill
\Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You
should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should
never wish to do less.
General Robert E. Lee
\We will occasionally use this arrow notation unless there is danger of
no confusion.
-- Ronald Graham, "Rudiments of Ramsey Theory"
\ I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance
in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a
most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a
fricassee, or a ragout.
-- Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"
\ Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had
become socially correct for girls.
-- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities"
\He, in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have
ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him.
-- Henry Fielding, "Jonathan Wild"
\In the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, it's often useful to have a
nice, solid piece of wood in your hands.
-- Ian Faith, manager of Spinal Tap
\All obvious theorems are true.
-- Pommersheim's Principle
All true theorems are obvious.
-- Keane's Kriterion
\Ya gotta feel sorry for all them convicts in New Hampshire, stampin'
out license plates that say "Live free or Die."
-- ???
\I'm a clown. That's my sole mechanism of defense. Very few people
will go out of their way to punish a clown.
-- ???
\He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains
a fool forever.
-- Old Chinese saying
\ Monty Python
"In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and
healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to
the death for it."
\ Ripping Yarns
"Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some
sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him..."
\"It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of
gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."
"Hit it."
\ Pink Panther
"Kato, what is going on in that little yellow brain of yours?"
-- Chief Inspector Clouseau, in reference to a priceless white\
Steinway piano.
\ Dave Barry
Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes
on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists
and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and
not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a
useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter.
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is
second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little
scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds
if we felt like it.
\ The Odd Couple
"A penny for your thoughts?"
"A dollar for your death."
\ The Princess Bride
"Inconceivable!"
"You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think
it does."
\ Daffy Duck
"Ho! Ha-ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!"
--D. Duck
\"Consequences, shmonsequences! So long as I'm rich!"
-- Daffy Duck
\"Mine! Mine! It's all mine!"
-- D. Duck
\ Politicians
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves,
only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that
there may be something to them we are missing."
-- Gamel Abdel Nasser
\"Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters."
-- Ross Presser
\ All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in
the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find
that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are
dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes,
to make it possible.
T. E. Lawrence
_The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_
\Always do what you are afraid to do.
Emerson
\"It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more
true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are
usually attracted by other things than power. When they
do act, they think of it as service, which has limits.
The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insa-
tiable, implacable."
David Brin
_The Postman_
\H. L. Mencken: "The American public knows what it wants,
and deserves to get it good and hard."
\"Hankerin' for trouble, eh? Well I would like--"
[aside] "I would like? I would like a trip to Europe!"
"--I would like..."
--Daffy Duck, "Dripalong Daffy"
\"Go on! Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of burnt feathers
and gunpowder and cordite!"
--Daffy Duck, "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!"
\"Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is
water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries
and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than
rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know."
--Groucho Marx, "Animal Crackers"
\"Go! And never darken my towels again!"
--Groucho Marx, "Duck Soup".
\"Oh, I know it's a penny here and a penny there, but look at me.
I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty."
--Groucho Marx, "Monkey Business"
\"The shortest distance between two points is through Hell."
--Brian Clark
\There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory,
decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.
-Timothy Leary
\"I'm a great housekeeper. I get divorced. I keep the house".
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor
\ James Bond: What do you expect me to talk?
A.Goldfinger: No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!
Goldfinger
\"Well, now, hold onta yer horses, there, Frazier. I mean, as a
psychiatrist, isn't it your job to, uh, `seek and uphold the truth'?"
"Oh, get real, Cliff."
--- Cheers
\A witty saying proves nothing.
--- Voltaire
\"J. D. Salinger... John Knowles... even James Kirkwood and that
guy Don Bredes... they've destroyed being an adolescent,Garraty.
If you're a sixteen-year-old boy, you can't discuss the pains of
adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off
sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon."
Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
\Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
\Lunatic Asylum: The place where optimism most flourishes.
\Old soldiers never die. Young ones do.
\The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
\Hartley's First Law:
You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float
on his back, you've got something.
\Cole's Law:
Thinly sliced cabbage.
\A conservative is one who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
\Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change.
\Frisbeetarianism: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the
on roof and gets stuck.
\The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
stupidity of your action.
\Bacchus: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for
getting drunk.
\Winston Churchill: "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats
look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
\Harry Bender:
"Imagine the appeals,
Dissents and remandments,
If lawyers had written
The Ten Commandments"
\James Thurber: "I think that maybe if women and children
were in charge we would get somewhere."
\Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C.": "If man evolved from the
ape, how come there are still apes around? Some of them were
given choices."
\Bill Watterson, cartoonist: "Sometimes I think the surest
sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe
is that none of it has tried to contact us."
\Unidentified Scientist: "After two years of trying,
scientists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center have
managed to get a chimpanzee pregnant." Which proves that no
task is repugnant to a true scientist.
\Irv Kupcinet: "What can you say about a society that says
God is dead and Elvis is alive?"
\A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
-- Ben Franklin
\A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity
in his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and
exceptional ability in that particular field."
\A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the Universe,
"the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane
\Be self-reliant and your success is assured.
\For economists, the real world is often a special case.
\Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if
one went to Harvard).
-- Edgar R. Fiedler
\A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted
\An ounce of vanity can ruin a ton of merit.
\Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
\A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
\The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
-- Sean O'Casey
\A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe
in God.