In English, every word can be verbed.  Would that it were so in our
programming languages.
	"I cannot read the fiery letters," said Frodo in a quavering
voice.
	"No," Said Gandalf, "but I can.  The letters are Elvish, of
course, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which
I will not utter here.  They are lines of a verse long known in
Elven-lore:

	"This Ring, no other, is made by the elves,
	Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves.
	Ruler of creeper, mortal, and scallop,
	This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop.
	The Power almighty rests in this Lone Ring.
	The Power, alrighty, for doing your Own Thing.
	If broken or busted, it cannot be remade.
	If found, send to Sorhed (with postage prepaid)."
A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary.
Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a "round tuit" now
has no excuse for further procrastination.
"This is a country where people are free to practice their religion,
regardless of race, creed, color, obesity, or number of dangling
keys ..."
"Why be a man when you can be a success?"
		-- Bertold Brecht
Anthony's Law of the Workshop:
	Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least accessible
	corner of the workshop.

Corollary:
	On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike
	your toes.
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.
		-- Charles McCabe
I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.
Rule of Defactualization:
	Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
Pretend to spank me -- I'm a pseudo-masochist!
Beware of low-flying butterflies.
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And plunged it deep into the VAX;
Don't you envy people who
Do all the things ___YOU want to do?
First Law of Bicycling:
	No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the
	wind.
Actor:	So what do you do for a living?
Doris:	I work for a company that makes deceptively shallow serving
	dishes for Chinese restaurants.
		-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of
the future.
Whistler's Law:
	You never know who is right, but you always know who is in
	charge.
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
		-- Abbie Hoffman
"Who cares if it doesn't do anything?  It was made with our new
Triple-Iso-Bifurcated-Krypton-Gate-MOS process ..."
Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.
	An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity
in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him.
	"Well, zayda, it's sort of like this.  Einstein says that if
you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like
an hour.  But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an
hour seems like a minute."
	The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a
moment and says, "And from this he makes a living?"
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman
out of a divorce.
		-- Don Quinn
Lieberman's Law:
	Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
Broad-mindedness, n.:
	The result of flattening high-mindedness out.
My God, I'm depressed!  Here I am, a computer with a mind a thousand
times as powerful as yours, doing nothing but cranking out fortunes and
sending mail about softball games.  And I've got this pain right
through my ALU.  I've asked for it to be replaced, but nobody ever
listens.  I think it would be better for us both if you were to just
log out again.
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
	You take one down, and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.
Wiker's Law:
	Government expands to absorb revenue and then some.
"The climate of Bombay is such that its inhabitants have to live
elsewhere."
If I had any humility I would be perfect.
		-- Ted Turner
Write-Protect Tab, n.:
	A small sticker created to cover the unsightly notch carelessly
left by disk manufacturers.  The use of the tab creates an error
message once in a while, but its aesthetic value far outweighs the
momentary inconvenience.
		-- Robb Russon
Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little.
LIBRA (Sep. 23 to Oct. 22)
	Your desire for justice and truth will be overshadowed by your
	desire for filthy lucre and a decent meal.  Be gracious and
	polite.  Someone is watching you, so stop staring like that.
Your lucky number is 3552664958674928.  Watch for it everywhere.
Reclaimer, spare that tree!
Take not a single bit!
It used to point to me,
Now I'm protecting it.
It was the reader's CONS
That made it, paired by dot;
Now, GC, for the nonce,
Thou shalt reclaim it not.
Dear Lord:
	I just want *___one* one-armed manager so I never have to hear "On
	the other hand", again.
Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?
Watson's Law:
	The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the
	number and significance of any persons watching it.
Put your Nose to the Grindstone!
		-- Amalgamated Plastic Surgeons and Toolmakers, Ltd.
All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
importance.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating.  It prevents moderation from
acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
		-- W. Somerset Maugham
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 ...
It will be advantageous to cross the great stream ... the Dragon is on
the wing in the Sky ... the Great Man rouses himself to his Work.
Take everything in stride.  Trample anyone who gets in your way.
Surprise due today.  Also the rent.
If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure
can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly
develop.
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.
If you can't be good, be careful.  If you can't be careful, give me a
call.
Admiration, n.:
	Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Anything is good if it's made of chocolate.
Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately,
no one we know belongs.
A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was
waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
		-- Mark Twain
Shamus, n.:
	A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the
temple, and makes sure everything is in working order.
	A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagog
functionaries, and there's a joke about that:
	A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the
middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!"  The cantor, not to be
bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!"
	The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I
am nobody!"  The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks
he's nobody!"
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
			-- Gifts for Men --

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

If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires.  More
than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set
of tires.
		-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time
to reform.
		-- Mark Twain
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest
shopping center in the world?
		-- Richard M. Nixon
Rule of Feline Frustration:
	When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly
	content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the
	bathroom.
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
Cinemuck, n.:
	The combination of popcorn, soda, and melted chocolate which
covers the floors of movie theaters.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Excellent day to have a rotten day.
Santa Claus wears a Red Suit,
	He must be a communist.
And a beard and long hair,
	Must be a pacifist.

	What's in that pipe that he's smoking?
		-- Arlo Guthrie
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
		-- Abraham Lincoln
Coward, n.:
	One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Heaven, n.:
	A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of
their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you
expound your own.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"Arguments with furniture are rarely productive."
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
Real Programmers don't write in PL/I.  PL/I is for programmers who
can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.
Future looks spotty.  You will spill soup in late evening.
"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing."
Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor):
	That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to,
	or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you
	should have gotten.
	"And what will you do when you grow up to be as big as me?"
asked the father of his little son.
	"Diet."
"Somewhere", said Father Vittorini, "did Blake not speak of the
Machineries of Joy?  That is, did not God promote environments, then
intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men
and women, such as are we all?  And thus happily sent forth, at our
best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are
we not God's Machineries of Joy?"

"If Blake said that", said Father Brian, "he never lived in Dublin."
		-- R. Bradbury, "The Machineries of Joy"
The chicken that clucks the loudest is the one most likely to show up
at the steam fitters' picnic.
Let us live!!!
Let us love!!!
Let us share the deepest secrets of our souls!!!

You first.
Never eat more than you can lift.
		-- Miss Piggy
Weinberg's Second Law:
	If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
	then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy
	civilization.
I'll grant the random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.
		-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
If I had a plantation in Georgia and a home in Hell, I'd sell the
plantation and go home.
		-- Eugene P. Gallagher
"But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad
place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge.
Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge?  What is a
kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs,
poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around?  Have I
explained yet about the bytes?"
Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of
pre-Adamite ancestral descent.  You will understand this when I tell
you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial
atomic globule.  Consequently, my family pride is something
inconceivable.  I can't help it.  I was born sneering.
		-- Pooh-Bah, "The Mikado", Gilbert & Sullivan
"I am not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it."
		-- English Professor
When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into
the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
		-- Woody Allen
Menu, n.:
	A list of dishes which the restaurant has just run out of.
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else --
unless it is an enemy.
		-- A. Einstein
He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
		-- Oscar Wilde
Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark
The Duke is fond of kittens
He likes to take their insides out
And use them for his mittens
	From "The Thirteen Clocks"
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in
praise of intelligence.
		-- Bertrand Russell
"When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut."
The Official MBA Handbook on business cards:

	Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm,
	Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of
	Corporate Planning."
Higgeldy Piggeldy,
Hamlet of Elsinore
Ruffled the critics by
Dropping this bomb:
"Phooey on Freud and his
Psychoanalysis --
Oedipus, Shmoedipus,
I just loved Mom."
First Law of Socio-Genetics:
	Celibacy is not hereditary.
Good night to spend with family, but avoid arguments with your mate's
new lover.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
		-- H. L. Mencken
	The men sat sipping their tea in silence.  After a while the
klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream."

	"Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other.  "Why?"

	"How should I know?  What am I, a philosopher?"
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the
flag.
Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming
	Never test for an error condition you don't know how to
	handle.
This life is a test.  It is only a test.  Had this been an actual life,
you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where
to go.
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
These days the necessities of life cost you about three times what they
used to, and half the time they aren't even fit to drink.
Old soldiers never die.  Young ones do.
Ever notice that even the busiest people are never too busy to tell you
just how busy they are.
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
		-- Dorothy Parker
Q: How many Martians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One and a half.
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer, then you find
there is nothing in it.
I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
		-- Pete Seeger
I never fail to convince an audience that the best thing they could do
was to go away.
Maier's Law:
	If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be
	disposed of.

Corollaries:
	1.  The bigger the theory, the better.
	2.  The experiment may be considered a success if no more than
	    50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to
	    obtain a correspondence with the theory.
Never call a man a fool.  Borrow from him.
Fairy Tale, n.:
	A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.
"The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as
we could with both of them."
		-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
Be different: conform.
"Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun."
		-- Jeff Berner
... if forced to travel on an airplane, try and get in the cabin with
the Captain, so you can keep an eye on him and nudge him if he falls
asleep or point out any mountains looming up ahead ...
		-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
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.
		      THE STORY OF CREATION
			       or
			 THE MYTH OF URK

In the beginning there was data.  The data was without form and null,
and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
was moving over the face of the market.  And DEC said, "Let there be
registers"; and there were registers.  And DEC saw that they carried;
and DEC separated the data from the instructions.  DEC called the data
Stack, and the instructions they called Code.  And there was evening
and there was morning, one interrupt ...
		-- Rico Tudor
Justice is incidental to law and order.
		-- J. Edgar Hoover
This fortune is false.
/earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can.
The notion of a "record" is an obsolete remnant of the days of the
80-column card.
		-- Dennis M. Ritchie
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
		-- William James
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the
crowd.  The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no
one has ever been.
		-- Alan Ashley-Pitt
A UNIX saleslady, Lenore,
Enjoys work, but she likes the beach more.
	She found a good way
	To combine work and play:
She sells C shells by the seashore.
I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
Polymer physicists are into chains.
Afternoon very favorable for romance.  Try a single person for a
change.
Johnson's First Law:
	When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the
	most inconvenient possible time.
		A Severe Strain on the Credulity

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device.  It is when one
considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really
starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor
maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing
of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
		-- New York Times Editorial, 1920
Surprise your boss.  Get to work on time.
"I'd love to go out with you, but I have to stay home and see if I
snore."
Finagle's Third Law:
	In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct,
	beyond all need of checking, is the mistake

Corollaries:
	1.  Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
	2.  The first person who stops by, whose advice you really
	    don't want to hear, will see it immediately.
Pope Goestheveezl was the shortest reigning pope in the history of the
Church, reigning for two hours and six minutes on 1 April 1866.  The
white smoke had hardly faded into the blue of the Vatican skies before
it dawned on the assembled multitudes in St. Peter's Square that his
name had hilarious possibilities.  The crowds fell about, helpless with
laughter, singing
	Half a pound of tuppenny rice
	Half a pound of treacle
	That's the way the chimney smokes
	Pope Goestheveezl
The square was finally cleared by armed carabineri with tears of
laughter streaming down their faces.  The event set a record for
hilarious civic functions, smashing the previous record set when Baron
Hans Neizant B"ompzidaize was elected Landburgher of K"oln in 1653.
		-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a
hole in his head.
A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by
its author.
		-- S. C. Johnson
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but
is always polite to traffic cops.
God rest ye CS students now,
Let nothing you dismay.
The VAX is down and won't be up,
Until the first of May.
The program that was due this morn,
Won't be postponed, they say.

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

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

	(chorus)
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
	That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose --
	What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
	Said his father.  "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
	Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"
		-- Lewis Carrol
Xerox never comes up with anything original.
George Orwell was an optimist.
Hindsight is an exact science.
Hoare's Law of Large Problems:
	Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get
	out.
New systems generate new problems.
Sturgeon's Law:
	90% of everything is crud.
Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones.
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
		-- Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17 -- SARTRE

Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an extremely
unstructured language.  Statements in SARTRE have no purpose; they just
are.  Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own functions.
SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed, and are no fun at
parties.
Immortality -- a fate worse than death.
		-- Edgar A. Shoaff
Fortune's graffito of the week (or maybe even month):

		Don't Write On Walls!

		   (and underneath)

		You want I should type?
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm attending the opening of my
garage door."
A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?

And he answered:

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

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

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

And that is Fate?  said the priest.

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

That's all right, said the priest.  I wanted to know what Freight was
too.
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
Westheimer's Discovery:
	A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a
	couple of hours in the library.
Never count your chickens before they rip your lips off
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
		-- LaRouchefoucauld
Satellite Safety Tip #14:
	If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck.
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to
speak it to?
		-- Clarence Darrow
Actor:	"I'm a smash hit.  Why, yesterday during the last act, I had
	everyone glued in their seats!"
Oliver Herford:	"Wonderful!  Wonderful!  Clever of you to think of
	it!"
Year, n.:
	A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Nothing is faster than the speed of light ...

To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before
the light comes on.
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
"If you wants to get elected president, you'se got to think up some
memoraboble homily so's school kids can be pestered into memorizin'
it, even if they don't know what it means."
		-- Walt Kelly, "The Pogo Party"
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long.
		-- Howard Kandel
Give thought to your reputation.  Consider changing name and moving to
a new town.
Do not drink coffee in early A.M.  It will keep you awake until noon.
Cynic, n.:
	A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not
as they ought to be.  Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking
out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"The voters have spoken, the bastards ..."
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one
damn thing over and over.
		-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
This is National Non-Dairy Creamer Week.
Scotty:	Captain, we din' can reference it!
Kirk:	Analysis, Mr. Spock?
Spock:	Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table.
Kirk:	Then it's of external origin?
Spock:	Affirmative.
Kirk:	Mr. Sulu, go to pass two.
Sulu:	Aye aye, sir, going to pass two.
San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.
		-- Herb Caen
Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
		-- Walt Kelly, "Pogo"
	... This striving for excellence extends into people's
personal lives as well.  When '80s people buy something, they buy the
best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability.
Eighties people buy imported dental floss.  They buy gourmet baking
soda.  If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a
reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their
table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is
not an excellent restaurant.  If it were, it would have an enormous
crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their
beepers going off like crickets in the night.  An excellent restaurant
wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of
Liza Minnelli.
		-- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
Angels we have heard on High
Tell us to go out and Buy.
		-- Tom Leher
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
		-- Paul Beatty
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us.  "He is full of
murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by
their ignorance the hard way."
		-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"
Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of
them keeps paying for it.
		-- Peggy Joyce
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time
to reform.
		-- Mark Twain
"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars."
		-- J. Paul Getty
Decisionmaker, n.:
	The person in your office who was unable to form a task force
before the music stopped.
	"I don't know what you mean by `glory,'" Alice said
	Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  "Of course you don't--
till I tell you.  I meant `there's a nice knock-down argument for
you!'"
	"But glory doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice
objected.
	"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor
less."
	"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean
so many different things."
	"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--
that's all."
		-- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
Every absurdity has a champion who will defend it.
Politics is like coaching a football team.  you have to be smart enough
to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.
The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body.
This means that only left handed people are in their right mind.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is
good for dandruff.
		-- Peter de Vries
Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister
		-- Su Tung-p'o
And this is a table ma'am.  What in essence it consists of is a
horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical
columnar supports, which we call legs.  The tables in this laboratory,
ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the
world.
		-- Michael Frayn, "The Tin Men"
Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no
government at all.
Man, n.:
	An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks
he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.  His chief
occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species,
which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest
the whole habitable earth and Canada.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Do something unusual today.  Pay a bill.
Mythology, n.:
	The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its
origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished
from the true accounts which it invents later.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it
every six months.
		-- Oscar Wilde
Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations.
When you do not know what you are doing, do it neatly.
Predestination was doomed from the start.
Lie, n.:
	A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one
discovered to date.
If I kiss you, that is a psychological interaction.

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

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

The crucial point is if you can tell which is which.
		-- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
Now and then an innocent person is sent to the legislature.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable.
		-- John F. Kennedy
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they
like.
		-- Abraham Lincoln
An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.
"I'd love to go out with you, but it's my parakeet's bowling night."
Reality is a cop-out for people who can't handle drugs.
Commitment, n.:
	Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs.
The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
Familiarity breeds attempt
You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
		-- Aelius Donatus
The Killer Ducks are coming!!!
What with chromodynamics and electroweak too
	Our Standardized Model should please even you,
Tho once you did say that of charm there was none
	It took courage to switch as to say Earth moves not Sun.
Yet your state of the union penultimate large
	Is the last known haunt of the Fractional Charge,
And as you surf in the hot tub with sourdough roll
	Please ponder the passing of your sole Monopole.
Your Olympics were fun, you should bring them all back
	For transsexual tennis or Anamalon Track,
But Hollywood movies remain sinfully crude
	Whether seen on the telly or Remotely Viewed.
Now fasten your sunbelts, for you've done it once more,
	You said it in Leipzig of the thing we adore,
That you've built an incredible crystalline sphere
	Whose German attendants spread trembling and fear
Of the death of our theory by Particle Zeta
	Which I'll bet is not there say your article, later.
		    -- Sheldon Glashow, Physics Today, Dec. 1984
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to
program.  What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in
organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be
self-critical?
		-- Alan Perlis
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10 -- SIMPLE

SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language
Environment.  This language, developed at the Hanover College for
Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code
with errors in it.  The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN,
END and STOP.  No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make
a syntax error.  Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful.  Thus
they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without
the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.
The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
		-- Ogden Nash
Q:	Why do ducks have flat feet?
A:	To stamp out forest fires.

Q:	Why do elephants have flat feet?
A:	To stamp out flaming ducks.
Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what
is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
		-- John Kenneth Galbraith
If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
		-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Who needs friends when you can sit alone in your room and drink?
Now that you've read Fortune's diet truths, you'll be prepared the next
time some housewife or boutique-owner-turned-diet-expert appears on TV
to plug her latest book.  And, if you still feel a twinge of guilt for
eating coffee cake while listening to her exhortations, ask yourself
the following questions:

1:	Do I dare trust a person who actually considers alfalfa sprouts
	a food?
2:	Was the author's sole motive in writing this book to get rich
	exploiting the forlorn hopes of chubby people like me?
3:	Would a longer life be worthwhile if it had to be lived as
	prescribed ... without French-fried onion rings, pizza with
	double cheese, or the occasional Mai-Tai?  (Remember, living
	right doesn't really make you live longer, it just *seems* like
	longer.)

That, and another piece of coffee cake, should do the trick.
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm taking punk totem pole carving."
... at least I thought I was dancing, 'til somebody stepped on my hand.
		-- J. B. White
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?
Cocaine -- the thinking man's Dristan.
Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a
receipt.
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at
once.
Receiving a million dollars tax free will make you feel better than
being flat broke and having a stomach ache.
		-- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
Sixtus V, Pope from 1585 to 1590 authorized a printing of the Vulgate
Bible.  Taking no chances, the pope issued a papal bull automatically
excommunicating any printer who might make an alteration in the text.
This he ordered printed at the beginning of the Bible.  He personally
examined every sheet as it came off the press.  Yet the published
Vulgate Bible contained so many errors that corrected scraps had to be
printed and pasted over them in every copy.  The result provoked wry
comments on the rather patchy papal infallibility, and Pope Sixtus had
no recourse but to order the return and destruction of every copy.
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
		-- H. H. Williams
I sent a letter to the fish,
I told them, "This is what I wish."
The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer back to me.
The little fishes' answer was
"We cannot do it, sir, because ..."
I sent a letter back to say
It would be better to obey.
But someone came to me and said
"The little fishes are in bed."
I said to him, and I said it plain
"Then you must wake them up again."
I said it very loud and clear,
I went and shouted in his ear.
But he was very stiff and proud,
He said "You needn't shout so loud."
And he was very proud and stiff,
He said "I'll go and wake them if ..."
I took a kettle from the shelf,
I went to wake them up myself.
But when I found the door was locked
I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked,
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, But ...

	"Is that all?" asked Alice.
	"That is all." said Humpty Dumpty. "Goodbye."
		-- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
we will invent new lullabies, new songs, new acts of love,
we will cry over things we used to laugh &
our new wisdom will bring tears to eyes of gentile
creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then &
in the end a summer with wild winds &
new friends will be.
One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they
never have to stop and answer the phone.
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President.  Now
I'm beginning to believe it.
		-- Clarence Darrow
I like being single.  I'm always there when I need me.
		-- Art Leo
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe.  For example, there are no
solids in the universe.  There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums.  There are no surfaces.  There are no
straight lines.
		-- R. Buckminster Fuller
Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life.
Van Roy's Law:
	An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
		-- Samuel Goldwyn
United Nations, New York, December 25.  The peace and joy of the
Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of
all the military forces of the world.  Panic reigns in the hearts of
all the patriots of every persuasion.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the
world.
		-- Isaac Asimov
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.
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
		-- Voltaire
There are two ways to write error-free programs.  Only the third one
works.
77.  HO HUM -- The Redundant

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

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

Six in the third place means:
	In former times men built altars to honor the Internal
	Revenue Service.  Great Dragons!  Are you in trouble!
Well, I would -- if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them
back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds,
or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive they
they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
		-- President Ronald Reagan, on the MX missile
This fortune cookie program out of order.  For those in desperate need,
please use the program "________randchar".  This program generates random
characters, and, given enough time, will undoubtedly come up with
something profound.  It will, however, take it no time at all to be
more profound than THIS program has ever been.
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved
it."
		-- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
Justice, n.:
	A decision in your favor.
If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied
harder.
		-- Pope John Paul I
PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the
solution set.
		-- E. W. Dijkstra
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get
out, and such as are out wish to get in?
		-- Ralph Emerson
When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.
		-- The Wall Street Journal
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they AREN'T after you.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job.
		-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it
		-- G. B. Shaw
A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a
Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser.
Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network
with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?"  Very earnestly, the
Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed
the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously
hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual.
The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.
The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper
		-- Thomas Jefferson
First Rule of History:
	History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each
	other.
This will be a memorable month -- no matter how hard you try to forget
it.
When a fly lands on the ceiling, does it do a half roll or a half
loop?
Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems.  It's easy to
criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.
		-- D. J. Hicks
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Measure with a micrometer.  Mark with chalk.  Cut with an axe.
Bacchus, n.:
	A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for
getting drunk.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing
to compare it with.
Don't kiss an elephant on the lips today.
	CAPRICORN (Dec 23 - Jan 19)
You are conservative and afraid of taking risks.  You don't do much of
anything and are lazy.  There has never been a Capricorn of any
importance.  Capricorns should avoid standing still for too long as
they take root and become trees.
Let He who taketh the Plunge Remember to return it by Tuesday.
God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.
"There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the
other is to read Pope."
		-- Oscar Wilde
Mother told me to be good, but she's been wrong before.
I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
Law of the Perversity of Nature:
	You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the
	bread to butter.
Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.
Take your dying with some seriousness, however.  Laughing on the way to
your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms,
and they'll call you crazy.
		-- Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul
Nine megs for the secretaries fair,
Seven megs for the hackers scarce,
Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs,
Three megs for system source;

One disk to rule them all,
One disk to bind them,
One disk to hold the files
And in the darkness grind 'em.
Never offend people with style when you can offend them with
substance.
		-- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977
History repeats itself.  That's one thing wrong with history.
What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel.
I for one cannot protest the recent M.T.A. fare hike and the
accompanying promises that this would in no way improve service.  For
the transit system, as it now operates, has hidden advantages that
can't be measured in monetary terms.

Personally, I feel that it is well worth 75 cents or even $1 to have
that unimpeachable excuse whenever I am late to anything: "I came by
subway." Those four words have such magic in them that if Godot should
someday show up and mumble them, any audience would instantly
understand his long delay.
A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
Did you know that clones never use mirrors?
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:

"This isn't right.  This isn't even wrong."
		-- Wolfgang Pauli
Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you.  They're too
busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
Don't tell any big lies today.  Small ones can be just as effective.
May a Misguided Platypus lay its Eggs in your Jockey Shorts
What I tell you three times is true.
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
	And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
	And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
	As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams --
	And I wish he were in Asia.
		-- Dorothy Parker
		DETERIORATA

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

	You are a fluke of the universe ...
	You have no right to be here.
	Whether you can hear it or not, the universe
	Is laughing behind your back.
		-- National Lampoon
GEMINI (May 21 to Jun. 20)
	Good news and bad news highlighted.  Enjoy the good news while
	you can; the bad news will make you forget it.  You will enjoy
	praise and respect from those around you; everybody loves a
	sucker.  A short trip is in the stars, possibly to the men's
	room.
Don:	I didn't know you had a cousin Penelope, Bill!  Was she
	pretty?
W. C.:	Well, her face was so wrinkled it looked like seven miles of
	bad road.  She had so many gold teeth, Don, she use to have to
	sleep with her head in a safe.  She died in Bolivia.
Don:	Oh Bill, it must be hard to lose a relative.
W. C.:	It's almost impossible.
		-- W. C. Fields, from "The Further Adventures of Larson
		   E. Whipsnade and other Tarradiddles"
	"Reflections on Ice-Breaking"
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
		-- Ogden Nash
You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting
incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail.
Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable
to find a way to damage them.  They last forever, largely because
nobody ever eats them.  In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes
they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year;
some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years.

The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then
pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet.  Be sure to wear
safety glasses.
		-- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
I dread success.  To have succeeded is to have finished one's business
on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment
he has succeeded in his courtship.  I like a state of continual
becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
		-- George Bernard Shaw
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for
lists of "Ten Best".
		-- H. Allen Smith
Mencken and Nathan's Sixteenth Law of The Average American:
	Milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that
	is possessed only by yokels, and no person born in a large city
	can never hope to acquire it.
Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.
The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to most of
us who are fortunate enough never to have been one -- like watching
Charlie Chaplin trying to cook a shoe.
With a rubber duck, one's never alone.
		-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Why does man kill?  He kills for food.  And not only food: frequently
there must be a beverage.
		-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
Anything worth doing is worth overdoing
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its
fascination.  When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be
popular.
		-- Oscar Wilde
Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to
make it complex and wonderful.
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.
	"What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty
teenager asked her mother.
	"Encouragement, dear," she replied.
"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up!"
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
$100 invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at
which time it will be worth absolutely nothing.
		-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
Every solution breeds new problems.
If anything can go wrong, it will.
Absurdity, n.:
	A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own
opinion.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name.
	Thy programs run, thy syscalls done,
	in kernel as it is in user!
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland";
but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would
be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call
you to say they had a nice time.  Now you'll be be expected to throw
another party next year.

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

If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless
your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas
through your living room window.  As host, your job is to make sure
that they don't arrest anybody.  Or if they're dead set on arresting
someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ...
I like work ...
I can sit and watch it for hours.
With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand
miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and
still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no
such thing as progress.
		-- Ransom K. Ferm
The chief cause of problems is solutions.
The world is coming to an end!  Repent and return those library books!
A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen
objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer
scientists.  Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added
concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three
dimensional objects ...
Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to
celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around
stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on
"The Waltons".  Well, you can forget it.  If everybody pulled that kind
of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight.  The
government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level
Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and
billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which
it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming
thousands.  So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with
the Holiday Program.  This means you should get a large sum of money
and go to a mall.
		-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
A penny saved is ridiculous.
"Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense"
Weiner's Law of Libraries:
	There are no answers, only cross references.
The First Rule of Program Optimization:
	Don't do it.

The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!):
	Don't do it yet.
		-- Michael Jackson
The revolution will not be televised.
All the world's a VAX,
And all the coders merely butchers;
They have their exits and their entrails;
And one int in his time plays many widths,
His sizeof being N bytes.  At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the Regent's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his Sun,
And shining morning face, creeping like slug
Unwillingly to school.
		-- A Very Annoyed PDP-11
Miss, n.:
	A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that
they are in the market.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you a man who is
playing golf with his boss.
		Answers to Last Fortune's Questions:

1.  None.  (Moses didn't have an ark).
2.  Your mother, by the pigeonhole principle.
3.  I don't know.
4.  Who cares?
5.  6 (or maybe 4, or else 3).  Mr. Alfred J. Duncan of Podunk,
    Montana, submitted an interesting solution to Problem 5.
6.  There is an interesting solution to this problem on page 1029 of my
    book, which you can pick up for $23.95 at finer bookstores and
    bathroom supply outlets (or 99 cents at the table in front of
    Papyrus Books).
"Die?  I should say not, dear fellow.  No Barrymore would allow such a
conventional thing to happen to him."
		-- John Barrymore's dying words
I'm not under the alkafluence of inkahol that some thinkle peep I am.
It's just the drunker I sit here the longer I get.
Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword.
Barometer, n.:
	An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we
are having.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the double lock will keep;
May no brick through the window break,
And, no one rob me till I awake.
For a good time, call (415) 642-9483
Brain, n.:
	The apparatus with which we think that we think.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction.

This technique is used on equations with "_n" in them.  Induction
techniques are very popular, even the military used them.

SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction.

	We know it's true for _n equal to 1.  Now assume that it's true
for every natural number less than _n.  _N is arbitrary, so we can take _n
as large as we want.  If _n is sufficiently large, the case of _n+1 is
trivially equivalent, so the only important _n are _n less than _n.  We
can take _n = _n (from above), so it's true for _n+1 because it's just
about _n.
	QED.	(QED translates from the Latin as "So what?")
I'm N-ary the tree, I am,
N-ary the tree, I am, I am.
I'm getting traversed by the parser next door,
She's traversed me seven times before.
And ev'ry time it was an N-ary (N-ary!)
Never wouldn't ever do a binary.  (No sir!)
I'm 'er eighth tree that was N-ary.
N-ary the tree I am, I am,
N-ary the tree I am.
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical"
		-- Jon Carroll
"Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly."
If you've done six impossible things before breakfast, why not round it
off with dinner at Milliway's, the restaurant at the end of the
universe?
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the
average man can see better than he can think.
Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them.
One of the oldest problems puzzled over in the Talmud is: "Why did God
create goyim?"  The generally accepted answer is "________somebody has to buy
retail."
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
		-- Dean Martin
In case of atomic attack, the federal ruling against prayer in schools
will be temporarily canceled.
What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
Ducharme's Precept:
	Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
Lysistrata had a good idea.
Universe, n.:
	The problem.
Rhode's Law:
	When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening,
	circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly,
	empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied,
	inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically
	guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience,
	expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal
	comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above,
	be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and
	adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally,
	immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes
	advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
		-- Disraeli
Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to
avoid responsibility with?
Do what comes naturally now.  Seethe and fume and throw a tantrum.
	"Deep" is a word like "theory" or "semantic" -- it implies all
sorts of marvelous things.  It's one thing to be able to say "I've got
a theory", quite another to say "I've got a semantic theory", but, ah,
those who can claim "I've got a deep semantic theory", they are truly
blessed.
		-- Randy Davis
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to
twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!
If there are epigrams, there must be meta-epigrams.
(Sung to the tune of "The Impossible Dream" from MAN OF LA MANCHA)

	To code the impossible code,
	To bring up a virgin machine,
	To pop out of endless recursion,
	To grok what appears on the screen,

	To right the unrightable bug,
	To endlessly twiddle and thrash,
	To mount the unmountable magtape,
	To stop the unstoppable crash!
Fakir, n:
	A psychologist whose charismatic data have inspired almost
religious devotion in his followers, even though the sources seem to
have shinnied up a rope and vanished.
		MORE SPORTS RESULTS:
The Beverly Hills Freudians tied the Chicago Rogerians 0-0 last
Saturday night.  The match started with a long period of silence while
the Freudians waited for the Rogerians to free associate and the
Rogerians waited for the Freudians to say something they could
paraphrase.  The stalemate was broken when the Freudians' best player
took the offensive and interpreted the Rogerians' silence as reflecting
their anal-retentive personalities.  At this the Rogerians' star player
said "I hear you saying you think we're full of ka-ka."  This started a
fight and the match was called by officials.
What the hell, go ahead and put all your eggs in one basket.
"I'd love to go out with you, but the last time I went out, I never
came back."
		     JACK AND THE BEANSTACK
			  by Mark Isaak

	Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL
character named Jack.  Jack and his relations were poor.  Often their
hash table was bare.  One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices
are sparse.  You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some
BASICs."  She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it
to him.
	So Jack set out.  But as he was walking along a Hamilton path,
he met the traveling salesman.
	"Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman
in high-level language.
	"I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips
and Apples," commented Jack.
	"I have a much better algorithm.  You needn't join a queue
there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now."
	Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house.  But when
he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she
started thrashing.
	"Don't you even have any artificial intelligence?  All these
kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the
window ...
Cerebus:	I'd love to lick apricot brandy out of your navel.
Jaka:		Look, Cerebus-- Jaka has to tell you ... something
Cerebus:	If Cerebus had a navel, would you lick apricot brandy
		out of it?
Jaka:		Ugh!
Cerebus:	You don't like apricot brandy?
		-- Cerebus #6, "The Secret"
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used.
		-- D. Gries
While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining
position.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite
you.  This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
		-- Mark Twain
	A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came
upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope.
"That's what I like to see", said the priest, "A man helping his fellow
man".
	As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, "Well,
he sure doesn't know the first thing about shark fishing."
		AMAZING BUT TRUE ...

There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
I don't believe in astrology.  But then I'm an Aquarius, and Aquarians
don't believe in astrology.
		-- James R. F. Quirk
Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.
		-- A. E. Newman
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible
simulation!
WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE

	Oh, dear, where can the matter be
	When it's converted to energy?
	There is a slight loss of parity.
	Johnny's so long at the fair.
	A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was
eating his morning meal.  "I would like to give you this personality
test", said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
	Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into
the toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too".
Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach.
		-- S. C. Johnson
Please ignore previous fortune.
Economics, n.:
	Economics is the study of the value and meaning of J. K.
Galbraith ...
		-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
Bombeck's Rule of Medicine:
	Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch He wears
a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised
only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich
Protestant Golfer Magazine.  The advertisements are written in
incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote
excellence:

"The Rolex Hyperion.  An elegant new standard in quality excellence and
discriminating handcraftsmanship.  For the individual who is truly able
to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting
things by hand.  Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold.  No watch
parts or anything.  Just a great big chunk on your wrist.  Truly a
timeless statement.  For the individual who is very secure.  Who
doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful.
Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high
school.  Because of his acne.  People who are probably nowhere near as
successful as he is now.  Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and
they'll see his Rolex Hyperion.  Hahahahahahahahaha."
		-- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
I bet the human brain is a kludge.
		-- Marvin Minsky
If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.
In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or
a loaf of bread.  However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it
to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by
forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy.  If you
stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit
punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong
enough to punch you.
		-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own
form of misery.
Heavy, adj.:
	Seduced by the chocolate side of the force.
Police:	Good evening, are you the host?
Host:	No.
Police:	We've been getting complaints about this party.
Host:	About the drugs?
Police:	No.
Host:	About the guns, then?  Is somebody complaining about the guns?
Police:	No, the noise.
Host:	Oh, the noise.  Well that makes sense because there are no guns
	or drugs here.  (An enormous explosion is heard in the
	background.)  Or fireworks.  Who's complaining about the noise?
	The neighbors?
Police:	No, the neighbors fled inland hours ago.  Most of the recent
	complaints have come from Pittsburgh.  Do you think you could
	ask the host to quiet things down?
Host:	No Problem.  (At this point, a Volkswagon bug with primitive
	religious symbols drawn on the doors emerges from the living
	room and roars down the hall, past the police and onto the
	lawn, where it smashes into a tree.  Eight guests tumble out
	onto the grass, moaning.)  See?  Things are starting to wind
	down.
Cold, adj.:
	When the local flashers are handing out written descriptions.
Baruch's Observation:
	If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?
		-- Elliot, "E.T."
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.
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
		-- Mark Twain
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.
BE ALERT!!!!  (The world needs more lerts ...)
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
		-- Albert Einstein
Fortune's nomination for All-Time Champion and Protector of Youthful
Morals goes to Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan.  During an
impassioned House debate over a proposed bill to "expand oyster and
clam research," a sharp-eared informant transcribed the following
exchange between our hero and Rep. John D. Dingell, also of Michigan.

DINGELL: There are places in the world at the present time where we are
	 having to artificially propagate oysters and clams.
HOFFMAN: You mean the oysters I buy are not nature's oysters?
DINGELL: They may or may not be natural.  The simple fact of the matter
	 is that female oysters through their living habits cast out
	 large amounts of seed and the male oysters cast out large
	 amounts of fertilization.
HOFFMAN: Wait a minute!  I do not want to go into that.  There are many
	 teenagers who read The Congressional Record.
A diva who specializes in risqu'e arias is an off-coloratura soprano ...
If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
Your conscience never stops you from doing anything.  It just stops you
from enjoying it.
New York is real.  The rest is done with mirrors.
Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill.  Check
three friends.  If they're ok, you're it.
Williams and Holland's Law:
	If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by
	statistical methods.
Ankh if you love Isis.
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
A very intelligent turtle
Found programming UNIX a hurdle
	The system, you see,
	Ran as slow as did he,
And that's not saying much for the turtle.
"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone
has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
		--English Professor, Ohio University
More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads.  One
path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total
extinction.  Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
		-- Woody Allen
A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon.  Buy the negatives at any
price.
"Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral."
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
"Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even
one which cannot be justified on any other grounds."
		-- J. Finnegan, USC.
A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well
as afterward.
People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that
Benjamin Franklin said it first.
The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get
much sleep.
		-- Woody Allen
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.
Truthful, adj.:
	Dumb and illiterate.
Ozman's Laws:
	1.  If someone says he will do something "without fail," he
	    won't.
	2.  The more people talk on the phone, the less money they
	    make.
	3.  People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
	4.  Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth.
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.
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial
challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
		-- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985
There was a plane crash over mid-ocean, and only three survivors were
left in the life-raft: the Pope, the President, and Mayor Daley.
Unfortunately, it was a one-man life-raft, and quickly sinking, so they
started debating who should be allowed to stay.

The Pope pointed out that he was the spiritual leader of millions all
over the world, the President explained that if he died then America
would be stuck with the Vice-President, and so forth.  Then Mayor Daley
said, "Look!  We're not solving anything like this!  The only fair
thing to do is to vote on it."  So they did, and Mayor Daley won by 97
votes.
Quick!!  Act as if nothing has happened!
"Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from
Presidents and Kings to the scum of the earth ..."
"We'll cross out that bridge when we come back to it later."
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.
		-- Phil White
"One planet is all you get."
Accident, n.:
	A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of
body is better.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
		-- Dykstra
Take your dying with some seriousness, however.  Laughing on the way to
your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms,
and they'll call you crazy.
		-- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"
Every program has two purposes --
written and another for which it wasn't.
What is a magician but a practising theorist?
		-- Obi-Wan Kenobi
What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream?  Or what's
worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
		-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #12 -- LITHP

This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of
an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH".  LITHP is said
to be useful in protheththing lithtth.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did.  I said I
didn't know.
		-- Mark Twain
Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
	Tip #1: How to tell when you are dead.

	1. Little things start bothering you: little things like
	   worms, bugs, ants.
	2. Something is missing in your personal relationships.
	3. Your dog becomes overly affectionate.
	4. You have a hard time getting a waiter.
	5. Exotic birds flock around you.
	6. People ignore you at parties.
	7. You have a hard time getting up in the morning.
	8. You no longer get off on cocaine.
Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral
slob.
		-- William F. Buckley
"I'd love to go out with you, but the man on television told me to say
tuned."
	"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of
that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put
more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'"
		-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job?
A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off.
"Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from
coughing."
Know what I hate most?  Rhetorical questions.
		-- Henry N. Camp
Die, v.:
	To stop sinning suddenly.
		-- Elbert Hubbard
Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone.
Every 4 seconds a woman has a baby.  Our problem is to find this woman
and stop her.
Think of your family tonight.  Try to crawl home after the
computer crashes.
"All flesh is grass"
		-- Isiah
Smoke a friend today.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
		-- Aesop
Bagdikian's Observation:
	Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American
	newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion"
	on a ukelele.
Virtue is its own punishment.
The owner of a large furniture store in the mid-west arrived in France
on a buying trip.  As he was checking into a hotel he struck up an
acquaintance with a beautiful young lady.  However, she only spoke
French and he only spoke English, so each couldn't understand a word
the other spoke.  He took out a pencil and a notebook and drew a
picture of a taxi.  She smiled, nodded her head and they went for a
ride in the park.  Later, he drew a picture of a table in a restaurant
with a question mark and she nodded, so they went to dinner.  After
dinner he sketched two dancers and she was delighted.  They went to
several nightclubs, drank champagne, danced and had a glorious
evening.  It had gotten quite late when she motioned for the pencil and
drew a picture of a four-poster bed.  He was dumbfounded, and has never
be able to understand how she knew he was in the furniture business.
Expense Accounts, n.:
	Corporate food stamps.
The superfluous is very necessary.
		-- Voltaire
E Pluribus Unix
Cold, adj.:
	When the politicians walk around with their hands in their own
pockets.
Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep till noon.
If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.
When you're not looking at it, this fortune is written in FORTRAN.
Abstainer, n.:
	A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a
pleasure.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
There was a young man who said "God,
I find it exceedingly odd,
	That the willow oak tree
	Continues to be,
When there's no one about in the Quad."

"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd,
For I'm always about in the Quad;
	And that's why the tree,
	Continues to be,"
Signed "Yours faithfully, God."
Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
DeVries's Dilemma:
	If you hit two keys on the typewriter, the one you don't want
	hits the paper.
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
		-- Olivier
Give your child mental blocks for Christmas.
If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end.
		-- Bert Whitney
Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb:
	Never use your thumb for a rule.  You'll either hit it with a
	hammer or get a splinter in it.
Keep in mind always the two constant Laws of Frisbee:
	1.  The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc
	    straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this
	    force is technically termed "car suck").
	2.  Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive
	    than "Watch this!"
The [Ford Foundation] is a large body of money completely surrounded by
people who want some.
		-- Dwight MacDonald
Majority, n.:
	That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent
thinkers.
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for
freedom and liberty.
		-- Henrick Ibson
Hire the morally handicapped.
"Really ??  What a coincidence, I'm shallow too!!"
Paul's Law:
	In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you
	save.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe
in God.
Schapiro's Explanation:
	The grass is always greener on the other side -- but that's
	because they use more manure.
Boston, n.:
	Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for
finishing second in the Irish jig competition.
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
Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy
it today you can do it again tomorrow.
If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost.
Laws of Serendipity:

	1.  In order to discover anything, you must be looking for
	    something.
	2.  If you wish to make an improved product, you must already
	    be engaged in making an inferior one.
Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.
		-- R. S. Barton
A Law of Computer Programming:
	Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you
	will find the programmers cannot write in English.
I'm really enjoying not talking to you ... Let's not talk again ____REAL
soon ...
Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a
larger object.
Good day to avoid cops.  Crawl to school.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity
-- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
[Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.
		-- Edwin Meese III
Hlade's Law:
	If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they
	will find an easier way to do it.
Worst Month of 1981 for Downhill Skiing:
	August.  The lines are the shortest, though.
		-- Steve Rubenstein
Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been attempted
before.
Experience is the worst teacher.  It always gives the test first and
the instruction afterward.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
In a five year period we can get one superb programming language.  Only
we can't control when the five year period will begin.
Alone, adj.:
	In bad company.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Fourth Law of Applied Terror:
	The night before the English History mid-term, your Biology
	instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria.
Corollary:
	Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do
	except study for that instructor's course.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and
that is not being talked about.
		-- Oscar Wilde
System/3!  System/3!
See how it runs!  See how it runs!
	Its monitor loses so totally!
	It runs all its programs in RPG!
	It's made by our favorite monopoly!
System/3!
Noncombatant, n.:
	A dead Quaker.
		-- Ambrose Bierce
It is generally agreed that "Hello" is an appropriate greeting because
if you entered a room and said "Goodbye," it could confuse a lot of
people.
		-- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
		-- Dorothy Parker
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence.  There's
a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work.
		-- Gallagher
Bug, n.:
	An aspect of a computer program which exists because the
PROGRAMMER was thinking about Jumbo Jacks or stock options when s/he
wrote the program.

Fortunately, the second-to-last bug has just been fixed.
		-- Ray Simard
Carperpetuation (kar' pur pet u a shun), n.:
	The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string at least a
dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then
putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Automobile, n.:
	A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down
pedestrians.
"I want to buy a husband who, every week when I sit down to watch `St.
Elsewhere', won't scream, `FORGET IT, BLANCHE ... IT'S TIME FOR "HEE
HAW"!!'"
		-- Berke Breathed, "Bloom County"
No problem is so large it can't be fit in somewhere.
Who made the world I cannot tell;
'Tis made, and here am I in hell.
My hand, though now my knuckles bleed,
I never soiled with such a deed.
		-- A. E. Housman
Hanlon's Razor:
	Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
	stupidity.
Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road?
A: Because it was on the other side.
The Roman Rule
	The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the
	one who is doing it.
You don't sew with a fork, so I see no reason to eat with knitting
needles.
		-- Miss Piggy, on eating Chinese Food
Day of inquiry.  You will be subpoenaed.
The steady state of disks is full.
		--Ken Thompson
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by
blowing first.
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
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach
your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings.
Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in
pain?  This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force,
but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an
important electrical lesson.

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

Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your
finger would explode!  But this is nothing to worry about unless you
have carpeting.
		-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
Weinberg's First Law:
	Progress is made on alternate Fridays.
Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest.
Electrical Engineers do it with less resistance.
The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when
to cringe.
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government,
intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption
from the cares of office.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics:
	Superiority is recessive.
You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that,
contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from
houses.  Really, that's what scientists believe.  In fact many
scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the
summer.  If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day,
you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist
sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.
		-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
Pecor's Health-Food Principle:
	Never eat rutabaga on any day of the week that has a "y" in
	it.
Think honk if you're a telepath.
	LEO (July 23 - Aug 22)
You consider yourself a born leader.  Others think you are pushy.  Most
Leo people are bullies.  You are vain and dislike honest criticism.
Your arrogance is disgusting.  Leo people are thieves.
"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"
		-- Oscar Wilde
Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios,
mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have
any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place
to plug them in.  Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer,
Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a
serious electrical shock.  This proved that lighting was powered by the
same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely
that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A
penny saved is a penny earned."  Eventually he had to be given a job
running the post office.
		-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder
aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
		-- Senator Soaper
Tax reform means "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind
the tree."
		-- Russell Long
Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
		-- Jules Feiffer
The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier.
Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up
to.
Real Programs don't use shared text.  Otherwise, how can they use
functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them?
During the next two hours, the VAX will be going up and down several
times, often with lin~po_~{po       ~poz~ppo\~{ o n~po_~{o[po	 ~y oodsou>#w4k**n~po_~{ol;lkld;f;g;dd;po\~{o
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
"The bland leadeth the bland and they both shall fall into the kitsch."
G. B. Shaw to William Douglas Home: "Go on writing plays, my boy.  One
of these days a London producer will go into his office and say to his
secretary, `Is there a play from Shaw this morning?' and when she says
`No,' he will say, `Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish.'
And that's your chance, my boy."
May the Fleas of a Thousand Camels infest one of your Erogenous Zones.
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
		-- Mike Adams
They spell it "da Vinci" and pronounce it "da Vinchy".  Foreigners
always spell better than they pronounce.
		-- Mark Twain
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
		-- Roy Santoro
God did not create the world in 7 days; he screwed around for 6 days
and then pulled an all-nighter.
The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and
robbers there will be.
		-- Lao Tsu
Heller's Law:
	The first myth of management is that it exists.

Johnson's Corollary:
	Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the
	organization.
"Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow."
The world is coming to an end.  Please log off.
Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
	(1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
	(2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
	(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the
	    first two laws.
In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own
incompetency
		-- The Peter Principle
If little green men land in your back yard, hide any little green women
you've got in the house.
		-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
Katz' Law:
	Man and nations will act rationally when all other
	possibilities have been exhausted.
We wish you a Hare Krishna
We wish you a Hare Krishna
We wish you a Hare Krishna
And a Sun Myung Moon!
		-- Maxwell Smart
"Grub first, then ethics."
		-- Bertolt Brecht
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
		-- Ogden Nash
Murphy's Law of Research:
	Enough research will tend to support your theory.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may
be in owning a piece thereof.
		-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
For an idea to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be
always old-fashioned.
While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their
correctness never does.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining
and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
		-- Mark Twain
Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon,
there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he
was so Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how
completely Mournful he would be on Wednesday ...
		-- Walt Kelly
Keep grandma off the streets -- legalize bingo.
... Now you're ready for the actual shopping.  Your goal should be to
get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in
the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs
on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage
children emotionally.  For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a
snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn
to love him, then melts.  And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about
a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an
outcast by the other reindeer.  Then along comes good, old Santa.  Does
he ignore the deformity?  Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect
Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath?  No.  Santa asks
Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some
kind of headlight with legs and a tail.  So unless you want your
children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop
quickly.
		-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
"Qvid me anxivs svm?"
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're
guessing.
When I said "we", officer, I was referring to myself, the four young
ladies, and, of course, the goat.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION
Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
	The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
	to ..... to ........ uh ..............
"Humor is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse."
		-- William Gilbert
Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly
misleading.  Debug only code.
		-- Dave Storer
Fifth Law of Applied Terror:
	If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.
Corollary:
	If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you
	live.
Meeting, n.:
	An assembly of people coming together to decide what person or
department not represented in the room must solve a problem.
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
Oh, when I was in love with you,
	Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
	How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by,
	And nothing will remain,
And miles around they'll say that I
	Am quite myself again.
		-- A. E. Housman
Everyone knows that dragons don't exist.  But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the
scientific mind.  The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact
wholly unconcerned with what ____does exist.  Indeed, the banality of
existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to
discuss it any further here.  The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the
problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the
mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical.  They were all,
one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely
different way ...
		-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
For some reason, this fortune reminds everyone of Marvin Zelkowitz.
Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year?
Just picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your
children open their old-fashioned presents.

Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?"

You:	"A spinning top!  You spin it around, and then eventually it
	falls down.  What fun!  Ha, ha!"

Son:	"Is this a joke?  Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer
	with two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory,
	and I get this cretin TOP?"

Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad?  Look at this."

You:	"It's figgy pudding!  What a treat!"

Daughter: "It looks like goat barf."
		-- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
Bore, n.:
	A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
It is said that the lonely eagle flies to the mountain peaks while the
lowly ant crawls the ground, but cannot the soul of the ant soar as
high as the eagle?
Help a swallow land at Capistrano.
Finagle's Creed:
	Science is true.  Don't be misled by facts.
Taxes, n.:
	Of life's two certainties, the only one for which you can get
an extension.
Monday, n.:
	In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
The past always looks better than it was.  It's only pleasant because
it isn't here.
		-- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)
A chubby man with a white beard and a red suit will approach you soon.
Avoid him.  He's a Commie.
In case of injury notify your superior immediately.  He'll kiss it and
make it better.
		Another Glitch in the Call
		------- ------ -- --- ----
	(Sung to the tune of a recent Pink Floyd song.)

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

	Hey!  Hacker!  Leave those lists alone!

Chorus:
	All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
	All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
Yesterday I was a dog.  Today I'm a dog.  Tomorrow I'll probably still
be a dog. Sigh!  There's so little hope for advancement.
		-- Snoopy
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at
least until we've finished building it.
November, n.:
	The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no
guarantee of eventual success.
A day for firm decisions!!!!!  Or is it?
Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
		-- Trotsky
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the
physical world.  One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker
entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
		-- Vannevar Bush
"I'd love to go out with you, but I want to spend more time with my
blender."
Oh, well, I guess this is just going to be one of those lifetimes.
Consultants are mystical people who ask a company for a number and then
give it back to them.
"Now is the time for all good men to come to."
		-- Walt Kelly
Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.
As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.
		-- Weisert
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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.
Boob's Law:
	You always find something in the last place you look.
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the
faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if
the trustees played.  There would be a great increase in broken arms,
legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the
loss to humanity.
		-- H. L. Mencken
Those who can, do.  Those who can't, simulate.
"Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what *___can*
you believe?!"
		-- Bullwinkle J. Moose [Jay Ward]
Idiot Box, n.:
	The part of the envelope that tells a person where to place the
stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Flappity, floppity, flip
The mouse on the m"obius strip;
	The strip revolved,
	The mouse dissolved
In a chronodimensional skip.
Power, n:
	The only narcotic regulated by the SEC instead of the FDA.
Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier.
Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor:
	People are always available for work in the past tense.
Grelb's Reminder:
	Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
	average drivers.
Mad, adj.:
	Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence ...
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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
Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose.
If life is a stage, I want some better lighting.
You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form.  The
short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified",
which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears
tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last
names.  Here's the complete text:

	"1.  How much did you make?  (AMOUNT)
	"2.  How much did we here at the government take out?  (AMOUNT)
	"3.  Hey!  Sounds like we took too much!  So we're going to
	     send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF
	     THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME)
	     household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way
	     you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST
	     NAME), that it pays to file the short form!"

The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your
money.  So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long
form.
		-- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
Disc space -- the final frontier!
Tonight's the night: Sleep in a eucalyptus tree.
Yield to Temptation ... it may not pass your way again.
		-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
Minnie Mouse is a slow maze learner.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to
see it tried on him personally.
		-- A. Lincoln
Whenever anyone says, "theoretically", they really mean, "not really".
		-- Dave Parnas
Know thyself.  If you need help, call the C.I.A.
Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL.
		-- Mae West
Don't believe everything you hear or anything you say.
Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
	When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more
	easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone
	Ranger have handled this?"
Ban the bomb.  Save the world for conventional warfare.
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
		-- Prof. Steiner
You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading
this sort of trash.
There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast
reflexes.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for
me!"
		-- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
Jones's First Law:
	Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of
	endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an
	obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the
	importance of their original contribution.
"Hey!  Who took the cork off my lunch??!"
		-- W. C. Fields
You may have heard that a dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog.
		-- Alfred Kahn
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
	"Gee, Mudhead, everyone at Morse Science High has an
extracurricular activity except you."
	"Well, gee, doesn't Louise count?"
	"Only to ten, Mudhead."

			-- Firesign Theater
Good-bye.  I am leaving because I am bored.
		-- George Saunders' dying words
Acquaintance, n.:
	A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well
enough to lend to.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
If God had intended Man to Watch TV, He would have given him Rabbit
Ears.
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on
people.
		-- W. C. Fields
Canada Bill Jone's Motto:
	It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

Supplement:
	A .44 magnum beats four aces.
Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends.
H. L. Mencken's Law:
	Those who can -- do.
	Those who can't -- teach.

Martin's Extension:
	Those who cannot teach -- administrate.
The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
		-- Bohr
How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
		-- Ben Franklin
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong.
		-- H. L. Mencken
The optimum committee has no members.
		-- Norman Augustine
The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.
"I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent."
		-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Those who can't write, write manuals.
Real Programmers think better when playing Adventure or Rogue.
Captain Penny's Law:
	You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of
	the people all of the time, but you Can't Fool Mom.
"It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either."
		-- Kevin White, mayor of Boston
Talkers are no good doers.
		-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
Think of it!  With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!
			Pittsburgh Driver's Test

7:	The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail
	light but a steady left tail light.  This means

	(a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn
	    to call the problem to the driver's attention.
	(b) the driver is signaling a right turn.
	(c) the driver is signaling a left turn.
	(d) the driver is from out of town.

The correct answer is (d).  Tail lights are used in some foreign
countries to signal turns.
Bumper sticker:

"All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British
manufacture"
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was very odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
		-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
Q:	Do you know what the death rate around here is?
A:	One per person.
"There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away
from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone
loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor."
Succumb to natural tendencies.  Be hateful and boring.
Beifeld's Principle:
	The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and
	receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when
	he is already in the company of: (1) a date, (2) his wife, (3)
	a better looking and richer male friend.
Famous last words:
	1.  Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
	2.  Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
	3.  What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
	4.  We won't need reservations.
	5.  It's always sunny there this time of the year.
	6.  Don't worry, it's not loaded.
	7.  They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting
enough cheese
		-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
"The pyramid is opening!"
"Which one?"
"The one with the ever-widening hole in it!"
		-- Firesign Theater, "How Can You Be In Two Places At
		   Once When You're Not Anywhere At All"
"I just need enough to tide me over until I need more."
		-- Bill Hoest
The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's very funny--
	Did you ever try buying then without money?
		-- Ogden Nash
Lactomangulation, n.:
	Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly
that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Behold the warranty ... the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh
away.
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
		-- Norm Schryer
Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
	It's on the other side.
Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old
ones.
Every creature has within him the wild, uncontrollable urge to punt.
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require
scholarship.
		-- Robert Heinlein
God is a polythiest
Never try to outstubborn a cat.
		-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means?
F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a dm!
Famous last words:
	1) "Don't worry, I can handle it."
	2) "You and what army?"
	3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be
	    a cop."
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.
"I'd love to go out with you, but my favorite commercial is on TV."
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer.  It has
a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk
storage, a screen resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels, relies entirely on
voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300.
What's the first question that the computer community asks?

"Is it PC compatible?"
Stay away from flying saucers today.
Dentist, n.:
	A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls
coins out of one's pockets.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"All my friends and I are crazy.  That's the only thing that keeps us
sane."
What this country needs is a dime that will buy a good five-cent
bagel.
Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.
		-- Woody Allen
If you're happy, you're successful.
They're only trying to make me LOOK paranoid!
This is for all ill-treated fellows
	Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they're in trouble
	And I am not.
		-- A. E. Housman
Joe's sister puts spaghetti in her shoes!
As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there
is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
		-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
Time flies like an arrow
Fruit flies like a banana
Goy: ... The distinction between Jewish and goyish can be quite subtle,
as the following quote from Lenny Bruce illustrates:

	"I'm Jewish.  Count Basie's Jewish.  Ray Charles is Jewish.
Eddie Cantor's goyish.  The B'nai Brith is goyish.  The Hadassah is
Jewish.  Marine Corps -- heavy goyish, dangerous.
	"Kool-Aid is goyish.  All Drake's Cakes are goyish.
Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish.
Instant potatoes -- goyish.  Black cherry soda's very Jewish.
Macaroons are ____very Jewish.  Fruit salad is Jewish.  Lime Jell-O is
goyish.  Lime soda is ____very goyish.  Trailer parks are so goyish that
Jews won't go near them ..."
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
	CANCER (June 21 - July 22)
You are sympathetic and understanding to other people's problems.  They
think you are a sucker.  You are always putting things off.  That's why
you'll never make anything of yourself.  Most welfare recipients are
Cancer people.
However, never daunted, I will cope with adversity in my traditional
manner ... sulking and nausea.
		-- Tom K. Ryan
SCCS, the source motel!  Programs check in and never check out!
		-- Ken Thompson
	Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the
month.  According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people
are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China.
	The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either
(depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax
tadpole".
	Bite the wax tadpole.
	There is a sort of rough justice, is there not?
	The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's
hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to
bite a wax tadpole.  Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad,
but broad satiric vistas do not open up.
		-- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle
Don't be humble, you're not that great.
		-- Golda Meir
Stop searching.  Happiness is right next to you.
While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still very
reassuring to know that it's still there.
Green light in A.M. for new projects.  Red light in P.M. for traffic
tickets.
You can create your own opportunities this week.  Blackmail a senior
executive.
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for
static cling."
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
		-- Milton Friedman
Troubled day for virgins over 16 who are beautiful and wealthy and live
in eucalyptus trees.
On-line, adj.:
	The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a
computer.
Idiot, n.:
	A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Iron Law of Distribution:
	Them that has, gets.
Do you realize how many holes there could be if people would just take
the time to take the dirt out of them?
Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity?

And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?
		-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
Decisions of the judges will be final unless shouted down by a really
overwhelming majority of the crowd present.  Abusive and obscene
language may not be used by contestants when addressing members of the
judging panel, or, conversely, by members of the judging panel when
addressing contestants (unless struck by a boomerang).
		-- Mudgeeraba Creek Emu-Riding and Boomerang-Throwing
		   Assoc.
Remember that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it could only be
worse in Cleveland.
		-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
Kin, n.:
	An affliction of the blood
When you're away, I'm restless, lonely,
Wretched, bored, dejected; only
Here's the rub, my darling dear
I feel the same when you are near.
		-- Samuel Hoffenstein, "When You're Away"
There is a green, multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder.
186,282 miles per second:

It isn't just a good idea, it's the law!
Accordion, n.:
	A bagpipe with pleats.
Absent, adj.:
	Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed;
slandered.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice
versa.
	We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength.
But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle
Haggard song at a French restaurant. ...
	I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of
her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile.  There had been a fight.  I
had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls.  Everyone
told him, "You ride the bull, senor.  You do not fight it." But he was
lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull.  And then he
fought me.  And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing
what men must do. ...
	"Stop the car," the girl said.  There was a look of terrible
sadness in her eyes.  She knew about the woman of the tollway.  I knew
not how.  I started to speak, but she raised an arm and spoke with a
quiet and peace I will never forget.
	"I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the
tollway belle's for thee."
	The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was
a lie.  Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I
poured whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day.
		-- Peter Applebome, International Imitation Hemingway
		   Competition
		Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
1.  Never use an elevator in a building that has been hit by a nuclear
    bomb; use the stairs.
2.  When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit
    the ground.
3.  If you're on fire, avoid gasoline and other flammable materials.
4.  Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to
    psychological problems.
5.  Food will be scarce; you will have to scavenge.  Learn to recognize
    foods that will be available after the bomb: mashed potatoes,
    shredded wheat, tossed salad, ground beef, etc.
6.  Put your hand over your mouth when you sneeze; internal organs will
    be scarce in the post-nuclear age.
7.  Try to be neat; fall only in designated piles.
8.  Drive carefully in "Heavy Fallout" areas; people could be
    staggering illegally.
9.  Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more
    sanitary due to limited circulation.
10. Accumulate mannequins now; spare parts will be in short supply on
    D-Day.
A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within.
"If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."
		-- Albert Einstein
Alliance, n.:
	In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot
separately plunder a third.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person."
Manual, n.:
	A unit of documentation.  There are always three or more on a
given item.  One is on the shelf; someone has the others.  The
information you need in in the others.
		-- Ray Simard
Don't abandon hope: your Tom Mix decoder ring arrives tomorrow.
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important
point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly
important thing to people.
		-- Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
	Murphy was an optimist.
Isn't it strange that the same people that laugh at gypsy fortune
tellers take economists seriously?
Magnocartic, adj.:
	Any automobile that, when left unattended, attracts shopping
carts.
		-- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends"
Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 100. Ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001,
   Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of
   the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank", and 20%
   of the definitions are of the form "A ...... consists of sequences
   of non-blank characters separated by blanks".
Boss, n.:
	According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages
the words "boss" and "botch" were largely synonymous, except that boss,
in addition to meaning "a supervisor of workers" also meant "an
ornamental stud."
Kiss me twice.  I'm schizophrenic.
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
		-- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in Optimizing
		   Compilers"
Famous last words:
C, n.:
	A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more
like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or
anything else.  It is either the best language available to the art
today, or it isn't.
		-- Ray Simard
Remember, even if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat.
You should emulate your heros, but don't carry it too far.  Especially
if they are dead.
	Excellence is THE trend of the '80s.  Walk into any shopping
mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as
"Garfield Gets Spayed", and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you
how to be excellent: "In Search of Excellence", "Finding Excellence",
"Grasping Hold of Excellence", "Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night
So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It", etc.
		-- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
The Abrams' Principle:
	The shortest distance between two points is off the wall.
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables.
It's not that I'm afraid to die.  I just don't want to be there when it
happens.
		-- Woody Allen
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach
their children to speak it.
		-- G. B. Shaw
"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the FOUNDING of a bank?"
		-- Bertold Brecht
Hall's Laws of Politics:
	(1)  The voters want fewer taxes and more spending.
	(2)  Citizens want honest politicians until they want something
	     fixed.
	(3)  Constituency drives out consistency (i.e., liberals defend
	     military spending, and conservatives social spending in
	     their own districts).
A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Hardware, n.:
	The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
Next Friday will not be your lucky day.  As a matter of fact, you don't
have a lucky day this year.
Absence makes the heart go wander.
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain
of being a damned fool.
		-- Bellamy Brooks
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you
really make them think they'll hate you.
When does summertime come to Minnesota, you ask?  Well, last year, I
think it was a Tuesday.
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.
Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes
to work.
There is no realizable power that man cannot, in time, fashion the
tools to attain, nor any power so secure that the naked ape will not
abuse it.  So it is written in the genetic cards -- only physics and
war hold him in check.  And also the wife who wants him home by five,
of course.
		-- Encyclopadia Apocryphia, 1990 ed.
Others will look to you for stability, so hide when you bite your
nails.
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and
religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging
from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its
yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the
world put together.
		-- Sir Peter Medawar
Perfect day for scrubbing the floor and other exciting things.
Have you ever noticed that the people who are always trying to tell
you, "There's a time for work and a time for play," never find the time
for play?
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to
chance.
Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history,
dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive
man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the
air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first
primitive umpire.

What inner force drove this first athlete?  Your guess is as good as
mine.  Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.
		-- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
Everyting should be built top-down, except the first time.
Only adults have difficulty with childproof caps.
"Sometimes I simply feel that the whole world is a cigarette and I'm
the only ashtray."
Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
		-- R. Geis
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The cow is nothing but a machine with makes grass fit for us people to
eat.
		-- John McNulty
Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it
needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
		-- Kipling
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
		-- Groucho Marx
Pascal Users:
	To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the
	death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half
	speed.
Mitchell's Law of Committees:
	Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are
	held to discuss it.
How doth the VAX's C-compiler
Improve its object code.
And even as we speak does it
Increase the system load.

How patiently it seems to run
And spit out error flags,
While users, with frustration, all
Tear all their clothes to rags.
Boren's Laws:
	(1) When in charge, ponder.
	(2) When in trouble, delegate.
	(3) When in doubt, mumble.
Ingrate, n.:
	A man who bites the hand that feeds him, and then complains of
indigestion.
FLASH!  Intelligence of mankind decreasing.  Details at ... uh, when
the little hand is on the ....
When in doubt, do what the President does -- guess.
	GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY (#21) -- July 30, 1917

On this day, New York City hotel detectives burst in and caught then-
Senator Warren G. Harding in bed with an underage girl.  He bought them
off with a $20 bribe, and later remarked thankfully, "I thought I
wouldn't get out of that under $1000!"  Always one to learn from his
mistakes, in later years President Harding carried on his affairs in a
tiny closet in the White House Cabinet Room while Secret Service men
stood lookout.
Garter, n.:
	An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her
stockings and desolating the country.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
		-- Henry Kissinger
Fourth Law of Revision:
	It is usually impractical to worry beforehand about
	interferences -- if you have none, someone will make one for
	you.
WARNING:
	Reading this fortune can affect the dimensionality of your
	mind, change the curvature of your spine, cause the growth of
	hair on your palms, and make a difference in the outcome of
	your favorite war.
If you push the "extra ice" button on the soft drink vending machine,
you won't get any ice.  If you push the "no ice" button, you'll get
ice, but no cup.
Serocki's Stricture:
	Marriage is always a bachelor's last option.
Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.
It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a
pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the
sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
		-- Voltaire
What is mind?  No matter.
What is matter?  Never mind.
		-- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
There is no time like the present for postponing what you ought to be
doing.
Alex Haley was adopted!
What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do.
No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.
"... all the modern inconveniences ..."
		-- Mark Twain
Chemicals, n.:
	Noxious substances from which modern foods are made.
Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Three.  One to report it as an inspired government program to bring
   light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government
   plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a pulitzer
   prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb-assassin
   to break the bulb in the first place.
	A man goes to a tailor to try on a new custom-made suit.  The
first thing he notices is that the arms are too long.
	"No problem," says the tailor.  "Just bend them at the elbow
and hold them out in front of you.  See, now it's fine."
	"But the collar is up around my ears!"
	"It's nothing.  Just hunch your back up a little ... no, a
little more ... that's it."
	"But I'm stepping on my cuffs!" the man cries in desperation.
	"Nu, bend you knees a little to take up the slack.  There you
go.  Look in the mirror -- the suit fits perfectly."
	So, twisted like a pretzel, the man lurches out onto the
street.  Reba and Florence see him go by.
	"Oh, look," says Reba, "that poor man!"
	"Yes," says Florence, "but what a beautiful suit."
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance.
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
stupidity of your action.
Harris's Lament:
	All the good ones are taken.
Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid
back.
Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of
	Western Civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
There's little in taking or giving,
	There's little in water or wine:
This living, this living, this living,
	Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
	The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
	And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
	And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle --
	Would you kindly direct me to hell?
		-- Dorothy Parker
"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."
		-- Woody Allen
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.
Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny.
Kleptomaniac, n.:
	A rich thief.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
There was a young lady from Hyde
Who ate a green apple and died.
	While her lover lamented
	The apple fermented
And made cider inside her inside.
The University of California Bears announced the signing of Reggie
Philbin to a letter of intent to attend Cal next Fall.  Philbin is said
to make up for no talent by cheating well.  Says Philbin of his
decision to attend Cal, "I'm in it for the free ride."
The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go
to erase it.
		-- Glaser and Way
	FIGHTING WORDS

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

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

But say my verses do not scan,
	And I get me another man!
		-- Dorothy Parker
If God had intended Men to Smoke, He would have put Chimneys in their
Heads.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes you
nothing.  It was here first.
		-- Mark Twain
AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaccccccccckkkkkk!!!!!!!!!
You brute!  Knock before entering a ladies room!
	 A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
			  by Mark Twain

	For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer
be part of the alphabet.  The only kase in which "c" would be retained
would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.  Year 2
might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with
"i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
	Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12
or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz
ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
	Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
"If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is
make the rubble bounce"
		-- Winston Churchill
Frobnicate, v.:
	To manipulate or adjust, to tweak.  Derived from FROBNITZ.
Usually abbreviated to FROB.  Thus one has the saying "to frob a
frob".  See TWEAK and TWIDDLE.  Usage: FROB, TWIDDLE, and TWEAK
sometimes connote points along a continuum.  FROB connotes aimless
manipulation; TWIDDLE connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse
search for a proper setting; TWEAK connotes fine-tuning.  If someone is
turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it
he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the
screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because
turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it.
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
		-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Once Law was sitting on the bench
	And Mercy knelt a-weeping.
"Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench!
	Nor come before me creeping.
Upon you knees if you appear,
'Tis plain you have no standing here."

Then Justice came.  His Honor cried:
	"YOUR states? -- Devil seize you!"
"Amica curiae," she replied --
	"Friend of the court, so please you."
"Begone!" he shouted -- "There's the door --
I never saw your face before!"
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on
the computer.
Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
HE:  Let's end it all, bequeathin' our brains to science.
SHE: What?!?  Science got enough trouble with their OWN brains.
		-- Walt Kelley
Positive, adj.:
	Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Losing your drivers' license is just God's way of saying "BOOGA, BOOGA!"
Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
"Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't
immune to bullets"
		-- The Brigader, "Dr. Who"
Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down
Is your job running?  You'd better go catch it!
"I'd love to go out with you, but I've been scheduled for a karma
transplant."
Hanson's Treatment of Time:
	There are never enough hours in a day, but always too many days
	before Saturday.
Anthony's Law of Force:
	Don't force it; get a larger hammer.
Sooner or later you must pay for your sins.  (Those who have already
paid may disregard this fortune).
It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
		-- Publilius Syrus
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the
ends.
		-- Herbert Hoover
Horngren's Observation:
	Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
Law of Probable Dispersal:
	Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly
	distributed.
Workers of the world, arise!  You have nothing to lose but your
chairs.
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's
supposed to do.
		-- R. A. Heinlein
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.
		-- R. Serling
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are
totally worthless.
Cigarette, n.:
	A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in
between.
Children seldom misquote you.  In fact, they usually repeat word for
word what you shouldn't have said.
Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing.
		-- Roy L. Ash, ex-president Litton Industries
If this fortune didn't exist, somebody would have invented it.
Do not meddle in the affairs of troff, for it is subtle and quick to
anger.
The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us
is right.
Afternoon, n.:
	That part of the day we spend worrying about how we wasted the
morning.
A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt --
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale, 
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover,
You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!
		-- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
Corrupt, adj.:
	In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.
"Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?"
		-- Lily Tomlin
When you're not looking at it, this fortune is written in FORTRAN.
Il brilgue: les t^oves libricilleux
	Se gyrent et frillant dans le guave,
Enm^im'es sont les gougebosquex,
	Et le m^omerade horgrave.
		-- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited
love.
		-- Charlie Brown
	It is always preferable to visit home with a friend.  Your
parents will not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all
to themselves and because in the presence of your friend, they will
have to act like mature human beings ...
		-- Playboy, January 1983
Human cardiac catheterization was introduced by Werner Forssman in
1929.  Ignoring his department chief, and tying his assistant to an
operating table to prevent his interference, he placed a uretheral
catheter into a vein in his arm, advanced it to the right atrium [of
his heart], and walked upstairs to the x-ray department where he took
the confirmatory x-ray film.  In 1956, Dr. Forssman was awarded the
Nobel Prize.
Osborn's Law:
	Variables won't; constants aren't.
You can't start worrying about what's going to happen.  You get spastic
enough worrying about what's happening now.
		-- Lauren Bacall
Honorable, adj.:
	Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach.  In legislative
bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the
honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!
		-- Mark "The Bard" Twain
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
		-- John Kenneth Galbraith
In America, any boy may become president and I suppose that's just one
of the risks he takes.
		-- Adlai Stevenson
Absentee, n.:
	A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove
himself from the sphere of exaction.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Do not try to solve all life's problems at once -- learn to dread each
day as it comes.
		-- Donald Kaul
Snacktrek, n.:
	The peculiar habit, when searching for a snack, of constantly
returning to the refrigerator in hopes that something new will have
materialized.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have
enlightened him with ours.
The Pig, if I am not mistaken,
Gives us ham and pork and Bacon.
Let others think his heart is big,
I think it stupid of the Pig.
		-- Ogden Nash
"To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it?"
Take it easy, we're in a hurry.
"Calling J-Man Kink.  Calling J-Man Kink.  Hash missle sighted, target
Los Angeles.  Disregard personal feelings about city and intercept."
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry.  Hence University education.
		-- G. B. Shaw
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our symptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
		-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
	SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21)
You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted.  You will achieve the
pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics.  Most Scorpio
people are murdered.
	On his first day as a bus driver, Maxey Eckstein handed in
receipts of $65.  The next day his take was $67.  The third day's
income was $62.  But on the fourth day, Eckstein emptied no less than
$283 on the desk before the cashier.
	"Eckstein!" exclaimed the cashier.  "This is fantastic.  That
route never brought in money like this!  What happened?"
	"Well, after three days on that cockamamie route, I figured
business would never improve, so I drove over to Fourteenth Street and
worked there.  I tell you, that street is a gold mine!"
	AQUARIUS (Jan 20 - Feb 18)
You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive.  You lie
a great deal.  On the other hand, you are inclined to be careless and
impractical, causing you to make the same mistakes over and over
again.  People think you are stupid.
No good deed goes unpunished.
		-- Clare Boothe Luce
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
		-- G. B. Shaw
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly
what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly
disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable.  There is another theory which states that this has
already happened.
		-- Donald Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Anoint, v.:
	To grease a king or other great functionary already
sufficiently slippery.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Politician, n.:
	From the Greek "poly" ("many") and the French "tete" ("head" or
"face," as in "tete-a-tete": head to head or face to face).  Hence
"polytetien", a person of two or more faces.
		-- Martin Pitt
"Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence"
		-- Time Bandits
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
on the bench.
You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.
People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never
slept in a room with a single mosquito.
I'm all for computer dating, but I wouldn't want one to marry my
sister.
President Thieu says he'll quit if he doesn't get more than 50% of the
vote.  In a democracy, that's not called quitting.
		-- The Washington Post
The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going
down.
'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 ...
Please take note:
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the
only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
		-- Wernher von Braun
Notes for a ballet, "The Spell": ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter
of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund
is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman --
unfortunately, divided lengthwise.  She enchants Sigmund, who is
careful not to make any poultry jokes ...
		-- Woody Allen
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
		-- Hawkwind
Adolescence, n.:
	The stage between puberty and adultery.
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is
not hereditary.
		-- Thomas Paine
Impartial, adj.:
	Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from
espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two
conflicting opinions.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
He's the kind of guy, that, well, if you were ever in a jam he'd be
there ... with two slices of bread and some chunky peanut butter.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
		-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents,
for these only gave life, those the art of living well.
		-- Aristotle
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
		-- Oscar Wilde
I must have slipped a disk -- my pack hurts
Cabbage, n.:
	A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as
a man's head.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Half Moon tonight.  (At least it's better than no Moon at all.)
Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law:
	When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
Never hit a man with glasses.  Hit him with a baseball bat.
Never be led astray onto the path of virtue.
Rules for driving in New York:
	1) Anything done while honking your horn is legal.
	2) You may park anywhere if you turn your four-way flashers
	   on.
	3) A red light means the next six cars may go through the
	   intersection.
One thing the inventors can't seem to get the bugs out of is fresh
paint.
An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.
		-- A. P. Herbert
Bureaucrat, n.:
	A politician who has tenure.
There's a fine line between courage and foolishness. Too bad its not a
fence.
As I was passing Project MAC,
I met a Quux with seven hacks.
Every hack had seven bugs;
Every bug had seven manifestations;
Every manifestation had seven symptoms.
Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks,
How many losses at Project MAC?
Drive defensively.  Buy a tank.
"MacDonald has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into
the smallest amount of thoughts."
		-- Winston Churchill
"Yacc" owes much to a most stimulating collection of users, who have
goaded me beyond my inclination, and frequently beyond my ability in
their endless search for "one more feature".  Their irritating
unwillingness to learn how to do things my way has usually led to my
doing things their way; most of the time, they have been right.
		-- S. C. Johnson, "Yacc guide acknowledgements"
Ray's Rule of Precision:
	Measure with a micrometer.  Mark with chalk.  Cut with an axe.
"God gives burdens; also shoulders"

	Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech
at the end of the 1980 election.  At least he said it was a Jewish
saying; I can't find it anywhere.  I'm sure he's telling the truth
though; why would he lie about a thing like that?
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip
around the Sun.
If all be true that I do think,
There be Five Reasons why one should Drink;
Good friends, good wine, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by-and-by,
Or any other reason why.
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed.  Our
authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as
the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as
the light of seven days."  Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much
radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much
as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all.  The light we
receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the
Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will
heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to
the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much
heat as the Earth by radiation.  Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for
radiation, (_H/_E)^4 = 50, where _E is the absolute temperature of the
earth (-300K), gives _H as 798K (525C).  The exact temperature of Hell
cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the
fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which
burneth with fire and brimstone."  A lake of molten brimstone means
that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C.  We
have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
		-- From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972
Excellent time to become a missing person.
Don't cook tonight -- starve a rat today!
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible
from one end to the other.  Reading the Bible straight through is at
least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin.  But the good parts
are, of course, simply amazing.  God is an extremely uneven writer, but
when He's good, nobody can touch Him.
		-- John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983
Only God can make random selections.
Old programmers never die.  They just branch to a new address.
	"For I perceive that behind this seemingly unrelated sequence
of events, there lurks a singular, sinister attitude of mind."

	"Whose?"

	"MINE! HA-HA!"
Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant
intelligence.
		-- Henrik Tikkanen
Electrocution, n.:
	Burning at the stake with all the modern improvements.
That secret you've been guarding, isn't.
Grabel's Law:
	2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
Miksch's Law:
	If a string has one end, then it has another end.
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of
us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of
the smaller prime numbers.

2:  The Odd Prime --
	It's the only even prime, therefore is odd.  QED.
3:  The True Prime --
	Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true."
31: The Arbitrary Prime --
	Determined by unanimous unvote.  We needed an arbitrary prime
	in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election.  91
	received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the
	next most.  However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none
	at all.

Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are
derived from those primes.  So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but
true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm converting my calendar watch from
Julian to Gregorian."
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access
cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been
removed.
		'Twas the Night before Crisis

'Twas the night before crisis, and all through the house,
	Not a program was working not even a browse.
The programmers were wrung out too mindless to care,
	Knowing chances of cutover hadn't a prayer.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
	While visions of inquiries danced in their heads.
When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter,
	I sprang from my tube to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
	But a Super Programmer, oblivious to fear.
More rapid than eagles, his programs they came,
	And he whistled and shouted and called them by name;
On Update!  On Add!  On Inquiry!  On Delete!
	On Batch Jobs!  On Closing!  On Functions Complete!
His eyes were glazed over, his fingers were lean,
	From Weekends and nights in front of a screen.
A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head,
	Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread...
Speak roughly to your little boy,
	And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy
	Because he knows it teases.

	Wow!  wow!  wow!

I speak severely to my boy,
	And beat him when he sneezes:
For he can thoroughly enjoy
	The pepper when he pleases!

	Wow!  wow!  wow!
		-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
Review Questions

1:	If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20
	KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it
	be before he exceeds the speed of light?  How long will it be
	before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his
	spaceship?

2:	If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he
	breaks twice as many bones as before, how long will it be
	before he breaks every bone in his body?  How long will it be
	before they cut off his insurance?  Where does he get a new car
	every week?

3:	If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four
	beers the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the
	cans in a pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger
	than King Tut's?  When will it fall on him?  Will he notice?
The world's as ugly as sin,
And almost as delightful
		-- Frederick Locker-Lampson
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology:
	There's always one more bug.
Garbage In -- Gospel Out.
Then a man said: Speak to us of Expectations.

He then said: If a man does not see or hear the waters of the Jordan,
then he should not taste the pomegranate or ply his wares in an open
market.

If a man would not labour in the salt and rock quarries then he should
not accept of the Earth that which he refuses to give of himself.

Such a man would expect a pear of a peach tree.
Such a man would expect a stone to lay an egg.
Such a man would expect Sears to assemble a lawnmower.
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
To be intoxicated is to feel sophisticated but not be able to say it.
	TAURUS (Apr 20 - May 20)
You are practical and persistent.  You have a dogged determination and
work like hell.  Most people think you are stubborn and bull headed.
You are a Communist.
Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.
	PISCES (Feb. 19 - Mar. 20)
You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by
the CIA or FBI.  You have minor influence over your associates and
people resent your flaunting of your power.  You lack confidence and
you are generally a coward.  Pisces people do terrible things to small
animals.
Molecule, n.:
	The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter.  It is distinguished
from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a
closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of
matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the
atom in that it is an ion ...
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
		-- Andrew Young
The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
		-- Andy Warhol
Liar, n.:
	A lawyer with a roving commission.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Yinkel, n.:
	A person who combs his hair over his bald spot, hoping no one
will notice.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
	The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood
as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all.
The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in
the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces.  Even though twenty-four parts in
twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.

	"Now about Lankhmar.  She's been invaded, her walls breached
everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a
fierce host which out-numbers Lankhamar's inhabitants by fifty to one
-- and equipped with all modern weapons.  Yet you can save the city."

	"How?" demanded Fafhrd.

	Ningauble shrugged.  "You're a hero.  You should know."
		-- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar"
"Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised.  "We're back in the universe
again ..."  An unusually long pause followed, "... but I don't know
which part.  We seem to have changed our position in space."  A
spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the
starfield surrounding the ship.

"Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC
announced after a short pause.  "The designs are not familiar, but they
are obviously the products of intelligence.  Implications: we have been
intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and
transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown.
Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious."
		-- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"
When Marriage is Outlawed,
Only Outlaws will have Inlaws.
THE GOLDEN RULE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
	The one who has the gold makes the rules.
VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22)
	Learn something new today, like how to spell or how to count to
	ten without using your fingers.  Be careful dressing this
	morning.  You may be hit by a car later in the day and you
	wouldn't want to be taken to the doctor's office in some of
	that old underwear you own.
"It's easier said than done."

... and if you don't believe it, try proving that it's easier done than
said, and you'll see that "it's easier said that `it's easier done than
said' than it is done", which really proves that "it's easier said than
done".
There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to.
Zounds!  I was never so bethumped with words
since I first called my brother's father dad.
		-- William Shakespeare, "King John"
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
		-- Leonard Brandwein
There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a
suitable application of high explosives.
Murphy's Law is recursive.  Washing your car to make it rain doesn't
work.
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
Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently
these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people
to communicate with the people they love; Husbands and wives who can't
communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so
on.  And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real
life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't
communicate.  I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very _____least
he can do is to Shut Up!
		-- Tom Lehrer, "That Was the Year that Was"
A CONS is an object which cares.
		-- Bernie Greenberg.
Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within.
	When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure
clarified your attitude toward him.  You have given a definite answer
to a definite problem.  For better or worse you have acted decisively.
	In a way, the next move is up to him.
		-- R. A. Lafferty
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.
		-- Tenessee Williams
A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block
of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an
elephant.
Have you noticed that all you need to grow healthy, vigorous grass is a
crack in your sidewalk?
We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it.
		-- Whole Earth Catalog
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
		-- Emerson
Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket.
Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity.
	SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs.
(1) Horses have an even number of legs.
(2) They have two legs in back and fore legs in front.
(3) This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd number of
    legs for a horse.
(4) But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. 
(5) Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs.

Topics is be covered in future issues include proof by:
	Intimidation
	Gesticulation (handwaving)
	"Try it; it works"
	Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...)
	Blatant assertion
	Changing all the 2's to _n's
	Mutual consent
	Lack of a counterexample, and
	"It stands to reason"
I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd
eat it, and I just hate it.
		-- Clarence Darrow
Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Three.  One to screw in the lightbulb and two to fend off all those
   Californians trying to share the experience.
Waiter: "Tea or coffee, gentlemen?"
1st customer: "I'll have tea."
2nd customer: "Me, too -- and be sure the glass is clean!"
	(Waiter exits, returns)
Waiter: "Two teas.  Which one asked for the clean glass?"
Millions of sensible people are too high-minded to concede that
politics is almost always the choice of the lesser evil.  "Tweedledum
and Tweedledee," they say, "I will not vote."  Having abstained, they
are presented with a President who appoints the people who are going to
rummage around in their lives for the next four years.  Consider all
the people who sat home in a stew in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert
Humphrey.  They showed Humphrey.  Those people who taught Hubert
Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when
Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the
black.
		-- Russel Baker, "Ford without Flummery"
Well, my terminal's locked up, and I ain't got any Mail,
	And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail;
I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues,
	I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.

If you think that it's nice that you get what you C,
	Then go : illogical statement with your whole family,
'Cause the Supreme Court ain't the only place with : Bus error views.
	I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.

On a PDP-11, life should be a breeze,
	But with VAXen in the house even magnetic tapes would freeze.
Now you might think that unlike VAXen I'd know who I abuse,
	I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
		-- Core Dumped Blues
Go 'way!  You're bothering me!
Mind!  I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there
is particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined,
myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in
the trade.  But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my
unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.  You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as
dead as a door-nail.
Bank error in your favor.  Collect $200.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with
themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
		-- Susan Ertz
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
		-- George Wald
If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?
		-- Art Hoppe
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
		-- Maslow
There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire
someone, or forbid your kids to do it.
This is the story of the bee
Whose sex is very hard to see

You cannot tell the he from the she
But she can tell, and so can he

The little bee is never still
She has no time to take the pill

And that is why, in times like these
There are so many sons of bees.
What this country needs is a dime that will buy a good five-cent
bagel.
California is a fine place to live -- if you happen to be an orange.
		-- Fred Allen
"His mind is like a steel trap -- full of mice"
		-- Foghorn Leghorn
What this country needs is a good five cent ANYTHING!
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
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that
each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his
choice.

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians
called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka"
and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People
passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy
Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"
		-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from
the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging
you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right
in his bowl full of jelly.
		-- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
I am not now, and never have been, a girl friend of Henry Kissinger.
		-- Gloria Steinem
	THEORY
Into love and out again,
	Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
	Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
	All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
	Someone dropped me on my head?
		-- Dorothy Parker
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the
Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats
in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the
moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine,
a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every
respect.  And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside
it, for it was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms,
then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they
chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine ...
		-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody
will.
Information Center, n.:
	A room staffed by professional computer people whose job it is
to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
Expect the worst, it's the least you can do.
Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child -- if you parboil them
first for seven hours, they always come out tender.
		-- W. C. Fields
If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a
conclusion.
		-- William Baumol
	COMMENT

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
		-- Dorothy Parker
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to _n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
		-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
There's no future in time travel
You may be recognized soon.  Hide.
Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have!
Oh, wow!  Look at the moon!
Who's on first?
If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four
tellers?
Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than
expected.  Carefully planned projects take four times longer to
complete than expected, mostly because the planners expect their
planning to reduce the time it takes.
"If you have to hate, hate gently"
I am the mother of all things, and all things should wear a sweater.
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
		-- Plato
[Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man -- he loves
to see him work.
		-- Winston Churchill
Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
You could get a new lease on life -- if only you didn't need the first
and last month in advance.
Hippogriff, n.:
	An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin.
The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle.
The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one quarter eagle, which
is two dollars and fifty cents in gold.  The study of zoology is full
of surprises.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
How come only your friends step on your new white sneakers?
Rule of the Great:
	When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
	thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots
The devil finds work for idle circuits to do.
Goto, n.:
	A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers
to complain about unstructured programmers.
		-- Ray Simard
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is
meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a
soap bubble?
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
		-- Groucho Marx
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
		-- Lily Tomlin
FORTUNE'S PARTY TIPS		#14

Tired of finding that other people are helping themselves to your good
liquor at BYOB parties?  Take along a candle, which you insert and
light after you've opened the bottle.  No one ever expects anything
drinkable to be in a bottle which has a candle stuck in its neck.
TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
		-- Frank Lloyd Wright
Genius, n.:
	A chemist who discovers a laundry additive that rhymes with
"bright".
Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
	Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no
responsibility at the other.
Whatever became of eternal truth?
Without ice cream life and fame are meaningless.
"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn't give up because by that time I was too famous."
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
		-- George Bernard Shaw
Lunatic Asylum, n.:
	The place where optimism most flourishes.
Kinkler's First Law:
	Responsibility always exceeds authority.

Kinkler's Second Law:
	All the easy problems have been solved.
Even though they raised the rate for first class mail in the United
States we really shouldn't complain -- it's still only 2 cents a day.
God is real, unless declared integer.
But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who
was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal
education and lived in New Jersey.  Edison's first major invention in
1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of
American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented.  But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he
invented the electric company.  Edison's design was a brilliant
adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends
electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the
electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant
part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch
of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since
very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United
States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it
ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate
increases.
		-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
Wethern's Law:
	Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
A limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
	But the good ones I've seen
	So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I.  I
believe everything positively stinks.
		-- Lew Col
Brain, v. [as in "to brain"]:
	To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of
error in an opponent.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the
pens will multiply instead of disappear.
Her locks an ancient lady gave
Her loving husband's life to save;
And men -- they honored so the dame --
Upon some stars bestowed her name.

But to our modern married fair,
Who'd give their lords to save their hair,
No stellar recognition's given.
There are not stars enough in heaven.
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.
I'm prepared for all emergencies but totally unprepared for everyday
life.
God is Dead
		-- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is Dead
		-- God
Nietzsche is God
		-- The Dead
"He is now rising from affluence to poverty."
		-- Mark Twain
The best cure for insomnia is to get a  lot of sleep.
		-- W. C. Fields
Silverman's Law:
	If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad
example.
		-- La Rouchefoucauld
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
		-- Oscar Levant
"I'd love to go out with you, but I did my own thing and now I've got
to undo it."
I belong to no organized party.  I am a Democrat.
		-- Will Rogers
Character Density: the number of very weird people in the office.
I haven't lost my mind -- it's backed up on tape somewhere.
Tact, n.:
	The unsaid part of what you're thinking.
"Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain."
		-- Lily Tomlin
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
The Kennedy Constant:
	Don't get mad -- get even.
Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
		-- Mark Twain
"He's just a politician trying to save both his faces ..."
You will be a winner today.  Pick a fight with a four-year-old.
If the odds are a million to one against something occurring, chances
are 50-50 it will.
Unnamed Law:
	If it happens, it must be possible.
Newton's Fourth Law:  Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems
theory.
"Uncle Cosmo ... why do they call this a word processor?"

"It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors do to food,
right?"
		-- MacNelley, "Shoe"
The ladies men admire, I've heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They'd rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints ...
So far, I've had no complaints.
		-- Dorothy Parker
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
		-- Arthur C. Clarke
Parker's Law:
	Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
If a group of _N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be _N-1
passes.  Someone in the group has to be the manager.
		-- T. Cheatham
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
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 ...
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
Forgetfulness, n.:
	A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their
destitution of conscience.
It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
It's not enough to be Hungarian; you must have talent too.
		-- Alexander Korda
Goldenstern's Rules:
	1.  Always hire a rich attorney
	2.  Never buy from a rich salesman.
Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:
	No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats --
	approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
UFO's are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist.
Once, adv.:
	Enough.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board
		-- Mark Twain
Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop
writing.
		-- R. Geis
Swipple's Rule of Order:
	He who shouts the loudest has the floor.
	THE WOMBAT

The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.
Magpie, n.:
	A bird whose theivish disposition suggested to someone that it
might be taught to talk.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm staying home to work on my
cottage cheese sculpture."
Lockwood's Long Shot:
	The chances of getting eaten up by a lion on Main Street aren't
	one in a million, but once would be enough.
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such things as a free
variable."
She is not refined.  She is not unrefined.  She keeps a parrot.
		-- Mark Twain
Genderplex, n.:
	The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to
determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and
tortoises).
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for
tomorrow morning, sleep late.
		-- Henny Youngman
Gauls!  We have nothing to fear; except perhaps that the sky may fall
on our heads tomorrow.  But as we all know, tomorrow never comes!!
		-- Adventures of Asterix.
Space is big.  You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-
bogglingly big it is.  I mean, you may think it's a long way down the
road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
		-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away.  The center
of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away.  You could drive that in a week,
but for some reason nobody's ever done it.
		-- Andy Rooney
It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for
being right.
He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and
heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope
of ever behaving "normally."
		-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"
Faith, n:
	That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be
untrue.
Aquadextrous, adj.:
	Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off
with your toes.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Eggnog is a traditional holiday drink invented by the English.  Many
people wonder where the word "eggnog" comes from.  The first syllable
comes from the English word "egg", meaning "egg".  I don't know where
the "nog" comes from.

To make eggnog, you'll need rum, whiskey, wine gin and, if they are in
season, eggs...
Graduate life -- it's not just a job, it's an indenture.
The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
"Heisenberg may have slept here"
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
		-- Albert Einstein
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue.
		-- Voltaire
Q: How many DEC repairman does it take to fix a flat ?
A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires.
Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
Meskimen's Law:
	There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to
	do it over.
Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.
		-- Ogden Nash
The Preacher, the Politicain, the Teacher,
	Were each of them once a kiddie.
A child, indeed, is a wonderful creature.
	Do I want one?  God Forbiddie!
		-- Ogden Nash
The Heineken Uncertainty Principle:
	You can never be sure how many beers you had last night.
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to
get more wax!!"
Weinberg's Principle:
	An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while
	sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
ROMEO: Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.
MERCUTIO: No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-
	door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.
QWERT (kwirt), n. [MW < OW qwertyuiop, a thirteenth]:
	1. a unit of weight equal to 13 poiuyt avoirdupois (or 1.69
kiloliks), commonly used in structural engineering; 2. [Colloq.] one
thirteenth the load that a fully grown sligo can carry; 3. [Anat.] a
painful irritation of the dermis in the region of the anus; 4. [Slang]
person who excites in others the symptoms of a qwert.
		-- Webster's Middle World Dictionary, 4th ed.
If God had intended Man to Walk, He would have given him Feet.
Love is sentimental measles.
Naeser's Law:
	You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it
	damnfoolproof.
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
	"All your papers these days look the same;
Those William's would be better unread --
	Do these facts never fill you with shame?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
	"I wrote wonderful papers galore;
But the great reputation I found that I'd won,
	Made it pointless to think any more."
NEWS FLASH!!
	Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West
	German pole-vault champion.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
		-- Charlie McCarthy
How come wrong numbers are never busy?
Conway's Law:
	In any organization there will always be one person who knows
	what is going on.

	This person must be fired.
Brain fried -- Core dumped
We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always
respect their good judgement.
"You can't teach people to be lazy - either they have it, or they
don't."
		-- Dagwood Bumstead
Furbling, v.:
	Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank
even when you are the only person in line.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
What publishers are looking for these days isn't radical feminism.
It's corporate feminism -- a brand of feminism designed to sell books
and magazines, three-piece suits, airline tickets, Scotch, cigarettes
and, most important, corporate America's message, which runs: "Yes,
women were discriminated against in the past, but that unfortunate
mistake has been remedied; now every woman can attain wealth, prestige
and power by dint of individual rather than collective effort."
		-- Susan Gordon
Besides the device, the box should contain:

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

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

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

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

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret.
		-- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
99 blocks of crud on the disk,
99 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
100 blocks of crud on the disk!

100 blocks of crud on the disk,
100 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
101 blocks of crud on the disk! ...
Today is the first day of the rest of the mess
Scott's second Law:
	When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found
	to have been wrong in the first place.
Corollary:
	After the correction has been found in error, it will be
	impossible to fit the original quantity back into the
	equation.
Fats Loves Madelyn
Paul Revere was a tattle-tale
	Deck Us All With Boston Charlie

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

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
		-- Walt Kelly
The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with.
Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil
using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle
Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats,
etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous
bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons.  None
of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats
developed cancer.
		-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
Insanity is the final defense ... It's hard to get a refund when the
salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon.
Deliberation, n.:
	The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is
buttered on.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Please try to limit the amount of `this room doesn't have any bazingas'
until you are told that those rooms are `punched out.'  Once punched
out, we have a right to complain about atrocities, missing bazingas,
and such.
		-- N. Meyrowitz
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
		-- Eric Hoffer
For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say
"Canada".  Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something.
		-- Sandra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador to
		   the U.S.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people
are right more than half of the time.
		-- E. B. White
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
Vail's Second Axiom:
	The amount of work to be done increases in proportion to the
	amount of work already completed.
If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it
will always do it.
		-- Les Aspin, D., Wisconsin
They also surf who only stand on waves.
Get forgiveness now -- tomorrow you may no longer feel guilty.
Canada Post doesn't really charge 32 cents for a stamp.  It's 2 cents
for postage and 30 cents for storage.
		-- Gerald Regan, Cabinet Minister, 12/31/83 Financial
		   Post
It looks like blind screaming hedonism won out.
"It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day.  Perhaps
I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it.  I
don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and
the signature (which I guessed at).  There's a singular and a perpetual
charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its
novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but
yours are kept forever -- unread.  One of them will last a reasonable
man a lifetime."
		-- Thomas Aldrich
Philadelphia is not dull -- it just seems so because it is next to
exciting Camden, New Jersy.
The only problem with being a man of leisure is that you can never stop
and take a rest.

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1162 .Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he
makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean
famous for its wild horses.  I realize that the concept of wild horses
probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you
have never met any wild horses in person.  In person, they are like
enormous hooved rats.  They amble up to your camp site, and their
attitude is: "We're wild horses.  We're going to eat your food, knock
down your tent and poop on your shoes.  We're protected by federal law,
just like Richard Nixon."
		-- Dave Barry, "Tenting Grandpa Bob"
Zero Defects, n.:
	The result of shutting down a production line.
"I am not an Economist.  I am an honest man!"
		-- Paul McCracken
It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
		-- Andrew Jackson
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to
die in.
		-- George McGovern
Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom:
	Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so
	vividly manifests their lack of progress.
Saturday night in Toledo Ohio,
	Is like being nowhere at all,
All through the day how the hours rush by,
	You sit in the park and you watch the grass die.
		-- John Denver, "Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio"
You're being followed.  Cut out the hanky-panky for a few days.
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together
		-- Herbert Prochnow
"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
	For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
	Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
	And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
	Has lasted the rest of my life."
		-- Lewis Carrol
Mustgo, n.:
	Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so
long it has become a science project.
		-- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends"
The Third Law of Photography:
	If you did manage to get any good shots, they will be ruined
	when someone inadvertently opens the darkroom door and all of
	the dark leaks out.
Arthur's Laws of Love:
	(1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you
	    remind them of someone else.
	(2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will
	    be delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool
	    of yourself in person.
You're never too old to become younger.
		-- Mae West
	LIBRA (Sept 23 - Oct 22)
You are the artistic type and have a difficult time with reality.  If
you are a man, you are more than likely gay.  Chances for employment
and monetary gains are excellent.  Most Libra women are prostitutes.
All Libra people die of Venereal disease.
Pardo's First Postulate:
	Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

Arnold's Addendum:
	Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in
	rats.
Easiest Color to Solve on a Rubik's Cube:
	Black.  Simply remove all the little colored stickers on the
cube, and each of side of the cube will now be the original color of
the plastic underneath -- black.  According to the instructions, this
means the puzzle is solved.
		-- Steve Rubenstein
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
		-- Mark Twain
You never know how many friends you have until you rent a house on the
beach.
Never call a man a fool; borrow from him.
Chicago, n.:
	Where the dead still vote ... early and often!
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a
hole in his head.
		Gimmie That Old Time Religion
We will follow Zarathustra,		We will worship like the Druids,
Zarathustra like we use to,		Dancing naked in the woods,
I'm a Zarathustra booster,		Drinking strange fermented fluids,
And he's good enough for me!		And it's good enough for me!
	(chorus)				(chorus)

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

CHORUS:	Give me that old time religion,
	Give me that old time religion,
	Give me that old time religion,
	'Cause it's good enough for me!
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
"The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the
flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
	And make errors few people could bear;
You complain about everyone's English but yours --
	Do you really think this is quite fair?"

"I make lots of mistakes," Father William declared,
	"But my stature these days is so great
That no critic can hurt me -- I've got them all scared,
	And to stop me it's now far too late."
Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word "database" are
typed with the left hand?  Now the layout of the QWERTYUIOP typewriter
keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even use
of both hands.  It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is
not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears.
"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
LSD melts in your mind, not in your hand.
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted
activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ...
neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
New Year's Eve is the time of year when a man most feels his age, and
his wife most often reminds him to act it.
		-- Webster's Unafraid Dictionary
"I'd love to go out with you, but I never go out on days that end in
`Y.'"
"Every time I think I know where it's at, they move it."
Feel disillusioned?  I've got some great new illusions ...