textfiles/humor/JOKES/scene1.frt

%%
(1) Alexander the Great was a great general.
(2) Great generals are forewarned.
(3) Forewarned is forearmed.
(4) Four is an even number.
(5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have.
(6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.

Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms.
%%
(1) Everything depends.
(2) Nothing is always.
(3) Everything is sometimes.
%%
1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight -- it's not just a good idea, it's
the law!
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10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0.
%%
100 buckets of bits on the bus
100 buckets of bits
Take one down, short it to ground
FF buckets of bits on the bus

FF buckets of bits on the bus
FF buckets of bits
Take one down, short it to ground
FE buckets of bits on the bus

ad infinitum...
%%
$100 invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at
which time it will be worth absolutely nothing.
                -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
%%
101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR
        (1)  Scarecrow for centipedes
        (2)  Dead cat brush
        (3)  Hair barrettes
        (4)  Cleats
        (5)  Self-piercing earrings
        (6)  Fungus trellis
        (7)  False eyelashes
        (8)  Prosthetic dog claws
        .
        .
        .
        (99)  Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors)
        (100) Killer velcro
        (101) Currency
%%
186,282 miles per second:

It isn't just a good idea, it's the law!
%%
2180, U.S. History question:
        What 20th Century U.S. President was almost impeached and what
        office did he later hold?
%%
$3,000,000
%%
"355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible
simulation!"
%%
43rd Law of Computing:
        Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped
%%
77.  HO HUM -- The Redundant

------- (7)     This hexagram refers to a situation of extreme
--- --- (8)     boredom.  Your programs always bomb off.  Your wife
------- (7)     smells bad.  Your children have hives.  You are working
---O--- (6)     on an accounting system, when you want to develop the
---X--- (9)     GREAT AMERICAN COMPILER.  You give up hot dates to
--- --- (8)     nurse sick computers.  What you need now is sex.

Nine in the second place means:
        The yellow bird approaches the malt shop.  Misfortune.

Six in the third place means:
        In former times men built altars to honor the Internal Revenue
        Service.  Great Dragons!  Are you in trouble!
%%
7:30, Channel 5: The Bionic Dog (Action/Adventure)
        The Bionic Dog drinks too much and kicks over the National
        Redwood Forest.
%%
7:30, Channel 5: The Bionic Dog (Action/Adventure)
        The Bionic Dog gets a hormonal short-circuit and violates the
        Mann Act with an interstate Greyhound bus.
%%
99 blocks of crud on the disk,
99 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
100 blocks of crud on the disk!

100 blocks of crud on the disk,
100 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
101 blocks of crud on the disk! ...
%%
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 [golf] ball hitting a tree shall be deemed not to have hit the tree.
Hitting a tree is simply bad luck and has no place in a scientific
game.  The player should estimate the distance the ball would have
traveled if it had not hit the tree and play the ball from there,
preferably atop a nice firm tuft of grass.
                -- Donald A. Metz
%%
A [golf] ball sliced or hooked into the rough shall be lifted and
placed in the fairway at a point equal to the distance it carried or
rolled into the rough.  Such veering right or left frequently results
from friction between the face of the club and the cover of the ball
and the player should not be penalized for the erratic behavior of the
ball resulting from such uncontrollable physical
phenomena.
                -- Donald A. Metz
%%
A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no
responsibility at the other.
%%
A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
                -- Carl Sandburg
%%
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out
of a divorce.
                -- Don Quinn
%%
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining
and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
A billion here, a couple of billion there -- first thing you know it
adds up to be real money.
                -- Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen
%%
A bird in the bush usually has a friend in there with him.
%%
A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring.
%%
A bird in the hand makes it awfully hard to blow your nose.
%%
... 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 celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
%%
A child can go only so far in life without potty training.  It is not
mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty
trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators.
                -- Dave Barry
%%
A child of 5 could understand this!  Fetch me a child of 5.
%%
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 classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody
wants to read.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
%%
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
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A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
%%
A CONS is an object which cares.
                -- Bernie Greenberg.
%%
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 countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
                -- Ben Franklin
%%
A crusader's wife slipped from the garrison
And had an affair with a Saracen.
        She was not oversexed,
        Or jealous or vexed,
She just wanted to make a comparison.
%%
A 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 someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that
you will look forward to the trip.
%%
        A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was
eating his morning meal.  "I would like to give you this personality
test", said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
        Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into
the toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too".
%%
A diva who specializes in risqu'e arias is an off-coloratura soprano ...
%%
        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 dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
        Divided by seven,
        Plus five time eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more.
%%
A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a
Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser.
Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network
with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?"  Very earnestly, the
Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor."  The Hacker then quickly
pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while
simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick
Interlisp Manual.  The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.
%%
A 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's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry.  Hence University education.
                -- G. B. Shaw
%%
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 formal parsing algorithm should not always be used.
                -- D. Gries
%%
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
                -- Adlai Stevenson
%%
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than
he could be elected Pope of Rome.  Both high posts are reserved for men
favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter
facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
A general leading the State Department resembles  a dragon commanding
ducks.
                -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
%%
A girl and a boy bump into each other -- surely an accident.
A girl and a boy bump and her handkerchief drops -- surely another accident.
But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid -- *____that ___had __to ____mean _________something*.
                -- S. Morganstern, "The Silent Gondoliers"
%%
A gleekzorp without a tornpee is like a quop without a fertsneet (sort
of).
%%
A good question is never answered.  It is not a bolt to be tightened
into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the
hope of greening the landscape of idea.
                -- John Ciardi
%%
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
                -- William James
%%
A hypothetical paradox:
        What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security
        team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad
        of Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a
        planet?
                -- Tom Galloway
%%
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
C is for Clair who wasted away, D is for Desmond thrown out of the sleigh.
E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech.
G is for George, smothered under a rug, H is for Hector, done in by a thug.
I is for Ida who drowned in the lake, J is for James who took lye, by mistake.
K is for Kate who was struck with an axe, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks.
M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, N is for Nevil who died of enui.
O is for Olive, run through with an awl, P is for Prue, trampled flat in a brawl
Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire, R is for Rhoda, consumed by a fire.
S is for Susan who parished of fits, T is for Titas who flew into bits.
U is for Una  who slipped down a drain, V is for Victor, squashed under a train.
W is for Winie, embedded in ice, X is for Xercies, devoured by mice.
Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in, Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin.
                -- Edward Gorey "The Gastly Crumb Tines"
%%
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.
%%
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
%%
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
%%
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
%%
A lady with one of her ears applied
To an open keyhole heard, inside,
Two female gossips in converse free --
The subject engaging them was she.
"I think", said one, "and my husband thinks
That she's a prying, inquisitive minx!"
As soon as no more of it she could hear
The lady, indignant, removed her ear.
"I will not stay," she said with a pout,
"To hear my character lied about!"
                -- Gopete Sherany
%%
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is
not worth knowing.
%%
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
in than some that do.
                -- Dennis M. Ritchie
%%
A large number of installed systems work by fiat.  That is, they work
by being declared to work.
                -- Anatol Holt
%%
A Law of Computer Programming:
        Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you
        will find the programmers cannot write in English.
%%
A limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
        But the good ones I've seen
        So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
%%
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of
nothing.
%%
A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon.  Buy the negatives at any
price.
%%
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 lot of people are afraid of heights.  Not me.  I'm afraid of widths.
                -- Steve Wright
%%
A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I.  I
believe everything positively stinks.
                -- Lew Col
%%
        A man goes to a tailor to try on a new custom-made suit.  The
first thing he notices is that the arms are too long.
        "No problem," says the tailor.  "Just bend them at the elbow
and hold them out in front of you.  See, now it's fine."
        "But the collar is up around my ears!"
        "It's nothing.  Just hunch your back up a little ... no, a
little more ... that's it."
        "But I'm stepping on my cuffs!"  the man cries in desperation.
        "Nu, bend you knees a little to take up the slack.  There you
go.  Look in the mirror -- the suit fits perfectly."
        So, twisted like a pretzel, the man lurches out onto the
street.  Reba and Florence see him go by.
        "Oh, look," says Reba, "that poor man!"
        "Yes," says Florence, "but what a beautiful suit."
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%%
A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a
sense of obligation."
                -- Stephen Crane
%%
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
%%
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
%%
A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed
on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new
game.  Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the
pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly
along it at the water's edge.  Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their
heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn
around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite
direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match.  Then, the
paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin
colony and overfly it.  Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins
fall over gently onto their backs.
                -- Audobon Society Magazine
%%
        A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at
the death of composer Edward MacDowell.  She played the elegy for the
pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion.  "Well, it's quite
nice," he replied, but don't you think it would be better if ..."
        "If what?"  asked the composer.
        "If ... if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?"
%%
A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey.  "It is out
on loan," the teacher replied.  At that moment, the donkey brayed
loudly inside the stable.  "But I can hear it bray, over there."  "Whom
do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"
%%
A new dramatist of the absurd
Has a voice that will shortly be heard.
        I learn from my spies
        He's about to devise
An unprintable three-letter word.
%%
A new koan:

        If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you.

        If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you.

It is an ice cream koan.
%%
A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary.
Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a round tuit now
has no excuse for further procrastination.
%%
A New York City judge ruled that if two women behind you at the movies
insist on discussing the probable outcome of the film, you have the
right to turn around and blow a Bronx cheer at them.
%%
A New York City ordinance prohibits the shooting of rabbits from the
rear of a Third Avenue street car -- if the car is in motion.
%%
        A 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 pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
                -- Gloria Steinem
%%
A penny saved is ridiculous.
%%
A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
%%
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
                -- George Wald
%%
A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt --
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover,
You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!
                -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
%%
         A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
                          by Mark Twain

        For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer
be part of the alphabet.  The only kase in which "c" would be retained
would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.  Year 2
might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with
"i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
        Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12
or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz
ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
        Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
%%
"A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil!"
                -- Firesign Theatre, "The Giant Rat of Summatra"
%%
A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?

And he answered:

It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.

It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.

It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City
upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come
to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.

And that is Fate?  said the priest.

Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.

That's all right, said the priest.  I wanted to know what Freight was
too.
                -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
%%
        A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came
upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope.
"That's what I like to see", said the priest, "A man helping his fellow
man".
        As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, "Well,
he sure doesn't know the first thing about shark fishing."
%%
A 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 psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that
your wife will give you for free.
%%
A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be
too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which
was intended for her preservation.
                -- Colton
%%
A putt that stops close enough to the cup to inspire such comments as
"you could blow it in" may be blown in.  This rule does not apply if
the ball is more than three inches from the hole, because no one wants
to make a travesty of the game.
                -- Donald A. Metz
%%
"A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today.  The results blacked
out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon."
                -- Steel City News
%%
A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:

Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying,
"Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny
bits, in thy mercy."  And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the
lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and
breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the
Holy Pin.  Then thou must count to three.  Three shall be the number of
the counting and the number of the counting shall be three.  Four shalt
thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then
proceedeth to three.  Five is right out.  Once the number three, being
the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand
Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight,
shall snuff it."
                -- Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
%%
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices
that the system works.
%%
A real person has two reasons for doing anything ... a good reason and
the real reason.
%%
A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen
objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer
scientists.  Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added
concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three
dimensional objects ...
%%
A Riverside, California, health ordinance states that two persons may
not kiss each other without first wiping their lips with carbolized
rosewater.
%%
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man
contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
                -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
%%
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will
keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those
that are worth committing.
                -- Samuel Butler
%%
                A Severe Strain on the Credulity

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device.  It is when one
considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really
starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor
maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing
of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
                -- New York Times Editorial, 1920
%%
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
                -- Prof. Steiner
%%
... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
                -- O'Henry
%%
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures.
                -- Daniel Webster
%%
A 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 total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention,
and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
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 university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest
in students.
                -- John Ciardi
%%
"A University without students is like an ointment without a fly."
        -- Ed Nather, professor of astronomy at UT Austin
%%
A UNIX saleslady, Lenore,
Enjoys work, but she likes the beach more.
        She found a good way
        To combine work and play:
She sells C shells by the seashore.
%%
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.
                -- Tennessee Williams
%%
A very intelligent turtle
Found programming UNIX a hurdle
        The system, you see,
        Ran as slow as did he,
And that's not saying much for the turtle.
%%
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without
getting nervous.
%%
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets
people's attention.
%%
"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 year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe
in God.
%%
A.A.A.A.A.:
        An organization for drunks who drive
%%
AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaccccccccckkkkkk!!!!!!!!!
You brute!  Knock before entering a ladies room!
%%
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
%%
Absence makes the heart go wander.
%%
Absent, adj.:
        Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed;
        slandered.
%%
Absentee, n.:
        A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove
        himself from the sphere of exaction.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Abstainer, n.:
        A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a
        pleasure.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Absurdity, n.:
        A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own
        opinion.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics,
because the stakes are so low.
                -- Wallace Sayre
%%
Accident, n.:
        A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of
        body is better.
%%
Accidents cause History.

If Sigismund Unbuckle had taken a walk in 1426 and met Wat Tyler, the
Peasant's Revolt would never have happened and the motor car would not
have been invented until 2026, which would have meant that all the oil
could have been used for lamps, thus saving the electric light bulb and
the whale, and nobody would have caught Moby Dick or Billy Budd.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
According to Arkansas law, Section 4761, Pope's Digest:  "No person
shall be permitted under any pretext whatever, to come nearer than
fifty feet of any door or window of any polling room, from the opening
of the polls until the completion of the count and the certification of
the returns."
%%
According to Kentucky state law, every person must take a bath at least
once a year.
%%
According to 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.
%%
According to the obituary notices, a mean and unimportant person never
dies.
%%
"According to the Rand McNally Places-Rated Almanac, the best place to
live in America is the city of Pittsburgh.  The city of New York came
in twenty-fifth.  Here in New York we really don't care too much.
Because we know that we could beat up their city anytime."
                -- David Letterman
%%
Accordion, n.:
        A bagpipe with pleats.
%%
Accuracy, n.:
        The vice of being right
%%
                        ACHTUNG!!!

Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.  Ist easy
schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit
spitzensparken.  Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen.  Das
rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in das pockets.  Relaxen und
vatch das blinkenlights!!!
%%
Acid -- better living through chemistry.
%%
Acid absorbs 47 times it's weight in excess Reality.
%%
Acquaintance, n.:
        A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well
        enough to lend to.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
"Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from
coughing."
%%
Actor:  "I'm a smash hit.  Why, yesterday during the last act, I had
        everyone glued in their seats!"
Oliver Herford: "Wonderful!  Wonderful!  Clever of you to think of
        it!"
%%
Actor:  So what do you do for a living?
Doris:  I work for a company that makes deceptively shallow serving
        dishes for Chinese restaurants.
                -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
%%
Actors will happen even in the best-regulated families.
%%
ADA, n.:
        Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in
        Computing.  Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an
        ADA awareness."
%%
Admiration, n.:
        Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Adolescence, n.:
        The stage between puberty and adultery.
%%
"Adopted kids are such a pain -- you have to teach them how to look
like you ..."
                --- Gilda Radner
%%
Adore, v.:
        To venerate expectantly.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Adult, n.:
        One old enough to know better.
%%
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest
way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
                -- Sinclair Lewis
%%
After [Benjamin] Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose
names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary
Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc.  These pioneers conducted
many important electrical experiments.  For example, in 1780 Luigi
Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two
different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current
developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer
attached to the frog, which was dead anyway.  Galvani's discovery led
to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine.  Today,
skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously
injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it
hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact
that it sinks like a stone.
                -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%%
After a few boring years, socially meaningful rock 'n' roll died out.
It was replaced by disco, which offers no guidance to any form of life
more advanced than the lichen family.
                -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
                   Do"
%%
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
%%
"... After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known
quotations."
                -- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
%%
After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party?  Surely not
for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have
simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
                -- P. J. O'Rourke
%%
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
on the bench.
%%
        After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from
Heaven.  As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought,
and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon
to be created."
        "This is true," He replied.
        "He will need laws," said the Demon slyly.
        "What!  You, his appointed Enemy for all Time!  You ask for the
right to make his laws?"
        "Oh, no!"  Satan replied, "I ask only that he be allowed to
make his own."
        It was so granted.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
"After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of
the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the
cost to others, to win advancement."
                -- Norman Thomas
%%
After I run your program, let's make love like crazed weasels, OK?
%%
After 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.
%%
Afternoon very favorable for romance.  Try a single person for a
change.
%%
Afternoon, n.:
        That part of the day we spend worrying about how we wasted the
        morning.
%%
Age before beauty; and pearls before swine.
                -- Dorothy Parker
%%
Age, n.:
        That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we
still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise
to commit.
                -- Ambrose Bierce
%%
Ah say, son, you're about as sharp as a bowlin' ball.
%%
Ah, but the choice of dreams to live,
there's the rub.

For all dreams are not equal,
some exit to nightmare
most end with the dreamer

But at least one must be lived ... and died.
%%
"Ah, you know the type.  They like to blame it all on the Jews or the
Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact
that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately
unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep
up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers."
                -- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic
%%
Air is water with holes in it
%%
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
                -- Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
%%
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire
telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.  You pull his tail in New
York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.  Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there.  The only difference is that there is no cat."
%%
Alden's Laws:
        (1) Giving away baby clothes and furniture is the major cause
            of pregnancy.
        (2) Always be backlit.
        (3) Sit down whenever possible.
%%
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
        You take one down, and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.
%%
Alex Haley was adopted!
%%
Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting
for a dial tone.
%%
Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of
them keeps paying for it.
                -- Peggy Joyce
%%
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent
upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a
visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is
informing, stimulating and ennobling.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
All bridge hands are equally likely, but some are more equally likely
than others.
                -- Alan Truscott
%%
All extremists should be taken out and shot.
%%
All Finagle Laws may be bypassed by learning the simple art of doing
without thinking.
%%
"All flesh is grass"
                -- Isiah
Smoke a friend today.
%%
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
%%
All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
importance.
%%
All I can think of is a platter of organic PRUNE CRISPS being trampled
by an army of swarthy, Italian LOUNGE SINGERS ...
%%
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power
                -- Ashleigh Brilliant
%%
All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are
Socrates.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
"All my friends and I are crazy.  That's the only thing that keeps us
sane."
%%
"All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more
specific."
                -- Jane Wagner
%%
All other things being equal, a bald man cannot be elected President of
the United States.
                -- Vic Gold
%%
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 big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can,
too, provided you use them for business purposes.  For example, if you
subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you
can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax
decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper?  Outside?  What
if it rains?"
                -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
%%
"... all the modern inconveniences ..."
                -- Mark Twain
%%
All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most
ridiculous ones.
                -- La Rochefoucauld
%%
All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by
the government in less than a second.
                -- Jim Fiebig
%%
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
                -- Sean O'Casey
%%
All the world's a VAX,
And all the coders merely butchers;
They have their exits and their entrails;
And one int in his time plays many widths,
His sizeof being _N bytes.  At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the Regent's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his Sun,
And shining morning face, creeping like slug
Unwillingly to school.
                -- A Very Annoyed PDP-11
%%
All things are possible, except skiing thru a revolving door.
%%
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 true wisdom is found on T-shirts.
%%
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes
infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in
which he was born.
                -- Francois Fenelon
%%
Alliance, n.:
        In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
        their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they
        cannot separately plunder a third.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Alone, adj.:
        In bad company.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight
Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
                -- Dave Barry
%%
Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios,
mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have
any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place
to plug them in.  Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer,
Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a
serious electrical shock.  This proved that lighting was powered by the
same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely
that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A
penny saved is a penny earned."  Eventually he had to be given a job
running the post office.
                -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%%
Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been
reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the
day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable
interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on
pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin,
and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.
Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous
material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the
management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion
the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical
Gamekeeping."
                -- Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959)
%%
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 try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing
that way."
%%
Am I ranting?  I hope so.  My ranting gets raves.
%%
                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.
%%
Ambidextrous, adj.:
        Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
                -- Charlie McCarthy
%%
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism
to decadence without touching civilization.
                -- John O'Hara
%%
America was discovered by Amerigo Vespucci and was named after him,
until people got tired of living in a place called "Vespuccia" and
changed its name to "America".
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective
employees be honest and hardworking.  It has even stopped hoping for
employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference
between the men's room and the women's room without having little
pictures on the doors.
                -- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister"
%%
"Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it."
%%
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because
people refuse to see it.
                -- James Michener, "Space"
%%
An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but
is always polite to traffic cops.
%%
"An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to
New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but
not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax."
                -- David Letterman
%%
An apple every eight hours will keep three doctors away.
%%
        An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean.  He
knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with
great restraint.
        As he designs the first work, frill after frill and
embellishment after embellishment occur to him.  These get stored away
to be used "next time".  Sooner or later the first system is finished,
and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of
that class of systems, is ready to build a second system.
        This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.
When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will
confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems,
and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that
are particular and not generalizable.
        The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using
all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first
one.  The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile".
                -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
%%
An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.
%%
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 English judge, growing weary of the barrister's long-winded
summation, leaned over the bench and remarked, "I've heard your
arguments, Sir Geoffrey, and I'm none the wiser!"  Sir Geoffrey
responded, "That may be, Milord, but at least you're better informed!"
%%
An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.
                -- A. P. Herbert
%%
An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch.  He
wears a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is
advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and
Rich Protestant Golfer Magazine.  The advertisements are written in
incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote
excellence:

"The Rolex Hyperion.  An elegant new standard in quality excellence and
discriminating handcraftsmanship.  For the individual who is truly able
to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting
things by hand.  Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold.  No watch
parts or anything.  Just a great big chunk on your wrist.  Truly a
timeless statement.  For the individual who is very secure.  Who
doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful.
Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high
school.  Because of his acne.  People who are probably nowhere near as
successful as he is now.  Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and
they'll see his Rolex Hyperion.  Hahahahahahahahaha."
                -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
%%
An exotic journey in downtown Newark is in your future.
%%
"... an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite often
picturesque liar."
                -- Mark Twain
%%
An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God.  Some of these
eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as
possible.
                -- Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann"
%%
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
%%
        An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity
in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him.
        "Well, zayda, it's sort of like this.  Einstein says that if
you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like
an hour.  But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an
hour seems like a minute."
        The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a
moment and says, "And from this he makes a living?"
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%%
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of purge."
%%
Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no
government at all.
%%
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 furthermore ... I don't like your trousers.
%%
And I heard Jeff exclaim,
As they strolled out of sight,
"Merry Christmas to all --
You take credit cards, right?"
                -- "Outsiders" comic
%%
... And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man
                -- A. E. Housman
%%
And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
%%
And so, men, we can see that human skin is an even more complex and
fascinating organ than we thought it was, and if we want to keep it
looking good, we have to care for it as though it were our own.  One
approach is to undergo a painful surgical procedure wherein your skin
is turned inside-out, so the young cells are on the outside, but then
of course you have the unpleasant side effect that your insides
gradually fill up with dead old cells and you explode.  So this
procedure is pretty much limited to top Hollywood stars for whom
youthful beauty is a career necessity, such as Elizabeth Taylor and
Orson Welles.
                -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
%%
"...and the fully armed nuclear warheads, are, of course, merely a
courtesy detail."
%%
And this is a table ma'am.  What in essence it consists of is a
horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical
columnar supports, which we call legs.  The tables in this laboratory,
ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the
world.
                -- Michael Frayn, "The Tin Men"
%%
        "And what will you do when you grow up to be as big as me?"
asked the father of his little son.
        "Diet."
%%
And yet, seasons must be taken with a grain of salt, for they too have
a sense of humor, as does history.  Corn stalks comedy, comedy stalks
tragedy, and this too is historic.  And yet, still, when corn meets
tragedy face to face, we have politics.
                -- Dalglish, Larsen and Sutherland, "Root Crops and
                   Ground Cover"
%%
Angels we have heard on High
Tell us to go out and Buy.
                -- Tom Lehrer
%%
Ankh if you love Isis.
%%
Anoint, v.:
        To grease a king or other great functionary already
        sufficiently slippery.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
                Another Glitch in the Call
                ------- ------ -- --- ----
        (Sung to the tune of a recent Pink Floyd song.)

We don't need no indirection
We don't need no flow control
No data typing or declarations
Did you leave the lists alone?

        Hey!  Hacker!  Leave those lists alone!

Chorus:
        All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
        All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
%%
Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree.
%%
Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but
television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom
and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that
offers whiter teeth *___and* fresher breath.
                -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
                   Do"
%%
                Answers to Last Fortune's Questions:

(1) None.  (Moses didn't have an ark).
(2) Your mother, by the pigeonhole principle.
(3) I don't know.
(4) Who cares?
(5) 6 (or maybe 4, or else 3).  Mr. Alfred J. Duncan of Podunk,
    Montana, submitted an interesting solution to Problem 5.
(6) There is an interesting solution to this problem on page 1029 of my
    book, which you can pick up for $23.95 at finer bookstores and
    bathroom supply outlets (or 99 cents at the table in front of
    Papyrus Books).
%%
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.
%%
Antonym, n.:
        The opposite of the word you're trying to think of.
%%
Any clod can have the facts, but having an opinion is an art.
                -- Charles McCabe
%%
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.
                -- Charles McCabe
%%
Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a
representation of contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a
representation of anything -- except a show to be ignored by anyone
capable of sitting upright in a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.
                -- Richard Schickel
%%
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
                -- Aesop
%%
Any father who thinks he's all important should remind himself that
this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a
whole week.
%%
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to
sell it.
%%
Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche
-- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea.  For instance,
my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off
the fence."  I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was
undoubtedly true.
                -- Solomon Short
%%
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
                -- Sydney J. Harris
%%
... 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.
%%
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
                -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
%%
Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
%%
Anybody who doesn't cut his speed at the sight of a police car is
probably parked.
%%
Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire.
%%
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 can make an omelet with eggs.  The trick is to make one with
none.
%%
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
                -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
%%
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
                -- Samuel Goldwyn
%%
Anyone who hates Dogs and Kids Can't be All Bad.
                -- W. C. Fields
%%
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%%
Anyone who 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 is good and useful if it's made of chocolate.
%%
Anything is good if it's made of chocolate.
%%
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 that is good and useful is made of chocolate.
%%
Anything worth doing is worth overdoing
%%
Aphorism, n.:
        A concise, clever statement.
Afterism, n.:
        A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.
                -- James Alexander Thom
%%
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.  It is the language of
the future for the problems of the past: it creates a new generation of
coding bums.
%%
"APL is a write-only language.  I can write programs in APL, but I
can't read any of them."
                -- Roy Keir
%%
Aquadextrous, adj.:
        Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off
        with your toes.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
AQUARIUS (Jan 20 - Feb 18)
        You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive.
        You lie a great deal.  On the other hand, you are inclined to
        be careless and impractical, causing you to make the same
        mistakes over and over again.  People think you are stupid.
%%
Arbitrary systems, pl.n.:
        Systems about which nothing general can be said, save "nothing
general can be said."
%%
ARCHDUKE FERDINAND FOUND ALIVE --
    FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE
%%
Are you a turtle?
%%
Are you a turtle?
%%
"Arguments with furniture are rarely productive."
                -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
%%
ARIES (Mar 21 - Apr 19)
        You are the pioneer type and hold most people in contempt.  You
        are quick tempered, impatient, and scornful of advice.  You are
        not very nice.
%%
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your
shoes.
                -- Mickey Mouse
%%
Armadillo:
        To provide weapons to a Spanish pickle
%%
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 anything you can get away with.
                -- Marshall McLuhan.
%%
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 a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are
interested in the basic nature of humor.  "What kind of a sick
perverted disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask,
"that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?" ...
                -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
%%
As 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 I was going up Punch Card Hill,
        Feeling worse and worser,
There I met a C.R.T.
        And it drop't me a cursor.

C.R.T., C.R.T.,
        Phosphors light on you!
If I had fifty hours a day
        I'd spend them all at you.

                -- Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes
%%
As I was passing Project MAC,
I met a Quux with seven hacks.
Every hack had seven bugs;
Every bug had seven manifestations;
Every manifestation had seven symptoms.
Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks,
How many losses at Project MAC?
%%
As long as I am mayor of this city [Jersey City, New Jersey] the great
industries are secure.  We hear about constitutional rights, free
speech and the free press.  Every time I hear these words I say to
myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist".  You never hear a
real American talk like that.
                -- Frank Hague (1896-1956)
%%
As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
%%
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its
fascination.  When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be
popular.
                -- Oscar Wilde
%%
As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.
%%
"As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500
programs; a process that traditionally requires some debugging."
                --- USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new
                    computer system.
%%
As 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 poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably because it's
so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there
is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
                -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
%%
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such things as a free
variable."
%%
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season.  There is a simple
memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time
to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A,
E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.
                -- Sandra Boynton, "Chocolate: The Consuming Passion"
%%
As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would
interfere with flight.  [In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the
Wright Brothers.  They were watching birds one day, trying to figure
out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on
Wilbur.  "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual
organs!"  You should have seen their original design.]  As a result,
birds are very, very difficult to arouse sexually.  You almost never
see an aroused bird.  So when they want to reproduce, birds fly up and
stand on telephone lines, where they monitor telephone conversations
with their feet.  When they find a conversation in which people are
talking dirty, they grip the line very tightly until they are both
highly aroused, at which point the female gets pregnant.
                -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
                   Teen Should Know"
%%
As you reach for the web, a venomous spider appears.  Unable to pull
your hand away in time, the spider promptly, but politely, bites you.
The venom takes affect quickly causing your lips to turn plaid along
with your complexion.  You become dazed, and in your stupor you fall
from the limbs of the tree.  Snap!  Your head falls off and rolls all
over the ground.  The instant before you croak, you hear the whoosh of
a vacuum being filled by the air surrounding your head.  Worse yet, the
spider is suing you for damages.
%%
As Zeus said to Narcissus, "Watch yourself."
%%
ASHes to ASHes, DOS to DOS.
%%
Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if
one went to Harvard).
                -- Edgar R. Fiedler
%%
Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.
%%
Ask Not for whom the Bell Tolls, and You will Pay only the
Station-to--Station rate.
%%
Ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls ... if thou art in the
bathtub, it tolls for thee.
%%
Ask your boss to reconsider -- it's so difficult to take "Go to hell"
for an answer.
%%
"Asked by reporters about his upcoming marriage to a forty-two-year-old
woman, director Roman Polanski told reporters, `The way I look at it,
she's the equivalent of three fourteen-year-olds.'"
                -- David Letterman
%%
Ass, n.:
        The masculine of "lass".
%%
Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve.
Run with decent folk and your own decent instincts will be
strengthened.  Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum.
Hang around with rich people and you will end by picking up the check
and dying broke.
                -- Stanley Walker
%%
At a recent meeting in Snowmass, Colorado, a participant from Los
Angeles fainted from hyperoxygenation, and we had to hold his head
under the exhaust of a bus until he revived.
%%
At 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 Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial
challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
                -- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985
%%
... at least I thought I was dancing, 'til somebody stepped on my hand.
                -- J. B. White
%%
"At least they're ___________EXPERIENCED incompetents"
%%
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.
%%
Atlanta makes it against the law to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole
or street lamp.
%%
Atlee is a very modest man.  And with reason.
                -- Winston Churchill
%%
Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever
depths they were once able to plumb.
                -- Stanley Kaufman
%%
Automobile, n.:
        A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down
        pedestrians.
%%
Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep.
                -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
%%
Avoid reality at all costs.
%%
"Avoid revolution or expect to get shot.  Mother and I will grieve, but
we will gladly buy a dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you."
                -- Dr. Paul Williamson, father of a Kent State student
%%
Bacchus, n.:
        A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for
        getting drunk.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Bagbiter:
        1. n.; Equipment or program that fails, usually
intermittently.  2. adj.:  Failing hardware or software.  "This
bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar."  Usage: verges on
obscenity.  Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the
bag".  Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS,
CHOMPER, CHOMPING.
%%
Bagdikian's Observation:
        Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American
        newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion"
        on a ukelele.
%%
Baker's First Law of Federal Geometry:
        A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides
        by governors.
%%
Ban the bomb.  Save the world for conventional warfare.
%%
Banectomy, n.:
        The removal of bruises on a banana.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Bank error in your favor.  Collect $200.
%%
Barach's Rule:
        An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own
        physician.
%%
Bare feet magnetize sharp metal objects so they point upward from the
floor -- especially in the dark.
%%
Barometer, n.:
        An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we
        are having.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
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.
%%
Baseball is a skilled game.  It's America's game -- it, and high
taxes.
                -- Will Rogers
%%
Basic is a high level languish.
APL is a high level anguish.
%%
"BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'."
%%
Basic, n.:
        A programming language.  Related to certain social diseases in
        that those who have it will not admit it in polite company.
%%
Bathquake, n.:
        The violent quake that rattles the entire house when the water
        faucet is turned on to a certain point.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Be a better psychiatrist and the world will beat a psychopath to your
door.
%%
BE ALERT!!!!  (The world needs more lerts ...)
%%
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely
get your Feet wet.  Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your
face.
                -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
%%
Be braver -- you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
%%
Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
Be different: conform.
%%
Be free and open and breezy!  Enjoy!  Things won't get any better so
get used to it.
%%
Be security conscious -- National defense is at stake.
%%
Be wary of strong drink.  It can make you shoot at tax collectors and
miss
                -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
%%
Bees are very busy souls
They have no time for birth controls
And that is why in times like these
There are so many Sons of Bees.
%%
        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 Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's
ego.
%%
Begathon, n.:
        A multi-day event on public television, used to raise money so
you won't have to watch commercials.
%%
Behold the warranty ... the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh
away.
%%
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 disintegrated makes me ve-ry an-gry!"  <huff, huff>
%%
"Being disintegrated makes me ve-ry an-gry!" <huff, huff>
%%
Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone.
%%
Bennett's Laws of Horticulture:
        (1) Houses are for people to live in.
        (2) Gardens are for plants to live in.
        (3) There is no such thing as a houseplant.
%%
"Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence"
                -- Time Bandits
%%
Besides the device, the box should contain:

* Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING"

* A plastic packet containing four 5/17 inch pilfer grommets and two
  club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns.

YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram
cable.

IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You IMMEDIATELY should turn to your
spouse and say: "Margaret, you know why this country can't make a car
that can get all the way through the drive-through at Burger King
without a major transmission overhaul?  Because nobody cares, that's
why."

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret.
                -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
%%
better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus <north pole >town

cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
santa claus <north pole > town

who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | egrep 'bad|good'
for (goodness sake) {
        be good
}
%%
Better dead than mellow.
%%
Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson
Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate.
Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and
great effort pushing boulders into a single word.

It can be seen from 10,000 feet, silhouetted against the snow.
Government officials exchanged memos full of circumlocutions (no Latin
equivalent exists) but failed to word an appropriation bill for the
destruction of this cairn, that wouldn't alert the press and embarrass
both Parliament and Party.

It stands today, a monument to human spirit.  If life exists on other
planets, this may be the first message received from us.
                -- The Realist, November, 1964.
%%
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it."
                -- Donald Knuth
%%
Beware of computerized fortune-tellers!
%%
Beware of low-flying butterflies.
%%
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
                -- Leonard Brandwein
%%
Beware of self-styled experts: an ex is a has-been, and a spurt is a
drip under pressure.
%%
"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 Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but
nothing of interest is easy.
%%
Binary, adj.:
        Possessing the ability to have friends of both sexes.
%%
"Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same
thing as division."
%%
Bipolar, adj.:
        Refers to someone who has homes in Nome, Alaska, and Buffalo,
        New York
%%
Birth, n.:
        The first and direst of all disasters.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic
%%
Bizoos, n.:
        The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a
        basketball.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
... bleakness ... desolation ... plastic forks ...
%%
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
%%
Blessed are they who Go Around in Circles, for they Shall be Known as
Wheels.
%%
BLISS is ignorance
%%
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.
%%
Board the windows, up your car insurance, and don't leave any booze in
plain sight.  It's St. Patrick's day in Chicago again.  The legend has
it that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.  In fact, he was
arrested for drunk driving.  The snakes left because people kept
throwing up on them.
%%
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.
%%
BOO!  We changed Coke again!  BLEAH!  BLEAH!
%%
Boob's Law:
        You always find something in the last place you look.
%%
Bore, n.:
        A guy who wraps up a two-minute idea in a two-hour vocabulary.
                -- Walter Winchell
%%
Bore, n.:
        A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Boren's Laws:
        (1) When in charge, ponder.
        (2) When in trouble, delegate.
        (3) When in doubt, mumble.
%%
Boss, n.:
        According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages
        the words "boss" and "botch" were largely synonymous, except
        that boss, in addition to meaning "a supervisor of workers"
        also meant "an ornamental stud."
%%
Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System.  You couldn't pry
that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation
straightened out for a crowbar.
                -- O. W. Holmes
%%
Boston, n.:
        Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for
        finishing second in the Irish jig competition.
%%
Boy, n.:
        A noise with dirt on it.
%%
Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least
when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
                -- James Thurber
%%
Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.
                -- Kin Hubbard
%%
Brace yourselves.  We're about to try something that borders on the
unique: an actually rather serious technical book which is not only
(gasp) vehemently anti-Solemn, but also (shudder) takes sides.  I tend
to think of it as `Constructive Snottiness.'
                -- Mike Padlipsky, Foreword to "Elements of Networking
                   Style"
%%
Bradley's Bromide:
        If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a
        committee -- that will do them in.
%%
Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
        When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more
        easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone
        Ranger have handled this?"
%%
Brain fried -- Core dumped
%%
Brain, n.:
        The apparatus with which we think that we think.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Brain, v. [as in "to brain"]:
        To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of
        error in an opponent.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Breast Feeding should not be attempted by fathers with hairy chests,
since they can make the baby sneeze and give it wind.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
Bride, n.:
        A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may
revitalize the corner saloon.
%%
British Israelites:
        The British Israelites believe the white Anglo-Saxons of
        Britain to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel
        deported by Sargon of Assyria on the fall of Sumeria in 721
        B.C. ... They further believe that the future can be foretold
        by the measurements of the Great Pyramid, which probably means
        it will be big and yellow and in the hand of the Arabs.  They
        also believe that if you sleep with your head under the pillow
        a fairy will come and take all your teeth.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
Broad-mindedness, n.:
        The result of flattening high-mindedness out.
%%
Brontosaurus Principle:
        Organizations can grow faster than their brains can manage them
in relation to their environment and to their own physiology:  when
this occurs, they are an endangered species.
                -- Thomas K. Connellan
%%
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.
%%
Bubble Memory, n.:
        A derogatory term, usually referring to a person's
        intelligence.  See also "vacuum tube".
%%
Bucy's Law:
        Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
%%
Bug, n.:
        An aspect of a computer program which exists because the
        programmer was thinking about Jumbo Jacks or stock options when
        s/he wrote the program.

Fortunately, the second-to-last bug has just been fixed.
                -- Ray Simard
%%
Bugs, pl. n.:
        Small living things that small living boys throw on small
        living girls.
%%
BULLWINKLE: "You just leave that to my pal.  He's the brains of the
            outfit."
GENERAL:    "What does that make YOU?"
BULLWINKLE: "What else?  An executive..."
                -- Jay Ward
%%
Bumper sticker:

"All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British
manufacture"
%%
Bureaucrat, n.:
        A person who cuts red tape sideways.
                -- J. McCabe
%%
Bureaucrat, n.:
        A politician who has tenure.
%%
Bureaucrats cut red tape -- lengthwise.
%%
Burn's Hog Weighing Method:
        (1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a
            sawhorse.
        (2) Put the hog on one end of the plank.
        (3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again
            perfectly balanced.
        (4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks.
                -- Robert Burns
%%
        ... But among the children of the Great Society there were
those whose skins were black.  And lo!  Their portion was niggardly,
and of the fatted calf they were sucking hind teat ...
        Now it came to pass that a prophet rose up amongst them, and
they called him King.  And he went unto Pharaoh and said, "Let my
people go to the front of the bus."
        But Pharaoh answered: "In the fullness of time and with all
deliberate speed shall this thing come to pass.  When ye shall prove
yourselves worthy, shall ye have your just portion -- yea, verily, like
unto a snowball in Hell."
                -- "The Begatting of a President"
%%
... But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can
easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed
and were a scourge to mankind.  The evidence (including confession)
upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was
without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable.  The judges' decisions based
on it were sound in logic and in law.  Nothing in any existing court
was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and
sorcery for which so many suffered death.  If there were no witches,
human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
"But don't you worry, its for a cause -- feeding global corporations
paws."
%%
"But I don't like Spam!!!!"
%%
... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand.  Human
intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as
we can tell.  If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues
that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding
of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.  Even the standard
example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads --
makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing
whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a
finite or an infinite number.
                -- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"
%%
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
                -- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in Optimizing
                   Compilers"
%%
"But officer, I was only trying to gain enough speed so I could coast
to the nearest gas station."
%%
But scientists, who ought to know
Assure us that it must be so.
Oh, let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about.
                -- Hilaire Belloc
%%
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!
                -- Mark "The Bard" Twain
%%
But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who
was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal
education and lived in New Jersey.  Edison's first major invention in
1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of
American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented.  But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he
invented the electric company.  Edison's design was a brilliant
adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends
electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the
electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant
part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch
of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since
very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United
States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it
ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate
increases.
                -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%%
"But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad
place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge.
Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge?  What is a
kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs,
poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around?  Have I
explained yet about the bytes?"
%%
... But we've only fondled the surface of that subject.
                -- Virginia Masters
%%
"But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable
computers?"
%%
Buzz off, Banana Nose; Relieve mine eyes
Of hateful soreness, purge mine ears of corn;
Less dear than army ants in apple pies
Art thou, old prune-face, with thy chestnuts worn,
Dropt from thy peeling lips like lousy fruit;
Like honeybees upon the perfum'd rose
They suck, and like the double-breasted suit
Are out of date; therefore, Banana Nose,
Go fly a kite, thy welcome's overstayed;
And stem the produce of thy waspish wits:
Thy logick, like thy locks, is disarrayed;
Thy cheer, like thy complexion, is the pits.
Be off, I say; go bug somebody new,
Scram, beat it, get thee hence, and nuts to you.
%%
By 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)"
                -- Quoted from a fortune cookie program
                   (whose author claims, "Actually, stealing IS easier.")
                   [to which I reply, "You think it's easy for me to
                   misconstrue all these misquotations?!?"]
%%
By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity -- another man's, I
mean.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to
point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very
fast.  People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are
often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people
from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B
that so many people from point A are so keen to get _____there.  They often
wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell
they wanted to be.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%%
C, n.:
        A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more
        like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one,
        or anything else.  It is either the best language available to
        the art today, or it isn't.
                -- Ray Simard
%%
Cabbage, n.:
        A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as
        a man's head.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Cahn's Axiom:
        When all else fails, read the instructions.
%%
California is a fine place to live -- if you happen to be an orange.
                -- Fred Allen
%%
California, n.:
        From Latin "calor", meaning "heat" (as in English "calorie" or
        Spanish "caliente"); and "fornia'" for "sexual intercourse" or
        "fornication."  Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot
        sex."
                -- Ed Moran
%%
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
                -- Indian proverb
%%
"Calling J-Man Kink.  Calling J-Man Kink.  Hash missile sighted, target
Los Angeles.  Disregard personal feelings about city and intercept."
%%
"Calvin Coolidge looks as if he had been weaned on a pickle."
                -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
%%
"Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth
Corner, Vermont."
                -- Clarence Darrow
%%
Campus sidewalks never exist as the straightest line between two
points.
                -- M. M. Johnston
%%
Canada Bill Jone's Motto:
        It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

Supplement:
        A .44 magnum beats four aces.
%%
Canada Post doesn't really charge 32 cents for a stamp.  It's 2 cents
for postage and 30 cents for storage.
                -- Gerald Regan, Cabinet Minister, 12/31/83 Financial
                   Post
%%
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
CANCER (June 21 - July 22)
        You are sympathetic and understanding to other people's
        problems.  They think you are a sucker.  You are always putting
        things off.  That's why you'll never make anything of
        yourself.  Most welfare recipients are Cancer people.
%%
Canonical, adj.:
        The usual or standard state or manner of something.  A true
story:  One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some
annoyance at the use of jargon.  Over his loud objections, we made a
point of using jargon as much as possible in his presence, and
eventually it began to sink in.  Finally, in one conversation, he used
the word "canonical" in jargon-like fashion without thinking.
        Steele: "Aha!  We've finally got you talking jargon too!"
        Stallman: "What did he say?"
        Steele: "He just used `canonical' in the canonical way."
%%
CAPRICORN (Dec 23 - Jan 19)
        You are conservative and afraid of taking risks.  You don't do
        much of anything and are lazy.  There has never been a
        Capricorn of any importance.  Capricorns should avoid standing
        still for too long as they take root and become trees.
%%
Captain Penny's Law:
        You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of
        the people all of the time, but you Can't Fool Mom.
%%
Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than
expected.  Carefully planned projects take four times longer to
complete than expected, mostly because the planners expect their
planning to reduce the time it takes.
%%
Carmel, New York, has an ordinance forbidding men to wear coats and
trousers that don't match.
%%
Carperpetuation (kar' pur pet u a shun), n.:
        The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string at least a
        dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it,
        then putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Cat, n.:
        Lapwarmer with built-in buzzer.
%%
Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
%%
CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh..
%%
Cecil, you're my final hope
Of finding out the true Straight Dope
For I have been reading of Schrodinger's cat
But none of my cats are at all like that.
This unusual animal (so it is said)
Is simultaneously alive and dead!
What I don't understand is just why he
Can't be one or the other, unquestionably.
My future now hangs in between eigenstates.
In one I'm enlightened, in the other I ain't.
If *you* understand, Cecil, then show me the way
And rescue my psyche from quantum decay.
But if this queer thing has perplexed even you,
Then I will *___and* I won't see you in Schrodinger's zoo.
                -- Randy F., Chicago, "The Straight Dope, a compendium
                   of human knowledge" by Cecil Adams
%%
Celebrate Hannibal Day this year.  Take an elephant to lunch.
%%
Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the
center of the universe.  The premise is wrong, but the navigation
works.  An incorrect model can be a useful tool.
                -- Kelvin Throop III
%%
Census Taker to Housewife: Did you ever have the measles, and, if so,
how many?
%%
Cerebus:        I'd love to lick apricot brandy out of your navel.
Jaka:           Look, Cerebus-- Jaka has to tell you ... something
Cerebus:        If Cerebus had a navel, would you lick apricot brandy
                out of it?
Jaka:           Ugh!
Cerebus:        You don't like apricot brandy?
                -- Cerebus #6, "The Secret"
%%
Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long
walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh.  They
then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy
health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old,
not because of their habits, but in spite of them.  The reason we find
only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the
others who have tried it.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's very funny--
        Did you ever try buying then without money?
                -- Ogden Nash
%%
                        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.
%%
Character Density, n.:
        The number of very weird people in the office.
%%
Checkuary, n.:
        The thirteenth month of the year.  Begins New Year's Day and
        ends when a person stops absentmindedly writing the old year on
        his checks.
%%
Chef, n.:
        Any cook who swears in French.
%%
Chemicals, n.:
        Noxious substances from which modern foods are made.
%%
Chicago law prohibits eating in a place that is on fire.
%%
Chicago Transit Authority Rider's Rule #36:
        Never ever ask the tough looking gentleman wearing El Rukn
        headgear where he got his "pyramid powered pizza warmer".
                -- Chicago Reader 3/27/81
%%
Chicago Transit Authority Rider's Rule #84:
        The CTA has complimentary pop-up timers available on request
        for overheated passengers.  When your timer pops up, the driver
        will cheerfully baste you.
                -- Chicago Reader 5/28/82
%%
Chicago, n.:
        Where the dead still vote ... early and often!
%%
Chicken Little only has to be right once.
%%
Chicken Little was right.
%%
Chicken Soup, n.:
        An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts of aureomycin,
        cocaine, interferon, and TLC.  The only ailment chicken soup
        can't cure is neurotic dependence on one's mother.
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%%
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.
%%
Chism's Law of Completion:
        The amount of time required to complete a government project is
        precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it.
%%
Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law:
        When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
%%
Chivalry, Schmivalry!
        Roger the thief has a
        method he uses for
        sneaky attacks:
Folks who are reading are
        Characteristically
        Always Forgetting to
        Guard their own bac ...
%%
Christ:
        A man who was born at least 5,000 years ahead of his time.
%%
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.
%%
Cigarette, n.:
        A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in
        between.
%%
Cinemuck, n.:
        The combination of popcorn, soda, and melted chocolate which
        covers the floors of movie theaters.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Clairvoyant, n.:
        A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that
which is invisible to her patron -- namely, that he is a blockhead.
                -- Ambrose Bierce
%%
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like
shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
                -- Phyllis Diller
%%
Cleanliness is next to impossible.
%%
Cleveland still lives.  God ____must be dead.
%%
"Cleveland?  Yes, I spent a week there one day."
%%
Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.
%%
Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
COBOL programs are an exercise in Artificial Inelegance.
%%
Cocaine -- the thinking man's Dristan.
%%
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Coincidence, n.:
        You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was
going on.
%%
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
                -- G. K. Chesterton
%%
Cold, adj.:
        When the local flashers are handing out written descriptions.
%%
Cold, adj.:
        When the politicians walk around with their hands in their own
        pockets.
%%
Collaboration, n.:
        A literary partnership based on the false assumption that the
        other fellow can spell.
%%
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the
faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if
the trustees played.  There would be a great increase in broken arms,
legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the
loss to humanity.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
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.
%%
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to _n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
Command, n.:
        Statement presented by a human and accepted by a computer in
such a manner as to make the human feel as if he is in control.
%%
        COMMENT

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
                -- Dorothy Parker
%%
Commitment, n.:
        Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs.
        The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
%%
Committee Rules:
        (1) Never arrive on time, or you will be stamped a beginner.
        (2) Don't say anything until the meeting is half over; this
            stamps you as being wise.
        (3) Be as vague as possible; this prevents irritating the
            others.
        (4) When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be appointed.
        (5) Be the first to move for adjournment; this will make you
            popular -- it's what everyone is waiting for.
%%
Committee, n.:
        A group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group
decide that nothing can be done.
                -- Fred Allen
%%
Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to
be appointed to do the work.
%%
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at
different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
                -- Clive James
%%
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
                -- Josh Billings
%%
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
                -- Albert Einstein
%%
Computer programmers do it byte by byte
%%
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems
theory.
%%
Computers are not intelligent.  They only think they are.
%%
Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers.
                -- Pablo Picasso
%%
Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in
the world that just don't add up.
%%
Computers will not be perfected until they can compute how much more
than the estimate the job will cost.
%%
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
                -- LaRouchefoucauld
%%
Concept, n.:
        Any "idea" for which an outside consultant billed you more than
        $25,000.
%%
... [concerning quotation marks] even if we *___did* quote anybody in this
business, it probably would be gibberish.
                -- Thom McLeod
%%
Condense soup, not books!
%%
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is
good for dandruff.
                -- Peter de Vries
%%
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the
situation.
%%
Congratulations!  You have purchased an extremely fine device that
would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that
you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer
maneuver.  Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS
OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE.  YOU ALREADY
UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU?  YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED
IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD
WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND
SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS,
RIGHT?  AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS,
RIGHT???  WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE
FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?
                -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
%%
Connector Conspiracy, n:
        [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the
KL-10, none of whose connectors match anything else] The tendency of
manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of anything)
to come up with new products which don't fit together with the old
stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive
interface devices.
%%
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
%%
Conscious is when you are aware of something and conscience is when you
wish you weren't.
%%
"Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich."
                -- "Ali Baba Bunny" [1957, Chuck Jones]
%%
Consultants are mystical people who ask a company for a number and then
give it back to them.
%%
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't.  That's logic!"
                -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
%%
"Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern
technology.  Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat."
%%
Conversation, n.:
        A vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath
        is called the listener.
%%
Conway's Law:
        In any organization there will always be one person who knows
        what is going on.

        This person must be fired.
%%
Coronation, n.:
        The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and
        visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a
        dynamite bomb.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Corrupt, adj.:
        In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.
%%
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a
muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can
make of capitalism.
                -- Walter Lippmann
%%
Corruption is not the #1 priority of the Police Commissioner.  His job
is to enforce the law and fight crime.
                -- P.B.A. President E. J. Kiernan
%%
Court, n.:
        A place where they dispense with justice.
                -- Arthur Train
%%
Coward, n.:
        One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with
nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.
                -- Wernher von Braun
%%
Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.
                -- A. E. Newman
%%
Critic, n.:
        A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries
        to please him.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Croll's Query:
        If tin whistles are made of tin, what are foghorns made of?
%%
"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.  It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
                -- Johnny Hart
%%
Cynic, n.:
        A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not
        as they ought to be.  Hence the custom among the Scythians of
        plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Cynic, n.:
        One who looks through rose-colored glasses with a jaundiced
        eye.
%%
Darth Vader sleeps with a Teddywookie.
%%
Dawn, n.:
        The time when men of reason go to bed.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Day of inquiry.  You will be subpoenaed.
%%
%DCL-MEM-BAD, bad memory
VMS-F-PDGERS, pudding between the ears
%%
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.
%%
Dear Lord:
        I just want *___one* one-armed manager so I never have to hear "On
        the other hand", again.
%%
Dear Miss Manners:
        My home economics teacher says that one must never place one's
        elbows on the table.  However, I have read that one elbow, in
        between courses, is all right.  Which is correct?

Gentle Reader:
        For the purpose of answering examinations in your home
        economics class, your teacher is correct.  Catching on to this
        principle of education may be of even greater importance to you
        now than learning correct current table manners, vital as Miss
        Manners believes that is.
%%
Dear Miss Manners:
        Please list some tactful ways of removing a man's saliva from
        your face.

Gentle Reader:
        Please list some decent ways of acquiring a man's saliva on
        your face ...
%%
Dear Mister Language Person: I am curious about the expression, "Part
of this complete breakfast".  The way it comes up is, my 5-year-old
will be watching TV cartoon shows in the morning, and they'll show a
commercial for a children's compressed breakfast compound such as
"Froot Loops" or "Lucky Charms", and they always show it sitting on a
table next to some actual food such as eggs, and the announcer always
says: "Part of this complete breakfast".  Don't that really mean,
"Adjacent to this complete breakfast", or "On the same table as this
complete breakfast"?  And couldn't they make essentially the same claim
if, instead of Froot Loops, they put a can of shaving cream there, or a
dead bat?

Answer: Yes.
                -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
%%
Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?

Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business
signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a
word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR
ANY ITEM'S.  Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when
creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put
quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT
DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
                -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
%%
Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
%%
Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
                -- R. Geis
%%
Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
%%
"Death is nature's way of saying `Howdy'".
%%
Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down
%%
Death is only a state of mind.

Only it doesn't leave you much time to think about anything else.
%%
Death to all fanatics!
%%
Decision maker, n.:
        The person in your office who was unable to form a task force
        before the music stopped.
%%
Decisions of the judges will be final unless shouted down by a really
overwhelming majority of the crowd present.  Abusive and obscene
language may not be used by contestants when addressing members of the
judging panel, or, conversely, by members of the judging panel when
addressing contestants (unless struck by a boomerang).
                -- Mudgeeraba Creek Emu-Riding and Boomerang-Throwing
                   Assoc.
%%
        Deck Us All With Boston Charlie

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower, alleygaroo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
                -- Walt Kelly
%%
"Deep" is a word like "theory" or "semantic" -- it implies all sorts of
marvelous things.  It's one thing to be able to say "I've got a
theory", quite another to say "I've got a semantic theory", but, ah,
those who can claim "I've got a deep semantic theory", they are truly
blessed.
                -- Randy Davis
%%
                        DELETE A FORTUNE!

Don't some of these fortunes just drive you nuts?!  Wouldn't you like
to see some of them deleted from the system?  You can!  Just mail to
"fortune" with the fortune you hate most, and we MIGHT make sure it
gets expunged.
%%
Deliberation, n.:
        The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is
        buttered on.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
"Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow."
%%
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than
we deserve.
                -- George Bernard Shaw
%%
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder
aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
                -- Senator Soaper
%%
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
                -- G. B. Shaw
%%
Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you
don't think.
%%
Democracy is also a form of worship.  It is the worship of Jackals by
Jackasses.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
Democracy is good.  I say this because other systems are worse.
                -- Jawaharlal Nehru
%%
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people
are right more than half of the time.
                -- E. B. White
%%
Democracy, n.:
        A government of the masses.  Authority derived through mass
meeting or any other form of direct expression.  Results in mobocracy.
Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate,
whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion,
prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
                -- U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932),
                   since withdrawn.
%%
Demographic polls show that you have lost credibility across the
board.  Especially with  those 14 year-old Valley girls.
%%
Dentist, n.:
        A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls
        coins out of one's pockets.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Despising machines to a man,
The Luddites joined up with the Klan,
        And ride out by night
        In a sheeting of white
To lynch all the robots they can.
                -- C. M. and G. A. Maxson
%%
Dessert is probably the most important stage of the meal, since it will
be the last thing your guests remember before they pass out all over
the table.
                -- The Anarchist Cookbook
%%
                DETERIORATA

Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice -- even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss -- and when.
Remember that two wrongs never make a right,
But that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on "HOLD".
Be comforted, that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
And despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.

        You are a fluke of the universe ...
        You have no right to be here.
        Whether you can hear it or not, the universe
        Is laughing behind your back.
                -- National Lampoon
%%
DeVries's Dilemma:
        If you hit two keys on the typewriter, the one you don't want
        hits the paper.
%%
Did I say 2?  I lied.
%%
Did you know ...

That no-one ever reads these things?
%%
Did you know that clones never use mirrors?
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Did you know that the voice tapes easily identify the Russian pilot
that shot down the Korean jet?  At one point he definitely states:

        "Natasha!  First we shoot jet, then we go after moose and
        squirrel."

                -- ihuxw!tommyo
%%
Die, v.:
        To stop sinning suddenly.
                -- Elbert Hubbard
%%
"Die?  I should say not, dear fellow.  No Barrymore would allow such a
conventional thing to happen to him."
                -- John Barrymore's dying words
%%
Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little.
%%
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term.
Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
%%
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
%%
Disc space -- the final frontier!
%%
Disco is to music what Etch-A-Sketch is to art.
%%
Distinctive, adj.:
        A different color or shape than our competitors.
%%
Distress, n.:
        A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
District of Columbia pedestrians who leap over passing autos to escape
injury, and then strike the car as they come down, are liable for any
damage inflicted on the vehicle.
%%
Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults do in adultery?
%%
Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?
%%
Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them.
%%
Do not drink coffee in early a.m.  It will keep you awake until noon.
%%
Do not meddle in the affairs of troff, for it is subtle and quick to
anger.
%%
Do not read this fortune under penalty of law.
Violators will be prosecuted.
(Penal Code sec. 2.3.2 (II.a.))
%%
Do not sleep in a eucalyptus tree tonight.
%%
Do not try to solve all life's problems at once -- learn to dread each
day as it comes.
                -- Donald Kaul
%%
Do something unusual today.  Pay a bill.
%%
Do what comes naturally now.  Seethe and fume and throw a tantrum.
%%
Do you have lysdexia?
%%
Do you realize how many holes there could be if people would just take
the time to take the dirt out of them?
%%
"Do you think what we're doing is wrong?"
"Of course it's wrong!  It's illegal!"
"I've never done anything illegal before."
"I thought you said you were an accountant!"
%%
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and
when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
                -- Dick Brandon
%%
Documentation is the castor oil of programming.  Managers know it must
be good because the programmers hate it so much.
%%
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
%%
Don't abandon hope: your Tom Mix decoder ring arrives tomorrow.
%%
Don't be humble ... you're not that great.
                -- Golda Meir
%%
Don't believe everything you hear or anything you say.
%%
Don't change the reason, just change the excuses!
                -- Joe Cointment
%%
"Don't come back until you have him", the Tick-Tock Man said quietly,
sincerely, extremely dangerously.

They used dogs.  They used probes.  They used cardio plate crossoffs.
They used teepers.  They used bribery.  They used stick tites.  They
used intimidation.  They used torment.  They used torture.  They used
finks.  They used cops.  They used search and seizure.  They used
fallaron.  They used betterment incentives.  They used finger prints.
They used the bertillion system.  They used cunning.  They used guile.
They used treachery.  They used Raoul-Mitgong but he wasn't much help.
They used applied physics.  They used techniques of criminology.  And
what the hell, they caught him.

                -- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin, said the
                   Tick-Tock Man"
%%
Don't cook tonight -- starve a rat today!
%%
Don't feed the bats tonight.
%%
Don't get even -- get odd!
%%
Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly
misleading.  Debug only code.
                -- Dave Storer
%%
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes
you nothing.  It was here first."
                -- Mark Twain
%%
Don't go surfing in South Dakota for a while.
%%
Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep till noon.
%%
Don't hit a man when he's down -- kick him; it's easier.
%%
Don't kiss an elephant on the lips today.
%%
Don't knock President Fillmore.  He kept us out of Vietnam.
%%
Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's in walking
distance.
%%
Don't let your mind wander -- it's too little to be let out alone.
%%
Don't look back, the lemmings are gaining on you.
%%
Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy
it today you can do it again tomorrow.
%%
"Don't say yes until I finish talking."
                -- Darryl F. Zanuck
%%
Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete successfully in business.
Cheat.
                -- Ambrose Bierce
%%
Don't suspect your friends -- turn them in!
                -- "Brazil"
%%
Don't take life too seriously -- you'll never get out if it alive.
%%
Don't tell any big lies today.  Small ones can be just as effective.
%%
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to
get more wax!!"
%%
Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts
avoiding you.
                -- The Old Farmer's Almanac
%%
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.  If your ideas are any
good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
                -- Howard Aiken
%%
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.  It's already
tomorrow in Australia.
                -- Charles Schultz
%%
Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you.  They're too
busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
%%
Don't you feel more like you do now than you did when you came in?
%%
Don:    I didn't know you had a cousin Penelope, Bill!  Was she
        pretty?
W. C.:  Well, her face was so wrinkled it looked like seven miles of
        bad road.  She had so many gold teeth, Don, she use to have to
        sleep with her head in a safe.  She died in Bolivia.
Don:    Oh Bill, it must be hard to lose a relative.
W. C.:  It's almost impossible.
                -- W. C. Fields, from "The Further Adventures of Larson
                   E. Whipsnade and other Tarradiddles"
%%
                Double Bucky
        (Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")

Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun
        Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and Meta side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
        Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!

Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
        Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
        Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
        Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

                -- (C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr.
%%
Double-Blind Experiment, n.:
        An experiment in which the chief researcher believes he is
fooling both the subject and the lab assistant.  Often accompanied by a
belief in the tooth fairy.
%%
Down with categorical imperative!
%%
"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing."
%%
Drew's Law of Highway Biology:
        The first bug to hit a clean windshield lands directly in front
        of your eyes.
%%
Drink Canada Dry!  You might not succeed, but it *__is* fun trying.
%%
Drive defensively.  Buy a tank.
%%
Drugs may be the road to nowhere, but at least they're the scenic
route!
%%
Ducharme'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.
%%
Duct tape is like the force.  It has a light side, and a dark side, and
it holds the universe together ...
                -- Carl Zwanzig
%%
Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production of great leaders
has been discontinued.
%%
Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate
and captain of your soul.
%%
        During a grouse hunt in North Carolina two intrepid sportsmen
were blasting away at a clump of trees near a stone wall.  Suddenly a
red-faced country squire popped his head over the wall and shouted,
"Hey, you almost hit my wife."
        "Did I?"  cried the hunter, aghast.  "Terribly sorry.  Have a
shot at mine, over there."
%%
During the next two hours, the system will be going up and down several
times, often with lin~po_~{po       ~poz~ppo\~{ o n~po_~{o[po    ~y oodsou>#w4k**n~po_~{ol;lkld;f;g;dd;po\~{o
%%
"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair.  And my advice to you is to have
nothing whatever to do with it."
                -- W. Somerset Maugham
%%
E Pluribus Unix
%%
Eagleson's Law:
        Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more
months, might as well have been written by someone else.  (Eagleson is
an optimist, the real number is more like 3 weeks.)
%%
Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends
%%
/earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can.
%%
"Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun."
                -- Jeff Berner
%%
Easiest Color to Solve on a Rubik's Cube:
        Black.  Simply remove all the little colored stickers on the
        cube, and each of side of the cube will now be the original
        color of the plastic underneath -- black.  According to the
        instructions, this means the puzzle is solved.
                -- Steve Rubenstein
%%
 Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow they may make it illegal.
%%
"Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may work."
%%
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
                -- John Kenneth Galbraith
%%
Economics, n.:
        Economics is the study of the value and meaning of J. K.
        Galbraith ...
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
Economists can certainly disappoint you.  One said that the economy
would turn up by the last quarter.  Well, I'm down to mine and it
hasn't.
                -- Robert Orben
%%
Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a
percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.
                -- Edgar R. Fiedler
%%
Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
                -- Fred Allen
%%
Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.
                -- Irsin Edman
%%
Eggheads unite!  You have nothing to lose but your yolks.
                -- Adlai Stevenson
%%
Eggnog is a traditional holiday drink invented by the English.  Many
people wonder where the word "eggnog" comes from.  The first syllable
comes from the English word "egg", meaning "egg".  I don't know where
the "nog" comes from.

To make eggnog, you'll need rum, whiskey, wine gin and, if they are in
season, eggs...
%%
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain
of being a damned fool.
                -- Bellamy Brooks
%%
Egotist, n.:
        A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Ehrman's Commentary:
        (1) Things will get worse before they get better.
        (2) Who said things would get better?
%%
Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.
                -- Ronald Reagan, famous movie star
%%
Eleanor Rigby
        Sits at the keyboard
        And waits for a line on the screen
Lives in a dream
Waits for a signal
        Finding some code
        That will make the machine do some more.
What is it for?

All the lonely users, where do they all come from?
All the lonely users, why does it take so long?
%%
Electrical Engineers do it with less resistance.
%%
        Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles,
called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you
have been drinking.  Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in
most American homes is 110 volts per hour.  This is very fast.  In the
time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could
have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey,
although God alone knows why it would want to.
        The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current,
direct current, lightning, static, and European.  Most American homes
have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one
direction for a while, then goes in the other direction.  This prevents
harmful electron buildup in the wires.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%%
Electrocution, n.:
        Burning at the stake with all the modern improvements.
%%
Elevators smell different to midgets
%%
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.
%%
Encyclopedia Salesmen:
        Invite them all in.  Nip out the back door.  Phone the police
        and tell them your house is being burgled.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless.
Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop.
                -- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary
%%
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
%%
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which
otherwise require harder thinking.
                -- Jerome Lettvin
%%
Epperson's law:
        When a man says it's a silly, childish game, it's probably
something his wife can beat him at.
%%
Equal bytes for women.
%%
Error in operator: add beer
%%
Es brilig war.  Die schlichte Toven
        Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-m"umsige Burggoven
        Dir mohmen R"ath ausgraben.
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
%%
Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
Etymology, n.:
        Some early etymological scholars came up with derivations that
        were hard for the public to believe.  The term "etymology" was
        formed from the Latin "etus" ("eaten"), the root "mal" ("bad"),
        and "logy" ("study of").  It meant "the study of things that
        are hard to swallow."
                -- Mike Kellen
%%
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to
speak it to?
                -- Clarence Darrow
%%
"Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral."
                -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
%%
Even though they raised the rate for first class mail in the United
States we really shouldn't complain -- it's still only 2 cents a day.
%%
Ever notice that even the busiest people are never too busy to tell you
just how busy they are.
%%
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what,
exactly, make people laugh.  That's why they were called "wise men."
All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with
spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about:
Would you please take my wife?  No.  How about: Here is my wife, please
take her right now.  No How about:  Would you like to take something?
My wife is available.  No.  How about ..."
                -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
%%
Every 4 seconds a woman has a baby.  Our problem is to find this woman
and stop her.
%%
Every absurdity has a champion who will defend it.
%%
Every creature has within him the wild, uncontrollable urge to punt.
%%
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not
spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
                -- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
%%
Every Horse has an Infinite Number of Legs (proof by intimidation):

Horses have an even number of legs.  Behind they have two legs, and in
front they have fore-legs.  This makes six legs, which is certainly an
odd number of legs for a horse.  But the only number that is both even
and odd is infinity.  Therefore, horses have an infinite number of
legs.  Now to show this for the general case, suppose that somewhere,
there is a horse that has a finite number of legs.  But that is a horse
of another color, and by the [above] lemma ["All horses are the same
color"], that does not exist.
%%
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.
                -- Frank Moore Colby
%%
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
%%
Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
                -- Don Vonada
%%
"Every man has his price.  Mine is $3.95."
%%
Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.
                -- Miguel de Cervantes
%%
Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis.

It makes sense, when you don't think about it.
%%
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one
instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every
program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.
%%
Every program has two purposes -- 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.
%%
"Every time I think I know where it's at, they move it."
%%
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
                -- Beckett
%%
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
                -- Dykstra
%%
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 to.  So it is with the great programmers.
%%
Everyone is a genius.  It's just that some people are too stupid to
realize it.
%%
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 ...
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
Everyone talks about apathy, but no one ____does anything about it.
%%
Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately,
no one we know belongs.
%%
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being
that a belch is more satisfying.
                -- Ingmar Bergman
%%
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
%%
Everything you know is wrong!
%%
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe.  For example, there are no
solids in the universe.  There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums.  There are no surfaces.  There are no
straight lines.
                -- R. Buckminster Fuller
%%
        Excellence is THE trend of the '80s.  Walk into any shopping
mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as
"Garfield Gets Spayed", and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you
how to be excellent: "In Search of Excellence", "Finding Excellence",
"Grasping Hold of Excellence", "Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night
So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It", etc.
                -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
%%
Excellent day for drinking heavily.  Spike office water cooler.
%%
Excellent day for putting Slinkies on an escalator.
%%
Excellent day to have a rotten day.
%%
Excellent time to become a missing person.
%%
Excess on occasion is exhilarating.  It prevents moderation from
acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
                -- W. Somerset Maugham
%%
Excessive login or logout messages are a sure sign of senility.
%%
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do
the work.
                -- John G. Pollard
%%
Expect the worst, it's the least you can do.
%%
Expense Accounts, n.:
        Corporate food stamps.
%%
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
                -- Olivier
%%
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake
when you make it again.
                -- F. P. Jones
%%
Experience is the worst teacher.  It always gives the test first and
the instruction afterward.
%%
Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old
ones.
%%
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
%%
Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.
%%
Extract from Official Sweepstakes Rules:

                NO PURCHASE REQUIRED TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE

To claim your prize without purchase, do the following: (a) Carefully
cut out your computer-printed name and address from upper right hand
corner of the Prize Claim Form. (b) Affix computer-printed name and
address -- with glue or cellophane tape (no staples or paper clips) --
to a 3x5 inch index card.  (c) Also cut out the "No" paragraph (lower
left hand corner of Prize Claim Form) and affix it to the 3x5 card
below your address label. (d) Then print on your 3x5 card, above your
computer-printed name and address the words "CARTER & VAN PEEL
SWEEPSTAKES" (Use all capital letters.)  (e) Finally place 3x5 card
(without bending) into a plain envelope [NOTE: do NOT use the the
Official Prize Claim and CVP Perfume Reply Envelope or you may be
disqualified], and mail to: CVP, Box 1320, Westbury, NY 11595.  Print
this address correctly.  Comply with above instructions carefully and
completely or you may be disqualified from receiving your prize.
%%
F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a dm!
%%
f u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd.
%%
f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng.
%%
F:      When into a room I plunge, I
        Sometimes find some VIOLET FUNGI.
        Then I linger, darkly brooding
        On the poison they're exuding.
                -- The Roguelet's ABC
%%
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
%%
Fairy Tale, n.:
        A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.
%%
Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam on a picnic
without looking to see whether the seeds move.
%%
Faith, n:
        That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be
        untrue.
%%
Fakir, n:
        A psychologist whose charismatic data have inspired almost
        religious devotion in his followers, even though the sources
        seem to have shinnied up a rope and vanished.
%%
Familiarity breeds attempt
%%
Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister
                -- Su Tung-p'o
%%
Famous last words:
%%
Famous last words:
        (1) "Don't worry, I can handle it."
        (2) "You and what army?"
        (3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be
             a cop."
%%
Famous last words:
        (1) Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
        (2) Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
        (3) What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
        (4) We won't need reservations.
        (5) It's always sunny there this time of the year.
        (6) Don't worry, it's not loaded.
        (7) They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
%%
Famous, adj.:
        Conspicuously miserable.
                -- Ambrose Bierce
%%
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the
Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life
forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches
are a pretty neat idea ...
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%%
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it
every six months.
                -- Oscar Wilde
%%
Fats Loves Madelyn
%%
Feel disillusioned?  I've got some great new illusions ...
%%
Fertility is hereditary.  If your parents didn't have any children,
neither will you.
%%
        Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors
d'oeuvres.
        Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright
piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.
        Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
the little hammers strike.
        Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
Christmas tree.  The piano is missing.

        You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
4.  The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.
%%
Fifth Law of Applied Terror:
        If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.

Corollary:
        If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you
        live.
%%
Fifth Law of Procrastination:
        Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that
        there is nothing important to do.
%%
Fifty flippant frogs
Walked by on flippered feet
And with their slime they made the time
Unnaturally fleet.
%%
        FIGHTING WORDS

Say my love is easy had,
        Say I'm bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad --
        Still behold me at your side.

Say I'm neither brave nor young,
        Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue --
        Still you have my heart to wear.

But say my verses do not scan,
        And I get me another man!
                -- Dorothy Parker
%%
Fights between cats and dogs are prohibited by statute in Barber, North
Carolina.
%%
Finagle's Creed:
        Science is true.  Don't be misled by facts.
%%
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, or (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.
%%
Finding out what goes on in the C.I.A. is like performing acupuncture
on a rock.
                -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
%%
Fine day to throw a party.  Throw him as far as you can.
%%
Fine day to work off excess energy.  Steal something heavy.
%%
Fine's Corollary:
        Functionality breeds Contempt.
%%
Finish the sentence below in 25 words or less:

        "Love is what you feel just before you give someone a good ..."

Mail your answer along with the top half of your supervisor to:

        P.O. Box 35
        Baffled Greek, Michigan
%%
First Corollary of Taber's Second Law:
        Machines that piss people off get murdered.
                -- Pat Taber
%%
First Law of Bicycling:
        No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the
        wind.
%%
First Law of Procrastination:
        Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility
        for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who
        imposed the deadline).
%%
First Law of Socio-Genetics:
        Celibacy is not hereditary.
%%
First Rule of History:
        History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each
        other.
%%
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
                -- The Doctor, "Doctor Who"
%%
First, a few words about tools.

Basically, a tool is an object that enables you to take advantage of
the laws of physics and mechanics in such a way that you can seriously
injure yourself.  Today, people tend to take tools for granted.  If
you're ever walking down the street and you notice some people who look
particularly smug, the odds are that they are taking tools for
granted.  If I were you, I'd walk right up and smack them in the face.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%%
Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity.
                -- Robert Firth
%%
Flappity, floppity, flip
The mouse on the m"obius strip;
        The strip revolved,
        The mouse dissolved
In a chronodimensional skip.
%%
FLASH!  Intelligence of mankind decreasing.  Details at ... uh, when
the little hand is on the ....
%%
Flon's Law:
        There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is
        the least bit difficult to write bad programs.
%%
Florence Flask was ... dressing for the opera when she turned to her
husband and screamed, "Erlenmeyer!  My joules!  Someone has stolen my
joules!"

"Now, now, my dear," replied her husband, "keep your balance and reflux
a moment.  Perhaps they're mislead."

"No, I know they're stolen," cried Florence.  "I remember putting them
in my burette ... We must call a copper."

Erlenmeyer did so, and the flatfoot who turned up, one Sherlock Ohms,
said the outrage looked like the work of an arch-criminal by the name
of Lawrence Ium.

"We must be careful --- he's a free radical, ultraviolet, and
dangerous.  His girlfriend is a chlorine at the Palladium.  Maybe I can
catch him there."  With that, he jumped on his carbon cycle in an
activated state and sped off along the reaction pathway ...
                -- Daniel B. Murphy, "Precipitations"
%%
Flugg's Law:
        When you need to knock on wood is when you realize that the
        world is composed of vinyl, naugahyde and aluminum.
%%
Flying saucers on occasion
        Show themselves to human eyes.
Aliens fume, put off invasion
        While they brand these tales as lies.
%%
Fog Lamps, n.:
        Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the
        fronts of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate
        that the driver's brain is in a fog.

        See also "Idiot Lights".
%%
Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing.
                -- Walt Kelly, "Putluck Pogo"
%%
For a good time, call (415) 642-9483
%%
For a man to truly understand rejection, he must first be ignored by a
cat.
%%
"For an adequate time call 555-3321"
%%
For an idea to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be
always old-fashioned.
%%
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
                -- R. Clopton
%%
        "For I perceive that behind this seemingly unrelated sequence
of events, there lurks a singular, sinister attitude of mind."

        "Whose?"

        "MINE! HA-HA!"
%%
For my son, Robert, this is proving to be the high-point of his entire
life to date.  He has had his pajamas on for two, maybe three days
now.  He has the sense of joyful independence a 5-year-old child gets
when he suddenly realizes that he could be operating an acetylene torch
in the coat closet and neither parent [because of the flu] would have
the strength to object.  He has been foraging for his own food, which
means his diet consists entirely of "food" substances which are
advertised only on Saturday-morning cartoon shows; substances that are
the color of jukebox lights and that, for legal reasons, have their
names spelled wrong, as in New Creemy Chok-'n'-Cheez Lumps o' Froot
("part of this complete breakfast").
                -- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide"
%%
For perfect happiness, remember two things:
        (1) Be content with what you've got.
        (2) Be sure you've got plenty.
%%
For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say
"Canada".  Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something.
                -- Sandra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador to
                   the U.S.
%%
For some reason, this fortune reminds everyone of Marvin Zelkowitz.
%%
"For that matter, compare your pocket computer with the massive jobs of
a thousand years ago.  Why not, then, the last step of doing away with
computers altogether?"
                -- Jehan Shuman
%%
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they
like.
                -- Abraham Lincoln
%%
"For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but
phone calls taper off."
                -- Johnny Carson
%%
For years a secret shame destroyed my peace --
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
                -- Justin Richardson.
%%
For your penance, say five Hail Marys and one loud BLAH!
%%
Forgetfulness, n.:
        A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their
        destitution of conscience.
%%
Forms follow function, and often obliterate it.
%%
FORTUNE DISCUSSES THE OBSCURE FILMS!    #6

RAZORBACK:                      Paul Harbride, 1984, 2 hours 25 min.
        One of the great Australian films of the early 1980's, and
        arguably the best movie ever made about a large, man-eating
        hog.  Some violence.  With Gregory Harrison.
%%
fortune's Contribution of the Month to the Animal Rights Debate:

        I'll stay out of animals' way if they'll stay out of mine.
        "Hey you, get off my plate"
                -- Roger Midnight
%%
Fortune's Fictitious Country Song Title of the Week:
        "How Can I Miss You if You Won't Go Away?"
%%
Fortune's graffito of the week (or maybe even month):

                Don't Write On Walls!

                   (and underneath)

                You want I should type?
%%
Fortune's nomination for All-Time Champion and Protector of Youthful
Morals goes to Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan.  During an
impassioned House debate over a proposed bill to "expand oyster and
clam research," a sharp-eared informant transcribed the following
exchange between our hero and Rep. John D. Dingell, also of Michigan.

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

        Incorrigible punster -- Do not incorrige.
%%
FORTUNE'S PARTY TIPS            #14

Tired of finding that other people are helping themselves to your good
liquor at BYOB parties?  Take along a candle, which you insert and
light after you've opened the bottle.  No one ever expects anything
drinkable to be in a bottle which has a candle stuck in its neck.
%%
fortune: cpu time/usefulness ratio too high -- core dumped.
%%
Fortune: You will be attacked next Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. by six samuri
sword wielding purple fish glued to Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Oh, and have a nice day!
                -- Bryce Nesbitt '84
%%
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 Revision:
        It is usually impractical to worry beforehand about
        interferences -- if you have none, someone will make one for
        you.
%%
Fourth Law of Thermodynamics:  If the probability of success is not
almost one, it is damn near zero.
                -- David Ellis
%%
Frankfort, Kentucky, makes it against the law to shoot off a
policeman's tie.
%%
Fresco's Discovery:
        If you knew what you were doing you'd probably be bored.
%%
Friends, Romans, Hipsters,
Let me clue you in;
I come to put down Caesar, not to groove him.
The square kicks some cats are on stay with them;
The hip bits, like, go down under; so let it lay with Caesar.  The cool Brutus
Gave you the message: Caesar had big eyes;
If that's the sound, someone's copping a plea,
And, like, old Caesar really set them straight.
Here, copacetic with Brutus and the studs, -- for Brutus is a real cool cat;
So are they all, all cool cats, --
Come I to make this gig at Caesar's laying down.
%%
Frisbeetarianism, n.:
        The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the on roof and
        gets stuck.
%%
Frobnicate, v.:
        To manipulate or adjust, to tweak.  Derived from FROBNITZ.
        Usually abbreviated to FROB.  Thus one has the saying "to frob
        a frob".  See TWEAK and TWIDDLE.  Usage: FROB, TWIDDLE, and
        TWEAK sometimes connote points along a continuum.  FROB
        connotes aimless manipulation; TWIDDLE connotes gross
        manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; TWEAK
        connotes fine-tuning.  If someone is turning a knob on an
        oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it he is
        probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at
        the screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing
        it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it.
%%
Frobnitz, pl. Frobnitzem (frob'nitsm) n.:
        An unspecified physical object, a widget.  Also refers to
electronic black boxes.  This rare form is usually abbreviated to
FROTZ, or more commonly to FROB.  Also used are FROBNULE, FROBULE, and
FROBNODULE.  Starting perhaps in 1979, FROBBOZ (fruh-bahz'), pl.
FROBBOTZIM, has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure
via the Adventure spin-off called Zork (Dungeon).  These can also be
applied to non-physical objects, such as data structures.
%%
[From an announcement of a congress of the International Ontopsychology
Association, in Rome]:

The Ontopsychological school, availing itself of new research criteria
and of a new telematic epistemology, maintains that social modes do not
spring from dialectics of territory or of class, or of consumer goods,
or of means of power, but rather from dynamic latencies capillarized in
millions of individuals in system functions which, once they have
reached the event maturation, burst forth in catastrophic phenomenology
engaging a suitable stereotype protagonist or duty marionette (general,
president, political party, etc.) to consummate the act of social
schizophrenia in mass genocide.
%%
From the "Guiness Book of World Records", 1973:

Certain passages in several laws have always defied interpretation and
the most inexplicable must be a matter of opinion.  A judge of the
Court of Session of Scotland has sent the editors of this book his
candidate which reads, "In the Nuts (unground), (other than ground
nuts) Order, the expression nuts shall have reference to such nuts,
other than ground nuts, as would but for this amending Order not
qualify as nuts (unground)(other than ground nuts) by reason of their
being nuts (unground)."
%%
From the moment I picked your book up until I put it down I was
convulsed with laughter.  Some day I intend reading it.
                -- Groucho Marx, from "The Book of Insults"
%%
[From the operation manual for the CI-300 Dot Matrix Line Printer, made
in Japan]:

The excellent output machine of MODEL CI-300 as extraordinary DOT
MATRIX LINE PRINTER, built in two MICRO-PROCESSORs as well as EAROM, is
featured by permitting wonderful co-existence such as; "high quality
against low cost", "diversified functions with compact design",
"flexibility in accessibleness and durability of approx. 2000,000,00
Dot/Head", "being sophisticated in mechanism but possibly agile
operating under noises being extremely suppressed" etc.

And as a matter of course, the final goal is just simply to help
achieve "super shuttle diplomacy" between cool data, perhaps earned by
HOST COMPUTER, and warm heart of human being.
%%
From the Pro 350 Pocket Service Guide, p. 49, Step 5 of the
instructions on removing an I/O board from the card cage, comes a new
experience in sound:

        5.  Turn the handle to the right 90 degrees.  The pin-spreading
            sound is normal for this type of connector.
%%
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.
                -- Swinburne
%%
Fuch's Warning:
        If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren't well
enough to travel.
%%
Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
        Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
%%
Furbling, v.:
        Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank
        even when you are the only person in line.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
                -- H. H. Williams
%%
Future looks spotty.  You will spill soup in late evening.
%%
G. B. Shaw to William Douglas Home: "Go on writing plays, my boy.  One
of these days a London producer will go into his office and say to his
secretary, `Is there a play from Shaw this morning?' and when she says
`No,' he will say, `Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish.' And
that's your chance, my boy."
%%
Garbage In -- Gospel Out.
%%
Garter, n.:
        An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her
        stockings and desolating the country.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Gauls!  We have nothing to fear; except perhaps that the sky may fall
on our heads tomorrow.  But as we all know, tomorrow never comes!!
                -- Adventures of Asterix.
%%
Gay shlafen: Yiddish for "go to sleep".

        Now doesn't "gay shlafen" have a softer, more soothing sound
than the harsh, staccato "go to sleep"?  Listen to the difference:
        "Go to sleep, you little wretch!" ... "Gay shlafen, darling."
Obvious, isn't it?
        Clearly the best thing you can do for you children is to start
speaking Yiddish right now and never speak another word of English as
long as you live.  This will, of course, entail teaching Yiddish to all
your friends, business associates, the people at the supermarket, and
so on, but that's just the point.  It has to start with committed
individuals and then grow ...
        Some minor adjustments will have to be made, of course: those
signs written in what look like Yiddish letters won't be funny when
everything is written in Yiddish.  And we'll have to start driving on
the left side of the road so we won't be reading the street signs
backwards.  But is that too high a price to pay for world peace?  I
think not, my friend, I think not.
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%%
        "Gee, Mudhead, everyone at Morse Science High has an
extracurricular activity except you."
        "Well, gee, doesn't Louise count?"
        "Only to ten, Mudhead."

                        -- Firesign Theater
%%
GEMINI (May 21 - June 20)
        You are a quick and intelligent thinker.  People like you
        because you are bisexual.  However, you are inclined to expect
        too much for too little.  This means you are cheap.  Geminis
        are known for committing incest.
%%
GEMINI (May 21 to Jun. 20)
        Good news and bad news highlighted.  Enjoy the good news while
        you can; the bad news will make you forget it.  You will enjoy
        praise and respect from those around you; everybody loves a
        sucker.  A short trip is in the stars, possibly to the men's
        room.
%%
Genderplex, n.:
        The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to
        determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and
        tortoises).
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why
you should.
%%
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus
handicapped.
                -- Elbert Hubbard
%%
Genius, n.:
        A chemist who discovers a laundry additive that rhymes with
        "bright".
%%
George Orwell 1984.  Northwestern 0.
                -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
%%
George Orwell was an optimist.
%%
George Washington was first in war, first in peace -- and the first to
have his birthday juggled to make a long weekend.
                -- Ashley Cooper
%%
Gerrold's Laws of Infernal Dynamics:
        (1) An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong
            direction.
        (2) An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.
        (3) The energy required to change either one of these states
            will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so
            much as to make the task totally impossible.
%%
Get forgiveness now -- tomorrow you may no longer feel guilty.
%%
                        Get GUMMed
                        ----------

The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April
1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above
the ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps.  Members will grep
each other by the hand (after intro), yacc a lot, smoke filtered
chroots in pipes, chown with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek
nice zombie processes, strip, and sleep, but not, we hope, od.  Three
days will be devoted to discussion of the ramifications of whodo.  Two
seconds have been allotted for a complete rundown of all the user-
friendly features of Unix.  Seminars include "Everything You Know is
Wrong", led by Tom Kempson, "Batman or Cat:man?" led by Richie Dennis
"cc C?  Si!  Si!" led by Kerwin Bernighan, and "Document Unix, Are You
Kidding?" led by Jan Yeats.  No Reader Service No. is necessary because
all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we
could tell them.
                -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84
%%
Get Revenge!  Live long enough to be a problem for your children!
%%
                        -- Gifts for Children --

This is easy.  You never have to figure out what to get for children,
because they will tell you exactly what they want.  They spend months
and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday-
morning cartoon-show advertisements.  Make sure you get your children
exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices.  If
your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You
Can Rip Right Off, you'd better get it.  You may be worried that it
might help to encourage your child's antisocial tendencies, but believe
me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you've seen a child
who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift.
                -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
%%
                        -- Gifts for Men --

Men are amused by almost any idiot thing -- that is why professional
ice hockey is so popular -- so buying gifts for them is easy.  But you
should never buy them clothes.  Men believe they already have all the
clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous.  For
example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only
three of them.  He has learned, through humiliating trial and error,
that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh
at him ("You're not going to wear THAT tie with that suit, are you?").
So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several
years without being laughed at.  If you give him a new tie, he will
pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you.

If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires.  More
than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set
of tires.
                -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
%%
                Gimmie That Old Time Religion
We will follow Zarathustra,             We will worship like the Druids,
Zarathustra like we use to,             Dancing naked in the woods,
I'm a Zarathustra booster,              Drinking strange fermented fluids,
And he's good enough for me!            And it's good enough for me!
        (chorus)                                (chorus)

In the church of Aphrodite,
The priestess wears a see-through nightie,
She's a mighty righteous sightie,
And she's good enough for me!
        (chorus)

CHORUS: Give me that old time religion,
        Give me that old time religion,
        Give me that old time religion,
        'Cause it's good enough for me!
%%
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 me a Plumber's friend the size of the Pittsburgh dome, and a place
to stand, and I will drain the world.
%%
"Give me enough medals, and I'll win any war."
                -- Napolean
%%
Give me the Luxuries, and the Hell with the Necessities!
%%
Give thought to your reputation.  Consider changing name and moving to
a new town.
%%
Give your child mental blocks for Christmas.
%%
"Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying
around, I'd rather lie around.  No contest."
                -- Eric Clapton
%%
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden:
Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful.  The LISP
machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
                -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
%%
Glib's Fourth Law of Unreliability:
        Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the
        probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting
        some useful work done.
%%
Gnagloot, n.:
        A person who leaves all his ski passes on his jacket just to
        impress people.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Go 'way!  You're bothering me!
%%
Go climb a gravity well!
%%
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may
be in owning a piece thereof.
                -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
%%
//GO.SYSIN DD *, DOODAH, DOODAH
%%
God did not create the world in 7 days; he screwed around for 6 days
and then pulled an all-nighter.
%%
"God gives burdens; also shoulders"

Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech at the
end of the 1980 election.  At least he said it was a Jewish saying; I
can't find it anywhere.  I'm sure he's telling the truth though; why
would he lie about a thing like that?
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%%
God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little ...
The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty ... I do
not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman
... not enough to support a man and five children if he insists on
smoking and drinking beer.  But the man who cannot live on bread and
water is not fit to live!  A family may live on good bread and water in
the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at
night!
                -- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
%%
God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh
%%
God is a polythiest
%%
God is Dead
                -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is Dead
                -- God
Nietzsche is God
                -- The Dead
%%
God is not dead!  He's alive and autographing bibles at Cody's
%%
God is real, unless declared integer.
%%
God is really only another artist.  He invented the giraffe, the
elephant and the cat.  He has no real style, He just goes on trying
other things.
                -- Pablo Picasso
%%
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
                -- Alfred Jarry
%%
God isn't dead, he just couldn't find a parking place.
%%
God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.
%%
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board
                -- Mark Twain
%%
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
                -- Kronecker
%%
God made the world in six days, and was arrested on the seventh.
%%
God may be subtle, but He isn't plain mean.
                -- Albert Einstein
%%
God must love the Common Man; He made so many of them.
%%
God rest ye CS students now,
Let nothing you dismay.
The VAX is down and won't be up,
Until the first of May.
The program that was due this morn,
Won't be postponed, they say.

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

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

        (chorus)
%%
Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to
school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a
person a car.
%%
Gold, n.:
        A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution.  It
        is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich
        men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons,
        although gold hasn't done anything to them.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
Goldenstern's Rules:
        (1) Always hire a rich attorney
        (2) Never buy from a rich salesman.
%%
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad
example.
                -- La Rouchefoucauld
%%
Good day for a change of scene.  Repaper the bedroom wall.
%%
Good day for overcoming obstacles.  Try a steeplechase.
%%
Good day to avoid cops.  Crawl to school.
%%
Good day to let down old friends who need help.
%%
Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
%%
Good news is just life's way of keeping you off balance.
%%
Good news.  Ten weeks from Friday will be a pretty good day.
%%
Good night to spend with family, but avoid arguments with your mate's
new lover.
%%
"Good-bye.  I am leaving because I am bored."
                -- George Saunders' dying words
%%
"Gosh that takes me back ... or forward.  That's the trouble with time
travel, you never can tell."
                -- Dr. Who
%%
Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward?  That's the trouble with
time travel, you never can tell."
                -- Doctor Who "Androids of Tara"
%%
Got Mole problems?
Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23
%%
Goto, n.:
        A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers
        to complain about unstructured programmers.
                -- Ray Simard
%%
Government lies, and newspapers lie, but in a democracy they are
different lies.
%%
Government spending?  I don't know what it's all about.  I don't know
any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he
doesn't know much.
                -- Will Rogers
%%
Grabel's Law:
        2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
%%
Graduate life -- it's not just a job, it's an indenture.
%%
Grandpa Charnock's Law:
        You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
%%
Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.
%%
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.
%%
Great minds run in great circles.
%%
        GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY #21 -- July 30, 1917

On this day, New York City hotel detectives burst in and caught then-
Senator Warren G. Harding in bed with an underage girl.  He bought them
off with a $20 bribe, and later remarked thankfully, "I thought I
wouldn't get out of that under $1000!"  Always one to learn from his
mistakes, in later years President Harding carried on his affairs in a
tiny closet in the White House Cabinet Room while Secret Service men
stood lookout.
%%
Green light in a.m. for new projects.  Red light in P.M. for traffic
tickets.
%%
Greener's Law:
        Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.
%%
Grelb's Reminder:
        Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
        average drivers.
%%
"Grub first, then ethics."
                -- Bertolt Brecht
%%
Gurmlish, n.:
        The red warning flag at the top of a club sandwich which
        prevents the person from biting into it and puncturing the roof
        of his mouth.
                -- Rich Hall & Friends, "Sniglets"
%%
Gyroscope, n.:
        A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also
        free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to
        each other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of
        the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of
        torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the
        entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on
        the angular momentum to any torque that would change the
        direction of the axis of spin.
                -- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
%%
H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L.
Mencken -- there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
                -- Maxwell Bodenheim
%%
H. L. Mencken's Law:
        Those who can -- do.
        Those who can't -- teach.

Martin's Extension:
        Those who cannot teach -- administrate.
%%
H:      If a 'GOBLIN (HOB) waylays you,
        Slice him up before he slays you.
        Nothing makes you look a slob
        Like running from a HOB'LIN (GOB).
                -- The Roguelet's ABC
%%
Hacker's Law:
        The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a
        nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
%%
Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
%%
... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror,
and you would not have been informed.
%%
Hail to the sun god
He sure is a fun god
Ra!  Ra!  Ra!
%%
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side?  And hain't that a big
enough majority in any town?
                -- Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn"
%%
Half Moon tonight.  (At least it's better than no Moon at all.)
%%
Half-done:
        This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still
crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor.  The difference
between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like
the difference between life and death.
        You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill
there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the
airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough
Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on
Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk
about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop.  Say to the
man, "Let me have a nice half-done."
        Worth the trouble, wasn't it?
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%%
Hall's Laws of Politics:
        (1) The voters want fewer taxes and more spending.
        (2) Citizens want honest politicians until they want something
            fixed.
        (3) Constituency drives out consistency (i.e., liberals defend
            military spending, and conservatives social spending in
            their own districts).
%%
Hand, n.:
        A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and
        commonly thrust into somebody's pocket.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Hanlon's Razor:
        Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
        stupidity.
%%
Hanson's Treatment of Time:
        There are never enough hours in a day, but always too many days
        before Saturday.
%%
Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.
                -- Ogden Nash
%%
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
                -- Oscar Levant
%%
Happiness, n.:
        An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of
        another.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Hard work may not kill you, but why take chances?
%%
Hardware, n.:
        The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
%%
Hark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious offender.  You stand
convicted of sickness, hunger, wretchedness, and want.
                -- Tobias Smollet
%%
Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark
The Duke is fond of kittens
He likes to take their insides out
And use them for his mittens
        From "The Thirteen Clocks"
%%
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
                -- Tom Lehrer
%%
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.
%%
Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he
makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean
famous for its wild horses.  I realize that the concept of wild horses
probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you
have never met any wild horses in person.  In person, they are like
enormous hooved rats.  They amble up to your camp site, and their
attitude is: "We're wild horses.  We're going to eat your food, knock
down your tent and poop on your shoes.  We're protected by federal law,
just like Richard Nixon."
                -- Dave Barry, "Tenting Grandpa Bob"
%%
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.
%%
Hartley's Second Law:
        Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
%%
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.
%%
Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word "database" are
typed with the left hand?  Now the layout of the QWERTYUIOP typewriter
keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even use
of both hands.  It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is
not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears.
%%
                        Has your family tried 'em?

                           POWDERMILK BISCUITS

                 Heavens, they're tasty and expeditious!

           They're made from whole wheat, to give shy persons the
           strength to get up and do what needs to be done.

                           POWDERMILK BISCUITS

        Buy them ready-made in the big blue box with the picture of the
        biscuit on the front, or in the brown bag with the dark stains
                         that indicate freshness.
%%
Hatred, n.:
        A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's
        superiority.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Have an adequate day.
%%
Have people realized that the purpose of the fortune cookie program is
to defuse project tensions?  When did you ever see a cheerful cookie, a
non-cynical, or even an informative cookie?

Perhaps inadvertently, we have a channel for our aggressions.  This
still begs the question of whether the cookie releases the pressure or
only serves to blunt the warning signs.

                Long live the revolution!
                Have a nice day.
%%
Have you ever noticed that the people who are always trying to tell
you, "There's a time for work and a time for play," never find the time
for play?
%%
Have you ever wondered what makes Californians so calm?  Besides drugs,
I mean.  The answer is hot tubs.  A hot tub is a redwood container
filled with water that you sit in naked with members of the opposite
sex, none of whom is necessarily your spouse.  After a few hours in
their hot tubs, Californians don't give a damn about earthquakes or
mass murderers.  They don't give a damn about anything , which is why
they are able to produce "Laverne and Shirley" week after week.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%%
"Have you lived here all your life?"
"Oh, twice that long."
%%
Have you noticed that all you need to grow healthy, vigorous grass is a
crack in your sidewalk?
%%
Have you noticed the way people's intelligence capabilities decline
sharply the minute they start waving guns around?
                -- Dr. Who
%%
"He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions"
%%
He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation
perfectly delightful.
                -- Sydney Smith
%%
He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and
heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope
of ever behaving "normally."
                -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"
%%
He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
                -- Oscar Wilde
%%
"He is now rising from affluence to poverty."
                -- Mark Twain
%%
He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.
%%
He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.
                -- John Mason Brown, drama critic
%%
He thought he saw an albatross
That fluttered 'round the lamp.
He looked again and saw it was
A penny postage stamp.
"You'd best be getting home," he said,
"The nights are rather damp."
%%
He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
                -- Jonathon Swift
%%
"He was a modest, good-humored boy.  It was Oxford that made him
insufferable."
%%
"He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both
eyes ..."
%%
He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry
attacks democracy itself.
                -- William S. Paley, chairman of CBS
%%
He who Laughs, Lasts.
%%
"He's just a politician trying to save both his faces ..."
%%
He's the kind of guy, that, well, if you were ever in a jam he'd be
there ... with two slices of bread and some chunky peanut butter.
%%
"He's the kind of man for the times that need the kind of man he is ..."
%%
HE:  Let's end it all, bequeathin' our brains to science.
SHE: What?!?  Science got enough trouble with their ___OWN brains.
                -- Walt Kelley
%%
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
%%
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying
of nothing.
                -- Redd Foxx
%%
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying
of nothing.
                -- Redd Foxx
%%
Heaven, n.:
        A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of
        their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention
        while you expound your own.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Heavy, adj.:
        Seduced by the chocolate side of the force.
%%
"Heisenberg may have slept here"
%%
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
                -- Milton Friedman
%%
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.
%%
"Hello," he lied.
                -- Don Carpenter quoting a Hollywood agent
%%
Help a swallow land at Capistrano.
%%
Help fight continental drift.
%%
Help me, I'm a prisoner in a Fortune cookie file!
%%
Help stamp out and abolish redundancy.
%%
Help!  I'm trapped in a PDP 11/70!
%%
HELP!  MY TYPEWRITER IS BROKEN!
                -- E. E. CUMMINGS
%%
Her locks an ancient lady gave
Her loving husband's life to save;
And men -- they honored so the dame --
Upon some stars bestowed her name.

But to our modern married fair,
Who'd give their lords to save their hair,
No stellar recognition's given.
There are not stars enough in heaven.
%%
"Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from
Presidents and Kings to the scum of the earth ..."
%%
Here I sit, broken-hearted,
All logged in, but work unstarted.
First net.this and net.that,
And a hot buttered bun for net.fat.

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

I need your help, I say 'tween sobs,
'Cause I'll soon be listed in net.jobs.
%%
Here in my heart, I am Helen;
        I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Sta"el;
        I'm Salome, moon of the East.

Here in my soul I am Sappho;
        Lady Hamilton am I, as well.
In me R'ecamier vies with Kitty O'Shea,
        With Dido, and Eve, and poor nell.

I'm all of the glamorous ladies
        At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
        So I stay at home with a book.
                -- Dorothy Parker
%%
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach
your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings.
Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in
pain?  This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force,
but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an
important electrical lesson.

It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works.  When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small
objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will
attract dirt.  The electrons travel through your bloodstream and
collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your
friend's filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the
carpet, thus completing the circuit.

Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your
finger would explode!  But this is nothing to worry about unless you
have carpeting.
                -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%%
        Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the
month.  According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people
are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China.
        The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either
(depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax
tadpole".
        Bite the wax tadpole.
        There is a sort of rough justice, is there not?
        The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's
hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to
bite a wax tadpole.  Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad,
but broad satiric vistas do not open up.
                -- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle
%%
Heuristics are bug ridden by definition.  If they didn't have bugs,
then they'd be algorithms.
%%
"Hey!  Who took the cork off my lunch??!"
                -- W. C. Fields
%%
Hi there!  This is just a note from me, to you, to tell you, the person
reading this note, that I can't think up any more famous quotes, jokes,
nor bizarre stories, so you may as well go home.
%%
"Hi, I'm Preston A. Mantis, president of Consumers Retail Law Outlet.
As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of
equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney.
Do you have a car or a job?  Do you ever walk around?  If so, you
probably have the makings of an excellent legal case.  Although of
course every case is different, I would definitely say that based on my
experience and training, there's no reason why you shouldn't come out
of this thing with at least a cabin cruiser.

"Remember, at the Preston A. Mantis Consumers Retail Law Outlet, our
motto is:  'It is very difficult to disprove certain kinds of pain.'"
                -- Dave Barry, "Pain and Suffering"
%%
Hier liegt ein Mann ganz obnegleich;
Im Leibe dick, an Suden reich.
Wir haben ihn in das Grab gesteckt,     Here lies a man with sundry flaws
Weil es uns dunkt er sei verreckt.      And numerous Sins upon his head;
                                        We buried him today because
                                        As far as we can tell, he's dead.
                -- PDQ Bach's epitaph, as requested by his cousin Betty
                   Sue Bach and written by the local doggerel catcher;
                   "The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach", Peter
                   Schickele
%%
Higgeldy Piggeldy,
Hamlet of Elsinore
Ruffled the critics by
Dropping this bomb:
"Phooey on Freud and his
Psychoanalysis --
Oedipus, Shmoedipus,
I just love Mom."
%%
Hindsight is an exact science.
%%
Hippogriff, n.:
        An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin.
        The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half
        eagle.  The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one
        quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold.
        The study of zoology is full of surprises.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Hire the morally handicapped.
%%
"His great aim was to escape from civilization, and, as soon as he had
money, he went to Southern California."
%%
"His mind is like a steel trap -- full of mice"
                -- Foghorn Leghorn
%%
"His super power is to turn into a scotch terrier."
%%
History is curious stuff
        You'd think by now we had enough
Yet the fact remains I fear
        They make more of it every year.
%%
History repeats itself.  That's one thing wrong with history.
%%
Hlade's Law:
        If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they
        will find an easier way to do it.
%%
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.
%%
Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness you send out for it.
                -- Rex Reed
%%
        Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who's
willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop
for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location.  Notice I say
"shop for", as opposed to "obtain".  This is the major drawback of home
centers: they are always out of everything except artificial Christmas
trees.  The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise
because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every
object--every board, washer, nail and screw--in the entire store ...
        Let's say a piece in your toilet tank breaks, so you remove the
broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if he has
a replacement.  The employee, who has never is his life even seen the
inside of a toilet tank, will peer at the broken part in very much the
same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at
an electronic calculator, and then say, "We're expecting a shipment of
these sometime around the middle of next week".
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%%
Home of Doberman Propulsion Laboratories:
The ultimate in watchdog weaponry.
                -- Chris Shaw
%%
"Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense"
%%
Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people.
                -- F. M. Hubbard
%%
Honk if you hate bumper stickers that say "Honk if ..."
%%
Honk if you love peace and quiet.
%%
Honorable, adj.:
        Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach.  In legislative
        bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable;
        as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Horngren's Observation:
        Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
%%
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on
people.
                -- W. C. Fields
%%
Horses are forbidden to eat fire hydrants in Marshalltown, Iowa.
%%
"Houston, Tranquillity Base here.  The Eagle has landed."
                -- Neil Armstrong
%%
How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?
%%
How come only your friends step on your new white sneakers?
%%
How come wrong numbers are never busy?
%%
"How do I love thee?  My accumulator overflows."
%%
How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?
                -- Elliot, "E.T."
%%
How doth the little crocodile
        Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
        On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
        How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
        With gently smiling jaws!
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
%%
How doth the VAX's C compiler
Improve its object code.
And even as we speak does it
Increase the system load.

How patiently it seems to run
And spit out error flags,
While users, with frustration, all
Tear their clothes to rags.
%%
How doth the VAX's C-compiler
Improve its object code.
And even as we speak does it
Increase the system load.

How patiently it seems to run
And spit out error flags,
While users, with frustration, all
Tear all their clothes to rags.
%%
How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're
on.
%%
How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None: "We'll fix it in software."

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

How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None: "The user can work it out."
%%
"How many hors d'oeuvres you are allowed to take off a tray being
carried by a waiter at a nice party?"

Two, but there are ways around it, depending on the style of the hors
d'oeuvre.  If they're those little pastry things where you can't tell
what's inside, you take one, bite off about two-thirds of it, then
say:  "This is cheese!  I hate cheese!"  Then you put the rest of it
back on the tray and bite another one and go, "Darn it!  Another
cheese!" and so on.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
%%
        How many seconds are there in a year?  If I tell you there  are
3.155  x  10^7, you won't even try to remember it.  On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury.
                -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs
%%
How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to
Dayton?
                -- Brian Boyle, UNIX/WORLD's First Annual Salary Survey
%%
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
%%
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
%%
Howe's Law:
        Everyone has a scheme that will not work.
%%
However, never daunted, I will cope with adversity in my traditional
manner ... sulking and nausea.
                -- Tom K. Ryan
%%
HR 3128.  Omnibus Budget Reconciliation, Fiscal 1986.  Martin, R-Ill.,
motion that the House recede from its disagreement to the Senate
amendment making changes in the bill to reduce fiscal 1986 deficits.
The Senate amendment was an amendment to the House amendment to the
Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the
bill.  The original Senate amendment was the conference agreement on
the bill.  Agreed to.
                -- Albuquerque Journal
%%
        Hug O' War

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
                -- Shel Silverstein
%%
Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.
%%
Human cardiac catheterization was introduced by Werner Forssman in
1929.  Ignoring his department chief, and tying his assistant to an
operating table to prevent his interference, he placed a uretheral
catheter into a vein in his arm, advanced it to the right atrium [of
his heart], and walked upstairs to the x-ray department where he took
the confirmatory x-ray film.  In 1956, Dr. Forssman was awarded the
Nobel Prize.
%%
Hummingbirds never remember the words to songs.
%%
"Humor is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse."
                -- William Gilbert
%%
Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
        The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
        to ..... to ........ uh ..............
%%
I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a
professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any
other minority viewpoint -- no matter how distasteful to the majority.
                -- Richard M. Nixon

What are our schools for if not indoctrination against Communism?
                -- Richard M. Nixon
%%
I am more bored than you could ever possibly be.  Go back to work.
%%
"I am not an Economist.  I am an honest man!"
                -- Paul McCracken
%%
"I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger."
                -- Gloria Steinem
%%
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.
                -- Dennis Ritchie
%%
"I am not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it."
                -- English Professor
%%
"I am ready to meet my Maker.  Whether my Maker is prepared for the
great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
                -- Winston Churchill
%%
"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone
has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
                --English Professor, Ohio University
%%
I am so optimistic about beef prices that I've just leased a pot roast
with an option to buy.
%%
"I am the mother of all things, and all things should wear a sweater."
%%
"I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person,
of pre-Adamite ancestral descent.  You will understand this when I tell
you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial
atomic globule.  Consequently, my family pride is something
inconceivable.  I can't help it.  I was born sneering."
                -- Pooh-Bah, "The Mikado", Gilbert & Sullivan
%%
"I appreciate the fact that this draft was done in haste, but some of
the sentences that you are sending out in the world to do your work for
you are loitering in taverns or asleep beside the highway."
                -- Dr. Dwight Van de Vate, Professor of Philosophy,
                   University of Tennessee at Knoxville
%%
'I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
                -- G. K. Chesterton
%%
"I belong to no organized party.  I am a Democrat."
                -- Will Rogers
%%
"I bet the human brain is a kludge."
                -- Marvin Minsky
%%
I brake for chezlogs!
%%
I call them as I see them.  If I can't see them, I make them up.
                -- Biff Barf
%%
I can feel for her because, although I have never been an Alaskan
prostitute dancing on the bar in a spangled dress, I still get very
bored with washing and ironing and dishwashing and cooking day after
relentless day.
                -- Betty MacDonald
%%
I can read your mind, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
%%
"I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent ability and
25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when the reverse could be
true."
                -- Harry Truman
%%
"I can resist anything but temptation."
%%
"I can't complain, but sometimes I still do."
                -- Joe Walsh
%%
"I can't decide whether to commit suicide or go bowling."
                -- Florence Henderson
%%
I can't understand it.  I can't even understand the people who can
understand it.
                -- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.
%%
I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a
novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
                -- Fred Allen
%%
"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."
                -- Lillian Hellman
%%
I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.

What a crock.  I could easily overemphasize the importance of good
grammar.  For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause
of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the
United States would have lost World War II."
                -- Dave Barry, "An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar"
%%
        "I cannot read the fiery letters," said Frodo in a quavering
voice.
        "No," Said Gandalf, "but I can.  The letters are Elvish, of
course, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which
I will not utter here.  They are lines of a verse long known in
Elven-lore:

        "This Ring, no other, is made by the elves,
        Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves.
        Ruler of creeper, mortal, and scallop,
        This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop.
        The Power almighty rests in this Lone Ring.
        The Power, alrighty, for doing your Own Thing.
        If broken or busted, it cannot be remade.
        If found, send to Sorhed (with postage prepaid)."
%%
I could dance till the cows come home.  On second thought, I'd rather
dance with the cows till you come home.
                -- Groucho Marx
%%
"I couldn't remember when I had been so disappointed.  Except perhaps
the time I found out that M&Ms really *do* melt in your hand ..."
                -- Peter Oakley
%%
"I didn't know it was impossible when I did it."
%%
I didn't like the play, but I saw it under adverse conditions.  The
curtain was up.
%%
        I disapprove of the F-word, not because it's dirty, but because
we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently
leads to violence.  What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say,
in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we've had
time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the
library, we could call each other up:

     You: Hello?  Bob?
     Bob: Yes?
     You: This is Ed.  Remember?  The person whose parking space you
          took last Thursday?  Outside of Sears?
     Bob: Oh yes!  Sure!  How are you, Ed?
     You: Fine, thanks.  Listen, Bob, the reason I'm calling is:
          "Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and ..."  No, wait.
          I mean:  "you may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill
          and ..."  No, wait.  (Sound of reference book thudding onto
          the floor.)  S-word.  Excuse me.  Look, Bob, I'm going to
          have to get back to you.
     Bob: Fine.
                -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"
%%
I do hate sums.  There is no greater mistake than to call arithmetic an
exact science.  There are permutations and aberrations discernible to
minds entirely noble like mine; subtle variations which ordinary
accountants fail to discover; hidden laws of number which it requires a
mind like mine to perceive.  For instance, if you add a sum from the
bottom up, and then again from the top down, the result is always
different.
                -- Mrs. La Touche (19th cent.)
%%
"I do not fear computers.  I fear the lack of them."
                -- Isaac Asimov
%%
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
                -- Galileo Galilei
%%
"I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should."
                -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%%
"I don't believe in astrology.  But then I'm an Aquarius, and Aquarians
don't believe in astrology."
                -- James R. F. Quirk
%%
I don't believe there really IS a GAS SHORTAGE.. I think it's all just
a BIG HOAX on the part of the plastic sign salesmen -- to sell more
numbers!!
%%
I don't care for the Sugar Smacks commercial.  I don't like the idea of
a frog jumping on my Breakfast.
                -- Lowell, Chicago Reader 10/15/82
%%
"I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the
nominating"
                -- Boss Tweed
%%
"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
                -- Ashleigh Brilliant
%%
"I don't have to take this abuse from you -- I've got hundreds of
people waiting to abuse me."
                --Bill Murray, "Ghostbusters"
%%
I don't know anything about music.  In my line you don't have to.
                -- Elvis Presley
%%
"I don't know anything about music.  In my line you don't have to."
                -- Elvis Presley
%%
        "I don't know what you mean by `glory,'" Alice said
        Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  "Of course you don't --
till I tell you.  I meant `there's a nice knock-down argument for
you!'"
        "But glory doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice
objected.
        "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor
less."
        "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean
so many different things."
        "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--
that's all."
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
%%
"I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd
eat it, and I just hate it."
                -- Clarence Darrow
%%
"I don't mind going nowhere as long as it's an interesting path."
                -- Ronald Mabbitt
%%
I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the
streets and frighten the horses.
                -- Victor Hugo
%%
"I don't object to sex before marriage, but two minutes before?!?"
%%
"I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes.  Just then, he vanished.
%%
"I don't think they could put him in a mental hospital.  On the other
hand, if he were already in, I don't think they'd let him out."
%%
I don't want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that
the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days.  Congress is
thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists
broadcast signals to alien beings.  This would be a large mistake.
Alien beings have nuclear blaster death cannons.  You cannot cut off
their federal programs as if they were merely poor people ...
                -- Davy Barry, "THE ALIENS ARE COMING, THE ALIENS ARE
                   COMING!"
%%
I doubt, therefore I might be.
%%
"I dread success.  To have succeeded is to have finished one's business
on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment
he has succeeded in his courtship.  I like a state of continual
becoming, with a goal in front and not behind."
                -- George Bernard Shaw
%%
"I drink to make other people interesting."
                -- George Jean Nathan
%%
I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamt that I was reading on,
so I woke up from sheer boredom.
%%
I for one cannot protest the recent M. T. A. fare hike and the
accompanying promises that this would in no way improve service.  For
the transit system, as it now operates, has hidden advantages that
can't be measured in monetary terms.

Personally, I feel that it is well worth 75 cents or even $1 to have
that unimpeachable excuse whenever I am late to anything: "I came by
subway."  Those four words have such magic in them that if Godot should
someday show up and mumble them, any audience would instantly
understand his long delay.
%%
"I found out why my car was humming.  It had forgotten the words."
%%
I gave up Smoking, Drinking and Sex.  It was the most *__________horrifying* 20
minutes of my life!
%%
'I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it."
                -- Mae West
%%
I get up each morning, gather my wits.
        Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
        So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
%%
I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
                -- Pete Seeger
%%
"I had to censor everything my sons watched ... even on the Mary Tyler
Moore show I heard the word 'damn'!"
                -- Mary Lou Bax
%%
"I had to hit him -- he was starting to make sense."
%%
"I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day cause that means
it's going to be up all night."
                -- Steven Wright
%%
"I hate quotations."
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
I have a simple philosophy:

        Fill what's empty.
        Empty what's full.
        Scratch where it itches.
                -- A. R. Longworth
%%
"I have a very firm grasp on reality!  I can reach out and strangle it
any time!"
%%
"I have come up with a sure-fire concept for a hit television show,
which would be called `A Live Celebrity Gets Eaten by a Shark'."
                -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
%%
I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth
and they never believe me.
                -- Camillo Di Cavour
%%
I have great faith in fools -- self confidence my friends call it.
                -- Edgar Allan Poe
%%
"I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages.  You
sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an
eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working.  I
have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of
beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below.  Westbrook Pegler, a
guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you.  You can take that as more
of an insult than as a reflection on your ancestry."
                -- President Harry S Truman
%%
I have learned
To spell hors d'oeuvres
Which still grates on
Some people's n'oeuvres.
                -- Warren Knox
%%
"I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming
that I have never made one."
                -- James Gordon Bennett
%%
"I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to
make it shorter."
                -- Blaise Pascal
%%
I have more humility in my little finger than you have in your whole
____BODY!
                -- from "Cerebus" #82
%%
"I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer."
                -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
%%
"I have the simplest tastes.  I am always satisfied with the best."
                -- Oscar Wilde
%%
"I have to convince you, or at least snow you ..."
                -- Prof. Romas Aleliunas, CS 435
%%
"I have two very rare photographs: one is a picture of Houdini locking
his keys in his car; the other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell
beating up a child."
                -- Steven Wright
%%
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked
at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
                -- Poul Anderson
%%
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's backed up on tape somewhere."
%%
"I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it."
%%
I just forgot my whole philosophy of life!!!
%%
"I just need enough to tide me over until I need more."
                -- Bill Hoest
%%
"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 know the answer!  The answer lies within the heart of all mankind!
The answer is twelve?  I think I'm in the wrong building."
                -- Charles Schulz
%%
"I like being single.  I'm always there when I need me."
                -- Art Leo
%%
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to
promote peace than our governments.  Indeed, I think that people want
peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of
the way and let them have it.
                -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
%%
"I like work ... I can sit and watch it for hours."
%%
"I like your game but we have to change the rules."
%%
"I love to eat them Smurfies
 Smurfies what I love to eat
 Bite they ugly heads off,
 Nibble on they bluish feet."
%%
"I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent."
                -- Ashleigh Brilliant
%%
"I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a
week sometimes to make it up."
                -- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"
%%
I must have slipped a disk -- my pack hurts
%%
"I never fail to convince an audience that the best thing they could do
was to go away."
%%
"I never met a piece of chocolate I didn't like."
%%
I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.
                -- G. B. Shaw
%%
"I only touch base with reality on an as-needed basis!"
                -- Royal Floyd Mengot (Klaus)
%%
"I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the
kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled
substances being in widespread use.  Back then, there were no
restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we
made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given
powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative
nerve disease."
                -- Dave Barry, "The Snake"
%%
I predict that today will be remembered until tomorrow!
%%
"I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral
slob."
                -- William F. Buckley
%%
        "I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of
that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put
more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'"
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
%%
I realize that the MX missile is none of our concern.  I realize that
the whole point of living in a democracy is that we pay professional
congresspersons to concern themselves with things like the MX missile
so we can be free to concern ourselves with getting hold of the
plumber.

But from time to time, I feel I must address major public issues such
as this, because in a free and open society, where the very future of
the world hinges on decisions made by our elected leaders, you never
win large cash journalism awards if you stick to the topics I usually
write about, such as nose-picking.
                -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against
                   Political Fallout"
%%
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 refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person."
%%
I see a good deal of talk from Washington about lowering taxes.  I hope
they do get 'em lowered enough so people can afford to pay 'em.
                -- Will Rogers
%%
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such _a-squared cos 2(phi)!
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
I sent a letter to the fish,
I told them, "This is what I wish."
The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer back to me.
The little fishes' answer was
"We cannot do it, sir, because ..."
I sent a letter back to say
It would be better to obey.
But someone came to me and said
"The little fishes are in bed."
I said to him, and I said it plain
"Then you must wake them up again."
I said it very loud and clear,
I went and shouted in his ear.
But he was very stiff and proud,
He said "You needn't shout so loud."
And he was very proud and stiff,
He said "I'll go and wake them if ..."
I took a kettle from the shelf,
I went to wake them up myself.
But when I found the door was locked
I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked,
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, But ...

        "Is that all?" asked Alice.
        "That is all." said Humpty Dumpty. "Goodbye."
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
%%
"I shot an arrow into the air, and it stuck."
                -- Graffito in Los Angeles
%%
"... I should explain that I was wearing a black velvet cape that was
supposed to make me look like the dashing, romantic Zorro but which
actually made me look like a gigantic bat wearing glasses ..."
                -- Dave Barry, "The Wet Zorro Suit and Other Turning
                   Points in l'Amour"
%%
"I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards.  I got a full
house and four people died."
                -- Steven Wright
%%
"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six.  Mother took me to
see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph."
                -- Shirley Temple
%%
I suggest you locate your hot tub outside your house, so it won't do
too much damage if it catches fire or explodes.  First you decide which
direction your hot tub should face for maximum solar energy.  After
much trial and error, I have found that the best direction for a hot
tub to face is up.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%%
"I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it."
%%
I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick
and tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this
country are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people
in this country are fed up with being sick and tired.  I'm certainly
not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
                -- Monty Python
%%
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
                -- Ogden Nash
%%
I think that I shall never see
A thing as lovely as a tree.
But as you see the trees have gone
They went this morning with the dawn.
A logging firm from out of town
Came and chopped the trees all down.
But I will trick those dirty skunks
And write a brand new poem called 'Trunks'.
%%
I think we can all agree that there is not enough common courtesy shown
... HEY!  PAY ATTENTION WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU DAMMIT!  I said I think
we can all agree that there is not enough common courtesy shown today.
When we take the time to be courteous to each other, we find that we
are happier and less likely to engage in nuclear war.  This point was
driven home by the recent summit talks, where Nancy Reagan and Raisa
Gorbachev, each of whose husband thinks the other's husband is vermin,
were able to sit down at a high-level tea and engage in courteous
conversation ...
                -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
%%
"I thought you were trying to get into shape."
"I am. The shape I've selected is a triangle."
%%
" ... I told my doctor I got all the exercise I needed being a
pallbearer for all my friends who run and do exercises!"
                -- Winston Churchill
%%
I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in
twenty minutes.  It's about Russia.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
I used to be an agnostic, but now I'm not so sure.
%%
"I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance."
%%
"I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure."
%%
I used to work in a fire hydrant factory.  You couldn't park anywhere
near the place.
                -- Steven Wright
%%
I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to
animals.  I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for
anything connected with society except that which makes the roads
safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women
warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.
                -- Brendan Behan
%%
"I want to buy a husband who, every week when I sit down to watch `St.
Elsewhere', won't scream, `FORGET IT, BLANCHE ... IT'S TIME FOR "HEE
HAW"!!'"
                -- Berke Breathed, "Bloom County"
%%
I was born because it was a habit in those days, people didn't know
anything else ... I was not a Child Prodigy, because a Child Prodigy is
a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows
up.
                -- Will Rogers
%%
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did.  I said I
didn't know."
                -- Mark Twain
%%
I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending
their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to
buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.
                -- Emile Henry Gauvreay
%%
I went on to test the program in every way I could devise.  I strained
it to expose its weaknesses.  I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass
stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold.
I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be
absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had
developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case.
Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's
temperature to be less than absolute zero.  I had found an error.  I
chased down the error and fixed it.  Now I had improved the program to
the point where it would not run at all.
                -- George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black
                   Holes and the Fate of Stars"
%%
"I went to the hardware store and bought some used paint.  It was in
the shape of a house.  I also bought some batteries, but they weren't
included."
                -- Steven Wright
%%
"I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the
statues that are in all the other museums."
                -- Steven Wright
%%
I went to the race track once and bet on a horse that was so good that
it took seven others to beat him!
%%
"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence.
There's a knob called `brightness', but it doesn't work."
                -- Gallagher
%%
"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've
always worked for me."
                -- Hunter S. Thompson
%%
"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I did my own thing and now I've got
to undo it."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I have to floss my cat."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I have to stay home and see if I
snore."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I never go out on days that end in
`Y.'"
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I want to spend more time with my
blender."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm attending the opening of my
garage door."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm converting my calendar watch from
Julian to Gregorian."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for
static cling."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm having all my plants neutered."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm staying home to work on my
cottage cheese sculpture."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm taking punk totem pole carving."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I've been scheduled for a karma
transplant."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but it's my parakeet's bowling night."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but my favorite commercial is on TV."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but the last time I went out, I never
came back."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but the man on television told me to say
tuned."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but there are important world issues that
need worrying about."
%%
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
%%
"I'll carry your books, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over,
carry forward, Cary Grant, cash & carry, Carry Me Back To Old Virginia,
I'll even Hara Kari if you show me how, but I will *not* carry a gun."
                -- Hawkeye, M*A*S*H
%%
I'll defend to the death your right to say that, but I never said I'd
listen to it!
                -- Tom Galloway with apologies to Voltaire
%%
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
"I'll rob that rich person and give it to some poor deserving slob.
That will *prove* I'm Robin Hood."
                -- Daffy Duck, "Robin Hood Daffy", [1958, Chuck Jones]
%%
"I'm a creationist; I refuse to believe that I could have evolved from
man."
%%
I'm a Lisp variable -- bind me!
%%
"I'm all for computer dating, but I wouldn't want one to marry my
sister."
%%
I'm changing my name to Chrysler
I'm going down to Washington, D.C.
I'll tell some power broker
        What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me!
I'm changing my name to Chrysler,
I'm heading for that great receiving line.
When they hand a million grand out,
        I'll be standing with my hand out,
Yessir, I'll get mine!
%%
I'm defending her honor, which is more than she ever did.
%%
"I'm defending her honor, which is more than she ever did."
%%
"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to
die in."
                -- George McGovern
%%
I'm going to Boston to see my doctor.  He's a very sick man.
                -- Fred Allen
%%
I'm going to live forever, or die trying!
                -- Spider Robinson
%%
... I'm IMAGINING a sensuous GIRAFFE, CAVORTING in the BACK ROOM of a
KOSHER DELI!!
%%
"I'm in Pittsburgh.  Why am I here?"
                -- Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate
%%
i'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be
living apart.
                -- e. e. cummings
%%
I'm N-ary the tree, I am,
N-ary the tree, I am, I am.
I'm getting traversed by the parser next door,
She's traversed me seven times before.
And ev'ry time it was an N-ary (N-ary!)
Never wouldn't ever do a binary.  (No sir!)
I'm 'er eighth tree that was N-ary.
N-ary the tree I am, I am,
N-ary the tree I am.
%%
"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 proud to be paying taxes in the United States.  The only thing is
-- I could be just as proud for half the money.
                -- Arthur Godfrey
%%
I'm rated PG-34!!
%%
"I'm really enjoying not talking to you ... Let's not talk again ____REAL
soon ..."
%%
"I'm returning this note to you, instead of your paper, because it
(your paper) presently occupies the bottom of my bird cage."
                -- English Professor, Providence College
%%
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus,
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous;
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
                -- Gilbert & Sullivan, "Pirates of Penzance"
%%
"I'm willing to sacrifice anything for this cause, even other people's
lives"
%%
I've built a better model than the one at Data General
For data bases vegetable, animal, and mineral
My OS handles CPUs with multiplexed duality;
My PL/1 compiler shows impressive functionality.
My storage system's better than magnetic core polarity,
You never have to bother checking out a bit for parity;
There isn't any reason to install non-static floor matting;
My disk drive has capacity for variable formatting.

I feel compelled to mention what I know to be a gloating point:
There's lots of room in memory for variables floating-point,
Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.

                -- Steve Levine, "A Computer Song" (To the tune of
                   "Modern Major General", from "Pirates of Penzance",
                   by Gilbert & Sullivan)
%%
I've enjoyed just about as much of this as I can stand.
%%
I've found my niche.  If you're wondering why I'm not there, there was
this little hole in the bottom ...
                -- John Croll
%%
I've given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
%%
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.  But this wasn't it.
                -- Groucho Marx
%%
I've known him as a man, as an adolescent and as a child -- sometimes
on the same day.
%%
"I've seen better heads on half a pint of beer."
%%
"I've seen, I SAY, I've seen better heads on a mug of beer"
                -- Senator Claghorn
%%
I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness;
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting.  I shall fall,
Like a bright exhalation in the evening
And no man see me more.
                -- Shakespeare
%%
IBM had a PL/I,
        Its syntax worse than JOSS;
And everywhere this language went,
        It was a total loss.
%%
Idaho state law makes it illegal for a man to give his sweetheart a box
of candy weighing less than fifty pounds.
%%
Idiot Box, n.:
        The part of the envelope that tells a person where to place the
        stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Idiot, n.:
        A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
        affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape
at about 30 miles/second.
                -- Grishman, Assembly Language Programming
%%
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
                -- Roy Santoro
%%
"If a camel flies, no one laughs if it doesn't get very far."
                -- Paul White
%%
If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then a consensus
forecast is a camel's behind.
                -- Edgar R. Fiedler
%%
If A equals success, then the formula is _A = _X + _Y + _Z.  _X is work.  _Y
is play.  _Z is keep your mouth shut.
                -- Albert Einstein
%%
If a group of _N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be _N-1
passes.  Someone in the group has to be the manager.
                -- T. Cheatham
%%
If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four
hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where
it votes guilty.
                -- Joseph C. Goulden
%%
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake
him up.
%%
If a President doesn't do it to his wife, he'll do it to his country.
%%
If a putt passes over the hole without dropping, it is deemed to have
dropped.  The law of gravity holds that any object attempting to
maintain a position in the atmosphere without something to support it
must drop.  The law of gravity supercedes the law of golf.
                -- Donald A. Metz
%%
If all be true that I do think,
There be Five Reasons why one should Drink;
Good friends, good wine, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by-and-by,
Or any other reason why.
%%
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error.
                -- John Kenneth Galbraith
%%
If all the Chinese simultaneously jumped into the Pacific off a 10 foot
platform erected 10 feet off their coast, it would cause a tidal wave
that would destroy everything in this country west of Nebraska.
%%
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
                -- Paul Beatty
%%
If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a
conclusion.
                -- William Baumol
%%
If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?
Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There's nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go commit siouxeyesighed.
                -- Charles Follen Adams, "An Orthographic Lament"
%%
If anything can go wrong, it will.
%%
If at first you don't succeed, give up, no use being a damn fool.
%%
If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.
%%
If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four
tellers?
%%
"If dolphins are so smart, why did Flipper work for television?"
%%
If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?
%%
If everything is coming your way then you're in the wrong lane.
%%
... If forced to travel on an airplane, try and get in the cabin with
the Captain, so you can keep an eye on him and nudge him if he falls
asleep or point out any mountains looming up ahead ...
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.
%%
If God had intended Man to Walk, He would have given him Feet.
%%
If God had intended Man to Watch TV, He would have given him Rabbit
Ears.
%%
If God had intended Men to Smoke, He would have put Chimneys in their
Heads.
%%
If God had meant for us to be in the Army, we would have been born with
green, baggy skin.
%%
If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
%%
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to
invent it.
%%
If God had wanted you to go around nude, He would have given you bigger
hands.
%%
If God is dead, who will save the Queen?
%%
If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
%%
"If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows."
                -- Yiddish saying
%%
If God wanted us to be brave, why did he give us legs?
                -- Marvin Kitman
%%
"If I am elected, the concrete barriers around the WHITE HOUSE will be
replaced by tasteful foam replicas of ANN MARGARET!"
%%
If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive!
                -- Samuel Goldwyn
%%
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
                -- Dorothy Parker
%%
If I don't see you in the future, I'll see you in the pasture.
%%
If I had a plantation in Georgia and a home in Hell, I'd sell the
plantation and go home.
                -- Eugene P. Gallagher
%%
If I had any humility I would be perfect.
                -- Ted Turner
%%
"If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."
                -- Albert Einstein
%%
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants.
                -- Isaac Newton

In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
                -- Gerald Holton

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.
                -- Hal Abelson

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
                -- Brian K. Reid
%%
If I kiss you, that is a psychological interaction.

On the other hand, if I hit you over the head with a brick, that is
also a psychological interaction.

The difference is that one is friendly and the other is not so
friendly.

The crucial point is if you can tell which is which.
                -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
%%
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 ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
%%
If it's Tuesday, this must be someone else's fortune.
%%
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him.
They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun
of it.
                -- Thomas Carlyle
%%
"If just one piece of mail gets lost, well, they'll just think they
forgot to send it.  But if *two* pieces of mail get lost, hell, they'll
just think the other guy hasn't gotten around to answering his mail.
And if *fifty* pieces of mail get lost, can you imagine it, if *fifty*
pieces of mail get lost, why they'll think someone *else* is broken!
And if 1Gb of mail gets lost, they'll just *know* that Arpa is down and
think it's a conspiracy to keep them from their God given right to
receive Net Mail ..."
                -- Leith (Casey) Leedom
%%
If life is a stage, I want some better lighting.
%%
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
                -- Tom Robbins
%%
If little green men land in your back yard, hide any little green women
you've got in the house.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
If mathematically you end up with the wrong answer, try multiplying by
the page number.
%%
If money can't buy happiness, I guess you'll just have to rent it.
%%
If one studies too zealously, one easily loses his pants.
                -- A. Einstein.
%%
If only God would give me some clear sign!  Like making a large deposit
in my name at a Swiss bank.
                -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
%%
If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.
%%
If only one could get that wonderful feeling of accomplishment without
having to accomplish anything.
%%
If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad,
he should see how bad it is with representation.
%%
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the
physical world.  One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker
entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
                -- Vannevar Bush
%%
If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied
harder.
                -- Pope John Paul I
%%
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
                -- Norm Schryer
%%
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to
get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving
the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting
that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.  The
college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious
and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to
rally their jaded spirits.  I would have the studies elective.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure
interest in knowledge.  The wise instructor accomplishes this by
opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for
himself.  The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for
boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%%
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for
me!"
                -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
%%
If the odds are a million to one against something occurring, chances
are 50-50 it will.
%%
If the weather is extremely bad, church attendance will be down.  If
the weather is extremely good, church attendance will be down.  If the
bulletin covers are in short supply, however, church attendance will
exceed all expectations.
                -- Reverend Chichester
%%
If there are epigrams, there must be meta-epigrams.
%%
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 no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?
                -- Art Hoppe
%%
If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make
something out of you.
                -- Muhammad Ali
%%
If this fortune didn't exist, somebody would have invented it.
%%
If this is timesharing, give me my share right now.
%%
If time heals all wounds, how come the belly button stays the same?
%%
If today is the first day of the rest of your life, what the hell was
yesterday?
%%
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is
doing the thinking.
                -- Lyndon Baines Johnson
%%
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
                -- Laurence J. Peter
%%
"If value corrupts then absolute value corrupts absolutely"
%%
"If we were meant to fly, we wouldn't keep losing our luggage."
%%
If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel
in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary
qualifications, that field's employment market is glutted.
                -- Marguerite Emmons
%%
If you are a fatalist, what can you do about it?
                -- Ann Edwards-Duff
%%
"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars."
                -- J. Paul Getty
%%
If you can lead it to water and force it to drink, it isn't a horse.
%%
If you can read this, you're too close.
%%
If you can survive death, you can probably survive anything.
%%
If you can't be good, be careful.  If you can't be careful, give me a
call.
%%
If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
%%
If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
                -- Harry S Truman
%%
If you didn't get caught, did you really do it?
%%
If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost.
%%
If you don't go to other men's funerals they won't go to yours.
                -- Clarence Day
%%
If you eat a live frog in the morning, nothing worse will happen to
either of you for the rest of the day.
%%
"If you ever want to get anywhere in politics, my boy, you're going to
have to get a toehold in the public eye."
%%
If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody
will.
%%
If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it
will always do it.
                -- Les Aspin, D., Wisconsin
%%
"If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is
make the rubble bounce"
                -- Winston Churchill
%%
If you had any brains, you'd be dangerous.
%%
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
%%
"If you have to hate, hate gently"
%%
If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to
boot yourself in the posterior.
                -- A. J. Liebling
%%
If you keep anything long enough, you can throw it away.
%%
If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee.
                -- Graham Summer
%%
If you live to the age of a hundred you have it made because very few
people die past the age of a hundred.
                -- George Burns
%%
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 only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
                -- Maslow
%%
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 pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite
you.  This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
If you push the "extra ice" button on the soft drink vending machine,
you won't get any ice.  If you push the "no ice" button, you'll get
ice, but no cup.
%%
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 stick a stock of liquor in your locker,
It is slick to stick a lock upon your stock.
        Or some joker who is slicker,
        Will trick you of your liquor,
If you fail to lock your liquor with a lock.
%%
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
                -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
%%
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 the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it.
                -- Arthur Kasspe
%%
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest
shopping center in the world?
                -- Richard M. Nixon
%%
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest
shopping center in the world?
                -- Richard Nixon
%%
If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would
be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call
you to say they had a nice time.  Now you'll be be expected to throw
another party next year.

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

If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless
your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas
through your living room window.  As host, your job is to make sure
that they don't arrest anybody.  Or if they're dead set on arresting
someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ...
%%
If you took all the students that felt asleep in class and laid them
end to end, they'd be a lot more comfortable.
                -- "Graffiti in the Big Ten"
%%
"If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything."
                -- A. L.
%%
If you want divine justice, die.
                -- Nick Seldon
%%
If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the
Constitution.  It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's
statecraft.  Instead, read selected portions of the Washington
telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with
titles beginning with the word "National".
                -- George Will
%%
If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every
word you say, talk in your sleep.
%%
"If you wants to get elected president, you'se got to think up some
memoraboble homily so's school kids can be pestered into memorizin' it,
even if they don't know what it means."
                -- Walt Kelly, "The Pogo Party"
%%
If you wish to live wisely, ignore sayings -- including this one.
%%
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for
tomorrow morning, sleep late.
                -- Henny Youngman
%%
If you're happy, you're successful.
%%
        If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs
around your home are too difficult to tackle.  So, when your furnace
explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it.  The
"professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on the sides and
deposits a large quantity of tools and two assistants who spend the
better part of the week in your basement whacking objects at random
with heavy wrenches, after which the "professional" returns and gives
you a bill for slightly more money than it would cost you to run a
successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.
        And that's why you've decided to start doing things yourself.
You figure, "If those guys can fix my furnace, then so can I.  How
difficult can it be?"
        Very difficult.  In fact, most home projects are impossible,
which is why you should do them yourself.  There is no point in paying
other people to screw things up when you can easily screw them up
yourself for far less money.  This article can help you.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%%
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
%%
If you're not very clever you should be conciliatory.
                -- Benjamin Disraeli
%%
If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%?
%%
"If you've done six impossible things before breakfast, why not round
it off with dinner at Milliway's, the restaurant at the end of the
universe?"
%%
If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.
                -- Ronald Reagan
%%
Ignisecond, n.:
        The overlapping moment of time when the hand is locking the car
        door even as the brain is saying, "my keys are in there!"
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Il brilgue: les t^oves libricilleux
        Se gyrent et frillant dans le guave,
Enm^im'es sont les gougebosquex,
        Et le m^omerade horgrave.
                -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
%%
Iles's Law:
        There is always an easier way to do it.  When looking directly
at the easy way, especially for long periods, you will not see it.
Neither will Iles.
%%
Illinois isn't exactly the land that God forgot -- it's more like the
land He's trying to ignore.
%%
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier
%%
"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the
usual way.  This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody
thinks of complaining."
                -- Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal
%%
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer.  It has
a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk
storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on
voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300.
What's the first question that the computer community asks?

"Is it PC compatible?"
%%
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
                -- Jack Paar
%%
Immortality -- a fate worse than death.
                -- Edgar A. Shoaff
%%
Impartial, adj.:
        Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from
        espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of
        two conflicting opinions.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Important letters which contain no errors will develop errors in the
mail.  Corresponding errors will show up in the duplicate while the
Boss is reading it.
%%
Impossible, adj.:
        (1) I wouldn't like it and when it happens I won't approve;
(2) I can't be bothered; (3) God can't be bothered.  Meaning 3 may
perhaps be valid but the others are 101% whaledreck.
                -- Chad C. Mulligan, "The Hipcrime Vocab"
%%
In 1750 Issac Newton became discouraged when he fell up a flight of
stairs.
%%
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled
waffles.
%%
In 1880 the French captured Detroit but gave it back ... they couldn't
get parts.
%%
In 1914, the first crossword puzzle was printed in a newspaper.  The
creator received $4000 down ... and $3000 across.
%%
In 1915 pancake make-up was invented but most people still preferred
syrup.
%%
In a five year period we can get one superb programming language.  Only
we can't control when the five year period will begin.
%%
        In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi,
junior, what are you up to?"
        "I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the
rabbit.
        "Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible!"
        "Well, follow me and I'll show you."  They both go into the
rabbit's dwelling and after a while the rabbit emerges with a satisfied
expression on his face.
        Comes along a wolf.  "Hello, what are we doing these days?"
        "I'm writing the second chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits
devour wolves."
        "Are you crazy?  Where is your academic honesty?"
        "Come with me and I'll show you."  As before, the rabbit comes
out with a satisfied look on his face and a diploma in his paw.
Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave and, as everybody
should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge lion sitting
next to some bloody and furry remnants of the wolf and the fox.

The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are important --
it's your PhD advisor that really counts.
%%
In a medium in which a News Piece takes a minute and an "In-Depth"
Piece takes two minutes, the Simple will drive out the Complex.
                -- Frank Mankiewicz
%%
In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus,
"one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."
                -- Mark Twain
%%
In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground
with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries.  Anthropologists call
this a form of primitive self-expression.  In America we call it golf.
%%
In America today ... we have Woody Allen, whose humor has become so
sophisticated that nobody gets it any more except Mia Farrow.  All
those who think Mia Farrow should go back to making movies where the
devil gets her pregnant and Woody Allen should go back to dressing up
as a human sperm, please raise your hands.  Thank you.
                -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
%%
In America, any boy may become president and I suppose that's just one
of the risks he takes.
                -- Adlai Stevenson
%%
In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own
incompetency
                -- The Peter Principle
%%
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables.
%%
"In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of
nations -- it's cold, half-French, and difficult to stir."
                -- Stuart Keate
%%
In Blythe, California, a city ordinance declares that a person must own
at least two cows before he can wear cowboy boots in public.
%%
In Boston, it is illegal to hold frog-jumping contests in nightclubs.
%%
In case of atomic attack, the federal ruling against prayer in schools
will be temporarily canceled.
%%
In case of injury notify your superior immediately.  He'll kiss it and
make it better.
%%
In Corning, Iowa, it's a misdemeanor for a man to ask his wife to ride
in any motor vehicle.
%%
"In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable."
                -- Winston Curchill, of Montgomery
%%
In Denver it is unlawful to lend your vacuum cleaner to your next-door
neighbor.
%%
In Devon, Connecticut, it is unlawful to walk backwards after sunset.
%%
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last
resort of the scoundrel.  With all due respect to an enlightened but
inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
In English, every word can be verbed.  Would that it were so in our
programming languages.
%%
In Greene, New York, it is illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on
the sidewalks when a concert is on.
%%
In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come
into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish
between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which
will only make it mushy.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
In Lexington, Kentucky, it's illegal to carry an ice cream cone in your
pocket.
%%
In Memphis, Tennessee, it is illegal for a woman to drive a car unless
there is a man either running or walking in front of it waving a red
flag to warn approaching motorists and pedestrians.
%%
In Ohio, if you ignore an orator on Decoration day to such an extent as
to publicly play croquet or pitch horseshoes within one mile of the
speaker's stand, you can be fined $25.00.
%%
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the
universe."
                -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
%%
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government,
intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from
the cares of office.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
In Pocatello, Idaho, a law passed in 1912 provided that "The carrying
of concealed weapons is forbidden, unless same are exhibited to public
view."
%%
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
In Seattle, Washington, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon that
is over six feet in length.
%%
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.
                -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
%%
"In short, _N is Richardian if, and only if, _N is not Richardian."
%%
In specifications, Murphy's Law supersedes Ohm's.
%%
In Tennessee, it is illegal to shoot any game other than whales from a
moving automobile.
%%
[In the 60's] there was madness in any direction, at any hour ...  You
could strike sparks anywhere.  There was a fantastic universal sense
that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning ...

And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we
didn't need that.  Our energy would simply `prevail'.  There was no
point in fighting -- on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum;
we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
___see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
%%
In the beginning was the word.
But by the time the second word was added to it,
there was trouble.
For with it came syntax ...
                -- John Simon
%%
In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in
the proper order then why can't he?
%%
In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is driven by the Grateful
Dead.
                -- Egyptian Book of the Dead
%%
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
                -- Alan Perlis
%%
In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or
a loaf of bread.  However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it
to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by
forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy.  If you
stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit
punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong
enough to punch you.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has
shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.  Therefore ... in the
Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million
three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years
from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
... There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to
drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at
discotheques.
                -- Art Linkletter
%%
In those days he was wiser than he is now -- he used to frequently take
my advice.
                -- Winston Churchill
%%
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
%%
Incumbent, n.:
        Person of liveliest interest to the outcumbents.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
... indifference is a militant thing ... when it goes away it leaves
smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat.  It is
not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery.
                -- Stephen Crane
%%
Individualists unite!
%%
Infancy, n.:
        The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven
lies about us."  The world begins lying about us pretty soon
afterward.
                -- Ambrose Bierce
%%
Information Center, n.:
        A room staffed by professional computer people whose job it is
        to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
%%
Ingrate, n.:
        A man who bites the hand that feeds him, and then complains of
        indigestion.
%%
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
                -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
%%
Ink, n.:
        A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and
        water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and
        promote intellectual crime.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Innovation is hard to schedule.
                -- Dan Fylstra
%%
Insanity is hereditary.  You get it from your kids.
%%
Insanity is the final defense ... It's hard to get a refund when the
salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon.
%%
Interpreter, n.:
        One who enables two persons of different languages to
        understand each other by repeating to each what it would have
        been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have
        said.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Intolerance is the last defense of the insecure.
%%
        INVENTORY
Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
%%
Iron Law of Distribution:
        Them that has, gets.
%%
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil"
                -- Douglas Hofstadter
%%
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is
meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a
soap bubble?
%%
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get
out, and such as are out wish to get in?
                -- Ralph Emerson
%%
Is your job running?  You'd better go catch it!
%%
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction
listen to weather forecasts and economists?
                -- Kelvin Throop III
%%
Isn't it strange that the same people that laugh at gypsy fortune
tellers take economists seriously?
%%
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 appears that after his death, Albert Einstein found himself working
as the doorkeeper at the Pearly Gates.  One slow day, he found that he
had time to chat with the new entrants.  To the first one he asked,
"What's your IQ?"  The new arrival replied, "190".  They discussed
Einstein's theory of relativity for hours.  When the second new arrival
came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer's IQ.  The answer
this time came "120".  To which Einstein replied, "Tell me, how did the
Cubs do this year?" and they proceeded to talk for half an hour or so.
To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the question, "What's
your IQ?".  Upon receiving the answer "70", Einstein smiled and asked,
"Got a minute to tell me about VMS 4.0?"
%%
It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater.  The clown
came out to inform the public.  They thought it was just a jest and
applauded.  He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder.  So I
think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the
wits, who believe that it is a joke.
%%
It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it is
thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have
drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
It has been said [by Anatole France], "it is not by amusing oneself
that one learns," and, in reply: "it is *____only* by amusing oneself that
one can learn."
                -- Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
%%
It has been said that man is a rational animal.  All my life I have
been searching for evidence which could support this.
                -- Bertrand Russell
%%
It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
%%
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 against the law for a monster to enter the corporate limits of
Urbana, Illinois.
%%
It is always preferable to visit home with a friend.  Your parents will
not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves
and because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like
mature human beings ...
                -- Playboy, January 1983
%%
It is 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 an important and popular fact that things are not always what
they seem.  For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed
that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so
much -- the wheel, New York wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins
had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.  But
conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more
intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending
destruction of the of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to
alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were
misinterpreted ...
                -- Douglas Admas "The Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The
                   Galaxy"
%%
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be
coming up it.
                -- Henry Allen
%%
It is better never to have been born.  But who among us has such luck?
One in a million, perhaps.
%%
It is better to kiss an avocado than to get in a fight with an aardvark
%%
It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three
benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never
to use either.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both
incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by
twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
                -- Rod Serling
%%
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is
lightly greased."
                -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
%%
It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its
proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community
a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to
treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the
focus of attention, the harder the task.
                -- Sydney J. Harris
%%
It is easier to 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, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
%%
It is illegal to drive more than two thousand sheep down Hollywood
Boulevard at one time.
%%
It is illegal to say "Oh, Boy" in Jonesboro, Georgia.
%%
It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry
a tune.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so
ingenious.
%%
It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not
desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong.  Our
offense consists in doubting it.
                -- Justice Robert H. Jackson
%%
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the
problem.
%%
It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be
privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to
corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.
                -- George Bernard Shaw
%%
It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail.
                -- Gore Vidal
%%
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one
damn thing over and over.
                -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
%%
It is now 10 p.m.  Do you know where Henry Kissinger is?
                -- Elizabeth Carpenter
%%
It is now pitch dark.  If you proceed, you will likely fall into a
pit.
%%
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue.
                -- Voltaire
%%
It is only people of small moral stature who have to stand on their
dignity.
%%
It is only the great men who are truly obscene.  If they had not dared
to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
                -- Havelock Ellis
%%
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration.
                -- Dijkstra
%%
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 something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more
glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through
which we look, which morally we can do.  To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts.
                -- Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Live"
%%
It is Texas law that when two trains meet each other at a railroad
crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed
until the other has gone.
%%
It is the business of little minds to shrink.
                -- Carl Sandburg
%%
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
                -- Hawkwind
%%
It is true that if your paperboy throws your paper into the bushes for
five straight days it can be explained by Newton's Law of Gravity.  But
it takes Murphy's law to explain why it is happening to you.
%%
It is very difficult to prophesy, especially when it pertains to the
future.
%%
It looks like blind screaming hedonism won out.
%%
It may be bad manners to talk with your mouth full, but it isn't too
good either if you speak when your head is empty.
%%
It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a
warning to others.
%%
"It runs like _x, where _x is something unsavory"
                -- Prof. Romas Aleliunas, CS 435
%%
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the
flag.
%%
"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn't give up because by that time I was too famous."
                -- Robert Benchly
%%
It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
%%
"It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set
foot."
%%
It was one of those perfect summer days -- the sun was shining, a
breeze was blowing, the birds were singing, and the lawn mower was
broken ...
                -- James Dent
%%
"It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day.  Perhaps
I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it.  I
don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and
the signature (which I guessed at).  There's a singular and a perpetual
charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its
novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but
yours are kept forever -- unread.  One of them will last a reasonable
man a lifetime."
                -- Thomas Aldrich
%%
        It was the next morning that the armies of Twodor marched east
laden with long lances, sharp swords, and death-dealing hangovers.  The
thousands were led by Arrowroot, who sat limply in his sidesaddle,
nursing a whopper.  Goodgulf, Gimlet, and the rest rode by him, praying
for their fate to be quick, painless, and if possible, someone else's.
        Many an hour the armies forged ahead, the war-merinos bleating
under their heavy burdens and the soldiers bleating under their melting
icepacks.
                -- The Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings"
%%
It wasn't that she had a rose in her teeth, exactly.  It was more like
the rose and the teeth were in the same glass.
%%
It will be advantageous to cross the great stream ... the Dragon is on
the wing in the Sky ... the Great Man rouses himself to his Work.
%%
It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human
nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant
examples.
                -- Charles Dickens
%%
It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing
warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or
two things still safe to eat.
                -- Robert Fuoss
%%
It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
                -- Andrew Jackson
%%
"It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milkbone
underwear."
%%
It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.
%%
"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
                -- Steven Wright
%%
"It's a summons."
"What's a summons?"
"It means summon's in trouble."
                -- Rocky and Bullwinkle
%%
It's a very *__UN*lucky week in which to be took dead.
                -- Churchy La Femme
%%
It's always darkest just before it gets pitch black.
%%
"It's bad luck to be superstitious."
                -- Andrew W. Mathis
%%
It's better to be wanted for murder that not to be wanted at all.
                -- Marty Winch
%%
"It's easier said than done."

... and if you don't believe it, try proving that it's easier done than
said, and you'll see that "it's easier said that `it's easier done than
said' than it is done", which really proves that "it's easier said than
done".
%%
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
%%
It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for
being right.
%%
"It's Fabulous!  We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an
hour!"
                -- Macy's
%%
It's illegal in Wilbur, Washington, to ride an ugly horse.
%%
It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it
is.  If you don't, it's its.  Then too, it's hers.  It isn't her's.  It
isn't our's either.  It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.
                -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News
%%
It's just a jump to the left
        And then a step to the right.
Put your hands on your hips
        And pull your knees in tight.
It's the pelvic thrust
        That really gets you insa-a-a-a-ane

        LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!

                -- Rocky Horror Picture Show
%%
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
                -- Walt Disney
%%
"It's Like This"

Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk.
%%
It's lucky you're going so slowly, because you're going in the wrong
direction.
%%
"It's men like him that give the Y chromosome a bad name."
%%
It's more than magnificent -- it's mediocre.
                -- Sam Goldwyn
%%
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.
                -- Phil White
%%
"It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either."
                -- Kevin White, mayor of Boston
%%
It's not enough to be Hungarian; you must have talent too.
                -- Alexander Korda
%%
It's not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps once you're off
the ground.
                -- Daniel B. Luten
%%
It's not that I'm afraid to die.  I just don't want to be there when it
happens.
                -- Woody Allen
%%
It's not the valleys in life I dread so much as the dips.
                -- Garfield
%%
It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that
English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many
other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case.
                -- Sydney J. Harris
%%
It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
%%
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
%%
It's so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the
Devil when he is the only explanation of it.
%%
It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon.  Which
raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody
not to.
                -- Franklin P. Jones
%%
It's the thought, if any, that counts!
%%
                     JACK AND THE BEANSTACK
                          by Mark Isaak

        Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL
character named Jack.  Jack and his relations were poor.  Often their
hash table was bare.  One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices
are sparse.  You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some
BASICs."  She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it
to him.
        So Jack set out.  But as he was walking along a Hamilton path,
he met the traveling salesman.
        "Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman
in high-level language.
        "I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips
and Apples," commented Jack.
        "I have a much better algorithm.  You needn't join a queue
there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now."
        Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house.  But when
he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she
started thrashing.
        "Don't you even have any artificial intelligence?  All these
kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the
window ...
%%
Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government:
        No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the
        legislature is in session.
%%
James Joyce -- an essentially private man who wished his total
indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
                -- Tom Stoppard
%%
Jenkinson's Law:
        It won't work.
%%
Jesus Saves,
Moses Invests,
But only Buddha pays Dividends.
%%
Job Placement, n.:
        Telling your boss what he can do with your job.
%%
Joe's sister puts spaghetti in her shoes!
%%
Johnson's First Law:
        When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the
        most inconvenient possible time.
%%
Join in the new game that's sweeping the country.  It's called
"Bureaucracy".  Everybody stands in a circle.  The first person to do
anything loses.
%%
Join the march to save individuality!
%%
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's First Law:
        Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of
        endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an
        obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the
        importance of their original contribution.
%%
Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac
(and nobody cares about it).
                -- Bill Joy 6/21/85
%%
Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good
solutions seldom black or white.  Beware of the solution that requires
one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the
winner.  The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is
because neither side has all the facts.  Therefore, when the wise
mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political
motivation.  Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the
whole truth.
                -- Stephen R. Schwambach
%%
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has
changed.
                -- Irene Peter
%%
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 go with the flow control, roll with the crunches, and, when you
get a prompt, type like hell.
%%
"Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't
immune to bullets"
                -- The Brigader, "Dr. Who"
%%
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to
twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!
%%
`Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried,
        As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
        By a finger entwined in his hair.

'Just the place for a Snark!  I have said it twice:
        That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark!  I have said it thrice:
        What I tell you three times is true.'
%%
Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along comes a
faster rat!!!
%%
Justice always prevails ... three times out of seven!
                -- Michael J. Wagner
%%
Justice is incidental to law and order.
                -- J. Edgar Hoover
%%
Justice, n.:
        A decision in your favor.
%%
K:      Cobalt's metal, hard and shining;
        Cobol's wordy and confining;
        KOBOLDS topple when you strike them;
        Don't feel bad, it's hard to like them.
                -- The Roguelet's ABC
%%
Kansas state law requires pedestrians crossing the highways at night to
wear tail lights.
%%
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.
%%
Keep grandma off the streets -- legalize bingo.
%%
Keep in mind always the two constant Laws of Frisbee:
        (1) The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc
            straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this
            force is technically termed "car suck").
        (2) Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive
            than "Watch this!"
%%
Keep you Eye on the Ball,
Your Shoulder to the Wheel,
Your Nose to the Grindstone,
Your Feet on the Ground,
Your Head on your Shoulders.
Now ... try to get something DONE!
%%
Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design.  Unlike most
automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gage, nor any of the
numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver.  Rather, if the
driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the
dashboard.  "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know
what's wrong."
%%
Kerr's Three Rules for a Successful College:
        Have plenty of football for the alumni, sex for the students,
        and parking for the faculty.
%%
Kids have *_____never* taken guidance from their parents.  If you could
travel back in time and observe the original primate family in the
original tree, you would see the primate parents yelling at the primate
teenager for sitting around and sulking all day instead of hunting for
grubs and berries like dad primate.  Then you'd see the primate
teenager stomp up to his branch and slam the leaves.
                -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
                   Do"
%%
Kin, n.:
        An affliction of the blood
%%
Kinkler's First Law:
        Responsibility always exceeds authority.

Kinkler's Second Law:
        All the easy problems have been solved.
%%
"Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack."
%%
Kirkland, Illinois, law forbids bees to fly over the village or through
any of its streets.
%%
Kiss me twice.  I'm schizophrenic.
%%
Kiss your keyboard goodbye!
%%
Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within.
%%
Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within.
%%
Kleptomaniac, n.:
        A rich thief.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Know thyself.  If you need help, call the C.I.A.
%%
Know what I hate most?  Rhetorical questions.
                -- Henry N. Camp
%%
Krogt, n. (chemical symbol: Kr):
        The metallic silver coating found on fast-food game cards.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Labor, n.:
        One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Lackland's Laws:
        (1) Never be first.
        (2) Never be last.
        (3) Never volunteer for anything
%%
Lactomangulation, n.:
        Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly
        that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Laetrile is the pits
%%
Langsam's Laws:
        (1) Everything depends.
        (2) Nothing is always.
        (3) Everything is sometimes.
%%
Larkinson's Law:
        All laws are basically false.
%%
Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with
was made up of idiots.  Remember?  One of them was always getting
pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the
farmhouse to alert the other ones.  She'd whimper and tug at their
sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do
you think something's wrong?  Do you think she wants us to follow her?
What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead
of every week.  What with all the time these people spent pinned under
the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops
whatsoever.  They probably got by on federal crop supports, which
Lassie filed the applications for.
                -- Dave Barry
%%
"Last week a cop stopped me in my car.  He asked me if I had a police
record.  I said, no, but I have the new DEVO album.  Cops have no sense
of humor."
%%
Last yeer I kudn't spel Engineer.  Now I are won.
%%
Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.
%%
"Laughter is the closest distance between two people."
                -- Victor Borge
%%
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.
%%
Laws of Serendipity:

        (1) In order to discover anything, you must be looking for
            something.
        (2) If you wish to make an improved product, you must already
            be engaged in making an inferior one.
%%
Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:
        No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats --
        approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
%%
Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads.
%%
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and
everything else follows in the same way.
                -- Alan J. Perlis
%%
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
%%
Legalize free-enterprise murder: why should governments have all the
fun?
%%
Legislation proposed in the Illinois State Legislature, May, 1907:
"Speed upon county roads will be limited to ten miles an hour unless
the motorist sees a bailiff who does not appear to have had a drink in
30 days, when the driver will be permitted to make what he can."
%%
Leibowitz's Rule:
        When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you
        hold the hammer with both hands.
%%
LEO (July 23 - Aug 22)
        You consider yourself a born leader.  Others think you are
        pushy.  Most Leo people are bullies.  You are vain and dislike
        honest criticism.  Your arrogance is disgusting.  Leo people
        are thieves.
%%
LEO (July 23 - Aug 22)
        Your determination and sense of humor will come to the fore.
        Your ability to laugh at adversity will be a blessing because
        you've got a day coming you wouldn't believe.  As a matter of
        fact, if you can laugh at what happens to you today, you've got
        a sick sense of humor.
%%
Let He who taketh the Plunge Remember to return it by Tuesday.
%%
"Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you're not just a
number.  You're two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash
and another number."
                -- James Estes
%%
Let us live!!!
Let us love!!!
Let us share the deepest secrets of our souls!!!

You first.
%%
Let's just say that where a change was required, I adjusted.  In every
relationship that exists, people have to seek a way to survive.  If you
really care about the person, you do what's necessary, or that's the
end.  For the first time, I found that I really could change, and the
qualities I most admired in myself I gave up.  I stopped being loud and
bossy ...  Oh, all right.  I was still loud and bossy, but only behind
his back."
                -- Kate Hepburn, on Tracy and Hepburn
%%
Let's say your wedding ring falls into your toaster, and when you stick
your hand in to retrieve it, you suffer Pain and Suffering as well as
Mental Anguish.  You would sue:

* The toaster manufacturer, for failure to include, in the instructions
  section that says you should never never never ever stick you hand
  into the toaster, the statement "Not even if your wedding ring falls
  in there".

* The store where you bought the toaster, for selling it to an obvious
  cretin like yourself.

* Union Carbide Corporation, which is not directly responsible in this
  case, but which is feeling so guilty that it would probably send you
  a large cash settlement anyway.
%%
Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return.  Here's an often
overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of
dollars:  For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your
tax return around under your armpit.  No IRS agent is going to want to
spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document.  So even if you owe
money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will
probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit.  What does he care?
It's not his money.
                -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
%%
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (The Times of London)

Dear Sir,

I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or
to the office.  We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in
public places.  They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result
in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn
will cause massive unemployment in the already severely depressed
agricultural industry.

Yours faithfully,
        Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J. P.
        Sevenoaks
%%
Lewis's Law of Travel:
        The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to
        anyone, ever.
%%
Liar, n.:
        A lawyer with a roving commission.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
                -- Harry Emerson Fosdick
%%
LIBRA (Sep. 23 to Oct. 22)
        Your desire for justice and truth will be overshadowed by your
        desire for filthy lucre and a decent meal.  Be gracious and
        polite.  Someone is watching you, so stop staring like that.
%%
LIBRA (Sept 23 - Oct 22)
        You are the artistic type and have a difficult time with
        reality.  If you are a man, you are more than likely gay.
        Chances for employment and monetary gains are excellent.  Most
        Libra women are prostitutes.  All Libra people die of venereal
        disease.
%%
Lie, n.:
        A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one
        discovered to date.
%%
Lieberman's Law:
        Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
%%
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
%%
Life is a yo-yo, and mankind ties knots in the string.
%%
"Life is like a bowl of soup with hairs floating on it.  You have to
eat it nevertheless."
                -- Flaubert
%%
"Life is like a buffet; it's not good but there's plenty of it."
%%
Life is like a simile.
%%
Life is like an analogy
%%
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer, then you find
there is nothing in it.
%%
"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 to you is a bold and dashing responsibility"
                -- a Mary Chung's fortune cookie
%%
"Life would be much simpler and things would get done much faster if it
weren't for other people"
                -- Blore
%%
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
%%
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made
sense from things she found in gift shops.
                -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
%%
Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.
                -- Alan McKay
%%
Limericks are art forms complex,
Their topics run chiefly to sex.
        They usually have virgins,
        And masculine urgin's,
And other erotic effects.
%%
Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations.
%%
Linus:  I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow.  Maybe
        we should think only about today.
Charlie Brown:
        No, that's giving up.  I'm still hoping that yesterday will get
        better.
%%
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.
%%
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And plunged it deep into the VAX;
Don't you envy people who
Do all the things ___YOU want to do?
%%
Loan-department manager:  "There isn't any fine print.  At these
interest rates, we don't need it."
%%
Lobster:
        Everyone loves these delectable crustaceans, but many cooks are
squeamish about placing them into boiling water alive, which is the
only proper method of preparing them.  Frankly, the easiest way to
eliminate your guilt is to establish theirs by putting them on trial
before they're cooked.  The fact is, lobsters are among the most
ferocious predators on the sea floor, and you're helping reduce crime
in the reefs.  Grasp the lobster behind the head, look it right in its
unmistakably guilty eyestalks and say, "Where were you on the night of
the 21st?", then flourish a picture of a scallop or a sole and shout,
"Perhaps this will refresh that crude neural apparatus you call a
memory!"  The lobster will squirm noticeably.  It may even take a swipe
at you with one of its claws.  Incorrigible.  Pop it into the pot.
Justice has been served, and shortly you and your friends will be,
too.
                -- "Cooking: The Art of Using Appliances and Utensils
                   into Excuses and Apologies"
%%
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 little bird, sitting in a tree; that smells *_____awful*.
%%
... Logically incoherent, semantically incomprehensible, and
legally ... impeccable!
%%
Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
                -- Oliver Goldsmith
%%
Look out!  Behind you!
%%
Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game.  You want us
to pay income taxes, too?
                -- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox
%%
Loose bits sink chips.
%%
Losing your drivers' license is just God's way of saying "BOOGA,
BOOGA!"
%%
Lost interest?  It's so bad I've lost apathy.
%%
Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
%%
Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
%%
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 is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious than gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And Love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But Hating, my boy, is an Art.
                -- Ogden Nash
%%
Love is sentimental measles.
%%
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
                -- H. L. Mencken
%%
Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes.
%%
Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
                -- Louise Beal
%%
Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up
to.
%%
        Love's Drug

My love is like an iron wand
        That conks me on the head,
My love is like the valium
        That I take before my bed,
My love is like the pint of scotch
        That I drink when I be dry;
And I shall love thee still, my dear,
        Until my wife is wise.
%%
Lowery's Law:
        If it jams -- force it.  If it breaks, it needed replacing
        anyway.
%%
LSD melts in your mind, not in your hand.
%%
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology:
        There's always one more bug.
%%
Lunatic Asylum, n.:
        The place where optimism most flourishes.
%%
Lysistrata had a good idea.
%%
"MacDonald has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into
the smallest amount of thoughts."
                -- Winston Churchill
%%
Machine-Independent, adj.:
        Does not run on any existing machine.
%%
Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate,
and play games -- but not with pleasure.
                -- Leo Rosten
%%
Mad, adj.:
        Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence ...
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child -- if you parboil them
first for seven hours, they always come out tender.
                -- W. C. Fields
%%
Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism

Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet.

The two definition immediately foregoing are condensed from the works
of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject
with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human
knowledge.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Magnocartic, adj.:
        Any automobile that, when left unattended, attracts shopping
        carts.
                -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends"
%%
Magpie, n.:
        A bird whose theivish disposition suggested to someone that it
        might be taught to talk.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
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.
%%
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly
        as one man.

Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds.

Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Majority, n.:
        That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
%%
Making files is easy under the UNIX operating system.  Therefore, users
tend to create numerous files using large amounts of file space.  It
has been said that the only standard thing about all UNIX systems is
the message-of-the-day telling users to clean up their files.
                -- System V.2 administrator's guide
%%
Malek's Law:
        Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.
%%
Man 1:  Ask me the what the most important thing about telling a good
        joke is.

Man 2:  OK, what is the most impo---

Man 1:  ______TIMING!
%%
"Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain."
                -- Lily Tomlin
%%
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
                -- Oscar Wilde
%%
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the
only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
                -- Wernher von Braun
%%
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
                -- Mark Twain
%%
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 is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the
victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
                -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
%%
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it
is an enemy.
                -- Albert Einstein
%%
Man, n.:
        An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks
        he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.  His
        chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own
        species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent
        rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history,
dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive
man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the
air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first
primitive umpire.

What inner force drove this first athlete?  Your guess is as good as
mine.  Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.
                -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
%%
Manual, n.:
        A unit of documentation.  There are always three or more on a
        given item.  One is on the shelf; someone has the others.  The
        information you need in in the others.
                -- Ray Simard
%%
Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon,
there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he
was so Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how
completely Mournful he would be on Wednesday ...
                -- Walt Kelly
%%
Mark's Dental-Chair Discovery:
        Dentists are incapable of asking questions that require a
        simple yes or no answer.
%%
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
                -- Voltaire
%%
Maryel brought her bat into Exit once and started whacking people on
the dance floor.  Now everyone's doing it.  It's called grand slam
dancing.
                -- Ransford, Chicago Reader 10/7/83
%%
Maternity pay?  Now every Tom, Dick and Harry will get pregnant.
                -- Malcolm Smith
%%
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.
                -- R. Drabek
%%
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 often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is
described as being n-dimensional.  Like modern sex, any number can
play.
                -- Dr. Thor Wald, in "Beep/The Quincunx of Time", by
                   James Blish
%%
"Matrimony isn't a word, it's a sentence."
%%
Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a
receipt.
%%
Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
                -- Jules Feiffer
%%
May a Misguided Platypus lay its Eggs in your Jockey Shorts
%%
May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual!
%%
May the Fleas of a Thousand Camels infest one of your Erogenous Zones.
%%
May your Tongue stick to the Roof of your Mouth with the Force of a
Thousand Caramels.
%%
Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.
                -- R. S. Barton
%%
Maybe you can't buy happiness, but these days you can certainly charge
it.
%%
Mayor Vincent J. `Buddy' Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city
nativity scene removed:
        "They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men
        and a virgin in the whole organization."
%%
McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom:
        If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not
        $19.95.
%%
Meader's Law:
        Whatever happens to you, it will previously have happened to
        everyone you know, only more so.
%%
Measure with a micrometer.  Mark with chalk.  Cut with an axe.
%%
Meeting, n.:
        An assembly of people coming together to decide what person or
        department not represented in the room must solve a problem.
%%
Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures
from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha
Centauri.  Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man
had split before.  Thus was the Empire forged.
                -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams