Subject: Life 3.I Alone, adj.: In bad company. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and exceptional ability in that particular field." A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never. A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths. -- Steve Wright Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. -- Dave Barry Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back. Always remember some people are more human. Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else. Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way. A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." -- Stephen Crane A man's home is his hassle. A man should live forever, or die trying. A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result, the manager retained his job. The manager tries to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I thought it was an interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward." The manager upon hearing this remarked, "This programmer, though he holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!" But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working on." Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. -- Charlie McCarthy A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks. America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. -- John O'Hara American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room without having little pictures on the doors. -- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister" America's best buy for a dime is a telephone call to the right person. Among economists, the real world is often a special case. Among the lucky, you are the chosen one. An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. -- James Michener, "Space" An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but is always polite to traffic cops. An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax. -- David Letterman An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know. Ancient Chinese Curse: May all your wishes be granted. Ancient Chinese Curse: May you live in interesting times. Ancient Chinese Curse: May your life be filled with experiences. And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible. An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose. -- A. P. Herbert A New York City ordinance prohibits the shooting of rabbits from the rear of a Third Avenue street car -- if the car is in motion. Angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly. An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of purge. An ounce of vanity can ruin a ton of merit. A city is a large community where people are lonesome together -- Herbert Prochnow A closed mouth gathers no foot. A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it. A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. -- Ben Franklin 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" 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!" Actors will happen even in the best-regulated families. A day without sunshine is like night. A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a fur coat. A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -- Winston Churchill A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. A fool must now and then be right by chance. A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. -- G. B. Shaw A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. -- D. Gries A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. -- Adlai Stevenson A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. --- Emerson A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. -- H. L. Mencken A high level staff meeting will always make the big boss feel better. Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers -- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic A hypothetical paradox: What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet? -- Tom Galloway A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction. Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." Alden's Laws: (1) Giving away baby clothes and furniture is the major cause of pregnancy. (2) Always be backlit. (3) Sit down whenever possible. Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting for a dial tone. Alex Haley was adopted! Alia jacta est. (The die is cast.) Julius Caesar after crossing the Rubicon A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist and too rich to be a communist All a biker needs is a tight paceline, a loose groove, and a warm place to sprint. All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy. All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power -- Ashleigh Brilliant All my friends and I are crazy. That's the only thing that keeps us sane. All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific. -- Jane Wagner All of the animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. All other things being equal, a bald man cannot be elected President of the United States. -- Vic Gold All power corrupts, but we need electricity. All scientific discoveries are first recorded on napkins or tablecloths. Engineering advances are drawn inside matchbook covers. Keep supplies of them handy at all times. All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. -- Jim Fiebig All the world's indeed a stage, and we are merely players, performers and portrayers. Each another's audience outside the gilded cage. -- Rush All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. -- Sean O'Casey All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun. Money's just the way we keep score. All true wisdom is found on T-shirts. All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born. -- Francois Fenelon Pittsburgh Driver's Test (8) Pedestrians are (a) irrelevant. (b) communists. (c) a nuisance. (d) difficult to clean off the front grille. The correct answer is (a). Pedestrians are not in cars, so they are totally irrelevant to driving; you should ignore them completely. AMAZING BUT TRUE ... If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful. AMAZING BUT TRUE ... There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert. 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". After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought, and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon to be created." "This is true," He replied. "He will need laws," said the Demon slyly. "What! You, his appointed Enemy for all Time! You ask for the right to make his laws?" "Oh, no!" Satan replied, "I ask only that he be allowed to make his own." It was so granted. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell. She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion. "Well, it's quite nice," he replied, but don't you think it would be better if ..." "If what?" asked the composer. "If ... if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?" "And what will you do when you grow up to be as big as me?" asked the father of his little son. "Diet." 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" Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry. Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire. Any excuse will serve a tyrant. -- Aesop Any father who thinks he's all important should remind himself that this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a whole week. Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. -- Publilius Syrus Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat." - R. Heinlein Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. -- Samuel Goldwyn 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" Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. -- Sydney J. Harris ... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.) Anything free is worth what you pay for it. Anything that happens enough times to irritate you will happen at least once more. A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry. A person's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. -- Oliver Wendall Holmes A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. -- George Wald A priest asked: What is Fate, Master? And he answered: It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness. And that is Fate? said the priest. Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master. That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was too. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free. A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today. The results blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon. -- Steel City News ARCHDUKE FERDINAND FOUND ALIVE -- FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE 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 ... Arguments with furniture are rarely productive. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery A rolling stone gathers momentum. Art is anything you can get away with. -- Marshall McLuhan. Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -- Paul Gauguin Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard). -- Edgar R. Fiedler As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? A soft drink turneth away company. As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs; a process that traditionally requires some debugging. --- USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new computer system. Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve. Run with decent folk and your own decent instincts will be strengthened. Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum. Hang around with rich people and you will end by picking up the check and dying broke. -- Stanley Walker 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 A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. -- O'Henry A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. -- Daniel Webster As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such things as a free variable." 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. Atlanta makes it against the law to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp. Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason. -- Winston Churchill At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, not including the error of blaming it on the computer. Automobile, n.: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians. A venerable old Jewish gentleman was day-dreaming while sunning himself on a bench on the boardwalk at Alantic City. His reverie was disturbed when another man approached and asked,"Can I join you?" "What's the matter, maybe I'm coming apart??" Avoid reality at all costs. Avoid revolution or expect to get shot. Mother and I will grieve, but we will gladly buy a dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you. -- Dr. Paul Williamson, father of a Kent State student Avoid running at all times. --- Satchel Paige A waste is a terrible thing to mind. -- Custodians of Love Canal A wise man can see more from a the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire A woman's place is in the house. And the senate. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. A young man wrote to Mozrat and said: Q: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any suggestions as to how to get started." A: "A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with some simple lieder and work your way up to a symphony." Q: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old." A: "But I never asked anybody how." Bankers' Hours: That part of the day when it is too hot to play golf. Baruch's Observation: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Baseball is a skilled game. It's America's game -- it, and high taxes. -- Will Rogers Be alert, we need all the lerts we can get. Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. Lord Rochester Being a frog isn't as bad as it seems. Whenever anything bugs them, they eat it. Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence -- Time Bandits Be security conscious - National defense is at stake. Be self-reliant and your success is assured. Best to leave town until this blows over. Better luck next time. Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate. Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and great effort pushing boulders into a single word. It can be seen from 10,000 feet, silhouetted against the snow. Government officials exchanged memos full of circumlocutions (no Latin equivalent exists) but failed to word an appropriation bill for the destruction of this cairn, that wouldn't alert the press and embarrass both Parliament and Party. It stands today, a monument to human spirit. If life exists on other planets, this may be the first message received from us. -- The Realist, November, 1964.