/************************/
/* phloem's quotes file */
/************************/


"You can fit the end of a wire coathanger into an electrical outlet, 
but that doesn't mean it's a good idea." 
     --Fluffy, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet

"Reality is the ultimate rorschach." 
     --Principia Discordia

"Usenet isn't groupware. Groupware isn't Usenet. Strawman knocked down  
and trampled." 
     --Timothy Miller, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but usually consumes the
bandwidth of more than two thousand." 
     --Gym Quirk, news.groups

"If you think [The Other Sister] was made to demonstrate that the
mentally handicapped can love just like the rest of us, it's time to
stop pouring NyQuil over your morning corn flakes."
     --Mr. Cranky 

"Here's an idea: tell [James Bond] he's got three minutes [to escape]
and actually give him three seconds and blow his martini-drinking ass
into a million pieces." 
     --Mr. Cranky, reviewing 'Goldeneye'

"Once you have tasted flight, you will walk this earth with your eyes
turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you long to
return."
     --Leonardo da Vinci

"Pay no attention to the man brushing the ethical questions present
under the curtain." 
     --Liam Stitt

"There certainly isn't a goony 'Touched by a Muslim' show on CBS prime
time, with Cat Stevens traveling the country doing good deeds while
paying lip service to the virtues of his religion." 
     --placidden@aol.com, alt.tv.er, on the insecurities of
       Christians 

"DAMN WHO MESSED WITH MY CAPSLOCK KEY that's better."
     --geoff lane, <e886430646@swirld.mcc.ac.uk>, asr

"People openely advertising on Usenet the availability of child porn
are either law enforcement agents or possessed of the approximate IQ
of an avocado." 
     --Russ Allbery, news.groups

"Hi, I'm Marc Andreesen, and after a hard day working on our piss-poor
browser, I need to relax with a piss-poor beer!" 
     --Malcolm Ray, on Marc's Miller Lite beer ads, asr

"Tree stuck in cat; firefighters baffled." 
     --Simcity 3000

"Good will triumph over evil because evil can't aim." 
     --Skye Allen

"Nikos Drakos. The only guy I know who tries to write LISP code 
in Perl." 
     --Stephen Harris, asr, on the author of latex2html

"We in medicine, and in emergency medicine in particular, have come to
accept death as a passive experience. We like our patients to die 
when we're not at the bedside, when we're not doing anything, and when
we haven't done anything lately." 
     --Ron Walls, MD, FACEP 

"Duuuh....George...why have you not used system(), George?"
     --Liam Stitt

"Usually when people get fucked this hard they use KY Jelly as a
lubricant. It sounds like you're asking for them to mix metal 
shavings with it." 
     --Ellis Vener, photo.net (in a deleted thread, sadly)

"HAPPY99.EXE proved there were a lot of stupid people on the
net. [W97M_Melissa] proves that not only are they stupid, they won't 
learn." 
     --Jay Denebeim, news.groups

"Bayliss: What, you don't trust me to drive my own car?
Pembleton: No, I don't. You might get tailgated, and end up shooting
at a school bus."
     --Tim Bayliss & Frank Pembleton, "Happy to be Here"

"What do you expect? The man is on the mean streets of Baltimore, 
stalking the big game, which is Dinty Moore in a can.. of course 
he's going to be armed." 		
     --Det. John Munch

"Do be a milk drinker; don't be a crack addict." 
     --Det. Kay Howard

"I spent years in front of that frickin' tube, and she never once 
saw *Beau* in the magic mirror. That bitch." 
     --Det. Beau Felton, complaining about 'Romper Room'

"I'm never sharing with you guys again." 
     --Det. John Munch

"The POP3 server depends on the SMTP server service, which failed to
start because of the following error: The operation completed
successfully."
     --Windowns NT Server v3.51

"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to
land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead."
     --RFC1925

"I don't eat soup with a fork, so why should I e-mail with a Web
browser?" 
     --Patrix Radman

"If anoyne in the plot had even the slightest intelligence, the story
would implode."
     --Roger Ebert, reviewing 'Jawbreaker'

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million
typewriters will eventually reproduce the works of shakespeare. Now,
thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." 
     --? 

"I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia
lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the mail gate. All
these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last
week. Time to die.." 
     --Peter Gutmann, sdm

"The biggest problem with driving in Houston is the fact that people
seem predisposed to leave their old mattresses and couches lying around
in the middle of the road. Bad drivers are less of a hazard than the
furniture." 
     --?

"The fact that there are a million cockroaches per human being on the
earth does not necessarily mean they are a superior form of life."
     --Tracy Reed, providing perspective on an advocacy war

"Sarah [McLachlan], of course, still has the most discrete way of 
describing the pleasure of submission in sex: 'And that line in
Possession -- 'hold you down, kiss you so hard' -- could be nasty,
could be nice.'"
     --Jennifer

"If Unix is the revenge of the nerds, then the rest of the industry is
the football team and the cheerleading squad trying to produce a
science project, and expecting an 'A' because they're the football
team and the cheerleading squad." 
     --? 

"'Since spammers are using Usenet, they are Usenet users.'
'Since robbers visit convenience stores, they are 7-11 customers. 
And since they get their money there, 7-11 is a bank.'"
     --Dave Hayes and Rick Buchannan, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet

"I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but THEY LIVE HERE
TOO, AND THEY'RE LOTS SMARTER THAN YOU ARE, WHICH IS WHY THEY'RE REAL
ROCKET SCIENTISTS"
     --Gharlane of Eddor, rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, on the 
       non-dangers of Cassini and other nuclear-powered spacecraft

"Running Windows NT as a server because it's easy to use is like
hiring Miss America to run your payroll because she's cute." 
     --Peter da Silva 

"You see this?! This is what happens to you when you drop out of school
and start smokin' reefer!"
     --Det. Leo Shannon, "DaVinci's Inquest"

"Remember, there's no problem so complex it can't be solved by killing
everyone even remotely associated with it." 
     --ljd, Scorched Earth Party

"Anyone who says 'disk is cheap' deserves to be shot." 
     --Linus Torvalds

"It's, well, a big dumb hippo that eats people that whack it on the
head too many times. Don't get me wrong: I love the Hippo, but it
really has no concept of who or why it's being whacked on the head,
just that it has happened a lot." 
     --Brian Moore, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, on Spamhippo 
				   
"It's about damn time that all of us who actually give a damn about
Usenet stand up and tell the people who don't to fuck off and die."
     --Russ Allbery 

".. and by *GOD* I know what this network is for, and you can't have
it."
     --Russ Allbery

"We aren't heroes from any one call that we go on. We're heroes
because we keep going back at it day after day." 
     --Jeff Vaughn, misc.emerg-services 

"What are all these things that just spew out of your head? Could you
at least use your brain as a filter?!" 
     --Ally McBeal

"Love, couplehood, partnership: I think I need to believe that it
works -- the idea that when two people come together, they stay
together. I have to take that with me when I go to bed at night, even
if I am going to bed alone."
     --Ally McBeal 

"I think that the indefinable space between happy and sad is the most
moving and compelling place for an artist to be. If there's anything I 
consistently strive for, it's a melancholy limbo. That's my favorite 
state." 					
     --Shawn Colvin

/* Megan Patricia Jamieson: a woman so smart she dropped out of MIT */

"Relationships on the net are different from relationships in the real
world. On the net, you're only as far away as the longest router hop." 
     --Megan P. Jamieson

"Physical and emotional distance between two people is not the same
thing; the people I am emotionally close to are usually the ones who
are the furthest away from me."
     --Megan P. Jamieson

"Too much research is wasted because the people who did it looked at
their results, got scared, and dumped their data. Half of progress is
getting over your fear of what might be on the other side." 
     --Megan P. Jamieson 

"Visual languages -- bah. Giving a student a visual language to learn
in is like giving a kid velcro sneakers: he can put his shoes on, but
he still doesn't know how to tie them up. None of these introductory
languages -- including Java -- provide any mechanics for learning
knots, which are useful for more things than just putting on shoes."
     --Megan P. Jamieson 

"I know who you are. I saw what you did. I've got the root password."
     --Megan P. Jamieson, trying out her BOFH license

"All I know is that I once felt something meaningful about my work,
and suddenly that feeling wasn't there anymore. Outside of a few
visionaries, computer science has been woefully deficient at providing
something useful for humanity. Most computer science students would do
better to take up bartending or drug dealing for what good it will do
them and the world." 
     --Megan P. Jamieson

"We may eventually dream our way out of this darkness, but the dreams
that lift us will not come from the places we traditionally associate
with dreaming. Like love, that dream will come from a most unexpected
direction. They will not come from the universities, because students
there have been conditioned to think in a particular way which I find
inhibits dreams. It will instead be some kid, somewhere in the world,
with a radical idea or message.. and that kid will change everything."
     --Megan P. Jamieson, not drunk enough

"'I will accept you for all that you are, and all that you might
become. I will stand by you in good times and in bad; I will be with
you when you need me, and I will go away when you want to be alone. I
will believe in you with my heart and soul. I will keep and cherish
your heart with all that I am and all that I am capable of, and there
will never be a moment when you will be far from my mind. That is my
promise to you, my love, my darling, my angel of happiness. I love
you beyond any words that I could say.' Wow. *That* is a declaration
of love." 
     --Megan P. Jamieson      

"Can I make an observation? Take the wrapper off whatever it is you're
smoking."
     --Megan P. Jamieson

"If it's more than 400 feet from the car, it's not photogenic." 
     --Edward Weston?

"Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
She anaphylaxed
Turned blue and collapsed
And the ambulance whisked her away."
     --Little Miss Milk Allergy

"Given a choice of the negative or positive aspects of any symbol --
sea as life-giving mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as
symbol of growth, tree as what falls on your head -- Canadians show a
marked preference for the negative." 
     --Margaret Atwood, "Survival"

"A novel about unalloyed happiness would have to be either very short
or very boring: 'Once upon a time John and Mary lived happily ever
after, the end.'" 
     --Margaret Atwood, "Survival"

"Again and again we find [Susanna Moodie] gazing at the sublime
natural goings-on in the misty distance.. only to be brought up short
by disagreeable things in her immediate foreground, such as bugs,
swamps, tree roots, and other immigrants." 
     --Margaret Atwood, "Survival"

"According to Hollywood logic, none of the actual Titanic passengers
was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo
and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This
seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk
up that attic." 
     --Libby Gelman-Waxner, Premier magazine

"I have no interest in seeing Doug [Ross] torn apart in post after
post, mostly by men viewers who are jealous of George [Clooney]'s
looks, talent, and success." 
     --errossfan@aol.com, alt.tv.er, trying out for the "Usenet
       Idiot Child" poster contest

"It's nice to see that Benton has a heart. I assumed the guy ran on
batteries." 
     --chrisnospam@ultralink.com, alt.tv.er

"Bitch! Bitch, bitch, bitch. Bitchy, bitch, bitch. Idiot bitch. You
know, I really hadn't taken a personal grudge against Judith
Fitzgerald.. I thought that was pretty clear." 
     --Sarah Andrews Cook, sf-fumblers

"I've never understood why women douse themselves with things that 
are alleged to smell of roses/tulips/freesias. What exactly are they 
trying to attract? Bees?" 
     --Tanuki the Racoon-Dog, sdm

"Both Doug and myself have been here long, long before you were. It's
*you* who are invading our turf, not the other way around. Now go hump 
your poodle." 
     --Jay Denebeim, news.groups

"In Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates, [twit] is motionless and the
black hole is an event in his future.. which runs up and eats him
(taking an alarmingly finite time to do so)." 
     --Alex Elliott, adfp

"Get it straight: a police detective, a man who gets paid government
money to put you in prison, is explaining your absolute right to shut
up before you say something stupid." 
     --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"

"It's one thing to be a murdering little asshole from southeast
Baltimore, and it's another to be stupid about it, and with five
little words you have just elevated yourself to the ranks of the truly
witless." 
     --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"

"Landsman waves again and the message becomes clear: Yo, assholes. My
white bitch ass is going home tonight to an air-conditioned rancher
and a woman and a dozen steamed crabs and a six-pack of beer. You're
going to a 98-degree cell for a steaming week of lockdown. Bon voyage,
you simple motherfuckers."
     --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"

"At his cluttered desk on the fourth floor of Courthouse West,
Lawrence C. Doan rearranges a stack of legal pads and runs one finger
along the bottom of his dark bangs and then back over the top,
carefully reassuring himself that all is in place. No cowlicks
today. No antigravitational shift in the tie's Windsor. No lint on the
lapels. No problem whatsoever, save for the fact that today he's going
to try to prosecute a murder in the city of Baltimore, which is a
little like trying to drive a Winnebago through the eye of a needle."
     --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"

"Doan buries his head in his hands, contemplating the known
realities. The federal budget is out of control, the ozone layer is
being depleted, twelve pissant countries have nuclear weapons, and I,
Lawrence Doan, am trapped in a small room with Rich Garvey, ten
minutes away from opening arguments."
     --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"

"How many system administrators does it take to change a light bulb?
None. Just remove the rights of everybody allowed to go into the
room." 
     --Ross Clement

"ftping from a filesystem you can mount is like having phone sex with
a girl you're in bed with." 
     --Nate 

"You are in a twisty maze of Motif Widget resources, all inconsistent."
     --Paul Tomblin 

"A retrospective of the 'good 'ole days' of the Net when men were real
men, all computers ran Unix, and the Web seemed like a good idea."  
     --third in a list of ideas for articles about the history of
       the Net by Paul Stephanouk

"What is a 'broken killfile'? One that only wounds messages rather than
killing them?" 
     --Craig Dickson

"Unfortunately, the crud passed off as 'operating systems' for 90% of
the desktop market (including W95) basically spread their legs and
scream 'infect me! crash me! corrupt me!'" 
     --Walt Buehring

"I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on tape somewhere."
     --Hemant Shah

"The Internet is a powerful example of free speech and the free market
in action; it is curious that the net has alarmed the lawmakers of a
nation founded on those principles." 
     --Denise Caruso

"People who think chess is a wimpy sport have never been hit over
the head with a solid marble chessboard." 
     --Thomas Boutel

"Geeky F mathematician with lots of bell curves seeks M, standard
deviant, for statistically significant activities. Your Laplace or
mine." 
     --Ilana Stern, "Poissonal Ads"

"Whatever our positions lost in logic might be recovered with
invective. If you never quit an argument, presumably you never lost."  
     --Patrick Buchanan, displaying the wisdom of a grizzled
       Usenet Warrior

"When in doubt, use brute force."  
     --attributed to Ken Thompson

"Everybody knows that it's still September '93 on the net.. and that 
means I don't have to meet these deadlines for *years*." 
     --Alan Bostick

"If you get mail from someone called MAILER-DAEMON, please do not send 
mail back to it. The mailer-daemon is a program and gets cranky when
people mail it." 
     --MOTD from Stony Brook's Instructional Computing Network

"The Pope is the Ed Wood of theology." 
     --Robert Anton Wilson

"Remember kiddies, rocks have more clues than lusers. i.e. they don't
phone you up. Ever. Unless you've been smoking crack." 
     --John Vaughan 

"The world is complex. sendmail.cf reflects this.." 
     --Robbie Honerkamp

"The command line is not a bug." 
     --John Flinchbaugh, alt.unix.wizards

"In Murray Hill did Dennis Khan the might Unix code decree
where Ken and Russ and Brian ran it on a pee dee pee.." 
     --Peter da Silva

"You need the computing power of a P5, 16 MB RAM and 1 GB harddisk to
run Win95. It took the computing power of approx 3 Commodor 64 to fly
to the moon. Something is wrong here, and it wasn't the Apollo."
     --Deon Ramsey

"Life's not fair, but the root password helps." 
     --BOFH

"<bgsound> is one [tag] I'm considering for the 'user we hate you'
build option." 
     --Alan Cox 

"It's aetually pretty de1ightfu1 if y0u have ever rcad the
doeumentatjon of 0rigin's U1tima 1-V1 Enc0re Co11ection CD."
     --Linards Ticmanis, commenting on OCR software

"Lately I've been saying, 'have you got there yet?'"
     --Mike Stella, taunting Windows users

"I don't *care* if there's been a nuclear holocaust -- Usenet news
hasn't been received for 36 hours and I'm moving to another ISP."
     --Joe Chew

"Immediate opening for window manager. The successful applicant will
be able to handle several hundred clients. BS/X11 required. Own
colormap a plus. Send cover letter & resume to.." 
     --Andrew Carey

"Next week: tactile load monitoring! Start up emacs and crush your 
sysadmin!" 
     --Wim Lewis

"But the second or third time I read news on Panix Jim mentioned
to me that rn had been installed since I'd last looked.  He
noticed I was 'more'ing the news spool." 
     --Mara Chibnik 

"Give a man a piece of working code and you solve his problem. Teach a 
man to write code and you give him a lifetime of new problems."
     --Timothy J. Luoma 

"Get either a killfiler or a gun (God's own retroactive moderator...) 
and a shitload of ammunition." 
     --Keith M. Lucas 

"If the NSA has time to read my e-mail, I wish they'd send me a bloody
monthly summary!" 
     --Jef Bryant

"Any member of the public who trusts Usenet is at best gullible."
     --Seth Breidbart

"People who read 'Wired' are *exactly* everything that's wrong with
the net." 
     --Thor Lancelot Simon

"I kinda like the paper stock. 'Wired' is one of the few magazines
where the ink *doesn't* bleed through to the opposite side. And
given the amount of ink they put on their average page, this is a
good thing." 
     --Daniel Rosenbaum

"X.400 was designed by people who really didn't want to communicate
with each other in the first place." 
     --Michael J. O'Connor

"Remember, SCSI is not black magic. There are fundamental technical
reasons why it is necessary to sacrifice a goat at midnight in order
to get a SCSI device working properly." 
     --Arnoud Engelfriet 

"If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains
unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not
only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be
one." 
     --John Barrow 

"I think I'd like to see a Simpsons episode start up with Bart
Simpson writing 'I will not attempt to undermine the Usenet Cabal.'"
     --J.D. Falk, sdm

"A gangrenous limb is still full of life. I wouldn't call it
thriving." 
     --Peter da Silva, discussing the state of alt.sex.*

"S'nice to find somebody who speaks fuckin' English out here onna
Innernet. Not like dem goddam fancy pants talkers from fuckin'
England or someplace." 
     --tariat@aol.com

"If it's not real, why does it take up disk space?" 
     --Wednesday

"Wow! 'Wired' has text? I think 'Wired' is the anti-'Playboy': I only
read it for the graphics." 
     --Ron Echeverri

"An hour into flight, I discover the computer is on and the battery is
80% used. This is irritating (!) and perhaps dangerous, although none
of my flights has crashed." 
     --Edward Holden, comp.risks, on in-flight use of electronic
       devices 

"Some day the US is going to face an enemy who *didn't* put their
armed forces together the way PHBs put together computer systems, by
looking in catalogs and listening to salesmen and going 'I want that'
without listening to the technical guys going 'but that won't work
with the stuff we already have.'" 
     --Paul Tomblin, sdm

"When flying, you will generally be the one to kill yourself. When
driving, there's a much better chance that someone else will kill
you." 
     --Kyler Laird, rec.aviation.misc, explaining accident
       statistics 

"Ever poke a dog in the eyes?  You *really* should try it sometime.
You will *not* get a Three Stooges reaction."
     --Kyler Laird, rec.aviation.piloting

"If 'Casablanca' was made in today's climate, Rick and Ilsa would
escape on the plane after avoiding a hail of gunfire (Rick would
probably be doing the two-fisted gun thing that John Woo loves)."
     --James Berardinelli

"This is a standoff with federal officers! A peaceful settlement is,
'Put your guns down, you're under arrest!'" 
     --Josh Lyman, "The West Wing"

"Attila is less hated than Hitler, better known than Franco, and lacks
Mussolini's comic charm." 
     --Bill Cole, sdm, on why Attila gets picked on

"You'd have to say 'hey, remove my stuff, or I'll whack your server in
the knee with a metal pipe!'" 
     --Sean Yamamoto, on the photo.net copyright infringement goon
       squad  

"Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from
smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of
smart terminals."
     --obs@burnout.demon.co.uk (seen in a .sig)

/* Anita Liberty: teaching me to be angry all over again */

"Samantha once asked me which experience I thought would be scarier:
seeing a ghost or being abducted by aliens. Here's my answer:
Neither. Nothing could ever be as terrifying as finding myself at the
same party as Mitchell and his new girlfriend. Since that happened
last night, I guess I can live the rest of my life without fear."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Mitchell broke my heart. So I broke his marble coffee table."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Never went outside today. Didn't clean my apartment. Didn't
shower. Didn't write. Didn't watch television. The phone didn't
ring. Not once. I didn't get any mail. Oh. That's not true. I got a
Chinese menu. Someone was thinking about me."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Slipping slowly, deeply, down the drain of my life. Consumed by the
darkness of my unfulfilled dreams. Black heat surrounds my lonely --
oh, desperately lonely -- body. My existence has become a blur of
dissatisfaction and I feel nothing but what I don't have and that is
everything. Don't feel bad -- I mean, it's not like it's your fault or
anything. Oh yeah, actually, it is."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"When your self-esteem is low, do not call someone who has rejected
you in the past. The chance that that person will say something that
will make you feel worse is great. The chance that that person will
say exactly what it is that you need to hear is slim."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"You're a bad habit. I want to kick you. Hard."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"I wish we were back together.. for just one night.. so I could.. push
you out of my loftbed while you were sleeping."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Now that you're gone and never coming back I feel that I can be
honest about the fact that you were never very good in bed."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"If you're over thirty, you don't *have* to take your parents'
advice. You can. Of course. If you want to. And if taking it doesn't
make you feel like you're still a child. And if somehow you are able
to convince yourself that their advice is solid and grounded and takes
into account how well they know you and how right they've been in the
past. If you can take their advice under those conditions, well, lucky
you."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Compromise: Lowering my standards so you can meet them."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"If you run into someone who's broken your heart, act like you don't
know him. Act like you've drawn a blank. Act life you've never seen
him before, even if you really want to whack his fucking black
baseball cap off his ugly head and kick his ass when he bends down to
pick it up."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"I know what people say about me. 'Anita Liberty's so angry.' 'Anita
Libery's so angry at men.' 'Anita Liberty just needs to get laid.' And
I'm like, you know.. duh!"
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Never call a first date a date. That way, if it doesn't work out, you
haven't had a bad *date*, you've just met someone with whom you don't
intend to waste any more of your time. If it does work out, then you
can call it a date after the fact. Fail-safe."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"Don't trust anyone who, after knowing you for all of four hours,
tells you that they've never felt so connected to, so moved by, so
comfortable with, someone as he/she feels with you. It's just not
true. Well, he/she may think it's true. And you are pretty great, but
he'she's just looking for something that he/she will find out you
can't deliver and then he/she will discover that you're just a normal
person. A really sexy, cool, well-adjusted normal person, but a normal
person all the same. And he/she will realize this and stop
calling. Just stop calling. And his/her desperation to see you again
and desire to spend every minute with you will fade away and be
replaced with a palpable ambivalence. And then you're the one who ends
up getting disappointed. Avoid that."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating

"I used to have dreams that Mitchell came back to me. I still do. But
now I call them nightmares."
     --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating


/* Philip Greenspun: my hero */

"Our strategy in dealing with CTOs was to ridicule them in front of
their bosses. `You're not sure if Unix is the right operating system?
What is next on the meeting agenda, are we doing to talk about the
color of the power cord used to plug the server in?'" 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Let's get real. Poverty sucks. If you claim to be an expert on modern
information systems and you aren't rich then most people will infer
that you are stupid." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Progress in computer science is made with the distribution of
revolutionary software systems and the publication of revolutionary
books. We don't need a fancy information system to alert us to these
grand events; they will hit us in the face. Another good excuse for
ignoring the literature is that, since everyone has strong beliefs
about fundamentals but can't support those beliefs rationally or
consistently convince non-believers, computer science is actually a
religion."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Computers are the tools of the devil. There is no monotheism strong
enough that it cannot be shaken by Unix or any Microsoft product. The
devil is real. He lives inside C programs." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"The companies making Unix machines were accustomed to building
proprietary systems and hence they couldn't resist introducing
annoying incompatibilities among their versions of Unix." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Digital, HP, and IBM sold big systems to big customers and laughed at
Sun. The people at Sun became so depressed that they decided to put
all the other Unix vendors out of business." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"I told all of my friends how they were losers for running Unix. They
should switch to NT. It was the future. That was more or less my
constant refrain until one pivotal event changed my life: I actually
tried to use NT." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"You might think that the user interface of Unix sucks. But, thanks to
X, it doesn't get any worse if you stay in your comfortable office or
cozy house and drive your web server remotely." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"By contrast, anyone who has learned to install Microsoft Word on a
Windows NT machine is suddenly a $150/hour consultant. Now that all
the nerdy high school kids have all gone over to Linux, there is no
pool of cheap expertise for NT." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"A true Windows NT expert is making $175,000 a year rebooting a
financial firm's e-mail servers; he isn't going to want to bother with 
your personal web server." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"When you have 11 million users, life begins at 50 million
hits/day/service, and you don't have too much patience for bogus
'scalable application server' products." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Until Microsoft is able to get Windows NT to work at its own sites
(e.g., hotmail.com), it is probably safest to rely on a Unix server."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Armies of hardware engineers will work anonymously in cubicles like
slaves for 30 years so that the powerful computers used by pioneers in
the 1960s will be affortable to everyone. Then in the 1990s rich
people and companies will use their PR staffs to take credit for the
innovations of the pioneers in the 1960s, without even having the
grace to thank the hardware geeks who made it possible for them to
steal credit in the first place." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Conventional wisdom in Italy has it that 'there are three ways to
make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it.'
Based on my survey of the computer industry, the third strategy seems
to be the most successful." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"You are a Web publisher. On the cutting edge. You need the latest and 
greatest in computer technology. That's why you use, uh, Unix. Yeah."
     --Philip Greenspun

"So you've gotten your pathetic Web site up and are proud of yourself
for your wimpy little SELECTs. You had planned to live on the
advertising revenue from your site, but find that $1.37 a month
doesn't go very far in Manhattan." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"I didn't want to write a dead trees book but I figured that ordering
lobster was my only chance of getting anything out of Ziff-Davis,
which had been copying my images off my Web site and running them
without credit or payment in its magazines."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Some people like a one-truth world. If you have a huge advertising
and PR budget then you can control your public image very effectively
in a literate world. Ford Motor Company has enough money to remind you
2,000 times a year that 'Quality is Job One;' unless you lost a friend
in a Pinto gas tank explosion, you probably will eventually come to
agree. Microsoft via the genius of Bill Gates invented the
mouse-windows user interface, reliable operating systems, affordable
computing, and the Internet; if you don't think all of that is true,
ask someone who has never used a computer and whose only exposure to
the industry is through mass media." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Since publishers don't pay real money for computer books, the only
people who are attracted to work as authors are the clueless and
unemployed. If I actually know something about Web publishing, why
should I write a book instead of consulting for $1,000/day? But if
I've never typed a line of SQL in my life, that makes me the perfect
candidate to write a book about databases. Yes the publisher is only
going to pay me $10,000 but it works out because I get an excuse to
learn a bunch of new things. Maybe I can get a job as a junior
database programmer when I'm done."
     --Philip Greenspun

"My principle home computer is a Windows NT 4.0 box that I don't
understand. I once tried to buy a book on NT that explained something
about the philosophical underpinnings so that I'd be better prepared
to use the on-line help. But all the NT books at my local Micro Center
were 1200 pages long. I don't have time to read a 1200 page book. I am
afraid to even let one in my house." 
     --Philip Greenspun

"Suppose that you are up all night tearing your hair out because
something has gone wrong with your RDBMS. You turn to your technical
bookshelf and thumb through all the dbadmin guides. Perhaps you do
find some useful information but you become enraged by the cheerful
tone of the book. You are in this mess because the RDBMS vendor
skimped on the design and implementation of a critical system
component. This skimping may well have been documented somewhere, but
you didn't see the relevant caveats before the skimping brought down
your service. Partly this is because tech books don't have sections
like 'design idiocies that are likely to fuck you over.'"
     --Philip Greenspun

"Amazon had apparently expected to get real writers but most of the
authors who'd stumbled upon the form as of May 1997 were hack writers
of tech books. You'd think that lying on their college applications
would have prepared these people to answer this question with
something like 'Every summer I sit on the beach and re-read Proust. It
recharges my creative batteries.' But apparently they'd lost all the
skills they'd had at age 17."
     --Philip Greenspun

"The book the Ziff folks sent me as an example of their art was 'Late
Night VRML 2.0 with Java,' 700 pages + CD-ROM, published February
1997. I was personally acquainted with more movie stars than people
who might conceivably have wanted to buy this book or any book like
it."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Another good thing about Morgan Kaufmann is that I will be their
stupidest and most commerical writer. Seemingly everyone else who
writes for them has a Ph.D. and a professorship. They don't have a
'DOS for Dorks' series with potential to sell 200,000 copies/year. So
when they do get their appointment with the buyer for Barnes & Noble,
my book will be the one that gets pushed rather than 'Atomic
Transactions: In Concurrent and Distributed Systems'."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Fuji has done great things to promote this format. They make 645
lenses that are just as good as Hasselblad's 6x6 lenses. They charge
less than half the price. Then they throw in a perfectly good body
behind the lens for free! Sometimes Fuji puts a meter in the body,
something that apparently costs 'Blad about $5,000 extra."
     --Philip Greenspun

"At noon, an ugly mob of users assembles outside your office, angered
by your introduction of frames and failure to include WIDTH and HEIGHT
tags on IMGs. You send one of your graphic designers out to explain
how `cool' it all looked when run off a local disk in a demo to the
vice president. The mob stones him to death and then burns your server
farm to the ground."
     --Philip Greenspun, describing what should happen to all bad Web
     designers


"It's bad form to arrive at a scene [of a fire] with sparks and smoke
already INSIDE the cab of the truck."
     --Jason Low

"So our first-ever WRC (Water Rescue Call) alarm after buying and
training with our rescue raft 2 years ago came today, as mutual aid to
another local department, and we got cancelled halfway to the scene
because the patient had sunk. Nobody really wanted to try to grab hold
of a 400 lb baby COW anyway.."
     --Jason Low

"This looks like a hardware issue with the monitor.  Physical
intimidation of your computer, while sometimes satisfying, should not
be necessary."
     --Michael Riley, AST Technical Support, in an e-mail to me

"I managed to get [a netscape session] to crack the 100M mark once.  I
don't know how. I think it was just hungry."
     --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"Heck, that's nothing. I remember a while back jwz posted about how
proud he was when Netscape passed XEmacs in resident footprint."
     --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"It's that [netscape has] taken on Gates' philosophy toward resources:
If your machine has more resources, they must be for me to use, so I
will."
     --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"They've dealt with it in every revision. Each major new version of a
M$ OS has improved upon the Microsoft inevitable-crash(tm) feature. It
becomes more reliable with every revision."
     --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"Emacs, the right tool for the right job... no matter what the job!"
     --Justin Lloyd, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"Don't you mean the new "Inevitable-crash(tm) Wizard"? Improve your
productivity - use new M$ Overbloated Product(tm) - does all those 
jobs you'd never wish to do with as much enthusiasm as you'd have too!
Eats your resources! Upgrade your machine now and all that spare time 
you'll gain from Overbloated Product(tm) can be used to reboot. Many
times."
     --Darrell Ottery, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"Is this such unusual behaviour in any other field? I think not. No,
it's down to the fact that computers are deemed 'hard' and 'difficult
to use' when the truth of the matter is that they are no harder to
operate effectively that a car is. You don't *have* to understand how a
4-stroke IC engine works to drive a car, you just need to know how to
drive. It's no different in any other field. Just seems to me that
people aren't willing to make any effort these days. Feh."
     --Darrell Ottery, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"If you wear a bulletproof vest, you should by that logic have no
complaint if people shoot you every day."
     --Ron Schwarz, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet

"There are pictures. There are pictures telling me that it's dialing,
connecting, checking a password, etc. Every fucking thing has an
icon. In theory, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel
utterly condescended to."
     --Jennifer, griping about AOL

"They also had a UNIX option for 2 cents a day for 1 mb, so I caved.
I can't deal with the idea of NOT having a system that I barely know
yet somehow use religiously."
     --Jennifer

"Life wouldn't be life for you if I didn't come in every now and then
and give you advice that could potentially make you sleep in your
office again."
     --Jennifer

"I have said on not too few occasions that I remember when I used to be
smart. For 12 years of my life I was officially labeled 'gifted AND 
talented.' Now I'm lucky if I can get myself to school without getting 
lost."
     --Jennifer

"I think there needs to be more of me in your quotes file."
     --Jennifer

"Predictability comes by habit; stability comes by choice."
     --Jennifer

"I realized I have SUCH a perfect relationship bed and nobody to have
a relationship in it with."
     --Jennifer (hopelessly out of context)

">Now let us never speak of this incident again.
Except for right now.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Dork."
     --me & Jennifer

"I should be reading property AND keeping my phone line open, which
explains why I'm online."
     --Jennifer

"I'm exhausted and stinky."
     --Jennifer (still hopelessly out of context)

"But I like [the sigquote] so much I had to quote it back. I'm famous.  
Should I look at your .plan again?"
     --Jennifer

"Let's throw some chlorine in the gene pool."
     --Jennifer's friend Nicole

"Trent Reznor uses shock to increase the effect of his music; Marilyn
Manson uses music to increase the effect of his shock."
     --Jennifer (I mangled the quote; sorry)

"Someone needs to take a melon baller and scoop out all the crap
from inside me and get it out in the open, and then I will feel clean
again."
     --Jennifer

"So good for you to choose anger. Fuck her. She had no right to make
you question your life like this."
     --Jennifer, Real Angry at my ex

"My firm paid $1,475 for me to take this course and learn about q-tips."
     --Jennifer, on bar review

"I love having fun with you. You're too easy."
     --Jennifer, waaaaay out of context

"There was nothing good about the Challenger disaster, but it did
happen on the day that L. Ron Hubbard died and it blew that useless,
evil, rat bastard's obituary off the front page and that, at least,
wasn't bad."
     --Penn Jillette

"DVD has two sides, and I don't just mean the discs: it's an
entertainment medium like video tape, and it's a computer medium 
like CD-ROM. So people are going to have DVDs in their computers, and
with the buzzword 'convergence,' they're going to want to use those
drives to read movies and audio DVDs. This raises a security problem, 
because as everyone knows, the Internet is full of evil hackers who
will infringe upon copyright owners' God-given rights just for the
sheer hell of it."
     --Matthew Skala, "DVD Crypto Considered Harmful?"

"Bandwidth is highly asymmetrical and if you run a server that pumps
out anything like as much output as it takes input, then you'll
saturate the upward pipe and your wanker neighbours who only want to
look at, um, 'content,' on commercial servers, won't be able to
transmit their HTTP requests."
     --Matthew Skala

"Just _how_ many signs of the apocalypse does this cover at once?"
     --Liam Stitt

"Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others
because they are excessive, in feeling or in actions.. while virtue
finds and chooses the mean."
     --Aristotle

"Usenet is essentially a HUGE group of people passing notes in class."
     --R. Kadel
 
"To err is human; to really fuck things up requires the root
password." 
     --someone in the sdm

"Sarah McLachlan's more of a 'this is a dark place.' Tori Amos is a
little 'is it dark? I think so,' and Trent Reznor's the guy who kicked
the lightbulb out in the first place."
     --John Shephard, fumbling-towards-ecstasy

"What's worse than a broken version of sendmail? An *antique* broken
version of sendmail that's giving an error that isn't in the Fruitbat 
Book. And doesn't understand the -d switch. Whoever ported IBM's
version of sendmail to OS/2 should be shot. Anyone out there using
AIX, is your sendmail this bad?"
     --someone in the sdm

"If you do not have a defragmenting tool for Windows NT, you can
defragment the disk or volume by backing up to tape, reformatting the
volume, and restoring from tape."
     --Windows NT 4.0 on-line help, demonstrating what Microsoft
       thinks is a good idea

"Emergency medicine demands the most intense involvement personally
and intellectually. Every area of clinical medicine is practiced,
every emotion is taxed. The challenge is in managing an unlimited
variety of disease or trauma at a level of immediacy that is rarely
approached in any other specialty." 
     --? (Peter Rosen?)

"Love is not a potato. You can't throw it out the window."
     --old Russian proverb

"Incidentally, the Muppet Show is being revived and one of the
recurring bits on the new show will be a 'barnyard medical drama'
called (I swear I'm not making this up) `E-I-E-I-O/R.'"
     --someone on alt.tv.er

"Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like."
     --Mark Stern

"An' then Chicken@little.com, he come scramblin outta the terminal
room screaming `The system's crashing! The system's crashing!'" 
     --Uncle RAMus, 'Tales for Cyberpsychotic Children'

"Don't assume that Windoze'95 suffers from extreme bloat because it
_tried_ to implement these features... it suffers extreme bloat
because of 15+ years of band-aid solutions on top of QDOS." 
     --someone on comp.os.os2.advocacy

"By the time you learn vi, you have to be a psychologist,
neurosurgeon, and voodoo priest as well as a crack programmer." 
     --Mark Morely

"To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of
two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that
will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with
them. Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems
handily available, they will create their own problems. Normal people
don't understand this concept; they believe that if if it ain't broke,
don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't
have enough features yet." 
     --Scott Adams

"If not for the compulsions of engineers, mankind would never have
seen the wheel, settling instead for the trapezoid because some
Neanderthal in Marketing convinced everybody it had great braking
ability." 
     --Scott Adams

"Here's a hint - if it starts to explode, you've gone too far."
     --Derran, to me, during a Robotech campaign

"If it can't overheat, it doesn't have enough fire power."
     --an alternate Jason

"Peace through superior aerial fire power!"
     --an alternate me

"D'you think a referral to Dr. Kevorkian is inappropriate right now?"
     --Dr. Beth Greenspan, imitating me

"If only to maintain our faith in ourselves and our families, we are
honor bound to believe each tearful young mother, to pray for the
dog-and-helicopter searches and to wear psychological, if not literal,
yellow ribbons. But even as we do so, again and again, we are coming
to realize that the climax of such searches is seldom a tearful
reunion or even an apprehended bad guy. Far more often, it is a
recanting, a tormented regression from 'she was stolen' to 'she fell'
to 'I may have dropped her' to 'I hit her with a big rock.'" 
     --David Van Biema

"Look on the bright side - if all he can complain about in your essay
is the font size used on the paper, then you're in pretty good shape."
     --Emily Shoichet

"Tom the cat is chasing Jerry the mouse across a table surface 1.5m
high. Jerry steps out of the way at the last second, and Tom slides
off the edge of the table at a speed of 5 m/s. Where will Tom strike
the floor and what velocity components will he have just before he
hits?" 
     --C.D. Scarfe, phys102

"Social psychology is in danger of becoming The Study Of The Things
People Do When They Think They're Doing Something Else." 
     --Dr. Janet Bavelas, psyc201

"I hate it when the people who correct me have no clue what they're
talking about."
     --Andrew Toppan, sci.military.naval
 
"Well, we know about this trend, and it's something we all feel.. but
because of the limited data collection capabilities we have, we can't
*prove* it."
     --Norma Jones, RN, illustrating why statistics are important

"You didn't let her down. 99% of what they teach you in med school is
bullshit, yet they don't find time to teach the three fundamental
tenets of medicine, the ultimate reason we are who we are, our
responsibilities above all else: to cure sometimes, to relieve often,
and to comfort always. If you forget everything you've been taught in
the last three years, remember this, live by it, and you will never,
ever go wrong." 
     --Dr. Eric Leggat, ucalgary oncology, circa 1992

"If I got shot, and someone was going to dig a bullet out of my leg, I
would hope to God that they'd give me something for the pain. 'Cause.. 
it hurts."
     --Dr. Steve Larson, upenn emergency medicine, circa 1995

"That's not right. You give a guy analgesia if you're going to do
that. I mean, this isn't the Civil War or anything - we don't tell
people to gnaw on a piece of wood." 
     --Dr. Steve Larson, upenn emergency medicine, circa 1995

"Do you have any recommendation to make regarding the management of
any patient that does *not* include the words 'Prozac,' 'haloperidol,' 
or 'refer to Dr. Kevorkian'?"
     --Dr. Neil Anderson, to me on a bad day

"Fuck OJ."
     --Xochitl Ruiz, summing that affair up quite nicely

"Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to
be very selective about who its friends are."
     --Kyle Hearn

"VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix."
     --davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM

"Unix is not an 'A-ha' experience, it is more of a 'holy-shit'
experience."
     --Colin McFadyen, sdm

"A Unix system will not understand you if you shout at it."
     --Don Stokes

"If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a
lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would
conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine." 
     --MAP@lcs.mit.edu

"DO NOT DISRUPT MY CAREFULLY CONTROLLED PATTERN OF HYPE, OR YOU WILL
BE PUT INTO A BOX WITH BILL GATES AND SHAKEN!!!" 
     --Leader Kibo

"The new Canon EOS-1V is taller than the EOS-1N.. the extra height
also signifies the strength of the latest professional EOS camera. If
you look at it more closely, you will agree that its contours, from
the pentaprism and both sides of the top plates, are shaped like
the neck and shoulder areas of a muscular man."
     --Canon promotional material (I'm unsure who their target
       demographic is for this camera)

"When a Windows machine got into trouble, the old command-line
interface would fall down over the GUI like an asbestos fire 
curtain sealing off the proscenium of a burning opera. When a
Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb,
which was funny the first time you saw it."
     --Neal Stephenson

"Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users,
whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so
OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for
anything in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose
big problem is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get
hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations."
     --Neal Stephenson

"Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the
service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a
product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker
subculture."
     --Neal Stephenson

"In hard contact wounds, the immediate edges of the entrance are
seared by the hot gases of combustion and blackened by the soot. This
soot is embedded in the seared skin and cannot be completely removed
either by washing or by vigorous scrubbing of the wound."
     --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of
       Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques"

"In firearm deaths, the individual may attempt to make the suicide
appear to be an accident. This generally takes two forms. The first of
these is the `gun cleaning accident.' The individual is found dead of
a gunshot wound with gun cleaning equipment neatly laid out beside
them. The proof that one is dealing with a suicide and not an accident
is usually the nature of the wound -- contact. An individual does not
place a gun against the head or chest and then pull the trigger in an
attempt to clean the weapon."
     --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of
       Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques"
 
"Occasionally an individual will use two totally different methods in
an attempt to commit suicide. Thus, one finds individuals dead of a
gunshot wound with potentially lethal levels of drugs. Apparently the
drugs do not work fast enough, and the individual decides to shoot
himself."
     --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of
       Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques"
 
"The fact that an individual can be mortally wounded, yet still be
capable of aggressive actions and a threat, sometimes for a prolonged
amount of time, is not appreciated by the public whose concepts of
shootings is derived from television and the movies. This is
periodically manifest by outcries from the public and the news media
against the police when an officer shoots a perpetrator multiple
times."
     --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of
       Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques"
 
"We discriminate upon intelligence because it is the one metric which
truly matters. In a blind discussion of this nature, all you bring is
your mind, and all we have to evaluate you on is what and how you
display it."
     --Liam Stitt

"I don't myself believe in astrology. However, I think that's because
I'm a Libra and Libras are always skeptical."
     --Philip Greenspun

"HTML and GUI browsers are doing the very same thing for Internet
communications that Citizen's Band has done for two-way radio
communications. Specifically, to aid morons to pack rainbows up each
other's ass."
     --Charles Miller

"There is one sector of e-commerce that is pretty much guaranteed
profitability: pornography."
     --Sean Yamamoto

"CAUTION: This device contains an explosive charge and disperses
approximately 180 3/8" pellets in a 360-degree area. Proper eye and
ear protection is recommended. For outdoor use only."
     --literature for Def-Tec Stinger crowd control device 

"The vulnerability exists because it is possible, under very specific
conditions, to violate IE's cross-domain security model in order to
allow a web site to read data that it should be prevented from
reading." 
     --Microsoft, on an Internet Explorer bug
"Huh?"
     --Megan P. Jamieson, reacting to Microsoft's reaction
"It's still broken, and they're not going to fix it."
     --me, trying to clear up Megan's confusion

"You may have seen reports in the media claiming that Windows 2000
contains over 63,000 defects. I'd like to assure our customers that
these reports are inaccurate. Microsoft is committed to delivering
high quality products, and we believe Windows 2000 is the most
reliable operating system Microsoft has ever shipped."
     --Microsoft Vice President Jim Allchin, in recognition of
       Overwhelming Irony Month

"People say they are religious, of course, in the same way they say
they don't masturbate." 
     --Bill Maher

"At the Republican debate last night, all the presidential candidates
said Elian Gonzalez should not be returned to Cuba. Gary Bauer said
Republicans believe very strongly in the family unit, but when Daddy's
a commie, that changes the whole equation."
     --Bill Maher

"The fact is that we don't need a bunch of Spicolies who can't go to
register to vote on their own when they can't even find the next place
to pierce or tattoo."
     --Debbie Schlussel

"Who cares who votes? Everybody's always whining about `Oh, we've got
38% --' yeah, you know, you can't get three out of ten people to agree
on pizza toppings, much less the leader of the country."
     --Dennis Miller

"Who needs dynamite when we've got IPOs?"
     --NetSlaves Combat Manual

"No, no, no -- that's right. That's right. I'm 99% sure you're a
wacko, but I'm not positive. I could have that 1%, can't I?"
     --Penn Jillette on certainty

"Hi, I'm Bill Maher. I'm a TV celebrity, so I wanna tell you how to
vote. Now, this past Tuesday, Californians rejected a proposal that
would have overturned Prop 10, and thank God! Prop 10 was the
anti-smoking proposition, which sent a powerful message, a message
that we support identifying smokers, taxing all they money away, and
giving it to other people's kids. Why? Because we're good, and they're
bad. And we want to make sure that when they get cancer, they can't
afford health care.

And sure, it's been fun, but have we really done enough? Well, the
answer is no. And that's why I'm endorsing Proposition 10A. Now, Prop
10 was good; it hit smokers in the pocketbook and, combined with laws
banning smoking, even in bars and outdoors, have made smokers feel
like pariahs in a land swimming with obnoxious habits and vices.

But that's not enough. With Prop 10A, when smokers buy cigarettes, the
woman behind the counter will slap them hard right in the face. Also,
the cigarettes will be kept in a case under the counter that takes a
very long time to unlock, causing the purchaser to miss their
bus. And, when the cigarettes are finally ready, the sales person will
throw them on the floor in front of the smoker, and, when the smoker
bends over to pick them up, he or she will be kicked right in the
ass. Also, smokers who attempt to avoid being slapped and kicked, by 
buying cigarettes from vending machines, will have their genitals
photographed by hidden X-ray cameras, and the photos will be posted on
the Internet and laughed at by minors.

And pack-a-day smokers will have to register with the police so decent
families will know where they live. And Camel smokers will literally
have to walk a mile. I urge you to join me in supporting Proposition
10A, a law that helps smokers by making their lives a living
hell. Prop 10A also legalizes Indian prostitution on tribal lands. Thank
you."
     --Bill Maher

"Who needs script kiddies when you've got backhoes?"
     --Dan Hollis, on nanog

"I think I'm going to start an e-commerce company and make pillows."
     --Sarah McLachlan, on what she's doing on her vacation from music

"You are in a maze of twisted packages, all dependent."
     --advent RedHat-style, Peter Dalgaard, sdm

"> Sadly, the web has turned into an area where lusers roam freely.
Um, `turned'? Has it ever been anything *but*?"
     --Abigail and Stewart Stremler, sdm

"Linux is probably one of the most Posix-compliant OS's out there
(except in those instances where Linus considers Posix to be
broken).."
     --Anthony W. Youngman, comp.unix.admin

"I remarked to Dennis [Ritchie] that easily half the code I was
writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, `We left all that
stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and
when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall,
`Hey! Reboot it!''" 
     --Tom Van Vleck

"Favorite Irish stereotype: 
a) Drunken brawlers. 
b) Devout morons. 
c) Knack for explosives."
     --abc.go.com/pi/poll/index.html

"Darva [Conger] is now going to strip -- no, she's going to be naked
in `Playboy.' And I'm sure after the shoot, she'll be sobbing, saying,
`I didn't know there was film in the camera!'"
     --Super Dave Osborne, PI 03/15/00

"[George W.] Bush is not stupid. But if he needed a kidney transplant,
he could call Quayle and not even do a blood test."
     --Super Dave Osborne, PI 03/15/00

"I hope that someday someone annihilates something you truly
care for out of ennui. Just so you can share in this feeling too.
What can I say, I'm a sharing kinda guy."
     --John Dillick

"Rotate all alphabet characters by 13. Crude form of encryption to
prevent excess hostility from easily offended control freaks who
believe in Truth, God, and Censorship."
     --Tom Dell, waffle BBS source for the rot13 function

"Excessive use of this function will result in diminished memory,
Alzheimers, or worse. Is there another name for this?"
     --Tom Dell, waffle BBS source

"Your modem must disconnect the line when DTR is dropped. Some modems
require a &Dx or &Cx sequence; others will require flipping a small
DIP switch inside or at the back of the modem. If neither of these is
the case, throw your modem from a tall building (we recommend the
Oakland Hyatt Regency)."
     --Tom Dell, waffle BBS documentation

"Error message format, displayed in response to an unrecognized
command. By default, this is something to the effect of `Monkey +
Keyboard = %i.%|' Sick people who want to play reverse psychology can
throw a %Z in there: make error, get cookie. Yum."
     --Tom Dell, waffle BBS documentation

"Now, why would you want to do this? You're wondering where all your
disk storage went, and want to find those UUENCODED GIFs someone
posted so you can delete them. Some people like to look for larger
articles that may be of substance, such as FAQs and other interesting
texts. Surprisingly, this is a quick way to find lots of cool things."
     --Tom Dell, waffle BBS documentation, on statistics

"The infinite wisdom of Microsoft, Inc. has given us the horrible
^Z-as-EOF character in MS DOS. There is no rhyme or reason to
this. Note, I did not want to have this misfeature, however numerous
complaints and confusion have made it necessary. The ^Z in MSDOS is a
bug in MSDOS. Appending a ^Z by any editor is a bug in that editor."
     --Tom Dell, waffle BBS source

"Management is not responsible for lost luggage, minds, virginity..."
     --Tom Dell

"Be safe or die."
     --MIT PSFC, Office of Environment, Safety and Health

"Okay, the celibacy is over. Now I want you to squat on my
lalijamba. That is right. And while you're at it, put your fist in my
gingee-gingee."
     --Dana Carvey, on swamis and gurus, PI 03/23/00
       (read in bad East Indian accent for big laughs)

"But we should congratulate the really big winner, which was `American
Beauty.' That won all the awards. Best picture. I don't know if you
saw it, but it's a terrific movie. It harkens back to a simpler time,
when high school kids' parents were shooting each other."
     --Bill Maher

"The man has been in the closet so long he has a pet bat."
     --Joan Rivers, PI 03/27/00

"I'm upset by all the angel pictures, because none of them know that
angels don't have bodies. Denzel Washington comes back and says, `Boy,
I haven't had a pizza in 30 years.' I'm thinking, if you are an angel,
you've *never* had a pizza."
     --Roger Ebert, PI 03/27/00

"Why *wouldn't* God drink beer?"
     --Roger Ebert, PI 03/27/00

"For years, I thought God was Tab Hunter. But that was just me... that
was my own vision. God was a great big blond gorgeous guy with a
surfboard."
     --Bruce Vilanch, PI 03/27/00

"What it means is that two people -- usually young people, high
school, college -- who are not seeing anyone romantically, but who
want to have sex, they just make a sort of quasi-business arrangement
that `Look, we're not romantically involved with anybody else, but we
need to have sex, let's just be buddies of a certain order.' Where was
this when *I* was in high school is what I want to know."
     --Bill Maher, on being friends with "priviledges"

"As you can see, you are NOT dead!"
     --Half Life: Opposing Force

"Mexican restaurants are the only place you can drink abusively with
your meal and not look like a lush."
     --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn

"You can tell a place is really cool if they don't give the
address. After all, their address is common knowledge among the truly
hip. Why are these places paying to advertise to people who are
already customers? Do they think poserus don't own phone books?"
     --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn

"You know you're in trouble when you start trying to predict what the
next drink will do to you. I need a wider variety of drugs. God, I
miss college."
     --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn

"Why the hell did you drink a whole bottle of scotch anyway? Oh,
right, you already told me. A writer."
     --Why I Hate Saturn

"Why do vegetarians spend so much time trying to make vegetables taste
like meat? Do monks buy a lot of inflatable sex dolls?"
     --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn

"There's a bar that Ricky and I refer to as the `Crap Bar', which must
be one of the seediest dives in town. Located in a basement, it's got
poor ventilation, exposed plumbing, which bursts regularly, and
everything is sticky. Naturally, it's one of the more exclusive bars
downtown."
     --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn

"I wonder if they sell pitchers of scotch."
     --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn

"Why is it that when we see something beautiful, we want to possess
it? We end up killing it, destroying the beauty that made us want it
in the first place."
"You fool! That's the whole *point* of relationships!"
     --Why I Hate Saturn

"You ain't seen ugly until you've seen a goth cross-dresser."
     --Joey Lindstrom

"I arrived in Venice in January with a slight cold. Water fell on me
from the sky and rose up from the sea to cover my shoes. Then it
started to snow. After a few days of this, I was giving demonstrations
of my maladies in Venetian pharmacies. I ended up taking four
different Italian drugs that I couldn't pronounce, much less read the
lengthy instructions. I sent email to my friends telling them that `I
either have AIDS or am Jewish.'"
     --Philip Greenspun

"Eventually the key broke in half and I learned a whole new set of
Italian words (none of which one could learn at Berlitz) while
watching the local mechanics spend an hour drilling the lock out."
     --Philip Greenspun

"This underlines one of the more depressing things that have happened
to Usenet since we started letting morons on."
     --Liam Stitt

"I have a better idea: Winter Daylight Losing Time. Late March, we set
the clocks *back* one hour. Advantages are that you get to sleep an
hour later than sun time (or be woken an hour early an hour later),
you have less daylight to contend with in the evening (vitamin D is a
Communist plot, right up there with fluoride), nightclubbers have a
much better chance of going home at dawn, and if you need to blame
your bad mood or random acts of senseless violence on something
there's always seasonal affective disorder."
     --Red Drag Diva, sdm

"DEAR MR. WEB DEZINUR:
PLZ WUD YOU UPLOD RAZL SO I KIN LOOK AT BEAVR. THANKU."
     --Wednesday, afw

"Gore versus Bush: Isn't this how they decide whether a movie gets an
R or an NC-17?"
     --Denis Miller

"I pick a president the way I pick a driver to get me to the airport:
Which one will cost me the least and not get me killed."
     --Denis Miller

"Deployment of critical software under NT experiences continuing
troubles; film at 11 unless the player BSODs."
     --Liam Stitt

"Share the screwdriver. Lift with your legs. 256 MB DIMMs are
pricey.."
     --james@arsdigita.com, on hardware maintenance

"In his acceptance speech, Bush made a clumsy attempt at pandering
without seeming to pander. `The polls say tax relief is not popular,'
he said. `I'm not proposing tax relief because it's the popular thing
to do. I'm proposing tax relief because it's the right thing to do.'
Of course. It's *courageous* to tell voters you're going to give them
money."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 10 March 2000

"It seems you just can't call people Christ-bashing sexual deviants
anymore without them getting all upset about it."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 20 August 1999

"I upbraided myself for not having a gun. (Sorry, NRA. I'm still here,
obviously, and I'm still not getting one.)"
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 13 August 1999

"On several occasions when I've been driving and had a brainstorm or
heard some useful bit of information on the radio, I've whipped [my
Palm Pilot] out in the middle of traffic to jot down a few words,
rather than try to make a mental note that will be forgotten as soon
as I've made it through the next red light. Yes, this is dangerous,
but there's a simple solution: if you see a blue 1989 Toyota Tercel
weaving back and forth, assume it's me, and stay the hell out of the
way." 
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 23 July 1999

"No doubt Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would never have embarked on
their murderous rampage if the principal had been allowed to post THOU
SHALT NOT KILL next to the football schedule."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 2 July 1999

"Of course, in the world of local school-board politics, the right of
86 people to keep their children enveloped in a haze of unreality (a
haze that in all likelihood exists only in the parents' minds)
supersedes the right of the majority to have their children
introduced, in school, to important, difficult literature."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 2 July 1999

"Cable sucks. Certainly cable TV has done a good job of accomplishing
its basic mission, which is to drain $30 to $100 from you every month
for something that used to be free."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 14 May 1999

"Math IS hard, as Barbie noted."
     --Philip Greenspun

"It is apparently not OK to remove A-bombs from Los Alamos
property. Nor are we allowed to gamble or use drugs here. Nor can one
use a fire extinguished unless one has been trained with a `real dummy
fire extinguisher' and `real dummy fires.' Then we were shown a
10-minute video on how to use the fire extinguishers we weren't
allowed to use. At the end I raised my hand and asked `since we aren't
allowed to gamble, are we going to get a video on how to card count in
six-deck blackjack also?'"
     --Philip Greenspun, "Footsteps"

"Those of you who've seen me cry like a baby and run to Mommy Maple
for even the simplest calculus problems will be shocked to learn that
I was the nerdiest person hired [at Los Alamos National Laboratories]
that week."
     --Philip Greenspun, "Footsteps"

"The overhead at [LANL] isn't very different from what it is at MIT,
which is remarkable when you consider that MIT doesn't have to
maintain hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence and enough guards and
heavy guns to repel the entire PLO."
     --Philip Greenspun, "Footsteps"

"Major road hazards specific to the Netherland Antilles and Aruba are
hidden and poorly maintained street signs, disoriented direvers not
familiar with where they are going, and goats wandering onto
roadways."
     --United States Department of State Consular information sheet
"The State Department has evidently never been to Massachussets."
     --Megan P. Jamieson

"One fact, two sharp edges. You're going to need an extra-large box of
Band-Aids."
     --Adam Schiff, "Law & Order"

"Peering is a poker game. The more of it you can get, the more people
will want to use your services, and the more networks will want to
peer with you to reach those customers. As you go along you add bigger
peers and drop the smaller ones. Lather, rinse, repeat, until your
network IS the Internet because you've got everyone else's customers
and they all want to peer with you to get them back."
     --Martin Cooper, NANOG

"If I were a cop and I had seen both `Scream' and [`I Know What You
Did Last Summer'], I'd be at writer Kevin Williamson's house searching
it for drugs. If I didn't find something, I'd plant a kilo of heroin
in his ass for writing this piece of crap."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

"Any film that inspired Dan Aykroyd to lose weight is okay with me. I
mean, we're talking about a guy who was getting so fat that people
were starting to wonder not whether he was still married to Donna
Dixon, but whether he had eaten her."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Blues Brothers 2000"

"Since both [Michael] Bay and [Jerry] Bruckheimer appear to have
degrees in auditory desnsitization, you can be damn sure that when the
movie calls for science and logic, science and logic go right out the
window in favor of `bitchin' tunes.'"
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Armageddon"

"Is Jennifer Love Hewitt's career goal to be an actress or to test the
elastic limits of the Wonderbra? Hey, don't get me wrong; I'm all for
skin on screen, but Hewitt's breasts are pushed so far up into her
face that her chin looks like the head pin in some sort of peculiar
game of dual flesh bowling -- a definite strike against this movie."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Can't Hardly Wait"

"[Director David] Koepp has obviously been in Los Angeles too long
because when his power goes out, he apparently runs down the street
picking off neighbors with an Uzi."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "The Trigger Effect"

"Basically, the film is banking on me being spookified by its
X-Files-like weirdness. Unfortunately, I don't find it weird at all. I
find it stupid. Mr. Cranky doesn't believe in ghosts. What Mr. Cranky
does believe is that those who buy such supernatural nonsense tend to
run around spouting witticisms they picked up from astrology columns
and passing that off as `knowledge.' If being trapped in a room with
200 such yammering nimrods is your idea of an ideal evening, then by
all means go see `The Sixth Sense.'"
     --Mr. Cranky

"`Jackie! Those Mounties took my beaver pelts and cursed at me in
French. Get them!' Since Jackie was already in Vancouver in the first
place, why not have him beat up Canadians? He would have garnered a
much bigger box-office take since Americans take great joy in watching
people of other nationalities beat the crap out of each other. Jackie
could have destroyed socialized health care while he was at it and
elicited enthusiastic cheers from millions of Americans, who, as a
general rule, resent any country where poor people actually have
access to health care."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Rumble in Vancouver^Wthe Bronx"

"Hey! A lot of theories don't work out! The lone gunman.. communism.. 
geometry.."
     --Joey Tribiani, "Friends"

".. fuck you, Mike, and the horse you rode in on."
     --Phyl Behrer (I just like to quote out of context)

"I don't like the looks of this doctor. I bet I've lost more patients
than he's treated."
     --Zoidberg, "Futurama"

"Please don't hit me! I'm brittle!"
     --Zoidberg, "Futurama"

"Hint to Ferrari engineers: I heard that this `knob' idea is going to
catch on."
     --Philip Greenspun

"I felt a hurricane blast of cold wind in my face. The joy of
open-window motoring? No. The result of leeting a Samoyed adjust the
ventilation controls with his paws."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Not using M$ products is a moral choice. Don't blame me if you don't
have the guts." 
     --petro, sdm

"The day that any real sysadmin, especially one who works with or
around Exchange servers, needs a *newsgroup* to tell them about a
massive virus outbreak is the day that sysadmin needs to go back to
Burger King."
     --Mike Sphar, sdm

"I'm glad you are committed to your philosophy of doing what Jesus
would do. I assume that includes writing insulting letters to
cartoonists on company time."
     --Dogbert

"Apparently Microsoft couldn't quite figure out how to make an
application written for Solaris 2.5 or 2.6 work on 2.7. And you'd
think they'd be able to, as masters of the ever-changing API. But I
guess they can't do that trick if it's not _their_ API."
     --Steve VanDevender, sdm, on IE 5 for Solaris

"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!"
"You can't *own* property, man!"
"I can! That's because I'm not a penniless hippie!"
     --Farnsworth & hippie, "Futurama"

"The point is, you shouldn't eat things that feel pain." *BONK!* "Ow!"
"Okay, we won't eat you!"
     --hippie & Bender, "Futurama"

"You're vegetarians! Who cares what you do?"
     --Leela, "Futurama"

"If I speak at one constant volume, at one constant pitch, at one
constant rhythm, right into your ear, you still won't hear; you still
won't hear."
     --Faith No More, "A Small Victory," perhaps describing Usenet

"A lot of people in this forum are saying they are willing to take `a
little' risk of data loss in exchange for speed. I promise you, you
will stop saying that after a data loss happens."
     --Tim Keating

"If you're simply backing up the files, and the database engine is in
the midst of updating a series of tables that reference each other,
you'll end up with inconsistent data. The filesystem backup program
has no knowledge of either implicit or explicit write locks on the
tables being changed. If you can't see how that will frequently lead
to inconsistent backups, I don't really care."
     --Don Baccus

"When I read the words `you will quickly find that transactions can be
easily reproduced via code,' I get a full-body shiver."
     --Jay R. Ashworth

"This comment is idiotic: `MySQL has carved out a very interesting
niche: raw speed and simple to setup/use/maintain database backend for
online applications.' I'll tell you what, if I was able to strip out
30% of the functionality of enterprise-level [relational database
management systems], they would be pretty damned fast too."
     --Matt Warden

"Which again proves that NT swervers are the most secure, since
they're down so much. Can't hack a down server."
     --Philip Newton, sdm

">he knows how to turn the PC on - still doesn't understand the
 >difference between netscape and IE.
That's ok; it often seems that the people at netscape have forgotten
too."
     --Alan J. Rosenthal, sdm

"I'm not an alcoholic. I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings."
     --Sarah Keating, MD (not out of context, sadly)

"Oh, great. Now we have to pee in the boat."
     --Ron Walls, MD, FACEP

"You can tell by the way I use my walk / I'm a Linux geek, no time to
talk / Ah ah ah ah coding in perl, coding in perl..."
     --Paul Tomblin, sdm, making fun of the Bee Gees

"Modifying the GNU C Library to work with other `make' programs
would be so hard that we recommend you port GNU `make' instead.
*Really.*"
     --glibc-2.1.2 INSTALL

"One alternative is to regard unwrapped lines, HTML, 20 line sigs,
and ms-tref as scoring; they help you evaluate the poster, as
well as her/his post."
     --David Lesher, NANOG

"Hey. We don't take no shit from a machine."
     --Information Society, "Mirrorshades"

"You can thank me later for that unhelpful bit of advice when it
ultimately proves useless."
     --Luke Carson

"I wish I had the kind of power that ER's music person or persons
have. Just plug a song into a scene on ER, and the Internet will be
swarming with people who *must* know it. `Baaa! Baaa! Must find song
title and buy CD! Baaa!'"
     --Philip D. Fitzgerald

"Position for an `Internet Test Engineer.'
`Try it now!'
*revrevrev* `Nope, still busted.'"
     --Wednesday, afw

"Nude scenes should be inspired by the libido, not the box
office. That's why I object to the phrase `gratuitous nudity.' In a
movie like this, the only nudity worth having is gratuitous. If it's
there for reasons thare clankingly commercial, you feel sorry for the
actresses, which is not the point."
     --Roger Ebert reviews "Road Trip"

"Together we figured out what had happened, which was useful, but not
the sort of conversation you should be having. When a movie doesn't
have a brain in its head, it's kind of unfair to require thought on
the part of the audience."
     --Roger Ebert reviews "Road Trip," take 2

"Films are supposed to be made because somebody wants to tell a story,
not because somebody wants to try out a new computer technique."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Dinosaur"

"One successful robbery, at knife point again but in Bali this time,
in which we both left happy, me with a rapidly beating heart but
otherwise OK and my new friend with exactly ten of my dollars. Hell, I
would have paid double that for my life."
     --Richard Johnstone, photo.net

"Please buy a gun for me so I can start shooting people."
"HEY. WAIT. You live in the gun-happy country, not me."
     --Phyl Behrer and me

"I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated
it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of
it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the
implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be
entertained by it."
     --Roger Ebert reviews "North"

"We are giving you the root password, a pat on the back, and a goodbye
kiss." 
     --ArsDigita

"And God looked down upon the masses and said, `Let there be Large
Format.'"
     --Daniel Taylor, photo.net

"I'm too damn sober."
     --Det. John Munch 

"This AI Olympics thing, it's all about getting to know each other,
no? Can you think of a better way to do that than rubbing up against
each other? That krazy `UniHoc' was fun. And now you can do it again,
to the beat of the world's most generic music! (Plus, you get to
participate in flooding a Boston club with 80 CS people.)"
     --MIT AI Olympics '99

"I'm not going to be a place that allows viruses to go unpunished. 
Anything virus-ridden gets cleaned, anything that can't gets deleted. 
Period. Fuck anyone who doesn't take heed. This is my network."
     --ben@lspace.org, sdm

"You may now return to bashing UNIX and its smug complacent users. We
in return will return to our smug complacency -- after all, we don't
have any machines to disinfect this weekend."
     --Jim Hill

"Love means never having to say, `Does that twenty include the
spanking?'"
     --?

"We pointed the error out to the cashier, who was probably barely old
enough to be legally employed, and her response, if she speaks for her
generation, was ominous, even terrifying: `It does that because
... because it's a computer.' An entire generation is growing up
believing that the current sorry state of affairs in information
technology could ever be accepted as _normal_!"
     --Zygo Blaxell, RISKS-20.89

"Physics is hard. MIT freshman physics is where I learned that I was
stupid."
     --Philip Greenspun

"The Internet is not an attention charity.  Go away."
     --Liam Stitt, offering to answer my e-mail

"You can't beat mass destruction as a way of entertaining everyone."
     --Rick Farmer

"And in today's lesson, we learn: 
 -that if you use override options to force CVS to accept your commit
  even though you haven't merged with the lastest changes, bad things
  will happen to you.
 -`bad things' include a large bellowing red-headed developer who is
  wondering where his entire last week's worth of work has gone."
     --Paul Tomblin, sdm

"If this is what one of your dreams is like, leave me out of them from
now on, ok?"
     --Briareos, "Altered Appleseed"

">May [DeScribe] rest in peace.
Along with its bonehead licensing scheme."
     --Adam Thornton & Matt McLeod, sdm

"Calgary is definitely Alberta's class act. Edmonton is so ugly that
people are apparently discouraged from taking photographs: despite
having roughly the same population, Edmonton does not have the high
quality photolabs that Calgary has."
     --Philip Greenspun, "Travels With Samantha"

"It was nice of you to let me reattach your arm."
     --Zoidberg, "Futurama"

"You are arguably the brightest, most talented freshman class in the
nation. But you did not come here without struggle. Many of you have
known bitter loneliness all your life; we affectionately label people
like you `losers.'"
     --Voo Doo welcomes the MIT class of 2001

"That language is C++.  <-- use this space for cheap shots"
     --Liam Stitt

"Hey, you pays your $50 through an auction site for a Paul McCartney
T-shirt and you takes your chances. But if you sign up for live,
streaming video of masturbating nymphets, then that's exactly what
you're going to get. It's called truth in advertising, pal."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 8 June 2000

"Alcohol is just another in a long line of things that have fallen
victim to `condomization,' the mistaken belief that by outlawing the
instruments, you can stop the music. Make it hard to get condoms, kids
won't screw. Ban drugs, kids won't get high. Criminalize teen alcohol
use, and make parents criminals for serving a beer to a minor, and
kids won't wrap themselves around telephone poles on graduation
day. Clearly, this line of thinking has yielded remarkable results so
far."
     --Kris Frieswick, Boston Phoenix, 8 June 2000

"Explosive alarm clock -- guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it."
     --Q, "License to Kill"

"My Macintosh was a friendly little toy computer that I used for years
for everything from writing a book about North America to Common Lisp
programming to PhotoShop. Despite the 1950s style operating system, I
was a reasonably happy camper until I connected my Mac to the Internet
and watched various network applications shoot each other in the
knees."
     --Philip Greenspun, "My Life as a Microsoft Achiever"

"I unboxed a genuine Intel-brand dual Pentium 166 server. NT 3.51 was
pre-installed so I couldn't mess anything up. It was the biggest
computer I'd seen in years. I felt like calling up some women to
impress them, but figured I'd better have Netscape installed first. So
I downloaded a couple of .EXE files from ftp20.netscape.com. They
wouldn't self-extract. I turned the machine off and went hunting for a
copy of PC Solaris."
     --Philip Greenspun, "My Life as a Microsoft Achiever"

"I think there are only three things that America will be known for
2,000 years from now: the Constitution, jazz music.. and baseball."
     --Gerald Early

"Who's left to buy tickets? Maybe those dwindling numbers who admire
movies for their daring and wit, and do not expect to be congratulated
and reinforced by the characters on the screen."
     --Roger Ebert reviews "Citizen Ruth"

"It is played everywhere -- in parks and playgrounds, and prison
yards, in back alleys and farmer's fields, by small children and old
men, by raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely
game that demands blinding speed, the only game in which the defence
has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond
expectency of spring time, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. 
It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the
ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and
timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope,
and coming home." 
     --Ken Burns, "Baseball"

"Speed hump my ass."
     --L.S.H. Carlson, hopelessly out of context

"Caution: It is almost impossible to swallow cyanoacrylates. The
adhesive solidifies and adheres in the mouth. The lips may be stuck
together."
     --GluStitch's MSDS (well, *that's* encouraging to know)

"Portable code is code that compiles on compilers that actually
exist."
     --Peter da Silva, sdm

"Lay people assume that medics must hate and fear working with AIDS
patients. Not really. All medics treat AIDS patients all the time, I
don't think too many are scared of contracting the disease from a
patient. You wear gloves. You watch what you do with the needles. And,
most important, you don't have sex with the patient."
     --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic" (what?! no sex!? --phloem)

"The EMS radio was squawking. The P.D. radio was blaring updates. I
cranked up the volume on the FM stereo as K-Rock began its psychedelic
six-pack, six songs from the sixties. I'm pretty good at listening to
everything at once."
     --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic"

"After we drove back to the hospital, I had to write out an incident
report. Roosevelt loves incident reports. I've written hundreds of
them. This one read: `While responding to a report of an unconscious
female, a red Plymouth wouldn't get out of my way. So I hit him.'
Signed Paul Shapiro."
     --"Paramedic"

"I don't want to sound like a bigot or deny the right of anyone to
celebrate his heritage or homeland, but where does it say you have to
be bombed out of your mind to do it?"
     --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic"

"All the stories I tell sound horrific, but quite frankly, they're not
much worse than assisting a childbirth, which is a very oogy
process. Babies are bloody and mushy. Nobody's happy: the mother's
screaming, the baby's screaming, the father looks like he's going to
keel over and seize." 
     --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic"

"We heard EMS dispatching a shooting call on West 75th Street to New
York Hospital medics Fifteen Victor. Normally that area would be
covered by Fourteen Young. I didn't know where the Rosy medics were,
but I was sure Lucy and I were closer to the call from Fifteen
Victor. I grabbed the EMS radio and advised Dispatch that we were
coming out of Roosevelt and would pick up the job. As Lucy was driving
there with lights flashing and siren blaring, EMS advised us that it
was possible that there were two people shot and that the gunman was
still on the scene, possibly on the roof, shooting at
pedestrians. Dispatch advised us to `use caution.' `No shit,' I said
to Lucy. `You think we can give this one back to Victor?' she asked."
     --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic"

"If I'm horny, I go to work. If I want affection, I've got my cats."
     --Stacy Valentine, quoted by James Berardinelli

"CS is about lofty design goals and algorithmic optimization.
Sysadmining is about cleaning up the fscking mess that results."
     --Graham Dunn, sdm

"I'll hear a call delivered to Fire first because of the way 911 takes
the call, and for them, it's a delta call. Let's say, chest pain. Then
EMS gets delivered a call and the address is off by a couple of
digits, in an important way. (38 Something Street is actually 30 A
Something Street.) Their calltaker gets the information, follows the
EMD cards, as he's supposed to, and determines it's only a Charlie
call. By this time, the pump's been on the air for 5 minutes, and the
medic too. The pump gets cancelled, because they only go on Delta
calls and MVAs, and the medic is told to continue Charlie to 30 A
Something. The pump *turns around in the driveway of 38* and heads
home, and the medics have to call back 2 minutes later for an address
change. Finally, they get the right address, and get there, and find
that there's not much chest pain left, inasmuch as it's progressed
into a full-blown MI and code. So they both get to work on the pt. and
one of them stops long enough to get dispatch to re-send the pump
(which has just booked off at the hall by now) delta for a
driver. They get there and for some reason the medics need not only a
driver but 2 more firefighters as helpers. In any case, they end up
leaving the captain there with the pump as the ambulance drives
off. The captain calmly gets on the radio and tells Fire Dispatch he
needs someone to come over and drive his pump home because he started
on the department before they gave everyone an airbrake couse, and he
can't drive it."
     --Jason Low

"The Internet is fulfilled mit Hai-Teg elektronische equippment. Fallen
leichte pakete aus shtreckers and laden der Ruckgrat mit
Frihsticksfleisch und mich-auch uber. Auch schweres kreuzanhangen und
flammen sein forbidden. The mauseclicking kuhle Brandunger must
leaving hir hande in dem taschen; elsewise you will be clipped off. 

Also: Please sitzen still and only watchen astaunished the
fluchtigblinken."
     --attributed to Wolfgang Schelongowski

"Okay, I only wanted to open an account so I could cancel the bastards
right on their own server, but that's besides the point."
     --Rick Buchanan, nan-au

"Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum
immane mittam."
     --Bill Bradford (I leave translation up to the reader)

"> Does anyone have any good, factual information on tradeoffs between a
 > NT and UNIX environment when setting up an E-Mail service?
An NT server can be run by an idiot, and usually is."
     --Tom Holub

"Hello. This is a response to your newsgroup message posted in
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings, on 1/30/98, advertising your goods
and services. You are not on a list, nor will you be contacted
again."
     --bozotic spammer, as reported by Podkayne Fries, nan-au

"We are not liars, we are telling the 100% truth (with some
exceptions)."
     --attributed to Sean Jorden, alt.politics.white-power (seen in a
     .sig) 

"Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"
"Because we use vi, son. They use emacs."
     --Iain Scott

"Bill Gates isn't the Devil - Satan made sure Hell worked before he
opened it to the damned..."
     --attributed to Michael Fleming

"tr is faster -- not least because you don't have to wait for Perl to
put on its makeup and walk the dog before running your script."
     --Brandon Allbery, sdm

"Civilization won't *die* from Y2K. It'll be more like Civilization
goes out drinking and the next morning discovers the importance of
drinking gin out of smaller containers."
     --Chris Adams's .sig (sdm)

"Unemployed Californian Larry Ellison: After being divorced by his
first wife because she said that he would never amount to anything or
make any money, started Oracle Corporation, world's leading supplier
of relational database management software (Note to academic computer
scientists: don't worry if you aren't sure what an RDBMS is; it isn't
necessary for running Microsoft Word)."
     --Philip Greenspun, "Aid to Evaluating Your Accomplishments"

"If a site has pages that cause your browser to restart, don't go
there again."
     --Microsoft, trying to be helpful on the subject of browser
     stability

"I defy anyone to find a mountain whereupon the dew is this particular 
colour, and then return to tell me about it.  And no fair wearing
rad-suits for the journey."  
     --Carl Jacobs, sdm, on Mountain Dew and false advertising

"I don't think it's possible to be more ham-handed in fiction than
Kenneth Starr has been in reality. The place I'd like to see some
nuance is in the real-life Office of the Independent Counsel. Starr's
been a cartoon-quality nemesis for the past two years, playing Wile
E. Coyote to the president's Road Runner. I think Clinton should
respond to all future allegations with a two-word statement: `Beep!
Beep!'" 
     --Walt MacPhearson, alt.tv.homicide

"There's nothing unnecessary about ridiculing someone's poor-me sob
story about how the liberal media is forcing unwanted opinions down
his throat. If you think I've held back from expressing disagreement
with something stupid that's posted in alt.tv.homicide, you should go
back and reread some of my replies to you."
     --Walt MacPhearson (again)

"I know why you're here, Neo. I know why you try to pick up IRC
chicks. Why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after
night you sit at your computer listening to mp3s."
"Because I'm a big dork?"
     --Trinity and Neo, detonate.net/matrixse/

"What did I do to deserve this? It's not like I integrated my browser
into a mainstram OS and used strong-arm tactics to stifle
competition!"
     --Neo, detonate.net/matrixse/

"You'll notice that I wear my sunglasses indoors. In a normal world,
this would make me look foolish, but since this *is*, after all, a
science fiction thriller, they serve to make me appear menacing. Can
you dig it?"
     --Agent Smith, detonate.net/matrixse/

"I.. *hate*.. this Internet, this world-wide-web, whatever you want to
call it.. It's the porn pop-ups! I feel.. saturated by them. And every
time I surf the web I fear that I have somehow become an S&M fanatic."
     --Agent Smith, detonate.net/matrix/

"Where do you want to go today, Mister Anderson?"
"@#%$ you! I run Debian!"
     --Agent Smith & Neo, detonate.net/matrix/

"Why, sir! I'm an MCSE! I can design, deploy, and maintain
enterprise-class NT solutions!"
"I've got no use for an arrogant NT admin. What I need is someone who
can speak the convoluted language of Slashdot geeks."
"My secondary function is to be an eggdrop! I can glean a fair
understanding of UNIX from #linuxhelp in no time!"
     --C3PO and Owen, detonate.net/sw4/

"4. If you are not wearing large headphones on the bus, people WILL
try to talk to you. This does not sound inherently bad except: Anyone
that wants to talk to YOU on the BUS is a raving lunatic."
     --cr0bar's "Why the Bus Sucks"

"Even more than Michael J. Fox, Rush is the anti-Elvis. Any band that
writes an instrumental with a drum solo should be condemned to play
State Fairs in Idaho for the rest of their lives."
     --Echo Love, Voo Doo Magazine

"The favourite interview question of one fellow I know is: `You're
locked in a room with Adolf Hitler, Bill Gates, and Eric Allman.  You
have a gun with one bullet.  What do you do?'" 
     --Anthony DeBoer 
     (coincidentally, sendmail 8.11.0 was released days after I added
     this to the archive..)

"Get outta here. Really? That would be my fondest fantasy made real.
Besides the one about having my way with Joan Chen in a sandbox
filled with cocaine, I mean."
     --Olin Shivers, on people distributing scsh apps

"The plot line is the usual hacker-meets-girl,-girl-turns-out-to-be-hacker,
-girl-gets-hacker fantasy that never happens in real life because real
hackers would get distracted by an interesting challenge somewhere
between events one and two."
     --Rob Slade

"About 51 percent of those responding to the Freedom Forum's most
recent survey think `the press in America has too much freedom,' a
decline from 53 percent last year. Hey, you still hate us, but maybe
not quite as much."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 13 July 2000

"It is possible.. to write about commonplace things and objects using
commonplace but precise language, and to endow these things -- a
chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring -- with
immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of
seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the
reader's spine.."
     --Raymond Carver

"My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist,
and sometimes that gives him the right."
     --Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

"Hey, this is just like Usenet: some loser is arguing with me."
     --Philip Greenspun

"If you want to get a Web site built on time, the best strategy is to
take 4 MIT students and say, `Let's talk about your plans to graduate
on May 10th.'"
     --Philip Greenspun

"[Under this model], Levi Strauss will never tell you, `you are now a
fat slob.'"
     --Philip Greenspun, explaining the design philosophy of ikhakis.com

"`We've telnetted to your couch, Mr. Greenspun, and our load bearing
sensors have indicated that you now weigh 300 pounds. We think you
would benefit from our "Lard-Ass" option..'"
     --Philip Greenspun reveals a bright future for Laz-E-Boy

".. and they all lived happily ever after, until they died."
     --Kimberly Hlina

"As a result of Congressional shortsight, lack of amusement is not
actionable under current copyright statutes."
     --Philip Greenspun

"To me one of the most exciting things in the world is being
poor. Survival is such an exciting challenge. There was a study done
about twenty years ago, I think at Harvard, which said the average
family of four could live on $68 a year. That's a balanced diet --
everything they need for a year. Now today that might be $250 or $300,
but when we see these people in line at supermarkets with all these
food stamps, buying potato chips and snack foods and ice cream, I
mean, give me a break! *THAT'S* poverty?"
     --Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, quoted in "The Rich
     Are Different" (I love these kinds of quotes)

"Everything that gives us pleasure also gives us pain to measure it
by."
     --The Residents, "Pain and Pleasure"

"All our lives we love illusion, neatly caught between confusion and
the need to know we are alive."
     --The Residents, "Pain and Pleasure"

"The morale will continue until the beatings improve."
     --Benno, as quoted by Skud, sdm

"And rather than place the blame on the drive manufacturers for making
shoddy equipment, he's been ranting like Robert McElwaine on crack
about how the Linux IDE driver needs to be rewritten to prevent drives
from being told to self-destruct, not that it would actually protect
the drive given that root can still have its way with any hardware
attached to your system. It's almost enough to make me swear off
Linux, except the BSD zealots emit just as much stupidity.  Indeed,
they all suck, in all sorts of ways."
     --Steve VanDevender, sdm

">UNIX is Yugoslavia.
And BSD is Bosnia."
     --Steve VanDevender, sdm

"If your kids like Pokemon, there's probably something really wrong
with them. Maybe you were too busy firing off e-mail to film critics
while Junior was guzzling the Drano under the kitchen sink."
     --Sick Boy reviews "Pokemon 2000"

"I find the whole thing offensive.  I don't *want* some special
day once a year when people are nice to me for no good reason.
They aren't nice to me on my birthday, why should they be nice
to me for something even more arbitrary?"
     --Matt McLeod, sdm, on sysadmin appreciation day

"Although the [Alaska] Highway is mostly paved now, the local economy
is based on delivery of three services: windshield repair, tire
repair, and (most worrisome) welding. I expected to need the first,
didn't think I'd need the second, and prayed I wouldn't need the
third."
     --Philip Greenspun

"We are reasonably satistfied with the events we have seen. Overall, I
would rate it a C+ -- OK, not great. As a result, we will not destroy
your planet."
     --Omicronian Overlord, "Futurama"

"HP good. Yamaha bad. Other brands YMMV."
     --Soleil Lapierre, on how to pick a CD-R

"Stop chasing Ganesh! You're just going to get more wrath!"
     --Ganesh^WHomer Simpson, 5F04

"During my PhD thesis defense, a professor complained `this isn't
science.' My response? I know I'm not good at science because I
haven't been offered a job in the new Biology building. I know I'm not
good at hype because I haven't been offered a job in the Media
Lab. Since I don't want to believe I'm not good at anything, I'm
trying to be a good engineer."
     --Philip Greenspun, "Why Teach Software Engineering?"

"It's funny because it's poisonous!"
     --Zoidberg, "Futurama"

"Finally, I have a good claw! See? Three human females, a number, and
a king giving himself brain surgery!"
     --Zoidberg, "Futurama," on the ideal poker hand

"All humans are vermin in the eyes of Morbo!"
     --Morbo, "Futurama"

"So.. humans have easily injured knees. My race will find this
information very useful indeed. Mwahwahahahaha!"
     --Morbo, "Futurama"

"Drugs are bad because if you do drugs you're a hippie, and hippies
suck."
     --Eric Cartman

"All right. Right now, I'm going to be totally serious with you, okay?
If you call me piggy one more time, I'm going to leap out of this
chair, and rip your goddamn nuts off with my bare hands!"
     --Eric Cartman

"A woman just stuck her tongue down my throat. I'm not even listening
to you!"
     --Chandler Bing

"Learn what you know. Share what you don't."
     --the *real* DejaNews motto, according to many people

"Pull out right now."
     --Liam Stitt, hopelessly out of context

"Camera make good slide. Slide make good print. Slide print make good
dent in wallet."
     --Okello Dunkley, photo.net

[a meteor is about to crash into the planet]
"Execution?! What are you going to get by executing us?"
"You are going to be executed for causing this situation. People are
ignorant. They'll feel better if someone is punished."
"I take back what little praise I had for this damn jackass!"
     --Barret & President Rufus, "Final Fantasy VII"

"You know, when the Devil's spawn are susceptible to steak knife
attacks, evil has a problem."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Bless the Child"

"Using the Internet to Pick up Babes and/or Hunks -- because sometimes
getting fucked by Unix isn't all that satisfying."
     --Philip Greenspun offers dating advice for nerds

"We live in a time when Hollywood shyly ejects weekly remakes of
dependable plots, terrified to include anything that might confuse the
dullest audience member. The new studio guidelines prefer PG-13 cuts
from directors, so now we get movies like `Coyote Ugly' that start out
with no brains and now don't have any sex, either."
     --Roger Ebert

"Satan vs. God. Evil against good. The spiritual war is at the heart
of Christian mythos, but leave it to Hollywood to present it with all
of the taste and intelligence of a WWF grudge match." 
     --James Berardinelli reviews "Bless the Child"

"I'd long for the days when the net was used by people at universities
and so who could be presumed to have a few more braincells, but then I
remembered what universities are like and scrubbed that idea."
     --Zebee Johnstone, sdm

"The end of the e-commerce boom was foreshadowed by Priceline.com's
announcement last spring that customers would be able to put in bids
on, say, boxes of Froot Loops, or lettuce. Wow! A head of iceberg for
49 cents! We're having salad tonight, baby."
     --Dan Kennedy

"It is very important that you understand that these binaries are not
complete programs. They might crash on startup. They might delete all
your files and cause your computer to burst into flames."
     --mozilla.org/binaries.html

"The only difference between those with tatoos and those without
tatoos is that those with tatoos are much, much cooler and can kick
your ass."
     --seen in Devin Ganger's .signature

"You might keep an eye out for the real Erin Brockovich, who plays a
waitress in a short scene at the beginning of the film. She serves the
fake Erin and her two fake kids some breakfast with a look of abject
horror that's not exactly apropos for a waitress. I believe it's
called the `if I knew Julia Roberts was going to be playing me in the
movie version of my life, I would have just drunk the water too'
look."
     --Mr. Cranky reviews "Erin Brockovich"

"Q. Do you feel bad for seeing eye dogs?
 A. I don't feel bad. They are like any other dog. They probably feel
 useful. They have a job."
     --Bill Maher

"[Socialism] sounds like fun, and so does Santa Claus. But he lives at
the North Pole, which is melting."
     --Bill Maher

"You want more than 50% taxes!? I'm going to kill you! That's
insanity! 50% is way too much as it is! Where's Steve Forbes when you
need him?!"
     --Joe Rogan, to a socialist

"Mother Nature is one of the most politically incorrect people I have
ever met in my life."
     --Bill Maher

"A naive person would probably ask, `if I let an arbitrary program
from the network run on my computer, what stops that program from
getting into my personal files, snooping around my local network,
etc.?' Sun Microsystems assures you that its Java engineering staff
has thought of every contingency and that Java is completely
safe. This is the same company that was unable to make their operating
system's mailer secure. Thus Robert Morris, a graduate student at
Cornell, was able to write a simple program that took over every Sun
Unix workstation on the Internet (plus most of the other Unix boxes,
except for Digital's). If you trust a Unix vendor to assure you
security, please send me e-mail. I have some waterfront property in
Florida that I would like to sell you."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Usenet does not change the fundamental nature of interpersonal
interaction. It lets people reach more people, different people, and
communicate in slightly different ways, but at the end of the day
insulting or attacking something is just as often wrong on Usenet as
it is in real life, which is most of the time."
     --Russ Allbery

"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because
that would also stop you from doing clever things."
     --Doug Gwyn

"As long as you're suffering, wouldn't you rather do it with the
occasional good hard boning from a big strong man? Sure you would. And
afterwards, we'll never ask you, `Hey, what are you thinking?' And not
out of respect for your privacy -- we just don't care."
     --Bill Maher taunts Anne Heche, PI 08/25/00

"Men are entirely visual today; it's only looks that count. That's why
men only want thin women, because to the eyes, thin is in. To the
hands, meat is neat."
"Were you a rapper in a former life?"
     --Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Danny Bonaduce, PI 08/25/00

"You wrote a book about sex and you don't know what comes after the
liquor?!"
     --Danny Bonaduce, PI 08/25/00

"Many of the politicians who say that marijuana is a `gateway' drug
(leading to cocaine and crack use) apparently smoked marijuana
themselves when they were younger. By their logic, this makes them
crack-heads and we should pay no attention to what they say."
     --Harry Browne, on the War on Drugs

"Some men have muscle cars. I have a stapler, because sometimes there
are attractive women in my classes who have to staple something
they're about to hand in, and it's nice to be able to say, `Here, use
*my* stapler!' `Ohh, what a big stapler you have!'"
     --Matthew Skala

"If you started logging all of Usenet from the very start, how many
years would it be before you filled 1.6G? How many hours would it take
to fill it if you started right now?"
     --Matthew Skala
(Answer: The feed size today is 220GB/day. That works out to
9GB/hour. So, to fill a 1.6GB storage device, I figure it would take
about ten minutes.)

"I was watching a television program before, with a kind of roving
moderator who spoke to a seated panel of young women who were having
some sort of problem with their boyfriends -- apparently, because the
boyfriends had all slept with the girlfriends' mothers. And they
brought the boyfriends out, and they fought, right there on
television. Toby, tell me: these people don't vote, do they?"
     --President Bartlet, "The West Wing"

"It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States
and Alberts v. California in a variety of ways. In saying this, I
imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with
the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached
the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative
implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that
under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area
are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not
today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to
be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could
never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it,
and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
     --Mr. Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964)

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be
gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for
the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science
and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will
become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United
States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether
this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of
war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the
hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the
hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored
and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the
mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of
ours.

"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space
as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the
best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may
never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our
goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35
years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this
decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because
they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure
the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one
that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and
one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
     --John F. Kennedy, at Rice University, 12 September, 1962

"I'm a moral carnivore; I only eat things that have a chance of
fighting back."
     --T.M. Pederson, sdm

"Of course, the stock market, even the new economy NASDAQ, is nothing
more than old-fashioned gambling. And the NASDAQ, properly understood,
is nothing more than bingo for yuppies. The difference is that for
this generation, bingo is a game in which everyone is entitled to win
all the time."
     --Rex Murphy, 17/04/2000

"The MPAA counts the beans but never tastes the soup. Make a worthless
movie but limit the nudity and language, and get a PG-13. Make a
movie where the characters live with real problems and try to figure
out what to do, and God forbid our children should be exposed to such
an experience."
     --Roger Ebert, reviewing "Crime and Punishment in Suburbia"

"He was elected governor of Texas, and before that he ran a baseball
team and lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business. But
what has happened in the intervening five years to make people believe
he'd be a good president? What is his accomplishment? That he's no
longer an obnoxious drunk?"
     --Ronald Reagan Jr., on George W. Bush

"Men fear solitude as they fear silence, because both give them a
glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness."
     --?

"You can get custard pie throwing permits?"
     --David Formosa, news.admin.net-abuse.policy

"Did you ever wonder if Chicken Little had an agenda? I mean, was
Chicken Little running around telling all the other chickens that the
sky was falling out of pure, disinterested altruism? Or was there
something Chicken Little wanted? And once Chicken Little had all the
other chickens convinced that the sky was falling was there, all of a
sudden, a Federal Department of Falling Sky? And did Chicken Little
get appointed Secretary of Things That Hit You on the Head?"
     --P.J. O'Rourke

"This guy's got about seven broken bones in his hand, if you want to
give him an aspirin or something.."
     --President Bartlett, "The West Wing"

"Mr. President, I have to ask you a few questions.. do you have any
medical conditions?"
"Well, I've been shot.."
     --"The West Wing"

"I keep asking people if money has changed me, but they assure me
that, no, I'm still the same obnoxious asshole I always was. So at
least there's that."
     --jwz.org/gruntle/corleone.html

"What the government is doing [with health care] is breaking your
legs, then handing you a crutch and saying, `See, we saved you.'"
     --Carla Howell, Massachusetts Libertarian Senatorial candidate

"Permission does not mean, `I once conned the user into giving out
his/her e-mail address, so now I can do as I please.'"
     --Jakob Nielsen

"The Internet is out of money. Pack your stuff and go home."
     --fuckedcompany.com

"The most common activity for visitors to a [Web] site is fleeing."
     --Edward Tufte, apparently studying my browsing habits

"Please look at the forest and don't try to force all of the trees to
grow the same way."
     --Russ Allbery

"A mouse is a device used to focus xterms."
     --Pim van Riezen, on nanog

"George W. Bush *is* the Yankees -- old money in pin-stripes with a
history of a drug problem."
     --Bill Maher

"Good movies are works of art, not links of sausage."
     --Roger Ebert

"An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he'd have someone to
look up to."
     --Gene Fowler

"Everyone needs an editor."
     --Tim Foote, commenting on the fact that Hitler's original title
     for "Mein Kampf" was "Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle against
     lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice"

"I really look forward to the extreme, crushing disappointment you're
going to have when things *don't* go your way.  The only thing that
will mar that enjoyment is that it most likely, based on your past
record, won't be enough to sour you on Usenet entirely and make you
just go the hell away."
     --Devin Ganger, news.groups

"Modern databases use buffering in RAM to speed up access to often
requested data. You don't have to do anything special to make this
happen, except tune your database well (which could take the rest of
your life)."
     --Perrin Harkins

"I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery, as
sanctioned by Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophmore, speaks fluent
Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a
good price for her be?"
     --President Jed Bartlet, "The West Wing"

"For the authentic Kyoto experience, you probably ought to stay in a
ryokan. These are traditional Japanese-style inns. Meals are included
in the price but probably best not to ask about why there is no
10Base-T jack in the tatami mats."
     --Philip Greenspun

"Part of the fun of being alive is knowing that you're annoying the
hell out of someone else."
     --Matt Groening

"If you don't like ACS, debug it, enhance it, port it -- don't
whine. It's Tcl, SQL, and GET and POSTs, not assembly coding for a
NASA rocket."
     --Li-fan Chen

/* American Presidential Election 2000 */ 

"People might be divided on who they want to be president, but they're
probably united in their belief that there ought to be *a* president."
     --Tucker Carlson, CNN 08/11/2000 

"Bob Bruce of the King County elections office said he was glad that
the presidential race in Florida was attracting national attention
away from Washington's Senate cliffhanger. Otherwise, Bruce figured,
the national media would be camped in his office. `Now everyone's down
in Tallahassee and bugging them instead of me, and I'm delighted,'
Bruce said."
     --Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 09/11/00

"Let me explain something. Your younger brother is not the ultimate
authority on this."
     --Al Gore, to George W. Bush, 08/11/00 (according to AP)

"I did *NOT* vote for Buchanan."
     --anonymous protestor's sign on CNN, 09/11/00

"By covering the Gore-Bush race as if it were the inevitable result of
forces beyond anyone's control -- rather than a contrivance foisted on
the public by the two major-party establishments -- they failed in
some pretty crucial and fundamental ways."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 08/11/00

"Republicans who hate Clinton are going to vote for a guy who is a
good ol' boy, a draft dodger, likes to party, and when the going gets
tough, isn't afraid to lie."
     --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 06/11/00

"Witness a horrifying AP photo, posted on Salon, of [Gore] trying to
re-enact The Kiss outside a Tennessee voting booth. Tipper seems
natural enough; but Gore, open-mouthed and slack-jawed, looks like he
can't decide whether to slobber all over her or bite her."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 08/11/00

"Maybe, despite all his faults and his Clintonian baggage and his
pandering, Gore will still wind up as president. The fact remains,
however, that it never should have been this hard. Running on a record
of peace and prosperity, against an opponent who thinks
`misunderestimated' is a word, Gore now finds his political future
hanging by a thin thread."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 09/11/00

"This margin is so thin, it should be on the cover of `Cosmo' and
making itself throw up."
     --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 10/11/00

"Warning! The US Presidential election is a satirical examination of
democracy. Some viewers, and a drunk governor of Texas, may not share
this sense of humor."
     --This Hour Has 22 Minutes, 13/11/00

"Yes, the same bad ballot caused problems four years ago. Therefore,
it should have been fixed at the time. Since it was not, redress is
now due, when the bad ballot may actually subvert the outcome of a
presidential election. The Bush-Baker position is like saying,
`Firstone tires killed people four years ago and there was no outcry
then, so why are you complaining this year?'"
     --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 13/11/00

"Those who call for a Gore concession say it would be `for the good of
the nation.' What will be good for the nation is if the legal winner
of the presidential election is sworn in as president."
     --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 13/11/00

"We should put George Bush and Al Gore in a room with Elian Gonzalez,
and whoever that little boy runs to -- that should be our next
president."
     --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 13/11/00

"I do know that election results are announced on the basis of exit
polls all the time, and those calls are almost always right -- even
when the numbers are incomplete and the final tally is close. Yes, all
the finger-wagging lessions of Election Night remain true. The
networks shouldn't make a call unless they're absolutely
sure. Exit-poll results shouldn't be announced when they could affect
the outcome of the race. Blah blah blah. Still, when all this is over
and the post-mortems get under way, the media ought to consider the
possibility that maybe -- just maybe -- they weren't as wrong in
Florida as everybody thought."
     --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 13/11/00

"These lawyers that do come in from out of state and from within are
not there to determine the accuracy of the vote. They're there to make
sure their candidate wins."
     --Gary McIntosh, Washington state elections supervisor, quoted in
     the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 13/11/00

"Bush ran his campaign under the slogan `he trusts the government; I
trust the people.' Except, apparently, when it comes to voting."
     --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 13/11/00

"Bush's attempt to stop the recount is an act of desperation by a man
who is so removed from the electorate thate he can't be bothered even
to *appear* to care about the will of the people."
     --Boston Phoenix editorial, 16/11/00

"Former secretary of state James Baker spends the night in Florida. So
does former secretary of state Warren Christopher. If a diplomatic
crisis should break out between, say, Fort Meyers and For Lauderdale,
we've never been in better shape to resolve it."
     --Steven Cooper, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00

"`But Daddy, you promised! Make Jeb fix it or I am going to throw a
tantrum! Waaaaah! My point: Bush would do the same thing if the shoe
was on the other foot.. It is unfair to accuse Gore of whining when he
is within his legal rights to fight this."
     --viewer e-mail, quoted by Steven Cooper, Boston Phoenix,
     16/11/00

"Al Gore is to John F. Kennedy as `Meet the Parents' is to `Bringing
up Baby.' And George W. Bush is to Richard Nixon as the 1998 remake is
to the original `Godzilla.'"
     --Robert David Sullivan, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00

"The broadcast media haven't been much help in sorting things out,
probably out of fear that they'll alienate viewers on either side of
the debate. Last weekend, the cable news networks were careful to give
equal weight to the Bush campaign's claim that machine counts of
punch-hole ballots are more accurate than hand counts, despite the
near-universal opinion among election experts that the reverse is
true. The way things are going, I expect to see a CNN documentary on
the space program in which equal time is given to experts who say the
moon landing was a hoax. (I almost feel sorry for former secretary of
state Jim Baker, who made the case against hand-counting last
weekend. After a lifetime of public service, during which he
presumably worked to introduce democratic values to less civilized
nations, he can't be delighted that the first paragraph of his
obituary is going to describe him as a Bush family retainer who asked
the federal government to snatch ballots away from local officials
trying to get an accurate vote count in a presidential election.)"
     --Robert David Sullivan, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00

"In short: All forms of government sucks. Side note: Lack of
government sucks, too, because of all the lusers out there. You'd
almost think government was some kind of software."
     --Arvid Grotting, sdm, 16/11/00

"You are going down to the Governor's Ranch with Colin Powell.. what's
on the agenda?"
"Lunch."
     --Bernard Shaw and Dick Cheney, CNN Inside Politics, 29/11/00

"I didn't vote for Gore, all right? But I swear to God, I've wound up
feeling sorry for Gore because of the way Bush is going around like
Veruca Salt in `Willy Wonka' saying, `I want to be president, and I
want it now.'"
     --John Fugelsang, Politically Incorrect, 11/12/00

"It will be to George W. Bush's advantage if he's President that the
expectations are so low, because he can only pleasantly surprise --"
".. I'm proud to be an American today.."
     --Dennis Prager & John Fugelsang, Politically Incorrect, 11/12/00


"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. HTML IS
LAYOUT."
     --Tor Iver Wilhemsen

"The Internet is overflowing like a septic tank full of rotting
condoms, and every day more and more people standing there with their
finger in the dike are realising that the thing on the other side isn't
the sea."
     --Peter da Silva, sdm

"It's like someone took a bag of weasels and shook it up and let 'em
loose in the room."
     --Dominic DaVinci, "DaVinci's Inquest"

"If you don't mind, I'd rather not get drunk and kill things...
staying sober would let me appreciate it more."
     --Skud, sdm

"Baldrick, you couldn't spot a subtle plan if it were to paint
itself purple and dance naked atop a harpsichord singing `Subtle Plans
Are Here Again.'"
     --Blackadder

"Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise
would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in the
field of psychology or marketing, not an article on information
technology."
     --John Kirch     

"They have a scheme to kill and clone Hank, Adam's friend, but by
mistake they clone Adam instead, leaving the movie populated by two
Arnold Schwarzeneggers who both think they're the real thing. Since
that is how most Schwarzenegger movies feel, this is not as confusing
as it sounds."
     --Roger Ebert, reviewing "The Sixth Day"

"In `Walden,' Thoreau said, `I have yet to hear the first syllable of
valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.' Were we to maintain
this attitude in the decidedly non-utopian world of cardiac surgery,
we might find outselves, unlike Thoreau, not only lost in the woods,
but sinking in the pond."
     --Daniel J. Waters, DO

"Poopykins, it's time to stop preaching damnation to everyone,
sweetie."
     --Mrs. Cartman, "South Park" 411

"Many of you knew Kenny McCormack; he was a playful school-going
8 year-old boy. And yesterday, he was SMACKED DOWN by the Lord -- God
bitchslapped him right to the firey depths of hell!"
     --Cartman the lay preacher, "South Park" 411

"Right here we have a little girl who is very, very ugly! Do you
believe He is going cure your face of the uglies?! He's going to take
that ugly face and make you reasonable to look at again!"
     --Cartman the faith healer, "South Park" 411

"And now I am receiving a message directly from God. God is telling me
that each and every one of you is to walk up to this stage and give me
one dollar! I want everyone to feel the love of God by coming up here
and putting a dollar in the box!"
     --Cartman the televangelist, "South Park" 411

"It breaks your heart. It is *designed* to break your heart. It begins
in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in
the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as
the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall
alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to
keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when
the days are all twilight, when you need it the most, it stops."
     --A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind" 

"That is why it breaks my heart, that game -- not because in New York
they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice,
and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the
circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It
breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to
foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some
pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality
that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered
again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and
betray pricesely what it promised. Of course, there are those who
learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are
others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These
are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion,
or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or
up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns
and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as
well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that,
in a green field, in the sun."
     --A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind"

"Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the
German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the
bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose
Shame, and then have War thrown in a little latter, on even more
adverse terms than at present."
     --Winston Churchill, in a letter to Lord Moyne, 1938

"Somebody said that all reporting is investigative. I disagree. In
television, next to no reporting is investigative. Especially the
stuff billed as investigative. Generally speaking, investigative
reporting on local news is general assignment reporting with a few
extra buzzwords and ominous pauses in the delivery. For example, `Our
investigation revealed that these convenience store snacks are made
mostly (ominous inestigative pause)... of *sugar*.' `We took our
hidden camera into this daycare center, and discovered that every
afternoon, the staff makes the children take naps (OIP)... on *floor
mats*.'" 
     --Michael Carpenter

"When a female coworker looks at you, narrows her eyes, and says, `Eat
shit,' it doesn't mean `I am trying to conceal the deep, relentless
longing I have for you, but which I am afraid to acknowledge -- even
to myself.' It just means, `Eat shit.' My therapist says I'm unusually
perceptive, but it took me 18 years to figure *that* out."
     --Michael Carpenter

"One of my favorite [promos] is one in which the anchor jumps into the
copter, looks at the pilot and dramatically *points at the sky*. Like,
where the hell *else* are they going to go?"
     --Michael Carpenter

"Being a news anchor is a lot like being one of the Backstreet Boys,
anyway. You look great, get a lot of money for displaying a modicum of
talent, and everyone else looks at you and wonders why it's happening."
     --Michael Carpenter

"To some degree, I actually sympathize with Tigger. How he stands
living with these mentall