#23 Jan 2023 #https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34495572 "Most innovation sells you an inferior product for a lower price. It is almost never better than what was available in the past, just cheaper. Life becomes a series of more, but lower value experiences. " --navane #2 Jan 2023 It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth. --Glass Onion (Benoit Blanc) #2 Aug 2022 #https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/ When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con." --Ta-Nehisi Coates #2 Apr 2022 "I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' --Martin Luther King, Jr. #25 Aug 2021 "I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but you're not being persecuted because you love Jesus. You're being held accountable because you're not acting like him." --Charles McBryde #17 July 2020 #p113 "But one of the Miasma's perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him---people who had better things they could have been doing---devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn't even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren't even humans." --Neal Stephenson, "Fall" #7 July "How about I find you, and I don't say magic is real, but I do seduce you, and *so* lift your spirits that life retains its sparkle for decades." "Yeah, that sounds nice. Thank you." "Okay." --The Magicians #31 May 2020 #https://www.yourtango.com/2017299164/20-martin-luther-king-jr-quotes-white-people-need-read "A riot is the language of the unheard." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of it." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." --Martin Luther King, Jr. #20 Mar 2020 "I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." --J.R.R. Tolkien #13 July 2019 #https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/gloria-steinem-talks-patriarchy-abortion-economic-independence-190712165559932.html "The ability to decide when and whether to have children is the single biggest determinant, worldwide, of whether a woman is healthy or not, educated or not, active outside the home or not, and how long she will live." --Gloria Steinem #9 Apr 2019 "Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator." --Pete Buttigieg #25 Mar 2019 # http://www.ginandtacos.com/2019/03/24/turning-point/ "Stop thinking about Russia. Stop talking about Russia. Russia tried to fuck with our election. They will try again in 2020. Russia wants a destabilized U.S. because that suits its foreign policy and economic ambitions. None of this is new and nothing has changed." --Ed Burmila #15 Mar 2019 "What follows won't be good, but it'll be bad for everyone---rich and poor, Equatorials and commless, Sanzeds and Arctics, now they'll all know. *Every* season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could've chosen a different kind of equality. We could've all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn't want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that's what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change." --N. K. Jemisin, "The Stone Sky" "But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them---even if, in truth, their victims couldn't care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky." --N. K. Jemisin, "The Stone Sky" "They're afraid because we exist, she says. There's nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There's nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing---so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives." --N. K. Jemisin, "The Stone Sky" #2 July 2018 #p192 « La guerre ne finit jamais, elle refroidit. On se trouve toujours des ennemis quand on cherche un peu. » --Daniel Sernine, "Chronoreg" #13 May 2018 "There's a war going on, out there, somewhere." --Dave Malloy, "Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812" "Chandeliers and caviar: the war can't touch us here!" --Dave Malloy, "Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812" #4 May 2018 #https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/ "Of course, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard." --Michael Gerson #27 March 2018 #http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/07/armada_by_ernest_cline_follow_up_to_ready_player_one_reviewed.html "It's a valuable question for gaming culture---and 'nerd culture' more generally---to ask itself: Do we want to tell stories that make sense of the things we used to love, that help us remember the reasons we were so drawn to them, and create new works that inspire that level of devotion? Or do we simply want to hear the litany of our childhood repeated back to us like an endless lullaby for the rest of our lives?" --Laura Hudson #12 Jan 2018 "Don't modulate the key then not debate with me!" --Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Hamilton" "Immigrants: we get the job done!" --Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Hamilton" "Oceans rise. Empires fall." --Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Hamilton" "Winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder." --Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Hamilton" "I changed parties to see the opportunity I saw." --Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Hamilton" #19 July 2017 #https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/19/15998154/netanyahu-orban-crazy-eu-bashing-hot-mic On Israel: "We are part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe." --Benjamin Netanyahu #12 June 2017 "The things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful." --Ben Platt #21 Apr 2017 "Treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt." --Leviticus 19:34 "He made a whip of cords and drove sheep and oxen alike out of the temple area, and knocked over the moneychangers' tables, spilling their coins. He told those who were selling doves: 'Get them out of here! Stop turning my Father's house into a marketplace!'" --John 2:15-16 #14 Mar 2017 #http://www.ginandtacos.com/2017/03/12/branding "Republican Lite and the post-Reagan death of actual liberalism have left the party without any meaningful identity other than "Not the Republicans" and the GOP has managed to brand a party that is barely left of center on most issues (and to the right of it on a few) as some sort of radical Marxist death cult. That was a problem before 2016 and it's a problem now." --Ed Burmila #14 Mar 2017 #http://www.ginandtacos.com/2017/03/08/healthcare-is-a-land-of-contrasts "The same student who slaps a paper together at the last second is unlikely to produce a paper much better by starting the assignment earlier. The person who cares so little about what he or she writes that the assignment is left until hours before the deadline is not the kind who will devote greater attention to it just because more time is available. In other words, if you're gonna half-ass the paper at the last minute you will probably half-ass it whenever you do it. The problem isn't the time you have available; the underlying problem is that you half-ass things." --Ed Burmila #9 November 2016 #http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-wins-uneducated-voters-20161109-story.html "America is still the land where the waitress's kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren't plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids." --Garrison Keillor #12 September 2016 "Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." --Tennessee Williams, "The glass menagerie" (Tom Wingfield) #20 July 2016 #http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/07/19/optimism-abounds/comment-page-1/#comments "[Trump] only got into the primaries to pump up his brand and sell more stuff, never dreaming he'd be nominated. But he's narcissistic enough to want to see how far he can take it & sociopathic enough to set the GOP on fire to make sure he doesn't get the job or the blame." --robert e #4 June 2016 #https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jun/02/steven-moffat-there-was-going-to-be-a-black-doctor-who "And we've kind of got to tell a lie: we'll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn't have been, and we won't dwell on that. We'll say, 'To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we'll summon it forth.'" --Steven Moffat #11 May 2016 #p24 "Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't even listening... or thinking... whichever one applies." --Edward Albee, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (George) #22 September 2015 #as q on http://www.vox.com/2015/9/22/9370549/black-on-black-crime "Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate." --Jill Leovy #21 September 2015 "That led me along the following train of thought, to which by reading you've inadvertently purchased tickets." --David Shoenthal #1 July 2015 # http://www.ginandtacos.com/2015/06/30/prostrating/#comments "France thought it was putting one over on Germany in that it would water down the economic leadership of the Bundesbank and the German government, allowing France to consolidate its political leadership of Europe. The Germans thought they were putting one over on France in that the euro would allow Germany to call more of the shots in Europe at the expense of Paris. Looks like Kohl won that bet." --Bill #1 June 2015 #email from Jan 2008 "I can say with confidence that our students, when they took C++ in CS1 and CS2, totally sucked when it came to pointers and programming close to the metal. They also failed to pick up essential skills in OO and software engineering, so it was a lose-lose situation." --Cay Horstmann #1 June 2015 #http://www.vox.com/2015/6/1/8676727/hillary-clinton-popularity "Among journalists, Clinton is one of the *least* popular politicians. She is not forthcoming or entertaining with the press. She doesn't offer good quotes. She doesn't like journalists, respect what we do, or care to hide her disdain for the media. She feels that the right-wing press has tried to destroy her for decades, that the mainstream press got played like a cheap fiddle by the conservative press, and that even the *liberal* press was overwhelmingly hostile to her during her 2008 campaign." --Matthew Yglesias #30 April 2015 # http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/11/sprj.irq.pentagon/ "While no one condones looting, on the other hand one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who've had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime." --Donald Rumsfeld #26 February 2015 #http://m.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31639376 "Israeli politicians tend to portray their country as a kind of branch office of the Free World, operating the franchise in a particularly tough neighbourhood." --Kevin Connolly #7 December 2014 #https://www.facebook.com/michael.kimmitt/posts/10203481373458332?comment_id=10203481397578935&offset=0&total_comments=3 The great challenge of discussing the Obama Administration is defending mediocrity against attacks from the lovers of gross incompetence. --Michael Kimmitt #1 September 2014 #http://www.ginandtacos.com/2008/06/19/battered-worker-syndrome/ "If the employee-employer relationship of our parents' post-War generation was a marriage, ours is a drunken hand job behind a bar." --Ed, ginandtacos.com #21 August 2014 "I have no idea what "political correctness" actually means, if anything. But it strikes me that almost every time I hear someone use that phrase, they are on the wrong side of some stark moral divide." --Fred Iutzi #20 Jul 2014 #http://www.chicagotribune.com/site/ct-cardinal-mundelein-flashback-0720-20140720,0,3822850.story "The strength and all the virility of the church has always rested in the laboring class. Whenever and if ever the church depended on the nobility, on the leisure class, for support and representation, she soon found she had built on sand." --George Cardinal Mundelein #15 Jun 2014 "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing---after they've tried everything else." --Winston Churchill #23 Apr 2014 # http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=2059 "Is this kindness... transactional?" --David Willis, "Shortpacked!" (Ultra Car) #21 Apr 2014 # http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html "Classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway." --David Moser #16 Mar 2014 # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408055 "HR, legal, finance and IT are all unpopular for the same reason: it's part of their job to stop you doing things that may get the company in trouble later." --pjc50 #11 Mar 2014 "Whenever I need inspiration for success, I look to Donald Trump. All he started with was with a dream, hard work, and six million dollars." --Nishant Kanitkar #10 Feb 2014 #http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g "That means [Facebook] are *actively* restricting the reach of posts from people like me, in order to force us into paying to reach the people who have already indicated that they like what we do." --Veritasium #http://www.ginandtacos.com/2014/02/09/personal-weakness/ "People hooked on drugs are sick. Neither prison nor your condescending lectures are going to help." --Ed, ginandtacos.com #27 Nov 2013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1981645 "Teachers often shelter behind undefined criteria until students submit their work, and then provide rationalizations of evaluations and grades after papers are returned. In other words, there is often the temptation to see what the students have done first. It is then irresponsible to say to students: 'What I was really looking for was....'" --Royce Sadler "The desire to label everything as good rests on two false assumptions, namely (1) that any negative reaction is bound to stifle personal development and creativity, and (2) that evaluating a performance as a performance is equivalent to judging a person as a person. Not everything produced by human beings, even honest and diligent ones, is good, and students are not so naïve." --Royce Sadler #27 Nov 2013 #http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ "All the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them." --thebarrytone #20 Nov 2013 "See, to me, football just looks like a bunch of cavemen trying to play basketball." --Will Hollingsworth #3 Nov 2013 #http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-schmich-1103-20131103,0,1587682.column "You become eligible for the Chicago club only when you give into the truth that in winter you can't be both warm and cute and you'd rather be warm." --Mary Schmich #9 August 2013 #http://raisingmyrainbow.com/2013/08/10/what-jennifer-finney-boylan-said-about-me "If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all." --Jennifer Finney Boylan #5 July 2013 # http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2013/07/cal-thomas-plays-the-pedophilia-card-atop-dennis-byrnes-polygamy-card.html#comments "Upcoming battlelines in the marriage war, made inevitable by the Supreme Court: Necrophilia Coprophilia Francophilia And, in an unfortunate misunderstanding, Hemophilia." --Jon B. #20 Jun 2013 "In essential things, unity. In doubtful things, liberty. In all things, charity." --St. Augustine #14 Jun 2013 "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept." --LTGEN David Morrison, Australian Chief of Army #1 Jun 2013 "We have been infected with a vision of... another world. ... Most of us don't think it's another planet in the sense of a speculative fiction speely. Maybe it's the future of *this* world. Maybe it's an alternate universe we can't get to. Maybe it's nothing but a fantasy. But at any rate it lives in our souls and we can't help striving toward it." --Neal Stephenson, _Anathem_ (Erasmas) #9 May 2013 "So I finally got around looking at the governor race. Its like we get to choose between fire and brimstone and a bottle of imitation vanilla." --Rebecca Dovi #8 May 2013 "Once you're at "making a comfortable living," any additional wealth accumulation should be treated as a personality disorder, and you should be expected to steal and kill, because you've already proven that you're deranged." --Michael Kimmitt #4 April 2013 "Our political class is, like Europe's, massively to the country's right. That doesn't last; eventually, either Mandela gets let out of jail or anarchists start shooting officeholders. The only question is how many people the oligarchs will manage to harm and murder before they are forced to grant nontrivial concessions." --Michael Kimmitt #4 March 2013, based on email from Sep 1998 "In chess too," he said at last, "there's a limit to the forecasts one can make. The best possible move, or the most probable one, is the one that leaves one's opponent in the least advantageous position. That's why one way of estimating the expediency of the next move consists simply in imagining that move has been made and then going on to analyse the game from your opponent's point of view. That means falling back on your own resources, but this time putting yourself in your enemy's shoes. From there, you conjecture another move and then immediately put yourself in the role of your opponent's opponent, in other words, yourself. And so on indefinitely, as far ahead as you can. By that, I mean that I know where I've got to, but I don't know how far he's got." --Muñoz, _The Flanders Panel_, Arturo Pérez-Reverte #13 February 2013 "Well they'd better get it done by Easter. If Jesus comes out of his tomb and doesn't see a Pope, it'll mean six more weeks of Lent." --Jonathan Prykop #2 January 2013 #http://www.ginandtacos.com/2013/01/03/once-again-we-must-sugar-our-own-churro/ "Business doesn't obey government in our system---government obeys business. We end up having to bribe them to obey the regulations and laws that we already allowed them to write for themselves." --Ed, ginandtacos.com #28 September 2012 "I'm generally dubious of legislation titles... seems like there's been one too many "Free Ponies For Everyone" acts that turn out to hide a lot of bullshit plus nobody actually gets a pony." --Jonathan Prykop #9 July 2012 "The US itself is based on the realization of the 1% that the .01% intended to screw them out of everything, and that it's worth letting the 99% get some stuff if it meant you got to stay fat and happy." --Michael Kimmitt #3 July 2012 # http://www.ginandtacos.com/2012/07/03/value/ "We used to be able to handle ideas like massive government projects to improve our standard of living. Now we sit around waiting for Private Sector Santa to save us; he never quite gets around to it." --Ed Burmila #15 May 2012 #https://gist.github.com/0f61db65bbd2d2cb681a "We learn new things because our perception of the world is shaped by our mental catalogues of what is possible and what it useful." --esmooov #30 Apr 2012 "I had a hard time with Ayn Rand, because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'" --Randall Munroe #1 Apr 2012 "As with speech and assembly, the freedom to be an asshole who only hangs out with other assholes is part of what makes it "free"...." --Jonathan Prykop #25 Feb 2012 "I think we can also unanimously conclude that Mitt Romney, for all of his good qualities, is a dork." --Kathleen Parker #20 Jan 2012 #http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/ "Right now everyone's fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can't watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It's fine if you want to have that fight, but don't yell and scream about how you're losing business to piracy when your stuff isn't even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this." --Jonathan Coulton #18 Jan 2012 "I swear, right now, if there were AP Homeroom and AP Lunch Period, kids would be signing up for it. It really needs to stop." --Nina Koch #12 Jan 2012 "I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions." --Warren Buffett #5 Dec 2011 "Success, education, intelligence, and credentials are all available independently of each other. If they were binary, you could find all 16 combinations in spades. (Probably not uniformly distributed, but I'm sure I could come up with anecdotes for SeIc or SEiC or any other combination if I needed an editorial written.) With particular relevance to this article, "I am successful and well-credentialed, ergo, if a test suggests that I am not educated or intelligent, that test must be faulty" is not by itself very persuasive to me." --patio11 #16 Nov 2011 # http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/11/14/static-age/ "It's a sad commentary on both our media and the electorate that Perry was taken seriously when he proposed eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency, and given the gong only after he forgot its name." --Ed Burmila #14 Nov 2011 "Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. The beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults." --Neil deGrasse Tyson #3 Nov 2011 #http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/07/18/Mobile-Net-Gloom "I don't want to write code for a platform where there's someone else who gets to decide whether I get to play and what I'm allowed to sell, and who can flip my you're-out-of-business-switch any time it furthers their business goals" --Tim Bray #6 Oct 2011 "Are we in the lab today?" "God, I hope so, I need to spend some serious Twitter time." "Yeah, I've got plans to make." --overheard in hallway #27 Sep 2011 "I considered war to be an utter waste of my time and energy, since most wars involved people I did not know arguing over matters I did not care about in pursuit of goals that would not have any direct impact upon me." --Sir Apropos of Nothing, Peter David #25 Sep 2011 "Parenting is a supremely masochistic kind of self-sacrifice - you spend years teaching them how to be independent adults and then THEY TURN INTO INDEPENDENT ADULTS. If you are parenting correctly, you are essentially teaching your children all they need to know to one day break your heart." --Jonathan Coulton #19 Sep 2011 "Sometimes you borrow from Peter to pay Paul because Peter will give you a reasonable interest rate and Paul will break your fucking legs." --Kevin Colby #bookmark #4 Sep 2011 "Without teachers, humankind would be sitting in a cold, dark, clammy cave, picking nits and wondering how Grandfather started his legendary fire." --Elle Newmark, _The book of unholy mischief_ #27 August 2011 "A home phone is like a normal phone, but attached to a building where you think they might be." --Martin Freeman #27 July 2011 "What would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both side are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won't do it, nothing will." --Paul Krugman #26 July 2011 "Blessed are the poor, for douchebag Christians will lie about them." --Michael Kimmitt #23 May 2011 "Within the Democratic Party... progressives share a political party with another group of people---the corporate neoliberals---who we disagree with on almost every single issue of substance." --Robert Cruickshank #10 May 2011 "How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?" --Steve Simon #9 May 2011 "The purpose of the War on Drugs is to put people in prison, and from that perspective it has been a smashing success. The War on Drugs is, at its core, a blunt form of class warfare." --Ed Burmila "I never tire of talking about the War on Drugs, a flawless example of everything wrong, deceptive, and misguided about the Reaganite vision of America." --Ed Burmila #27 Apr 2011 #http://www.k12math.org/doclib/4pillars.pdf "Without understanding, all of K-12 math education is much less valuable than a four-function calculator from the Dollar Store." --Matt Brenner #17 Apr 2011 "With absolutely no understanding of how narrative, plot, character development, or exposition work, Rand produces fiction that sounds like it was written in Urdu and translated into English with the least reliable free online translator available." --Ed, ginandtacos.com #14 Mar 2011 # http://vihart.com/blog/pi-is-still-wrong/ "The way of mathematics is to make stuff up and see what happens." --Vi Hart #26 Jan 2011 "SML... is so fanatically typed that you're guaranteed *never* to get a runtime exception, because you will *never* get your goddamn program to compile." --Steve Yegge "Having a deep understanding of compilers is what separates the wheat from the chaff. I say that without having the slightest frigging clue what "chaff" is, but let's assume it's some sort of inferior wheat substitute, possibly made from tofu." --Steve Yegge "The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you can never know if they are genuine." --Abraham Lincoln #19 Jan 2011 "Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick." --John Scalzi "I work on the assumption that Facebook is working by default to make me look like an asshole to everyone who's connected to me, because I've seen it do it to others." --John Scalzi #18 Jan 2011 "Facebook's valuations are being driven by large amounts of investor money injected into the Zynga symbiote, who throws nine figures a year at Facebook to continue identifying new pieces of brain matter to feed to their mad cows." --patio11 #16 Jan 11 "The next time you... find yourself talking to a linguist, ask them about their research (definitely!), but please don't ask them how many languages they speak. That would be like asking a wedding planner how many spouses they have." --DS Bingham #7 Dec 10 "To put it bluntly, I believe the world is patriarchal because men are bigger and stronger than women, and can beat them up." --Roger Ebert #5 Dec 10 "Each kid takes their turn letting the quirks and imperfections of their peers roll off them with a mutter of that phrase, before they all come together for a moment of pure Christmas spirit. So this year, when your family members inevitably do something that chafes, try to let it pass through you with a sigh of 'good grief'." --Jonathan Prykop #2 Dec 10 "When we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed---even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail---even if their attacks succeed." --Bruce Schneier #17 Nov 10 "Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it." --Penn Jillette #16 Nov 10 "When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious." --Edsger Dijkstra "When judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes." --Edsger Dijkstra #15 Nov 10 "Gaping at the color balance on the map is ridiculous because Republicans have proven beyond any doubt in the past 30 years that they are absolutely dominant in areas where no one lives." --Ed, ginandtacos.com "It's not a football game, Mark. People die due to bad policy. They have to watch their children succumb to treatable illness because they can't afford their care. They don't get jobs, they drink and they do things they never forgive themselves for. I understand that you enjoy the game aspect, but real life is very different." --Michael Kimmitt #10 Nov 10 "We want a government that will resolve every problem we currently face with solutions that require no effort, no sacrifices, and no money. And I have no doubt that we have elected a group of people brave enough to promise exactly that." --Ed, ginandtacos.com "A beautiful program with a single misplaced semicolon is like a sports car with one piston out of line. Both are dead machines, functionally indistinguishable from junk." --Kevin Carey "The only way to simulate the state's byzantine school-financing law was to understand every inch of it, every historical curiosity and long-embedded political compromise, to the last dollar and cent. To write code about a thing, you have to know the thing itself, absolutely." --Kevin Carey #26 Oct 10 "Commas group and separate meaning. They're the duct tape of written English. No set of rules based on form rather than content can adequately describe their habits and activities." --Teresa Nielsen Hayden #25 Oct 10 "For years, motivational speakers and the like have been touting how the Chinese word for "crisis" is made of "danger" and "opportunity," which (1) is bullshit and (2) is a little insulting as it implies Chinese words were created to teach lessons, unlike any other culture where words are created because you need to say that thing." --Christina H #22 Oct 10 "Sometimes one despairs of using natural language for communication of propositions between humans, when it is so manifestly not suited to the task." --Geoff Pullum #14 Oct 10 "We have to stop looking at the government as 'them', and have to start reclaiming it as 'us'." --Rich Whitney #9 Oct 10 "In my experience it's the people who are born on third base who are the most enraged at the poor---they want everyone to think they hit a triple." --Kip #25 Sep 10 "[Republicans] say that we need to keep taxes on the rich low because they're the job creators. They're not. They're much more likely to save money through mergers and outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor, and pass the unemployment along to you." --Bill Maher #16 Sep 10 "Obama ran as a visionary and leads as a legislator. That's been the most disappointing thing about him." --Jon Stewart #13 Sep 10 "I can see where it's heading: a service called Google Assault that doesn't even bother to guess what you want, and simply hurls random words and sounds and images at you until you dribble all the fluid out of your body." --Charlie Brooker #10 Sep 10 "I figured I'd just talk to them each, and do that." - Marta #2 Sep 10 "Autotune... it's the audio equivalent to 'Snap to Grid'." --xpaulbettsx #20 Jul 10 "We may not always like what the First Amendment permits, but we've agreed as a nation that the short-term aggravation of personal offense is the tithe we pay for freedom." --Kathleen Parker #13 Jul 10 "The terror of printing the most basic of the earthy Germanic words for human excrement clearly continues unquelled. Except here, of course, because on Language Log we are linguists, and we don't give a shit. We don't believe simple Anglo-Saxon monosyllables will either sear your eyeballs or warp the moral fiber of the young." --Geoff Pullum "The living people who call themselves Jedi may know with great certitude that Luke Skywalker never existed, but that doesn't keep them from being passionately devoted to what they believe are his ways, investing as much into their fandom as some folks invest in Christ. That they choose this as their religion has NOTHING TO DO with the literal reality of the story. Same goes with my belief in Christ." --Jonathan Prykop #8 Jun 10 "Major USA-Asia wars since WWII: one loss, one tie, two in OT. Too bad. I like our troops, but I especially like them alive and defending the USA instead of dead or being made to stir up hornets' nests a world away." --Matt Zanon #27 May 10 "Praying does seem wiser than hoping at this point." --Rachel Maddow #27 May 10 "The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention." --Jonathan Edwards #3 Apr 10 "It's probably safe to say that if a principal was accused of overlooking a child molester in his classrooms or recycling him to other schools, nobody would compare his suffering to Christ's." --Katha Pollitt #25 Mar 10 "But it's not odd at all. It's "The moral majority... weren't in charge of such things before; now they are. They will not have to pay for what they consider sinful, but those of us they've deemed too sinful to support will still have to pay for them." --Jonathan Prykop #15 Mar 10 I'm so glad that I'll never fit in; that will never be me. Outcast girls with ambition: that's what I want to see! --Pink, "Stupid girls" #22 Feb 10 #http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2010/02/nosediver.html "At least four speakers at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington made Obama-teleprompter jokes while standing right in front of teleprompter screens, as though irony had never been invented." --Eric Zorn #20 Jan 10 # http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065332 "I have a coat older than Google. I have drill press older than the entire internet. I have books that predate the transistor. This is all new and we are just barely coming to terms with a giant sea change in every industry and cultural institution." --dan_the_welder #19 Jan 10 "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul." --Isaac Asimov #8 Jan 10 #http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/problems-with-hash-tables/ "A popular implementation technique of hash tables is, rather than doubling (or halving) in size during resize, to just add or remove some constant number of buckets. And then still claim its O(1) cost for insert et al. It's a hash table, after all. At times like this, I understand why the zen masters tended to simply hit their students upside the head with a stick when they said something stupid." --Brian Hurt #28 Dec 09 "They're pretty crappy wood floors (they need a bit of work in the kitchen), which makes them only like 500 times better than carpet." --Benoit Hudson #22 Dec 09 "The Magna Carta... came about for the same reason so many landmarks of liberty, including the Declaration of Independence, were established in the English-speaking world---because the upper middle class balked at paying taxes." --Sarah Vowell #13 Dec 09 Of Stephen Colbert the character: "He's not mendacious and stupid; he's innocent and stupid. He's more like a puppy urinating on your politics." --Tom Purcell #11 Dec 09 "Two approaches we could take here. The first is we just stick to the facts. Lotta fun that is. The second is we wave cheerily at the facts en route to a more entertaining sociopolitical perspective. This is the Fox News system, and you can see it works for them." --Cecil Adams #6 Dec 09 "When I go to get a new driver's license... or deal with the city inspector... or walk into a post office... I find public employees to be cheerful and competent and highly professional, and when I go for blood draws at Quest Diagnostics, a national for-profit chain of medical labs, I find myself in tiny, dingy offices run by low-wage immigrant health workers who speak incomprehensible English and are rude to customers and take forever to do a routine procedure." --Garrison Keillor #1 Dec 09 "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Robert Heinlein #20 Nov 09 "How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?" --Paul Graham #9 Nov 09 "To many of us Brits, the cry 'keep government out of health care' just sounds a little kooky, on a par with 'keep government out of defending the nation' or 'keep government out of building roads'. In Britain one of the main things the government does, one of the main reason people pay taxes, is for health care, so naturally the revulsion at it in the States seems a little strange." --Mark Mardell, BBC #26 Oct 09 Why major in CS?: "It seems obvious to me that one would have to be an idiot to be employed doing anything other than practicing magic in a world filled with sorcery." --Maxwell Galloway-Carson #24 Oct 09 #[liberals] = libs "Most [liberals] believe that conservatives vote against their own interests. I think that's ridiculous; they just hate their fellow Americans a lot and vote their values." --Michael Kimmitt #17 Oct 09 #http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print "Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class." --Matt Taibbi #25 Sep 09 #http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html "Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for." --Paul Graham #21 July 09 On Zionism (in 1901): "However attractive this dream seems..., the future Palestine would be very different from the idyllic Palestine of the past. Jews will be living there as if on a volcano.... Conflicts and persecutions there will not stop until the Jews are expelled from there once again." --Ludwig Zamenhof #8 May 09 "Everyone at Knox is responsible for holding up the illusion that this campus is a microcosm of the real world. Obviously, nobody is going to care how or why feminists were denied a house in ten years, but if we don't fake it for a while, we'll never learn how to stand up for ourselves in the real world." --Deana Rutherford #2 Mar 09 "I have decided not to take a sabbatical after all. You go off to the woods for a year and it puts you under terrible pressure to write 'Moby Dick' or something worthy of having had an entire year in which to write, and the longer you work at this masterpiece, the shabbier it looks, the whale turns into a guppy, and at the end of the year you have torn up almost everything you wrote and you are filled with self-loathing and bitter regret. No thanks. I am sticking to my post and recommend that you do, too." --Garrison Keillor #24 Feb 09 "It is true that coalition governments are necessarily governments of compromise, and are accused of being in a state of paralysis. But this accusation comes from people who call for action, any action, at all costs. Do something, do anything, they say. Not very good advice." --Moshe Arens "Both the Arabs and Israelis have unassailable moral arguments, and anyone who does not understand how this is true cannot understand the true nature of tragedy." --Nadav Safran #12 Dec 08 Speaking for many of us: "I tend to ramble when I think I'm saying something intelligent." --Robert Hoekman, Jr. "[Software] shouldn't spend a lot of time and effort interrupting their work to tell them something has broken and there's nothing they can do about it but click OK. It's *not* OK." --Robert Hoekman, Jr. "While many people who use the Web regularly feel pretty confident with it, we all know someone---someone close---who can never quite figure out whether or not the one-click purchase they just made on amazon.com is going to ship to the new house or the old one." --Robert Hoekman, Jr. #10 Dec 08 "How about social conservatives make their argument without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one's values, but let reason inform one's public arguments." --Kathleen Parker #4 Dec 08 'If you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".' --Edsger Dijkstra 'If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.' --Edsger Dijkstra "Do the universities provide for society the intellectual leadership it needs or only the training it asks for?" --Edsger Dijkstra #20 Nov 08 "For more than 100 years this country has gradually extended rights, privileges and respect to more and more groups. To block a further extension you have to do better than cite tradition and the wounded feelings of those who already enjoy such status." --Eric Zorn #10 Nov 08 "Ranting at others because they are 'killing babies' may be emotionally satisfying, but it doesn't change people's minds." --Fr. Andrew Greeley #28 Oct 08 "The Book of Revelation reads like it was translated from Aramaic to Greek by someone who spoke neither." --Jack Collins #27 Oct 08 "If we read the Koran as a totality rather than pulling out random verses or half a line, that opens all kinds of possibilities for sexual equality." --Asma Barlas #24 Oct 08 "Chicago enjoys a myth about itself---tough, brawling, but also amiable---that's grounded in a certain amount of bad behavior. A lot of people here like the legend of corruption, if not the actual practice. Corruption makes good stories." --Mary Schmich "Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt." --Studs Terkel #2 Oct 08 "Sarah Palin is not a well-informed or particularly engaged or curious person. She has neither a creative nor nimble mind and her ideological views are based only on snappy sound bites and factoids that she's managed to memorize." --Eric Zorn "What justifies the [Boumediene] decision is the practical necessity and importance of reassuring the citizens of the United States and the world at large that the United States had not given up the role it assumed after World War II as the chief proponent of the rule of law worldwide." --Noah Feldman, "When judges make foreign policy", NYT #28 Aug 08 "Vista sucks like one of those fancy vacuum sweepers that can pick up a bowling ball." --Andrea Johnston #25 Jul 08 "I see horizons wide as a man's must I be nothing till I'm some man's wife?" --Boublil & Schönberg, "The Pirate Queen" (Grania) #14 Jul 08 Blessed are the ones who make peace Blessed are the ones who scrape by Blessed are the ones living holy lives; here's to the rest of us who try.... --The Roches, "Jesus shaves" #8 Jul 08 "Gah, if TPTB want to shut down all airline travel, it'd be way easier to just come out and say it. ALL AIRPORTS CLOSED! Better than this long drawn-out charade where we all have to hate airplanes first." --Eva Sweeney #3 Jul 08 "Houston is not so much a city but a climatic disaster masquerading as one." --Matt Frei, BBC #23 May 08 "Good ol' C++. It will happily let you shoot your foot off. It might alert you if your sight is misaligned." --Kevin Colby #30 Apr 08 "Look, I know it's embarrassing and it makes you feel kind of silly. I understand. But you should never make someone feel bad for liking you. It's a compliment. It means she thinks you're a good guy. Don't make her feel like she's wrong about that. It doesn't mean you have to like her, it doesn't mean you have to play with her, it doesn't mean she has to be your girlfriend. The only thing you're obligated to do is to say, 'Thank you.' Nothing else. Okay?" --Leigh Anne Wilson #28 Apr 08 #http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2008/04/the-aclu-vexing.html?cid=112202506#comment-6a00d83451b4ba69e200e551fad82a8833 "Two Cheers for the ACLU! I keep sending them money because they stand up for my values even in cases when I wouldn't." --Austin Mayor #15 Apr 08 "But you don't expect all television to be great do you? How would you choose what to watch, or get anything done? I submit that the mediocre taste of the American viewer is a good thing for you." --Aaron Hanford #8 Apr 08 "The web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn't ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it's almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you're safer just asking for the fruit plate." --Joel Spolsky #27 Mar 08 "The Jews got stone tablets and the Mormons arranged for an angel to bring them their holy text, but ours was hammered out through a long contentious political process, sort of like the tax code, and that's something you don't care to know more about." --Garrison Keillor #25 Feb 08 "Just insert one more comma, get an extra cup of coffee, and relax." --Eva Sweeney #15 Feb 08 "We will not fear any longer. We will not fear the international terrorists; we will thwart them. We will not fear the recognition of the manipulation of our yearning for safety; we will call that what it is: terrorism. We will not fear identifying the vulgar hypocrites in our government; we will name them. And we will *not* fear George W. Bush, nor will we fear because George W. Bush *wants* us to fear." --Keith Olbermann #2 Feb 08 "A mild-mannered neighbor most of the year, Snowblowerman---he wears many parkas---turns into a hero when the flakes fall. All he asks in return is a jaunty wave." --Eric Zorn #29 Jan 08 "you do begin to wonder who is truly the realist in this debate, and who the romantic. We live, as [Wendell] Berry has written (in an essay called 'The Total Economy'), in an era of 'sentimental economics,' since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time." --Michael Pollan #17 Jan 08 "A wise and benevolent dictator in particular can still fall at the opposite far end of that spectrum. Because in general we're not able to find such leaders amongst humanity, I favor democracy and consensus building in politics. But because we're so easily able to IMAGINE a leader who outshines the self-centered compromises afforded by democracy, I favor deference to that ideal God as a framework for religion." --Jonathan Prykop #10 Jan 08 "I've also come to simply accept that I will _never_ get an answer from tech support/sales at a cell phone company, radio shack, best buy, or a travel agency that is better or more accurate than what I could have researched myself. I will instead be lied to by someone who lacks any training in the product they support in order to decrease call handle times or increase sales. Even when you're REALLY confused and can't sort out the jargon that they publish it is still the wrong choice to call and ask these companies because they have no more information than you and they care about understanding it a whole lot less." --Zach Miller #4 Jan 08 "We are not a collection of red states, and blue states, we are the *United* States of America and in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again." --Barack Obama "By globalising, we take away from nation states their ability to enforce and to enact the polices necessary to internalise external costs, to control population, to do the things that are necessary." --Herman Daly #17 Dec 07 "I'm just amazed that US history before the Depression is covered in anything but the most cursory of fashions. The Depression and WWII were such enormous reset buttons on the lives of most Americans." --Michael Kimmitt #14 Dec 07 "I encourage us to teach history backwards & outwards. No one's doomed to repeat history just because they think Plato used to be a planet, but we're certain to repeat it if we can't remember the twenty five years before we were born or who built our town's water way." --Jonathan Prykop #7 Dec 07 "Real hypocrisy is not in the failure to practice what one preaches, for ideals that may be practiced without stumbling are hardly worth preaching in the first place. Rather, hypocrisy is the failure to forgive the particular failings of others the way you'd forgive yourself for your own particular failings, to see the good despite the bad in yourself but not in others." --Jonathan Prykop #14 Nov 07 "DST has only been around for 90 years; it's understandable that the software hasn't caught up yet." --Jim Wong #6 Nov 07 "The computer is simply a testing ground for a well-thought-out idea." --Natasha Chen #6 Nov 07 "I'll pause now so you can catch your breath after choking on the idea that the office of governor of Illinois is dignified and respectful. Three of its last seven former occupants have ended up in prison, after all, and the current governor is less popular than staph infections." --Eric Zorn #4 Nov 07 "Phelps... believes in a god of hellfire, but he doesn't actually build the hellfire himself---he's got enough faith to leave it to his god to do that. ...There's plenty of actual awfulness in the world; guys like Phelps are just poseurs, like trendy college Satanists, and responding to them as an actual threat just seems like it would do nothing but feed the delusion." --Jonathan Prykop #30 Oct 07 You are what you love and not what loves you back --Jenny Lewis #24 Oct 07 "The great need to distinguish Christianity from Buddhism or Science from Not-Science seems born of the desire to separate that which is given Authority from that which is not. The thing is, if you're giving science Authority, you're already beyond the practice of science. (Same for Buddhism and Christianity, strangely enough.)" --Jonathan Prykop #27 Sep 07 "How can I have a nine year old? I'm only 25, and have been for twelve years." --Leigh Anne Wilson #14 Sep 07 "Since we're still on our first round of batteries, we weren't sure what this meant in terms of recording time. The unit is rated to run 18 hours, but nobody who works with electronics takes these sorts of ratings as anything other than gentle fun, a brief diversion from the world of hard facts." --Shriram Krishnamurthi #29 Aug 07 On the Iowa straw poll: "It's an election with no Democrats, in one of the whitest states in the Union, where rich candidates pay you $35 for your vote. Or as the Republicans call it, 'our vision for the future'." --Jon Stewart #16 Aug 07 "The breakthrough idea that seals my allegience to Christ is that goodness may pour out abundantly even from a chalice of wickedness, and so it is in forgiving the wicked that we cultivate what good is to be found, for great good and great evil often mingle inextricably in the same vessel." --Jonathan Prykop "I can walk into a Christian church and evoke a plethora of symbols that help lead people to compassion. The vast majority of people might suck at loving their enemies and forgiving those who tresspass against them, but at least the words are there to plant the seed of the idea. Whereas I walk into a UU church, and their secular symbols focus entirely on "justice," rewarding the innocent and condemning the guilty." --Jonathan Prykop #14 Aug 07 "What makes such briefings disappointing is partly that they often run on far too long and are full of words like 'dread' and 'imbue', and either take themselves very seriously or, which is worse, don't." --Graham Nelson "The secret of success in designing the backdrop is originality: once you can imitate that, all else will follow." --Graham Nelson "Looking back at the early microcomputers is like looking at the fossils in ancient shale, before evolution took out three quarters of the species, some of them weirder than anything living today." --Graham Nelson #4 Aug 07 "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." --Edsger W. Dijkstra #31 Jul 07 #http://thisoldcrackhouse.blogspot.com/2007/07/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed.html "When asked, I describe myself as a ten of all trades." --Gary Leitzell #22 Jul 07 "I should be able to see Christ in every member of Christ's body, for Christ is in them. It is not Christ's maleness that is of significance, in the Eucharist or in anything else, but his humanity, which obviously includes his maleness, but just as obviously is not limited to or by it. Which brings us to the serious doctrine this position contradicts. For it is taught that what is not assumed (by Christ in the Incarnation) is not redeemed. And Christ assumed the whole of human nature. Otherwise how could women be saved?" --Fr. Tobias Haller #17 Jul 07 "I have a policy about honesty and ass-kicking, which is, if you ask for it, then I have to let you have it." --Taylor Mali #9 Jul 07 "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis #6 Jul 07 "Is Mother Nature the fall gal for God, or simply a comfortable alias?" --Eric Zorn #21 Jun 07 "When network administrators fail, we suffer the inconvenience of the email being down. When farming fails on a large scale---a disaster that has periodically visited humanity since agriculture's emergence 10,000 years ago---people starve. That's why farming is fundamentally different, and why it is still deserving of some form of public support." --Tom Philpott #8 Jun 07 "The way the Bible is often used by Christians in this culture is scary, mean-spirited, and unlike the Jesus they know." --Kelly Fryer #27 May 07 "I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don't feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. ... I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that's how it was for me. At any rate, it's complicated." --Jonathan Coulton #24 May 07 "Ok, is there any reason this shouldn't work?" --Matt "Well, Murphy's Law, but..." --Yvonne #23 May 07 "Bagging correctly is actually quite an art; the stuff slides off the conveyer, and suddenly it's Grocery Tetris, and you have 5 seconds to get it all in there and done before the customer finishes swiping her debit card." --emjaybee #4 May 07 "If there's an afterlife for language pedants, I think it must be something like wikipedia. I'm just not sure if it's the equivalent of heaven or hell." --Ben Gold #27 Apr 07 '"Choice" language is somewhat inadequate to the task---especially since it hides the fact that pro-choicers are not fighting for the right to *pick* (which is what choice language sounds like sometimes), but rather the right to *decide*.' --Chris Tessone #21 Apr 07 "You have to be awfully desperate to leave your home behind, risk the crushing daytime heat and the cold nights of the desert, and set out for a country that wants your cheap labor but not the economic burden of educating your children and caring for your sick." --Carol Marin #6 Apr 07 "The web is NOT the best front end for every goddamned piece of information in the world." --Sam Walker #25 Mar 07 "The main issue appears to be that Gonzalez got caught lying to Congress, and Rove appears to have blood in the water. Again. So the Democrats are using the subpoena power and the Bush administration has no idea how to react to a Congress that doesn't just go "okah" when they tell a bald-faced lie." --Mike McCool #14 Mar 07 #http://www.paulgraham.com/wisdom.html "The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence." --Paul Graham "A teacher has to walk a narrow path: you want to encourage kids to come up with things on their own, but you can't simply applaud everything they produce. You have to be a good audience: appreciative, but not too easily impressed. And that's a lot of work. You have to have a good enough grasp of kids' capacities at different ages to know when to be surprised." --Paul Graham "Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at higher speeds." --Paul Graham #12 Mar 07 I ask for nothing; I can get by. But I know so many less lucky than I. Please help my people, the poor and down-trod--- I thought we all were the children of God. --Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, "God help the outcasts" #26 Feb 07 "If we elect a bum worse than the one we threw out, we can vote for someone else four years later. Democracy's not that complicated. If we don't start behaving like we live in one, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves for the consequences." --Ben Joravsky #23 Feb 07 "It's too bad you can't roll around naked in an online bank statement." --Jonathan Prykop #21 Feb 07 "Skeptics of evolution may have the bad luck of being on the wrong side of the data, but the problem lies in the authority they choose to accept---it doesn't make them stupid or fit for scorn. In fact, they are revealing a weakness in Western science that many on the other side have a hard time seeing." --Chris Tessone #14 Feb 07 "When heart disease remains such a menacing killer, focusing so much attention on relieving its symptoms seems a little like celebrating the victory over Darth Maul when you know that Palpatine's plan is still unfolding like clockwork." --Keith Winstein "I think sometimes we focus a little too much attention on whiz-bang medical technology (like stents) while losing the broader picture that, basically, the only things we have found to save people from the #1 killer is what you learned in second-grade nutrition lessons." --Keith Winstein Seeds of democracy, Nurtured with honesty, Become our liberty When we share the load. --Dan Berggren, "From every mountain side" You and I will someday win 'Cause no one owns the wind or sun. --Dan Berggren, "Power from above" #10 Feb 07 #http://www.bustedhalo.com/features/RememberingV-DayDefendingtheVaginaMonologuespt2.htm "If the Church stopped protesting the Monologues and instead started engaging women in an honest, healthy and mature *dialogue* perhaps The Vagina Monologues would no longer be necessary. Until then, I'm afraid we women will have to remain content with a *monologue* and pray that someone is, at the very least, listening." --Sr. Mary Eve #9 Feb 07 "My biggest problem is that we are trying to shoehorn abundance into scarcity because our economics are utterly unsuited for coping with abundance. It doesn't matter if you are talking about 'movies' or 'television' or 'youtube' or 'music' or 'programs': it's all _data_. There is only negligible cost associated with making a copy of data and distributing it. And after distributing it _you still have it_." --Sam Walker "If you worked hard enough to earn your way into the womb of a woman living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it's your right to not have to suffer. Anything less would be communism, and those who say otherwise are jealous of the hard work that's gotten you to where you are now." --Greg Kaiser #5 Feb 07 "While there's obviously priority involved, I'm prety damn sure that pileups are closer to LIFO than FIFO." --Neal Groothuis #30 Jan 07 #http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html "It's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness." --Michael Pollan "If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat." --Michael Pollan "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." --Michael Pollan #29 Jan 07 "I worship a god who laid down his life so that unworthy people would not get the punishment they deserved." --Jonathan Prykop #28 Jan 07 "It's obviously outrageous that tens of millions of the citizens of *the wealthiest country to have ever existed in human history* are one cluster of metastasizing cells away from bankruptcy." --Ted Rall #25 Jan 07 "What a strange attitude that actually is, when we no longer find Christian service worthwhile if the denarius of salvation may be obtained even without it! It seems as if we want to be rewarded, not just with our own salvation, but most especially with other people's damnation---just like the workers hired in the first hour. That is very human, but the Lord's parable is particularly meant to make us quite aware of how profoundly un-Christian it is at the same time." --Joseph Ratzinger, 1964 #24 Jan 07 "I think Solomon would agree that the only fair solution here would be to cut Joe Lieberman in half lengthwise." --Mike McCool #19 Jan 07 "I see NCLB much like the initiatives that created the high-density housing projects of the War on Poverty era. Both are programs that were created with good intentions, but are simply, irretrievably *broken* and end up doing much much more harm than the original creators would ever have thought and go on for much longer than should ever have been allowed." --Tori O'Neal #16 Jan 07 "Only if human life from conception until death is respected is the ethic of peace possible and credible; only then may non-violence be expressed in every direction, only then can we truly accept creation, and only then can we achieve true justice." --Pope Benedict XVI #8 Jan 07 "The '60s counter-culture revolution was deeply, deeply galvanizing for many people. Not so much for the hippies themselves, mind you---the Boomers transitioned fairly seamlessly into toothless feel-good bromides, middle management, and unrepentant consumerism. No, the real legacy of the 60s/early 70s was to freak out *conservatives* on a primal, lizard-brain level." --David Roberts #4 Jan 07 "I exist simultaneously in every internet conversation across all spacetime. I've been participating for years in debates that haven't even started yet." --Jonathan Prykop #3 Jan 07 "I feel kind of bad that I probably tripped up her innate sense that some kind of spin control needed to be done on this issue. I wish I knew the secret 'don't worry you don't have to schmooze me' handshake." --Zach Miller #1 Dec 06 "There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses." --Bjarne Stroustrup "People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first." --Bjarne Stroustrup #16 Nov 06 "If you're a sinful homosexual, being attracted to someone of your own sex could lead to a great relationship. If you're a disordered homosexual, it could lead to a divorce." --Ross M. Levine #11 Nov 06 "The inheritance we've received in our beliefs is like a priceless work of art that draws the masses wherever it appears. But if you throw it at someone or handle it improperly, it breaks." --Rocco Palmo #10 Nov 06 "When I pray to Him, I find I'm talking to Myself." --Peter Barnes, _The ruling class_ (Jack) "Last time I preached the Word, in Galilee, I spoke in parables. MIS-take!" --Peter Barnes, _The ruling class_ (Jack) "You see 10 million billion miracles a day, and you want conjuring tricks." --Peter Barnes, _The ruling class_ (Jack) "Not here---last time I was kissed in a garden, it turned out rather awkward." --Peter Barnes, _The ruling class_ (Jack) #7 Nov 06 "Dick Cheney: A man who can say, 'I'm not currently saying this', and mean it." --Betty Bowers #31 Oct 06 "I've discovered new depths of personal fatigue and sleep deprivation in this first week of parenthood. I suspect the baby is controlling me with pheromone conditioning, because when I see him through my exhausted haze, I find myself wishing to do his bidding." --Scott Harris #28 Oct 06 "Why have I let myself be tempting into cutting another head off of the science-journalism hydra? This is the occupational disease of blogging, I guess." --Mark Liberman #12 Oct 06 Where is WMD? What a kick if he has none Sorry about that --Col. Steve Rotkoff #29 Sep 06 "Sex is good too, but you can't do that in the car on the way to Peoria." --Natania Rosenfeld #23 Sep 06 "Are we Christians going to be held to the same standard? Are we going to start hitting Google News every morning to make sure we apologize on our blogs or in letters to the editor for every atrocity committed in the name of Jesus Christ? Because that is what we in the West are demanding of Muslims---apologies for every single thing done in the name of Allah that we find wrong." --Chris Tessone #19 Sep 06 "All the 'tipping point' theories in the world won't protect Sprint from the basic truth that the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do." --Joel Spolsky #12 Sep 06 "The best part about YouTube is that it gives me still more childhood to relive, after I've run out of childhood that's already been sold back to me." --Matt Stanislawski #11 Sep 06 On 9/11: "We looked inward rather than outward, and sadly, did exactly what our president asked us to do. Kept shopping. Not conserving. And certainly not sacrificing. Most of us, myself included, have given up nothing except, of course, a few treasured constitutional freedoms." --Carol Marin #8 Sep 06 "The world of programming is very just and very strictly ordered and a heck of a lot of people go into programming in the first place because they prefer to spend their time in a just, orderly place, a strict meritocracy where you can win any debate simply by being right." --Joel Spolsky #7 Sep 06 On modern America: "We have inherited something spectacular. We take it for granted, and that is a _mistake_." --Joan Lefkow "Giuliani v. Clinton would be like a wood chipper versus baby chicks. Why does our party do such a foul, foul job of picking candidates?" --Matt Zanon #30 Aug 06 "Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don't require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks)." --Seth Stevenson #28 Aug 06 "My stepbrother's wife is from Hawai'i, and when they got married, they were living out there and had the wedding there. They didn't have a honeymoon afterwards, but I have to wonder where Hawaiian couples go for their honeymoon---Nebraska?" --Brian Sebby "Memo to the City of Chicago: Crossing the street should not require *tide charts*." --Shalom Owen 'Can't offer details on individual units, but Kim, TiVo was made for you. Somewhere deep in TiVo central, someone's saying, "I can't believe she hasn't gotten one yet. I mean, we made it just for her."' --Jonathan Prykop "Are people who teach function-oriented languages in CS1 crazy? On the contrary, there is a method to their madness, and we would like to incorporate some of their madness into our methods!" --Franklyn Turbak et al, "Teaching recursion before loops in CS1" #22 Aug 06 "Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." --Grigoriy Perelman #21 Aug 06 "I'm not a country club golfer. I'm a municipal course golfer who is both unfamiliar and uneasy with the conventions of country-club golf in which the pampering is so obsequious and excessive that an unfamiliar observer could fairly conclude that all golfers are physically disabled and mentally challenged." --Eric Zorn "The fall contest between Stroger and Cook County Commissioner Anthony Peraica shapes up to be as snippy as the governor's race. It will go something like this: Stroger: My name is Stroger. Peraica: His name is Stroger." --Carol Marin #20 Aug 06 "Puritans came frequently to Vagabond-camps bearing the information that at the time of the creation of the Universe---thousands of years ago!---certain of those present had been predestined by God to experience salvation. The rest of them were doomed to spend eternity burning in hellfire. This intelligence was called, by the Puritans, the Good News." --Neal Stephenson, _Quicksilver_ "Why did Daniel refuse to hate Roger? Not out of blindness to Roger's faults, for he saw Roger's moral cowardice as clearly as Hooke peering through a lens at a newt. Not out of Christian forgiveness, either. He refused to hate Roger because Roger saw moral cowardice in Daniel, had done so for years, and yet did not hate Daniel. Fair's fair." --Neal Stephenson, _Quicksilver_ #9 Aug 06 "Folks, the President needs a break. He's like a Black-and-Decker cordless Dirt Devil vacuum. If you don't recharge his batteries, *he can't suck*!" --Stephen Colbert #4 Aug 06 "And I wonder if that includes Jesus of Nazareth, who, as Gibson may have discovered during his extensive research for his movie, was Jewish. Maybe the fact that Jesus' mother had a nice Catholic name was confusing." --Fr Jim Martin, SJ #24 Jul 06 "Baseball caps are inelegant. They are boyish. They are a symbol of the American determination to make every occasion, however special, into a subset of "casual Friday." They are sporty in the obnoxious extreme. They are everything that has gone wrong in American style since mid-century." --PeaceBang #23 Jul 06 "I buy Cosmo occasionally. I get a kick out of finding out what men are really thinking." --Neal Groothuis #21 Jul 06 "I wish I could just go to Lowe's or Home Depot and explain this and have them load my cart, but my experience there has been about 10% amazingly helpful people and 90% "It's over there *vague hand wave*" when I ask for assistance. I wish the 10% wore different hats or something." --Tori O'Neal #18 Jul 06 'Ultimately it comes down to a set of axioms about what is needed for a "just peace." The darker side of Islam says that we need to stone suspected adulteresses, execute converts to other religions and forcibly convert the rest of the world. The darker side of secularism says that we need to purge the culture of all religions that make people worship a God or gods other than the state.' --Mark Hoemmen #17 Jul 06 "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it." --P. J. O'Rourke #15 Jul 06 "Without knowing the IDF strategy it really looks like Israel is ripping the heads of Lebanon's Barbies because Lebanon's cousin took Israel's Tonka truck." --Joe Shidle #7 Jul 06 "Please stop seeing everything I do or say as part of some bid for (higher office in) 2008. What I said needed to be said and it wasn't part of any plan or any campaign. It was part of what I'm supposed to do as a senator." --Barack Obama #6 Jul 06 "So, Middle Eastern men, gang bangers, etc., listen up!Ê It has been scientifically shown that firing guns into the air for entertainment is not a good idea. Please stop right away. Also knock off with the holy wars and random violence. Thank you." --Cecil Adams #27 June 06 "Something's been sticking in my craw. No surprise there; I was born with an unusually narrow craw." --Stephen Colbert #22 June 06 "Many of the adjectives that come immediately to mind begin with the letters 'sl.'" --Eric Zorn #15 June 06 "I do enjoy myself a good crap out-beating." --Paul Hebble #8 June 06 "I had a slightly insane discussion the other day with a winger who wanted urgently for me to understand that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war. Whereas I was trying to point out to him that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war." --Molly Ivins 'I love it when people say something is an "acquired taste." What this means is, "If you don't like it, the problem is YOU. You just need to eat it more, in the hope that you become BETTER."' --Jeff Vogel "How You Can Tell That Being a Parent Is a Pain, Despite All Societal Propaganda Telling You Otherwise: Every new parent is repeatedly warned not to shake the baby too hard. I think that the need to spell this out explicitly kind of gives the game away." --Jeff Vogel "But it doesn't matter if we named her Cordelia, or Jennifer, or Peggy Sue, or Hildegarde. It won't make a difference if we dress her in overalls or pink, frilly dresses or if we send her to school with Barbies hanging from around her neck like talismans. You can't disguise having a brain. Or perhaps you can, but it means giving it up, which is even worse." --Jeff Vogel "This phrase is usually used about second weddings, but the miracle of Catholicism is that it represents the triumph of hope over experience." --Rocco Palmo #6 June 06 "It's like Jesus ascended into heaven, and it was all downhill from there." --Jonathan Prykop 'Somewhere in the quiet, leafy recesses of the Bush family, somebody is thinking, "Wrong son. Should've tried the smart one."' --Garrison Keillor "I disagree: I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition, or just a random fetish." --Jon Stewart #http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/june/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060605_convegno-diocesano_it.html "The adolescents and the young... must be liberated from the widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its commandments and its prohibitions, places too many obstacles to the joy of love." --Pope Benedict XVI "The Ten Commandments are not a series of 'No', but a big 'Yes' to love and to life." --Pope Benedict XVI #31 May 06 "[Blagojevich] acts like an ordinary, impulsive person: He wants what he wants, he wants it now, and he doesn't let worries about the future or the Constitution trouble him too deeply." --Eric Zorn #23 May 06 "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." --Jaroslav Pelikan #22 May 06 #http://catholicsensibility.blogspot.com/2006/05/chuckles-in-my-rage-rock-takes-poke-at.html "Maybe it's time for real artists with the English language to replace a few Latin I students on ICEL." --Todd #19 May 06 On potential two-person activities: "What did you have in mind, a short, blunt, human pyramid?" --Tom Stoppard, _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead_ #17 May 06 "Put people in direct control of the stuff around them and they will, more or less, on average, be happier. It explains why some people like stick shifts, it explains why lethargic user interfaces make you frustrated and depressed, and it explains why people get so goddamn mad when Sony decides to install viruses on their computers just because they tried to listen to a CD." --Joel Spolsky #13 May 06 "Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism---it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do." --Br. Guy Consolmagno, Vatican astronomer #12 May 06 "To use *anything* as an idol is to see in it the sum or measure of the Source, to forget what precedes what, and to follow the creation rather than That Which Creates." --Jonathan Prykop #10 May 06 "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men." --Abraham Lincoln #5 May 06 "Two facts: He loved us. And we killed Him." --Nicholas Patricca, _The fifth sun_ (Anne) "I do not agree with them---but I do not judge them." --Nicholas Patricca, _The fifth sun_ (Rutilio) "God is a good marxist, Monseñor. He takes from each according to his ability, and gives to each according to his need." --Nicholas Patricca, _The fifth sun_ (Hector) #3 May 06 "Any organization based around a common ideology will act like a church when given political power." --Jonathan Prykop #1 May 06 "The one thing we can say about George W. Bush is we will be forever in his debt...." --Rahm Emanuel #28 Apr 06 "Above all else, I am a human being, just as you are." --Ingmar Bergman, "Nora" (Nora Helmer) #18 Apr 06 "Giving 51% of the people 100% of the power is immoral. It's rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic to debate whether the 51% should be chosen randomly or by careful scheming." --Paul Hebble #11 Apr 06 "Don would know how much more true that is than I do!" --Lee Kinkade #10 Apr 06 #http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002926.html Geoff's Question: For heaven's sake, if people have absolutely no idea how to use technical terminology of grammar, why do they try...? #5 Apr 06 "A Catholic university is where the Church does its thinking, and that thinking, to be beneficial, must come from an intellectually rigorous engagement with the world." --Fr John Jenkins, CSC #27 Mar 06 'The question isn't whether God exists like a brick exists, but rather "what part of our experience does the symbol 'God' reveal and what parts does it obscure?"' --Jim Rigby #24 Mar 06 "Large religions are not merely difficult to usefully generalize about because they're large; they're large because they're difficult to usefully generalize about." --Jonathan Prykop #20 Mar 06 "An interesting thing...if you remove Garfield's thought balloons, it goes from an unfunny comic to a rather sad, poignant story about a lonely man who has wasted his life talking to his cat." --Lakin Malich #19 Mar 06 #http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.fandom/msg/a8ebe365e0c283b4 "For all I know, someone put it together as a joke and sent copies around. It almost doesn't matter: the example is so perfect that mere existence could not possibly add anything to it." --Vicki Rosenzweig "That there is still a craving for occasional formality is evident on the two such occasions left for it---the prom and the wedding. It would be nice if the older generation could show them what it really is. A hint: It is not riding around town in an impossibly long and expensive car, throwing up." --Miss Manners #18 Mar 06 "Worcestershire sauce CURDLES MILK. I had not known that before, but I will not forget. And now you know too. Do not forget!" --Eva Sweeney #15 Mar 06 "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." --Jamie Raskin #9 Mar 06 # http://www.schadenfreude.net/justin/ # -TMP or -LGS? "I'm "that" guy at an Oscar party.... I make fun of dresses and awkward (stuff) like the rest, but it quickly deteriorates into rants about the ignorance of our society and how lame it is that we are watching this crap. I usually am banished to the kitchen by the costume designs." --Justin Kaufmann #7 Mar 06 "For now, suffice it to say that making the users of your design unhappy is not likely to be precisely the result you were looking for, unless you're designing a French film." --Joel Spolsky #20 Feb 06 "The nice thing about it being 12 degrees out is that having a space heater pointed at my bare feet is the most luxurious opulent sensually enjoyable thing I can imagine experiencing while I work on a boring porn site for money AND I AM DOING IT RIGHT NOW." --Zach Miller #17 Feb 06 "If we're going to do the Star Wars analogy, the Democrats are, at best, Ewoks." --Jon Stewart For I must tell you friendly in your ear, Sell when you can: you are not for all markets! --Shakespeare, _As you like it_ (Rosalind) "Didst thou hear these verses?" "O, yes, I heard them all, and more too; for some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear." "That's no matter: the feet might bear the verses." "Ay, but the feet were lame and could not bear themselves *without* the verse and therefore stood lamely *in* the verse." --Shakespeare, _As you like it_ #12 Feb 06 "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted, but getting what you have, which, once you have got it, you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." --Garrison Keillor #9 Feb 06 "How dare the government make a moral judgement over you? You're supposed to be doing that over the woman!" --Jason Jones, _The Daily Show_ #4 Feb 06 "Suppose you could insure everybody in the US today, right now---now and forever---but in exchange there would never be any more improvement in medical care at all.... Would you do it? ... For many people that is the crux of the matter. What I think is we're actually rich enough to do both. So stop your whining and raise taxes." --David Cutler "The criticism sticks to every developed nation. Our wealth does not belong to us, and we have not acquired it through superior virtue or greater faith. We have our 10,000 talents because the king sets all of us free from our debt. Let's not demand from the developing world its 100 denarii. It isn't the Christian thing to do." --Chris Tessone #2 Feb 06 "I'm a single woman with three cats---if she hangs out here much longer I'll get attached to her and keep her and will someday end up shuffling around with thirty-odd cats in a filthy, decrepit Victorian house, frightening the neighborhood children and likely being eaten when I expire. I'd like to prevent this." --Jill Moniz #1 Feb 06 "Unrelated anecdote: I was just washing my dishes and noticed with surprise that both my pots and my kettles are all silver. I wonder what they call each other and what they mean by it." --Zach Miller #27 Jan 06 "Everybody knows Carville's not playing with a full deck; I know where the missing cards are." --Paul Begala "Help control the local pet population: teach your dog abstinence." --Stephen Colbert #26 Jan 06 "If it is abortion that is actually being fought, criminalizing it is not the most effective answer. This should not surprise Christians---we are called to a much less adversarial and judgemental relationship with the people around us, and we should be even more eager to use this approach when the question involves young women who are routinely marginalized by our society." --Chris Tessone #24 Jan 06 "As for this being the stupidest column I've ever written---ha! not even close! I've written lots of stupider ones. You just need to read more." --Eric Zorn #20 Jan 06 "Miss Manners recommends dropping whatever else you are doing to go hunt for salad knives. It will not be easy, but the small knife, also sometimes called a tea knife or a youth knife, is the only correct one to use. You need them, because you are at an impasse. You are right that meat knives should never be used on salad, but your partner is right that one has to defend oneself against inconsiderate and lazy salad-makers." --Miss Manners #9 Jan 06 "It is horrifying to have to fight our government to save the environment." --Ansel Adams #6 Jan 2006 "I have found this to be true in 90%+ of all applications I've used: command line IS faster, more robust, more flexible, less resource intensive and less conducive to error and physical [health] problems such as RSI, than GUI. It's just not as 'pleasant'." --Hans Forbrich #4 Jan 2006 "I believe it would be much healthier for society, for the poverty situation, and for the effectiveness of social welfare programs if instead of all poor people having a shitty job and a miserable life, half of those poor people had decent jobs and the other half were on the dole." --Zach Miller "For those who read the Lewis books as a Christian parable, Aslan fills the role of Christ because he is resurrected from the dead. I don't know if that makes the White Witch into Satan, but Tilda Swinton plays the role as if she has not ruled out the possibility." --Roger Ebert #7 Dec 2005 On R6RS: "I'm glad Wikipedia knows when it will be done! If they could do us the favor of actually authoring it, too, that could save a lot of people a lot of trouble." --Shriram Krishnamurthi #22 Nov 2005 On Wikipediasurfing: "It always starts out with some modern presidential factoid. It seldom ends less than 90 minutes later, more recently than the 18th century, or farther up the line of succession than Secretary of the Treasury." --Matt Stanislawski #20 Nov 2005 "I still feel at home in churches brimming with demons; they're just fixer-uppers, is all. Like a junk room that's starting to attract rats, one of the worst things you can do is to continue not going in there." --Jonathan Prykop "It takes serious mojo to perform a sacrament." --Jonathan Prykop #9 Nov 2005 "Another possible economic factor in explaining the roles of Utica and Rochester in the religious revival is that Finney arrived in both places at a time when the boom brought on by building a section of the canal had declined, and the townspeople had reverted to more thought upon their religious condition and to concern about "sin," a commodity that moved with considerable facility along the canal." --Hermann Muelder, _Fighters for Freedom_ #5 Nov 2005 "That's why it's called *pseudocode*, jackass." --overheard at a programming competition #24 Oct 2005 "Monks are not used to being compared to camels in heat, but they took it pretty well. I noticed eyebrows going up around the choir, and then a kind of quiet assent: 'well, there are days.'" --Kathleen Norris #18 Oct 2005 "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James Nicoll "Of course they're not the same. *Homosexuality* has no cure. *Pedophilia* can be fixed with a transfer to another diocese!" --Lewis Black #12 Oct 2005 On Jon Stewart: "Those of us in television who dwell in the "actual news" realm are merely his content providers." --Brian Williams, MSNBC news anchor #11 Oct 2005 "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work" --Thomas Edison #26 Sep 2005 'Sudoku comes from a Japanese word meaning "You won't believe the amount of time I have to kill."' --Howard Leff #23 Sep 2005 "Why do you think the world is more stupid than you?" --Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, to Richard Nixon "The biggest threat is terror? Yes, I agree. But we have terror of many things. We have terror of being ill---especially if you have no medical insurance...." --Yevgeniy Yevtushenko "Hold this fragile world in your hands. Don't drop it." --Yevgeniy Yevtushenko #20 Sep 2005 "Republicans are as capable of great ideas and moving the country forward as anybody else. They just don't *do* it." --Alan Alda #14 Sep 2005 On Katrina's aftermath: "It feels like we're living in a Dickens novel: brutal, overblown, superficial, poorly written, and surrounded by misery." --Sam Walker #21 Aug 2005 "At least Cindy Sheehan now has her answer. It turns out her son Casey and 1,850 other U.S. servicemen and women just like him died so that Iraq could have a budding Islamic theocracy that, when it's not busy teetering on the brink of civil war, cannot come to a consensus---even when faced with a hard-and-fast deadline---on whether women should have equal rights under the law." --Jim Leach #8 Aug 2005 "Here's all you need to know about the American Tobacco Trail: it starts at slaves and ends at cancer." --Jon Stewart #3 Aug 2005 "Can't someone take some *human* credit for a job well done?" --Jon Stewart #2 Aug 2005 You, O Lord, will keep us and preserve us always from this generation, While about us the wicked strut and in high place are the basest of men. --Ps 12:8-9 "I soon felt the astonishment that often comes to me during worship... it is the wonder that I should be there at all. My faith was non-existent, or at least deeply submerged, for so long a time, but liturgy pulled me back." --Kathleen Norris "I began to despise mathematics when I sensed that I was getting only part of the story, a dull, literal-minded version of what in fact was a great mystery, and I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them." --Kathleen Norris "When artists discover as children that they have inappropriate responses to events around them, they also find, as they learn to trust those responses, that these oddities are what constitute their value to others." --Kathleen Norris "'Language is the only homeland,' says the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and here on the range, where there are many more antelope than people, if a discouraging word is ever heard, at least it isn't 'deconstructionism.'" --Kathleen Norris #31 Jul 2005 "I sometimes get in trouble when I refer to the Incarnation as the ultimate metaphor, daring to yoke the human and the divine. To a literalist, I have just said that the Incarnation isn't 'real'. As a poet, I think I've said that it is reality at its most alive; it *is* the new creation." --Kathleen Norris "I'm not saying that the Canadian system is perfect, or even awesome. I am saying that we pay twice as much per capita as they do already, so we could probably have a system that has the Canadian virtue of universal coverage and the US virtue of enough money thrown at the problem to produce, Voltron-like, a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts." --Michael Kimmitt #26 Jul 2005 "That we all begin inside a woman and must emerge from her body is something that the male theologians of the world's religions have yet to forgive us for." --Kathleen Norris, _Cloister Walk_ #25 Jul 2005 "If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost. For example if they tried to sell a tube sock that can withstand the unusual rigors of, say, being washed in a washing machine, they'd have to use all kinds of expensive components, like, say, cotton, and the cost for every single sock would go up." --Joel Spolsky #23 Jul 2005 "On the upside, sex toys are the kind of plastic that is more fun than the kind of plastic that you put old food in. Think about it: Tupperware's big selling point is that it "burps." The big selling point of sex toys is that they provide mind-blowing orgasms." --Leigh Anne Wilson #22 Jul 2005 "It's nice to see someone at least as concerned about people who have successfully escaped the uterus as they are about a group of cells who are simply laying around doing nothing at the Petri Dish Hilton." --Jim Leach #12 July 2005 "My favorite letter on this point suggested that I'd like it better 'if they changed the name from Tour de France to Tour of Freedom.' A fine line, but I've got nothing against the French, honest. I love their fries, twists, postcards and kisses." --Eric Zorn #21 Jun 2005 "There is nothing pleasurable about being a Cassandra." --Molly Ivins "For all the dozens of sermons and homilies I've heard denouncing abortion, I have never once, in almost a quarter-century of regular church-going, heard a sermon denouncing those who throw their pregnant daughters out of the house." --Chris Tessone #14 Jun 2005 "There's only one person who cannot walk away from your problems." --Vernor Vinge #12 Jun 2005 "A simple antiphon sung or heard quietly and repeatedly is easier to learn, remember, and even apply to daily life, than a three-verse strophic hymn. Advertising agencies apply this lesson well. Parish music ministries ought to consider it---is not the "product" we "advertise" much more valuable than, say, cat food?" --Aristotle Esguirre #9 Jun 2005 "The enemy of a critical theology is not natural literalism but conscious literalism with repression of and aggression toward autonomous thought." --Paul Tillich, _Dynamics of Faith_ "Faith, if it takes its symbols literally, becomes idolatrous!" --Paul Tillich, _Dynamics of Faith_ "The radical criticism of the myth is due to the fact that the primitive mythological consciousness resists the attempt to interpret the myth of myth. It is afraid of every act of demythologization. It believes that the broken myth is deprived of its truth and of its convincing power." --Paul Tillich, _Dynamics of Faith_ "If [civil authorities] try to enforce spiritual conformity, and are successful, they have removed the risks and courage which belong to the act of faith." --Paul Tillich, _Dynamics of Faith_ #6 Jun 2005 "Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself." --Barack Obama "In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it: Social Darwinism, every man or woman for him or herself. It's a tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity.... And it's especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life's lottery." --Barack Obama #2 Jun 2005 "Our present prisons ... find or make men guilty, ... enclose wretches for the commission of one crime, and return them, if returned alive, fitted for the perpetration of thousands...." --Oliver Goldsmith, "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766) "Dogma is useful for pulling oneself up by one's moral and religious bootstraps, but simplistic moral claims are not effective in choosing between several far-from-perfect alternatives." --Chris Tessone "If Christianity is to remain relevant in the United States, it has to emphasize a doctrine that has historically been important to the faith but has been much maligned in this past century: the efficacy of the conscience apart from the institutional church." --Chris Tessone What could we say? We're only twenty five years old, with 25 sweet summers, and hot fires in the cold. This kind of life makes that violence unthinkable; we'd like to play hockey, have kids, and grow old.... --Moxy Früvous, "Gulf War Song" #18 May 05 "I know you're usually more prone to reading things like the History of the Romanian Basketweavers Revolution and shit like that, but Potter's on par with LOTR and much less longwinded. It's kind of a "Chronicles of Narnia" for pagans. It's a must-read, if you want to keep up with the state of the mythological arts." --Jonathan Prykop "The fact that Cuba is poor may have something to do with the US blockade and with the state-controlled economy; the fact that everyone appears to eat all right and to have clothes and full, free medical care, however, does have to do with the social and economic priorities of the Cuban government." --Anis Memon #11 May 05 "Woe unto those who reject love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness because of what was written in a long-passed time, place and language. We know they do not know the Living God because they must submit themselves to a dead thing and give it the name of Jesus Christ." --Jonathan Prykop "For two millennia, despite the primary message of the Spirit being one of salvation, the Dark Lord's PR teams have been busy spinning it into a message of human degradation, making us feel dirty and unworthy of what Christ freely gave, until the very name of Christ has become synonymous with a view of humans as fundamentally fallen rather than fundamentally redeemed." --Jonathan Prykop #10 May 05 "It strikes me that Bauer's guess was pretty lucky--I have two axes in my garage but have yet to inscribe either with the word "axe." But hey, when the high priest tells me, "Inscribe the word 'axe' on this axe, chop-chop," I'm not about to wait around for him to axe me politely." --bibliophage #7 May 05 "I'm sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, *resistance was obviously useless against a family that could invent italics*." --Lynne Truss, _Eats, Shoots & Leaves_ #3 May 05 "Next year, we're hoping that the Headline Club defines the category differently, narrowly and in a way that plays better to our strengths--- perhaps asking the judges to 'look for offhand observations, snark and the coolest links to places on the Web where you can fritter away the precious hours of the one and only life you will ever have.'" --Eric Zorn #2 May 05 "As for developers who are still using QuickDraw, well, they've had four years. They probably have another two at least before QuickDraw disappears completely, but honestly, at some point it's time to blit or get off the pot." --John Siracusa #29 Apr 05 "I think the understanding of the word 'belief' that puts it in tension with reason is born of luddites and politicians attempting to thump their Bibles to support an unreasonable agenda on the one hand, and three centuries of academically authoritative atheist reactionaries willing to neglect all religion on the other. Neither are contributing much to the improvement of religious practice in this world." --Jonathan Prykop #27 Apr 05 "We should not only happily sign over what we owe the IRS, knowing our money goes to even greater good than the coins Jesus exhorted those around him to turn over, but we should look for ways to be even more charitable to those around us. If everything---including our wealth---is a gift from God, we have no right to begrudge any portion of it to the disadvantaged. We didn't earn it through superior virtue." --Chris Tessone #23 Apr 05 #quoted at the KCPJC rally "Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war." --Donald Rumsfeld #19 Apr 05 "If *quidquid Latine [dicitur], altum videtur* 'whatever is said in Latin seems profound', then surely perhaps *Graece altius* 'deeper in Greek'." --Angelo Mercado #14 Apr 05 "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." --John Kenneth Galbraith "Whatever visceral appeal the "Life Begins When Sperm and Egg Walk Into a Bar" position may hold, it remains factually inaccurate; only a fringe of the medical community accepts the notion that emergency contraception is an abortifacient." --Dahlia Lithwick "If you walk/swim far enough, everything is west of St. Louis. Including, amazingly enough, St. Louis." --David Singleton "In our modern, first world country, there is no reason why we as a society can't afford to support old people retiring after a certain age. They've paid their dues, we've seen to that in the "credits" requirement. Living your last few years in restful peace and quiet, with a $700 check every month as a "Thank you" for having been a productive member of society all your life, should damn well just be a benefit of living in America, God's greatest gift to this brave new millennium." --Eva Sweeney #13 Apr 05 "it would do [Bush] no harm if he had to listen at regular intervals over a cup of tea to a gentle, firm, sensible lecture about social responsibility from somebody like the queen, who, for all her faults, is very conscious that the poor and the humble are as much her subjects as is the Duke of Devonshire." --Michael Korda, "Family Drama", USN&WR #9 Apr 05 "We attempted to make a legit run at (Barack) Obama with someone with the capacity and skills to make that legit run. Because that person chose not to run a campaign but rather a statewide Pentecostal revival, I regret it as much as anyone...." --Dan Proft, campaign manager #7 Apr 05 "If we have to pay off one welfare queen every month to make sure that five people are comfortable enough to pursue their interests and dreams rather than schlepp for Wal-Mart, I think we'll still come out ahead." --Jonathan Prykop #2 Apr 05 "I am happy, and you should be as well. Let us pray together with joy." --Pope John Paul II, on his deathbed #31 Mar 05 "Terrorists think they can attack us with conventional weapons? Listen up, Osama: I don't care how long you plan, I don't care how far you go, there's no way you can kill more Americans with your guns than we already do with our own." --Lewis Black #29 Mar 05 "We're spending resources pat-searching teenagers, ferociously guarding our sacred cracked gong and checking every last Timex on the Circle Line. We're rubbing the rabbit's foot of the magnetometer, hoping that playing at security will keep us safe." --Eric Zorn #24 Mar 05 "It's like the pull-out-and-pray method of birth control--really, it's one of the most sinful methods of birth control because it sucks at preventing unwanted babies, and the point of Catholic dogma is that life should be desired, not that our methods of preventing life must be shoddy." --Jonathan Prykop "I've always been rather pro-life, but where in God's Word does that mean arresting and detaining people who perform or seek out abortions? For me, the "culture of life" means cultivating a world in which life is wanted, not forcing life upon the world whether it wants it or not." --Jonathan Prykop #22 Mar 05 "It really sounds like you're trying to put a nail in a wall using only a cheese danish and a variety of expletives." --Neal Groothuis "In Schiavo's case, God must wait in the wings until the courts and Congress are through playing Him...." --Burt Constable #10 Mar 05 "Well, it's a type A planet, so it should at least have Roddenberries." --Leela, _Futurama_ #8 Mar 05 "Sometimes I wish software was corporeal so I could wring its throat good and proper." --Brian Porter #23 Feb 05 #On the Daily Show "I believe that there are UFOs; I just don't know who's driving them." --Peter Jennings #22 Feb 05 "We believe that labels are important, but mostly for bottles of wine." --Christo and Jeanne-Claude "I'm convinced artichokes are actually an extremely sessile animal; perhaps an extraterrestrial species. They're Meat Plants." --Sam Walker "I've never been to Sicily, but I cannot imagine how desolate and bleak the landscape must be for those poor starving people to look at an artichoke and say, hey, beats starving to death." --Joe Shidle "The Charter was enshrined to ensure that the rights of minorities are not subjected, are never subjected, to the will of the majority. The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority." --Canadian PM Paul Martin #16 Feb 05 "Life is so short." "Well, that's no reason to---" "Oh, but it is!" --Arthur Schnitzler, _Reigen_ #14 Feb 05 "Dean's job as DNC chair is now to reattach the ass handed to them by the Republicans in the last election." --Jon Stewart #24 Jan 05 On the Bush inauguration speech: "'Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies,' he said, apparently without understanding how he has achieved that precise objective." --Joe Conason #22 Jan 05 "If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration." --Paul Graham #19 Jan 05 "This is what happens when you don't let gays marry... they start designing out of spite." --Jon Stewart #18 Jan 05 "Faith without works is nothing! And works without faith... is still pretty good." --Jon Stewart #http://www.drmartinlutherkingjr.com/thepurposeofeducation.htm "It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life. Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate." --Martin Luther King, Jr. #6 Jan 05 "Maureen Dowd once referred to Bill Clinton's sexual escapades in the White House as "maladroit du seigneur," which infuriates me because I didn't think of it." --Eric Zorn #4 Jan 05 "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" --often attributed to Benjamin Franklin "You know sir, you're not as dumb as I am for starting this sentence." --Doonesbury #3 Jan 05 "Schweitzer's display of independence worked, and red Montana, like red Wyoming, red Arizona and red Kansas, installed a blue leader, thus turning his state purple---a color the Eastern analysts seem blind to, but which Westerners recognize as the color of sagebrush and, as the song says, of mountain majesties (whatever those are)." --Walter Kirn #2 Jan 05 "If I could get an A in a class where the tests required me to learn all about potlatch blankets, I could handle anything, no matter how boring. The next time I accidentally get stuck in Lincoln Center sitting through all 18 hours of Wagner's Ring Cycle, I could thank my studies of the Kwakiutl for making it seem pleasant by comparison." --Joel Spolsky "After that things start to deteriorate: you get into Macroeconomics (feel free to skip this if you want) with its interesting theories about things like the relationship of interest rates to unemployment which, er, seem to be disproven more often than they are proven, and after that it just gets worse and worse and a lot of econ majors switch out to Physics, which gets them better Wall Street jobs, anyway." --Joel Spolsky "Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can't do anything about that." --Joel Spolsky #27 Dec 04 "When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough---often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write." --Paul Graham "It's hard to say exactly what constitutes research in the computer world, but as a first approximation, it's software that doesn't have users." --Paul Graham #26 Dec 04 "There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. It's hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. Maybe it's not a coincidence." --Paul Graham "Why doesn't Sony dominate MP3 players? Because Apple is in the consumer electronics business now, and unlike other American companies, they're obsessed with good design. Or more precisely, their CEO is." --Paul Graham "Here's to the Texas Legislature, about to convene once more, depriving many a village of its idiot." --Molly Ivins #21 Dec 04 "Even the kindest of souls occasionally harbor unkind thoughts, but if they can plausibly deny them, no harm is done." --Miss Manners #20 Dec 04 On IP law: "Well, there's a lot of bathwater there, so it's hardly surprising that some people are having trouble spotting the baby." --Michael Kimmitt #19 Dec 04 "Lack of confusion isn't one of the services offered by the CNS." --Kevin Price #16 Dec 04 "Now there is a VITAL need for parents to Raise Their Fucking Kids. GTA should NOT be used by kids unsupervised. Parents whose kids want to play GTA because all their friends do should have a talk with their kids about violence." --Zach Miller "There's a real strong tendency to assume that experiments done on large populations of people should work out just like experiments done with chemicals in a high school lab, but everyone that has ever tried to do experiments on people knows that you get wildly variable results that just aren't repeatable and the only way you can be confident in your results is to carefully avoid ever doing the same experiment twice." --Joel Spolsky "The answer is really complicated. I'm going to start with a little economic theory, then I'm going to tear the theory to bits, and when I'm finished, you'll know a lot more about pricing and you still won't know how much to charge for your software, but that's just the nature of pricing." --Joel Spolsky #15 Dec 04 "There are no stupid ideas. Well, there are; I don't know why people say that. But give it a whirl!" --Leo, _West Wing_ #5 Dec 04 "A God who can harness the laws of randomness and chaos, and create beauty and wonder and all of these marvelous structures, is a lot more creative than fundamentalists give him credit for." --Richard Colling #3 Dec 04 "That's because you don't have the Sekrit Literally-True Internally-Consistent Bigotted Bible you can only buy at evangelical churches and bookstores. "Thou shalt not be gay" appears in place of "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," because that one was crampin' the fundies' style." --Chris Tessone #22 Nov 04 "Congratulations, Christian Right: I'm Jewish, and you've even got *me* praying." --Lewis Black #21 Nov 04 "Liberalism is about alleviating the inherent shortcomings of capitalism so that we can gain its benefits without having a society which totally blows." --Michael Feltes #12 Nov 04 "We were sort of bored in Illinois, so we thought we'd head up to North Dakota." #7 Nov 04 "A large part of the public likes the conservatives' theme music. Now they will be tested on whether they like the lyrics." --Barney Frank #5 Nov 04 "Liberals once lost elections for supporting civil rights as well and now look back on those losses as badges of honor. Eventually, since young people are far more tolerant of homosexuality than their parents, gay marriage will stop hurting Democrats at the polls." --Peter Beinart #4 Nov 04 "It is WRONG to rule through fear. Not in some abstract or removed god-says sort of way, but rather in that visceral experiential way showing us again and again that the fruit of fear is tyranny." --Jonathan Prykop Best Illuminati reference ever: "Maybe the Democrats will finally get some nutsack and realize you have to keep attacking the Gnomes to keep them from winning." --Joe Shidle #3 Nov 04 "It doesn't outrage me that roughly half of you disagree. But it does outrage me to hear my position disparaged as capitulation to terror, sympathy for Osama bin Laden, soft-headedness or a shallow desire to advance domestic liberal social programs no matter what the risks." --Eric Zorn #27 Oct 04 "Kerry is not the ideal instrument, just as a rubber raft is not the optimal vessel on the open sea. But when the ship is sinking, you can't be choosy." --Steve Chapman #14 Oct 04 "They are men and women who would otherwise be civilians at home and to me, that's a draft." --Joe Shidle #13 Oct 04 "Programming is just another name for the lost art of thinking." --Aaron Hsu #5 Oct 04 "No matter how you feel about Bush, watching him speak is difficult. It's like watching a drunk man cross an icy street." --Tucker Carlson #30 Sep 04 "The intuitive bottom line on the Macintosh versus PC productivity debate is actually pretty simple: I've never met a PC user whose focus on the job he or she was supposed to be doing wasn't significantly diluted by the need to accommodate the PC and its software, but I've never met a business Mac user who considered the machine anything other than a tool, like a telephone or typewriter, for getting the job done." --Paul Murphy #28 Sep 04 "I would say that participants in this discussion would be well-served to read "Ideology and Utopia" by Karl Mannheim, but no one here ever takes book recommendations seriously, preferring instead to argue from existing bases of knowledge and assumptions that don't overlap, so I won't." --Michael Feltes #12 Sep 04 "Osgood, I'm a man!" "Well, nobody's perfect." --_Some Like It Hot_ #9 Sep 04 "We import 61% of our oil. There is no possible way to drill our way out of this mess. We have to *invent* our way out of it." --John Kerry "If I ever get elected God, one of the policies I'm going to implement is massive and real penalties for the board of directors and CEO (or equivalent) of any company that puts out a product with a planned obsolecence. It's a crime against humanity." --Sam Walker "They're called sweetbreads for the obvious reason that if you called them thymus glands or whatever you couldn't give the damn things away. The art of euphemism goes back a long way." --Cecil Adams #7 Sep 04 "It's true! He totally is! In a roundabout way, he reminds me of Chris Rock's stand up routine where he says that people have two options: good relationship and boring, or bad relationship and exciting.... Alan Keyes is the GOP's bad boyfriend." --Leigh Anne Wilson #6 Sep 04 "The great thing about ebay is that it was a huge success *precisely because* it seemed like a terrible idea at the time, and so nobody else tried it, until ebay locked in the network effects and first-mover advantage." --Joel Spolsky #1 Sep 04 "It used to be sad that the Republican Party couldn't find more black candidates. Now it's tragic." --Brent Spillner #31 Aug 04 "I pity the bacterium who lands on MY chili." --Eva Sweeney #30 Aug 04 "Yet people crave change, which is why we have seasons in the first place. Places with insignificant temperature changes may brag about their perfect climates, but even perfection requires contrast to be appreciated. Theirs, which they may neglect to mention at the time, tend to be hurricanes and earthquakes." --Miss Manners #28 Aug 04 "I mean, look at poor Ann Landers: That woman was always stressing out about fake letters making it into her column---and where is Ann Landers today? Dead! No doubt from the stress of worrying about fake letters making it into her column! Personally, I'd rather have margaritas carry me off." --Dan Savage #27 Aug 04 "Paperwork alone is not really an excuse to press someone into military service. "All-volunteer military" has some ethical weight to go along with its practical benefits; paperwork tricks like this diminish that ethical value." --Jonathan Prykop #19 Aug 04 'To my selective hearing, however, the mom's sales pitch sounded like: "Gush, gush, gush, cat urine, gush, gush, cat urine, gush, gush, gush, the urine of the cats, gush, gush, missing puzzle piece, gush, gush, gush, bowel obstruction, gush, gush, gush, $2,000 for kitty surgery, gush gush."' --Burt Constable "Update: Apparently, the secret of traffic is to dis economics professors. J. Bradford DeLong, your mom wears combat boots!" --Michael Kimmitt #18 Aug 04 '"OOPA!" is actually Greek for "watch out, don't light your hair on fire".' --Eva Sweeney #17 Aug 04 "I suspect jesus is 100% digestible. What you poop is just non-jesus substrate." --Zach Miller "It's all just hot air. The only folks who see [Nader] as a threat are the useless Democrats who bring nothing to the table but their non-Republican status. Everyone else just cracks jokes and moves on." --Jonathan Prykop #16 Aug 04 "Wiggling is almost always the correct solution to hardware problems." --Zach Miller #15 Aug 04 "I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful and all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful." --Oscar Wilde "If you removed every reference to poverty in the New Testament, the Good Book would be reduced to little more than a Not Bad Pamphlet." --Arianna Huffington #13 Aug 04 "I was reading the LotR series a while back and I was struck by how every damn sword, ring, hat, codpiece, and brandy snifter had some bad-ass name." --Joe Shidle #9 Aug 04 "If you're a Democrat, then you win when people think." --Bill Clinton #6 Aug 04 '"But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?"' --Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_ #3 Aug 04 "The single most important weapon we have against terrorists is international cooperation, and that's what we so stupidly blew in this case." --Molly Ivins "Man, I'm glad that people in the profession are much more forgiving than I am. If /I/ ran a clinic, I'd force everyone to sign a statement that they believed abortion ought to be safe and legal before undergoing the procedure. Let 'em go try it in the back alleys with a coat hanger if that's how they want it." --Doug Morrow "For Friday's game, Tribune Co. installed safety netting, which, in the event of an emergency, I'm guessing, could fall and trap fans trying to flee the falling concrete." --Burt Constable #2 Aug 04 "But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America." --Barack Obama "Several seemed to be privately messaging each other across the table, passing notes, as it were. BlackBerry Nation---where junior high never stops." --Eric Zorn "With a track record like that you'd think conservatives would be lying low, hoping no one would notice them. But no. They're still out and about, making a lot of noise and telling the rest of us how to live our lives. That's what makes us a free country, I guess, the freedom not merely to make a mistake but to repeat it, endlessly." --Donald Kaul #1 Aug 04 "Yes, children, we did used to have blogs. We called them diaries, and they got us into almost as much trouble as yours will get you." --Miss Manners "Root looks taken aback. 'If you're going to tell me that Finns are worse, pound for pound, than the Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other Germans.'" --Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_ #30 Jul 04 On politicians: "He can talk all he likes. I'm not listening. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, you're all fucking fired." --Joe Shidle #12 Jul 04 "No. There is no null. null is a four-letter word." --Viera Proulx #9 Jul 04 "The closest I get is the first 10^-42 seconds of the universe. You want to call that 'god', fine." --Mike Attisha #7 Jul 04 "I'll take the pig. You keep the girl." --Sam Beckett, _Quantum Leap_ #6 Jul 04 "Edwards' central message of fairness and economic justice puts the question in play: Which is the true political morality? Opposing gay rights and abortion or heeding the biblical admonition "We shall be judged by what we do for the least among us"?" --Arianna Huffington #5 Jul 04 "They don't like you because you make them do what they're supposed to do anyway?" "No, because I want to eviscerate them." #2 Jul 04 "Historically, the Bible has been used to justify some stupefying crimes, including slavery and genocide. I see no indication that we are any better at divining the Lord's intent now than we ever were." --Molly Ivins "Drag God into politics, and you'll ruin his reputation in no time." --Molly Ivins #29 Jun 04 "The major problem today is, `You're gay... what then?' So many people take it as their identity, their body, their psyche. I just don't find it that interesting." --Rufus Wainwright "I love you all, but I am too busy to go to jail for you." --Leigh Anne Wilson #27 Jun 04 "As to things which do not strike at the root of Christianity, we think and let think." --John Wesley #26 Jun 04 "My *un*official title is President of the Matt Zanon groupie fan club." --Cathy Veal #25 Jun 04 On the Jack Ryan debacle: "Becoming the Republican nominee under these circumstances (would be) like having a cancer transplant." --Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) #24 Jun 04 "Now I live in Washington, D.C., a place where everyone's sissy student-council president goes to live, eventually." --Hank Stuever #16 Jun 04 "MORNINGS ARE NOT MY CUP OF TEA. I prefer lipton." --Kathy Blaheta "WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the *real* way to make searching work is *by making searching work*." --Joel Spolsky #15 Jun 04 On learning foreign languages: "If you can't say what you mean in conversation, then instead mean something you're able to say. (For a while after I'd studied the Hindi future tense but hadn't yet learned the past tenses, whenever someone in our house asked me at the dinner table what I'd done today, I'd just say "I don't remember" and go on to talk about what I was planning to do tomorrow.)" --Kim Plofker "I really can't trade the hope of liberty for security, sorry. Unfortunately, I get the feeling much of the rest of liberal America is willing to trade my liberty for their security. It's depressing." --Jonathan Prykop #14 Jun 04 "We teach these children, not because they are Catholic, but because *we* are." --Dr Mary MacDonald "Urban areas belong to all of us---whether we live there or not." --Dr Mary MacDonald #13 Jun 04 "The problem with nominating a weak vacillator who puts politics before principle as our standard bearer is that he vacillates and puts politics before principle, and makes us look weak." --Michael Kimmitt "Miss Manners does not minimize the amount of self-control it takes to look on with equanimity while one's property is demolished. It takes practice. But it sounds as if the circles in which you move are prepared to offer you that." --Miss Manners #3 Jun 04 "What's going to be awesome is what (if any) culture emerges on Mars. The combination of "you must be this familiar with the utility of educated action to enter" and "the environment is seriously trying to kill you" will weed out a lot of the libertarian and fundie bullshit that's holding us back right now." --Michael Kimmitt "My head was exploding right and left during that story. At the end all I was left with was a stubby brain stem weakly throbbing out waves of judgmental astonishment at the whole durned story." --Tori Bryan #--Tori O'Neal #24 May 04 "Hey, don't make me take off my leg and beat the shit out of you." --Harley Jackson #21 May 04 "I'm going to appreciate this two-weeks-straight-of-68-degrees thing as much as I can, and look back on it fondly when the entire state is on fire in August." --Pete McFerrin "Most people would die sooner than think---in fact, they do so." --Bertrand Russell #11 May 04 "I kind of thought that the point of the Nicene Creed was to lay out the stuff that Absolutely Had To Be Believed and imply that the rest of it was stuff that To A Greater Or Lesser Extent Really Ought To Be Believed." --Michael Kimmitt "Bush may not have been born stupid, but he has achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor." --Jacob Weisberg #23 Apr 04 "One almost gets the sense that [the Gospels] are steps in a developing oral tradition, rather than anything remotely resembling a report of fact." --Jonathan Prykop "We're all condemned to certain death, after which there may or may not be a bonus round." --Cary Tennis #20 Apr 04 "I could characterize myself as Mother Theresa but that doesn't make me any less of a hothead." --Joe Shidle #16 Apr 04 #www.livejournal.com/users/insafemode "Yes [I swing that way], but whereas many of our gay friends prefer to swing for the fences, I prefer to bunt." --insafemode #12 Apr 04 "Yeah, but then your ass would always weight 15 lbs. even when empty." --Joe Shidle "Aaah, you can take a 'venti' razor and shove it up your ass, you 'tall'-brained moron." --Foamy Squirrel, www.illwillpress.com #8 Apr 04 "Pot takes an obnoxious asshole teenage boy, and makes him kinda tolerable." --Dan Savage "Oral sex is sex. Did we learn *nothing* from the Clinton impeachment?" --Dan Savage "Don't look at me as if you've never stuck a finger in a guy's ass!" --Dan Savage "If you do really crazy kinky things with Doris Day playing, you just feel so dirty!" --Dan Savage "It's one of the fringe benefits of having a lover---that guy who fucks you in the ass is gonna spot that mole on your back when it turns cancerous, long before you do." --Dan Savage "Blah, blah, blah, who put a nickel in me?" --Dan Savage "The gay community can do nothing 'for gay youth', other than keep our hands off 'em." --Dan Savage "The most reliably anti-gay, anti-gay-marriage folks out there are over sixty, and thank _God_, they're going to die." --Dan Savage "The senator doesn't *have* to come for a visit every time you have anal sex, folks." --Dan Savage "I didn't come up with 'pegging', my readers did. (My Aunt Peggy was really upset about it.)" --Dan Savage "Rick Santorum is the enemy of your blowjobs!" --Dan Savage "So, if you're a sparrow with a whale... fist 'er." --Dan Savage "Basically, I just give talks that are long digressions." --Dan Savage "Yes, I did get a pre-nup. It's about as thick as a phone book. 'Cause my boyfriend was *really* upset about all this." --Dan Savage "Puritans... were the original Moral Majority types. They didn't come here for religious freedom, they came here for the right to religiously persecute anyone they could get their hands on." --Dan Savage #7 Apr 04 On ordering food in foreign countries: "It is all about sign language and gesturing. Of course it helps if you can make out some of it, but I alway consider it a sign of success if I can get the waiter to physically try to imitate the type of animal to help explain what type of food you are ordering." --Matt Wicks #1 Apr 04 'In its heyday, "hussy" was the sort of noun that attracted intensifiers---any woman worth labeling a "hussy" would almost certainly, upon closer examination, turn out to be a "brazen hussy," a "shameless hussy," or at least a "bold hussy."' --Evan Morris #28 Mar 04 "Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!" --James Carville #26 Mar 04 "I'm trying to keep her from killing your wife!" --Will Parker "Mind your own business!" --Ali Hakim, "Oklahoma!" "Maintenance, cleanup on aisle three please. We have a can of worms opened on aisle three." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney "Wait. Stop right there. That's all you need to say. You don't have a point beyond this. Your argument is stupid, vacuous and based on assumptions you don't have the language or ability to back up. On top of that, it's unwarranted here. This is where you need to shut up." --Theo O'Neal #25 Mar 04 "It would be better to teach creationism in the context of a high school class on world religions or human origins, but not if science continues to be taught as Truth and religion as Something Gullible People Believe In." --Chris Tessone #23 Mar 04 "Sign a few contracts, the well-intentioned advise, and you'll get all the same rights as straight couples---that's an outrageous fiction, but not as outrageous as the notion that being almost equal under the law is good enough." --Laura Conaway "Sometimes I think the greatest hindrance to our cause is the sheer force of the American legend. So strongly do people believe this country stands for freedom that they can't fathom it's ever otherwise." --Laura Conaway #20 Mar 04 "The essential idea of conservatism is a pessimistic view of human nature; however, since a lot of conservatives are basically decent human beings, they tend to make exceptions for themselves.... The concept of the Rule of Law demands that the law be applied impartially, which leads to an an ongoing tension in conservative thought and action." --Michael Kimmitt #14 Mar 04 Illustration of argument in the alternative: (1) I never met the victim. (2) If I did meet her, I certainly didn't kill her. (3) If the jury is actually fooled by the prosecution, and thinks I killed her, then you have to understand it was self-defense. (4) Also, I'm completely batshit insane. --Mike Peil #12 Mar 04 "May I suggest Girl Scout Thin Mint Chocolate Ice Cream? Available now in your grocer's freezer. I mean, if God exists, this is what's in His freezer." --David Singleton #4 Mar 04 'It should be a movie. A movie musical, in fact. That entire first book of Samuel screams out, "MAKE ME INTO AN EPIC. INCLUDE AN INTROSPECTIVE BALLAD."' --Jonathan Prykop #1 Mar 04 "To the Democratic party: I don't work for you. You work for me. I've got something /you/ want. You want my vote, you fucking woo me. You explain what you're going to do that I want you to do if I help put you in power. Don't even try to guilt-trip me by calling a candidate that deals with issues that I care about a "spoiler," because I'll be out the door faster than you can say "four more years," assholes." --Neal Groothuis #27 Feb 04 "Advocating civil unions for all... is instead undercutting the homophobe's diversionary tactics and forcing the debate to focus on the issues. In other words, the debate comes to whether the legal benefits of marriage can be denied to homosexual partners, instead of blathering about whether someone's sanctity is all up in a bunch." --Eric Blau "The weakening of marriage has been heterosexuals' doing, not gays', for it is their infidelity, divorce rates and single-parent families that have wrought social damage." --The Economist #26 Feb 04 "Like broccoli pizza, gay marriage isn't for everyone, but that's no reason to keep it off the menu." --Steve Chapman #19 Feb 04 "The teacher coaxes people towards ideas instead of saying them outright because lots of liberal arts knowledge is only approximately effable." --Jonathan Prykop #12 Feb 04 "Miss Manners believes that young ladies should appear modest and deferential to adults. It sets them a good example." --Miss Manners #11 Feb 04 "They all eventually get old and rattley. Everything eventually gets old and rattley, even real live sex partners, so why be so judgemental about some battery operated plastic?" --Leigh Anne Wilson "I am sure, absolutely sure that Dante fully intended to include Retail Hell into one of the circles. Maybe I just overlooked it when I had to read it in college. It's possible. I was drunk a lot back then." --Leigh Anne Wilson #29 Jan 04 "This is exactly why I have a hunting dog. He is all over alerting me to any animals in the house, especially the ones on tv." --Jonathan Wagner #28 Jan 04 "Predictions, gut feelings and polls have proven all but useless so far in this campaign season so I beg of you, *do not mark my words*." --Eric Zorn #23 Jan 04 "I think Kerry's major appeal must be to the "I have a funny feeling about Bush but I don't really want anything else to change" demographic. Which could be significant." --Brent Spillner #22 Jan 04 "Googling suggests that mplayer is the answer (as it is to most questions for which emacs or perl are not the answer)." --Zach Miller "I appreciate the irony of this rich, pampered, oft-rescued son of a president admonishing athletes that there are no "shortcuts to accomplishments." I marvel at how Bush devoted more time to homosexuals than he did to the environment." --Burt Constable #15 Jan 04 "Do you know what I love about corporate CEOs? Their commitment to honesty. I like to think we owe the free market for that. In a more regulated system, they might lie sometimes." --Bob Romashko #14 Jan 04 "All this talk in the ongoing immigration debate that immigrants "do the jobs that Americans don't want to do" is misleadingly incomplete. In fact, immigrants do the jobs that Americans don't want to do for the wages American employers are willing to pay." --Eric Zorn #9 Jan 04 "No Democrat can win by playing 'Whose swagger is swaggier?' or 'Whose flight suit is tighter?'" --Arianna Huffington #7 Jan 04 'Resisting says, "I am a gourmet dessert, rare and expensive." Being too eager says, "I am a cheeseburger. You know what I taste like and you can get me anytime you want."' --Jonathan Prykop #6 Jan 04 "We have to pretend problems don't exist. Gets difficult when there are odours involved." --Tom, "Daria" #5 Jan 04 "Don't get me started on Hawai'i drivers. I think it's because there's nowhere to go." --Michael Kimmitt #3 Jan 04 "Watching Elmo be joined by the Backstreet Boys is like having the person who is repeatedly kicking you in the balls suddenly say, 'Oh. I'm sorry. I forgot to set you on fire first.'" --Jeff Vogel #2 Jan 04 "Humorous and detailed stories that people aren't bound to take seriously make for *excellent* smalltalk. If you can hide the fact that you're just retelling an old X-Files episode, even better." --Jonathan Prykop "The worst thing about being a libertarian is realizing that all of your fellow travelers are also white male college sophomores, even if they're in their fifties." --Michael Kimmitt #1 Jan 04 "Kristi, I can't believe you came from the same womb as Michael." --Jonathan Prykop "Jonathan, you just need to start every sentence you say with 'Assuming we exist...'." --Kristi Foss #30 Dec 03 "Mormon girls make really bad lesbians." --Eleni Moraites #29 Dec 03 "This shirt is for *your* protection." --Scott Harris "Well, your partner has left you, but there's a pleasant fellow with a beer who would like to make your acquaintance." --Scott Harris "Congratulations! No penis." --Scott Harris #18 Dec 03 Making sure that kids have health insurance is the right thing. Pissing away time in a quixotic quest for ideological purity is not. --Michael Kimmitt #17 Dec 03 "You know how it goes: stood up, cussed her something fierce, received applause from entire airplane, cut to reality, oops, it was all my passive-agressive imagination, put headphones back on." --Matt Stanislawski "Certain death; small chance of success; what are we waiting for?" --Gimli, _Return of the King_ #11 Dec 03 "Do you think we wear bras because you think they're cute? Because that's really not why we wear them." --Angela Feraco "It's not that I didn't like her, it's just that I found her really annoying." --Rob Hunter #4 Dec 03 "The side effects of our programming are daytime drowsiness and an extreme sense of well-being." --Adult Swim "I exercise when it becomes clear that the alternative is to buy new pants." --Bob Romashko "So, I had a caffeine addiction, and I wanted to stop. So, I developed an addiction to chewing gum, and I wanted to stop. So, I started smoking, and I wanted to stop. So, I started reading notesfiles, and I really don't want to start drinking." --Amanda Muller #2 Dec 03 "Whatever system they have in place clearly has far too many humans in the loop, because the IMSAlum was addressed to 'Windy Peak Lane' and I live on 'Cloudy Peak Lane.'" --Brent Spillner #1 Dec 03 "There is nothing like an old-fashioned ballet class run like a Siberian labor camp to give the lie to the notion that children are immune to disciplined formality---and to make even the most exacting parents seem lenient." --Miss Manners #25 Nov 03 "People are out there screwing with your realities every day. You can say that if we just "abide by the law" no one will bother us. But one day you might wake up and find that someone out there wrote a lot of laws you don't want to abide by." --Brian Thurber #24 Nov 03 "Men don't automatically get homemakers who tend to their kids' every need when their sperm finds fertile women. I don't think that women should get fat paychecks for their children simply because a sperm fertilizes their egg." --Christie Babinski #21 Nov 03 "I've recently started using a Mac (where right click is actually Ctrl click) and now I have to put my coffee down to create an object. This is a serious problem, obviously." --Sebastian Hunt #14 Nov 03 "DECAF!? Are you trying to kill me??" --Cecilia, _Piled Higher and Deeper_ "Americans were sold on a short, sharp war with a short, cheap occupation based on a massive threat to US security. They got one of the three, and they may demand that they get the second due to the lack of the third." --Michael Kimmitt #13 Nov 03 "The only similarity I see between Christ and Neo is that they should have both fired ther scriptwriters." --Theo O'Neal #12 Nov 03 On Matrix Revolutions: "It ceased to be about an epic struggle to free the human mind, and became a movie about how CGI graphics still can't simulate believable inertia when animating bipedal robot weapons platforms." --Paul Hebble "If I were tied down and tickled until I had to choose . . . damn. I really don't know." --Michael Kimmitt "As a recognized guru of dead horse abuse, I gotta say y'all are beating a big one." --Jonathan Prykop #11 Nov 03 "School boards call it No School Board Left Standing; the teachers just call it No Behind Left." --Howard Dean "Well, I don't think the leader of North Korea is such a fine fellow either, but I don't think our foreign policy should be based on the petulance of our president." --Howard Dean "Even the Costa Ricans have health insurance for their people, and *we should too*." --Howard Dean "Borrow and spend, borrow and spend---this is the credit card presidency!" --Howard Dean "The Palestinians will never have a state until the Israelis feel secure, and the Israelis will not feel secure until the Palestinians have a state." --Senator George Mitchell #7 Nov 03 "For the record, I question the logic of the anonymous identity merged with "hey, let's tell all our IMSA friends on the notesfiles". The IMSA community's secret-keeping prowess is best likened to the 'Rizzo's pregnant' scene from "Grease"." --Joe Shidle #4 Nov 03 "Maybe not foie gras, but I'd go for a roquefort machine in the basement of my building." --Joe Shidle "He was not especially persecuted, Sweden is a tolerant country, and Jansson not a serious symptom, but he determined to make the time-honored gesture of emigrating to a country where 'he could worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience'; his followers, of course, being expected to permit their leader's conscience to do all the dictating, also according to formula." --Earnest Elmo Calkins, _They Broke the Prairie_ (1937) #29 Oct 03 "It is astonishing how many sides truth seems to have, even in the hands of devout Christians." --Earnest Elmo Calkins, _They Broke the Prairie_ (1937) #15 Oct 03 "There's the old axiom in design that says, `Less is more.' They should have that printed on the outside of the PowerPoint box. It needs a warning label." --Larry Nighswander, director, OSU School of Visual Communications #13 Oct 03 "Do you ever wonder if the "Christ of Scripture" is really worth following? I think some folks get sold on the happy-go-lucky Christ as children, on the simple premise that such a Christ is totally worth following, and then turn their thoughts to various other possibly evil Christs later in life, out of devotion to the name." --Jonathan Prykop "Because daydreaming required people to think up their own plots, as opposed to simply downloading them, it seems as quaint as paying personal visits instead of instant-messaging. But it does serve to illustrate the etiquette of multitasking. The rule is that you must not get caught." --Miss Manners #9 Oct 03 "Anything that spoils the polite fiction that one's coworkers possess neither sexualities nor sexual organs is likely to be inappropriate." --Gel Thelen #8 Oct 03 "As I write this, I am sipping espresso from a demitasse. I assure you, there is sufficient foof here." --Neal Groothuis "To all the West Coasties (IMSAn, ISUn or otherwise), who've ever made snide remarks about Midwestern conservatism in my presence, I have a brief message: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER WAS JUST ELECTED GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA. SUCK IT." --Fred Iutzi #27 Sep 03 "Yeah, I never realized what fun it would be to do interviews until I remembered how neurotic, self-important and generally unable to converse in a relaxed casual way law students are." --Jonathan Wagner #25 Sep 03 "Then came 9/11, and we all rallied. Country under attack, most horrible thing, what can we do? Ready to give blood, get out of our cars and ride bicycles, whatever. Shop, said the president. That and more tax cuts for the rich." --Molly Ivins #24 Sep 03 "Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office." --Philip Greenspun #23 Sep 03 "We realize that having the service available to test would be a good first step in the direction of utility. Sometimes we have to shut the service down to implement improvements. Sometimes it decides on its own to break for a nice pot of Earl Grey and some fresh silicon wafers." --Google labs "The etiquette of symphony concerts is that the only muscles that may be moved are the ones needed for turning to glare at those who dare to breathe too loudly. What is done to toe-tappers is too horrible to mention." --Miss Manners #22 Sep 03 "[19th-century ministers] were also the self-appointed custodians of education, which must not be allowed to escape from theological leading strings. They were as much concerned with keeping schools and colleges free from religious heresy as modern business men are to purge them of political heresy." --Earnest Elmo Calkins, _They Broke the Prairie_ (1937) #20 Sep 03 "Television is the alcohol of the body politic. A little helps the entity function more smoothly, but excessive continued use causes terrible harm." --Michael Kimmitt #18 Sep 03 "No, no, Bush isn't a Nazi, but he's related to Nazi sympathisers. His family laundered money for them. His fortune comes from, among other places, my great-uncle's gold tooth." --Dan Lieberman #14 Sep 03 "If you think about it, the Confederacy has finally won the Civil War---a long-awaited victory won by luring stupid Yankees down there with a promise of 5,000 BTUs and a built-in icemaker." --Michael Moore, _Stupid White Men_ #10 Sep 03 "Well, if by 'weird' you mean 'Russian', then yes." --Chris Tessone THIS LOT IS ADJACENT TO A SPORTS FIELD. PARK AT YOUR OWN RISK. --sign at a Knox College parking lot #9 Sep 03 "Well, I don't think normal goo cubes are intelligent, although maybe they're just misunderstood." --Ben Gold #7 Sep 03 On where to turn for usage information: "Style manuals. Good ones. Specifically, ones that agree with me." --Annemarie Peil #5 Sep 03 "The Judge was still dead when Ray returned to his study, and that was not a complete surprise." --John Grisham, _The Summons_ #4 Sep 03 "Of course they're razzing you--that's what straight men do. It's how you people display affection and/or hostility." --Dan Savage "Bitching about it on notesfiles, on the other hand, is probably not very productive. It's definitely something you should save until you're a graduate student and have nothing better to do." --Keith Winstein #27 Aug 03 "I've lodged countless emails with Ms. Shidle over the years. I think I'm at about an 8% response rate. You may wish to try the phone." --Joe Shidle "Why are you so defensive about this? I *like* that you have neat cool impractical things." --Angela Feraco #23 Aug 03 "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong---faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to a man in a blind rush until it's too late." --Bene Gesserit proverb #20 Aug 03 "It is shocking to me how often I hear from people who think there are secret messages imbedded in otherwise straightforward and polite invitations. "No gifts, please" doesn't mean "The Luftwaffe strikes at dawn; please send some pretty candlesticks immediately."" --Amy Dickinson #quoted by Molly Ivins "And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again." --Bill O'Reilly on Good Morning America, 18 Mar 2003 #19 Aug 03 "No, wait... I've confused semen with roundworms. Fucking Google. Sorry about that." --Gel Thelen "The problem is, Peil's guardian angle is obtuse." --Joe Shidle #18 Aug 03 "Hey, if Purina made Bachelor Chow---I'd eat it." --Greg Seidman #13 Aug 03 "Life and sleep are mutually exclusive, and I know which one I'd pick." --Kevin Colby #7 Aug 03 "If you're learning about religion from books, you're probably missing the better parts, anyway." --Jonathan Prykop #2 Aug 03 "I'm always on solid ground. I tend to break unsolid ground." --Sam Walker #1 Aug 03 I had some mint-scented odor eaters once. They gave me tic-tac toe. --Peter Morris #31 Jul 03 "Sure he was a total flake but he seemed like such a nice total flake." --Zach Miller "I'm from the country. New York takes one look at me and says, ah bet yew squeal REAL nice, only without the southern accent and in twelve different languages." --Matt Boyd, Mac Hall #30 Jul 03 "The basic problem with Perl 5's subroutines is that they're not crufty enough, so the cruft leaks out into user-defined code instead, by the Conservation of Cruft Principle." --Larry Wall, Apocalypse 6 #29 Jul 03 "IIRC, "hepatitis" is just itis of the hepa. That is, an inflamed liver." --Sam Walker #27 Jul 03 Ashcroft's Corollary: "As a dispute goes on, the probability of one side claiming the other is helping terrorists approaches one." --BenjyD "Statistics is like a bikini: what it reveals is suggestive, but what it conceals is vital." --Keith Schwols "Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets." --Eddy Peters #14 Jul 03 "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." --Buckminster Fuller #10 Jul 03 "Consulting? Why would we consult you? Do you know something?" --Fr Henry Bodah From the come-again-now? dept: "I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." --Ari Fleischer #7 Jul 03 "I believed then and I believe now that removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was a just cause. But not every just cause requires that we go to war, especially with inadequate planning and without maximum support." --Howard Dean #5 July 03 "Krispy Kremes are like twelve little orgasms in a box." --Kelly Mayberry #1 July 03 "I'm really sick of the whole feed the baby routine. I'm tired of picking out the meals, and spooning the food in her mouth, and cleaning her afterwards. I'm looking forward to the day when she says "I'm hungry." and I can just hand her a live chicken and a gun and let her take care of it." --Jeff Vogel "Rather than send $20 a month to feed a starving child, we as a society choose to spend $200 a month to upgrade to the Super Extra Huge SUV, with fucking rear view cameras so we don't even have to turn our bloated heads on our fat little necks to avoid crushing our evolutionarily- unviable offspring on our way to get a Shiatsu massage." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney "Just when you had all but forgotten that carbon-based life exists above the 49th parallel, those sly Canadians have redefined their entire nation as Berkeley North." --David Montgomery, Washington Post "I'm not morally superior to him: I'm smarter than he is. There's a difference." --Sam Walker THERE IS NO WORLDWIDE SHORTAGE OF EGGS, BABIES, OR PEOPLE. THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY SEEMS TO STILL BE WORKING FINE. --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #26 Jun 03 On the prescription drug coverage bill: "Ted Kennedy is for it, and The Wall Street Journal is against it. On the other hand, the White House is for it, and pretty much everyone on the left except Kennedy is against it. The press is helpfully wringing its hands and announcing, 'This is *soooo* complicated.'" --Molly Ivins #25 Jun 03 "I would go back to the Clinton era of taxes because I think most Americans would gladly pay the same taxes they paid when Bill Clinton was president if they could only have the same economy that they had when Bill Clinton was president." --Howard Dean #23 Jun 03 "I deeply resent sleep, and yet, I am only human." --Kevin Colby "Symptoms of cyanide poisoning are excitement, convulsions, respiratory distress, and spasms. Another warning sign is death, which can occur without any of the other symptoms." --Cecil Adams #21 Jun 03 "Personally, I'd let the guards sit around and squeeze making "honk-honk" noises if they'd let me keep my damned shoes on at the xray, but hey, we all have our quirks." --Gel Thelen #17 Jun 03 "I just finished a beer that was so large that I had to lift it with both hands. Really, the only reason I ordered it was to wash down a pretzel that was itself so large that it could have eaten me under the right circumstances. I have a very high opinion of Munich, but it may have been artificially produced." --Tycho "I started to cry as I sat down with a gigantic piece of meat, a schnitzel, which is like a fried continent. I mean it, I pulled my hat off my head and started to cry. *This is what it is all about.* If getting drunk at eleven in the afternoon and eating a huge piece of meat is wrong, then *I don't want to be right.*" --Tycho "Between Venice and Rome, I've seen about nine different varieties of Monks, Priests, and Nuns. What do these differences represent, I wonder---is it for intramural sports? At the vey least, I'd imagine that each type has different skills and bonus feats. " --Tycho "If you want to see as compelling a demonstration of Ethernet as you are ever likely to see in your life, head on over to Rome and try to cross the street. Don't wait to cross it, they'll never stop. Everyone goes at once. That's right, there are forty motorscooters and tiny Smart Cars and what looks like a motorized wheelbarrow going where you're trying to go at the same time you're tring to go there. You may momentarily feel as though you are floating in a sea of careening metal. That is actually fairly accurate. But you are in no danger." --Tycho #10 Jun 03 "To point out to others that they are short, tall, fat, thin, pregnant, using a wheelchair, looking anxious or blushing is not as informative as many people imagine, and to inquire why is not likely to enlighten or amuse even the one who asks." --Miss Manners #8 Jun 03 "To make grand changes in the body plan of animals, there is no need to invent new genes, just as there's no need to invent new words to write an original novel (unless your name is Joyce)." --Matt Ridley, "What makes you who you are", _Time_ #6 Jun 03 "I'd rather live next to a wind farm than a coal plant. If ugliness were justification enough for stopping human structures from being built, there would be no Wal-marts or trailer parks or Modesto, CA." --Gel Thelen #4 Jun 03 "Um, if we're gonna try and list all the famous artists, musicians, writers, actors, etc that have smoked weed, that's gonna take a REALLY LONG TIME." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #3 Jun 03 "I look much too dorky to be an eighteen-year-old. Although, actually I looked even dorkier when I *was* eighteen, but they don't know that." --Sharon Goldwater #23 May 03 "Freed from the normal constraints of truth and veracity, "journalists" such as Blair, Shalit, Barnicle, Smith and Glass shine above their counterparts. They're promoted ahead of the pack because their stories, sneakily cloaked as journalism, read better than everyone else's stories. In a profession fueled by competition, their careers are propelled along because of, rather than in spite of, their transgressions." --Terry M. Neal, Washington Post "As far as the barn-raisin', paint-strippin' part goes, Amish and Mormons are functionally identical. The Mormons will probably bring a Wagner Power Painter modified to spray mineral spirits, however." --Pete McFerrin #21 May 03 From the oh-really? dept.: "Bush is a Republican. I'm a Democrat. In fact, I'm seeking the office he holds. But at this moment there's not an inch of distance between us." --Joseph Lieberman #20 May 03 "I knew if I was willing to sell out the rights of a whole group of Americans to get reelected, then I'd wasted my time in politics." --Howard Dean "This is amazing. You've run into somebody who seems to be a complete loon, on the Internet of all places." --Neal Groothuis "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." --Hermann Goering "As long as she kept her mouth shut, I'd give serious thought to refraining from kicking Ann Coulter out of bed for eating crackers." --Michael Kimmitt "After all, let's face it, evil is easier, more fun, and better paying." --Sam Walker "Actually, it's because being anti-war is sensible, and being pro-war is allowing one's testosterone to overcome sense. It's assumed that women aren't as susceptible to this particular failing." --Michael Kimmitt #17 May 03 "Good spaces almost always have a "perfect" vantage point. It's the best place to stand. Photographers seek these places out almost instinctively. Good urban design includes making sure that such places are there to be found." --J. Crawford, _City Design_ #15 May 03 "The doomsday cults---which predict the end of the world or the creation of a new world order---are the most sinister, but the absurd, white-shrouded Pana Wavists may not gain even the distinction of being considered dangerous. Of course, if the world does end on Thursday sceptics will face a position of unthinkable embarrassment." --Robert Pigoll, BBC #8 May 03 "Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus. In either case, it's a terribly serious situation." --Molly Ivins "Too much has happened the last couple of days but my head is as heavy as a lead boulder. Hay fever time. The sexual life of palm trees makes me weep." --Salam Pax "You should only need comments when there is some kind of kludge you need to warn readers about, just as on a road there are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves." --Paul Graham "What you learn about programming in college is much like what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you had in high school." --Paul Graham "Scientists start out... trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original." --Paul Graham "When you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies." --Paul Graham "Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this." --Paul Graham "We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler." --Paul Graham "There is nothing so tempting as an easy test that kind of works." --Paul Graham "As anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants." --Paul Graham "Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia." --Paul Graham #1 May 03 "I should emphasize that just because our Irish friends start their summer earlier does not mean Ireland gets warmer earlier. The cruel truth is that it never gets warm in Ireland, which has one of the most dismal climates on earth." --Cecil Adams #29 Apr 03 "English can most charitably be described as a generous, expansive, and flexible language; a less charitable description would characterize it as drunk and disorderly." --Teresa Nielsen Hayden #24 Apr 03 "I regard the construction of a theory of truth as the basic goal of serious syntax and semantics; and the developments emanating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offer little promise towards that end." --Richard Montague "This vessel, the accumulated canon of copyright and patent law, was developed to convey forms and methods of expression entirely different from the vaporous cargo it is now being asked to carry. It is leaking as much from within as from without. Legal efforts to keep the old boat floating are taking three forms: a frenzy of deck chair rearrangement, stern warnings to the passengers that if she goes down, they will face harsh criminal penalties, and serene, glassy-eyed denial." --John Perry Barlow #22 Apr 03 "Bush made it clear a month ago that this was all about finding weapons of mass destruction... no, wait a minute, last week he made it clear this was all about liberating the Iraqi people... hold on, this morning he made it clear this was about cutting off the flow of oil to Syria, a known haven for terrorists... well, in any event, it has NOTHING to do with American oil interests: that much has been made clear." --Bill Swift #16 Apr 03 "Hey Don---I don't suppose you want a grad student...." --David Tucker #14 Apr 03 "Built in 1874, the historic Knox County Jail was acquired by Knox in 1996 and converted into classrooms and office space. The 19th century cellblock was restored it its original condition as well, making it a popular attraction for campus visitors." --www.knox.edu #11 Apr 03 "Hell, yes, I support our troops! I support them so much that I want them safe at home. I support them so much that, if it were up to me, they would never have been put into danger in Iraq in the first place." --Chronos #10 Apr 03 "Wouldn't it be easier if we just let one or two people steal? But that's not our way. We're Puritans---we audit *everybody*." --Uwe Reinhardt "Americans: they even want choice when it's all the same stuff." --Uwe Reinhardt "'Charges' is what the uninsured are required to pay for medical attention, and it's defined as what a drunken sheik from the Middle East could pay, if his wife weren't around to care." --Uwe Reinhardt "The National Rifle Association loves the AMA---they never miss their target, which is their own foot." --Uwe Reinhardt "When state legislators are willing to pay only, say, $10 for a visit of a Medicaid baby to a pediatrician's office, but are willing to pay $50 for a visit by their own, they are signalling a different social valuation on the medical care of different people." --Uwe Reinhardt "Pure egalitarianism strangles everything. I'm just saying, *be decent*." --Uwe Reinhardt "I have never seen such passion for foetuses as here in the US, but as soon as you take one breath of oxygen, it's 'you're on your own, kid.'" --Uwe Reinhardt #5 Apr 03 "I *love* Chicago! It's just like New York, except that it's bright and clean, and people there try to be helpful." --Rebecca Santoro #3 Apr 03 "Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." --Mark Twain #2 Apr 03 "Those marathon knitting sessions are bad not only for your hands, but hard on your love life. (Yes, we not only want you to be a healthy knitter, we want you to be a slyly smiling, happy knitter.)" --Bonne Marie Burns, knitty.com #31 Mar 03 "A Police State needs for everyone to be a criminal on paper, to have that potential, to be able to use that against them." --zogger #30 Mar 03 "I've figured it out. Here in Rhode Island, people are catching all the Rs people are dropping up in Boston. They're all up there pahking their cah, and the Rs migrate down here so my landlord calls me Thereser." --Theresa Ross #22 Mar 03 "Dictators have an uncanny habit of not dying from natural causes." --Adam Hirsch #19 Mar 03 "It's not so difficult---[Bush] does what rich people want, and he does what ignorant, violent people want. So he has lots of money and a huge constituency." --Michael Kimmitt #18 Mar 03 "We cannot continue to be a strong, vital, vigorous nation when only 20-30% of our people go to the polls." --Janet Reno "I think I can see some senators out there; I think I see some members of Congress, and I think I see a President of the United States of America. Pursue public service---it makes all the difference." --Janet Reno "All punishment is arbitrary, or has the potential to be arbitrary... and with the death penalty, you can't take it back." --Janet Reno "The most difficult balance to strike is the balance that must be struck in time of war or time of peace, the balance between liberty and security." --Janet Reno "Ladies and gentlemen, we can protect our security at the same time as we protect our great blessings of freedom for posterity, and it doesn't have to be either/or if we do it right." --Janet Reno #17 Mar 03: BDH "If the war's supporters can't stand the fact the people of Europe have their own minds, how much more contemptuously will they regard the will of the people in the Arab world? Am I supposed to believe people who want European leaders to defy 80 and 90 percent of their populations are concerned about democracy?" --Brian Rainey "We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat." --Robin Cook I don't care if you really care as long as you don't go. --The Cardigans, "Lovefool" "God forgive me, but Isaac was really a bit of a schmuck." --Fr Henry Bodah "'Satellite' is like my favourite song ever, except for a few other ones." --Rebecca Santoro #4 Mar 03 "I am absolved of my sins every time I clear my browser history." --Sam Walker #3 Mar 03 "The Creator definitely intended for breakfast cereals to *only* be brown." --Winona LaDuke "There is a direct correlation between the development of the United States and the *under*development of Native America." --Winona LaDuke "Sacajawea and Pocahontas---why is it that Americans know those two? Those would be the helping-out-white-guys women, hmm?" --Winona LaDuke "You probably already go a little bit outside your arena of comfort---go a little bit further. That is what activism requires." --Winona LaDuke "I think patents are for toasters. They should not be for life forms." --Winona LaDuke "I have been trying to work on Ralph for years, on his wardrobe. I was thinking a cape. With a big R on it." --Winona LaDuke "You want to hang out with Dick Cheney and Doctor Evil, or you want to go hang out with the Indians, and ice cream?" --Winona LaDuke "*Actually*, the Democrats took a lot of votes from the Greens." --Winona LaDuke "If you want to have a democracy, you gotta figure out how to have one, here." --Winona LaDuke dad@hvn, ur spshl. we want wot u want &urth2b like hvn. giv us food & 4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don't test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss, ur tuf & ur cool 4 eva! ok? --Matthew Campbell #2 Mar 03 "You want a pretzel?" "I can fold myself into a pretzel!" --Dave and Marissa #David Tucker #Marissa Caldwell "I would be a good girl." --David Tucker "The Yankees? Yeah, they're a baseball team. They're from the Bronx. Like me." --David Tucker "And J Lo, too." --Yana Kucheva #28 Feb 03 "It's hard to come up with a single journalist/pundit appearing on television who is even remotely as far to the left of the mainstream spectrum as most of these conservatives are to the right. To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left, a network would need to convene a 'roundtable' featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro." --Eric Alterman #26 Feb 03 Q: How many computational linguists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Only one, but he has to watch you do it a hundred thousand times first. --Sharon Goldwater #23 Feb 03 Dear Miss Manners: I am not a know-it-all and don't monopolize conversations, but I do contribute some factual knowledge in areas that interest me. Numerous times, I've heard, "How come you know so much?" I'm confident that Miss Manners can suggest a reply that, while not accommodating an apparently peeved attitude, might facilitate social peace. Gentle Reader: Try "I like to listen to people who know more than I do." Miss Manners suggests following this with a pleasant smile and then a long pause. #21 Feb 03 "All Things Considered, eh? 'The news is next. But first, an awkwardly long interval featuring some bizarre tribal Kenyan mandolin music.'" --Steve Crutchfield "I'm told that I should never attribute to malice what incompetence will explain, but I'm fairly sure that both are in great supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days." --Michael Kimmitt #18 Feb 03 #http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html "Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits." --Paul Graham "Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children." --Paul Graham "[Nerds] were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence." --Paul Graham #15 Feb 03 "The American dream is to be born in a gutter, grow up and make *all* the money in the world, stick it in your ears, and go *THHBBBBBTTT!*" --Eddie Izzard "Sam, you're not just going to hide a bow in your pants that you can pull out and unload ten shots at someone." --Matt Lease #14 Feb 03 "I really don't like how I look on video." "I've decided to just get used to it." --Rob Hunter and Mike Attisha #--Rob Hunter #--Mike Attisha #3 Feb 03 "Our English language is, after all, the end product of an informal committee made up of several hundred million people over the course of several centuries, and it shows." --Evan Morris #2 Feb 03 "You voted for Perot?? I voted for Bush, but I was *insane* then. That's different." --Kelly Martin #30 Jan 03 "Honestly, I really wouldn't care if the rich kept getting richer, if only they weren't such assholes about it." --Sam Walker #25 Jan 03 "Look---Switzerland has twice as many guns as we do; Japan is far more of a pressure cooker; and Northern Ireland has been fighting a low-level civil war for the past 50 years. All of them have lower rates of homicide than the US. At some point, there's got to be a cultural difference." --Michael Kimmitt #18 Jan 03 "How am I going to achieve my foreign policy goals with $36?" --Michael Kimmitt #17 Jan 03 # "I have NO LEGS." He `OLE WÄWAE ko`u. #16 Jan 03 "It always amuses me that George Bush Sr. coined the term voodoo economics to describe trickle down and now his son is the zombie master himself." --Zach Miller #12 Jan 03 "Huh. I didn't even know they *had* a grandma." --Tami Kimmitt "Undergraduates have lots of dreams about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Lots of sexual dreams. You do not have that luxury." --Professor Gerard Russo, ECON606, Micro 1 #11 Jan 03 "Control for whatever factors you want and black people still end up getting a disproportionate number of death sentences. This isn't just an issue of lack of access to good lawyers (which would be bad enough for me) it is an issue of endemic racism in the legal system (which ought to be bad enough for you)." --Zach Miller "Let's be perfectly clear. You cannot have a war when the so-called enemy has done nothing to provoke you and is absolutely no threat to your national safety and has no significant military force and has negligible chance of even setting off a firecracker near your own overwhelming death machines, and whose only weapons of minimal destruction are the rusty short-range warheads and biochemical agents we sold him 20 years ago, and kept selling to him, even after we knew he was gassing his own people." --Mark Morford, SF Gate #9 Jan 03 "The thing about Clinton, unlike Dukakis, Mondale, and Carter, is that he won the election. Leftists forget how far right this nation really is. The American people demand bad government, and they will not rest until they are, at minimum, tricked into believing they will get it." --Michael Kimmitt "Don't tell ME that I don't understand the difference between special and general relativity, you uneducated turd-boy. I'll distort your timespace continuum into next WEEK." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #8 Jan 03 "Every election we're more liberal in how conservative we allow our moderates to be." --Zach Miller #4 Jan 03 "The making of language and mythology are related functions; your language construction will breed a mythology." --J.R.R. Tolkien "It's a new development, and a disgusting one. Half the words in IMSA's Mission Statement are probably in some dictionary these days." --Brent Spillner #3 Jan 03 From the yes-exactly dept.: "I really hope the anti-smoker nazis don't take my quitting as a sign that their billboards and laws and taxes and insults are at all justified. I'm quitting purely for personal health reasons. I wish I could keep smoking, just to piss off those hippie assholes, but alas, I only have two lungs, and I need them for other things." --Jonathan Prykop #15 Dec 02 On the Mother of God: "C'mon, it's a well-established fact that Mary was an alto." --Pat Duggan #12 Dec 02 "One can always burn a cross in the sanctity of one's bedroom." --SC Justice Antonin Scalia #9 Dec 02 "I hang my head and do that little twisty thing with my foot." --Joe Shidle #7 Dec 02 "Gott in Himmel! Die Linuxboxen sind befuckt!" --Joe Shidle #5 Dec 02 "Why does my pocket feel so warm all of a sudden? Huh... my wallet seems to be smoldering... let's see what's going on... Wow. My credit card just burned its way through and seems to be inching towards the keyboard. This could be a problem." --Sam Walker "With English spelling, like Perl, there is often more than one way to do it. But with French, as I understand it, if you misspell something (or, god forbid, mispronounce it) they throw cheese at you then surrender preemptively." --Ponty #3 Dec 02 "Why am I playing this awful music when I have Frank Sinatra?" --Russell Monk #2 Dec 02 "When the astronauts take a leak while on a mission and expel the result into space, it boils violently. The vapor then passes immediately into the solid state (a process known as desublimation), and you end up with a cloud of very fine crystals of frozen tinkle. It is by such humble demonstrations that great scientific truths are conveyed." --Cecil Adams #30 Nov 02 "I used to think of New York as flyover between Chicago and Paris, but now I see that it's a lovely city in its own right." --Michael Kimmitt #23 Nov 02 "Before World War I, ladies did not put on makeup in public for the sensible reason that they were pretending they never wore any. After the war, some of them inaugurated the modern era of fashion by wearing little else." --Miss Manners #21 Nov 02 "Going up against Wal-Mart, well, it can be very expensive to be right." --Tim Storm #17 Nov 02 Coming soon for American audiences! Harry Potter and the Room of Secrets Harry Potter and the Jailbird of Alcatraz Harry Potter and the Cup of Fire --David Singleton #14 Nov 02 "I think I'd need something that ends in -ine to play that game well." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #13 Nov 02 "Now I'm confused and have lost track of the point I was trying to make." --Casey Westerman #7 Nov 02 "A halo has to fall only a few inches to become a noose..." --Dan McKinnon "So this is like that part of the face lift where they cover the face in mud and place cucumbers over the eyes and put bad flash applets in the ears. It all makes sense." --Kevin Price "Man, what are New Mexicans doing in New York anyway? Isn't the INS doing its job?" --Sendhil Revuluri #31 Oct 2002 "Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." --Abraham Lincoln #28 Oct 2002 "I swear something pink just flew past my window and oinked at me." --Kevin Price #27 Oct 2002 "Miss Manners is sorry to inform you that proper school dress is what your parents and teachers deem proper dress, modified by whatever you can manage to do to it that they fail to notice." --Miss Manners #22 Oct 2002 "Iraq's actions right now demonstrate a new grasp by Saddam of a concept Americans seem to have a firm understanding of---actual imprisonment is totally unnecessary if one maintains a credible threat of imprisonment, and leniency towards the dissidents who don't matter can buy you a lot of popular support & trust when dealing with the dissidents who might make a difference." --Jonathan Prykop #21 Oct 2002 "The following story contains graphic violence not suitable for anyone. Parental guidance is suggested. Or you can just staple the kid's eyelids shut. That's not *suggested*, the parental guidance thingy is *suggested*, but we can't deny that staples are a timesaver." --Pete Abrams, Sluggy Freelance #11 Oct 2002 "Those who ignore the dictates of domestic etiquette will have ample opportunity to try the full range of legal and psychiatric solutions, as home life is bound to get worse." --Miss Manners #9 Oct 2002 "And, while I'm not sure how Dildo-Lovin' Dyke In San Francisco will feel about this, I want to emphasize that giving your daughters dildos, as I urged Traumatized Over Youngster to do, will not necessarily turn them into strippers, pro-dommes, and dykes. (Maybe one or two of those things, but the trifecta is rare.) --Dan Savage #5 Oct 2002 "There are a _lot_ of dead people in history." --Claudia Arno #26 Sep 2002 "George W. Bush yields falsehood when preceded by his quotations." --Zach Miller "Still, the most detailed reports of the battle [of the Alamo] come from Mexican soldiers. It turns out that the stirring stories of heroic deeds so cherished by Texans were arrived at mostly by that creative process we call "making it up," the basis of much American history." --Cecil Adams #25 Sep 2002 A man wakes up in Hell and gets the grand tour by the Devil. He says Hell isn't so bad, just not as cushy as Heaven. Heaven has a five-star hotel, Hell has a decent motel; Heaven has an 18-hole golf course, Hell has a 9-hole course. Just then they drive past a fiery pit where several naked people are torturing themselves. 'What about that?' asks the man. 'Oh, that's for the Catholics,' replies the Devil. 'They insisted.' #24 Sep 2002 "Nah, the ungrateful wretches all join the Republican Party as soon as their household income spikes over $40k anyway. If you look closely, you can actually see Condoleezza Rice pulling up the ladder behind her." --Michael Kimmitt "The victories came at a high price, since his best officers and fighters were lost. Well, not "lost," since he knew where they were---dead, mostly." --SDSTAFF Ken #16 Sep 2002 "I mean, virgins are everywhere. There's one up in Ohio, several in the Boston area." --Christopher Gill, HI163, on various interpretations of the Virgin Mary #11 Sep 2002 "Of course, it is illegal to buy fireworks on the reservation and carry them off. But everyone does it anyway. This provides a useful and educational example to children which helps guide their choices when first exposed to marijuana." --Jeff Vogel "In sum, babies have the same, adorable, limitless enthusiasm for exploring the world as puppies. And everyone loves puppies! But while puppies grow up to be big, dumb, slobbering dogs, babies grow up to be people. So babies are better." --Jeff Vogel #9 Sep 2002 "Babies on the other hand, spend the vast majority of their time either i) sleeping, ii) eating, or iii) bitching. Behaviorally, they're a lot like sheep, but without the keen, piercing intelligence. Or the ability to move." --Jeff Vogel "I'm not saying that vaccines should be mandatory, but everyone who doesn't have their infants take advantage of the miracles of modern medicine should be required to either provide a solid health reason why the vaccine will be harmful ("The last one made her burst into flames.") or write a 500 word essay entitled 'Why Polio Isn't So Bad.'" --Jeff Vogel "You ever wonder if there's a Japanese version of UPN that plays a lot of really bad Korean shows?" --Aaron McGruder, "The Boondocks" #6 Sep 2002 "You seem to imply that there's a better way. This is me, being all ears." --Michael Kimmitt "I expect a good deal of the problem is that you are busy disbelieving a different God than the one I am busy believing in." --Larry Wall "You'll find that most of the feature requests are bogus on some level or other because they tend to suggest bandaid solutions. Nevertheless, I think it's best to treat them all as a "cry for help". With computer languages, about 75% of the bandaids have a bullet hole underneath." --Larry Wall #5 Sep 2002 "It's like Return of the Jedi, when a whole planet gets blown up and there's like two seconds of silence, but an Ewok gets conked with a rock and the whole theater bawls for ten minutes. Perspective, people. One life cannot be summarily valued higher than another, and this is a case where omission is a great sin." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney "The difficulty of your life inspires me to become a Russian author." --Matt Zanon "Well, someone come up with a good word that means "person whose name I can put on the same invitation separated by an "and" if I want both people in a couple to show up at my dinner party" yet doesn't indicate what they do with one another in their spare time so as to earn this distinction, and I'll be happy." --Gel Thelen "You can't really get an education if it begins with the premise that there's some book or doctrine that's too dangerous for you." --Janet Cooper-Nelson #4 Sep 2002 "Wouldn't it be nice if just once, on some issue, the Bush administration came up with a plan that didn't involve weakened environmental protection, financial breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations and reduced public oversight?" --Paul Krugman #31 Aug 2002 "There are environmentally aware Americans---they mostly wear beads and live in Seattle. The rest of the nation drives past them hardly noticing their presence." --Justin Webb, BBC #30 Aug 2002 Ill-considered comment #524: "If I ever find myself in the same quotes file as Miss Manners, I'm slitting my throat." --Matt Stanislawski "I blame Martin Luther." --Fr Henry Bodah "Telling people to 'zip up' is never proper unless they are exposing themselves." --Miss Manners #27 Aug 2002 "Jon, didn't you say the table was granite? You don't need coasters unless you plan to set core-temp lava or dildos vibrating at the resonant frequency of quartz on top of it." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney "I always got the impression that Jude was, like, a fixer saint. A Winston Wolf type. He makes your very bad problems go away, but you don't call on him if your problems aren't very bad. He accepts payment in the form of little acknowlegements in the classified section of the Chicago Reader." --Casey Westerman #From alternativefoodcoop.com On organic farms, they till it like it is. #23 Aug 2002 "Is that arrogant enough for you? I'm trying to get in touch with my inner Texan, so that I can properly tell you off, but I'm afraid I've been in California too long." --Al Petrofsky "Suckiness has many orders. Lots of people filter on higher-ordered suckiness factors, like how they perceive the tone of your posts, or whether or not you've demonstrated due diligence in researching their areas of expertise. The thinking goes: if these factors flag suckiness, probably first-order suckiness is also indicated." --Thien-Thi Nguyen #22 Aug 2002 "The usual conservative has to argue against liberal solutions on liberal grounds: e.g. affirmative action is bad because it doesn't treat all races equally; gays are really demanding "special rights". The antidemocrat can argue more directly: he doesn't believe in equality." --Mark Rosenfelder "I distinguish liberals from progressives, who can be recognized theoretically by their belief that The Man is as oppressive as ever, and operationally by their low-circulation magazines, their Volvos, and their Third World jewelry." --Mark Rosenfelder "Liberals believe in equality of opportunity but not of results. In other words, in the game of life we should all start out at about the same place, but there's no maximum level of attainment. That neatly divides us from leftists, who would prefer some sort of ceiling, and from rightists, who don't believe in the level floor." --Mark Rosenfelder Exercises for the Republican reader #1: Write a rebuttal justifying the corporate subsidy of your choice, respecting the conservative principle that the tax system cannot be used for social engineering. --Mark Rosenfelder Exercises for the Republican reader #2: Write a homily, suitable for use in Sunday school, explaining why Jesus should have condemned the sheep who demeaned the poor by feeding and clothing them, and blessed the rich man for living in splendor while Lazarus suffered. --Mark Rosenfelder Exercises for the Republican reader #3: Take your favorite flat tax proposal and your last 1040, and have your accountant calculate how much money it will save you. Find the names of the five or six middle-class people who will have to make up that shortfall, and write them a nice thank-you note. --Mark Rosenfelder Exercises for the Republican reader #4: Compare the GNP with the rate of taxation over the last fifty years---e.g. the boom years of the '50s with their 90% marginal tax rate---and practice explaining that high tax rates discourage investment until you can do it with a straight face. --Mark Rosenfelder "English has more phonemes than the alphabet has available symbols; the usual expedient of the orthography for solving this problem is to use digraphs. Both the problem and the solution are inherited from Latin, which had hardly finished tossing out the Greek letters it didn't think it needed when it started to borrow Greek words that needed them." --Mark Rosenfelder #20 Aug 2002 "Rainbows look pretty a long way off up in the sky, and maybe as a bumber sticker. They do NOT make a good color scheme. The point of having a color scheme is that you, you know, _choose_ colors, not just accept them all. Don't worry. They're just colors. They won't feel offended." --Kevin Colby #19 Aug 2002 "Never underestimate the power of lint." --Eric Blau #16 Aug 2002 "This morning I received a test email I sent from myself, to myself, on the IMSA system shortly after the system changeover. It's passport was completely full of stamps, its tie had some sort of gravy stains on it. There appeared to be blood (maybe mud) on its suitcase. It had a black eye and was roaring drunk. It's 2.5 weeks late, but I think it had a pretty good time." --David Singleton #15 Aug 2002 "Sigh. Once again, [you're] conflating "rich and powerful" with "white male". One is a very very small subset of the other." --Sam Walker #14 Aug 2002 "I honestly feel that the baldfaced lying that the Bush Administration engages in is even worse than Bill Clinton's complicated relationship with objective fact." --Michael Kimmitt #9 Aug 2002 "Money's just a way of keeping score." --H L Hunt "Why would I want to be a middle-of-the-road politician? Ain't nothin' in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadilloes." --Jim Hightower, Texas Ag Commisioner "There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't." --Sam Walker #4 Aug 2002 "If someone said that Jesus Christ would be at the United Center Tuesday night for two hours, to talk to you and listen to your problems, that place would be jam packed full of people. But this is what we Catholics say happens *every week* at Mass." --Fr Victor #31 Jul 2002 The Politician's Slogan: '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 all of the people all of the time. Fortunately only a simple majority is required.' If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed.... #29 Jul 2002 "These anti A&F letters were so persuasive, Mary, that I wish I were hip enough to shop there simply so I could stop doing so." --Eric Zorn 'It both amazes and saddens me that such a purportedly pro-technology school continues to be plagued by IT services that could be charitably described as "careless and uniformed", or as I would put it, "grossly incompetent".' --Kevin Colby "It's all horribly reminiscent of a previous president who had record poll ratings and fought a successful foreign war but couldn't win a second term because he made a mess of the economy. George Bush, prepare to meet your father." --Justin Webb, BBC #26 Jul 2002 #alt.forum "The brilliance in democratic schemes of government is two-fold. One, we don't let any individual player in the government become more of a habit than the government structure itself. And two, by making the government highly accountable to the people, people's dissatisfaction is thrown back on itself; they can't easily depose /themselves/." --Mike McLawhorn #24 Jul 2002 "Mr. Bush is very much from the business wing of the Republican Party while Mr. Ashcroft is more typical of social-issue Republicans who sit in the front pew of the church on Sunday." --Neil A. Lewis, NYT On John Ashcroft: "Losing to a dead candidate is a decidedly unpromising sign about the electoral future." --Neil A. Lewis, NYT "I just assume that good managers secretly schedule these kind of meetings out of the knowledge that effective workers need catnaps from time to time and this is the unspoken time to take those." --Zach Miller #22 Jul 2002 "Man, if they offered the SAT at midnight, that would be such a party. I'd take it every week. I'd be like, hey, let's get ripped and take the SAT again. It'd be better than midnight bowling." --Casey Westerman #18 Jul 2002 "My philosophy is to "educate and then trust the general public". This philosophy is in line with the basic values of democracies. The government's approach to homeland security is "keep everything secret and trust nobody". This is in line with the basic values of authoritarian governments." --John Gilmore #13 Jul 2002 "You've said yourself that North Carolina is changing because of a flood of Northerners coming in and changing the culture. That's great. I'll keep it in mind as a model for fixing the rest of Dixie." --Michael Kimmitt "It is my opinion that, under the social contract, a person is entitled to a set of political freedoms (freedoms to, if you will) and economic freedoms (freedoms from)." --Michael Kimmitt "If Apple really wanted to sell more Macs, they should just show people how it looks when you minimize shit in OS X. I thought I was going to pee my pants." --Tycho "There seems to be this whole bizarre weed etiquette thing that goes on. It doesn't work like food or alcohol or other consumables. People hoard drugs and lie about them and are willing to hurt friendships over access to them, from what I've seen. It's just all very odd and unappealing." --Gel Thelen "US teens invariably report that it is VASTLY more difficult to obtain beer than cannabis or hallucinogens. No one asks them for ID when they try to buy cocaine." --Sam Walker #12 Jul 2002 "Nobody has a sense of history anymore. The modern fan could tell you Barry Bonds' on-base percentage with two outs and runners in scoring position during night games on the road, but he's never even heard of the old St. Louis Browns shortstop Walter "Shitty Batter" Dugan. They called him that because he was a real shitty batter." --Joe Shidle "By the way, I have an upcoming TV appearance--- as a lip-synching member of the chorus in a TV opera about Princess Diana. As the old saying goes, "You should make a point of trying everything once, except incest and folk-dancing", and that was certainly my feeling about this experience." --John Lavagnino #24 Jun 2002 Gus, we love you and we will be here when you need us. Signed, The Moderate Wing of the Democratic Party. --Michael Kimmitt "Maybe "Bob's School of Auto Repair" would have been better for you than a "Math and Science Academy." I mean, really, this is like those people who walked out of the theater remarking that _Dumb and Dumber_ was really stupid. They warned you in the title, people." --David Singleton "We were sitting in a hot truck, just off the bridge, on a one-lane dirt road without a house or another vehicle in sight. It struck me as the perfect place and time for an important conversation." --John Grisham, _A Painted House_ #20 Jun 2002 As I've gained more experience with Perl it strikes me that it resembles Lisp in many ways, albeit Lisp as channeled by an awk script on acid. --Tim Moore "And her face is like a potato only in that it's not anything like a potato." --Kevin Price #19 Jun 2002 "I'm not sure whether this is sarcasm, irony, meta-irony, post-postmodern quasi-meta-ironicism, or mere stupidity." --Pete McFerrin "SKOR! If the director says "well great, we'd love to offer you the position, there's just one little thing...would you suck my cock?" DO IT." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #18 Jun 2002 '...Also, I think the plural of "ex" is "ices."' --Mike Peil "And then there's bash. I mean, BASH? It's like a neanderthal playing in a steel drum band. And sed and awk sound like a cartoon Roman senator cussing. So you've got this cussing Roman senator with a massive forehead playing in a steel drum band, or you've got the ageless wisdom of the clams. Isn't it obvious?" --Jered Wierzbicki #16 Jun 2002 "If the only punishment we can mete out is the direct abuse of innocent shareholders and the indirect approbation of the people who made the decisions . . . I'm not feeling the deterrent. The Death Penalty for corporations just doesn't have the sting of its human counterpart." --Michael Kimmitt "Give a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Light a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life." --Terry Pratchett #13 Jun 2002 "And as with most things I bet the truth is somewhere in the land of moderation. Milk and meat won't kill you, lack of milk and meat won't kill you, milk and meat have some good things for you in them, and they also have some bad things for you in them. Your mileage and your diet may vary and don't forget to exercise." --Zach Miller #SD, 17 Sep 1982 "As for your second question, we must point out that, scientifically speaking, animals always do it for fun. The only critters who do it because they have to are Catholics." --Cecil Adams #12 Jun 2002 "Actually, I've gone beyond 'McCarthy!' and straight into 'Mussolini!'" "Kimmitt deftly avoids Godwin's Law: 2 points." --Michael Kimmitt and Zach Miller #--Michael Kimmitt #--Zach Miller "It's wishful thinking to hope that American fascism will be anywhere near as stylish as conventional fascism. I see a future filled with red white and blue jumpsuits." --Jonathan Prykop #6 Jun 2002 "I was under the impression [Bush] was fairly up front about his advisor-happy leadership style. If I didn't horribly disagree with his basic goals, I'd probably find it commendable." --Jonathan Prykop #4 Jun 2002 "If I were him and somebody gave me a chance to be me, I'd be a lot more excited than *that*." --Lincoln Pierce, 'Big Nate' #3 Jun 2002 "It's not PDA! We weren't making out, we were just french kissing. And it wasn't public, it was on a bus." --Carly Robinson "I was told I would recognise the [Enron] building because it looks like a stick of deodorant. It does, just the right contoured shape for an enormous giant to pick up comfortably in his fist to wipe his armpit with." --Mark Gregory, BBC correspondent #30 May 2002 Sam has not learned To spell hors d'oeuvres Which still grates on Some people's n'oeuvres. --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #22 May 2002 #On slashdot "This is the statistical anomaly that will never happen again. M$ used their one "get to be right for free" card on knocking down RealNames, so it's safe to assume they'll *never* *ever* be right again. Satisfying, in a way." --NoMoreNicksLeft "Finally, now, the baby Jesus!" --Clemency Williams "Actually... it's the animals." --Kim Plofker "Upon reflection, it's just as bad as I thought." --Julia Flanders #20 May 2002 #On Star Wars Episode II: "I still contend that the love dialogue was so bad that it was frighteningly realistic. I could so empathize with Anakin's "I gotta pull shit out of my ass to win her over because I'm such a yutz" approach." --John McFerrin "Of course the flaw in this paranoid delusion is for it to work MS has to offer more than a cheap console and a bunch of crappy games. If all they have to offer for the $10 Ybox is Halo2: More shooting then the gamers will still probably flock to the PS3 with GTA4: Killing some more Hos." --Xenopax NICE BRIDGE. WATCH OUT FOR THE TROLL. --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney "Gordon's is only good for *serious* mixing/jello, and even then only because it's cheap. As a matter of fact, the only good thing about Gordon's is that it's cheap. And at least 80 proof. Two. Two good things." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #18 May 2002 "I'm sure we could manage a reasonable middle ground, what with that "intelligence" and "flexibility" stuff going for us as a species." --Jonathan Prykop #16 May 2002; from 7 Dec 01 article in Yale Daily News "Let's be honest---when was the last time a carrot ejaculated on you at the salad bar?" --Natalie Krinsky "Dear Jack---What's all this nonsense about birth control? We never said anything about birth control. Please check your files and advise ASAP. ---Regards, G. P.S.: Kennedy for President!" --The secret message of Fatima according to Cecil Adams "While Casey is, in fact, a Chick Magnet as such, I feel obliged to point out that I am, in fact, _married_, as such." --Michael Kimmitt #14 May 2002 "Sorry, I didn't mean to engage you in a discussion. Backing off now." --Mike Peil "You can certainly ask yourself "How are we different than the Nazis" and come up with plenty of good answers. But when I start asking, "How are we the same as the Nazis", the answers begin to chill the blood. We may not be genocidal, but we're doing plenty of harm, and our nazionaler rhetoric is doing a great job of hiding our misdeeds from most Americans." --Jonathan Prykop #8 May 2002 "I could answer that question, but then I would put it on the final." --Chris Sedlack "If the Israelis build a wall and pull back the settlements, they will have peace. If the Israelis get UN peacekeeping forces to come in and help with security---and pull back the settlements---they will have peace. If the Israelis take off all their clothes and dance in the sweet Mediterranean rain---and pull back the settlements---they will have peace." --Michael Kimmitt "We arbitrarily named the three versions TOP, MIDDLE, and BOTTOM (the names reflect the order that we wrote them on a white board.)" --McNamara & Smaragdakis, "Functional Programming with the FC++ Library" "This experiment isn't going to be valid, but then, I don't think any of them ever are." --Sharon Goldwater "Some things I do because I loathe the process but enjoy the outcome. I call these 'laundry.' Other things I do because I enjoy the process so much the outcome is secondary. These often have something to do with Will Wright." --Gel Thelen #26 Apr 2002 "If games can't communicate ideas, then why does he care who buys them?" --Penny Arcade "It is essential to the free exercise of a religion, that its ordinances should be administered---that its ceremonies as well as its essentials should be protected.... The sinner will not confess, nor will the priest receive his confession, if the veil of secrecy is removed." --DeWitt Clinton "Yet, as morally as you wage war you cannot wage a moral war." --Yishay Mor "As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves." --Eric Flint "Online piracy---while it is definitely illegal and immoral---is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates." --Eric Flint "Have you ever noticed how it's explicitly legal in Illinois to have gay sex, but explicitly illegal to marry someone of the same sex? People don't mind queers as much when they're acting like they're "supposed to"---promiscuous, flaming, singing musical theatre. It's when queers ask to be respectable citizens that people get really up-in-arms." --Jonathan Prykop "I know that physics conventions are sort of blacklisted from Vegas these days. Of course, I think that had more to do with the fact that physicists know too much math to do a lot of gambling, but I think the prostitutes may also have been underutilized." --Chris Sedlack "Are we talking morose, effeminate, homoerotic vampire, disfigured, bloodsucking freak vampire, brooding, distinguished European royalty vampire, Blackula vampire, or something else altogether?" --Maciej Babinski "It would be awfully embarassing to come back from the dead only to spend your time in jail for insurance fraud." --Mike McLawhorn 'Well, god forbid we require people to actually have a decent vocabulary in order to play well, let alone make the game challenging, so it has been twisted into, "Who can memorize more stupid two-letter combinations that, though not actually words, we slipped into the 'standard' dictionary for this one game."' --Kevin Colby "I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors." --Sir Ian McKellen "Genes don't say "eek!" They mostly just sit there and be transcribed." --David Singleton 'If you assemble 100 gay and lesbian people in a room and ask them, "What's the worst experience you've ever had as a gay man or lesbian?" 95 of them will answer, "Coming out to my parents." (The other 5 will respond, "Being courtmartialed.")' --The Plaid Adder, "The Fine Art of Being Come Out To" 'Many men grow up so focused on following the job-wife-kids-car-condo achievement pattern that it can be years before they find themselves staring very very hard at one of those Hilfiger's ads and thinking, "It's not really the arresting graphic design that's holding my attention, is it?"' --The Plaid Adder, "The Fine Art of Being Come Out To" "It is very likely that you will not realize, say, that your tomboy sister is now a dyke, or that your brother's early interest in Cut 'n' Style Barbie has prepared him for considerably more than his lucrative career in the hairdressing industry, until s/he actually tells you these things." --The Plaid Adder, "The Fine Art of Being Come Out To" "But Ronnie is nothing if not the original Company Boy. He has been tenured into the marrow of the system; he is Hollywood's dearest, most faithful mediocre son, and last night [Oscars 2002] they gave him the party they've been tacitly promising him since 1978." --Cintra Wilson "That sounds like a product of the great game of telephone that much American Protestant theology seems to have become." --Jonathan Prykop On _The Time Machine_ (the 2002 movie): "It starts out slightly silly, then gets annoying, followed by predictable, unintentionally humorous, ridiculous and meaningless, followed by long periods of bad. Then it wraps itself up in blatantly lame with spouts of mere badness and disgust and misery." --The Self-Made Critic "The thing about obviousness is that it's rarely shared between two people." --Shriram Krishnamurthi "If you think about it long enough, you'll see that it's obvious." --Saul Gorn #16 Mar 2002 "Ah, but do spike trains care about *you*?" --Mijail Serruya "Well, yeah. Dilbert is Cathy for self-loathing tech workers." --Casey Westerman "Maybe this summer I'll get some balls and put on a skirt." --Zach Miller "The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses.... Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: 'But it's only fiction, only entertainment.'" --Richard Dawkins "I may---and don't hold me to this---shout "Woo"." --Tycho "I don't feel quite as cute as i used to be, but ah well, we all become hairy old men, even women." --Christopher Baldwin Qui bibit, bis orat (He who drinks, prays twice) -St. O'Gustine --Pat Duggan "I have never even pretended to be as cool as you think you are, Jonathan." --Liz Chilton "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle, and quick to anger." --J.R.R. Tolkien "Every moment someone hangs out with their neighbors is a moment they aren't watching TV is a moment they are closer to the realization that other people are humans too." --Zach Miller "I've got nothing against the people of America, but when they put their collective power and opinions together into a single entity, they become one giant greedy self-righteous asshole." --Jonathan Prykop "If you sealed your status as a social outcast every time you had sex, you'd be pretty angry, too." --Jonathan Prykop #Posted on 8 March 2002: "A smooth plain of glass would make a nice Holy Land IMO. Give people something to look at, and contemplate what happens when so many people are mean, dumb idiots about one particular place." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney "You know what, I really thought people would stop saying things like this after 9/11. But I guess now I know how long it takes to forget the existence of innocent bystanders---three days short of six months. I should write that down." --Casey Westerman "There have been parents who have considered wealth when choosing godparents in the hope that these tasks would be performed lavishly. Such ulterior motives need concern you only to the extent of resolving to work extra hard at teaching spirituality to a child from a morally disadvantaged home." --Miss Manners "Giving a reception for your intimates to meet your baby is a beautiful idea, provided that you do not attempt to make it a pseudo-christening. Hopelessly irreligious people should have the courage of their lack of convictions." --Miss Manners "Judaism. Isn't that one of those weird religions practiced in big cities?" --Sam Walker "A proper baseball team is composed of gentlemen who remember to wear hats outdoors and observe traditional patterns, such as taking turns and spitting on their hands." --Miss Manners "Christian symbol? I thought this was the Celtic death god of the wood!" --Terry Landry "Common names are bad. Unlisted numbers are tricky. States where you need to prove you're related to obtain official records are a challenge. People with no affiliations with organizations, too. Not knowing a state or city---annoying. Those who never get arrested or do anything noteworthy in their communities---frustrating. The uberchallenge, though, is trying to find someone who never existed in the first place." --Gel Thelen "All daytime events were properly referred to as "morning" ones, regardless of the time; morning calls, for example, always took place in the afternoon. "Morning" simply meant any time before evening; any party that wasn't a "soirée" was a "matinée". The word, from the French for morning, survives in America to designate an afternoon theatrical performance. Don't ever say that Miss Manners never taught you anything." --Miss Manners "The buffet table is properly set so that it would form an attractive pattern if viewed by a guest hanging from the chandelier." --Miss Manners "A host who does not use large plates and huge napkins for a buffet meal deserves what he eventually finds on the rug." --Miss Manners "The correct offer of a drink mentions a choice of specifics ("Let's see: I have gin and scotch, and there's wine if you like, or tomato juice"). The host who asks "What do you want?" and claims to have "everything" deserves to spend an hour making Singapore Slings and Bellinis." --Miss Manners "Abstinence-only sex ed may be stupid and may not work, but it is the only possible option for a lot of folks who have a certain set of beliefs. To fundies, nothing matters more than sex. Once you understand this, you will understand the insanity surrounding homosexuality, abortion, movie ratings, and sex ed. It's all about the sex. It's always about the sex." --Michael Kimmitt "I've found the vast majority of clubs I've gone to have been "too out" for a guy like me who's been out since age 15. I wish I could find a group for meeting & socializing with guys who like to do things besides being gay." --Jonathan Prykop "The only thing worse than a religious hypocrite is an irreligious hypocrite." --Fr Henry Bodah "There are few things as entertaining as watching Jonathan mow the lawn. I've never seen anyone amble/mosey/lollygag behind a mower before." --Kim Kinsella "If the company that invents a cure for AIDS is expected to make their money back in 17 years, why can't we ask the same of the company that markets big-titted lip-syncing chicks and goddamn cartoon *mice*?" --Tackhead "It's said that virgin birth becomes more frequent in turkeys if the female is exposed to semen having a low sperm count---second-rate goods, in other words, which may incline the female to think she'd be better off seeing what she could whip up on her own." --Cecil Adams "w/r/t self-determination: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The rules changed in 1918. Period. Historical examples before then are not analogous to examples after then." --Michael Kimmitt "Because one cannot whip out a small tray, load on the salt and pepper, and pass that to the person, the next best thing is to set it down within that person's reach. Also, manners require passing both the salt and pepper together, even when only one is requested. They get lonely if separated." --Miss Manners "Since children consider that their entire childhoods are, by definition, embarrassing, it requires some delicate negotiation on the part of parents to convince them that certain stories do not reflect upon them adversely. The word "cute" should be omitted from such an argument." --Miss Manners "The idea that one should marry the boy or girl next door was not just a bit of homely romanticism; it was a logistically brilliant wedding plan." --Miss Manners "Accustomed as Miss Manners is to denouncing snoops, she is much too atwitter with curiosity to manage doing it here. What on earth are you people reading? "Swinging With Dick and Jane"? "Recognizing the Rodents in Your Kitchen"? And, if so, why don't you tuck them behind "Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything," where no one will ever find them?" --Miss Manners "Each person is responsible for carrying his or her own shielding and mopping device. It is called a handkerchief. (Miss Manners has heard tell that there is an ersatz version of this in paper, which she reluctantly supposes would also accomplish the job.)" --Miss Manners "The belief that humanity gets more depraved with each succeeding generation is a source of comfort to parents and children alike, but neither history nor literature supports it." --Miss Manners "It is said that to speak Italian correctly, one must sing it. In my experience, to speak Italian correctly, one must whine it, preferably to one's mother." --Michael Kimmitt "As a sailboat owning Orienteer, I can assure you contour following doesn't work well on the water and reentrants are really hard to see." --Gerard Weatherby "Why do I get the feeling that, though these are on the list of things which, like humping the wall, the window, or your wife in public when shnockered, endear you to your friends, your wife may not necessarily appreciate them on a day-to-day basis?" --Liz Chilton "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --Carl Sagan "You know, love the mother, hate the psycho evil born-again cult." --Joe Shidle "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Twenty, if they're doing a foxtrot. Goes down considerably for polkas." --Michael Feltes "I've come to think of life as a neverending attempt to hit moving targets, and things like spirituality and religion are attempts to slow down the target so that you can nail it real good once or twice before it slips away and you have to start running again." --Bob Murching "Blowjobs with teeth are like industrial fireworks---fantastic when used by experts; likely to cost you an appendage when used by a novice." --Kevin Colby "The Supreme Court would have been irrelevant if Gore's campaign hadn't been run like an eighth grade class council effort." --Pete McFerrin Folks, He Isn't Kidding: "I need to keep up on all sorts of interests that might make me want to discriminate against people! It's a lot of work, but someone needs to do it, or else we'd have peace, love, and fellowship for all mankind." --Mark Hardwidge "...much the same way that getting an "American" look is rather rough. I mean, there are a lot of overweight, loud, self-satisfied people in the world, so it's not like our cultural factors are dispositive." --Michael Kimmitt "Why did that plane crash? My understanding is that the investigation is ongoing, but the gist of the current theory can be described as "pilot death." --Michael Kimmitt As the sign in my Women's Clinic puts it: "Never put anything into your vagina that you wouldn't put in your mouth". (OK, I know you wouldn't put a tampon in your mouth either. You know what I mean.) --ruadh On implementing perl on top of scheme: "You say this as if it were a gentle afternoon's exercise, rather than a lifetime of quiet torture." --Simon Cozens "As for God, the guy *invented* the penis. He's gotta be pretty comfortable with it." --Kevin Audleman #16 Nov 2001 "Only dedicated herpetologists could characterize the vista up a turtle's gaping bunghole as a `spectacular view.'" --Cecil Adams #http://www.nation.com.pk/daily/091101/editor/opi6.htm "You should have stuck to your original petty war against the Saudis and, perhaps, you would have brought some change for the better there. Instead, you brought wretchedness to proud but hungry and abused Afghans, with your empty slogans and your money, and showed them a new hell where bombs and chocolates fall from the skies." --Izzat Majeed, in an open letter to Osama bin Laden "True jihad today is not in the hijacking of planes but in the manufacturing of them." --Izzat Majeed "In verse 143 in Sura Al-Bacarah (the Cow), the Almighty says: "And thus have we willed you to be a community of the middle way." It is this God-ordained 'middle way' that we Muslims have lost. And we must find it in harmony with today's and tomorrow's hope for moderation and a better quality of life for us all." --Izzat Majeed "But, but wonky makes me happy. I'm into wonky. It's a thing." --Greg Seidman "Too many people see religious hypocrites and think that the only alternative is to become irreligious." --Fr Henry Bodah "Apple doesn't support the plus sign." --Apple tech support "How do the Talibanies feel about homosexuality? I thought they were against it, but when I hear about their anti-women rules, I have to wonder what they're actually up to." --Mark Hardwidge "It would be relatively easy to form a wheat cartel, seeing as there are many fewer countries which are large-scale producers of wheat than there are large-scale producers of oil. The U.S., Canada, Argentina, Russia, and the Ukraine could basically starve the rest of the world. That is not, however, politically expedient." --Michael Feltes, apparently cribbing from _The Nine Nations of North America_ "Y'know, DMT is produced in a small but measurable amount in the human brain. Should we make brains illegal as well? I know they won't be missed over at the DEA." --Sam Walker "I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan---the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when I heard [Slayer's "Raining Blood"], I just imagined a huge, juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers." --Tori Amos "I would argue that most Americans could tell you that Washington state (or at least, the city of Seattle) is in the Pacific Northwest. I would not necessarily expect them to be able to find any of the following things on a map or a globe, however: 1) Washington state, 2) Seattle, 3) the Pacific, 4) north or 5) west." --Chris Sedlack On the Afghan King in exile: I don't see why you people care about someone running a country who didn't win an election. It's not like that doesn't happen in other places. --Kevin Price "A motherless child is helpless and adrift; even a poor choice is better if it's the mother's." --Eva Schillace #--Eva Sweeney #ling example: neat verb! "I'm more in there if you s/wrong/distasteful/g." --Kevin Colby "I'm pro-abortion for Republicans. Does that count?" --Michael Kimmitt "This is like worrying about Bin Laden trying to get nukes. Sure, it would do a lot of damage, but terrorism is about terror, not weapons of mass destruction. If there is anything to be learned here, it is to stop layering on more armor on our helmet and notice the fact that we have no protection below the knees." --Kevin Colby "I give you my blessing... AND my permission!" --Tevye "We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists." --Thomas Friedman "The only phrase in Klingon I know is "Where is the bathroom?". I keep trying to work it into a joke hinging on "going where no man has gone before" but decided it was too geeky." --Sam Walker Iran's position, paraphrased: "We express our condolences to the United States. We support in principle the United States' effort to rid the world of the menace of terrorism against innocent civilians. Unless the U.S. regards us as guilty of terrorism against innocent civilians. In which case, forget that whole 'support' thing. But we still send our condolences. We cool? *tap tap* Is this thing on?" --Mike Peil Well, I figured it was Anime, and thus I needed to know how japanese it was before deciding if I cared. By "japanese" I mean does it tend to throw out lots of pseudo-mystic crap that never gets even perfunctorially explained? Are all the female voice actors most comfortable conversing in a frequency only heard by dogs? Are there commonly unexpected and earth shattering deus ex machinas, uh, I mean, "plot twists" that happen at the end of every episode then completely ignored in the next episode? Ie: How japanese is it? --Sam Walker "I say to our enemies: We are coming. God may have mercy on you, but we won't." --Sen. John McCain "Saturday, Dolly gets theological: "God never takes a vacation 'cause He can't find anybody good enough to fill in." Poor God. Handcuffed by His high standards. Too bad He can't just slap in two weeks of reruns from 1977, like Bil Keane. And Bil Keane has Jeff Keane to help him out. If only God had a son to help Him out. Oh." --Funny Paper "The war on drugs is over. We lost. You cannot curtail the supply. You can decrease the demand. Change your priorities now." --Charles Lindner If there's a gender trend, I think it's, "Human beings will often choose dishonesty over an irate woman." --Jonathan Prykop "If I ever do get a car it will be something to tinker with and be small, old, and British. Just like my mum." --Simon Jansen "He tried to kiss me. And he kissed like a PEZ DISPENSER! His head fell back 180 degrees, and his tongue popped out!! Like I'm s'posed to give him Communion!!" --Judy Tenuta It is not necessary to say anything the opposite of which is absurd. --Clive Moss "People do what they want to do. Corollary: When people do things, it's because they want to do them. This philosophy saves me a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on trying to figure out other people's motives." --Casey Westerman "Wait, vegans won't eat *honey*!?!? I mean, for goodness sake, they're *bees*. There are *trees* that are higher on the evolutionary scale than bees." --Jonathan Prykop "My impression is that just about every damn thing you can think of makes the baby Jesus cry. The little wanker should grow some thicker skin already." --Chris Sedlack "If it were up to me, Riffany, I would have liked to see it end in compulsory couples ballroom. You expect blood in sudden-death armorball, but it's so much more vivid when it's dealt during a foxtrot." --Schlock Mercenary, Howard Tayler "When I was an altar boy, the most coveted job was to be "thurifer," or incense hassler. This job was great because you got to light the charcoal in the thurible (incense burner) before the service, which gave my natural desire to play with matches a religious significance that I still feel when lighting coals in the Weber." --Cecil Adams "'No Scrubs,' TLC. It begins with a definition. It has axioms. It makes inferences. How cool is that?!" --Annemarie Peil "If [British journalists] want to hole up in their hotels, explore their TV remotes and dream of over-cooked vegetables, warm beer and that elusive invite to their boss's private club, that's their business." --David Staples, Edmonton Journal "While my armpit hair isn't thick and nasty, it has started to reach, God-and-Adam-in-the-Sistine-Chapel-like, for my chest hair." --Joe Shidle "SQL is the Fortran of data bases---nobody likes it much, the language is ugly and ad hoc, every data base supports it, and we all use it." --ORA Lex & Yacc (1992) "The true test of one's sexuality lies in one's attraction to not-beautiful people." --Jonathan Prykop "If AIDS is punishment for promiscuity, are colds punishment for shaking hands? Is cancer punishment for smoking or just living too long? Is heart disease punishment for eating meat? How far does this go?" --Michael Kimmitt "What many straight people don't understand is that for most of us, our lives are as horribly boring as theirs are. The really nice perk, though, is that we have more money for vacations." --Brian Quinby "The only difference in the game of love over the last few thousand years is that they've changed trumps from clubs to diamonds." --The Indianapolis Star Preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words. --St Francis of Assisi "It becomes a faith, not an ideology, when it grows over a lifetime. Because there will be times when you disagree completely with the tenets of Christianity, doubting everything, and yet deep down, you'll still feel Christian. That wouldn't happen to a convert." --Jonathan Prykop "I'm assuming you were just being pithy, and don't actually intend to attempt to back this up." --Mike Peil #27 July 2001 La cucaracha, la cucaracha Ya no puede caminar Porque no tiene, porque le falta Marijuana que fumar. "This was part of the aesthetic of the early seventies in which folk art was judged by its resemblance to marijuana buds and/or bongs. Macrame looked like both, and was smiled upon." --Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg Welcome to Illinois: We may not get the worst weather in the world, but we come in second, in every category. --Sam Walker And the Lord said unto them, "Thou shalt not exceed the speed of Light." And the people did leap and flap their arms, and did run about in circles, and did race though the desert in chariots, yea, even until the wheels did fall off. Yet none could move more swiftly than the Light, and so did the people obey the Lord's command. Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away; and barefoot. --Ancient Chinese proverb On Tomb Raider: "Nonetheless, the movie did have its moments. Especially when they strung Angelina Jolie up and had her kick ass on wires. Unlike Crouching Peter Hidden Pan, the wires were *supposed* to be there, and it kicked all the more butt because of this." --Jonathan Prykop I kind of enjoy holding vociferous opinions, and people are only really allowed to hold vociferous opinions when they know what they're talking about. Morally, I mean---in practice, most people who do hold forth vociferously are painfully ignorant. --Michael Kimmitt The best case: Get salary from America, build a house in England, live with a Japanese wife, and eat Chinese food. Pretty good case: Get salary from England, build a house in America, live with a Chinese wife, and eat Japanese food. The worst case: Get salary from China, build a house in Japan, live with a British wife, and eat American food. --Bungei Shunju "The overwhelming majority of people who feel strongly about consent laws are the teenagers themselves, and they (a) don't vote, and (b) quickly fall into the conservative camp once they have kids of their own. A close runner-up is the powerful NAMBLA lobby, but politicians are curiously unwilling to publicly align themselves---or appear to publicly align themselves---with the pedophilia bloc." --Mike Peil "Sadly, the G.I. Joe cartoon never really bothered to tell us what the other half the battle was. Perhaps it is composed of a dozen or so smaller things, all individually negligible in the face of knowing." --Chris Sedlack "What's jousting? Jousting is when two guys strapped in armor charge their horses at each other while trying to knock the holy bejeesus out of each other with long wooden poles. Or one guy on a flying bird trying to turn enemy birds into eggs. Depends on what generation you belong to." --The Self-Made Critic On Unbreakable: "It's times like this when I wonder why everyone else's taste in movies SUCKS. Tori, I can find you many beautifully filmed movies that don't drag on like a homily in latin." --Jonathan Prykop "It's not that it's impossible to be intelligent and a member of both the NRA and an anti-abortion group. It's just that it's not done." --Michael Kimmitt "What is 'correct' usage? We have no king to establish the King's English; we only have the President's English, which we don't want." --William Zinsser #Ben Gertzfield Witty Comeback to Unwanted Proposition #3: "Sorry, baby, my sign is Parking in Rear Only." "There is, after all, nothing in the definition of `tree' that specifies which sense of `plant' is the appropriate superordinate. That specification is omitted on the assumption that the reader is not an idiot, a Martian, or a computer." --George A. Miller "I'll make it real simple. I'm a 36-C. In the game, she's a double-D. In the movie, she's a D. We split the difference." --Angelina Jolie, on her role as Lara Croft Again, Rehnquist, et al. see, in microscopic fine print at the end of the fourth and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, the following phrase: "except in the case of enforcement of controlled substance laws." I don't know why this is, but it is. --Michael Kimmitt "When the turn of the millennium came and went without eschatological immanentization, I decided I should probably enroll in Dramatic Criticism, so that I could graduate." --Jonathan Prykop On dramatic criticism: "like sodomy, it's one of those things that will never sound fun unless you actually try it, so I'm not even attempting to make it sound fun here." --Jonathan Prykop "The 'A' is for content, the 'minus' is for not typing it. Don't ever do this to my eyes again." --Professor Ronald Brady, Philosophy, Ramapo State College "The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again." --George Miller "My body hair provides me with a natural AC of 7." --Jonathan Prykop "After all, deleting e-mail all day builds up an appetite. And what better way to fill that craving than with a protein-rich square of salty, pink pork." --Wired "well *I* use triple-rot13 ... nyah nyah nyah" --Skapare "In my experience, God's pretty two-faced when it comes to micromanagement. I mean, one minute God'll be all, "Jonathan, I'm making you team-leader on this one," but then whenever I try to *accomplish* anything God's all like, "I'm going to make a few revisions or this will never fly with Marketing," and next thing I know I'm playing minesweeper all day and God's smiting half my department." --Jonathan Prykop "Medical marijuana is a gateway drug, and many who use it go on to use even stronger stuff---even engaging in full-blown chemotherapy." --The Onion "Looks are nice, but when the lights are out all you have is sex and conversation. Sex takes very little to do badly, and either a lot of practice and/or a lot of creativity and/or a lot of energy to do well. Conversation relies solely on personality. Overall, personality is what makes one person more appealing than another." --Greg Seidman "The Chinese government is repressive---sort of like US big-city police departments, but less oversight." --Michael Kimmitt "He's just not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But that's what we get when Democrats run awful campaigns. Really, Democratic candidates should be more mindful of their responsibility to protect this country from their opponents." --Michael Kimmitt "I really don't feel like studying. Hm, maybe I'm hungry." --Emi Iwatani When you share wealth, you divide it. When you share knowledge, you multiply it. --Krishnaiah Revuluri "Pay no attention to Anand---he was born without taste. "Dancer in the Dark" is the best musical since "Singing In the Rain"." --Casey Westerman "I meet clumps of intelligent people worth knowing all the damn time. Most of them are involved in multiple meaningful social groups. I dunno ---maybe your problem stems from the fact that you know too many Catholics and not enough Jews." --Casey Westerman "Regular expressions are their own little language nestled inside of Perl. (There's a bit of the jungle in all of us.)" --_Programming Perl_, 3e "Today, 30 years into feminism, we have models who look not just weak and unsophisticated, but also dumb and victimized.... Is this how women in fashion see themselves?" --Karen Lehrman "Recent fashion photography also is more than a bit misogynistic. If photographers and editors really cared about the role of women in society, they would use models above the age of 20, who look like they could complete a sentence." --Karen Lehrman "Infinity+1 must be prime. Multiply all the positive integers together, and you get positive infinity. So infinity must be congruent to 0 modulo every positive integer. Therefore, infinity+1 must be congruent to 1 modulo every positive integer larger than 1. So, it has no natural divisors other than 1; therefore, infinity+1 is necessarily prime." --Brent Spillner "I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.'" --Richard Jeni #*screen* wipes in pdf format.... "...I've been fucking with wipes for over three hours." --Greg Seidman "Isn't having a smoking section in a restaurant like having a peeing section in a pool?" "Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid." --Don Knuth "Fraternal twins develop from separate eggs and are no more closely related than ordinary siblings, except that they spend nine months sharing an extremely small bedroom." --Cecil Adams "Verbs don't work! Verbs don't work!" --Andrew McClain "Water, water, everywhere, nor any a drop to drink." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, _The Ancient Mariner_ "We produce way way more pollution and CO2 per capita than any other country in the world. A global treaty which did not treat the US as the largest polluter would be a complete waste of time." --Michael Kimmitt "The "melting pot" theory works in some areas in the larger cities. The "salad bowl" theory works rather well for other towns and cities. But I propose a third theory that covers vast areas of the US. The "child's plate" theory. In this theory all of the foods are separated into their own groups and if the ketchup touches the green beans all hell breaks loose." --Brian Pyle WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR JOBS. --Mike Peil "Character is what you are in the dark." --Dwight Moody "I'm not an idiot, and if I really cared about any of that "to wit" shit I would have wasted years of _my_ life in some law school." --Brent Spillner Thursday also happens to be "take our children to work day" at IBM. If you seem significantly taller and less rambunctious than the other participants in the conference room, check whether you have inadvertently signed up for an event at "take our children to work day". If so, return to the lobby and re-register. --PL Day Info, IBM "A cure for those bugs that eat cloth, Is steal," said old Heinrich the Goth, "A flatulent pony." .... He's wrong, but if only... A stolen roan gasses no moth. # Can't Touch This "Povsyuda idu, iz Londona do "da Bay," I vsegda "Hammer idi, Hammer yo, Hammer M.C. Hammer, I drugiye mogut idti igrat'!" --translated by Mike Peil YA VELIKOYE KORNHOLIO! YA TREBUYU T-P DLYA SVOYEVO BUNGHOLA. --Mike Peil #Fascinating grammar example: "Scared of relationships? I think that's chick polite speak for you don't make the introducing to her friends cut." --Gel Thelen Mein bratwurst has a first name, It's F-R-I-T-Z, Mein bratwurst has a second name, It's S-C-H-N-A-C-K-E-N-P-F-E-F-F-E-R-H-A-U-S-E-N. --Tony Nuval "...but anyone who sees you surfing foxwomen in bikinis will assume you're also surfing wolfwomen getting anally shagged by iguanamen." --Joe Shidle "The purpose of Historical Jesus seminar is to place the Bible in context by understanding the events surrounding it. This is essentially inimical to Protestant Fundamentalists, as it requires them to actually analyze Biblical texts, a process to which their faith simply cannot stand up." --Michael Kimmitt "Set me free by the Zuider Zee and let me roam in my sabots through the polders." --Zashikibuta Actually, it's the dice that play God with the universe. "`You gave me some joy but not a whole lot'... you just can't report that as `filled my life with joy'." --Polly Jacobson "The American Revolution was in large part a revolt against corporations, which are bodies formed to allow rich people to shirk responsibility for abuses. The Founding Fathers thought corporations immoral, and they were illegal here during the first 50 years of the Republic." --The Progressive Review "It looks like a tiger, it quacks like a tiger, but it's actually a Martian robot." --Polly Jacobson # ~28 Mar 2001, in Bermuda On why that marriage just wouldn't work: "In every way that could possibly matter, you have a higher metabolism than I do." --Greg Seidman "As soon as they tell me, I'll be on it like "uh" on a switchboard corpus." --Don Engel "We think different problems are attacked better in different languages, and that software engineers and computer scientists should not be restricted to a single semantic arrow in their quivers." --Weiser, Demers, and Hauser, _The PCR Approach to Interoperability_ Even now, in the nostalgic glow of nonpartisanship, I am tempted to point out that, in his otherwise carefully composed self-encomium, Clinton's "working together, America has done well" is a prime example of a dangling modifier. It could be corrected by changing the subject "America" to "Americans" or "the American people," which would be a plural subject that could be "working together." But in the father of our country's paraleiptic tradition, I will pass over this grammatical lapse in utter silence. --William Safire, 2 Feb 01 "You come in wearing ties sometimes. I think you need to go listen to some David Bowie or something." --Shriram Krishnamurthi, to deengel # BDH; 15 Mar 2001 "As for smell, there is so much damn marijuana, incense, sweat, and semen in the air at Brown that anyone with a working nose should be appalled at that, not smoking." --Amy Lichtenbaum "What matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed." --British Medical Journal "Drowning in cheese is not a kosher death." --Don Engel "Oh, wait, *I* was talking! I got us confused." --Don Engel The Joys of Finnish: "Kokko, Kokoon koko kokko." ("Kokko, gather together the whole bonfire.") "Kokoko kokko?" ("The _whole_ bonfire?") "Koko kokko, Kokko." ("The whole bonfire, Kokko.") --Eric Dahlman "I will comment, however, that it seems that whoever is baking Jesus for mass these days is using more sugar. There was a distinctly sweet overtone on [Ash] Wednesday that I don't recall being there before." --Tori Bryan #--Tori O'Neal "I am not going to be suddenly, unexpectedly having sex! I am not going to look down and say, `Oh my, what *is* that wrapped around my waist??'" --Greg Seidman "Note that these probabilities encode some facts that we think of as strictly syntactic in nature, as well as facts that we think of as more culturally based (like the low probability of anyone asking for advice on finding British food)." --Jurafsky & Martin Ch. 6 "I don't have to be subject to the tyranny of AltaVista." --Stan Zdonik "FOR THE LOVE OF ST ISIDORE WHEN WILL TEMPLATES FINALLY WORK?" --Scott Swanson "It's still possible to get locked out of a private home, but usually this requires the help of another in the form of a playful spouse, rowdy friends, or just a toddler who pulls closed a door for whatever reason toddlers do most things." --Snopes "I can't believe anyone on the same ideological sub-continent as Stephanie Pace Marshall would condone such an act. I refuse to believe it." --Jered Wierzbicki "Oh, wait. You're in California, where they put their hands over their ears and go "lalala" when urban blight is mentioned. No wonder." --Pete McFerrin "He wants a patron saint. I think he should just whine to the Virgin Mary more." --Eric Stuckey "'Temptation Island' ... 'frat boy' ... 'business major' ... 'sorority girl' These are the important keywords involved in this little bourgeois puzzle." --Matt Stanislawski "*Everyone* knows the Painful Chill of Nonexistence. That's high school." --Sam Heath "To be sure, being forced, physically or through peer pressure, to 'chug' beer is not an obstacle. It's a stupid, dangerous, self- destructive act. Who's more of a pansy? The guy who won't chug the beer, or the guy who lets himself be browbeaten into a pointless and stupid act?" --Scott Harman "These conditions can signify one of two things: (1) some horrible disease, trauma, or other problem, or (2) nothing." --Cecil Adams "Some men think a green-eyed woman is exotic. The truth is she's got fat eyes." --Cecil Adams "Masturbation is a normal part of human sexuality and about the safest sex there is. You won't contract any sexually transmitted diseases or cause an unintended pregnancy, and you don't have to worry about performance anxiety or ever leaving your partner unsatisfied. And really, there's no need not to respect yourself in the morning, unless you didn't respect yourself before." --SDSTAFF Jill "If we get into the voucher thing, everybody is going to position themselves, and they are going to scream and yell for the cameras, and nothing is going to get done." --Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago On the relationship between the US and Cuba: "First of all, biology works. Someday Castro will be gone." --Madeleine Albright "[Pagers] retain the upper hand over mobile phones, thanks to fears the latter may interfere with delicate hospital equipment. At least that's what your doctors will tell you if they trade in their pager for a new putter or four iron." --BBC "After this semester, it will all be better." --Joe LaViola "After this semester, it will all be better." "You say that every semester." "It's different this time!" --Joe and Dave #--Joe LaViola #--Dave Gondek "I tend to look for weak, uncertain students and feed off of their insecurities; by preying on their poor self-images, I manage to temporarily assuage my own feelings of inadequacy and failure. I've also found undergraduate advising to be a terrific vehicle for venting a lot of my own pent-up rage and frustration." --Olin Shivers "I think men band together for stupidity." --Ranyee "Well, everyone needs a cause." --Celeste "warning: resume: target already running. Pretend to resume, and hope for the best!" --gdb warning message Why is Brent boycotting Pillsbury? "It's because that doughboy is in a Navy uniform, and Brent thinks he's gay." --Eric Stuckey On wedding receptions: "Is God going to be offended because I didn't spend half a year's salary feeding bland catered food to everyone I ever met once, making them dance to "whomp there it is", and providing them with the means to get trashed?" --Tori Bryan #--Tori O'Neal "If you /did/ get action, you wouldn't be as whiny and annoying and unenviably wretched as you are. Jesus, do you even masturbate? That might help take the edge off." --Amanda Wozniak On the 2000 election: "Ah, hell, let's junk it all and switch to an enlightened monarchy ruled by a benevolent philosopher-king. I think Kimmitt would be up to the job." --Pete McFerrin "I'm just a cranky old alum out looking for trouble. Clearly I've found the right place." --Eric Stuckey "The statement that people are rational and we just can't figure out the function they use is something I would expect from someone who had made that assumption without actual study to back it up. It's the same failing economists have." --Eric Stuckey Dance is not the answer. Dance is the question. "Yes!" is the answer. "I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance." --Nietzsche "[Ballroom Dancing] just gets more exciting the more you know about it, which is why you have to do well at school so you can spend the rest of your life supporting your habit. Just don't plan to marry anyone who dislikes dancing; it'll probably win in the end!" --Kay Teague, YCN Coordinator "Uh-oh, Ryan. You're starting to base your religious beliefs on an experiential relationship with God. It's all downhill from here, y'know." --Jonathan Prykop "The removal of a man's balls, I decided, turns him into his parents." --KKBattousai "I was a huge fan of "True Love Waits," until I came out of the closet." --Jonathan Prykop "That [virginity] pledgers who have sex are likely to be contraceptively unprepared is to be expected, for it is hard to imagine how one could both pledge to be a virgin until marriage and carry a condom while unmarried." --Federal study on virginity pledging "Toss out words like "sexual behavior of teenagers," "virginity" and "highly effective" and the parents of adolescents claw their way to newsstand and keyboard in a panicky search for enlightenment, looking, always, for relief from the kind of angst they heaped on their own elders just long enough ago not to remember." --Salon "I don't know, Dave, you don't sound much like an Asian whore." --Greg Seidman "I don't like substance use." --Dave Gondek "That's 'cause you're not good at it." --Don Blaheta "Grad school applications are even hard for non-smokers." --Arun Bhalla "2000." "That is *so* last year." "You... ninny!" --Dave Gondek and Greg Seidman, 15 Jan 2001 #--Dave Gondek #--Greg Seidman "Sex of any kind is likely to be `beautiful' only to the participants." --Orson Scott Card #On PR account executives... "Everyone hates flacks. Journalists hate them because they think they're incompetent whores. Businesspeople hate them because they think they're incompetent whores. And flacks hate themselves because deep down inside they suspect that they might be incompetent whores." --Forbes "If there are environmenalists out there who would be physically capable of wanting Gore to win, there must be some who would be capable of wanting Bush to win." --Zach Miller "Food are *always* in caves. They're like the grocery stores of the ancient world." --Sam Heath "I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for things." --Casey Westerman "That's called your aortic cavity and you really shouldn't put things there." --Mike McLawhorn "FIGHTING IGNORANCE SINCE 1973 (it's taking longer than we thought)" --www.straightdope.com "I have been very displeased to find the term "diva" applied to every off-key warbler with a video and a vagina." --Johnny Atomic "Nobody likes us independents. All we do is swing elections." --Jack Mabley "I believe it is against my religion to impose my religion on others." --John Ashcroft "My biggest concern in the 107th Congress is that Bill Clinton will be with my wife in the Senate spouses club." --Sen. Gordon Smith, R-OR On the Supreme Court decision about the 2000 election: "No, they just followed the principle of "one person, one vote." And Gore lost the election, 5-4." --Michael Kimmitt Cut from Gore's concession speech: "Despite the fact that this election, in the end, failed to represent the will of the American people, either through a pure majority or through the careful balances of our electoral system, we must all rally behind president-elect Bush, signaling to the world that America will remain united even during our collapse." --Jonathan Prykop "...and Paul put his on top for extra pressure." --Hilary Mason IMSAns clump. --Neil Krasovec "Really, um, I'm pretty happy that numbers are primitives." --Don Blaheta Yeah, well I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art." --plunge #bookmark "Concerns that the most recent Chernobyl problems were somehow caused by a Mongol Feudal Age rush are probably overstated." --Adrenaline Vault I don't know why, but it's true; I always mix up the numbers five and seven. "I think this country's intolerance toward alcohol has a lot to do with the revivalism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries." --Pete McFerrin "I think this country's intolerance toward everything has a lot to do with the revivalism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries." --Kiersten Kerby "Gore is a rusty spike in the gut to Bush's rusty spike in the head." --Zach Miller Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule---and both commonly succeed, and are right. --H. L. Mencken I know nothing about this subject but I do have prejudices, which I am more than happy to share with you. --Leon Botstein If a disorganized desk is a sign of a disorganized mind, of what then is an empty desk a sign? --Albert Einstein The people who vote decide nothing. The people who count the vote decide everything. --Stalin (apocryphal) Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. --Groucho Marx Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves. --Ronald Reagan #http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/newsid_1048000/1048022.stm # 30 Nov 2000 "Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou art more compact and more. She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa." --Sean Thomas, winner of 2000 Bad Sex Award "Haskell is like Mao. They keep redefining it and they don't tell you. Nobody *really* knows all the rules." --David Tucker On drug-search roadblocks: "The checkpoint program is also not justified by the severe and intractable nature of the drug problem. The gravity of the threat alone cannot be dispositive of questions concerning what means law enforcement may employ to pursue a given purpose." --SC Justice Sandra Day O'Connor "Jesus powered off so that all men might power on again." --Squeeze Truck In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was Chocolate. And The Word became flesh, and dwelt upon us forever. (Confections 1oz:360cal) "When they come for the innocent without crossing over your body, cursed be your religion and your life." --Anon (often quoted by Dorothy Day) ``"Slippery slope"? Christ, guys, we went power-diving down the slippery slope of not having mandatory location when NSI shrugged its shoulders and said "eh" to letting fuck all in .net and .org. Of course, note that NSI urges you to "Protect your identity!" by registering all three, now.'' --Spinn "I called 'DO-OVER'!" "But I called 'NO DO-OVERS'!" --Gore and Bush, according to Tom the Dancing Bug "I was already being irresponsibly holy by reading your paper; I have to get to bed. My circumstances have made your words haughty." --Jonathan Prykop Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). --The Revocation of Independence "You are a man of deep personal faith, and one of the ways you express that faith is to masquerade as a Christian, pushing children into making self-inconsistent statements. Then you sit back and remark that your faith is superior, because you made a child angry and confused. You're a sadist, and you have no business fouling this notesfile with your presence." --Michael Kimmitt "You can't just point hundreds of thousand of users to a small web site and not expect to kill it. Nevermind one in JAPAN for gods sake. The whole damn place is connected to the net with 4 AOL accounts, 2 deaf monks doing sign langauge and a very tiny guy in a suit that just got tired of the lag and decided to get out and push." --Hardwyred "That's OK---for every vote cast by someone like you, there should be one vote cast by someone who dislikes funny names, cancelling each other out and leaving the decision up to the informed voters. As a bonus, you have plenty of time to get a voter's guide or surf the internet for information to help you decide which candidate you would have voted for if you had informed yourself, so you will have someone to root for when the results come in." --Jacob Weber "Sleep is for those who don't know how to tango." --Jonathan Sadler "You leave my xyphoid process alone!" --Hilary Mason Mark: "Why do you think that the vast majority of people considers homosexuality to be evil and disgusting, but not too many feel the same way about usury?" Mike: "Because the Christian Right doesn't spend all its time trying to keep credit cards out of the military." "All of these solutions suffer from the same drawback; the macro writer is responsible for their realization. If he is negligent, the macro is insidious." --Eugene Kohlbecker, "Hygienic Macro Expansion" Marijuana is what is known as a 'gateway drug'. This means that kids move on to harder drugs after trying it and finding out that it's not nearly as good as all the warnings against it would have them believe. "In other words, orbital radius is independent of planetary mass, so despite the loss of 1/81 of the combined terralunar bulk, orbitwise the earth would rock on." --Cecil Adams "I don't want nations feeling like that they can bully ourselves and our allies. I want to have a ballistic defense system so that we can make the world more peaceful, and at the same time I want to reduce our own nuclear capacities to the level commiserate with keeping the peace." --George Bush, Jr. "I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question." --George Bush, Jr. "No, really, the Republicans are just evil. They hide it for a few years, but then they give up and just go, `You're evil. We're evil. Vote for us.'" --Michael Kimmitt "The only difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock." --Ralph Nader "You assume that everyone in the united states thinks it is not only romantic but necessary /and/ morally imperative for them to register their love with the proper authorities. Why? Do you say these things /just/ to get on the nerves of people who don't share your moral views?" --Kiersten Kerby "What do you think---gay super hero?" --"Jeffrey" (Sterling) "Joe, it's *not* natural ability. It's these pheromones I buy off the internet." --Dave Gondek "So diaeresis causes vowel movement?" --Joe Lee "When a character dies, his soul immediately departs. Getting it back into the body is a major hassle." --D&D Players' Handbook, 3e "If you refuse to take any medication, I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR YOU WHINING!! I don't CARE if you are Southern Californian & think that "Western medicine" is insufficiently life-affirming or whatever." --Stella*Fantasia "So, what's the lesbian life like?" --Zach "DRAMA." --Danah "There's nothing more annoying than being unexpectedly assaulted by the theme to "The Facts of Life"." --Chris Sedlack "Well, I don't think being assaulted by Natalie herself would be any picnic." --Brent Spillner "Not so much a tree, as a forest of small saplings." --Greg Seidman "Their problem is that they don't stand up for what is right, but rather their own crazy ideas." --Mark Hardwidge, on Afghanistan "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." --Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending A Staircase "(9b) is true even if Capone didn't pull the trigger himself, because he bears the responsibility for the action (the difference being that responsibility tends not to carry over to non-sentient parts of an agent, though Capone's bad liver may have had something to do with it)." --Fred Landman In the bedroom, the quiet bedroom, John Bobbitt sleeps tonight. In the kitchen, the quiet kitchen, Lorena grabs a knife. A wiener whack, a wiener whack, ... --craw #From West Wing, "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" Why do Frenchmen only have one egg for breakfast? Because in France, one egg is un oeuf. "It is not considered the pinnacle of programming propriety for folks from outside the class to come waltzing into an object, brazenly accessing its data members directly." --Perl OO Tutorial "Why the underscore? Well, mostly because an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer." --Perl OO Tutorial "It's about software reuse, and therefore related to Laziness, the principal virtue of a programmer." --Perl OO Tutorial Early to rise, early to bed makes a man groggy, grumpy, and dead. --Chronos #Posted by cove A man was sentenced to five years in prison last week for having sex with a horse. When will men learn that neigh means neigh? "Anyway, when dealing with the questions economics generally attempts to address, such as "How can we all get rich together?" or "What the hell is going on over there in Japan?" the fundamental value of human life doesn't come up much." --Michael Kimmitt "What I can't get over is that people in Wisconsin or Norway or wherever will buy and presumably drink an ice-cold Coke in the middle of winter. It's supposed to be the pause that refreshes, not that gives you hypothermia." --Cecil Adams "Generation X... grew out of MTV, which came into being because advertisers found it handy to have young people stripped out from the rest of us so they might be more accurately targeted." --NYT, 13 Aug 2000 "My friend Dave smokes dumpsters full of dope every other day and it hasn't turned him into a lesbian, so it's probably not the weed. Maybe it's your diet. Have you tried cutting out dairy?" --Dan Savage "Ya Slim Shady, nu ya nastoyashoye Shady; Vsye iz drugikh Shadys prosto sdyelayut vid." --Mike Peil Once if by LAN, twice if by C. "You're wrong." "No, you're wrong." "Oh, yeah, well, you're gonna go to hell!" "Oh YEAH? Well, uh...YOU'RE THE ANTICHRIST!" "That's it. You get out of here, right now!" "You can't kick me out, because I'M LEAVING!" "FINE!" "FINE!" --A dialogue between the Pope and Luther, by Jonathan Prykop #--Jonathan Prykop "Dude, a womb is just a really cool specialized body cavity. We can clone you some uteral tissue, redirect some arteries to keep it alive, give you lots of supplemental hormones, and extract the kid by surgery. Use your imagination." --Mike McLawhorn "Erotic is when you do something sensitive and imaginative with a feather. Kinky is when you use the whole chicken." #Quoted in _The Java Programming Language_, 2e "Computers are useless---they can only give you answers." --Pablo Picasso #Quoted in _The Java Programming Language_, 2e "A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit." --The US Army's _PS_ magazine, August 1993 On Microsoft developers supporting Microsoft: "So, the bottom line is: you don't care if it's all just a big circle jerk, because as long as you're in the circle, you're getting your pecker pulled." --Tony Shepps "Vimes had noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: It fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination---but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato." --Terry Pratchett, _The 5th Elephant_ "This, too, shall pass." --Eastern proverb "The best thing about Chicago (as opposed to, say, California or New York) is that it doesn't have a lot of twerps running around yapping about how great it is to be there. Everybody just *knows*." --Brent Spillner A quick brown fox jumps a lazy dog. # http://www.sacbee.com/voices/national/barry/barry_20000618.html "The national sport of Germany is stickling." --Dave Barry "When you farm corn, you farm corn all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day!" --Gel Thelen "Are you comparing my genitalia to my chest?" --Loring Holden "What? Coffee's a little like chocolate. It's more like chocolate than, say, eggs." --Greg Seidman "Congratulations. You're no longer incoming, you're incame." --Greg Seidman "Boy bands are like barbershop quartets gone horribly wrong." --Greg Seidman "I've whipped it out four times tonight!" --Don Blaheta "I would say Lotus Notes was a tool of the devil, but I'm guessing he uses more efficient communication methods." --Mark McCarthy # For his 'playwrighting' class "I'm here to beg for an incomplete. I just got way bogged down this quarter... and I looked at my `To-do' list a few days ago and noticed it looked a lot like the course syllabus...." --Jonathan Prykop "Life is like a sewer---what you get out of it depends on what you put into it." --Tom Lehrer "From what I gather, physics is a lot like Catholic theology. If you think you've found a contradiction, 99.9999% of the time it's just because you don't know enough or are using a simplified model." --Jonathan Prykop "Also, if you must get drunk enough to puke, do it in the mulch." --Greg Seidman "NO! There is no repenting. This is not religion, it's computer science." --Don Blaheta There was once a grape that simply lived to lie about in the sun. It was his raisin d'etre. "My professor has +10 charisma and Bracers of Belgianness." "I *knew* there was a reason I wore a skirt today." --Laura, _High Fidelity_ « Être ou ne plus être ? C'est la question. » "People say losing builds character. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. All losing does is suck." --Charles Barkley, 9/29/96 Nobody ever looks like Joe McCarthy. That's how they get in the door in the first place. "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again." --Marin County newspaper's TV listing for The Wizard of Oz "he couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag if his life depended on it." "who would code their way out of a paper bag? anyone who does that needs to learn some problem solving skills." --anonymous rumours "In general a COACH is a chartered comfortable form of bus (often advertised as "executive travel"), whereas a BUS is a public conveyance and is therefore bumpy, noisy and late." --UK English for the American Novice "CURRY HOUSE n. 1. Indian restaurant. These typically serve dishes which use the curry spices which you will: a) like or b) dislike." --UK English for the American Novice "Note that DIGS is always plural, as in: `Have you got a FLAT yet? No, I'm still in DIGS.' or: `What are your DIGS like? OK, except for the landlady's man-eating ALSATIAN.'" --UK English for the American Novice "THE FINANCIAL TIMES is the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal and deals only in business news. This paper is printed on faded pink paper so everyone will know the reader is a member of the business community and will be impressed." --UK English for the American Novice "MMMM... phrase. 1. `Expression' meaning a) `Yes', b) `Yes, probably' c) `Yes, but not now' or d) `No'." --UK English for the American Novice "ROUNDABOUT n. 1. Traffic circle. A British version of billiards played with automobiles. This is an attempt by the British to avoid the dilemma Americans have when four cars come simultaneously to a four-way stop. The British solve this by allowing everyone to continue into the intersection without stopping." --UK English for the American Novice You're so vain you probably think this sig is about you. "And 'high-falutin', what's that about? Does anything ever falute without being high?" --Lee Kinkade "High school, in this sense, is something of a 'vocational' school for office politics." --Mike Peil The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable. "Being a hacker today doesn't mean you'd be a cowboy in the 1800's. It means you'd be the one the cowboys would be beating up. You know assembly, C, perl, who cares. Doesn't make you a cowboy. Cowboy work is men's work. But you're a 17th level Paladin and that's all that counts, right?" --Anonymous Coward on /. #alt.jarf 191:4 casey: "Which is higher - the price of hubris, or the price of haggis?" csedlack: "Hubris, unless you're the sheep." #re: samba "I can only do it if I touch myself." --Thao "I've had problems when I've had money, and I've had problems when I didn't have any money. I'd rather have money." --Louise Kimmitt "I'd love to help you, but I'm trying to pop my stack." --Greg Seidman #define TRUE ('/'/'/') #define FALSE ('-'-'-') Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Greek for still doesn't work. Computer programmers know how to use their hardware. "Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing." - CitizenC A computer scientist is someone who, when told to "Go to Hell," sees the "go to," rather than the destination, as harmful. #define QUESTION ((bb) || !(bb)) /*--Shakespeare*/ While it's true that there is no 'I' in 'team', boy howdy is there ever a 'U' in 'failure'. #=alt.forum 50:23-24 "...because people are too stupid to think for themselves" --Kevin Price "But, god help us, we have to let them. The alternative is unconscionable." --Theo O'Neal # http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_685000/685989.stm # 21 Mar 2000 "Snakes, being cold-blooded, need to be kept in a warm environment, but inside underwear is not normally recommended." --BBConline "Ok, how do I put it in, Don? Do I wait for it to stop?" --Dave Gondek "Americans won't accept the new dollar coins unless the one dollar bill is removed from circulation. We are a people resistant to change." --MidnightRambler When caught in the rain without mac, Walk as fast as the wind at your back, But when the wind's in your face The optimal pace Is as fast as your legs can make track. --D. Brown #Everything wrong (or right, depending on perspective) with this country, #wrapped up in one sentence of an Op-Ed; BDH 3-feb-2000 "It may take an extra car out of the garage of every professional athlete, and it may take an extra vacation home away from every $25 million-per-year CEO, but that's a price I think most Americans are willing to pay." --Jason Steuerwalt "She danced and flipped out there as if Michael Jackson himself were a white, female Jewish gymnast." --Brown Daily Herald, 2 Feb 00 "In short, 100 means nothing at all on the Fahrenheit scale, 96 used to mean something but doesn't anymore, and 0 is colder than it ever gets in Denmark. Brilliant." --Cecil Adams "Science without the humanities is aimless, but the humanities without science are groundless." --Anonymous As part of the renovation efforts on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, architects are planning to replace the seven cast iron bells on the eighth floor with a clock. Because after all, it's no use having the inclination if you haven't got the time. --Cecil Adams (?) "2001 may be the Millenium, but I'll celebrating the Odometrium---the rollover from 1999 to 2000." --Heather Garvey Chain-letter piece of advice of the day: "Never trust someone who leaves their eyes open when they kiss you." "While Miss Manners thinks of previews as a humane warning system, she understands that others think of them as short, punchy movies with the plots judiciously removed." --Miss Manners "Lubrano is a terrible classroom. It's like having a class in a bus. At night." --Manos Renieris Rule One: Question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable, eff the ineffable, think the unthinkable, and screw the inscrutable. --Fabian "Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it." --Seymour Cray, on virtual memory "Your Gothic look should be as opulent, decadent, and original as possible. If you're not up to making the necessary effort to carry off this most high-maintenance of affectations, try wearing plaid shirts and listening to Nirvana instead." --lord damien star "ML is a deeply beautiful language." --Greg Seidman "Ok, so you know what 'deeply beautiful' means? It's when you go on a blind date, and you ask what he's like, and I say "He has a *good personality*". *That* is what 'deeply beautiful' means." --Miriam Goldberg "In the real world, everything stretches from both ends, except for catapults. And catapults are meant to hurt people, which is I think what most user interfaces are meant to do." --Bill Buxton "[A hysterectomy] also takes away the worry that some women may have about pregnancy, and means you can enjoy yourself riotously." --Dr Sally Hope "I could teach most of a course in antitrust law from these findings." --Richard Hawkins, re the Microsoft FoF "They give a flurry of beta explanations, searching for one that will hold up." --John Lederer, re Microsoft "Who says wisdom that comes out of someone's ass isn't wisdom?" --Joe LaViola A British fellow was touring an orchard in America, and the tour guide was explaining what they did with all the fruit. "We eat what we can, and what we can't we can." The British fellow thought that this was just so amusing that he had to go and tell his friends about it first thing when he got home. "You see, they eat what they can," he told them, "and what they can't, they put up!" Linux development is communist, libertarian, and successful. It's rare enough that you see any two of those adjectives applied to the same concept, much less all three. --roystgnr "I'm not a junkie, I just want one more game, that's all." --Joe LaViola How is computer equipment different in England? They use a Double Decker Bus! Wocka wocka wocka! Wait a minute---I don't think I get that one. --Fozzie Bear It has been postulated that, given an infinite number of monkeys bashing away at an infinite number of keyboards, we could eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this to be incorrect. "Here's to alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." --Homer Simpson Beaker is Bunson's lackey grad student. Of course! He fits all the archetypes: 1) He's got crazy hair. 2) He's stressed out ALL THE TIME. 3) No one can understand a word he says, and... 4) His advisor treats him like dirt. That said, he's a lot funnier than the grad students I know. --slothbait "Like the situation at ski resorts of young women looking for husbands and husbands looking for young women, the situation is not as symmetric as it first appears." "There's a myth that if we legalise a substance it would somehow take the illegality out of it." --UK drugs czar Keith Hellawell "Dr Thurley said the left arm of the skeleton was folded across the chest, suggesting a Christian burial. But the ornate scallop shell decoration on the outside of the lead coffin had been thought to be pagan symbols, a sign of what he called "an interesting insurance policy"." --BBC # 8 Nov 1999 "Of course, Bill Clinton has gotten by with incomplete answers and avoidance of the truth. But he can fall back on his indisputably brilliant intellect to bail him out. As any of his classmates at Yale can tell you, George W. does not have this luxury." --BDH editorial Incredible, isn't? People going to a university, being in the vicinity of a whopping great library and people full of the most interesting stuff, and being interested in nothing but the next glass of beer... --Boudewijn Rempt Socrates was a man. Socrates was gay. Therefore, all men are Socrates. --Bryan Maloney Old linguists never die---they just come to voiceless stops. "I don't day-trade. I week-trade." --Joe LaViola "Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right." --Kurt Herbert Alder DPB /d*-pib'/ vt. [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To plop something down in the middle. Usage: silly. "DPB yourself into that couch there." The connotation would be that the couch is full except for one slot just big enough for one last person to sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10 instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other bits. Hackish usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP function of the same name. --the jargon file Déjà Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before. "The answer, then", said Doctor Brown, Who's worked on it a month, n "Isn't merely x , n+1 It's x ." To find a rhyme for silver Or any rhymeless rhyme, Requires only will, ver- bosity, and time. --Willard Espy "Asking the American drugs czar for advice about our drugs policy is about as useful as asking Pinochet or the president of China for advice about our human rights policy." --Labour MP Paul Flynn "In AI, much of the I is in the beholder." --Manning & Schütze "Being bright does not grant an immunity to doing idiotic things; more like, it just enlarges the possible scope." --Lois McMaster Bujold Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury. The runaway inflation caused by this profligate practice has made Monopoly money virtually worthless. When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." The trick is considered "work" and is strictly regulated by the opossum's union. "Just when it looked like the forces of scientific rationality were about to take over, we've all been shat on by a stinking torrent of tabloid mysticism." --Charlie Higson "They say you can learn what a man thinks of you by what sort of earrings he gives you. The mind simply *reels*." --Audrey Hepburn Always code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Seeing the wrong solution to a problem (and understanding why it is wrong) is often as informative as seeing the correct solution. --W. Richard Stevens "She looked at me with this huge-eyed, `you just mke2fs'd an active mount!' stare. Slowly she explained to me that I had ordered pan-fried African earthworms on a bed of exotic vegetables." --technos "You go to a resort like St Antonio in Ibiza and everyone's sitting outside having a full English breakfast, reading their Sun and looking as though they could be in Britain. Apart from the fact that it's sunny." --BBConline "Mr Goodall spoke to the Seven network's Today Tonight program, which launched the Goodall Children Appeal to raise money to pay for their funerals." --The Australian "We are all born originals---why is it so many of us die copies?" --Edward Young "Hackers like to work on things that are cool. They will do boring, necessary work every now and then, but only after all the more interesting options have been exhausted---just look at how the Linux GUI environments consider themeable checkboxes to be at least as important as having a usable file selector." --Shawn Hargreaves "I can't believe how easy it was to claim Kiev for the Kingdom Of Ealdormere," said Royal Peer Gawain Falconsfyre, a 44-year-old tech-support assistant from a suburb of Toronto. --The Onion "Is life worth living? Depends upon the liver." --Dave Gondek "Can is open! Worms everywhere!" --Sam Walker "One of the things that frustrates teenagers is that they want to do things, but they can't, and we can do whatever we want, and don't." --Theo O'Neal "With all of the advances available to us today, anyone with a lick of determination can function as an adult. For adults, that's fine: we've grown into accepting the fact that we can do, go and say what we want, or have methods of dealing with the repercussions. For those who are, under age for voting, driving, all that fun stuff that they can't do, simply because of an unshakable (for them) arbitrary age limit, it's a day-to-day frustration." --Theo O'Neal REDMOND, WA (AP)---Microsoft Corp. announced today that the official release date for their new operating system, "Windows 2000", will be delayed until the second quarter of 1901. ``Your husband may not have been much before, Lady, but I'm afraid right now he's rather less.'' --Tarma, "The Making of a Legend", MZ Bradley ``I would be very surprised if the average MS Word user has spent less time digging through the help system, calling tech support, and sacrificing chickens to the AutoCorrect wizard than I spent reading the LaTeX documentation.'' --Brent Spillner ``In fact, the vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron -- perhaps, Dr. Maines suggests, "reflecting consumer priorities."'' --NYT, 23 Feb 1999 "I removed the last bug from my code today." --Brian Roark "As the centerpiece of humanities studies at an Ivy League university, the Rock should be a jewel in Brown's crown. Sometimes it seems like more of a pebble in Brown's shoe." --BDH editorial "I was talking to a biologist the other day, he was studying these three populations of fish, spread out in 3 regions of the Atlantic Ocean. Group A can and does interbreed with group B, Group B can interbreed with Group C, but Groups A and C cannot interbreed at all. Are they the same species or not? Are fish of all three groups treyf? And why don't fish of groups A and C become resentful towards fish of group B?" --Dr. Matt When you're having a bad day and it seems like people are trying to piss you off, remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a decent sniper rifle. The Kimmitt Thesis: "Nearly all cultures express roughly the same amount of aggression toward their opponents." Or, to put it another way, "If they had invented gunpowder and navigation first, they would have been delighted to kick our booties up and down the continents." --Michael Kimmitt "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat..." --Rebecca West "[American Catholicism] has more to do with wanting to be an educated Westerner while retaining the rituals and comforting beliefs of our childhood." --Michael Kimmitt "It should be illegal to yell "Y2K" in a crowded economy." --Larry Wall Q: When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station? MR. BROOKS: Objection. That question should be taken out and shot. If it ain't broke, you're not trying hard enough. "I'm a bit tired of (PO)MDP papers myself." -tld "I've found, in general, that when people feel the need to proclaim `Jesus loves me', it's because nobody else does." --Shalom Owen #from rumor "Keith - I'm coming after you." "sounds like fun, but you'll have to wait a minute, for you see, I haven't come yet myself." "No, the customer is *never* right. This is Geoff's." --Kelli #from r.h.j "Does a litvak have the buddha-nature?" Joshua said, "nu?" --Zen Cohen "I don't know any Buddhist rabbis, but I do know a Zen Cohen." --Joseph Bay A priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into a bar together. The bartender says, "What is this, a joke?" --tracey fox "Some people wouldn't know Yiddischkeit from Highland if it hit them with a kosher haggis." --pyotr filipivich "The programmer wants to ask `When did this tree first get an illegal cycle?' The tricky parts of this question are: `when', `*this* tree', `first get', and `cycle'." --Feldman & Brown, "IGOR: A System for Program Debugging via Reversible Execution" "In order to apply IGOR, one should use a modified compiler, library, and loader, and run on a system with a modified kernel." --Feldman & Brown, "IGOR: A System for Program Debugging via Reversible Execution" "It's a beautiful day, there's Dew in the fridge." --amp "If you have not yet developed an intimate relationship with emacs, we are giving you another opportunity." --CS017 Lab 9, F98 "Man does not live on bread alone. He also needs wines and meats and little gourmet cheeses. Which, of course, is why he needs the bread." --GQ "I'm surprised compilers survive encounters with this source code..." --Laurion Burchall, on Emacs-19 "Gnus is another 11,000 lines..." "Yeah, 10,000 of which is a delay loop." --Laurion Burchall/Brian Cantrell "Democracy is the worst form of government imaginable. Unless one considers the alternatives." --Winston Churchill "Of course I'm stretching things; we all know software evolves, as it cannot possibly be intelligently designed." --Ryan Pierce "It's as sixy a six as if you had added three and three." --Leslie Kaelbling "...Gradually women began to realize it was a bad bargain. If girls give sex in order to get love, while boys give love in order to get sex, dumping free sex on the market inevitably drove the cost of love through the roof." --Frederica Mathewes-Green, "Now for Some Good News" A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face and the egg is frowning and looking put out. The egg mutters to no one in particular, "Well, I guess we answered THAT question." "To understand recursion we must first understand recursion." #The cookies... "I _love_ little schoolboys!" --Leslie Kaelbling "Wouldn't it be great if..." "PHILIP!!" "That space should be in red." --Leslie Kaelbling "Suddenly I feel like I've fallen in a manhole and landed in C." --Leslie Kaelbling #Control structure... from _DesignPatterns_? "Don't call me, I'll call you" "I guess my problem was that Armageddon just wanted to be an action flick, while Deep Impact had intellectual pretensions, which brought my plot-hole tolerance bar way higher. So I suffered from satisfaction blue balls." --Michael Kimmitt #By Padraic Brown: #thane /T/: freeborn man; thus /T/: frankincense; theve /D/ smell Is that thy thane I theve wearing thus thus upon thy thigh? #By Padraic Brown: #theine /D/: serve/wait upon Thieve thou not my thistle, or this'll end thy theining. "If you're grown-up enough, you can use 'if'." --Phil Klein "C is just a preprocessor for assembly code." --Phil Klein "I before E, except after C... what a weird society." "I hear you're losing weight again, Mary Jane. You ever wonder who you're losing it for?" --Alanis Morissette, "Mary Jane" "Holier than---ow!" --Lee Kinkade "MLworks: Unexpected `fun'." "I honestly believe that you can convince anyone of anything, if only for a moment. The difference between demogoguery and leadership is the ability to choose the 'anything.' The difference between tyranny and statesmanship is the ability to choose the 'anyone.' The difference between genius and bullshit is the ability to prolong the 'moment.'" --Mike Peil "The unexamined life is up to something unheimlich." --Mike Peil "For added clarity, Lisp primitives have names like CAR and CDR." --_ML for the working programmer_ "Letting strings denote degrees of nobility may be inadvisable. It does not prevent spurious degrees like `butcher' and `madman'." --_ML for the working programmer_ #www.mum.org/lysol1.htm "Lysol, which today scours toilets and bathroom floors, cleaned vaginas in an earlier era, when, I guess, women were hardier." --Harry Finley #davidh on =www, 32:8; 1 Jul 1998 "HTML documents look different in every browser and under every setting; the concept of "control" or "force", when it comes to HTML, is an illusion. The concept of WYSIWYG applies *only* to Y, but WYSI-not-W-other-people-G." --David Henderson #From spur.posse "Sexpert Opinion" in _Salon_ "Most young women I meet these days on high school and college campuses are struggling to liberate themselves from the pitfalls of sexual passivity and Prince Charming fantasies. They know how to say `no' repetitively, but they're utterly at a loss as to what to say `yes' to." --Susie Bright # in =shiggy, re: ani's sexuality "I never figured that buying the cow precluded the ponderment of other milk, just the purchase thereof, if you take my meaning." --Michael Kimmitt "To continue my metaphor, bisexual indicates a taste for both skim and 2%, not necessarily having both in the fridge at once." --Michael Kimmitt # and later, in =yagapooga "2% milk has the same taste as whole milk, just a slightly different consistency." --Michael Kimmitt # in spur.posse, re: ballet dancers having sex before performances "I'm just picturing a whole stage full of randy, frisky chicks and sleepy, grumpy boys. And of course they're all in leotards. It's a fun image. Please join me in it." --Casey Westerman "Is it the rule you are breaking, or the rule that is breaking you?" --Cybermind The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. --Anonymous "True, the Founding Fathers had provided for a specific right to bear arms, but the only reason they'd nothing to say to about the right to plant seeds (was)... because it never would have occurred to them that any state might care to abridge that right. After all, they were writing on hemp paper." --Will Fulton "Marijuana gives rise to insanity---not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis." --Eric Schlosser, _More Reefer Madness_ #Kelly Baluta, aces@imsa.edu "do you swallow?" "no, I puke." JURISPRUDENCE FETISHIST GETS OFF ON A TECHNICALITY "This is all one big game of chess where the pieces with power keep it, but sometimes a pawn can earn it." --Cybermind #Re: divorce (=christians 31:16) "It's pretty much just a theological rationalization.... They decided what outcomes they wanted and worked backwards. You'll find this is the way that most theology works." --Jonathan Prykop It takes many nails to build a crib, but just one screw to fill it. --Speefk Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, "I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream." The waitress replies, "I'm sorry, monsieur, but we're out of no cream. How about with no milk?" "Yeah, yeah, I misread his list or something. My badd. You have all now witnessed the fourth mistake I've ever made. I feel dangerously close to becoming a mortal." --Brent Spillner "The Spanish missionaries arrived, and they told the locals, 'We only have one God.' The Natives yawned, and replied, 'We have a bunch of gods, what's one more?' 'Ah,' said the missionaries, 'But our God is actually _three_ Gods.' The locals perked up, and said, 'One God that's three gods. Cool.' Then the missionaries told them about the saints. The natives really _dug_ the saints." --Prof. Bill Meyers, Wake Forest University, in HST 355, "Mexican History after 1492." "The whole tobacco thing is such a flaming mess of utter pain that I can't see any politician with an eye on his career being able to utter two adjacent sentences that are consistent with one another." --Michael Kimmitt "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." anagrams to: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten." "After many decades of furious debate among the verberati, it has been settled that the proper plural of 'mongoose' is 'polygoose'." --John COWAN "Attached are four (gasp!) patches. The first one goes from version 1 of my patch to version 2 on a copy of mutt without reverse_threads. The second is version 2 of my patch (if you haven't applied version 1) to go over a mutt without reverse_threads. The third attached patch goes over reverse_threads version 5 and version 1 of my patch; the fourth and last attached patch goes over reverse_threads version 5 if you haven't applied noparent_subject before. Hope this is not too confusing...." --Daniel Eisenbud "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing Man that he didn't exist." --Verbal Kint, _The Usual Suspects_ I always thought that feminists missed the boat with the term "Ms." We should have gone whole-hog and demanded the use of the term "Mr." and the pronoun "he".... That would have been much more fun. --Karen Robinson "Some people hack for fun, some because they want things their way, some don't because they can't, and some because they can't be bothered. Some can make anything work, some can but would rather not, and some could misconfigure a bowling ball." --Bill Davidsen It is remarkable that C3PO is fluent in over five million forms of communication and yet somehow manages to speak all of them with a British accent. --~mark The danger of confusion arising between sexual and grammatical gender is, in my experience, small, and confined to titles of books and conference papers such as "Gender", or "Marking of gender in Bongo Bongo pronominal clitics", and so on. --And Rosta There's a lot of shit flying around out there, the _least_ of which is the 2 or so Kelvin microwave background. --Ben Gold I think you guys are being a little hard on Kermit, and I wish you'd stop. I understand his pain---at one time I actually thought _I_ had CFS. Fortunately, it turned out that I was just a lazy piece of shit. I don't need to tell you how relieved I was. --Brent Spillner "...one of the Bad News Bears movies---I think the original. Of course I am old enough to have been the "right" age to see that when it came out---assuming that there is a right age to see that movie." --Matt Wicks Eight six seven five three oh ni-ee-i-ine... is a prime number. #From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, via jcn "Does looking at guns make you want to have sex?" - Cordelia "I'm 17. Looking at _linoleum_ makes me want to have sex." - Xander "Does the cs16_grades script calculate our total homework grade with the lowest one dropped?" --cs16 student "I don't think it drops a homework. I don't think it takes late credits into account. I'm not exactly sure what it calculates, actually. Call it an approximation algorithm." --Mark Handy "Please don't cry. It makes the code look all wavy, and then you'll never find the bugs." --Mark Handy, on brown.cs.cs016 "You won't be penalized for seg-faults, since Java never crashes." --Mark Handy, on brown.cs.cs016 "New Scripture was cannonized by the newly formed Roman Catholic Church in 3** AD, and it's first and primary use was as a tool with which to condemn and burn heretics. It was how we began feeding _ourselves_ to the lions." --Jonathan Prykop "Well, uh, there's not much danger of another world war in the foreseeable future, now that the countries with indoor plumbing are no longer polarized by economic ideology." --Brent Spillner From the Mozilla source (ns/cmd/xfe/mozilla.c): "C++ loses, Cfront loses, we are now steeped in all of their lossage. We will descend into the burning pit of punctuation used for obscure language features, our links will go asunder, when we seek out our proper inheritance, from the mother *and* father from which we were begat, we shall be awash, for we will be without identity. We shall try to be pure, but shall find ourselves unable to instanciate. ... shall be statically bound unto him. Oh, woe unto us... djw" "Being the second-biggest turd in the dungheap still makes you a piece of crap." --Peter McFerrin "In fact, I consider the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" meme that appeared in the early eighties to be one of the most pernicious ideas ever adopted by Western civilization." --Don HARLOW #http://hyw1.erudite.com/Books/History/Latin_La.htm "Medieval Latin would probably have made Cicero gag had he had the misfortune to encounter it, but he was a bit of a snob anyway." --Hundred Years' War game archive #April Fool's Day 1998 "Since it first popped out of the oven in 1982, Sun Microsystems has risen to its position as a leading provider of hardware, software, sugar, and spice for establishing enterprise-wide intranets, expanding the power of the Internet, and messing up mugs. Sun can be found in more than 150 countries and on the WorldWide Web, where you already seem to have found us." --http://www.sun.com/980330/javaapi/ "Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, Java, and Throw Once, Hit Everywhere are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Joy Buzzer is a trademark of Acme Enterprises, Ltd." --http://www.sun.com/980330/javaapi/ #On abortion vs. sodomy: "...I always figured that if a right to privacy included the right to extraordinarily controversial elective surgeries, it certainly extended to wet squishy noises." --Michael Kimmitt "I hope this explains somewhat. Compulsory Notice: exceptions exist; all examples valid in Iceland; your local umlaut may vary; void where prohibited by phonologic law." --Padraic Brown #http://xochi.tezcat.com/~markrose/chance.htm "Human beings have been designed by evolution to be good pattern matchers, and to trust the patterns they find; as a corollary their intuition about probability is abysmal. Lotteries and Las Vegas wouldn't function if it weren't so." --Mark Rosenfelder #Mike Fried "Perhaps the real answer is that the TA's are right for some mystical reason which is taught in a higher CS course." --Mike Fried Q: If there's H2O on the inside of a fire hydrant, what's on the outside? A: K9P. #From Amanda Silver... also, some 60's song! For tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun. "Which development tools do I use? I use vi. [Cheers, Applause] Honestly. I mean, it's the only one that works really well on Win95. I guess it just... huh? UNIX doesn't run real well on 95. I won't go into that one, jeez...." --James Gosling #stuff from the Perl book "'junk on end of regexp': The regular expression parser is confused." "'corrupted regexp program': The regular expression engine got passed a regular expression program without a valid magic number." "Piece of cake, of the have-it-and-eat-it-too variety." --_Programming Perl_ "Now, anyone who has written a program generator knows that it can make your eyes go crossed even when you're wide awake. The problem is simply that much of your program's data looks like real code, but isn't (at least not yet). The same text file contains both stuff that does something and similar looking stuff that doesn't." --_Programming Perl_ "'Missing right bracket': The lexer counted more opening curly brackets (braces) than closing ones. Hint: you'll find the missing one near the place where you were last editing." "'Negative length': You tried to do a read/write/send/recv operation with a buffer length that is less than 0. This is hard to imagine." 'oops: oopsAV' --Perl error message "If it was more regular, it'd be a decent conial. But it isn't, and it isn't." --Phil Hunt, on Interlingua "You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere, even if only out of curiosity." --Colin Powell #Jim Veverka, BDH Op-Ed 11 Mar 98 "Now, of course, some people will object, if we can go off and kill Saddam, that would just mean any other country could come over and kill Clinton. So what? That's what we have a vice president for." --Jim Veverka #from Ørjan... Stop .signature plagiarism! "It's either chocolate, or blood." --Mark Faktorovich "What are you doing?! You're grading the answer key!" --Greg Slovacek to Seth Landy "I got the bitch pile, I got the bi---oh wait, that was _stupid_, I don't want the bitch pile!" --Saul Nadler "note that while there is an 'elsif', there is no 'elsunless'. This is generally construed as a feature." --Ben Gertzfield "Lawyers have the best deal in the country. We write the rules, interpret what the rules mean, apply the rules, and change them as necessary, all the while making them so incomprehensible that you need to ask one of us what the rules are." --Jeremy Gottlieb's father "In particular, most of [the Jews I know] do not do the `kosher by cooties' thing." --Tony Stuckey "Oh, crappy!" --written by a grader on a CS 16 test "The file server will be down on Friday March 6 between 9 and 10 am for board replacements." --posted late Thursday, *during* an unscheduled all-day downtime London headline: SEVERE FOG ON CHANNEL, EUROPE COMPLETELY ISOLATED "The fate of a world doesn't depend on its best examples, but on its worst. It takes but a few to destroy the many." --The Outer Limits ("Heart's Desire") "Well, whatever the truth of the matter, the French seem to take to LE like ducks to water." --James CHANDLER "If you miss a turn-off, then just keep going, and eventually you'll get to another. There is no sacred road." --Dr. David Kirchhofer "ALGOL is a very elegant, carefully designed, and strongly typed language developed in the 1960's. PASCAL is a simplified version of ALGOL. C is a bastardized version of ALGOL." --_Embodied Intelligence_ #Jeremy Gottlieb, Liz Chilton---alt.jarf:174,14 "In that case, Liz must be pregnant." "AAAAAAAAAGH. I think NOT." #of Mike Peil: "I want to have the hips that push out his children!" --Virginia Hawthorne #alt.jarf:62,89 "Clinton and Dole: talk about the evil of two lessers...." --Chuck Maddox "This morning's NPR news's coverage of Sonny Bono's death stated that the former singer 'had a great impact on the entertainment world and politics', to which I mentally added, "not to mention on a tree." --sej@aol.com #alt.forum:75,4 "yes, the U.S. has one of the dozen oldest or so presently-existing, continuous, nation-level, formal government structures in the world, broadly speaking.... Please note, aside from my first caveat paragraph, my answer contains at least six caveats, each of which is a good monograph-long argument in and of itself." --Mike Peil #lancer35, jwagner: "Happy?" "No, but I won't make fun of you anymore." # 25 Jan 1998 Alertbox Some analysts say that users don't want to be "nickeled and dimed" while they are online. In fact, the problem is being dimed; not being nickeled. --Jakob Nielsen "Inferiors revolt that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions." --Aristotle "There has to be a change in the way you treat a newly conceived child. While it may come unexpectedly, it is never an aggressor." --Pope John Paul II "It is clear that cracking the genetic code would be of significantly less benefit if we allow our moral code to become cracked as well." --Al Gore "Patches set upon a little breach Discredit more in hiding of the fault Than did the fault before it was so patched." --Shakespeare, _King John_ "A Vector can grow dynamically, much like a hermit crab that moves into a larger shell when it outgrows its previous one." --Data Structures and Algorithms in Java "Stores, theaters, public offices, etc. typically serve customers according to the FIFO principle. [This policy is true in most Western countries, such as France, Germany, the UK, and the USA, with the notable exception of Italy, where customers at a post office are usually loath to form a line and instead typically choose more creative arrangements.]" --Data Structures and Algorithms in Java "If I could work any miracle, the miracle I would want would be to have the power to get the last song you heard out of your head so you wouldn't keep singing it all day and driving people crazy." --Jenni "Dr. Pepper" Howard "The line should be drawn somewhere, I believe, preferably at the point where making the sound also forces some type of dislikable substance, whether it be liquid, solid, or gas, to be ejected from the body." --Fuscian "Today [we] will fly to Copenhagen. There we will encounter something that is no language but a throat-illness, Danish." --Allan KIVIAHO "[Ataturk showed] that it helps considerably to have a language that is primarily spoken (a) in a limited and well-defined area by (b) a limited number of pepole who are ruled by (c) a charismatic but no-nonsense dictator." -Don HARLOW # Taliesin WORD OF THE DAY: besserwissers "I'm not criticizing Interlingua for doing what it set out to do, I'm criticizing it for setting out to do what it set out to do." --James CHANDLER "I recommend we develop Polytheism so we can build: Elephant." "That is only the statistic, and you are not a statistic. You are a datum." --John COWAN "In the last four chapters you have learned everything about Java except the fun parts! If this were a FORTRAN book, we'd be done already." --The Java Handbook _Quod erat demonstratum_: Latin for "I told you so." --The Java Handbook #Dr. Kirchhofer, George Ruona "This is the only New World nation to have been the seat of both a kingdom and a major world empire..." *buzz* "Minnesota!" "This kind of argumentation left Mutt as the bloaty mess it is now. 'I think there are people' does not qualify as reason to include code in Mutt." --Felix von Leitner #/* Written 8:23 am Nov 13, 1997 by cveal@coke.imsa.edu in pepsi:imsa.news */ "This is such a wonderful conversation, and very important." --Cathy Veal #John Lavagnino, "What not to tag": Malapropism of the day: "This is the sort of information we _have_ to inseminate." "We can't make Mexico rich, but we can give Mexico good advice on how to become such. Then, the problem becomes one of Mexico keeping the Guatemalans out. Not our business." --Michael Kimmitt "If Bill Gates and company installed your plumbing, you'd be drinking from the toilet and pissing in the pool." --Bill Buxton "This 4000% overhead is annoying, but tolerable on lightly loaded networks." --rfc896 All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not touched by the frost. --J.R.R. Tolkien 'as in' pronunciation guide of the day (or, "why we should use IPA"): öi = "euille" as in "feuille" --Kou, Géarthnuns "The only human being who is recognized as perfect was given the mission to say things which have caused the shedding of so much blood that it would have drowned mankind if it had all been shed at once." --Feodor Dostoyevsky (The Idiot) "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermind.'" The data structure which I am referring to is not properly a tree, as it can potentially be very intertwined. It might be compared to a family tree with a lot of inbreeding. --Jonathan Hayward After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box. -Italian Proverb Favourite word of the day: "antepreulminate", Jack Durst The Feynman problem solving Algorithm 1) Write down the problem 2) Think real hard 3) Write down the answer "I've just learned English and am still having troubles with my bowels." --Zorro, the Gay Blade "All grammars leak." --E. Sapir "All grandpas drool." --E. Harding 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." Do not underestimate the bandwidth of a wagon full of mag tapes. Wired has its head so far up its collective ass it's a moebius strip. --Michael Kimmitt "Data was available. I took him; we came." --Cmdr. Shelby "DYSLEXIA CURE FOR DISCOVERED" --Naked Gun 33 1/3 "I went vegetarian for a year and a half, but it just got too dull living without barbecue." --John Flansburgh "Kirk tries to buck up the young captain." --STVII "Normal is what everyone else is, and you are not." --Dr. Soran, STVII "It was a case of 'I'd like to meet the guy who invented sex and see what he's working on now' paraphrased appropriately... did I just compare going backwards in the pager to sex?" --,dunc "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-" General John Sedgewick, Union commander in the Civil War, last words. Adding a cup of water to a cup of popcorn doesn't yield two cups of anything... just one cup of soggy popcorn. --Mark E. SHOULSON I didn't say we *can't* do it. In fact we can. We also can calculate digits of sqrt(2) in the background, drive space shuttles, or have an AI algorithm write poems in Swahili while inside the pager. --Liviu Daia They're sharing a drink they call loneliness but it's better than drinking alone. --Billy Joel "The original question was asked by someone who is 8, or at least may have been 8 when this thread started." --Douglas J. Zare, in sci.math Notice: This message was found in a dead-letter box and appears to be for you. If you have already gotten a copy of this message, we beg your tolerance. The Unix Systems Group Jeder Tag an dem du nicht lächelst, ist ein verlorener Tag. --C. Chaplin Hiroshima '45 Tsjernobyl '86 Windows '95 Black holes are where the gods divide by zero. "We've never been on Saturday Night Live, but we have been on Good Morning America which is like Saturday Night Live only it happens in the morning." --John Flansburgh "At one point stinky white smoke started pouring out of the computer, and everyone went 'AAAAGH!'" --John Linnell "Let's see if he's quoting me (fat chance)." It seems there was a trampoline team from Prague who hid from the Nazis in a house near Ann Frank's. When the Nazis arrested the Frank party, they captured the family who helped the trampolinists in the same sweep. But they were charged with a different "crime" than those who helped the Franks. They were charged with caching bouncing Czechs. "The ancient Greek _porne_, from which the word pornography is derived, was the lowest class of prostitute, a sexual slave available to all male citizens. Pornography does not consist of depictions (_graphos_) of naked women; it consists of depictions of women *as prostitutes*." --Mariah Burton Nelson "Without proposals, without Change, Agora degenerates first into legal nitpicking, and then finally into a slumber too reminicent of death." --Swann Law of Survivors: It's not who is right, it's who is left. There are three stages of a man's life: 1. He believes in Santa Claus 2. He doesn't believe in Santa Claus 3. He *is* Santa Claus "When I meet a man, I ask myself, 'Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?'" --Rita Rudner Captain Hook died of jock itch. Support the right of unborn males to bear arms! --A public service announcement from Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic Church, and the National Rifle Association Jesus lived in a state of grace in a near-eastern land. Elvis lived in Graceland in a nearly eastern state. Coincidence? '...It *is* a gift, Chayla, no matter how it happened. Abortion is wrong.' Though her blue eyes blazed, her voice was cool as she said, 'My Lord, when *you* can get pregnant, *then* you may have an opinion.' --Melanie Rawn, _Skybowl_ "I'm a Sunrunner, not a baker!" --Melanie Rawn, _Skybowl_ (Johlarian) Cunning linguists are very skilled with their tongues. "Oh, look! Linux calls all the children `zombies'... how cute!" How do I get started? For Windows users: 1. From the Program Manager, choose Run from the file menu. 2. In the Command Line box, type D:\INSTALL (where D is the letter assigned to your CD-ROM drive), and click OK. To run The Merchant, double-click The Merchant icon. Start shopping! For Windows 95 users: Windows should start The Merchant automatically. The first time it is run, click on Install The merchant. If Windows does not start the program automatically: 1. Choose Run from the Start menu. 2. In the Open box, type D:\INSTALL (where D is the letter assigned to your CD-ROM drive), and click OK. Then, to run The Merchant, select Start The Merchant when the CD-ROM is first inserted, or from the Start menu select Programs>Merchant For Men>The Merchant. Start shopping! For Mac users: Double-click The Merchant icon. Start shopping! --"hassle-free shopping" CD installation instructions, quoted in _Macworld_ Rohan sighed. "Think of the laws written the past seven Riall'im. Very few involve prohibitions of one sort or another. They simply state what will occur if a certain thing is done. People do what they wish to do, and saying it's not legal usually won't stop them. But if the consequences of a particular action are clear, they may do the thing anyway, but they also know exactly what will happen if they're caught." --Melanie Rawn, _Sunrunner's Fire_ (Rohan) "Controlling a fast horse in a headlong race up a mountainside while at the same time weaving sunlight to find a downed dragon were not recommended for the easily distracted." --Melanie Rawn, _Sunrunner's Fire_ This planet has---or rather had---a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. --Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ 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. --Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." --Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" --Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ The Forbidden Donut is mm, mm, sacrilicious. "I'm inventing a new technology to prevent kids from seeing smut on the internet." "So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers?" --Scott Adams, _Dilbert_ "I'm a thief in every respect. I don't enjoy something unless I bargain for it, trick someone out of it, or steal it. It's my way of making something out of nothing, you might say, which makes me like God!" --Anne Rice, _The Tale of the Body Thief_ (Raglan James) "You're not afraid of the Devil, are you?" "Not if he requires an act of mercy." --Anne Rice, _The Tale of the Body Thief_ "God is love. But I'm not sure God is absolutely brilliant." --Anne Rice, _The Tale of the Body Thief_ (David Talbot) "Do you know, with all the differences between you and my father---both as men and as High Prince---I think it may all come down to one simple thing. My father never said 'please' to anybody in his life." --Melanie Rawn, _The Star Scroll_ (Princess-Regent Pandsala) "To touch is to heal; to hurt is to steal; if you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel." --U2, "Mysterious Ways" "I can't picture the Bible saying, 'the snake told Eve to come on to Adam, and Adam shagged her rotten, which made mortal humans fall.'" --a guy I know "Behold, earthshaking inventions which are useless or obsolete within the same century---the steamboat, the railroads; yet do you know what these meant after six thousand years of galley slaves and men on horseback? And now the dance hall girl buys a chemical to kill the seed of her lovers, and lives to be seventy-five in a room full of gadgets which cool the air and veritably eat the dust. And yet for all the costume movies and the paperback history thrown at you in every drugstore, the public has no accurate memory of anything; every social problem is observed in relation to 'norms' which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves 'deprived' of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all." --Anne Rice, _The Queen of the Damned_ "'Canada' is the politically correct term for the Northern Wastes." "Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?" She offered her honor. He honored her offer. And all through the night, it was honor and offer. I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated. "I think of them as the four horses of the apocalypse. The boy is war. The sisters are still sorting themselves out among the other forces of destruction." --Orson Scott Card, _Alvin Journeyman_ "Does Mother know you're going?" "Please be practical, Miro. I have no fear of Satan, but Mother . . ." --Orson Scott Card, _Xenocide_ "Individually, human beings are all dolts." "While collectively . . ." "Collectively, they're a collection of dolts." --Orson Scott Card, _Xenocide_ # From the OpenBSD fortune data file, maybe? # see http://fortunes.cat-v.org/openbsd/ !07/11 PDP a ni deppart m'I !pleH (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! $100 invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at which time it will be worth absolutely nothing. --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) 186,282 miles per second: It isn't just a good idea, it's the law! "355/113---Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!" 43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr randsig: Segmentation fault---Core dumped 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 Gandhi A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce. --Don Quinn 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 of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five. 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 classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. --Mark Twain A closed mouth gathers no foot. A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern. --Edgar A. Shoaff 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 diva who specializes in risqué arias is an off-coloratura soprano. A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. --Winston Churchill A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. --George Bernard Shaw A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. --Adlai Stevenson A general leading the State Department resembles a dragon commanding ducks. --New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance. A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. --Robert Frost A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction. If a language doesn't affect the way you think about programming, it's not worth knowing. --Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming" 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 First Law of Computer Programming: Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English. A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. --H. H. Munroe A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and exceptional ability in that particular field." A man 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." --Audubon Society Magazine A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space. --Gloria Steinem A penny saved is ridiculous. A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. "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 radioactive cat has eighteen half-lives. A sine curve goes off to infinity, or at least the end of the blackboard. --Prof. Steiner [He was] a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. --Mark Twain 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 tautology is a thing which is tautological. 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 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 vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. --Tennessee Williams A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. A.A.A.A.A.: An organization for drunks who drive Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy. Absence makes the heart go wander. Absent, adj.: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered. 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. According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless. 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. Adore, v.: To venerate expectantly. --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Adult, adj.: 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 Advice to young men: Be ascetic, and if you can't be ascetic, then at least be aseptic. After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn. On Shakespeare: "... After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations." --H. L. Mencken Alas, I am dying beyond my means. --Oscar Wilde, sipping champagne on his deathbed 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 my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific." --Jane Wagner 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 taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. --Jim Fiebig All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it. --Richard P. Feynman All things are possible, except skiing through a revolving door. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. --Dave Barry Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away. Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else. Am I ranting? I hope so. My ranting gets raves. Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. --Charlie McCarthy 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 apple every eight hours will keep three doctors away. An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible. An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all. And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode. "...and the fully armed nuclear warheads, are, of course, merely a courtesy detail." Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes. Galileo: No, unhappy the land that _n_e_e_d_s heroes. --Bertolt Brecht, "Life of Galileo" Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. --Tom Lehrer Ankh if you love Isis. Answer: None. (Moses didn't have an ark.) Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you're trying to think of. Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. --Sydney Harris 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 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 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. --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) 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. ARCHDUKE FERDINAND FOUND ALIVE---FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE Armadillo: To provide weapons to a Spanish pickle 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 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 Zeus said to Narcissus, "Watch yourself." Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard). --Edgar R. Fiedler Ask not for whom the tolls. "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 the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, at least one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer. Automobile, n.: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians. Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare. BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of Scientific Creationism. Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint. --Mark Twain Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss. --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego. Behold the warranty ... the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away. "Being disintegrated makes me ve-ry an-gry!" Bell Labs Unix---Reach out and grep someone. 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 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. Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division. Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt. Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier. Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom: Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress. Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen. --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Boy, n.: A noise with dirt on it. If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee---that will do them in. Brain fried---Core dumped Bride, n.: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Bumper sticker: "All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture" Bureaucrat, n.: A politician who has tenure. Bureaucrats cut red tape---lengthwise. "But officer, I was only trying to gain enough speed so I could coast to the nearest gas station." By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task completely overwhelm you. "By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry' ..." --Gary Larson, "The Far Side" By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity---another man's, I mean. --Mark Twain "Cable is not a luxury, since many areas have poor TV reception." --The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, 1989 When all else fails, read the instructions. The USPS doesn't really charge 32 cents for a stamp. It's 2 cents for postage and 30 cents for storage. Carmel, New York, has an ordinance forbidding men to wear coats and trousers that don't match. CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh.. Chef, n.: Any cook who swears in French. Chemistry is applied theology. --Augustus Stanley Owsley III Children are natural mimics 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 seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said. The amount of time required to complete a government project is precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it. Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. 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. Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. --Mark Twain COBOL programs are an exercise in Artificial Inelegance. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum--- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am." --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Command, n.: Statement presented by a human and accepted by a computer in such a manner as to make the human feel as if they are in control. Commitment, n.: Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, the pig was committed. Committee, n.: A group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done. --Fred Allen Condense soup, not books! Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation. Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. --H. L. Mencken Court, n.: A place where they dispense with justice. --Arthur Train 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 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. Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little. Disco is to music what Etch-A-Sketch is to art. 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 meddle in the affairs of troff, for it is subtle and quick to anger. Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup. Do you have lysdexia? Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much. Don't believe everything you hear or anything you say. 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 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 worry about avoiding temptation---as you grow older, it starts avoiding you. Down with categorical imperative! "Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." Drink Canada Dry! You might not succeed, but it *_i_s* fun trying. 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**~{ E Pluribus Unix 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 Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees. --Ronald Reagan, famous movie star Electrical Engineers do it with less resistance. Electrocution, n.: Burning at the stake with all the modern improvements. 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-mümsige Burggoven Die mohmen Räth ausgraben. --Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" Even though they raised the rate for first class mail in the United States we really shouldn't complain---it's still only two cents a day. Every four seconds a woman has a baby. Our problem is to find this woman and stop her. Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for 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 is a part of some other program, and rarely fits. 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 taught not to realize it. Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs. Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones. Experience varies directly with equipment ruined. F u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd. Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable. Faith, n: That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be untrue. Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do. Fights between cats and dogs are prohibited by statute in Barber, North Carolina. Finding out what goes on in the C.I.A. is like performing acupuncture on a rock. --New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 History doesn't repeat itself---historians merely repeat each other. 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. For a man to truly understand rejection, he must first be ignored by a cat. For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. --H. L. Mencken For large values of one, one equals two, for small values of two. Form follows function, and often obliterates it. Incorrigible punster---Do not incorrige. fortune: cpu time/usefulness ratio too high---core dumped. 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 George Washington was first in war, first in peace, and the first to have his birthday juggled to make a long weekend. --Ashley Cooper 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. God did not create the world in seven days; he screwed around for six days and then pulled an all-nighter. God is real, unless declared integer. God must love the Common Man; He made so many of them. 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. Mole problems? Call Avogadro 602-1023 Graduate life---it's not just a job, it's an indenture. Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks. Great minds run in great circles. 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! Hard work may not kill you, but why take chances? Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked. Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things. --Tom Lehrer He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace. --John Mason Brown, drama critic "He's just a politician trying to save both his faces ..." 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 "Heisenberg may have slept here" Help stamp out and abolish redundancy. Heuristics are bug ridden by definition. If they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms. If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person---they will find an easier way to do it. Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account. Honk if you love peace and quiet. The real world is usually a special case. How come wrong numbers are never busy? "How do I love thee? My accumulator overflows." 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 "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 cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ... --F. H. Wales (1936) "I didn't like the play, but I saw it under adverse conditions. The curtain was up." "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." --Galileo Galilei "I think not," said René 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 doubt, therefore I might be. "I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer." --Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" "I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it scattered around the beaches of the world ... Perhaps you've seen it." --Steven Wright I haven't lost my mind---it's backed up on tape somewhere. "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 love Saturday morning cartoons, what classic humour! This is what entertainment is all about ... Idiots, explosives and falling anvils." --Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes "I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." --Steven Wright "I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it." "I thought you were trying to get into shape." "I am. The shape I've selected is a triangle." 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 think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." --Emo Phillips I'm a creationist; I refuse to believe that I could have evolved from man. 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. If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up. If at first you don't succeed, redefine success. If God didn't mean for us to juggle, tennis balls wouldn't come three to a can. If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way. 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 I don't see you in the future, I'll see you in the pasture. If I had any humility I would be perfect. --Ted Turner If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people? If mathematically you end up with the wrong answer, try multiplying by the page number. If money can't buy happiness, I guess I'll have to rent it. If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking. --Lyndon Baines Johnson If you sit down at a poker game and don't see a sucker, get up. You're the sucker. 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" Illinois isn't exactly the land that God forgot---it's more like the land He's trying to ignore. 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. 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 Blythe, California, a city ordinance declares that a person must own at least two cows before he can wear cowboy boots in public. In case of atomic attack, the federal ruling against prayer in schools will be temporarily canceled. In Seattle, Washington, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon that is over six feet in length. Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares? Individualists unite! Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids. 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" Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has, gets. Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? --Kelvin Throop III It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats. 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 to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one. It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem. It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. 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 seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag. "It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set foot." 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's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for being right. 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 men like him that give the Y chromosome a bad name." It's the thought, if any, that counts! Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. Jesus saves! (Roll for damage.) Justice, n.: A decision in your favor. Kin, n.: An affliction of the blood "Kirk to Enterprise---beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack." Klein bottle for rent---inquire within. Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code. Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to. Lowery's Law: If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. Matrimony isn't a word, it's a sentence. Millihelen, adj: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life. Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing. Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light. It did not last; the devil howling "Ho! Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo. Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat. Never let your schooling interfere with your education. Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time. Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower. Never try to outstubborn a cat. --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value. No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas. No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style. No matter what other nations may say about the United States, immigration is still the sincerest form of flattery. "No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too hot.'" --Dr. Who Nobody wants constructive criticism. It's all we can do to put up with constructive praise. "Of _course_ it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?" Old programmers never die. They just branch to a new address. "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." --Charles Babbage One man's theology is another man's belly laugh. One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model. Optimization hinders evolution. Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't. Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket. Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them. People usually get what's coming to them ... unless it's been mailed. People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito. Personifiers Unite! You have nothing to lose but Mr. Dignity! Pick another fortune cookie. Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. --Don Marquis Play Rogue! Visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures and kill them. Political T.V. commercials prove one thing: some candidates can tell all their good points and qualifications in just 30 seconds. "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." --John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987 Predestination was doomed from the start. Prof: So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data encryption standard and they came up with ... Student: EBCDIC! Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it. Put your nose to the grindstone! --Amalgamated Plastic Surgeons and Toolmakers, Ltd. Q: How many IBM cpu's does it take to do a logical right shift? A: 33. 1 to hold the bits and 32 to push the register. Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem to the earlier joke. QUOTE OF THE DAY: ` Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. Ray's Rule of Precision: Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe. "Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words---but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures." --Alan Perlis Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. --Mark Twain Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O. Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much good it did them. Real programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC after reaching puberty. Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them? realtime, adj.: Here and now, as opposed to faketime, which only occurs there and then. Real Users find the one combination of bizarre input values that shuts down the system for days. Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it. Real World, The n.: 1. In programming, those institutions at which programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, IBM, etc. 2. To programmers, the location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5. 4. The location of the status quo. 5. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person. Reality is for those who can't face science fiction. Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin. --Anatole France Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. --Wernher von Braun Resisting temptation is easier when you think you'll probably get another chance later on. Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London: Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat. Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in. Sauron is alive in Argentina! Schizophrenia beats being alone. She's genuinely bogus. SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE! Silverman's Law: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. --Bertrand Russell So, what's with this guy Gideon, anyway? And why can't he ever remember his Bible? Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them. --Ed Howe #ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress. --Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming" Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear. Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword. Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. --Mark Twain Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood. Sweater, n.: A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. --Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming" Telephone, n.: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. --Ambrose Bierce Texas law forbids anyone to have a pair of pliers in his possession. That secret you've been guarding, isn't. That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them. --Dorothy Parker The 80's---when you can't tell hairstyles from chemotherapy. The Abrams' Principle: The shortest distance between two points is off the wall. "The algorithm to do that is extremely nasty. You might want to mug someone with it." --M. Devine, Computer Science 340 The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. --Tom Lehrer The average income of the modern teenager is about 2 a.m. The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. The bigger the theory the better. "The bland leadeth the bland and they both shall fall into the kitsch." The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to school. The Briggs/Chase Law of Program Development: To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program, take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one, and convert to the next higher units. "The C Programming Language---A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language." "The climate of Bombay is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere." The Consultant's Curse: When the customer has beaten upon you long enough, give him what he asks for, instead of what he needs. This is very strong medicine, and is normally only required once. The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it is none of my business, but---" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about. --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity. "The difference between a misfortune and a calamity? If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity." --Benjamin Disraeli The District of Columbia has a law forbidding you to exert pressure on a balloon and thereby cause a whistling sound on the streets. The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men. --Ambrose Bierce The fortune program is supported, in part, by user contributions and by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities. The full impact of parenthood doesn't hit you until you multiply the number of your kids by 32 teeth. The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice. The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They gave him love and he invented marriage. The good die young---because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good. The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers. The hieroglyphics are all unreadable except for a notation on the back, which reads "Genuine authentic Egyptian papyrus. Guaranteed to be at least 5000 years old." The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity ---the rest is overhead for the operating system. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. --Mark Twain The idea is to die young as late as possible. --Ashley Montagu The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group. "The last time somebody said, `I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, `They used to say the same thing about drugs.'" --Roy Blount, Jr. The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. --Anatole France The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train. The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon. The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. --Mark Twain The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a soda can, when discarded will last forever ... and a $7,000 car which when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years. The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation. --Lew Mammel, Jr. The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me. --Nicol Williamson The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader. "The more data I punch in this card, the lighter it becomes, and the lower the mailing cost." --Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" The more things change, the more they stay insane. The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right. "The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment." --Theodore H. White The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." --Isaac Asimov The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on. "The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in 1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert." --D. Letterman The National Short-Sleeved Shirt Association says: Support your right to bare arms! The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system. But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. --Matthew 5:37 "The New York Times is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country. The National Enquirer is read by the people who think Elvis is alive and running the country ..." --Robert J Woodhead The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. --Andrew S. Tanenbaum The notion of a "record" is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card. --Dennis M. Ritchie The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy. The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath. --Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe. The opossum is a very sophisticated animal. It doesn't even get up until 5 or 6 p.m. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. --Bohr "The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost went back in time." --Steven Wright "The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose." --David Lardner The President publicly apologized today to all those offended by his brother's remark, "There's more Arabs in this country than there is Jews!". Those offended include Arabs, Jews, and English teachers. --Baltimore, Channel 11 News, on Jimmy Carter The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change. --FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers The primary requisite for any new tax law is for it to exempt enough voters to win the next election. The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action. The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues. --Elizabeth Taylor The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. The reader this message encounters not failing to understand is cursed. The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much. "The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography" "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up! The steady state of disks is full. The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it. --Franklin P. Jones The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him. --Jim Samuels The universe does not have laws---it has habits, and habits can be broken. "The voters have spoken, the bastards ..." The way to make a small fortune in the commodities market is to start with a large fortune. The world is coming to an end... save your buffers. The world is coming to an end. Please log off. The years of peak mental activity are undoubtedly between the ages of four and eighteen. At four we know all the questions, at eighteen all the answers. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" There are many intelligent species in the universe. They all own cats. There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axes are chosen correctly. There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. --Richard Davisson There are people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying. There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone. --Gloria Steinem "There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis; and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again, don't we all?" There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. --Miss Manners, "Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior" There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it. "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make is so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." --C. A. R. Hoare There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about. There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature: that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." --Arthur C. Clarke "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." --Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977 There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes. There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. --Ross MacDonald There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. --Mark Twain There once was an old man from Esser, Whose knowledge grew lesser and lesser. It at last grew so small, He knew nothing at all, And now he's a College Professor. "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." --C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia There was a young poet named Dan, Whose poetry never would scan. When told this was so, He said, "Yes, I know." There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business? There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to. There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. --Will Rodgers There's nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won't aggravate. Things are more like they used to be than they are now. Think honk if you're a telepath. "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency, do you really think we'd stick around to tell you?" This sentence contradicts itself---no actually it doesn't. --Douglas Hofstadter Those of you who think you know everything are very annoying to those of us who do. Those who can't write, write manuals. Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. --Henry Spencer Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. --John F. Kennedy Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Time is an illusion; lunchtime, doubly so. Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and, whatever you hit, call it the target. To err is human, to forgive is not company policy. To err is human, to forgive beyond the scope of the operating system. To err is human, to moo bovine. To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of them absent. To iterate is human, to recurse, divine. To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load. "To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it?" Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest. Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future. --Amrom Katz Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly. Tussman's Law: Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come. 'Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, And throughout our place of residence, Kinetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus. Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the woodburning caloric apparatus, Pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an imminent visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appelations is the honorific title of St. Nicklaus ... Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive. Universe, n.: The problem. University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and ... UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on Tue Nov 5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch). --Andrew S. Tanenbaum Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible. Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. --H. L. Mencken Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three---and paradise is when you have none. --Doug Larson Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. Veni, Vidi, Visa. Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters. Virginia law forbids bathtubs in the house; tubs must be kept in the yard. "Virtual" means never knowing where your next byte is coming from. Virtue is its own punishment. Vote anarchist! Warning: Listening to WXRT on April Fools' Day is not recommended for those who are slightly disoriented the first few hours after waking up. --Chicago Reader 4/22/83 Warp 7---It's a law we can live with. Waste not, get your budget cut next year. We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it. --Whole Earth Catalog "We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem." --Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming" We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved. We can predict everything, except the future. We have only two things to worry about: That things will never get back to normal, and that they already have. "We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation." --Lily Tomlin We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgement. We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some of our best friends are trying to kill us. We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem---how to run a sunbeam through a meter. Weiner's Law of Libraries: There are no answers, only cross references. Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter. He'll come in handy if you run out of food. --Dean McLaughlin Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. Wethern's Law: Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. "What are you doing?" "Examining the world's major religions. I'm looking for something that's light on morals, has lots of holidays, and with a short initiation period." What color is a chameleon on a mirror? "What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty teenager asked her mother. "Encouragement, dear," she replied. What garlic is to food, insanity is to art. What is a magician but a practising theorist? --Obi-Wan Kenobi What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton on its peak. What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do. What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away. What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn? --Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn" What you don't know can hurt you, only you won't know it. "What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" --Dr. Who When a fly lands on the ceiling, does it do a half roll or a half loop? When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere. --Robert Heinlein When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours." --Vine Deloria, Jr. When does summertime come to Minnesota, you ask? Well, last year, I think it was a Tuesday. "When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving." --Steven Wright "When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, `Well, what do you need?'" --Steven Wright When in panic, fear and doubt, Drink in barrels, eat, and shout. When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom! --Laurie Anderson When marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws. When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done. When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. --George Bernard Shaw "When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut." When you don't know what you are doing, do it neatly. "When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite." --Winston Churchill, On formal declarations of war When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers. --The Wall Street Journal When you try to make an impression, the chances are that is the impression you will make. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. --Abraham Lincoln Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. --Mark Twain, "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax. Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? While anyone can admit to themselves they were wrong, the true test is admission to someone else. While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several. While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position. While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their correctness never does. "Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school. --George Ade Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. Why does New Jersey have more toxic waste dumps and California have more lawyers? New Jersey had first choice. Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives. Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat. Wit, n.: The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery ... by leaving it out. --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" X-rated movies are all alike ... the only thing they leave to the imagination is the plot. Xerox never comes up with anything original. You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. You buttered your bread, now lie in it. You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. --Franklin P. Jones You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular. You can take all the impact that science considerations have on funding decisions at NASA, put them in the navel of a flea, and have room left over for a caraway seed and Tony Calio's heart. --F. Allen You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers. --Steven Feiner You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. --Booker T. Washington You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing. --Sydney Harris You may easily play a joke on a man who likes to argue---agree with him. --Ed Howe You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. --Charles A. Beard You never know how many friends you have until you rent a house on the beach. You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1. --Ernest Rutherford You think Oedipus had a problem---Adam was Eve's mother. Your conscience never stops you from doing anything. It just stops you from enjoying it. Your fault: core dumped Zero Defects, n.: The result of shutting down a production line. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 Rene Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes. The "y" in signs reading "ye olde..." is properly pronounced with a "th" sound, not "y." The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England use the rune "thorn" (þ) to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y." Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover. The flag of the Philippines is the only national flag that is flown differently during times of peace or war. A portion of the flag is blue, while the other is red. The blue portion is flown on top in time of peace and the red portion is flown in war time. See Derrida. See Derrida philosophize. Philosophize, Derrida, philosophize! File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/n) To continue, enter any 10-digit prime number. Unspeakable error in module Cthulhu at address R'lyeh. Duplicate file name or file not found. Unsure which. Those whom computers would destroy, they first drive insane. Cursors! Foiled again! My other computer is a Cray. C:\DOS...C:\DOS\RUN...RUN\DOS\RUN Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic System halted: Press any key to do nothing. Press all the keys at once to continue. File not found. Loading something that looked similar. Melted fruit snacks on keyboard. Delete children (Y/n)? Keyboard not connected. Think F1 to continue. (A)bort (R)etry (U)se the Force VirusScan: "Windows found: Remove it? (Y/n)" Vampiric Error: (A)vert (R)eflect (I)mpale Failure reading left brain. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)rolic "The DM wouldn't be THAT mean, would she?" "He hits and...hm, I'm gonna need more dice..." He who lives by the sword dies by the crossbow bolt. Never work higher magic in clothes you can't run in. "Who's the chick with the spiders?" Cthulhu and Hastur and Nyarlathotep. Oh my! DM: "He who buys the pizza, lives." Jesus saves. Moses invests. Cthulhu forecloses. "But I don't have 30 hit points left...is that bad?" "Exactly what is a `pantheon', and why is it mad at me?" "Fireball, fireball, I know it's in here somewhere..." Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend. "I have a 21 Physical Endurance! I don't *need* sleep!" RPG philosophy: Life's a die and then you bitch. When the DM smiles it's too late to panic. Tolkien is hobbit-forming. "No, your fighter doesn't gain any bonuses from drinking coffee." "Mapping? No, I'm not mapping. I thought you were mapping." "I think the dragon's asleep." DMs love a hero. They also love a good joke. Think about it. "I missed with a natural 20?" Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home. Don't use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice. Every morning is the dawn of a new error. For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord. I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead. It's not hard to meet expenses; they're everywhere. Help Wanted: Telepath. You know where to apply. Budget: A method for going broke methodically. Shin: A device for finding furniture in the dark. Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted. Windows: Just another pane in the glass. Who's General Failure and why is he reading my disk? ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI. "640K ought to be enough for anybody." --Bill Gates, 1981 Programmers don't die; they just GOSUB without RETURN. Sex is like air, it's not important unless you aren't getting any. If vegetable oil is made of vegetables, what is baby oil made of? No guts, no glory, no brain, same story. Cocaine is god's way of telling you that you make too much money. If quitters never win, and winners never cheat, then who is the fool who said "Quit while you're ahead"? If everything is going well, you don't know what the hell is going on. One good turn gets most of the blankets. It is better to be looked over than overlooked. It is not what a teenager knows that bothers his parents, it is how he found out. Homework is like a juicy steak---rarely done. There are two kinds of pedestrians---the quick and the dead. An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. If at first you don't succeed---give up! No use being a damn fool. Falling in love is awfully simple. Falling out of love is simply awful. No job is so simple that it can't be done wrong. You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever. All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy. We were born naked, wet and hungry. Then things got worse. I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous. Five out of four people have trouble with fractions. If the world was a logical place, men would ride horse side-saddle. Warning: Dates on the calendar are closer than they appear. I just got a physical and asked the doctor, "How do I stand?" He said, "That's what puzzles me." If God had intended man to smoke, he would have set him on fire. What is a "free" gift? Aren't all gifts free? Give me ambiguity or give me something else. Tact is the art of making guests feel at home when that's where you wish they were. I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it. The gene pool could use a little chlorine. Confidence is the feeling you have before you really understand the problem. I used to be clueless about math, but I turned that around 360 degrees. The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier. If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four tellers? Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to edge his car onto a freeway. Learn from your parent's mistakes - use birth control. Experience is the thing you have left when everything else is gone. What if there were no hypothetical questions? One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other people. Eagles may soar free and proud, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines. A day without sunshine is like night. Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock. It's sad that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs. If our knees bent the other way, what would a chair look like? If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation? Is there another word for 'synonym'? Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice"? How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on. I used to never finish anything I started but now I always Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual trip around the sun. Always borrow money from pessimists. They don't expect to be paid back. What do you do when you see an endangered animal that eats only endangered plants? Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them? Why do people who know the least know it the loudest? Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I'll show you a man who can't get his pants off. If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary forms. Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense. Does the name "Pavlov" ring a bell? If life is like a stage, I want better lighting. "I want to make sure everybody who has a job wants a job." --George Bush, during his first Presidential campaign "This is a great day for France!" --Richard Nixon, while attending Charles De Gaulle's funeral "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy. But that could change." --Dan Quayle "If I listened to Michael Dukakis long enough I would be convinced that we're in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going without food and medical attention and that we've got to do something about the unemployed." --Ronald Reagan "Now we are trying to get unemployment to go up and I think we're going to succeed." --Ronald Reagan GREAT MOMENTS IN POLITICAL DEBATES: Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time." "Bite the wax tadpole." --"Coca-Cola" as originally translated into Chinese "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave." --ad slogan "Pepsi Comes Alive" as originally translated into Chinese "We pray for MacArthur's erection." --sign erected by Japanese citizens in Tokyo, when MacArthur was considering a run for President "You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid." --from a guest directory at a Japanese hotel, 1991 "It takes a virile man to make a chicken pregnant." --Perdue chicken ad, as mistranslated abroad "Nixon has been sitting in the White House while George McGovern has been exposing himself to the people of the United States." --Frank Licht, then governor of Rhode Island, campaigning for McGovern in 1972 "Retraction: The 'Greek Special' is a huge 18 inch pizza and not a huge 18 inch penis, as described in an ad. Blondie's Pizza would like to apologize for any confusion Friday's ad may have caused." --correction printed in The Daily Californian "Winfield goes back to the wall. He hits his head on the wall and it rolls off! It's rolling all the way back to second base! This is a terrible thing for the Padres!" --Jerry Coleman, Padres radio announcer The gene pool could use a little chlorine. All generalisations are false. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine. Out of my mind. Back in five minutes. Seen on an old, beat-up car: "This is not an abandoned vehicle." Sometimes I wake up grumpy; Other times I let her sleep. I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather... not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car. I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian. Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition. Real women don't have hot flashes, they have power surges. Where there's a will, I want to be in it! Okay, who stopped the payment on my reality check? If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat? Few women admit their age. Few men act it. I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it! Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off NOW! IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got. It's lonely at the top, but you eat better. According to my calculations the problem doesn't exist. Some people are only alive because it is illegal to kill them. A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory. First the engagement ring; then the wedding ring; then the suffering. He who laughs last thinks slowest. Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies. Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home. Why is 'abbreviation' such a long word? Ever stop to think, and forget to start again? Auntie Em: Hate you, hate Kansas, taking the dog. -Dorothy. Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off. Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself. Eschew obfuscation. If you throw a cat out a car window does it become kitty litter? If corn oil comes from corn, where does baby oil come from? If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex in the box? When a cow laughs does milk come up its nose? Why do they put braille on the number pads of drive-through bank machines? How did a fool and his money GET together? If nothing sticks to Teflon, how do they stick Teflon on the pan? How do they get a deer to cross at that yellow road sign? If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them? What's another word for thesaurus? Why do they sterilize the needles for lethal injections? What do they use to ship styrofoam? Why is abbreviation such a long word? Why is there an expiration date on my sour cream container? Why do kamikaze pilots wear helmets? How do you know when it's time to tune your bagpipes? Is it true that cannibals don't eat clowns because they taste funny? Does 'virgin wool' come from sheep the shepherd hasn't caught yet? When you choke a smurf, what color does it turn? Does fuzzy logic tickle? Do blind Eskimos have seeing-eye sled dogs? Do they have reserved parking for non-handicap people at the Special Olympics? Why do they call it a TV set when you only get one? Do radioactive cats have 18 half-lives? If you shoot a mime, should you use a silencer? What was the best thing before sliced bread? Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it? What do little birdies see when they get knocked unconscious? Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard? Is the main reason Santa is so jolly because he knows where all the bad girls live? Should you trust a stockbroker who's married to a travel agent? Is boneless chicken considered to be an invertebrate? Do married people live longer than single people or does it just SEEM longer? I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose. If all those psychics know the winning lottery numbers, why are they all still working? Isn't Disneyland a people trap operated by a mouse? Sooner or later, doesn't EVERYONE stop smoking? Since light travels faster than sound, isn't that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak? Isn't the best way to save face to keep the lower part shut? War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left. How come you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead? Why are they called buildings, when they're already finished? Shouldn't they be called builts? --Gallagher Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together? Why do people without out a watch look at their wrist when you ask them what time it is? Why do you ask someone without a watch what time it is? Why does sour cream have an expiration date? Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk? The light went out, but where to? Why do banks charge you a "non-sufficient funds fee" on money they already know you don't have? Why is it you have a "pair" of pants and only one bra? Does the reverse side also have a reverse side? If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? If you got into a taxi and he started driving backwards, would the taxi driver end up owing you money? Why is a carrot more orange than an orange? When two airplanes almost collide why do they call it a near miss? It sounds like a near hit to me! Do fish get cramps after eating? Why are there 5 syllables in the word "monosyllabic"? If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be? Why do they call it the Department of the Interior when they are in charge of everything outdoors? Why do scientists call it research when looking for something new? If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat? When I erase a word with a pencil, where does it go? Why is it, when a door is open it's ajar, but when a jar is open, it's not adoor? Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it. How come Superman could stop bullets with his chest, but always ducked when someone threw a gun at him? Why is lemon juice mostly artificial ingredients but dishwashing liquid contains real lemons? How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't grow in it? Why buy a product that it takes 2000 flushes to get rid of? Why do we wait until a pig is dead to "cure" it? Why do we put suits in a garment bag and put garments in a suitcase? Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff. --Mariah Carey Question: If you could live forever, would you and why? Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever. --Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are. --Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, August 22 I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law. --David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering accusations that he failed to pay his taxes. Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life. --Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body. --Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. --Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C. Beginning in February 1976 your assistance benefits will be discontinued... Reason: it has been reported to our office that you expired on January 1,1976. --Letter from the Illinois Department of Public Aid The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history...this century's history....We all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century. --Dan Quayle, then Indiana senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate during a news conference in which he was asked his opinion of the Holocaust Rotarians, be patriotic! Learn to shoot yourself. --Chicago Rotary Club journal, "Gyrator" The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe. --Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted. --Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explaining why we should export toxic wastes to Third World countries After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal, the school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of David Steele to the post. --Philip Streifer, Superintendent of Schools, Barrington, Rhode Island The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing. --Dizzy Dean explaining how he felt after being hit on the head by a ball in the 1934 World Series When a man goes on a date he wonders if he is going to get lucky. A woman already knows. --Frederick Ryder A woman's appetite is twice that of a man's; her sexual desire, four times; her intelligence, eight times. --Sanskrit proverb Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it. --Lyndon Baines Johnson I don't have a solution but I admire the problem. BEAR TAKES OVER DISNEYLAND IN POOH D'ETAT! <-------- The information went data way -------- BREAKFAST.COM halted... cereal port not responding WORLD WIDE WEB BROKEN: SPIDERMAN AT LARGE Disinformation is not as good as datinformation. "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981 Hidden DOS secret: add BUGS=OFF to your CONFIG.SYS DOS Tip #17: Add DEVICE=FNGRCROS.SYS to CONFIG.SYS Error reading FAT: Try SKINNY? (Y/N) Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. I almost had a psychic girlfriend, but she left me before we met. I intend to live forever---so far, so good. If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? If you ain't makin' waves, you ain't kickin' hard enough! Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of. When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane. One nation, indivisible, with Liberty, large fries, and a Coke to go. I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain. --Carol Leifer Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog's face he gets mad at you? But take him in a car he sticks his head out the window. --Steve Bluestone You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is. --Ellen DeGeneres You have a cough? Go home tonight, eat a whole box of Ex-Lax... tomorrow, you'll be afraid to cough. --Pearl Williams A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Pass. Motorists are asked to be on the lookout for sixteen hardened criminals. --Ronnie Corbett I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry. --Rita Rudner God help me to consider people's feelings, even if most of them ARE hypersensitive. God help me to take responsibility for my own actions, even though they're usually *not* my fault. God give me patience, and I mean right NOW! God, help me to finish everything I sta Lord keep me open to others' ideas, wrong though they may be. On an Electrician's truck: "Let us remove your shorts." Outside a Radiator Repair Shop: "Best place in town to take a leak." On a Maternity Clothes Shop: "We are open on Labor Day." On Maternity Room door: "Push, Push, Push." On a Front Door: "Everyone on the premises is a vegetarian except the dog." At an Optometrist's Office: "If you don't see what you're looking for, you've come to the right place." On a Scientist's door: "Gone Fission" On a Taxidermist's window: "We really know our stuff." In a Podiatrist's window: "Time wounds all heels." On another Butcher's window: "Pleased to meat you." On a fence: "Salesmen welcome. Dog food is expensive." At a Car Dealership: "The best way to get back on your feet: miss a car payment." Outside a Muffler Shop: "No appointment necessary. We'll hear you coming." Outside a Hotel: "Help! We need inn-experienced people." At an Auto Body Shop: "May we have the next dents?" In a Dry Cleaner's Emporium: "Drop your pants here." On a desk in a Reception Room: "We shoot every 3rd salesman, and the 2nd one just left." In a Veterinarian's waiting room: "Be back in 5 minutes. Sit! Stay!" On a Music Teacher's door: "Out Chopin." At the Electric Company: "We would be delighted if you send in your bill. However, if you don't, you will be." In a Beauty Shop: "Dye now!" On the side of a Garbage Truck: "We've got what it takes to take what you've got." On the door of a Computer Store: "Out for a quick byte." Inside a Bowling Alley: "Please be quiet. We need to hear a pin drop." In a Cafeteria: "Shoes are required to eat in the cafeteria. Socks can eat any place they want." On the door of a Music Library: "Bach in a minuet." In the front yard of a Funeral Home: "Drive carefully, we'll wait." Never knock on Death's door: Ring the doorbell and run (he hates that). The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when it's open. I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. --Frank Sinatra Life is a waste of time, time is a waste of life, so get wasted all of the time and have the time of your life. HARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS? Can you drive a French motorcycle? COGITO, EGGO SUM I think, therefore I am a waffle RIGOR MORRIS The cat is dead REPONDEZ S'IL VOUS PLAID Honk if you're Scottish QUE SERA SERF Life is feudal POSH MORTEM Death styles of the rich and famous ALOHA OY Love, Greetings, Farewell, from such a pain you should never know EX POST FUCTO Lost in the mail VISA LA FRANCE Don't leave your chateau without it Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before. Law of Probability Dispersal: Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed. If a mute swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap? If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages? If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked? Red wine with meat, white with fish, and any port in a storm! If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried. A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it. For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. He who hesitates is probably right. Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with. No one is listening until you make a mistake. Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view. The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it. The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread. The severity of the itch is proportional to the reach. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles. Two wrongs are only the beginning. You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive. Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life. The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before. Change is inevitable....except from vending machines. Don't sweat petty things....or pet sweaty things. A fool and his money are soon partying. Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow. Always try to be modest. And be damn proud of it! If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of mortgage payments. How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hands.... Attempt to get a new car for your spouse---it'll be a great trade! Drugs may lead to nowhere, but at least it's the scenic route. I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize. Everybody repeat after me....."We are all individuals." Death to all fanatics! Chastity is curable, if detected early. Love may be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener. Hell hath no fury like the lawyer of a woman scorned. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now. Eagles may soar, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines. Borrow money from pessimists---they don't expect it back. Beware of geeks bearing gifs. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good. If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you.... Why do you need a driver's license to buy liquor when you can't drink and drive? Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds? Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii? Why are there flotation devices under plane seats instead of parachutes? Why are cigarettes sold in gas stations when smoking is prohibited there? Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime? Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations? How does the guy who drives the snowplough get to work in the mornings? If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors? If a cow laughed, would milk come out her nose? If nothing ever sticks to TEFLON, how do they make TEFLON stick to the pan? If you tied buttered toast to the back of a cat and dropped it from a height, what would happen? If you're in a vehicle going the speed of light, what happens when you turn on the headlights? You know how most packages say "Open here". What do you do if the package says, "Open somewhere else"? Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM? Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways? Why is it that when you transport something by car, it's called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it's called cargo? Why is it that when you're driving and looking for an address, you turn down the volume on the radio? "Man who drop watch in toilet have shitty time." "Man trapped in pantry have ass in jam." "Virgin like balloon . . . one prick, all gone." "Baseball wrong . . . man with four balls cannot walk!" "Work to become, not to acquire." "Baby conceived in automatic car shiftless bastard." "A bird in hand makes hard to blow nose." "Man who smoke pot choke on handle." "Ok for shit to happen . . . will decompose." "Man who put head on Rail Road track to listen for train likely to end up with splitting headache." "Sailor who gets discharged from navy leave buddies behind." "Secretary becomes permanent fixture when screwed on desk." "Don't drink and park, accidents cause people." "He who crosses the ocean twice without washing is a dirty double crosser." "Man who tell one to many light bulb jokes soon burn out!" "It takes many nails to build crib, but one screw to fill it." "Never raise hands to angry child, it leave groin exposed." "Woman who cooks carrots and peas in same pot is unsanitary." "Man who fart in church sit in his own pew!" "Man who eat many prunes, sit on toilet many moons." "Confucius say too God damn much!" "Those who quote me are fools." "Man who drive like hell bound to get there!" "Man who keep feet firmly on ground have trouble putting on pants!" "Man who stand on toilet is high on pot!" "Man who sit on tack get point!" "Man who runs behind car gets exhausted!" "Man who jump off cliff jump to conclusion!" c code. c code run. please, code, run! When two deaf people have orgasms in the woods do they make a sound? "The mist clung to the mountain the same way a thirteen-year-old girl clings to her boyfriend, although the mountain wasn't thinking about 'getting lucky.'" (1990 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest entry) If Sh*t doesn't happen, SPAM will. If the telephone rings today, water it. Jesus saves and redeems sinners... for valuable cash prizes! Everyone chant with me: Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Judaism: And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Christianity: And man, being only man, ecce homo, returned the favor. I would enjoy the day much more if it began later. Keep warm and save energy. Go to bed with a person of your choice. Join the army, travel to foreign countries, meet exotic people---and kill them. If Superman is so clever, why does he wear his underwear over his pants? Marriage is the main cause of divorce. We have to go too far to find out how far we can go. If a cow laughed, would milk come out of its nose? "On a clear disc, you can seek forever." "Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this." --Douglas Adams "Look, I tried the cat experiment. On the third trial, the cat was dead. On each of the subsequent 413 trials, it remained dead. Am I doing something wrong?" --James Nicoll Q. How many Heisenbergs does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. If you know the number, you don't know where the light bulb is! "Isn't it great. If I had said these things years ago, I would have been considered a problem child. Now, I'm a 'well adjusted adult,' wonderful." Coffee Facts from Dr. Science: 1) You can never brew coffee too strong. 2) You can never drink too much coffee. 3) Coffee does not make you nervous. Your own inadequacies do that. Coffee merely increases your perception of your own inadequacies. 4) Tea is to coffee as ginger ale is to Scotch. 5) There is no such thing as a bad cup of coffee. 6) "Even a bad cup of coffee is better than no cup of coffee at all." --David Lynch At a Mall: "5 Santas, No waiting" If cats always land on their feet and bread always lands butter side down, what would happen if you strapped a piece of buttered bread to the back of a cat and threw him...? When they ship styrofoam, what do they pack it in...? "The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University." --Robert Pirsig 'Penn State University - where men are men and women are womyn.' Smith and Wesson: the Ultimate Point-and-Click User Interface. Every new technology carries with it an opportunity to invent a new crime. --Laurence A. Urgenson "Whatever makes the most money will happen." --Eleanor Glyn Data is not information is not knowledge is not wisdom. A bird in the hand is inconvenient. Did you hear about the dyslexic devil worshipper? He sold his soul to Santa. --Herb Caen Famous Last Words: "Whaddya mean, a pentagram only has FIVE sides?" Nobody can fix the economy. Nobody can be trusted with their finger on the button. Nobody's perfect. VOTE FOR NOBODY. "Have a revelation, the first one's free/Soon to be addicted to eternity" What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it. The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip. "Bad mood, bad mood...Sure I'm in a bad mood! I haven't had sex...*EVER!*" --Virgin Mary "Look, he's being attacked by creamy nugget centers." --Joel It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. "America is truly a great big melting pot. When you bring it to a boil the scum rises to the top." Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. --John Lennon Babs : "Excuse me, are those Bungle Boy jeans you're wearing?" Buster : "I'm not wearing any pants." "These check boxes actually function as check boxes." --from a SW spec "Gad---I'm SUCH a genius!" --Wile E. Coyote "You'll never find happiness as a human being, kid." --Suehiro Maruo This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time. --Aneurin Bevan, ignorant of the abilities of government written on a condom machine in a men's room: "This bubble gum tastes like shit, but it's great for blowing bubbles and it lasts a LONG time." "Is there any other part of the matzo you can eat?" --Marilyn Monroe "After we made love he took out a piece of chalk and made an outline of my body." --Joan Rivers I know a guy named Stephen McGargle..... Of course, we call him Scope "Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep." --Fran Lebowitz Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one. "Who cares about apathy anyway?" I have two personalities. One is paranoid, and the other is out to get him. --Steven Wright Brooke's Law: Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition. "Our job is to play games. Our hobby is to consult." Archaeology: it's got no future, but a hell of a past. Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. "If I were the moon, I'd be cool" --Pink Floyd "The truth comes knocking on the door and you say,'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it does. Puzzling." --Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it. --Steven Wright In space, its never Miller time. --Opus the Penguin "The question of whether a computer can swim is more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can think" --Lenny Dykstra From Zen: One Man Says, The Flag Is Moving. Second says, The Wind Is moving. Third Says, Neither the wind or flag moves, but it is your mind that Moves. Humans: Beings stupid enough to create their own monsters, and then curse their luck when they run into them. "On a day such as this you should insist on more than the truth" --Pere Ubu John 14:6 Moe 23:5 Larry 6:9 Curly 0:3.1415926 C: Unintelligible code means job security. Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it. --Moses Hadas Co-ed Naked Calculus---maximize the function of your ln "If you're not part of the solution you're part of the precipitate." --Steven Wright Only the needle has been changed to protect the record. "If we do not succeed, then we risk the chance of failure!" --Dan Quayle "Sometimes it is better to have twenty million instructions by Friday than twenty million instructions per second." --Wes Clark "I've given up trying to stay ahead of the times, it's now a matter of how far I get left behind." "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. --Emerson M. Pugh "A horse! A horse! Somebody give me a horse, man, because I come to bury this dirtball, not to praise him. Whaddya think I am? Whether it's nobler for the mind to make people suffer with all these totally outrageous arrows arrows for a fortune, or what!" --D.R. "Son, all the pretty, intelligent, healthy young women are taken. It's a basic rule of the universe, and if you don't like it, go somewhere else." --Ken Johnson's dad, 1906-1992 Yow! Did something bad happen or am I in a drive-in movie?? "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." --Groucho Marx "Oh, you're a bigot all right, you just feel that saying you have the right to be one means you're liberal. If it didn't happen so often, it would be funny." --Mark Sobolewski, in talk.religion.misc "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." --Robert Heinlein Regnant populi. (The people rule.) Pregnant ropuli. (The snake will soon lay eggs.) "Why is it a penny for your thoughts, but you always have to put in your 2 cents worth? " "It's better to be dead and cool...... than to be alive and uncool." --The Marlboro Man "I have news for you. 'Thppht' spelled backwards is STILL 'thppht'." "make lots of money", "enjoy the work", "operate within the law": choose 2 "It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent." --Q, ST-TNG "Deja-Q" "Learn as though you were to live forever. Love as though you were to die tomorrow." --Henry David Thoreau "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to keep the water and food dishes filled, and the litterbox scooped" "We've replaced the cheap wine and crackers we normally serve at communion with the Blood and Body of Your Lord and Saviour! Let's see what happens..." Uhlmann's Razor: When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there is no need to have recourse to any other. --Michael M. Uhlmann, assistant attorney general for legislation in the Ford Administration A concept that cannot be expressed tersely is a badly understood concept. --Chuck Moore The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. --E. W. Dijkstra (1982) "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." --Doug Gwyn "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." --Somerset Maugham "Without gratuitous sex, we would be no better than animals." --M. Swanwick "Burnt Sienna. Thats the best thing that ever happened to Crayolas." --Ken Weaver "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity" --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) I haven't lost my mind, its backed up on tape somewhere! --Peter da Silva "Sig quotes are like bumper stickers, only without the same sense of relevance" "Using a computer should always be easier than not using a computer." --Ted Nelson "If we had a budget big enough for drugs and sexual favors, we sure wouldn't waste them on members of Congress..." --John Perry Barlow "I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free." --Eris The revolution will not only be televised, but it was scripted and recorded live in front of a studio audience. --adwyer@mason1.gmu.edu "Unencumbered with facts as I am, I will comment." --Drew Larson in alt.folklore.computers; now the official Usenet Motto Rules of Creative Research: 1) Never draw what you can copy. 2) Never copy what you can trace. 3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down. Beer and Wheaties - Breakfast of Champions Jolt and Twinkies - Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner of programmers everywhere... "Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees." --Intel VP David House, In _EE_Times_, 16 October 1989 Did William Faulkner have little creatures on his old typewriter? If so, they were the product of whiskey, which addles the brain less than cartoon creatures and menus and buttons that send messages to the screen demanding: "Abort? Quit? Try Again? Drop Dead? Exit? Go To Hell You Schnook?" --Mike Royko "The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it." --Brian Eno You do not have to be unemployed to be a burden on society. Jake liked his women the way he liked his kiwi fruit: sweet yet tart, firm- fleshed yet yielding to the touch, and covered with short brown fuzzy hair. The Sausage Principle: People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either one being made. "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." --Gene Spafford, 1992 He's dead, Jim....I guess he won't be needing this watch! They're "A bit dry, but they'd be OK with a cup of tea." Isn't that *the* catchphrase for just about anything in Britain? It's only premarital sex if you're going to get married. UK Parliament Virus: Splits the screen into two with a message in each half blaming other side for the state of the system. What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. --Dave Barry "The trouble with radicals is that they read only radical literature and the trouble with conservatives is that they don't read anything." --Thomas Carter Frisbee's theorem: Any sport using a ball, has a sufficient replacement in a disc. "I was pleased to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." --Mark Twain, _Life on the Mississippi_ "This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true." --Hunter S Thompson (1) Ignorance of your profession is best concealed by solemnity and silence, which pass for profound knowledge upon the generality of mankind. --"Advice to Officers of the British Army", 1783 "Aren't you glad that smell is not one of the senses affected by television?" Going to a Moebius strip joint, and hitting the Klein bottle "What's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" Life's too darn short to waste time trying to please every meddlesome moron who's got an idea how I ought to be. --Calvin The excess fatty tissue surrounding the mammary gland, tissue whose abundance is eternally sought after by a significant subset of the population and eternally cursed by yet another subset, also has excellent bouyancy. Unfortunately, this lightness in water has a comparable heaviness in the rather thinner air, leading to back pain, posture problems and photographs published by the National Geographic Society. Fighting for peace is like making love for virginity. Windows NT (WNT). If you take the letters before them in the alphabet, you get VMS. Arrghhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "Girls are like parking spaces---all the good ones are already taken" --Anlo Liu "Everywhere I go, it seems to say `no parking'" --Jimmy Yu Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the galaxy lies a small yellow sun, orbited by a blue green planet, whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think Windows is a pretty neat idea. When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all. The Feynman problem solving Algorithm 1) Write down the problem 2) Think real hard 3) Write down the answer Murray Gell-mann in the NY Times If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. --Maslow "If it were easy to understand, we wouldn't call it code." "Life is just one non sequitur after catfish." --Brian Postow If the auto industry were like the computer industry, a car would now cost $5, would get 5000 miles to the gallon, and at random times would explode, killing all its passengers. I giggle uncontrollably when I see an advertisement for "Snap-on Tools" (tm). Descartes had two sons he had reared, And the end of his patience soon neared. So he said to his boys, "I can't think with this noise!" And, with that, poor Descartes disappeared. --biggles@wam.umd.edu In 1981, my roommate and I each bought a case of beer and each drank a case of beer on Super Bowl Sunday, and pissed back into the empties. Much to our astonishment, we pissed more than we drank. I cite this as proof that beer is a diuretic. And that a college education still leaves people pretty stupid after they've had a few beers. --josh@pogo.cqs.washington.edu "Seriousness of mind was a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian physics. I am not convinced that it is not a handicap in understanding quantum theory." --Connie Willis "I'm sure LSD is just great and all, but, to tell the truth, I'm not sure I want to be in a mental state in which the lyrics to Strawberry Fields make sense." (talking about sex) "Some people provide quantity. Some provide quality. I provide good conversation afterwards." "Ah, the B-52's. The band that makes really, really annoying songs that everyone likes anyway." "The really great thing about C is that it will let you do absolutely anything you want. On the other hand, the really terrible and horrifying thing about C is that it will let you do absolutely anything you want." "When you type to UNIX, a gnome deep in the system is gathering your characters and saving them in a secret place." - Unix 6th edition manual "696969 is the number of the beast with two backs." --Rick Kelly "Actually, I was calling for the answering machine. Is it on?" "The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten." --Jules Feiffer "...the ceaseless stroking of my ego is something that all creatures, living and dead, should obviously devote their existences to." --Scowling Jim Cowling, from rec.arts.comics.misc BSD: UNIX with Berkeley enhancements LSD: Reality with Berkeley enhancements "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." --Jeremy S. Anderson In the Serengeti, there is a small outcropping of rock which conceals a rich oasis. Tucked away, hidden from the burning sun by a stone ceiling, is a small pool of fresh water, and in this pool grow clues by the moist thousands. See your travel agent. --jswan@netcom.com if a man stands on the hood of a ford escort moving at light-speed, and he pisses into the wind, he doesn't get wet... but his children do. "Old enough to know better, young enough not to care." --MCCLELLAND "Whilst hanging by one arm, up a tree in the garden at the weekend doing a bit of amateur tree surgery, I read the label on the side of my trusty Husqvarna, it said 'Caution: Chainsaws can be dangerous'" --Dave Langstaff "Since the best place to be is a jacuzzi, and the best food is chocolate chip cookie dough and milk, and the best thing to do is make love, then utopia is probably making love to a person that is made out of chocolate chip cookie dough in a jacuzzi full of milk." --Jon Mason Gougar, Jr "Depends on how you look at it. I always interpreted the question 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' to be: masturbation." --Strayhorn "Programming is like sex: One mistake and you support it a lifetime." "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to change it every six months." --Oscar Wilde Engineering: "How will this work?" Science: "Why will this work?" Management: "When will this work?" Liberal Arts: "Do you want fries with that?" ... Profanity (n): The ONE language ALL programmers know. "The only bad part about procrastination is that last day." --Brian Wellington If it weren't for C, we would be using BASI, PASAL, and OBOL. Space is curved. That or my car pulls to the left. vi is to emacs as masturbation is to making love: effective and always available but probably not your first choice. --Gary Engebretson I may look lazy, but on a cellular level I'm really busy. "If you do not possess superior genes worthy of my ovaries then FUCK OFF." --Yong-Mi Kim "I'd just like to point out that I really like the vagina. It's probably my favorite body part, beating out the elbow by a considerable amount." --Scott Dorsey "The bird has begun to make modem tones. I didn't believe that she could until I heard it." "There's little in life as satisfying as beating out 8 straight yellow lights." --Ron Echeverri 30 years of progress in rock-n-roll: 1964 - The Beatles sing "I want to hold your hand." 1994 - Nine Inch Nails sings "I want to fuck you like an animal." That about sums it up. --rpwhite "'Data,' as you probably know, is from the Latin; it's plural for 'datum,' meaning 'something that a computer will process, once they're invented.' Those Romans were a bright bunch. It's the opposite of 'disum,' meaning 'everything that currently exists and hence won't be processed by a computer in the next 2000 years or so.'" --Joe English I just flustered my kid with the question, "What does a 'You-Are-Here' sign say when you are not there?" --Anders Vinberg "Maybe if I pee they'll fit better." --Josh Adams "The bizarre is that which heals us of reality." --Diane Wilson Computers save time like kudzu prevents soil erosion. On geekspeak: "You guys should really get a foreign language credit for this." --Liz Cothen "I have finally thought of the ultimate villain for the comics: Physics Man. Physics Man's only power would be to enforce the laws of physics. Colossal Boy would collapse under his own weight. Laurel Gand would suffer time dilation. Spider Man would get blood cancer. Superman would have to eat a WHOLE lot or spend month at a time in close orbit around the sun. Batman would be on a respirator. Kitty Pride would be twenty three. Powergirl would own a br..well, you get the point;-)" --charyma "There is a creeping evil in the world and it's called Management Consultants. These are people who know nothing about your business and charge you money to prove it." --Geoff Lane I believe that the purpose of life is to get as much good food, good sex, and expensive hardware as possible, and then go out in a blaze of glory, guns, and large samurai armies a la the end of Kurosawa's _Ran_. --Michael Handler "We just don't discuss that capability. I can't tell you why we don't discuss it because then I'd be discussing it." --Pete Williams "UNIX is the answer, but only if you phrase the question very carefully." --Jonathan H. N. Chin "The only things infinite in size are the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the Universe." --Albert Einstein A polar bear is just another way of expressing a rectangular bear. "In the 1964 SF novel _Andromeda_Breakthrough_ (ISBN 0-06-080471-8) by Hoyle & Elliot, there is an evil, shadowy multinational corporation. It's name? Intel." --Gary Heston "I met a guy from New York once, he said the reason the city never sleeps is if it did someone would steal it." --Alan Cox "Even paperback books have a far longer lifespan than computers. It's a humble thing, a book, but the interface doesn't change and they don't need software upgrades and new operating systems. A five dollar paperback book will dance on the grave of a five thousand dollar computer." --Bruce Sterling "There's safety in numbers. Large prime numbers." --John Gilmore unix is an operating system, os/2 is half an operating system, windows is a shell, and dos is a boot partition virus. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. Artificial Intelligence stands no chance against Natural Stupidity. "Next Saturday night is going to be a dangerous time to be a brain cell." --Steph Hausler "People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it's safer to pick on rich women than biker gangs." --Lenny Schafer The real question is not whether machines think, but whether men do. --B.F. Skinner UNIX is user friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are. "Grad school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life." --Comedian John Rogers (who holds a graduate degree in physics) "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." --Rich Cook "The press only knows three stories: Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future." --Dave Winer "It's not procrastination, it's my new Just-In-Time Workload Management System!" --Jim Paradis On Mac reactions to the NeXT: "We're in the land of the blind, selling working eyeballs, and they balk at the choice of color." --Tony Lovell "I could eat alphabet soup and *shit* better lyrics." --Johnny Mercer "Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." --Blair Houghton Windows 95: n. 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition. #from 8/6/97 San Jose Mercury News "...We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, "What a huge waste of corporate productivity." So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work." --Scott McNealy #(daughter of Calvin Klein) "My only complaint about having a father in fashion is that every time I'm about to go to bed with a guy I have to look at my dad's name all over his underwear." --Marci Klein "If it's not real, WHY DOES IT TAKE UP DISK SPACE?" --bev "Unlike cockroaches, Windows NT is something you can't possibly be unfair to." --Peter da Silva "Males and females are equally clueless, it's just that they have different blind spots that make each seem so ridiculous to the other." --Greg Seidman "Ethernet withdrawal sucks. Bandwidth is like smoking---going cold turkey really sucks." --Matthew Schnierle And in response, thus spake the Oracle: } I'm sorry, Monica, but you are the dented Spaghettio's can in the } supermarket aisle of my life. "In a literary light, if UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes." --Thomas Scoville "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" --Adolf Hitler "One World, One Web, One Program" --Microsoft Promotional Ad #gss's uncle "Sometimes, all you can lay is groundwork." --A.S. And while we must recognize that computers are wonderful machines that have improved our lives in countless ways, we must also, by the same token, recognize that they are the evil demon spawn of Hell. --Dave Barry "The brain space you have dedicated to knowing Java I have dedicated to mid-80s rap lyrics, which I consider a better use of resources." --Sam Heath "But as always, like the dinosaur had to pass, so will your love. This is utterly true. In fact, this has always been true. Remember, love is for fools, you've said it yourself and with good reason. Thousands of years have taught us that. She'll be gone, she'll take the lingerie you bought her to use with someone else." --Rollin Thomas On the difference between O(n^n) and O(2^(2^n)) "Banging your head against the wall for an hour is better than banging your head against the wall for a day." --Stan Zdonik "How are you... going to respond when the Clock-Radio of Challenge emits the Irritating Buzz of Opportunity? Are you going to roll over and hit the Snooze Button of Complacency? Or are you going to wake up and, after performing the Bodily Functions of Preparedness, boldly grasp the Toothbrush of Tomorrow?" --Dave Barry "You know, now that I rewatch that scene in [A Clockwork Orange] where Alex is forced to watch the horrors on TV, I think it actually was just regular prime-time Fox he was watching. "The rough sex, the violence---I knew it all looked familiar from someplace... Kubrick must have found a Fox tape that had fallen through a timewarp from 2002 or something." --Skyshadow Vegetables aren't food, vegetables are what food eats. If someone is going to make a mistake costly to me, better for it to be an understandably incompetent human like myself than a mysteriously incompetent machine. --J Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason "Vegetarians don't date their food!" --Dave Gondek When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb. --Steve Hoflich, comp.lang.c++ Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go wherever they like. Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change ready. The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know. --Patricia E. Presutti, 1986 Winner, Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. This Internet is your middle finger to the universe, don't let them break it. --Marilyn Manson You can't talk your way out of problems you behaved yourself into. "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen "Do what's right. You'll please some people, and amaze everyone else." --Mark Twain Life is like photography: You use the negative to develop... The secret of being a child is never knowing that you will one day die. The secret of being an adult is never forgetting that you once were immortal. Just remember...if the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off. If you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world's population. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it. Eat right. Stay fit. Die anyway. The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those who got there first. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat drinking beer all day. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries. When you swim in the creek, and an eel bites your cheek, that's a moray! A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. Dyslexics have more fnu. Clones are people two. Microbiology Lab: Staph Only! Santa's elves are just a bunch of subordinate Clauses. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. Editing is a rewording activity. Help stamp out and eradicate superfluous redundancy. What if there were no hypothetical questions? I don't care WHO you are, you're not walking on the water while I'm fishing. A good sermon should have a good beginning and a good ending, and they should be as close together as possible. Photons have mass!? I didn't even know they were Catholic... A diagnostic is someone who doesn't know whether there are two gods. I am an agnostic pagan. I doubt the existence of many gods. He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at. --Terry Pratchett, 'Small Gods' And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords... --Alan Wilson Watts Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much. --G.K. Chesterton I am ready to meet my maker. Whether or not my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter. --Winston Churchill A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?" Adam to Eve: I'll wear the plants in this family! And on the 8th day God said, OK Murphy, you take over. Birth, life, death. Repeat as necessary. I disbelieved in reincarnation in my last life, too. Sects, sects, sects. Is that all you monks ever think about? The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people. The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep. On the sixth day, God created the platypus. And God said: let's see the evolutionists try and figure this one out. God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe. --Malaclypse the Younger Do I believe in the Bible? Hell, man, I've seen one! Heck is a place for people who don't belive in Gosh. Go thou and sin more creatively next time. Every time someone predicts the date of the end of the world, God pushes the date back a little, just to be funny. History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion - i.e. none to speak of. --Robert Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (Lazarus Long) "If God wanted us to have a president, He would have sent us a candidate." --Jerry Dreshfield "What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought that you didn't believe in God?" "I don't," she sobbed, bursting into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be." --Joseph Heller Did you hear about the Unitarian branch of the Ku Klux Klan? They burn question marks in people's front yards. #From Hilary A good pun is its own reword. A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking. Dijon vu - the same mustard as before. Practice safe eating - always use condiments. I fired my masseuse today. She just rubbed me the wrong way. A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death. A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy. A hangover is the wrath of grapes. Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play. Sea captains don't like crew cuts. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? When you dream in color, it's a pigment of your imagination. Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion. Reading whilst sunbathing makes you well-red. When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I. #Latin Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. --Stuart Thomson "Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex." (Where there is no police, there is no speed limit.) --Roman Law, trans. Petr Beckmann (1971) Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam. "Qvid me anxivs svm?" Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necesitate. --William of Ockham #German Ich bin ein .signature Virus. Mach' mit und kopiere mich in Deine .signature. Don't ask what it means, just put it in your .signature, okay? Für die Raupe ist es das Ende der Welt; für den Rest der Welt ist es ein Schmetterling. Warum heissen eigentlich alle Frauen mit nachnamen jpg? Um Recursion zu verstehen muß man sie entweder schon verstehen oder Jemanden kennen der sie versteht. #French « L'hipocrisie est un vice à la mode, et tous les vices à la mode passent pour vertus. » --Molière, _Dom Juan_ (Dom Juan) « La naissance n'est rien où la vertu n'est pas. » --Molière, _Dom Juan_ (Dom Louis) « Un gentilhomme qui vit mal est un monstre dans la nature, [car] la vertu est le premier titre de noblesse. » --Molière, _Dom Juan_ (Dom Louis) « Je ferois plus d'estat du fils d'un crocheteur qui seroit honneste homme que du fils d'un monarque qui vivroit comme vous. » --Molière, _Dom Juan_ (Dom Louis) « Tout ça comme si je me frapois la teste contre un mur. Vois-tu, ça n'est ny biau ny honneste de naimer pas les gens qui nous aimont. » --Molière, _Dom Juan_ (Pierrot) « Je te dis toujou la mesme chose, parce que c'est toujou la mesme chose, et si ce n'estoit pas toujou la mesme chose, je ne te dirois pas toujou la mesme chose. » --Molière, _Dom Juan_ (Pierrot) Il brilgue : les tôves lubricilleux Se gyrent et frillant dans le guave, Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux, Et le mômerade horsgrave. --Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" « D'après mon diagnostic provisoire, votre cerveau se comporte comme un disque dur d'ordinateur qu'on aurait utilisé durant des années sans le défragmenter. Vous avez enregistré plus d'informations, plus d'émotions que vous n'êtes capable d'en assimiler. » --Philippe Curval, _Voyance Aveugle_ Sur George Bush fils: « C'est très logiquement que le Texas, habitué aux échecs, a choisi un perdant comme gouverneur. » --Daniel Lazare #Spanish Y mañana podria llover, pues yo seguire el sol.