Do you play chess? Volyibol? Tenyisneya? Or should we sit in the cafeteriya and enjoy big glasses of hot tea with all the sugar and talk and talk and talk. --Garrison Keillor, "Glastnost" % "You wear different perfume" --L., quoting K on why he can't compare L. and R. % "It's killing me!" you say this too often, yet it's true-- everything you say, everything you do is leading slowly, inexorably to your end. And every breath is one closer to your last... % "Bad artists borrow, good artists steal" --Picasso % The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster Lose something every day. Accept the flurry of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look: my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (*Write* it!) like disaster. --E.Bishop, "One Art" % "Why won't you love me?" he asked. She reached out and wrapped him in her arms. How could she tell him that in his eyes she could see him preparing to consume her out of love? He would begin with the eyes, then move on to her hands, her mouth, taking special care for the delicate lips. The feast would continue with her breasts, and sex, then finish with her vitals, and her heart. "Oh baby," she murmured, "baby baby baby." They rocked together in the dim afternoon light. % Ophelia! You're breakin' my heart Oh Ophelia! You're makin' this dane It's makin' me sick Melancholy-- like poor old Yorrick who I knew, who I knew Makin' love in the afternoon and Ophelia it's my uncle has come undone in my mom's bedroom handing out flowers to most everyone Ophelia! It's changin' my tune Ophelia All the slings + arrows I'm worried a lot of outrageous fortune about whether to be... ...or be not --with apologies to the Bard and paul Simon % "I'm glad you brought your raincoat-- I think it's beginning to rain" --Madonna, 1992 % Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw, "I just wanted to be sure of you" % Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey. I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody. --J. Tate, "Good Time Jesus" % "I didn't have any life this weekeend except have sex." -A.T., Oct 29 1995 % "I just want a lover who'll make me chicken soup when I'm sick" -L, Nov 1 1995 % "My mind is in the dirt making mudpies" --Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite % You would never spend the night, always leaving a short time after. I thought you were afraid I could steal your breath away as you slept, stealing the precious Oxygen you needed, blanketing you in dead CO2 even as I helod you in my arms. I always hoped there was oxygen enough for all. % "I will bring you love," said the young lover, "A glad light to dance in your dark eye. Pendants I will bring of the whitebone, And gay parrot feathers to deck your hair." But she only shook her head. "I will put a child in your arms," he said, "Will be a great headman, great rain-maker I will make remembered songs about you That all the tribes in all the wandering Will sing forever. But she was not impressed. "I will bring you the still moonlight on the lagoon, And steal for you the singing of all the birds-- I will bring down the stars of heaven to you, And put the bright rainbow in your hand." "No," she said, "bring me tree-grubs." --OODGEROO of the tribe Noonuccal % "Do you know much about love, Chuck?" "Probably not." --Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown % Favorite 70's cocktail: "Slow Comfortable Screw" % "Do you like oral sex?" overheard Times Square, Dec 31 1995 % "I want you to love me" % "Stars and People are made of the same stuff" --Bill Nye the Science Guy % Your tender glance Luring and clever What a pleasant dance Resounding with laughter Or Marivo's pen so impulsive Your nose Pierrot The curve of your lips so entrancing They spin my mind, like the Marriage of Figaro! --Kuzmin % i've never been one to write mushy love sonnets but- right now i'm holding on to my heart with both hands to keep it from breaking your name is the one i think i see inscribed on the moon % What the Indigo Girls don't realize is that It *does* resound like the hymns of 1,000 years, and it is just pop emotion-- the two are one and the same, the tawdry cannot escape the eternal. --Mar 30 1996 % She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting. --Gertrude Stein on Gertrude Stein, _The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ % take a METAPHOR to BED % the MAN is a MOUNTAIN of QUOTES % "There's too much of a spiritual, neurotic side to you that's going to have to come out" % Heav'n, you're pleas'd to say, has made me beautiful, and that to such a Degree, that you are forc'd, nay, as it were compell'd to love me, in spite of your Endeavours to the contrary; and for the sake of that Love, you say I ought to love you again. Now, tho' I am sensible, that whatever is beautiful is lovely, I cannot conceive, that what is lov'd for being handsome, shou'd be bound to love that by which 'tis lov'd, meerly because 'tis lov'd... --Marcella, _Don Quixote_ % Sometimes us romantic adventurers get bopped in the nose. -K, Apr 26 1996 % Now is the winter of our discontent-- and I'm makin' snowballs! % "Free your mind and your ass will follow" --George Clinton % His heart would break, and like a broken bone, it would mend, but never be what it once was, perhaps aching in prediction of bad weather % there may be some things that you can't put into words, but generally fewer than people think. % "I'm gonna achieve immortality or die trying!" % There are no "facts"-- there is only *the fact* that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient. --Henry Miller, _Tropic of Capricorn_ % "I'm as confident as Cleopatra's Pussy" --The Divine Miss M. % But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. --Joe Haldeman, _The Forever War_ % Well, the fog's lifting The sand's shifting I'm drifting on out Old Captain Ahab's longing to hear from me. Swallow me, Don't follow me, I'm travelling alone Blue water's my daughter I skip like a stone... --The Divine Miss M. % You know, I wanted to leave you with the memory of the good beneath the gaudy, the saint beneath the paint, the pure little soul that lurks beneath this lurid exterior... but then again I figured: Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke! --Bette Midler % Do you really think I would and I do love all you with all me. Do you really think I could, yes I could yes I would love all you with all me. Do you really think I should yes I should love all you with all me yes I should yes I could yes I would. Do you really think i do love all you with all me, yes I do love all you with all me And bless my baby. --Gertrude Stein to Alice B. Toklas % Besides: what clod alive hasn't pursued some species of myth and looked a dman fool in the process? --Michael Detracca, _Captain Zzyzx_ % "[Having a baby] is like owning a *really* dumb dog" --P.M. Jul 15 1996 % I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. --William Goldman, _The_Princess_Bride_ % "I would have made a good pope" --Richard Milhous Nixon % "I'd believe only in a god who understood how to dance" --Henry & June % "All life is 6-to-5 against, just enough to keep you interested" --Damon Runyon % "She's immortal!" "You're amoral?" "You're a mural??" "You're a moray eel???" % "I remember two things very well, and that is that ladies are pretty and money pays the bills when you get it" --B.B.King % "Has God forgotten everything I've done for Him?" --Louis XIV % "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn" --Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, Sep 9 1949 % "Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea." % Love is two crickets hopping in the same direction --W.T.Vollmann % "Lord what fools these mortals be!" --Puck % "I may be a craven little coward, but I'm a *greedy* craven little coward." --Daffy Duck % "Tough times make monkeys eat red peppers." --Frank Costello % "Man and machines share in the stimulating exchange of...aaargh." --Eddie, H.G.t.t.G Radio Scripts % "The time has come," the walrus said, "To speak of manic things, Of shots and shouts, and sealing dooms Of commoners and kings." --Thurber % "Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep" --Pynchon % "I like frogs, and their outlook, and the way they get together in wet places on warm nights and sing about sex." --overheard at the New England Aquarium % "You suspect I suffer from WOMB ENVY... but it is only ROMANCE that I seek..." -Mortimer Mouse, _Outland_ % "Now that I'm enlightened, I'm just as miserable as ever." --Suzuki % If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut. --Albert Einstein % Proof that an elephant and a flea have the SAME weight: Let e = weight of elephant f = weight of flea d = difference between e and f Therefore: e = f + d [Multiply both sides by (e -f)] e (e - f) = (f + d) (e - f) ee - ef = ef - ff + de - df [Subtract de from both sides] ee - ef - de = ef - ff - df e (e - f - d) = f (e - f - d) [Cancel (e - f - d) from both sides] e = f The weight of an elephant equals the weight of a flea, QED. % Romeo was restless he was ready to kill Jumped out the window 'cause he couldn't sit still Juliet was waitin' with a safety net- said "don't bury me 'cause I'm not dead yet" --Elvis Costello, "Mystery Dance" % ALVY ...It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know, this, this this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken and, uh, the doctor says, well why don't you turn him in? And the guy says, I would, but I need the eggs. Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it... because... most of us need the eggs. --Woody Allen, _Annie Hall_ % You gotta program like you don't need the money, You gotta compile like you'll never get hurt, You gotta run like there's nobody watching, It's gotta come from the heart if you want it to work. % I got gravel in my paw Dirty motor oil soaked Down to my skin Got gravel in my paw Dirty motor oil soaked Down to my skin Broken glass in my mouth Sparkles Every time I grin --Bobby Sichran, "Stray Dog" % I was feeling sorry for myself Because I had no shoes. But then I met a man who had no feet. And I said, "friend, can I have your shoes?" --The Foremen Folk Heroes % That's the whole point; at least I think that's what Bethrah was saying although it's difficult to accept. I mean it seems horrible that the most you can do for people you love is to leave them alone. you love is to leave them alone. --Dymphna Willson, _A Different Drummer_ % "Computers let you make more mistakes faster than anything except handguns and tequila..." --Mitch Ratcliffe % "I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it." % If your time hasn't arrived yet, not even the doctor can kill you % Be careful. Maybe God was *you* in a previous life. % It is not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one damn thing over and over. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay % The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream." "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other. "Why?" "How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?" % "Our lives are better left to chance. I could've missed the pain, But I'd have had to miss the dance." --Garth Brooks % My brain racked with life, yet all these thoughts should comes to this: despite all trials and tribulations I still hunger for your kiss % The autumn leaves are falling like rain. Although my neighbors are all barbarians, And you, you are a thousand miles away, There are always two cups at my table. --T'ang Dynasty % "Kid, you ever get a message from God? Something you just had to do? Something you just knew was gonna be the biggest thing in your life, ever?" "No..." "Me neither. But I'm working on it" % "When I Dream of Angels, I Dream of You" (Saying this in French to a French speaker is alleged to be the best pickup line in the world) % She held on tightly to me, reluctant to let go for even an instant, to allow a change of posture between us, to allow me to hang over her and take the sight of her in. Her arms wrapped around me, I could feel the expansion and contraction of her ribcage as she breathed. Later I said "God, you really don't like to let go." "That's OK," she replied, "Neither do you." % Here I am; I'm here-- in my mind, and yours, it seems. Please don't hold me too dear. Some dreams are unrealized. --R % The poem that gives G. hope for the English Language: She offered her honor He honored her offer So all day and all night He was on her and off her % Dreams are like sausages-- small, and, uh, full of good stuff and- uh- watch out, some are really spicy! And- oh, never mind. % I'll sit here and breathe-- inhale, exhale, smoothly, and with grace. Our ability to breathe os something that's always knocked me over. % "Won't you come away with me?" People had been saying that to him all his life. He had still not learned to turn them down. --Anne Tyler, _Searching for Caleb_ % Love is a Many Splintered Thing % As If I Could See The World In Your Kiss. % Her face was beautiful, with full cheeks and lips: it seemed always on the brink of laughter. This fascinated him-- to be on the brink of laughter, senses at their most and least aware. % "Jeez! Slow Down! You think apples grow on trees??" "Uh-" "Never mind!" % To be dissolved in a kiss % "He's just your old man-- he's as full of shit as anybody" --Bull Durham % "If I knew who Godot was, I would have said so in the play!" --Samuel Beckett % OPEN YOUR MIND (as well as your legs) % She was built with the strength, balance, and elegance of a handcrafted dry-stone wall % Laugh at yourself, and you'll always be entertained. % As you slide down the bannister of life may all the splinters point the right way. % You know, life as a rhino beetle might *seem* glamorous, but actually it sucks % The girl was tall, trim, supple; built like a symphony. Her Callistan vexto-silk gown, of the newest and most violent shade of 'radioactive' green, was phosphorescently luminous; fluorescent; gleaming and glowing, its hem swept the floor, but above the waste it vanished mysteriously except for wisps which clung to strategic areas here and there with no support, apparently, except the personal magnetism of the wearer... --E.E.'Doc' Smith, _First Lensman_ % Do you suppose the guy who invented marmalade has "he invented marmalade" inscribed on his tombstone? Think about it. % Man, how it would suck to be a baby worm; I mean, all you got to look forward to is being a big worm, or something. % Miracles aren't always blessings --_Hawkeye_ % "Will we ever see each other again?" "I don't know. Probably no." --Rob et al. Summer 1995 % Honour thy parents, Brothers and Sisters. They were hip to the groove too once you know. Parents are soul. --Joey "The Lips" Fagan, _The Commitments_ % I kissed the Blarney Stone; Now I'm Wicked Eloquent % Touch is a way of worshipping life. And sex is a way of kicking death in the ass. % "You better go." "You're saying that like you might change your mind." "I know. That's why you better go." --_Bye Bye Love_ % Then again, I might be wrong. % "I don't want to be friends. I've got friends. I want sex! What am I gonna do with more friends?" --David Cale, _Don't Let Your Lover Make a Mess Of You_ % you're not the first you're not the last... another day, another crash. --Laundry Room Graffito % There is no god and Murphy is his prophet % Sexuality is just sublimated religion % "Fear is the lock, and laughter the key to your heart." -Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young % "He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day- but that's not why *I* ran away" % "He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day- but that's not why *I* ran away" % "Well, we all got misery, but it passes, it always passes!"-Mike Feder,New_York_Son % "Psst! Father Restrepo! If that story about hell is a lie, we're all fucked, aren't we..." -Isabel Allende-_The_House_of_the_Spirits_ % "People are sheer stark raving crazy nuts. Quote me." -Jack Poderhotz, as quoted by Garrison Keillor % "Life is so peculiah don't let anybody fool ya!" --Five Guys Named Moe % "I had to shoot my dog!" "Oh, was it mad?" "Well, it wasn't happy." % Today is the first day of the rest of your short,brutish existence as a sentient creature before being snuffed out into utter nothingness for all eternity.-Matt Groening % Mickey: The heart is a very, very resilient little muscle. --Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters % "Remember, there's no problem so complex it can't be solved by killing everyone even remotely associated with it." --ljd, Scorched Earth Party % "you're such a sensitive boy that sometimes I just wanna slap you really hard." --Aimee Lortskell % "Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle." --Author Unknown % The lady of the porcelain department Smiles at the world through a set of false teeth. She is business-like and keeps a pencil in her hair But behind her sharpened eyes take flight The summer evenings in the park And heated nights in second story dance halls. Man's life is powerless and brief and dark It is not possible for me to make her happy. --T.S.Eliot % after a bad call in a baseball game: Yogi Bera: "What would you do if I called you a fucking asshole?" Umpire: "I'd throw you right out of this game." Yogi Bera: "Well, I guess I'll just have to THINK IT." % Morons and fools lie down beside me. This is stranger than i've ever known. Flights of fancy leave every hour. The hint was caught but never quite thrown. % DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT % Insecurity knocks once in a while. Invite her in. Sit down, have coffee with her. And once you have heard Insecurity out for a while, take that sugar spoon and poke her in the eye. --Erica Bial % "Damn it, James, I'm as Almish as the next guy, but if we don't take out that sub there won't be a Pennsylvania to return TO." % the rain in spain falls mainly on me. % When it comes to love throw the dice. Embrace fate. What's the price? Nothing you can't afford to lose: Loneliness, some rights to choose; Solitaire, insecurity, Unstructured life, virginity. Youse pays yer dime youse takes yer chances-- Sometimes that is all romance is. For centuries the game's gone on And will be played once you are gone. Don't know the rules? Then fake them. Romances are half what you make 'em. Here's the point, (duly noted) Babe, you'll find these dice are loaded. % buster the sheep could never accept the mediocrity and anonimity that was his lot. He was convinced that the current ill treatment he was undergoing at the hands of the farmhand would someday be a chapter in his biography titled 'a star is shorn' % "If falling in love is anything like learning to spell, I don't want to do it. It takes too long." --Glenn, age 7 (thanks J.T.) % "In an upstairs room, a modem made a connection." --Lincoln Spector, Computer Currents % "Context is strawberries" bas-jan@seneca.demon.nl % "Every man should be lucky" --E.B.White, when asked to account for his literary achievments % Someone's Law: All the easy problems have already been solved % Science Fiction is our Sword of Damocles --Graffiti at Harvard Square % "Better to die in battle with a god than to live in shame" --Pharoah, The Ten Commandments % "Can it matter where or in whom you put it?" --Mark Antony, 81-30bc % "When life gives you poop, make poop juice." --Max Canon's Red Meat % "To create is divine to reproduce is human." --Man Ray % "Looking back on your life, what would you say satisfied you most?" "...I'd say women." --Interviewer and Man Ray (sculpter, photographer, artistic genius) % "Notice I didn't say 'TV'. 'TV' is a nickname. Nicknames are for friends. Television is not your friend." --sketch on Mr.Show % "And isn't sanity really just a one trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh oooh oooh, the sky is the limit!" --The Tick % "When your phone don't ring, it'll be me." --George Jones % "Run a damp sponge across a bookshelf, and you pick up a few bits of defunct comets, of grime ground off colliding asteroids, and of powder left behind when the planets formed." --The New Yorker % In a lecture, Werner von Braun once said "Ve haf alvays been aiming for zer stars," and a little voice at the back replied, "But ve keep hittink London." % "If heartaches were commercials, we'd all be on TV" --John Prine % "There is a fine line between genius and insanity; I play hopscotch." % Q.What did the buddhist say to hotdog vendor? A. "Make me one with everything" --Spare Change % clichis for a new millenium: whatever... turns you on bangs your head loves thy neighbor mows your lawn floats your boat touches your monkey milks your cow lights your fire sinks your battleship makes you happy drains your pool salts your margarita rolls your dice fills your sausage melts your chocolate % "The road to hell is paved with melting snowballs." --Larry Wall % "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." --Ernest Rutherford % "The question is complex and life is short." --Protagoras on the existence of the gods % "hey boy, ain't nothin' in the world worth dying for" --cop in car to fleeing motorcyclist % "When I kick at a cat, it's nearly always for a good reason." --Calvin Trillin % when you see infrared we're all luminescent --97-5-21 % Ringo: Really nice apartment, Chris. Chris: Thanks. Uh, I know you guys know him-- what do you think of Mick Jagger? John: Turrific lips. Paul: Gives me an erection joost watchin' 'im chew goom. --from Beat the Meatles, Chris Miller % kirk's moving rule no. 381: don't lose your damn keys % "if you ain't where you are you're nowhere" -Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H* % The cat is trying to open the door on the hinge side. I laugh, then realize that I make the same mistake with people, ideas, and doors, too. --New Yorker cartoon % "If you haven't been rejected three times this week then your not trying." --www.emtex.com/toptips % "Never, ever fall for a gal named after a flower, a gemstone or a month of the year." --www.emtex.com/toptips % "The best thing about the 90's is that it's almost over" -king@aiinc.com % "a dead whale or a stove boat" --traditional toast % I am a follower of the 'retard socratic method': ask a lot of leading questions, but have NO IDEA what the answer actually is. % Feeling Stressed Out? Sometimes it helps to think of happy scenes, maybe a pastoral field, a field with a babbling brook. You're there on a lovely summer's day... ...holding someone's head under the water. Now you're letting them up for a second, then blam! Back into the freezing water! Over and over again!! There! Feel better? % "maybe He doesn't WANT to cook a herring" -Bjorn % Jenny: Let me tell you something. Men and women want very different things out of sex. They've never forgiven each other. Irmy: Where would you say love came in? Dorry: Oh, now there's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever. --Woody Allen, Shadows and Fog % life goes on like melting ice you can't escape no plot device will free you from this slope of fate embrace risks don't hesitate --97-6-9 % "The claim that 'They laughed at Columbus' is tempered by the fact that they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --NCAHF newsletter % Superhero stands arms akimbo. Below him the city is a neon sprawl. He aches. Too many arch-villains battled, too many last minute rescues. Thanks to certain fictional characters the world expects superhero to be invulnerable. But he's not. Superpowers are wear and tear on a body- the knees and back especially. And such bad karma- encountering all that evil and having all that power. You don't think evildoers try to make sweet sounding deals? As if superpowers and good intentions automatically came bundled with super morals. But now the city sleeps safely, and superhero calls it a day. % And they say sacrifice is letting sweet love go -Edie Brickel % "my henry to your june" --untested intellectual pickup line % "We don't want to get any more specific or else they'll yell at us more" --David Johnson during the defunct QA forum % "Never eat more than you can lift" --Miss Piggy % this morning i discovered my own Godel number... luckily my memory is so bad I forgot it before any harm was done... % John Cage pointed out that we are never in silence- in the stillest of rooms we carry the high pitched jangle of our nervous system, the low throb of coursing blood. 97-6-21 % "Aww you know you're my awesomest" "You're awesomest what?" "Nothing. Everything. You're just my awesomest." % "Life's too short to worry about it" % "Morality's lease is up and Science has the keys to the apartment." -Ander's Mad Scientist Page % "the post literate society- 'of COURSE I can read, but THANK GOD I don't have to.'" -Tom Lehrer % "Keep your knees loose" -old advice % you're my little guppy of love you're my little guppy of love like a little fishy darting in the sea swim away from danger swim right toward me you're my little guppy of love you're my little guppy of love 'cause you know that friendship is the salt in this ocean and physical attraction adds the wavelike motion you're my little guppy of love you're my little guppy of love 97-7-8 % boundaries form. Ice, scabs, jello skin, bread crust, relationships. 97-7-11 % What's the meaning of life? "I can't tell you, but I can dance it" --Woody Allen % "if time heals all wounds then why do we all have bellybuttons?" % If fireflies didn't exist we would be forced to invent them. % fight fire with napalm % Square peg in a round hole is a sound engineering principle. Easy to drill round holes, effecient to cut square pegs, and once pounded into place it's very sturdy. It's ironic how people misuse that idea. % "I want to live like I type- fast, and with lots of mistakes" % "The only intuitive user interface is a nipple" % twinkle twinkle rattle squeak how i wonder what you seek 97-7-26 % There are women who say: "For you I am ruining myself!" Others say: "You will despise me." These are only different ways of expressing the fatality of love. But she, she did not speak one word. -Barbey d'Aurevilly % "After all, those who can't repeat the past are condemned to remember it" --Mark O'Donnell, _Getting Over Homer_ % I think of a story Sean brought home from CYO camp, about an Indian brave so in love with a maiden from the tribe across the lake he tries to swim over to her and drowns. The punchline is, 'And from that day to this, it has been known as Lake Stupid.' --Mark O'Donnell, _Getting Over Homer_ % "some days are better than lovers" % I find my love fishing His feet in the shallows. We have breakfast together, And drink beer. I offer him the magic of my thighs He is caught in the spell. --Egyptian, from 1500-1000BC, translated by Ezra Pound and Noel Stock % Obscenity, by itself, is the last refuge of the vulgarian and the crutch of the inarticulate motherf**ker. --Lawrence Paros % "the only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly" --Freud % Meanwhile, Ziller was doing a bit of tasting himself. Amanda was melting in the glory of it. She felt like the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World. --Tom Robbins "Another Roadside Attraction" % "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." --John Lehman, secretary of the navy 1981-1987 % "Sugar, your thighs are hives of honey, and I am the Bumble Bee of love." --Mary A. Koncel % I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have been from you. --Ashleigh Brilliant % "I'm going to kill everyone in this room." "Now that's DARN rude." --The Joker visits David Letterman, The Dark Knight Returns % it's not enough that life imitates art- it always has to imitate *bad* art % "Diet Dr Pepper is god's perfect softdrink" --Mad Mike % "I'm a slippery monster in a sticky world- this is no place for me" --Ickus, The Real Monsters % "never refuse a breathmint" --http://www.emtex.com/toptips % Catherine thought, perhaps if we travel together, I shall get to know them at last, for so far I have been all wrong, and they have turned out different to what I thought. How is one to know what people are like? ... Perhaps one can never know; perhaps people are uncapturable, and slip away like water from one's hand, changing all the time. --Rose Macaulay, "Staying with Relations" % kirk's law:the grass was always greener yesterday % "I come not to praise Orange Julius but to drink 'em" % "a soup can filled with black power..." --typo by Brian Trosko % "I do have a cause though. It's obscenity. I'm for it." --Tom Lehrer % "Do you come here often? Do I?" --Alzheimer's pickup line % Her eyes were cold and harsh, which made them tough to chew. --Roger Lee raj@netcom.com % "We will run amok together, and then, when we get tired, he will walk amok." --Jimmy Bond, Casino Royale % "let 'em all go to hell except cave 76" --Mel Brooks as the 2000 year old man % "The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before."--F.Scott Fitzgerald % "True Love is just codependency with a better soundtrack" --Charles Peterman % "If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer % "We were once so close to heaven, Peter came out and gave us medals declaring us the nicest of the damned." --They Might Be Giants % the mule will work patiently for you for ten years for the chance to kick you once. --William Faulkner % "I'm not against women. Not often enough, anyway." --Groucho Marx(?) % every first kiss feels like a miracle % "Programming is a series of discoveries leading you from one plateau of understanding to another... The trick is not to step in the stuff between the plateaus." --20 Past Midnight. % when it comes to romance: sometimes you're windshield sometimes you're bug. % "When hormones grab you it's bigger than you are" --John Updike, 97-10-3 % I love you, And would brave anything for you. Except bees. I'm allergic to bees. --Green Wave % "You have licked the lollipop of mediocrity and now you completely suck" --slambe@neilnet.com % we catch cold like bullets between our teeth --Marc D. Goldfinger, "This Autumn", Spare Change % windows 95, 98..what do they do after that? Suddenly my faith in Microsoft's handle on the millenium bug is diminished --Dylan, 97-10-6 % Well, that's all the dish for this time, true believers, but remember to keep looking at the stars, and then maybe one will fall on you. And I mean that in a pleasant way, not an unpleasant way. % "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." --Douglas Adams % No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning --three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come If we're to go on living. --Wislawa Szymborska % some comparisons can't be compared to comparing apples + oranges % my knife has a wife but my spatula is a bachula --The Button % "Carpe Daemon - Seize the Background Process" --Paul Tomblin % Love is holding your breath and diving for pearls, only to get your leg clamped on by a giant clam that won't let go. At night, the sludge eels come. --Matt Groening, Life In Hell % "The death of God left the angels in very strange position." --Lions Unix Documentation % "Hypocrisy is the lubricant of a civilized society" --Arianna Huffington % "I miss her sometimes" I ran into my old girlfriend yesterday then I backed up and ran into her again... I miss her sometimes --lounge lizards, comedy central % On The Longevity of Mass Storage devices: another poster pointed out that storage devices like clay tablets and cave walls have been shown to outlast entire civilizations, though difficult to mount or backup.--wjh@teleport.com % " 'Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' " --Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater % I feel like a million tonight, but one at a time. --Mae West % "I want to do to you what the spring does to cherry trees." "I want to do to *you* what you do to chinese food." --tufts.general % I'll heal your wounds, I'll set you free I'm Jesus Christ on ecstasy --Nine Inch Nails % And in the dawn, there came a song, Of some sweet lady, singing in his ear, Your God has gone, and from now on, You'll have to learn to hate the things you fear. --cwagner@io.com (?) % I know: You say love when you mean control. --Sam Phillips % ...and when she looks up and asks you "what?" you say "nothing," when you really mean, "I love you." --abryant@cs.tufts.edu (?) % A witty saying proves nothing. --Voltaire % What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency. --George Jean Nathan % "I want to be reincarnated as seaweed" --Mo Roihl % "Cactus should *definately* taste like cocunut" % "If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy" --Kurt Vonnegut % "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." --Kurt Vonnegut % "I'm throwing away 3 eggs." "Don't throw them away, cook me an omelette." "Eggs are gross after 6 months." --Murray and Israel, 97-11-19 % Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look forward to, he looked back. We think he sang then, but the song is lost. At least he had seen once more the beloved back. I say the song went this way: *O prolong Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.* --Donald Justice, from "There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings" % I cannot seperate her from the beautiful body. She has charm and a very gay spirit; in every way she's attractive. Intelligent and she reads good books. But it's the faultless body that forces me to make a fool of myself, pursuing a virtuous girl I could never possess. --James Laughlin (1914-1997) % "We're all soldiers in the war against entropy." --alt.folklore.computers % "I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt." --Mark V. Shaney % "the day that you die will be like any other day, only shorter." --Beckett? % "No why. Just here." -John Cage, Life Magazine's "Why are we here" % "Eat bread and salt and always tell the truth." --Russian Proverb % You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse; the red plague rid you, for learning me your language! --Caliban, The Tempest 1.2 % Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less travelled by, Tripped over a branch, and broke my nose % I hear America singing, and doggone if someone's not flat. One of the tenors, I think. % an ant crossed the sidewalk in it's busy little industry i saw reflected the laws of god and man 'enough of this' i thought and crushed its tiny head % [fx:paper spilling] "Aw man, code just reviewed all over the floor!" --Bob S., before the big Catalyst code review % "If I can't be free, at least I'll be cheap"--some guy on the net % "...love is what *still* goes on when you are *not* horny." --Robert Heinlein % I guess the winter Makes you laugh a little slower Makes you talk a little lower... --Counting Crows % "... if cats looked like frogs, we'd understand what nasty, brutal little creatures they really are." --Terry Pratchett % "Tyler?" "Yeah?" "You are my trailer park." "And you, Anna-Louise, are my tornado." --Douglas Coupland, "Shampoo Planet" % "We are animals. Our first instinct when we see an object of beauty is to eat it." --Douglas Coupland, "Shampoo Planet" % Kaekel's Conjecture: Any neural system sufficiently complex to generate the axioms of arithmetic is too complex to be understood by itself. % "Civilization and science fight against the natural mistakes of our brains. It's a wonder of our species that we're learning to use our brains to fight our brains. If you feel it, but it isn't right, don't do it and don't believe it. We can be better than natural -- we're human." --Penn Jillette % Empty vase, empty sky, full sake cup and a lone drinker. --Basho % "Improvise. Adapt. Overcome." --222 Street Jazz % "the genius of Jimi Hendrix... was that he could stand up at all, he was so pumped full of drugs" --AbFab % Do you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices. --Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market" % "Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing." --Charles Bukowski % In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right? --Paul Gauguin % "Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly." --Gypsy Rose Lee % But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. --W.H Auden, from "Lullaby" % [paper spilling] "Aw man, code just reviewed all over the floor!" --Bob S., before the big Catalyst code review 97-12-2 % "If I cannot be free, I'll be cheap" --Joe Boswell % "...love is what *still* goes on when you are *not* horny." --Robert Heinlein % {making love stay is easy... It's lust that flees} --Tom Robbins % I guess the winter Makes you laugh a little slower Makes you talk a little lower About the things you could not show her And it's been a long December And there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last I can't remember all the times I've tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass --Counting Crows, A Long December % "... if cats looked like frogs, we'd understand what nasty, brutal little creatures they really are." --Terry Pratchett % I imagine I bury a pocket calculator with liquid crystals spelling her name, then watch the earth shoot forth lightning bolts --Douglas Coupland, "Shampoo Planet" % "Tyler?" "Yeah?" "You are my trailer park." "And you, Anna-Louise, are my tornado." --Douglas Coupland, "Shampoo Planet" % "We are animals. Our first instinct when we see an object of beauty is to eat it." --Douglas Coupland, "Shampoo Planet" % "What'll you do when you meet Heather-Jo on the beach in Malibu?" "Ask her to write her name in the sand, then roll in the words." --Douglas Coupland, "Shampoo Planet" % "I'm out to shave with Occam's Razor" % Kaekel's Conjecture: Any neural system sufficiently complex to generate the axioms of arithmetic is too complex to be understood by itself. % "He is the billboard of his own buffoonery." --dleeper@mail.com % Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain, perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside-- that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the Universe made manifest, tring to figure itself out. -Delenn, Babylon 5 All the molecules in your body were formed inside stars. We are the future of ancient stars. -The 1997 Nobel Conference. People and stars are made of the same stuff. -Bill Nye the Science Guy % "I think I love you, Ms. Pac-Man. I know your boyfriend. What do you see in him? He is round & yellow. Look at me. I am sexy and trim!" --Johnny Blue-jeans, VV % "You know, sometimes it annoys me that these cartoon characters have more power in this world than I do." --Dylan, on the coorporate power of Dilbert et al. % "There are many things I hope to experience with you. Reconstructive surgery is not one of them." % "I am a fish person." --Sarah Strachan % "We don't know if there's a god- but there *are* women..." --Woody Allen, "Deconstructing Harry" % "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." "If lettuce were seagulls, burgers would fly." --Bizarro % "[having a kid] is like being in jail where you really love the warden." --patient on "Dr. Katz" % The poptart was a sacrifice to the twin gods of Matt and Steve. % My name is Leonardo I am a retardo I climb up the steeple And spit on the people And they say, "Hello-- What's your name?" My name is Leonardo... % "They go in and out- nipples. Stylistically I mean... uh, and physically." --Paul Morville on the relatively recent phenomenon of mannequins with nipples % "How do we stop an elephant if it goes berserk? What do we do? Do we use an AK-47? An M-16? An AR-15?... Frankly, would that stop an elephant? I really doubt it. Do they have a bazooka?" --US Senator Bob Smith, protesting plans in 1995 for a circus on Capitol Hill % "These guys idea of sex is five beers and- *UHHGHH!*" --C.P. % "Kirk is his own Enigma- 'I just don't understand myself'" --Paul Morville % "Funk is its own reward." --George Clinton % "Do you have any super powers?" "Of course I have super powers. I'm Schooly D." "Display them!" "I can't do that." "Why not?" "I'm not allowed to do it." "So you mean you don't have any." "Yeah." "So, the D stands for defenseless." --Space Ghost + Schooly D., Space Ghoast Coast to Coast % "Let our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ save *you*- over 50% per month on long distance and international calls over 20 minutes!" % "I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was. . . an artic wilderness." --Steve Martin % folly. 98-2-3 % "Is there a dream part you would like to play someday?" "A dumb guy with no dialogue. I hate dialogue." -The Onion's A.V. Club interviews Chow Yun-Fat % Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. -- Charlie Brown % An organism is not adapted to its environment. It is adapted to the environment of its ancestors. --Begon, Harper & Townsend. % "A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." --Nietzsche % "I Defy Biology and Achieve Ignorance" "Without a hurt the heart is hollow" "Damn your kumquats!" --The Fantasticks % My favorite game is "Wind Up Kitty". This is when you take an adult, misanthropic cat and pick it up (kindly) by the midsection with one hand and hold it about 6 inches off the floor. With the other hand you twirl the tail (again, kindly; I'm not suggesting you twist it off) and make "rrrrr rrrr RRRR RRRR" noises. Then, when the cat is at his height of annoyance, put it down on the floor and let it go. The cat will speed off like one of those little cars. --alt.religion.kibology % "The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews." --W.H.Auden % "If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast." --s.s.b-b % Never say anything more predictive than "Watch this!" -Ancient Advice % "I take Him shopping with me. I say, 'OK, Jesus, help me find a bargain'" --Tammy Faye Bakker % "i have a devilish craving for a small sausage" --Soviet Mayday Protester % "C is for salad, that's good enough for me [...] no, C is the abstract representation of this salad [...] I mean, C is a variable, to which I'm assiging the value of salad [...] I really like balsamic vinegar dressing." -mo, 98-3-7 % "Gosh, is this what life is all about?" --Anthony Colindres % "Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set fire to him, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." -J. Heyes-Jones % "The Germans are a cruel people. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy." -Black Adder % "Vikings? There ain't no vikings here. Just us honest farmers. The town was burning, the villagers were dead. They didn't need those sheep anyway. That's our story and we're sticking to it." --viking@probe.net % "It's a sad ass that never rejoices." --Someone's grandfather caught farting % "All women are either girls, women, or men. And all men are either men, boys, or hairdressers [...] Sigourney Weaver is a man. Jane Fonda is a man. Diane Keaton is a girl. Jessica Lange is a woman. Mel Gibson is a boy, Clint Eastwood is a man. Cary Grant is a hairdresser." --Cynthia Heimel quoting Felicity quoting Will Wenham's theory % I am nuts for information-- as are we all, I suspect, most real men and women. I can't get enough of the stuff. When I'm clicking through the hundreds of E-mail messages that await me each morning, sometimes I imagine I'm a mighty information whale, sifting through thousands of tiny (but nutritious!) krill bits. Yum! Whether it's reading the cereal box or scanning the advertisment slide show some genius thought to project on the big screen at the movie theater, my appetite for information is unquenchable. --Joshua Quittner % "The beatings will continue until morale improves" % "Some people have a way with words, others have not way." --Steve Martin % "Love isn't something you can wrap in chains and throw in a lake. That's Houdini. Love is liking someone a lot." --Jack Handey % SCORPIO: Remember, torturing animals is wrong, unless it is for cosmetic reasons -- because the only thing worse than a dead cat is an ugly woman. PISCES: You should be proud of your idea. It is a very good idea. To combine a spork with a spork and make a very spork. That's invention! --Max the Psychic % KNOCK KNOCK who's there? ANXIOUS COW anxio MOO!! KNOCK KNOCK COW WITH ESP --Steve Sian % "You cannot allow the temple of justice to be defiled." --Ken Starr, right before issuing a subpeona to bookstores frequented by Monica Lewinsky. % "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." --Jay Gould, Gilded-Age Industrialist % "Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more." -- Erica Jong % "Pierre A. von Kaenel" writes: > "Simplify, simplify, simplify" - Thoreau Shouldn't that be just "Simplify"? --Dave Sill % The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to go for the gusto, ask yourself this important question: "How long am I going to be dead?" With that perspective, you can now make a free, fearless choice to do just about any goddamned sneaky thing your devious little mind can think up. Go ahead. Have your fun. You're welcome. Go on. See you in hell. --Matt Groening, "So You Want To Have A Shameful Affair Yet Somehow Can't Justify It", Love Is Hell % "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" --Carl Sagan % "So many women, so little nerve." --Bruce Bethke, "Headcrash" % "Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: This is the ideal life." --Mark Twain % Don't worry if one person is not showing the same love that someone else has shown you. No two loves are the same. -Taxi Driver Wisdom (NYC) % Love is 90% responsibility. Whatever that other 10 percent is, it must be quite something. -Taxi Driver Wisdom (NYC) % Time goes. That's it. -Taxi Driver Wisdom (NYC) % "So Zeus was like their President Bill Clinton?" --Schoolchild in New Yorker Cartoon % "Wow, I've got my denial mojo working!" --Jay Sherman, "The Critic" % TVG: Do you think you've changed enough that you could settle down and get married? Madonna: Is getting married the only way to settle down? TVG: No, but it helps. --TVGuide interviews Madonna % First Law of Humanics: Even complete jerks deserve a second chance --Bruce Bethke, "Headcrash" % "Which will last longer - Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney Incorporated?" --Koan posed by Danny Hillis % doorhinge (roughly) rhymes with orange but month stands alone. % In the spring, a young man's fancy iightly turns to thoughts of what The older man, throughout the year, Has never even once forgot Isaac Asimov, "The Sensuous Dirty Old Man" % 'The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door...' the shortest SF-story ever, by Fredric Brown. % "Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it." --Alice Walker % Earwigs, as in ere-wig-o-again. This debate will run and run. There was no year 0 to 400ish, and in fact the calendar was constructed by back calculation by Exegius (who got it wrong) and Bede (who made it worse). We are stuck with the 7ish year error, and the missing 0, so that 1AD follows 1BC, so we might as well have the party to celebrate the carry propagation. --H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl % "We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation." -- Lily Tomlin % "Skeptics say that a company fitness program will not succeed. Let's do some aerobics and see who's right!" OUCH! OW! WHAP! UNH! "The skeptics are right." "We usually are." --Dilbert % Blah, blah, blah. Whatever, blah, blah, etcetera, etcetera. --Ratbert's short story for impatient people % And when your only hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb. --unknown % "When you really think about Christianity, it is a religion without a penis." --Tori Amos % "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world" -- Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI % "There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat. "And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin. "I could have answered it if I had been there." "Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in the middle of the night?'" % "Time is a play thing. But when it breaks, you're fucked." --Phillip Zibilich % Caution. Blade is sharp. Keep out of children. --MIT lab knife warning % For once, somebody may call me "Sir" without adding, "...you're making a scene." --Homer Simpson % As for kissing on the first date, you should never date someone whom you would not wish to kiss immediately. --Mr. Blue on Salonmagazine.com % "I really *like* gratuitous nudity. I hate it when people go, 'I'll only do it if it makes sense for the movie.' That's such a crock ... it never makes sense. So I like it-- the more gratuitous the better.''--David Duchovny on "Access Hollywood.'' % "Indians testing nuclear bombs? They can't even get my tandoori right." --Chris Knight, Chiropractor "I'm just glad American Indians don't have the bomb. Talk about heap big payback for Paleface." --Josh Carter, Sales Representative "God, the Indians are so much more in touch with their spiritual side, aren't they?" --Lori Backman, Mathematician "I just hope the Indians love their children, too." --Joseph Teufel, Landscaper --The Onion, "India and The Bomb" % I've got a strong urge to fly But I've got nowhere to fly to Roger Waters, Nobody Home, The Wall, Pink Floyd % "I think art should be in the place in our culture where religion used to be. Where magic used to be, there should be art." --Teller % We come together making chance into starlight --Jeff Buckley % "We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish." --20 Past Midnight % My love of haiku Was small as a cicada And then got smaller. --Mr. Blue % "You killed my mammy! You killed my pappy! And you split my lip!" --Carolyn See quoting the worst mini-series ever. % If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants --~kzm , ketil@ii.uib.no % Men are like a fine wine. They all start out like grapes, and it's women's job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you'd want to have dinner with. % Q: You're also involved in the Humanitarian Reform Movement. A: I see you scanned my website. You worked really hard. Did you listen to the record too? Q: Yeah. And I watched the short film you made to accompany Ophelia, in which you speak, like, four languages. A: Five. Six, if you include English. Q: Six languages? Are you showing off? A: *Oy vay!* Q: That's, like, a seventh language. A: You're annoying me. It's like being interviewed by the biggest snotty bullyboy in the world. Q: It's just that you seem kind of serious. What do you do for fun? A: I don't really have wacky momemnts. It's more of finding the humor in people and situations. I don't wake up in the morning and say, I'll be wacky today. What do you do to be wacky, Joel? A: Ask annoying questions of female vocalists. --Joel Stein interviews Natalie Merchant % "I am a thing of beauty." --Frank Sinatra % My favorite is The Invisible Man, because in great scene Invisible Man eats large bowl of cookies. All you see are cookies. No distractions. Me like that. --Cookie Monster, asked by Time to name Favorite Movie Monster. % "I'm a good influence on everyone I meet-- but they don't realize until decades later. That's what I keep telling myself." --David Johnson, 98-6-17 % "What kind of a loser comes in at 12 and leaves at 2?" "The other name for that is executive." --Dave + Bob % "It's hard to get excited about a company that has delusions of mediocrity." --John Lammers on IDD, 98-6-18 % not better than sex, pretty ok afterwards. --Pete's ESP Lager % The biggest problem with y'all is that you are riddled with sin. I'll betcha you've got unicorns, rock'n'roll records, secular books, Nintendos, Smurfs cartoons on them fancy VCR tapes, and other stuff that draws you toward Satan's stronghold." --God's Hatchetman % "Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it." --W. Somerset Maugham % "As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual." --Latka Gravas in "Taxi" % "Hello Fish!" "Hello Aquaman!" "Have you seen anything unusal or suspicous, here under the water?" "......Hello Aquaman!" --comedian on Dr. Katz on why Aquaman sucks. % "[Hume] was willing to live with uncertainty, with no supernatural justifications, no complete explanations, no promise of permanent stability, with guides of merely probable validity; and what is more, he lived in his world without complaining, a cheerful stoic."--Peter Gay % "Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way." --Peter Gay % A professor of physics is talking to the university president about needing several hundred thousand dollars for research equipment. The president replies "Your research is so expensive. Why can't you be more like the mathematicians - all they need is paper, a pencil, and a wastebasket. Or better yet, the philosophers - they don't even need a wastebasket." % Stegosaurus Two words: spiked tail. "Oh, so you're sneaking up behind me to eat my delicious body? WHAM! Spikes! For you! In your head!" --Brunching Shuttlecocks, http://www.brunching.com % Winnie-the-Pooh I have to admit a soft spot in my heart for Pooh, even through years of overzealous merchandising. He eats, he sleeps, he makes up dumb little songs. That's pretty much what'd I'd be doing if I lived in a tree trunk. --Brunching Shuttlecocks, http://www.brunching.com % "Ninjas aren't dangerous. They're more afraid of you than you are of them." --wjhardaker@ucdavis.edu % skepticism=heroism % Just an article detector on the Information Supercollider. % "When you eat meat you are eating murder, blood, death, fat, cholesteral, muscle, connective tissues, veins, corpse, rat hairs, lips, assholes, eyeballs, guts, and flies." -- Jill Ballard Mmmm! I'd like seconds, please! --alt.tasteless % "Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" --David Hume % Zoe Love (zoe@welcomehome.org) wrote: : I like my coffee like i like my men: : Pale, weak & bitter. : : -- Zoe, the happy love slave I like my humans like I like my coffee: Stuffed in an air tight bag and all the air sucked out until it collapses down and squeezes them into a hard little brick. % "... 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 in alt.sysadmin.recovery % I want to live forever or die in the attempt I want to live forever or die trying % "Love is two chicks cybersurfing in the direction of the Love Blender." -- M. E. Cablemann % "Men are like fudge: sweet, but dense and rarely good for you." -- Audrey Walton-Hadlock, '99 % "We are *all* standing in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde. % "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." --Oscar Wilde % "Sleep... Those little slices of death; O how I LOATH them!" -- Edgar Allen Poe % Here are some of the more interesting things I've [Shane Drew] learned in my classes in my four years at Tufts: 1. Beef jerky was first extensively eaten by the Mayan Indians. 2. How to determine the 12th digit of a UPC symbol. 3. The guy who INVENTED Modern Algebra (Galois) died at age 21. 4. When counting cards in Blackjack, tens and face cards are -1, 3-6's are +1. 5. The earth is the only place in the solar system where you can stand naked and still survive. 6. The clitoris was first (officially) discovered in 1559 by Dr. Reginald Columbus in Padua, Italy. 7. At the age of nine, Gauss derived the formula for the sum of the first n integers. 8. If you're ever playing Let's Make a Deal, always switch doors. 9. My advisor's research is on the topology of soap bubbles. 10. The numbers 220 and 284 are "friendly numbers". % Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.) % There once was a lady from Crewe Whose limerics went to line two. There once was a man from Verdun. There once was a lady from Bree Whose limericks went to line three, And never went farther. There once was a man on the floor Whose limericks went to line four. He'd start up the trend, and then it would end. There once was a man from the Styx Whose limericks went to line six. He never did know How far they should go, And never did bother to fix Them at all. % Unix IS *very* user-friendly-- it's just very particular as to who it makes friends with... % "To K.S. -- I've been wanting to say these three special words for a long time now, so here it goes. 'Wow! Great ass!'" % Scully and Mulder, however, seem well-matched to their adversaries. Mulder's supposedly the intuitive one, evidenced by his insight as he flees an explosives-laden building that "something's wrong." Similarly, Scully, the smart one, sees a patch of emerald-green grass in the middle of the desert and is quick to conclude that "something's unusual." --Mr. Cranky, http://www.mrcranky.com/ % "I wish you luck with a capital F." --Elvis Costello % "I'm not a vegetarian because I like animals, I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." --A Whitney Brown % "Menu items are the modern programmer's way -- even that of the Java programmer, who is too pure of heart to use pointers -- of putting an obscene number of unpredictable GOTO statements everywhere in his code." % So we keep asking, over and over, Until a handful of earth Stops our mouths-- But is that an answer? --Henrich Heine, "Lazarus" % "...the greatest bargain since Jesus bar-Miriam was was sold for thirty pieces of silver to the Romans, who, God wot, have been selling him ever since..." -- Avram Davidson, "The Redward Edward Papers" % i seem to be constantly reminded that everything is temporary. the older i get, the more this bothers me. -- http://dancy.franz.com/~virago/ % Why is ice-cream-on-a-stick so much better when it's in the shape of a cartoon head? --98-7-4 % Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke. Got a light, hon? --Lynda Barry % "How was it for you?", the larded one asks. "It was a bit like sex, only shorter", she replies. --alt.flame % "Striving for excellence, like a moth beating itself to death on the side of a light bulb." --Josh Space, church of josh % "Rakes and hoes," so says the Rose, "The blood still flows and no one knows the way mud goes between the toes." % Nature is that lovely lady to whom we owe polio, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer. % "I realize that each day is a gift. Now it's a matter of figuring out how to exchange fourteen thousand six hundred of them." --New Yorker Cartoon by B.E.K. % "I view the progress of science as ... the slow erosion of the tendency to dichotomize." --Barbara Smuts, U. Mich. % [On not feeling 'House-on-Fire' Love] I speak as one whose house has burned a few times, and while it is a glorious experience and while I pity anyone whose house doesn't at least have serious smoke damage, there is no connection between this and a sustained relationship. --Mr. Blue % And remember that sleep is a form of meditation and a good night's sleep can solve difficult problems. It really can. --Mr. Blue % They have already forgiven Clinton not only for his dalliance but for lying about it, and they have forgiven him not because they are indifferent to it, not because they don't care, not because "the economy is good," not because they find the behavior admirable, but because what they cannot forgive is Kenneth Starr's asking about it in the first place. --Steve Erickson, www.salonmagazine.com % > > P.S. There's nothing like the sound of the pipes (played by > > someone good) to make you feel home sick. > > Rather depends where home is, surely? :-) Not really... Whenever I hear bagpipes I want to go home, mainly because my home doesn't have anyone playing bagpipes in it. --cam.misc % Listen, kid, stop adding up batting averages in sports pages. Go outdoors. Play in the sun and have fun, now, before it's too late, because before you can say Jack Robinson, twilight falls and the game will be over. --The Boston Globe Ombudsman % "Without music, life would be a mistake. ...I would only believe in a God that knew how to dance." --Friedrich Nietzsche % Let me walk you through this: If there were such things as angels, which there are not, and if there were such a thing as God, which there is not, God and his heavenly host would have more important things to do than stand at the foot of your bed and watch you get fucked in the ass. Angels, despite the pop-culture moment they're currently enjoying, do not exist. --Dan Savage % "You're unnatturally mean spirited today, Kirk" "Me? Are you serious?" "Well, in a friendly kind of way I guess." --John Lammers + Kirk Israel 98-7-23 % "The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I'm left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can't quite remember." --George Carlin % Boss: There are no new original ideas! Me: I've heard that. --ed@csd.uwm.edu % It's the ones who resist that we most want to kiss Wouldn't you say? --George Michael, "Cowboys and Angels" % Questioning the Religous System = MetaSin = Medicine. Heh. % > > All positive integers are interesting! > Any doubters? No, no, no. All positive integers are boring. Proof by contradiction: Let n be the smallest non-boring positive integer. So what? QED. --sci.math % All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism. --/usr/bin/fortune % mrs.major betty israel is a BAD GIRL -Sarah % "Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated." --R. Drabek % I still don't think we have much to worry about. You could spend the rest of the millennium thinking about the myriad of small, detailed problems that will crop up when the chronometer rolls over, but I still say that overall this is primarily a management problem, not a computer problem. I think we can be sure that the biggest technical problems will be solved, and at worst we will be faced with some (maybe many) minor hassles. We can't cure every computer system, but we can identify those which must be cured, and focus on them. The really bad stuff won't happen. When non-critical systems fail, they will be fixed or replaced on a priority basis. Someday we will look back on this and laugh the way we do at people who panicked over the passing of Haley's comet last century. People always fear what they don't understand, and the y2k problem is so widespread (but not necessarily so bad or dangerous), that it's hard for one person to comprehend -- hence the fear reaction. Fortunately, one person does not have to fix this whole thing. --David Johnson on Y2K % "There are two adults and one child. Majority rules. Live like an animal or die." --My Father on the Family % "Jerry, you are a morality-free zone" -- 'Sliding Doors' % "Evolution is blind to the future." --Richard Dawkins % The midwest: the milkshake of human kindness. % Vonnegut quoting Saul Bellow's realisation that we should that which comes easily and naturally, not seek out grand challenges. % Car broke down Wife left me. Life is lite, and then Hefty. --Rand Carlson % "There's always a little bit of heaven, even in a disaster area." --Wavy Gravy % There hasn't been this kind of upheaval in Beantown since John Adams leaned over stoically to Paul Revere, bared his yellow teeth, and whispered, "I've always loved you, my man. I'll always think about your naked ass between my fingers." --HoleCity.com,"Avenge" % "While making 'Supercop,' I dislocated a cheekbone. I didn't even know you could do that." --Jackie Chan % "Say the purpose of sex isn't procreation or recreation. Say it's concentration. Say it makes you focus on the person you're sleeping with, 'cause there's just too many other people in the world. It's like biological highlighter. [...] Look for me first, in any crowded room, and I'll do the same" --Lyle Lovett, The Opposite of Sex % For him, having sex came as naturally as breathing. Even more so. Which may have explained his fascination with autoerotic aphyxiation... % "Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love you knowing nothing?" -- Lloyd Cole and the Commotions % "[falling in love is] Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life." --Roger, 9 % "Beauty is skin deep. But how rich you are can last a long time." --Christine, 9 % "Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I've been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me." --Bobby, 8 % "Don't forget your wife's name...that will mess up the love." --Roger, 8 % "Be a good kisser. It might make your wife forget that you never take the trash out." --Randy, 8 % Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's 'right to know'. -- Kenneth Starr?, 1987, "Sixty Minutes" % Along the way you ran into dangerous enemies described in the [Mighty Bomb Jack] manual like this: "Rube: It is very much revengeful towards Jack, and it pursues him endlessly." Translation: "Ha ha, American. Tecmo no hire no one for speak English make manual of you." --Seanbaby % Van Ho, Van Ho! It's off to march he goes- he trips and falls and marks time wrong- Van Ho, Van Ho Van Ho Van Ho! 98-9-25 % THE LIVING END Before long the end Of the beginning Begins to bend To the beginning Of the end you live With some misgivings About what you did. --Samuel Menashe % Religion is like masturbation because: It doesn't produce anything. Nothing is created by it. A lot of people spend a lot of time at it and derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it. Most important, polite people do it in private. --alt.fan.cecil-adams % "Levi, want to wear my vest? It's a zipper...." (Hells Angel seducing Almish Man in drug selling incident) - Suzanne Westenhoffer % "Cynicism in a writer is not just bad faith, it's a critical wound. " --Mr. Blue % As we get older, we accumulate certain griefs that never go away. They're simply a part of our lives. We can still be happy and productive, but they never go away. --Door interview with Garrison Keillor % ...the universe is only five days old (it only seems to be much older because when God made it five days ago, He made lots of instant "memory"-laden adults, libraries full of apparently ancient books, mountains full of brand-new fossils, and so forth) --Douglas Hofstadter % "fiction gives aspirations to our relationships" % "Where's the pep spirit?" "Pap smear?" "Pot smoke?" --Mike+Mo, EHS Homecoming 98-10-9 % Falling in love happens like multiplication. Unfortunately, broken hearts heal only at the slow pace of addition. 98-10-13 % "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." --Tolstoy % Geek Code v3.1 GCS/L d(--) s:+ a-- C++ US+ P+++ L+ E W+++ N++ o+ K+ w++ !O !M+ V PS+ PE+ Y PGP t 5 X R- tv- b++ DI++ D++ G- e++ h- r++ y+ % On losing Daylight Savings Time: Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Well I say fuck 'em both. 98-10-26 % If penises could walk and talk, the circumcised penis would be a suit and tie, a clean shave and a shoulder-high salute. The intact penis would be a rumpled shirt, a five o'clock shadow and a finger flipping you the bird. --Debra S. Ollivier % "Our research and experience show that there is nothing in life more fun than the military." --Capt. Mike Doubleday % "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he is, and all he's ever gonna be." --Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven % Maharaja Bhupendra Singh of Patiala (1670-1733) - 365 wives Once said, "wine, fish, meat, alcohol and plenty of sex was good for the soul." A toweringly handsome Sikh with a colorful personality, he was famed for his sexual prowess and appetite and forever on the lookout for pretty women, even going so far as to kidnap them when they refused his overtures. Every evening he would light 365 lanterns around his palace, each with the name of one of his wives inscribed on it. The wife whose lamp went out first would be his for the night. For leap years, he'd take the night off. --World Sexual Records, http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~jmeans/WSR.html % Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) A tireless French actress, Sarah went through more than 1,000 lovers in her colorful life, many of them famous writers and artists. She once observed, "It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." Sarah often slept in a rosewood coffin lined with letters from her lovers. --World Sexual Records, http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~jmeans/WSR.html % And so I'm leaving You can find out how much better things can get And if it helps I'd say I feel a little worse than I did when we met (So when you find someone else You can try again, Might work next time) --Dar Williams, "As Cool As I Am" % "Man Prone To Lying Beds Woman Prone To Lying Prone" --The Onion headline, Nov 18 1998 % You must always distribute and consume Tic Tacs® in twos, otherwise you're just dealing with Tics. 98-11-21 % the dye is cast the dice are rolled i feel like shit you look like gold % "Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known." --Michael Shermer % "Helen doesn't nag. She just mentions the hell out of things." --Mr. Vanderpoel % MEDIOCRITY "It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late." INEPTITUDE "If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly." PROCRASTINATION "Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now." STUPIDITY "Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those that never win AND never quit are idiots." DEFEAT "For every winner, there are dozens of losers. Odds are you're one of them." MISTAKES "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." Demotivators, http://www.despair.com % "Love? What is it? Most natural pain killer what there is. L O V E" --William Burrough's Journal % Q. How do you make a cat go 'woof'? A. Drench it in gasoline and flick a match at it! Q. How do you make a dog go 'meaow'? A. Deep freeze it, and run it through a power saw! % "God bless... God damn." --last words of James Thurber 1961 % "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." --last words of Richard Feynman, 1988 % "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." --last words of Oscar Wilde 1900 % "No no- not my eyes! Great God of Rabbits, how that hurts!" --Thumper being mauled by the wise old owl % "No matter how many tricks you do, you will still bore the cat." --Marmaduke % "Intelligence is no impediment to stupidity" --Wayne Green % On the death of a baby racoon: "It's either mean or it's arbitrary, and either way I've got the heebie-jeebies." --Calvin % "He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day- but that's not why *I* ran away." 99-1-9 % "It's Time To Party Like It's This Year!" --Jackie Harvey's "The Outside Scoop", The Onion % For the past month or so I haven't been able to shake the feeling that winter consists of the Arctic forces reaching south, trying to take over our land. 99-1-14 % "[World War I] changed the language. It made patriotic words sound hollow, unacceptable, ridiculous" --Stephen E. Ambrose, "Citizen Soldiers" % "God damn the bastards, they got me. The hell with it." --Pvt. Jack Leonard, D-Day % "Fuck you, Hemingway." --Pvt. Jack Crawford, Late Summer 1944 % "Life is not for amateurs." --Mort Gerson % What we really need is "Prozac for Sharks" to make our seas safe. % "I'm Drew Carey, God's Hackey-Sack" % "I think I have attention deficit whatever." --Tina the Troubled Teen % Love is less about the perfect moments and more about how you handle the imperfect ones. 99-1-25 % "Mobility is Nobility" --Timothy Leary % "Winter is acommin' in, let us sing Goddamn." --Ezra Pound % "Sisyphus has a sense of playfulness [...] you have to look at it from the rock's point of view." --Pointy Haired Boss, Dilbert (TV) % "I have heard of a drinking game associated with "2001: A Space Odyssey" - You drink every time someone speaks. By the end of the movie, you are still sober." --friedman@Xenon.Stanford.EDU % "Why Do You Persist In Tormenting Me So?" % "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people." --Adolf Hitler, 1933-04-26 % "The Blues isn't about feeling better-- it's about making other people feel worse." --Bleeding Gums Murphy % I like a good time as much as the next guy. I'm just not... the next guy. --Next Stop Wonderland % I just got cable and I feel like I brought home a big bag of heroin. There's some excitement (oh boy, I'm going to try heroin!) mixed with a lot of fear (wait a minute; I'm going to be a junkie). --http://www.subatomichumor.com % Who were the Celts, anyway? Some kind of ancient culture. Some kind of ancient *loser* culture. They didn't even build stonehenge -- that was the Druids. So, even by the standards of other backwards, ancient, loser cultures, the Celts were underachievers. --http://www.subatomichumor.com % "God or somebody save us from any society founded on Darwinian principles." --Richard Dawkins % Too often we take stair railings for granted. We use them and don't even think about them. I guess that's an example of good design. 99-2-9 % I don't kill flies, but I like to mess with their minds. I hold them above globes. They freak out and yell "Whoa, I'm way too high!" --Mark Pitta % Then's the moment not to be astounded When you find you've been merry-go-rounded --Ogden Nash, Vernen Jordan, "Roundabout" % POST FACTO: Her: "Mmmm, I love simultaneous orgasms." Him: "Guhhhkkguh..." % "Life is what happens while you're busy looking for a parking space." --John Seabrook % "Uncertainty in the pressure of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales." --Bertrand Russell % "S+M is more than just pain..." "Oh, I know-" "Yeah, but the pain's important too." 99-2-20 % unix love: gawk, date, finger, wait, unzip, touch, nice, suck, strip, mount, fsck, umount, make clean, sleep. --norman@arcady.u-net.com (NF Stevens) % The Difference Between Pornography and Erotica is Lighting." --Gloria Lenoard % sesquipedalian: given to or characterized by the use of long words % "When they ask me what I liked best, I'll say it was you." --Maggie Rice, City of Angels % "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. *A lousy interface would mean a lousy life.*" --Myron Krueger % "An art form based on the computer should be impossible without it." --Myron Krueger % You might like to know that *every* national anthem in the world can be sung with the words "I am right and you are wrong". Try it -- you'll annoy the *hell* out of people (the USSR is one of the hardest to make scan, but even it works, after a fashion. US, UK, Germany, France dead easy.) --Alan Lothian % "The past resembles the future as water resembles water" --Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) % Don't theorize about your own romances, friend. Be thrilled, be ecstatic, be desolate, but don't be an expert about you and the people you love and why it happened. With love, the pleasure is in the details, not in the theory. Love has to do with her eyes, the touch of her hand, her voice, her laughter, how it felt to stand next to her and feel her brush against you, how it felt to see her after a long absence. Love isn't a Problem to sit around and discuss. If your heart still longs for her, then you are in love, and her idea about why it didn't work out is something that may give her consolation but it doesn't mean anything to you or me. --Mr. Blue % > Jesus knows how to get down! Somebody must've taught Him then, because the last I heard, He couldn't. Jesus Christ on a dance floor: "Help! I've risen but I can't get down!" --Delain, Expert Doughminatrix % [ courtesy of daniel ] Nothing good comes from phone calls at three a.m. "I'm so sorry," she began. The caller ID said the rest. --bittersweets.org % "A small anarchic community of wireheads and hackers made the mistake of giving fire to the masses. Nobody is going to give it back. It is paradise lost." --John Markoff % The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. --Bertrand Russell % "Forget her, Stanely... That girl will tear your heart out, put it in a blender, and hit frappe" --The Mask % "Life is a 3-D movie without the glasses." --Ronnie Shakes % "Don't matter how gorgeous she is, some guy's tired of her." --alibaba@Hawaii.edu's grandpaw % When he was growing up, my father lived under what he likes to describe as "harsh circumstances" in a small, ugly apartment. By harsh circumstances my father means that they had a curtain instead of a bathroom door. He never had a bedroom and had to sleep on a back-breaking foldout sofa and go to work before and after school, shining shoes and selling newspapers. He has a point there, that's harsh. Unfortunately, they never gave him a medal for it and as a result he brings it up time and time again. --David Sedaris, "My Manuscript" % "The first time ever kissed a man I was in a blue rental Geo Metro." --D. % empty dorm room; two red earrings by the unmade bed % Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Walter Lewin has calculated that there are 80 billion trillion atoms in a dollar bill! --Ripley's Believe It or Not!, 99-4-15 % "Lets remember to pray for Mrs. Lance- she injured herself quite seriously, breaking her leg in two places." "Sounds like we have to keep her out of those kinds of places..." --Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Israel % "Don't call me a bitch when we're making love, it really pisses me off." % "Turnpike!" "Where? Did you see a sign?" "No, for a name: Turnpike Israel." "Grrr- how about 'Dumbass Israel'?" K+R Summer 1996 % "Evaporation is God's paper towel" --Dylan Murray % "Whoa, like, lay off my headbone, daddy-o." The Onion's Our Dumb Century, "Area Beat Beaten" % "Life's to short to buy green bananas" --check slogan % Jon: Sometimes I believe in god. Nancy: Really? Jon: Yeh, like on perfectly still summer days, when there's no movement at all. Then I try to light a cigarette, and a big gust of wind comes and blows out my match. Frickin' god! He's such a goodie good. Nancy: Yeh. --http://www.advancednet.net/objectcity/o.htm % A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit. --In the August 1993 issue of PS magazine, the Army's magazine of preventive maintenance % This site was made possible by a grant from Atlantic Puppy-Grinding Company. "It may be cruel, but think of the jobs!" --http://members.tripod.com/~tzimisce69/ % "The voters are not always smart. They're not always intelligent about the issues." --Jesse "The Governer" Ventura % "You cannot move mountains if you believe them to be mountains. You must think of them as collections of small stones, which can be moved one at a time, and then reassembled." --The Tao of Meow % "Don't think of it as programming. think of it as warfare." --Dmitry Orlov,99-5-13 % "What is it with this chick, she have beer flavored nipples?" --10 Things I Hate About You % "A dead man could get up a better legend than this one. I don't mean a fresh dead man either; I mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks." --Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi % "I'm just a walking mountain of testosterone. Step off." --99-5-15, Dylan's Goodbye Brunch % "Dixie to Cicero: The Jazz Migration" [...] Songs include: "She Be Big, Maybe Too Big Blues," "Can I Has Yo Fish?", and the classic "Wha's Dis on Yo Shoe?" --Humans % "Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret." --TWENTY PAST MIDNIGHT, 99-5-22 % "Why do you suppose we only feel compelled to chase the ones who run away?" "Immaturity?" --Dangerous Liason % Of course, degeneration is programmed into our DNA: Nature seems to want us to reproduce and then fall by the wayside. But your generation wants to hang onto its youth into its 90s, on the theory that if you stay around long enough maybe you can get your life together. --Mr.Blue % Dear Social Arbiters: I hear you can tell what kind of a lover a man is by the way he dances. Is that true? Melissa Dear Melissa: Yes, it's simple. A man who is a good dancer is not a good lover. No one knows why this is true. No evidence about women has yet been published. Social Arbiters --Cynthia Heimel, "But Enough About You" % Through the twilight, / I can hear the humming Of a melancholy tune. For the memories that still linger,/ I thank you Mr. Moon. And, although I've never smiled, /Winter, summer, autumn too, Now here's one tune to remind me / why I feel so blue... Tubas in the Moonlight Playing for me all night Tell me what I want to hear... Am I only dreamin'? Am I only schemin? Stars above me, shining brightly... Why can't she be sitting here beside me? Tubas in the moonlight Will bring my loved ones home --Dave Gannett, "Tubas From Hell" % Remember: revenge is the best revenge. --Cynthia Heimel, "But Enough About You" % Even the broken letters of the heart Spell...Earth. [...] Even the earth of the brokenhearted can heal --Daniel Thompson (in Spare Change) % "Lips kissed for the first time are kissed forever." --Sandra Bernhard, "Love, Love, Love" % "Before enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice. After enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice." --Max Rible % "Humility is no substitute for a good personality." --Fran Lebowitz % "Negative space: it's better than nothing." --99-6-1 % "Life is a traffic jam of crosses to bear." --Mark O'Donnell, Getting Over Homer % Ammo@Sportsman's Guide: "Let's shoot our way through Y2K"(tm) % "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." --John von Neumann (1951) % "Perl is the Cliff Notes of Unix." "It's no accident that the ductwork shows in shell scripts. Only we call them pipes." --Larry Wall, "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" % "How do you know I'd be afraid?" Lloyd said, "How do you know that would be the last thing I'd feel?" "I don't know that." Shwartz *tick-ticked*ed the pen. "You can never know. That's what's terrible about death." "Lots of things you don't know when you're alive. So what's the difference?" Schwartz's fingers stopped, and he stared at Lloyd as though he had seen him purely and for the first time. --Thomas H. McNeely, from "Sheep" % [When asked "Does the Bible specifically tell us what is going to happen in the future"] "It sure does, Ben, it definitely does...this is definite...it specifically clearly, unequivocally says that Russia and other countries will enter into war and God will destroy Russia through earthquakes, volcanoes..." --Pat Robertson,"700 Club" 1981-12-2 % I've known about the dangers of sex for quite a while, but having some girl shatter my skull with her tongue wasn't one that I'd have expected. --otto.man@the.couch, rec.arts.movies.current-films % "The fact is good writers are almost never dangerous." --John Gardener % "Man Versus Nature: The Road To Victory" --Troy McClure movie on The Simpsons % Edgar: "You can have my gun when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands." Bug: "Your terms are acceptable." --Men In Black: % [On Claim that Star Wars is ripping off the Bible:] "I especially like the bible scene were Jesus' tie fighter goes spiralling out of control into the void-- you just *know* he's gonna be back!" --99-6-15 % 1) Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again... 3) I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce. 9) I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth. 13) No, my powers can only be used for good. 14) How about never? Is never good for you? 16) You sound reasonable...Time to up my medication. 22) It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy. 26) Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject. --Smart Comments (rec.humor.funny) % Leibowitz's Rule: When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you hold the hammer with both hands. % "I'm gonna walk down to the corndog shack and watch the girlies make lem-one-ade." --Cotton, King of the Hill % "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons." --James Thurber % "You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets." --Nora Ephron % "Things that upset a terrier may pass virtually unnoticed by a Great Dane." --Smiley Blanton % "Sometimes, in the pursuit of pleasure, we forget that what we are ultimately searching for is happiness." --someone on alt.support.diet % My purpose is not to change anything. I don't give a shit about this country. This country could explode tomorrow and I'd just move to Ireland. I don't care about America, I don't care about democracy, I don't care about the human race. And I don't care about religion or God or any of those things. I care about friendship, family ties and romantic love. Those are the things I believe in. And I love my writing. --George Carlin % Measuring time in sunburns- "but darling, the romance between me and her proved it couldn't last and besides, that was many sunburns ago." --99-6-24 % "Who are you and how did you get in here?" "I'm a locksmith. And...I'm a locksmith." --Police Squad % "'Course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay" --Bull Durham % "...and He rolled the huge stone away from the mouth of the cave... and stepped outside...into bright sunlight...and......six more weeks of winter!" --Bear on a.f.c-a % 1000 love poems read about the sense of soaring, flying, using the stars for navigation. I realized that wasn't me, never was. I am too much of this earth; Of this joking earth, to be fair, The world is too much with me. % "'Pet me a little then feed me'... Sounds about right." --Mo on understanding different types of cats % "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." --Ancient Eastern Saying? % Family Anecdote: "I don't talk to no walls." --James Israel % Q. How come so many women love horses, which are big and dirty and smelly and stupid and go to the bathroom all over the place, and yet women are highly critical when men exhibit exactly these qualities? A. That is a good question. --Dave Berry's Questions and Answers % We are, as the animal behaviorist John S. Kennedy calls us, "compulsive" anthropomorphizers. [...] Human beings do it so instinctively that they are forever ascribing malignant or benignant motives even to inanimate forces such as the weather, volcanoes, and internal-combustion engines. --Stephen Budiansky, "The Truth About Dogs", The Atlantic July 1999 % "Nostradamus did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks." --Unca Cecil % "Earth to stupid guy, hello!" --Homer Simpson % The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian's readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians' predisposition for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why they led the field for many years in both chess and ax murders. It is well known that as early as 1970, the U.S.S.R., aware of what a defeat at Reykjavik would do to national prestige, implemented a vigorous program of preparation and incentive. Every day for an entire year, a team of psychologists, chess analysts and coaches met with the top three Russian grand masters and threatened them with a pointy stick. That these tactics proved fruitless is now a part of chess history and a further testament to the American way, which provides that if you want something badly enough, you can always go to Iceland and get it from the Russians. --Marshall Brickman, Playboy, April, 1973 % "It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy." --Larry Wall % Statistics are not useful for predicting individual human behavior. --hpstrdufuz@aol.com, alt.fan.cecil-adams % 'Death and Distraction!' said the Pins and Needles. 'Destruction and Debauchery!' --Edward Gorey, The Inanimate Tragedy % Next day a motorist drove up And told her to expect a cup. The weeks went by; no package came; She did not know the sender's name. 'Life is distracting and uncertain,' She said and went to draw the curtain. --Edward Gorey, The Eleventh Episode % "I love skissors!" --Woman on Sexbytes 2.5 % >I make a lousy single guy. We all do, Kirk, the world is just full of guys who won't admit it. --Greg Owen, 99-7-9 % Proposed definition: [for a typo for "emphasis"] emphasism (n.) - the belief that nothing exists beyond what one is concentrating on. --Chris on alt.fan.cecil-adams % "That is what June says. She repeats, 'And you forget this, and you forget that. You only remember the wrongs.' The truth is, Anaïs, that I take goodness for granted. I expect everybody to be good. It is evil which fascinates me." --Henry Miller, from The Diaries of Anaïs Nin % "I want to leave a scar on the world." --Henry Miller, from The Diaries of Anaïs Nin % "Anyone who does not have a mistress is a nincompoop." --Francis I of France % "That really reminds me of a film Woody Allen would make." --Mo after watching (Woody Allen's) "Celebrity" % Frasier: You exploit vulnerable people, charging them huge fees for holding their hands and pretending insight into their problems. Fortune Teller: How is that different from what you do? Frasier: [long pause] I can prescribe drugs. --Cheers % She lay on her side, the table lamp on beside her. I saw that damned chin hair still, and the curving line down to her hollow waist and up the bump over her hip that's so unbelievably beautiful it proves God's a perverted ass freak. --Matthew Klam, "Issues I Dealt With In Therapy" % "Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered" --H. L. Mencken % Six wise, blind elephants were discussing what humans were like. Failing to agree, they decided to determine what humans were like by direct experience. The first wise, blind elephant felt the human, and declared, "Humans are flat." The other wise, blind elephants, after similarly feeling the human, agreed. % "What's it all about? After the last line, *what*?" --Henry Miller % "Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." --Alan Dean Foster % "Ohhho, your inner child pretty much runs the place, huh?" --Tracy (The Drew Carey Show) % "Aww Kate, nothing's corny if it gets you some" --Drew (The Drew Carey Show) % "We never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." --Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being % Necessity knows no magic formulae-- they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders. --Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being % While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs [...], but if they meet when they are older [...] their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. --Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being % She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Facism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. --Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being % As reported, the American version of [the orgy] sequence has had digital figures introduced during a 65-second shot in order to obscure the copulating bodies that caused the MPAA board to threaten the film with an NC-17. Apparently, it wasn't the nudity that bugged the board -- it was the movement of the couples. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the MPAA ratings board are the only people left in America who don't move when they fuck, but do they have to ruin the fun for the rest of us? --Salon's Charles Taylor on Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" % "There may be intelligent life on other planets in the galaxy, but somebody, somewhere, had to be first." --Carl Sagan % "You don't SIT IN the traffic jam; you ARE the traffic jam."--Werner Icking % "They say that true love is when you strip away all the passion and romance and you find that you still care for the other person." "Well. What fun is that?" --bitersweets.org % "You're not obsessed with [death], you just resent it." --Mo,99-7-17 % "Lurp is the integer between 3 and 4" --Mo, recalling lessons from CTY % Because that's really something I can't stand -- when people refer to themselves as crazy. The truly crazy are labled so on the grounds that they see nothing wrong with their behavior. They forge ahead, lighting fires in public buildings and defecating in frying pans without the slightest notion that they are out of step with society. That, to me, is crazy. Calling yourself crazy is not crazy, just obnoxious. --David Sedaris, Barrel Fever % "SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON'T THINK SO." --sign language by Crumpet the Macy's SantaLand Elf (David Sedaris) % "Ahh to be young again. And also a robot." --Professor Farnsworth, Futurama % "You know- sometimes it's a good day to die, some days it's a good day to have breakfast." --Thomas Builds-The-Fire, "Smoke Signals" % The World's Last Romantic took a breath and knocked on the blue door, flowers in hand. --99-7-20 % "Evil is just plain bad! You don't cotton to it! You gotta smack it on the nose with the rolled up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog! Bad dog!"-The Tick % "A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars." --http://photo.net/bg/ % "What's the matter, Miss Quinn? Have we forgotten the words to 'Eeny meeny miney mo'?" --Campus Comedy % Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth... --John Gillespie Magee, Jr., start of "High Flight" % Chanting against Nazism is like drinking for sobriety. --http://www.subatomichumor.com % Unch: a unit of measure for grapefruit juice --from a typo of Mo's, 99-7-26 % "I love everything that flows" % "Man is a god in ruins." --Ralph Waldo Emerson % Two Belgrade residents are having coffee together. One says, "How do you feel about the bombing last night?" The other takes a long sip of coffee and replies, "Well, I feel I was missed." --Joke from the Former Yugoslavia % "Good looks aren't everything. It's also important to have loose morals." --Culture Time: 20 Pat Midnight 99-7-28 % "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." --John Kenneth Galbraith % "I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted paychecks." --net.humor: "Sarcastic Remarks" % "Values of ß will give rise to dom!" --Ritchie's Sixth Edition Unix mv command % /* You are not expected to understand this */ --Ritchie, comment in Sixth Edition Unix % Many supermarket chashiers here in Nashville wear these ["What Would Jesus Do?"] bracelets. I have this recurring fantasy of one day screaming out "You know what Jesus would do?!?! He'd bag my fucking groceries a bit faster!" --john-dean@msn.com % "Unrequited Love is like hitting your head against a wall that isn't there." --Too Much Coffee Man % "If you can't be happy naturally, you might as well force it." --Too Much Coffee Man % "That which doesn't kill you will make you bitter and cynical." --Too Much Espresso Guy % "We're going to party like it's 1999. Again." --Frye on Futurama % Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states. --John Bernal % "God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen." --S. Hawking % "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" --Isaac Asimov % "But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me." --Richard Feynman % "Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things." --Gandalf, "The Two Towers" % "love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time" -ani difranco, "two little girls" % McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom: If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95. % "Why you're about as 'fatale' as an after-dinner mint." --Cabaret % Uma Thurman on a Hog Harley: now *that's* heaven. --k.d.lang % This life is like an Atomic Fire Ball (r) - once you get past the stuff that hurts it's pretty sweet. % "[life is like chocolate covered espresso beans...] once you get past the stuff that's sweet, it's really dark and bitter and keeps you up at night." % "She moved so easily All I could think of was sunlight" --Paul Simon % "Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep." Pynchon % Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors. His hands are limp between his knees. There are too many things to feel about this woman. His head hurts. Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." --Toni Morrison % (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens, only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) --e.e. cummings % liFe is Not aLL jazz and Joy) sMiles and suNNy weaTher! EVERy golD has it'S aLloy! toHOld tHe Stuff together! !if LUCk is good! why maN aliVE! weLcoMe iT! And ch eer iT! buT if THE drinK'S two seven five Try to griN! AND beer iT! heNry! --don marquis % I see friends shaking hands saying 'how do you do?' they're really saying 'I love you' and I think to myself What a wonderful world" --Louis Armstrong % "I think it's kind of funny you think I'm the boy to make you cry I can make you happy... if only for a while" --George Michael % "Would not a rose, by any other name, have so many ?$^ thorns????" % The autumn leaves are falling like rain. Although my neighbors are all barbarians, And you, you are a thousand miles away, There are always two cups at my table. --Author Unknown, dated from the T'ang Dynasty % "Broken heart, huh?" "Does it show?" "Listen, when you've been tickling the ivories for as long as I have, you see a broken heart for every drop of rain, a shattered dream for every falling star..." --Rowlf and Kermit, The Muppet Movie % run away with me where everywhere and then what be with me And our kisses were like chewing dynamite. % I turn the set back on and close my eyes. "I want to understand you," a woman is saying to The Fugitive. "You will in time," The Fugitive tells her. "May I use your car?" --Jay Gummerman, "We Find Ourselves in Moontown" % It's very hard to get your head and heart to work together in life. In my case, they're not even friendly. --Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors % "The helicopter on the computer screen has to be spinning- otherwise it just wouldn't work." --Rick Hanson on The Matrix and pretty much every computer mockup in movieland % Larry Bone wrote: > "He who uses profanity gives other people permission to ignore > what he is saying" - Kurt Vonnegut. "A similar effect can be achieved by quoting Kurt Vonnegut." - me --bd % Life is a search for the truth; and there is no truth --Chinese Proverb % This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general. --Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line % "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." --Benjamin Franklin % "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that's my religion." --Abraham Lincoln % "I'm taking care of you Taking good care of you For, once, I was very little, too Now I take care of you." --Fred Rogers % My basic rule of life is, "Do unto others as you would [have others] do unto you." It's not Christian, it's global. It's a simple rule, and in most situations it tells you what you should do. If you ever wonder, "What should I do?" and you ask yourself that question-- "What would I want somebody else to do?"--suddenly you know the right answer. --Linus Torvalds % "You were thinkin' too much. I mean, he's there, he's hittin' ya, ya can't *think* about this, Joey, it takes too long." "I thought you said it was a mental game." "In a sense, yes. But primarily, no. Primarily, you gotta hit the guy." --Ethan Coen, "Destiny" % [On Y2K Survival Kits] Yeah, right! If the world.s grinding to a halt in a few months I really want to spend that time on some kind of goofy scavenger hunt for bottled water and band-aids. You.re even supposed to pack several months worth of pet food. Look, man, if it comes to that, the pets *are* food. --http://www.subatomichumor.com/ % "Life's a bitch and so's my mom" --topic on Win Ben Stein's Money % "*kiss kiss*" "There's not enough beer in the world, Spleen, I'm sorry-" --Spleen & Bowler, Mystery Men % Cybersybar wrote: >"Who owns the fish?". The correct answer is "Yes". > It's a Zen koan, get it? Come closer and I'll show you the sound of one hand clapping. --Bill Baldwin on a.f.c-a % Sometime after their breakup, after they had each regained their strides with new love, they met. They discussed the idea that every person has a finite amount of love, that the other relationships they had found true romance in precluded the two of them from loving now. To their surprise, their goodbye kiss was greedy and passionate. All he could think of was "Well, there goes my affection for the country of China."- the feeling had to be coming from somewhere. --99-8-17 % "Life sucks and then you keep living." --BEK (New Yorker, Aug. 23 & 30, 1999) % "Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse." --Miguel de Cervantes % "Alejandro, forgive me, but this world in here seems crazy to me. Why would sensible people, who can afford to buy fish, want this torture instrument in their houses? It is far beyond my understanding." --Porfirio the Fisherman on a catalog offering a rowing machine (quoted by Alastair Reid) % "Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum"- "Justice be done, though it bring down the cosmos." (from article on Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address in The Atlantic, denouncing extremism in 'just vengance') % "Well-behaved women rarely make history." --Laurel Thatcher Ulrich % "The real problem with having mind-controlled zombies as my servants is that it's tough to get up a really sincere-sounding round of cheers when I've come up with a plan I think is worth cheering." --Maximus, X-Factor Annual 2. % "Life is right in any case." --film "Kama Sutra" % "You may look upon the future and behold: It will be boring." --Robert Gilmore % "Kids are not nice, innocent, flower-loving little rainbow children. Kids are all little bastards; they don't have any kind of social tact or etiquette." -- "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone % Time flies like a rocket ship. Like one of those old rocket ships, that's only good for one trip, and stages fall off to plunge into the ocean, pieces of shattered burnt-out wreckage as the main section barely makes it up to beyond the atmosphere, not like one of these new-fangled reusable space shuttles with all their fancy-shmancy 1970s technologies that get to fly and land and fly again. % "I didn't wake up this morning--" --World's Shortest Blues Song by "Blind Lemon" Yankovic % Salvation Army: Special Force: Some homeless people don't want to be helped. For these people we call... Salvation Army: Special Force! Working together with the Salvation Army, the Salvation Navy, the Salvation Tank Core and the Salvation Air Force, this elite team delivers free sandwiches and religious pamphlets to the most dangerous poor people around, with the help of an amazing arsenal of hi-tech machinery and, of course, God. --www.subatomichumor.com, "Inside Hollywood" % "Bumblebees would be more fashionable if they didn't wear stripes, which is what makes them look so fat that scientists think they can't fly." --Kibo % "When one has tasted watermelons, one knows what angels eat." --Mark Twain % "Red beans and ricely yours," --letter closing of Louis Armstrong % "... in ancient times they said a thing was holy if it made you hold your tongue. We said it was holy if it made you laugh." --John Crowley,"Engine Summer" % "EAT WITH GUSTO, SHIT WITH GUSTO, DO NOT FEAR DEATH." --rubber stamp % "It's art. You give it up, you were never an artist in the first place." --Lionel Dobie, New York Stories % As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way. --Deep Thoughts % I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it. --Deep Thoughts % I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money." --Deep Thoughts % "I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines" --Sir Alec Guinness on why he encouraged George Lucas to kill off Obi-Wan % "Here I predict Mr. Liston's dismemberment. I'll hit him so hard he'll wonder where October and November went." --Cassius Clay % "Personally, I always claim Cecil Earl is a little screwy, or if he is not screwy that he will do very well as a pinch-hitter until a screwy guy comes up to bat." --"Broadway Complex", Damon Runyon % "After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know the Stone was really not such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all-- the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them." --Dumbledore, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", J.K.Rowling % Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. --Psalms 137:9 % "It is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching." - Assyrian Tablet, c.2800BC % A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the way that astonishes him least. --Tao of Programming, http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html % "If life was fair there wouldn't be rich people." --Beth, NewsRadio % "Microsoft has done for software what McDonald's did for the hamburger." --PC Magazine, June 1997 % "We put the hyper into hypertext" --99-9-18 % "Whatcha doin'?" "Looking for frogs." "How come?" "I must obey the inscrutable exhortatons of my soul." "Ah. But of course." "My mandate also includes weird bugs." --Hobbes and Calvin % the terms of youth the uncounted cost *the loves we've held that then we lost.* the twists of this heartache known to give as well as take --99-9-23 % "Listen, the FBI *had* to use deadly force: Those guys in there had some sort of Messiah or something." --The Onion on Waco % "Santa Claus. He's a foolish story for small children. He's a big jolly bribe to control their criminal instincts." --Mysterious Old Man, "Red Ranger Came Calling", Berkeley Breathed % Meeting a Zen master on the road, Face him neither with words nor silence. Give him an uppercut And you will be called one who understands Zen. --The Gateless Gate #36 % Song of Oysters I like to eat an uncooked oyster. Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister Nothing's easier on your gorge Or, when the time comes, to disgorge. But not to let it too long rest Within your mouth is always best. For if your mind dwells on an oyster... Nothing's slicker. Nothing's moister. I prefer my oyster fried. Then I'm sure my oyster's died. --Roy Blount, Jr from "One Fell Soup" % "May the wind always be at your back but not coming out of you yourself personally" --Prairie Home Commonplace Book "Irish Envy" % As I get older, I don't enjoy the same things I once enjoyed. But I enjoy new and different things! I just don't enjoy them as much as I used to enjoy the things I no longer enjoy. --Arlo, "Arlo + Janis" % You Shall Not Subject Your God To Market Forces! --Book of Om, Chap. IV v.6b ("Small Gods",Terry Pratchett) % We have the flu. I don't know if this particular strain has an official name, but if it does, it must be something like "Martian Death Flu". You may have had it yourself. The main symptom is that you wish you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past "HIGH", that said "ELECTROCUTION". You know the kind of flu I'm talking about. --Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide" % Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? --TWENTY PAST MIDNIGHT % Be free and open and breezy! Enjoy! Things won't get any better so get used to it. --TWENTY PAST MIDNIGHT % > >Tea is ok, coffee is better. I like it black as a midnight on a > >moonless night - damn good coffee... and HOT! > > I like my coffee like I like my women-- blonde + sweet... > ("I like my coffee like I like my women-- hot, black, and > with one of those little pastry croissant things on the side") --vigstrand.fritz@mailbox.swipnet.se and kisrael@cs.tufts.edu % "Win95, Win98... what are they gonna call it after 2000? Once I realized this I suddenly lost *whatever* faith I had in Microsoft's dealing with that Millenium Bug." --Dylan % This reminded me of a comedian I saw once. (I cannot remember her name of course!) That was just hilarious. She's talk about her boyfriend commenting "I think your gaining weight" and she'd respond "I don't see that hair growing back now do I?" Him: "You didn't do the dishes." Her: "Where's your hair?" --Sandy Breiner % "Come on down to Wendell's For one hell of a kau kau! It's a foot-long lau lau. Better den poi, Better den pig. Wendell's lau lau -- frickin' big!" --Karla % "All I want out of life is to be a monkey of moderate intelligence who wears a suit. That's why I've decided to transfer to business school!" --Guenter the Monkey on Futurama % these romances passed strangely sweet cost *the loves we've held that then we lost.* the wistful bend of this heartache: known to give as well as take --99-10-4 % Happiness is a small and lovely achievement. --Mr. Blue % "What's your favorite instrument? You play them all." "Mmm. Stewardesses!" --The Electryfying Mojo and Prince % 1. We are not heroes. 2. Our time here is brief. 3. Our untapped potential is limited: We are doing about the best we can do. 4. Personal charm doesn't count for much. 5. There's no point in looking back. It doesn't help. --Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente as told to Garrison Keillor % "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs-- they didn't go for it, eh?" "The people have more opiates than they know what to do with." --Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente and Lenin (as told to Garrison Keillor) % "Exceptional my ass!" -Something About Mary, on "special" populations % BAR JOKE #1 A man walks into a bar. He has a few drinks and chats with the bartender. Later that night, he goes home and reflects on the poor decisons he's made in life. CHICKEN JOKE #63 Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the chicken lacks any reasoning or decision-making capabilities, it seems unlikely that the chicken's action was spurred by any particular motivation. --The Newest Jokes From Jokeland, http://www.mcsweeneys.net % "There's nothing horrible in any of them. You know, there's nothing like, 'Wasn't it fantastic when you bent me over the sofa?' Not that I ever did that." --The late Princess Diana's ex-lover James Hewitt, defending his decision to publish Diana's love letters despite her wishes. % "I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you." --Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" % What *I* got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes *so much* that they're depressed, or they're happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general and large: You don't know the individuals who have appreciated it directly. I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn't have it. This was interesting. --Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" % "Oral sex combines a man's two favorite activities. Sex ... and not moving, at all." --Richard Jennie % "Our company newsletter has reports of bizarre workplace crimes. I've never thought of these crimes before, but now I have an urge to be a copycat. Thank goodness my parents raised me to be lazy." --Wally (from Dilbert, October 14, 1999) % THE POINT by Bryan O'Sullivan you could spend an hour counting the petals in a flower it might take you a year to count the veins in each petal if you spent ten lifetimes, maybe you could count its cells but you'd have completely missed the point you fuckhead --cDc #300 % Give me something to bite my teeth into, like your wool socks, gray and soft, best when worn without shoes, displayed, kicked up on the coffee table. Better yet... your jeans; five pockets, rivets, amber thread stitching, with a zipper fly. Again and again they thump and tumble with mine in the dryer. Never offering resistance to its heat. I admit to being frightened at the thought of such a hunger. --Give Me, by Tery J. England (Spare Change) % "Who thought I'd laugh this much in church" "Practical. Spiritual. Fun." --Subway advertising for Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge (www.cambridgevineyard.org) % "Life is made up of impossible plot twists designed to lead to cheap sex. Who are we to question life?" --Jordan Lee in Dreamlover % My comment on that is, no one talks to a hat salesman; everyone talks to a porn shop merchant. --Paul Z [emphasis added] % It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars. --Mr. Blue, 99-10-26 % "Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction." --Dean William R. Inge % "And some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to pieces wi' hammers, like sae mony road-makers run daft -- they say it is to see how the warld was made!" --Sir Walter Scott, St. Ronan's Well (1832) % You may be damned if you do. You may be damned if you don't. You are unquestionably damned if you try to do both. --Greg Owen, 99-10-26 % "Seaside was covered with very nice sands. Sitting on the sands, rolled a cigarette there. I smoked by the sea. It was great, my dear, even though the weather was a little windy. I don't know how long I stayed there. To think about my past pleased me. I couldn't find anything wrong in my past life. Maybe there was something wrong, but I couldn't remember." --Lynne Tillman, "Motion Sickness" % "Although he lacked the strain of irresponsibility which I think essential (in moderation) to the rounded human being, we got on well together and were soon exchanging information without reserve on either side."-Philby book, Lynne Tillman, "Motion Sickness" % You'll see, she prophesies dourly, life is much harder than you young Americans ever imagined it would be, your generation has had it easy, and there won't be anyone around to fight your battles. *Ach*, this life will break your heart. --Lynne Tillman, "Motion Sickness" % [on the idea "You can't unscramble an egg"] Now consider: how expensive would it be to make a device that would take scrambled eggs as an input and deliver unscrambled eggs as an output? There is one ready solution: put a live hen in the box! --Dennet, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" % Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are. --Leslie Orgel % There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? And what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: only love. --Don Juan, from Don Juan DeMarco (1995) % "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them" -Spinoza "The ridiculing and scorn, that's just gravy."-Courage % The AIDS virus has undergone so much mutation in the last decade that its history over that period exhibits more genetic diversity- measured in codon revisions- than is to be found in the entire history of primate evolution! --Dennett % two rubberbands overlapping each other on top of a scribbled page of poetry this is romance --The Guppy % "These poems will convince more than one other you were loved greatly and should be again. Will it be the way a fallen star tells the ground about the night sky?" --Tess Galagher's "Kiss Without a body" % "I dunno, isn't there a drink that uses a egg? Like a 'gin & egg'?" --99-11-6 % We are made up of the same sorts of autonama that invade us [viruses and bacteria] -- no halos of *élan vital* distinguish your antibodies from the antigens they combat; they simply belong to the club that is you, so they fight on your behalf. --Daniel Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" % The Panglossian pessimist says, "Isn't it a shame that this is, after all, the best of all possible worlds!" Imagine a beer comercial: as the sun sets over the mountains, one of the hunks lounging around the campfire intones, "It doesn't get any better than this!" -- at which point his beautiful companion burts into tears: "Oh no! Is that really true?" It wouldn't sell much beer. --Daniel Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" % "The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'" --Rich Jeni % "Knew someone in the pagan community who asserted that for the majority, Jesus Christ was the god of minor injuries and household emergencies..." --dcarpend@kiva.net % Capricorn: (Dec. 22--Jan. 19) Cheer up: Nobody ever died of a broken heart. Unless, that is, you count suicides, depression- related anemia or heart attacks. --Lloyd Schumner Sr. at The Onion % So, if happiness isn't being rich, then it's probably not being middle class, which means you're just as likely to find it at rock bottom, which doesn't require all the effort, and hell, I'm already there. --Jake, "Staggering Heights" % New Dessert Idea: "Wham, Bam, Thank You Flan" % "She left a trail of hopeful, broken hearts behind her a mile long and ten feet deep." --99-11-22 % When faced with the tough choice of either seeking the truth at the risk of his life or cozying up to an all-powerful ruler in return for comfort and security, 17th-century French mathematician and problem gambler Blaise Pascal didn't think twice before doubling down on the latter. "If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing," Pascal wrote famously, adding that only an idiot on the order of Jimmy the Greek could pass on that sort of action. Given such great odds, Pascal concluded with Pete Rose-like certitude, "We are compelled to gamble." "Pascal's Wager" became the model for the self-serving justifications and moral hedging that have characterized the French nation ever since (indeed, we need only substitute "Hitler" and "win" at the appropriate moments in Pascal's formulation to understand France's collaborationist strategy during World War II). --Suck, 1999-11-23 % "I'm the total package: all the lurp, none of the unpleasant smell." (presenting myself as a lurpy but good smelling guy, 99-11-29) % "Life is a struggle. Nobody gets through it unmarked." --Mr. Blue % "You could point to every item in the Sears catalogue and somebody, somewhere, wants to sleep with it." --Detective Dietrich, "Barney Miller" % "Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever." --quoted by Danny Rathjens % Tempus fugit, babe. Everyone dies young. --99-12-2 % Oracle is a Harsh Mistress. --99-12-2 % "Is that a can of polyurethane in your pocket... or are you just happy to see me... or is it a tumor of some sort?" --Mo, 99-12-4 % "You are closer to death, and that makes you kinder." --wall at Man Ray 99-12-4 % "I had an exhilarating, deeply moving, sharing moment with the woman who brought you into this world" --Loomis Farkle getting *nasty* % What is it to be in love? Well, I'm in love, and it means you feel you have sailed into port. At the end of the road, after each day of the petty struggle for power and glory, I get to be with this marvelous human being whose company is continually interesting, whom I admire, who can speak the truth to me, who I am loyal to and fond of to an excessive degree, whom I crave being naked with, and who reciprocates these feelings. There is deep bass drumming and there is also a high degree of civility, I believe. And it does exist. And it's worth your time and trouble to find a person you can be in love with. Surely there are many men you could be in love with, maybe as many as 214, and all you need to do is come across one of them when the stars are shining and the light is right for your complexion. He'll look at you and fasten himself to you for the rest of the evening and it'll be all you can do to shuck him and after a while you'll give up on it and marry him. --Mr. Blue % The nineties bite, and they leave marks. --David Denby (New Yorker review of "American Beauty") % Guns don't kill people. It's those damn bullets. Guns just make them go really really fast. --Jake Johanson % "For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." --Bill Bryson, "Notes from a Big Country" % Self-interest at its healthiest implicitly recognizes the self-interest of others, and therein lies the possibility of compromises-- and realism. A moral position admits few compromises. That's some of what I took away from Israel. --Robert D. Kaplan, "Israel Now" % "Writing is not heroic, it is methodical, like dentistry or throwing the discus." --Mr. Blue % MARVELOUS COOKWARE OF SERPENTINE STONE. (USE EXPLANATION) 1. It's paste edible oil to boil over 100°C in the salt water. 2. It's principle to get used to it to be pot stewed. 3. The food must be attention to not get burned. (only cooking roast) The color of board pay attention to until it change to black color. 4. The case of arising fine crack to error treatment is not intervene to using. MADE IN KOREA % Two people and a dog walking through the snow. She removed one of her mittens, and placed her hand in his. He touched her cheek. "Sooner or later," the dog thought, "one of them is going to forget and drop the leash." --Snoopy % BEANS, BEANS, BEANS Baked beans, Butter beans, Big fat lima beans, Long thing string beans-- Those are just a few. Green beans, Black beans, Big fat kidney beans, Red hot chili beans, Jumping beans too. Pea beans, Pinto beans, Don't forget shelly beans. Last of all, best of all, I like jelly beans! --Lucia and James L. Hymes, Jr. % My Watchwords: Sincerity, Industriousness, Decicisiveness. (Har Har) 99-12-28 % "Words fail me. Pictures aren't much better." --Robert Crumb % "What if 2000 is like that- dancing but you don't see the splinters." --Mo, an hour or two after midnight % Although the idea of being a circus clown has held appeal for me ever since childhood, the practicalities have always kept me at bay: I would not enjoy getting into a tiny car and sitting very, very close to other members of my profession; I do not waut to litter my friends' home with my failed balloon art; I am not anxious to have seltzer down my pants. --Henry Alford, Municipal Bondage % "Y2K appears to be the Baby Boomers mid-life crisis, and it has the potential to be a dandy." --Anonymous % I'm in love...not just with Beth Hillyer who is utterly, completely wonderfully feminine, but I'm in love with Sheila Grove and Dorothy Stapleton...in fact, I'm in love with fifty girls. "Bless them all, the long and the short and the tall..." That's a World War II song my father used to sing...and there's another. "Thank Heaven for little girls." Only these aren't little girls...they are fully developed women with breasts and swaying behinds and soft round stomachs. --Robert H. Rimmer, The Harrad Experiment % This monument has been erected by the Gravity Research Foundation Roger W. Babson Founder It is to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents 1961 % "All beginnings are easy, but the last steps are difficult and cost too much." --Leif B. Kristensen paraphrasing Goete % In America we really don't have a speed limit. Nobody knows what it is. Everybody drives in packs. If the lead car is going 85, by God, so be it. It's amazing when people go to work in the morning. It's like a gang in the Old West going to rob a bank: "Awright, we're a goin' inta town. We're all a gonna drive 75 miles an hour. They can't catch us all! Move 'em out!" --http://www.bahnhof.se/~sk/Transportation/Car_Traffic.html % Modern electronic-rock music, inaugurated in the early 1960s, is, and always has been, a joint enterprise of British military intelligence and Satanic cults. --http://www.av1611.org/othpubls/roots.html % Q: D'you know anything about JavaPerl? As in how they combine the two? A: Well. Imagine that Java is a dainty, well-dressed Victorian lady. And Perl is a big, grimy 10th century viking with a hard-on. JavaPerl is like a small room with a bed. --from IRC % Around twenty years ago. I used to play against a program that had an interesting view of legality of moves. Normally, it played the best legal move that it could find (not that it was much good, but I think this is what it was trying to do). But if you stalemated it, it couldn't find a legal move, so it played the best illegal move that it could find. Typically, this was picking up my queen, converting it to its colour, and capturing my rook with it. --Nick@maproom.co.uk, rec.games.puzzles % This is a haiku this is the middle of it and this is the end. --B % "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." --Dr. Mark Vonnegut, M.D. % "You can make enough money to buy a fucking gold plated hooker and a giant robot dick to stick in her, your still not going to be proud of yourself." --Vern, http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Veranda/3556/ % A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications puts him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. --Kurt Vonnegut, "Bluebeard" % "Your vigor for life appalls me." --Robert Crumb Letters % "Remember, when someone annoys you, it takes 42 muscles in your face to frown. But it only takes 4 muscles to extend your arm and SMACK THAT ASSHOLE UPSIDE THE HEAD." --thought for the day (Dan Savage on Gary Bauer's Staff) % It's possible to be in love with three people at the same time, maybe four, but it does get to be time-consuming, and most of us don't require that much love. --Mr. Blue % Dear Mr. Blue, My girlfriend and I have been friends for five years and living together for over six months now and talking about marriage. I'm crazy about her -- she means the world to me -- and I have no serious misgivings. In fact, it's that lack of misgivings that worries me: How do I know if I'm thinking about all the implications? Concerned About My Calm Dear Concerned, What's to think about? You'll both get (1) older and probably (2) heavier and (3) duller and your love will be tried by (4) ugly little things you say and (5) sheer ennui and children who will cost you (6) sleep and keep you in a state of (7) paranoia and (8) self-doubt for years and (9) meanwhile there's the ebb and flow and gradual diminution of the sexual urge and (10) the fact that you look at your spouse sometimes and feel you married a complete stranger. But heck, a lot of that stuff happens to single people too. And if you marry a true friend, then it's vastly easier. And if you're crazy about her and she means the world to you, then how could you not? % Romance is an act of imagination, and the human imagination is infinitely capable of great leaps, including forgiveness and renewal. --Mr. Blue % "Your secret mantra is 'Moo.'" --Swami Pete ("Questionable Swamis", Life in Hell) % "Any time of the day is a good time for pie." --Fabienne, Pulp Fiction % "I'm the opposite of hypochondriacal. I'm not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever." --Edward Gorey % We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. --Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird % It was pity stayed his hand. "Pity I don't have any more bullets," thought Frito. --Bored of the Rings % "At the end of those two hours, if you turned down the volume of your TV and you listened real carefully, you could hear Western civilization crumbling around you." -- Robert Thompson on "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" % If I love you, what business is it of yours? --Johann van Goethe % VEGETARIANS Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy And we eat them. --Edmond Conti % Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems. --Reinhold Niebuhr % "I can say 'Your sister's a whore' in Italian!" "You could, but I would punch you in the face." "Wait. On second thought, I don't actually PAY your sister." --Hotendotey, 00-2-28 % "Absolutely not. Why? I mean, we won." --Minnesota Governor Jess Ventura on returning a flag captured by the Minnesota 1st Volunteer Regiment from The 28th Virginia Infantry regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 % "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reasons ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side." --Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Vonnegut's "Mother Night" % What a guy! I mean, he.s lost it all: his uniform, his plane. What.s he got left? A razor. Not even a can of shaving cream. But you can.t keep him down. There he sits, rubbing his face. At least he got a smooth shave! He.s looking on the bright side. Booyah naked jet pilot! --subatomichumor.com on the Mach 3 razor ads % "People say you can't compare apples and oranges. But why not? They are both hand-held, round, edible, fruity things that grow on trees." --Anonymous % "WOW I can hear my STOMACH making POOP!" --Trollman on Upright Citizen's Brigade % "It's the cracked ones who let all the light into the world." --writer from my Tufts writing class % Definition: poem: Words huddled together for warmth. % you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write --W.S. Merwin, "Berryman" % whirl mehitabel whirl leap shadow leap you gotta dance till the sun comes up for you got no place to sleep archy --Don Marquis % Trinculo: They say there's but five upon this isle. We are three of them; if th' other two be brained like us, the state totters. --Shakespeare, "The Tempest" % "There's a word for people who live close to nature - starving." --Brother Guy Consolmagno, Vatican astronomer % A fire knows But one sensation And cannot dream Of its own cessation But ice knows Many voices Ones that sit stolid And one that rejoices. --Poem from College % Love is like skin, Vera: It's a beautiful thing provided you don't examine it under a microscope. --Dan Savage, "Savage Love" % "Well past 70, Rosalynn and I have learned to accommodate each other's desires more accurately and generously." --Jimmy Carter % Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read. --Elisabeth Anne Riba, % "If Ford is to Chevrolet what Dodge is to Chrysler,what Corn Flakes are to Post Toasties, what the Clear Blue Sky is to the Deep Blue Sea, what Hank Williams is to Neil Armstrong...can you doubt we were made for each other?" --Lyle Lovett % If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto's orbit into a coffee cup; then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America. --Wayne Hayes % Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250 --Harper's Index, October 1989 % "Have you any idea how successful censorship is on TV? Don't know the answer? Hm. Successful. Isn't it?" --Max Headroom % "If I want low-impact aerobics, I'll masturbate. If I want high-impact aerobics, I'll masturbate again." --Dennis Miller % "Nuclear war would really set back cable." --Ted Turner % "There's someone out there for everyone - even if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night goggles to find them." --Harris K. Telemacher, "L.A. Story" % "Sun, sex, and spaghetti." --Millionaire playboy "Ricky" di Portanova on the only things worth living for. % I heard on the radio this morning that "Today the Pope celebrated mass on a hillside in Israel". Now, I'm no theologian, but somehow, I just can't see this guy *celebrating* mass... "Woohoo! It's *mass*! It's there even when we're weightless! Without it there would be no intertia! It's much better than volume or even density! It leaves length width and height *way* in the dust! Chant with me! MASS! MASS! MASS! All-riiiiight!" Then again, I can't really see this guy wearing a hat like that, so I guess we're even. --00-3-24 % Occam's eraser: The philosophical principle that even the simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it. --slashdot.org % "How about we reenact the resurrection with hand puppets instead?" --Captain James Israel, when pushed to hold a sunrise Easter service. % "Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. " --Steinbach % How am I gonna explain "Zamfir- master of the pan flute" to my kids? 00-3-31 % "Kirk, it's your birthday, do not be obsessed with death [...] At least not until the project is finished." --Rob Baum 00-3-31 % You've been dead before, remember. What was the first 15 billion years of the universe like for you? --wallern@aol.composter, responding to my fear of missing out on the Universe after I die % I still look at things and think: mortal, transient, likely to be wasting my finite and limited time. Maybe it will pass (well of course it will, that's the bleedin' point, but I mean maybe it's just a phase. Hmm- maybe there is a tie-in with stress at work.) But something new just occured to me: maybe the problem comes from my religous upbringing- I blame the world for being fragile and the universe for being impermanent because I secretly apply the impossible standards of immortality that I learned in my youth. If the Universe as we know it is itself fleeting, than the seeming triviality of the things that make me happy is no crime. "Life can then little else supply / But a few good fucks and then we die" indeed. Doing goofy little pleasurable things is what the universe is all about. --00-4-4 % I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped got a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the starts and made my peace with the darkness. --Heinz Pagels, physicist and quantum mechanics researcher before his death in a 1988 climbing accident % "Birds can fly, unless they are penguins and ostriches, or if they happen to be dead, or have broken wings, or are confined to cages, or have their feet stick in cement, or have undergone experiences so dreadful as to render them psychologically incapable of flight." --Marvin Minsky (dealing with the problems knowledge systems face.) % Enjoyably, [Greg] Critser describes fast food restaurants as the bathhouses of the childhood obesity epidemic, "the places where the high-risk population indulges in high-risk behavior." --Suck, 00-4-5 % Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. --Charlie McCarthy % What a strange machine man is. You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams. --Nikos Kazantzakis % I Love [my company] Event Zero Because... "it's like sleeping on a bed full of money." --00-4-12 % According to the NRA, the best form of personal protection is to be in possession of a loaded firearm at all times. To ensure your personal safety, stay the hell away from NRA members. --"Personal Safety Tips" from The Onion, 00-4-12 % "My heart shattered, I am living testament of a cancer-ridden love that I perceived as perfection. She was my all. But now loneliness, uncertainty and confusion contend for my nightly companonship." "If I had any arms, I would most certainly beat you to fucking death." --http://hotendotey.com, 00-4-10 % "Event Zero: preparing to rule the Internet startup arena with an iron fist! Bow before the might of the blue and orange! We will crush our enemies like so many pecan shells, strewing their remains before us for increased traction on slippery surfaces! We will rip the earth from its foundations and throw the oceans from their beds! Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair..." --00-4-14 % "Death is inevitable. I think life enjoys it" --dream Isaac Asimov % "Oh, yes, this is my country. And this is the place, because you can say anything you want in America. There is the worst, but there is also the best, in America. When Europeans talk about America it makes me laugh. They don't know. America is anything you can say, do, be ... There are the dumbest but also the most intelligent people in America. Americans are great because they get so mad, they get so passionate. " --Oliviero Toscani, artist behind Benetton's controversial campaigns % "Stupid people see beauty only in beautiful things." --Oliviero Toscani quoting Dadaist Saying % "Your life is lived with the kind of excitement that your forebears knew only in battle. They, unlike you, were the prisoner of mundane tasks." --Mark Hekprin % "The Web and TV complement each other perfectly. TV doesn't require much attention from the viewer. It fits perfectly into the spaces created by downloading Web pages." --Steven Leibel % "We are a small-number people in a large-number world." --James Gleick, Faster % BEE TRAPPED IN L.R. LIGHT. Gone To get Bug Spray --note by Mo "bee slayer" Roihl, 00-4-23 % "Life has got to be lived - That's all there is to it. At 70, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this, too, shall pass!'" --Eleanor Roosevelt, The New York Times, 8 Oct. 1954. % "It's not only the criminals and people outside with guns. Now it's the government, too." --Marisleysis Gonzalez (Miami Relative of Elian) "Well, Duh." --Me % "Death is the lot of us all, and the only way that the human race has ever conquered death is by treating it with contempt. By living every golden minute as if one had all Eternity..." --Robert A. Heinlein % "Justify your existance. And the judge shall be.. Yourself." "Oh, smeg." --Red Dwarf % Agnostic: I don't know whether there is a God. Militant Agnostic: AND NEITHER DO YOU! --Phil Foglio % "As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." --M. Cartmill % "My stomach says no but my sick carny sense of humor says yes..." --Mr. Wick (The Drew Carey Show) % What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to try to save a solid-gold baby? Maybe we'll never know. --Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts" % "Time which you enjoyed wasting was not wasted" --G.K. Chesterton % "So, what are you going to be doing this Millennium?" "Not much - I'm going to be dead for most of it..." --Man on Street Interview, CNN 2000 coverage in London (quoted by hmvh@acenet.co.za) % "Sometimes I am, sometimes I think." --Paul Valéry % Dennet saying we are preprogrammed to build our minds the way a beaver is preprogrammed to build its dam, or the spider its web. --00-5-2 % >4. Which person influences you the most? My cat. He's my hero: he's fat, neurotic, and does nothing all day but sleep, look out the window, and make messes for other people to clean up. Then he gets to complain about it. Oh, and no matter how much hair he sheds, he never goes bald. As far as I can tell, the only real advantage in life I have over him is toilet paper. --Grant Griffin (alt.humor.best-of-usenet) % If the resolution of our vision were as poor as the resolution of our olfaction, when a bird flew overhead the sky would go all birdish for us for a while. --Daniel Dennet, "Conciousness Explained" % As for your other question--can this possibly work out?-- that depends on what you mean by "work out." If you mean falling in love, getting married, and growing old together, then, no, it's not going to work out. If you mean having some fun and enjoying the time you have together (you enjoy his maturity and experience, he enjoys your youth and orifices), then, yes, it's going to work out fine. --Dan Savage, in response to "I'm boinking my college TA" % "I am but a way station in the life of plastic swizzle sticks" --How to draw a radish and other fun things to do at work % Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers. --George Santayana % Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little dearth. --Arthur Schopenhauer % But what is all this fear of and opposition to oblivion? What is the matter with the soft darkness, the dreamless sleep? --James Thurber % Something New For The Holidays [coming soon to a watercooler near you]: "Melted Snowman In A Jug" --New Yorker Cartoon, Dec 27 1999 & Jan 3 2000 % I wish you had, but I'm glad you didn't. --Sandra Bernhard, "May I kiss you on the lips, Miss Sandra?" % November, 1956 TO THE BEST WIFE A MAN EVER HAD: Honey, I am writing to say a few things that I might leave unsaid if I should depart this world unexpected-like. In this flying business you never can tell when you might all of a sudden get unlucky and wake up dead. I suppose this shows me up for being an old sentimental fool, but I thought if I could make sure you know how I feel about such things it might be a comfort. First of all, let's face one fact--everybody ends up dead. Think of all the infants and children and people who had the misfortune to die before they got much of anything out of life, and then think of all I got out of it. Even if I should die the day after writing this, I am still one of the luckiest people who ever lived, and you know it. When you come right down to it, I've done just about everything I've wanted to do and seen about everything I've wanted to see. Sure, I'd like to stick around while the boys are growing up, and have fun with you once they've done doing that and when we have time again. But you and I agree so closely on how to raise a family, I'm sure that the boys are going to be all right. And I've had enough fun with you to last a lifetime. Don't let the memories of me keep you from marrying again, if you run across somebody fit to be your husband, which would be hard to find, I know. But you're much too wonderful a wife and mother to waste yourself as a widow. Life is for the living. (That's not original, I'm sure.) So get that smile back on your face, put on some lipstick and a new dress, and show me what you can do toward building a new life. Just remember me once in a while--not too often, or it'll cramp your style--and as long as I'm remembered, I'm not really dead. I'll still be living in John, Bill, and Al, and Dan, bless their hearts. That's what they mean by eternity, I think. My love as always, JACK [Jack Sweeney, stationed in Bermuda, died a few weeks later when his plane crashed in the Atlantic.] % "Killer Tees" would be a good name for AIDS-related t-shirts, but I'm not sure if anyone would get it. --00-5-26 % "Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence." --Spanish Proverb % When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mythical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. --Whitman Gah! It's crap like this that reminds me how much I hated reading the transcendentalists in high school... he looked up in mute incomprehension, willing to have the ease of labeling it as a big silent black box rather than working to see what really is. As if I scientist loses the ability to look up at the perfect silence! Like Feynman says, but he can enjoy the flowers on many more levels than the only-poet. --00-5-28 % Odd biological thought, not for polite company: our anuses are really lame sculptors, though the raw material provided by our intestines makes a big difference. --00-5-28 % "I gave women multiple orgasms so I can hear them scream MY name!!" --God, quoted by xeno6696@earthlink.net % As a nation, the United States is a fiction that stands on three legs: a set of still contested eighteenth-century political documents; the cautionary example of the Civil War; and the daily consumption of mass culture. That's it. Everything else, however tremendous, is secondary. Tripods are precarious, as I'm reminded whenever I encounter intimidatingly foursquare foriegners--all these knitted residues of race, land, religion, and language. The rest of the world deems Americans superficial, and that is correct. What the rest of the world may not grasp is that we are profoundly superficial. --Peter Schjeldahl % Let me make a general observation--the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. --F. Scott Fitzgerald % There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's the answer. --Gertrude Stein % Hickory dickory dork The mouse he fucked a fork. --mo % "They have not yet fallen in love." --Susan Richards Shreve % "If it's got testicles or tires it's gonna be trouble." --Rita Mae Brown's Mother % The weird thing about life and death is how REAL it all is. How astounding that this IS all there is. --00-5-31 % The scylla of remembering so well all life "seems just like yesterday" and the charybdis of not remembering enough to get the full value of your life. --00-6-1 % "The mystery of what a couple *is*, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature-- or for love, for that matter." --Mavis Gallant % A guy sentenced to death tells the king: "Spare my life, and within one year I will teach your horse how to dance." The king, laughing uproariously, agrees. Later, a friend tells the guy: "Who are you kidding, you'll never be able to do that." The guy responds, "A lot can happen in a year. The king may die. The horse may die. And who knows... the horse might learn to dance!" % Love illusions are very famous. He says "I never really loved you. I mean, not really." She says, "What?" "Not once," he says, "in the last thirty-two years." "Not even that week in Santa Cruz?" He says, feeling the honor of truthfulness, "No." He says, "Not deeply really. No. It was an illusion, but not untill disillusionment. Before that, it was a fact. It was love." --Grace Paley % "It's much easier to bathe unruly children if you take the first step of holding them under the water until the bubbles stop." --James Israel paraphrased % "Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it." --Richard Feynman % Sort of like the scene in Oaklahoma (as it SHOULD have been played...) "I'm just a girl who caint say nnn... nnnnuh... nnnuhhhhhh..." --Wayne Throop @ rec.arts.sf.written % "History doesn't always repeat itself... sometimes it just screams 'Why don't you listen when I'm talking to you?' and lets fly with a club." --JWC,Jr. % Morrocan Mint Tea (according to Habib) In a smallish glass, put the leaves from about four stems of mint and pat them down ("garden fresh mint" said the package- it should smell fresh and the leaves should be rough.) Pour boiling water over the leaves. Stir in two teaspoons of sugar. Keep stirring to ensure the leaves don't scold. Let simmer to taste. Drink and enjoy. Yum! --00-6-7 % "The Wonder Twins had the right idea. I defy you to think of any crisis situation that would not be vastly improved by the presence of a gorilla with a bucket of water." --Maraud % "Motherfucker, I ain't seen pussy in so long, I'd throw stones at it." --David Sedaris' brother 'Rooster' % I have learned to take satisfaction in the life that Hugh has led. His stories have, over time, become my own. I say this with no trace of a kumbaya. There is no spiritual symbiosis; I'm just a petty thief who lifts his memories the same way I'll take a handful of change left on his dresser. --David Sedaris % Gilgamesh opened his mouth, saying to Enkidu: "Friend, who can scale heaven? Only the gods live forever under the sun. As for men, their days are numbered; their achievments are a puff of wind. Here you are, afraid of death. What of your great strength? Let me walk in front of you, and let your mouth call to me, 'Keep on! Fear nothing!' If I fail, I will have made myself a name. 'Gilgamesh,' they will say, 'went against fierce Humbaba and died.' They will remember, afterward, the child born in my house..." % To keep silent and act wise Still not as good as drinking sake Getting drunk and weeping. --Otomo no Tobito (665-731 CE) % "Why does "philosophy of consciousness/nature of reality" seem to interest you so much?" "Take away consciousness and reality and there's not much left." --Greg Egan Eidolon interview % "I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional and intellectual feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture." --Carrie Fischer's Journal, when she had a crush on Harrison Ford % "The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live -- moreover, the only one." --E. M. Cioran % I had only one other sexual incident, and that was with the tree outside my attic window. When it flowered in May it gave off the most erotic odor. I would get unsolicited erections just sitting there at my card table. I fell in love with that tree. --Jonathan Ames, "What's Not To Love" % I believe that God made sex as a kind of unsolvable Rubik's cube so that we could have something to do while we're killing time here on Earth. --Eric Bogosian % * If you are a sitcom character and your camping trip is going badly, do not say, "Look on the bright side: At least the weather's nice." * Remember: Snakes are freaky-looking creatures that will bug you out if you chance across them. Why? Get this: The little fuckers don't have any legs at all. * To hike, put one foot in front of the other, propelling yourself forward at a steady, workmanlike pace. After repeating this action thousands of times, you will theoretically begin to experience "fun." --Camping Tips from The Onion % "That's why we're born, honeygirl," she says. "To learn how to love each other. And it takes all the time we've got. Some folks never get the hang of it." --Amber Coverdale Sumrall, "Siesta" % After the garden party, the garden. --Ruth Yarrow, "May" % "Sometimes your shallowness is so thorough, it's almost like depth." --Daria % Does frog sperm look like tadpoles? --00-6-23 % The plight of man: short lived and headachey. --00-6-26 % "If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies." --Fran Lebowitz % "This is what the Lord asks of you; only this, to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God." --Micah 6:8 % "Being 'in a state of nudity' is not an inherently expressive condition." --Sandra Day O'Connor, in a Surpreme Court ruling upholding a ban on nude dancing in Florida % "Mr. Madison, I am from the 21st century!" "Impossible!" "I thought you might not believe me, so I brought PROOF! Try this!" [Pours cup of Sprite] "Fizzy... sweet... refreshing! [...] Truly the beverage of an idyllic future!" --Bob and James Madison, "Bob's Adventure Through Time", [Ruben Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug] % Information wants to be anthropomorphized. --Golias on slashdot.org % If I were Han Solo, I wouldn't have named my ship the Millennium Falcon, I'd have named it "You have clearance to leave," cause I bet that would get me out of a lot of jams. --Larry Hollister % "My grandfather was a painter ... was looking at me and he said "Harry, there are two kinds of tired, there's good-tired, and there's bad-tired. Ironically enough, bad-tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people's battles, you lived other people's days, other peoples agendas, other people's dreams - and when it was all over there was very little "you" in there, and when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn, you don't settle easy. Good-tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost. But you don't have to tell yourself, because you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days, and when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy - you sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say "take me away". Now, Harry, all my life I've painted... God I would've loved to be more successful, but I have painted and I have painted, and I am good-tired, and they can take me away." --from Harry Chapin's Gold Medal collection % And remember: you're not just another year older, you're... well, let's just leave it at the older. --Note to Dylan on his birthday, 00-7-6 % "I'm just curious about how one goes from making tapes for one person to marriage proposals to another in two days. Fair enough?" "Fair enough." "So?" "I'm just sick of thinking about it all the time." "All what?" "This stuff. Love and marriage. I want to think about something else." "I've changed my mind. That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard. I do. I will." "Shut up. I'm only trying to explain." "Sorry. Carry on." --Nick Hornby, "High Fidelity" % "DAMN! You don't get kissed like THAT in prison!" --Strip Mall % With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. --Pegasus Publishing Bumpersticker % I hope fox starts "a room with a bunch of knives and a pile of money" --slithy@pobox.com [on the recent bout of voyeuristic/big money competition shows] % "It's like the coronation of the locust queen" --Skinny Legs and All % "It looks like the war is over, but if any enemy planes appear shoot them down in friendly fashion." --Admiral Halsey, VJ day % The very essence of romance is uncertainty. --Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest" % "I've always felt that deep down I'm a genius... a person with the potential for greatness." "Are you kidding? Look at you! Look at your life!" "I know. I'm as surprised as you are." --K. Rat (Andy Mosier) % "Kid, I gotta tell ya. You ever just know there was something you had to? A message from God kinda deal? Like a life's mission?" "Uh- I guess not." "Yeah, me neither." --short story start from Tufts, "Tower of Billy" % Sometimes at night as I lay me down to bed A funny little thought comes creeping through my head I'll be dead someday but I think it'll be alright 'Cause I get practice being dead as I'm sleeping every night 00-7-25 % Be cheerful while you are alive. --Phathotep, 24th Century B.C. % So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results. --George Carlin % All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. --Slashdot.org % "So little time, so little to do." --Oscar Levant % If discretion is the better part of valor, and running away the better part of discretion, then I plan on being one of the most valiant men I know. % boy, the claims you've made on love- i think it must be sin. (as if the deepest part of me was found six inches in!) 00-8-7 % "I rooted for him during the impeachment process, of course, because fanaticism and puritanism in any form are my enemies" --Oliver Stone on Bill Clinton, April 1999 % But catastrophes only encouraged experiment. As a rule, it was the fittest who perished, the mis-fits, forced by failure to emigrate to unsettled niches, who altered their structure and prospered. --Auden, "Unpredicable but Providential (for Loren Eiseley)" % Unlike baboons, our butts aren't flaming red. As a consequence, humans have a harder time hooking up. --Dan Savage % "Give me a plant with a demonstrable sense of irony, then I'll be all over botany." 00-8-19 % "I'll call you..." "For what? We're so over... we need a new word for over." --Sex in the City (HBO) % Crazy Morty! "Visit our 12 Convenient Bowels!" Crazy Morty says "Hush, Feet!" "Our prices are so incestuous, we must be WAWAWA" Take it from Morty's Doctor: "It's true. Morty Zimmerman is clinically insane, yet somehow operates a chain of 'stores,' such as they are. If you were able to find something of use to you, and were actually able to successfully conduct a transaction, you would probably pay a price wholly unrelated to the value of the item you purchased." --Ruben Bolling, "Tom the Dancing Bug" % Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. --Christopher Morley % "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws" --S.J.Perelman % Life is like a tin of sardines. We're, all of us, looking for the key. --Beyond the Fringe % "[the idea of closed footwear (shoes) is] a fashion hangover from Europe. It's ridiculous, like ties are ridiculous." --Mark Thatcher, inventor of Tevas % He's the dumbest human being I ever saw. Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge. --Hal S. Blake, The Dark Horse (1932) % As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. --Maurice Wilkes, 1949 % The greatest disloyalty one can offer to great pioneers is to refuse to move an inch from where they stood. --Slashdot Quote % [on 'would you have your self cryonically frozen?'] No, absolutely not, never. I keep looking for enjoyable ways to make my life _shorter_, that's why, plain and simple. :) Connie-Lynne --clynne@ugcs.caltech.edu % "Revenge is a dish best served cold!" "So is gazpacho!" -Tom the Dancing Bug's Super-Fun-Pak-Comix % QOTD: "It's not the despair... I can stand the despair. It's the hope." --Slashdot.org % "God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through." --Paul Valery % The Onion: Is there a God? Jimmy Kimmel: Uh, I think so, yeah. Sure. I was praying for Him to kill me last night as I was vomiting up my lobster pasta. I can't take this altitude: I've been [at the Aspen Comedy Arts Festival] for four days--three last year and one this year--and I've vomited on three of those days. O: Yeah, the altitude can wreak havoc... JK: Well, I use the altitude as an excuse, but it's really the 17 shots of whatever people hand me. % "Decay is inherent in all compund things. Work out your own salvation with diligence." --from the final words of Buddha % Lex Luthor: Now to unveil my latest and most important device for evil! BEHOLD THIS BATHROBE! Grodd:[God damn giant monkey hands... break the fucking computer every time...] A BATHROBE?! What does it do, Luthor? LL: This bathrobe, when worn by a gorilla, renders him not fucking naked anymore! Look at you! You're just standing there naked! G: I'm a gorilla. Gorillas don't wear clothes. LL: Look, I don't know what planet you think you're on, but once a species starts talking, it covers up its genitalia. You know our dog? It can go naked. The minute it starts talking to us, we're putting a sweater on it. --Seanbaby's Superfriends Page % "There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." --Ambrose Bierce % "Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, you've gotta make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death... if you're quiet you're not living... your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively." --Mel Brooks % It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. --Voltaire % "I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story," said Ford. "Eh?" "Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?" "Yes, of course I do." "Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise, surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting 'Gotcha.' It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it." "Why not?" "Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of metality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end." --Douglas Adams % There's nothing very mysterious about you, except that nobody really knows your origin, purpose, or destination. --Slashdot % "Life is like a grapefruit [...] it's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast." --Ford Prefect, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" % Subject: :) Planes, Trains, & Automobiles! What do they all have in common? <<< They all need SUPERIOR LUBRICATION!! --Spam received 00-9-20 % Coincidences are spiritual puns. --G.K. Chesterton % How to tell you're becoming an technology prima donna: You become convinced that none of your coworkers can name anything properly, whether it's machines, files, or their children. [...] % "The last of the waxy M+Ms in the bag are finished. We devour that which we don't understand." --Captain Distraction (Me) % If only you knew how much I smell you --Roy Blount Jr on True portraits of dogs % I have seen a great deal of the world. People are pretty much the same. --Roy Blount Jr gives voice to a Chihuahua % The past doesn't go away. It keeps calling to us from the woods, and at vulnerable moments, at twilight on a fall day with a Chopin étude playing, it can be almost overwhelming. Those old voices weeping and whispering. I have my ghosts and you have yours. Tell me about it. Meanwhile, the day passes, we eat dinner, we put the dishes in the dishwasher, we clean up the kitchen, we pick up a book, life goes on. I believe that All of the lovers and the love they made -- Nothing that was between them was a mistake. All that we did for love's sake Was not wasted and will never fade. A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago: "You can't regret all of the things you went through in order to get to the happiness where you are now." The old love prepared you for this new one. The tortured and exhausting 10 years with him is a crucial part of your education and can't be separated from the rest and burned. It's quite reasonable to still miss him after only two years. You're not imprinted with him, though, and you know that. You've moved on. You're only enjoying a little sweet sadness. What would an autumn night be like without it? What an inhuman life a person must lead to never experience such feelings. --Mr. Blue % Bees are nice. They are gentle. They make honey and pollinate flowers. Of all the things that sting you, they are my favorite. Similarly, of the things that disembowel you, I feel tigers are the prettiest. --subatomichumor.com, O Nature! % First let's talk smells. Today people worry about their rights and freedoms. Some want more. Some want less. I'm more concerned that they're taking away our individual smells. It's terrible. There's a spritz or a spray for everything. Under the arms. In the nose. In the crotch. You have no idea who you're talking to anymore. You don't know the difference between men and women. Everybody smells like a strawberry. You walk past a fruit stand and get hot. What the hell is that? That's no way to live. --The 2000 Year Old Man % But in between, there is plenty to celebrate. We have poetry, music, dance, and now bagel shops on every corner. Like I once said to Gertrude Stein, "A rose is a rose, and you can't do better than a dozen of them to Alice on Valentine's Day." My advice is to slow down, relax, and smell the lox and onions. The reason we're all here is no mystery. Scientists can stop looking. Life is about one thing, and one thing only. Love. That's what I'm talking about. Love. L-O-V-E. It's not just a many-splendored thing. It's *the* splendored thing. --The 2000 Year Old Man % You're claiming to be German- yet you don't drink beer. Yet you're in *England* claiming to be *German*- so you must be something really bad. Bosnian or Welch. Probably Welch. --Uwa explaining his brother's experience in England % "Most of the dandelions had changed from sun to moons." --Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita" % Greenland's beauty rocky, ice-laden, yet fair Still best I think When seen from the air. 00-10-8 % Libra: Your plan to commit the perfect crime is flawed in one important aspect: Sitting on the couch watching football all weekend is not illegal. --Horoscopes on The Onion % Candy Corn is concentrated evil plus a little sweetener. That's why you mostly see it around Halloween. 00-10-10 % Wasting time is an important part of living. --Slashdot quote % "'Tis better to have loved and lost, then to never... oh, give me a drink" --Major Charles Emerson Winchester III,M*A*S*H % I just met with the Birdabon Society. I had to promise we wouldn't hurt any birds. Our caterer served chicken sandwiches for lunch. I pretended to give mine CPR but I was really eating it. --Pointy Haired Boss, "Dilbert" % My personal belief is that in 90% of the cases, whoever takes the "it's all or nothing" position, deserves to get the nothing --Jose (JRDelirio) Diaz % "Now, I know I may not be the most likeable politician, but at least I'm not an idiot. Let's face it. My opponent doesn't even understand half the things I've claimed to have done." --Joe Lavin 'quoting' Al Gore % "[Al Gore] want[s] the federal government to control Social Security like it's some kind of federal program." --George W. Bush % When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us!" --Turkish proverb % "I hate when people say they want a politician who doesn't act too much like a politician. What other career would you say that about? I want a doctor who doesn't act like a doctor?" "Hooker." --Mo + Kirk, 2000-11-10 % Lawyer and Small Convict: "I've got a plan!" "Great!" "I'm going t'SNAP my fingers like a cricket!" "What'll that do?" "SOOTHE me like th'pines" Big Convict and Small Convict: "What's th'word?" "Bonkers" --Top of the World % Indeed, [the modern focus-group-based campaign] process becomes a virtual Rube Goldberg machine for locating that precise dead center. --Lawrence Weschler on the Gore/Bush photofinish % "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." -- Gandhi % As he lay on the floor a priest was sent for and with his dying breath Johnny confessed "I spent most of my money on women and wine and like a fool I squandered the rest." --Benny Hill, "Go 'Round Again" % And then we'll do it doggy style So we can both watch "X-Files" You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel --"The Bad Touch", Bloodhound Gang % The trade secret of a happy marriage, according to a friend of mine who recently celebrated his 35th anniversary, is: "You behave as though you were in a crowded lifeboat: You respect the space of the others, you don't make any sudden moves, you thank heaven for every minute you're alive and you keep any disastrous thoughts to yourself." --Mr. Blue % Dear Theo, Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her! [...] Vincent --Woody Allen, If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists % "The fireman said, 'If you hear a sound like , you shouldn't run and hide, because it's a good thing. It means that there is a fireman coming to rescue you.' But I was thinking in my head that maybe it's a bad thing, because it means your house is on fire." --Ian the 6-year-old % "I had a lover's quarrel with the world." --Robert Frost's gravestone % "Wow. The depth of your sarcasm amazes me." --Dan P, 2000-12-6 % "Don't these fools realize they're violating every principle of feng-shui?" --two construction foreman poring over a plan on a girder, New Yorker cartoon % "Joe, you never heard such cheering." "Yes, I have." --Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio % "Q. Do I exist? A. Who wants to know?" --Jerry Bauer % "mr. wiggles, i met this girl the other night + one thing led to another, + now i'm feeling things i've never felt before." "is it love?" "i don't know. does love burn when you urinate?" "only the good kind, my friend, only the good kind..." --neilswaab.com % "I have a theory that neither of them really want to be president... they just want to live in a giant house." --Fifth Grader on NPR on the 2000 election % "God damn it, what are you eating now Jake?" -- Brooke at her party, 00-12-17 % Life's too short for sentences that begin "life's too short for..." --Slashdot % "The kneebone's connected to the... something. The something's connected to the... red thing. The red thing's connected to my wrist watch. ...Uh oh." --Dr. Nick Riviera, The Simpsons % "What a day, eh, Milhouse? The sun is out, birds are singing, bees are trying to have sex with them -- as is my understanding..." --Bart Simpson % "Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city! He is the cancer and I am the... uh... what cures cancer?" --Chief Wiggum % "Lisa, I've had it with you and your stories. 'Bart's a vampire.' 'Beer kills brain cells.' Now let's go back to that... building thingy... where our beds and TV... is." -Homer Simpson % "They say the greatest tragedy is when a father outlives his son. I've never understood why that is; frankly, I can see an upside to it! Ha ha!" --Abe 'Grampa' Simpson % "I guess one person can make a difference but most of the time they probably shouldn't." --Marge Simpson % "Remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it." --Blank Regk % Norbert: "In Germany... there was this one... Christmas tradition we had..." Kirk: "Invade France." 2000-12-24 % "Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact dirty lyrics...it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned deliquent on the face of the earth." --Frank Sinatra "You can't knock success." --Elvis Presley % "When it comes to emotions even great heroes can be idiots." -Sir Te, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" % "If you have to hate, hate gently." --slashdot.org % "I'm *grossly* well-adjusted." --Michelle Zabka, 00-12-29 % "Bringing the beast stumbling to its feet" --John Lammers on how not to code up large software systems % "Worry is like a rocking chair--it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you anywhere." --Dorothy Galyean % "I don't like the idea of anybody getting killed, but especially me." --Clint Eastwood % "The sun setting is no less beautiful than the sun rising." --Life Care Centers of America % "Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest." --Eric Clapton % "Life is a shit sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you can't taste the shit." --Jonathan Winters % But if you want a simple answer: Here are the three meaningful things in life: being happy, being kind & patient & generous, and being interesting. % "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." ---Paul Anderson % "The world's full of offensive knickknacks, Yahoo, have fun banning it all." --slashdot.org Yahoo Kuckles Under % "What is so *wrong* with culture that it should be really conspicuous in only one species?" --Richerson and Boyd % "What did I tell you about sharing?" "...nothing?" --"Grounded for Life" % "Tom will be working something like 4 jobs in the next few months. My advice to you - don't follow your dreams. It takes up too much time and leaves you poor." --Dylan Murray on Tom the Actor % Surveys indicate that people in their 40s and 50s tend to indentify strongly with president-elect Bush -- but people with higher IQs hate him. --paraphrased from Suck.com 'Transfer of Power' % The world's wordless beauty intact, indeed it can never be other than radiantly intact like the stars, like the stars when the stars have no names once again. --Franz Wright (from 'From a Discarded Image', via The New Yorker) % "Unfortunately, in my experience the only places without ice have southerners or californians." --Greg Owen, 01-1-3 % "When you reach the ripe old age of 27 like I have, and you have the choice between investing time and investing money, you realize you should never go for the time. You can always make more money..." --from a dream % "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." -- John Maynard Keynes, A Tract On Monetary Reform, 1923. % "I tried to give as good as I got." --Bill Clinton, January 20, 2001 % "Just because there's a cup on it doesn't make it a coaster." --Phil the QA Guy, October 11 2000 % "You make me want to be a better man." "That's maybe the best compliment of my life." "Well maybe I overshot a little, because I was aiming at just enough to keep you from walking out." --Melvin Udall & Carol Connelly, From As Good As It Gets % Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. --Anonymous % "There is no one quite so righteous as a former sinner who finds salvation and no one quite as enthusiastic as a former choirboy who discovers sin." --Robert Davolt, former choirboy % As I said in Ansible 152 about another piece of technology, "I may be as disappointed in this as I was in the error-correcting modem, the magnetic stud finder, the universal remote control, and the Radio Shack male-to-female, female-to-male conversion kit." --Timothy A. McDaniel, via alt.humor.best-of-usenet % "That was really.... stellar." --2001.01.30 % I, Hatchet Jack, being of sound mind and broke legs, do leaveth my rifle to the next thing who finds it, Lord hope he be a white man. It is a good rifle, and killeth the bear that killeth me. Anyway, I am dead. Sincerley, Hatchet Jack. --From "Jeremiah Johnson" % "There's something ironic about you having a machine named 'Placid'" --John Trussell % Morocan Mint Tea: In a smallish glass, put the leaves from about four stems of mint and pat them down ("garden fresh mint" said the package- it should smell fresh and the leaves should be rough.) Pour boiling water over the leaves. Stir in two teaspoons of sugar. Keep stirring to ensure the leaves don't scold. Let simmer to taste. Drink and enjoy. --Habib Adnan % "It is ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the eighties, we should by now have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music." --Joachim Lous translation of current Swedish joke via rec.humor.funny % "As we say in the trade, nothing bad happens to a writer, everything is material." "Enjoy your life, my dear; it is the only one you'll have on this earth, and it's a good earth." --Garrison Keillor writing as Mr. Blue. % "Hey, what's the matter?" "I'm sad because you're going to die." "Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think... ...When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway." --Richard Feynman and Danny Hillis % "While some look at what is and ask 'why?' and others look at what could be ask 'why not?' I look at my coffee table and ask 'where are my sunglasses?'" --Paul Mather, subatomic humor % Selling out is the new integrity. % I don't pretend to understand the mysteries of relationships, but it seems to me that lust and passion and sex are how many men and women manage to fend off the natural shocks of matrimony and all that proximity and the inevitable bruises and the sagging heart. --Mr.Blue % Row row row your boat gently on the lake merrily merrily merrily merrily consciousness is just the story that we make % "What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake." --Klingon Programmer Top 20 % Spoken like a woman who's never worked night-shift. But the next one's bad. I went down to the drop-in centre and got in a fight about shock treatment with this old guy. He was saying how great it was and how it had really helped him. He had this voice, this voice you get to recognize. I told him, "Man, they have fucked up your brain. I can hear the damage when you talk." And he looked at me and said, "I've had a hundred shock treatments, I have to believe it was for something." I felt so fucking bad. What am I doing, rubbing this guy's face in it just to make my point. --Prozac Highway % "She could suck the chrome right off a trailer hitch." "Uh- I don't think the quality of that kind of activity should be rated in PSI." % "Sorry Rob. I don't think 'Being a Dork' qualifies as being a performance piece. And bringing in your laundry hoping someone will do it for you is not a multimedia installation." % Well there are parts of Unix that have timeless qualities. But cron... 70s as disco. % When I was younger I hated going to weddings...it seemed that all of my aunts and the grandmotherly types used to come up to me, poke me in the ribs, cackle, and tell me, "You're next." ...They stopped that crap after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals. --from rec.humor.funny % "His code is 'write only'. It might work, but you have no chance of understanding or modifying it, you might as well burn it to CD." % Mallory collapsed off of her and lay blowing like a beached cetacean in the foetid air. His muscles felt like rubber, and he'd half-sweated the whisky off with the sheer work of it. He felt utterly wonderful. He felt quite willing to die. If the tout arrived and shot him dead on the spot he would somehow have welcomed it, welcomed the opportunity never to come back from that plateau of sensibility, the opportunity never to be Edward Mallory again, but only a splendid creature drowned in cunt and tea-rose --Gibson/Sterling, from The Difference Engine % "You know what you are? You're God's answer to Job, y'know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, He would have pointed to you and said, y'know, 'I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these.' You know? And then Job would have said, 'Eh. Yeah, well, you win.'" % "best weight loss advice ever: 'eat a carrot, run a mile'" --dj, 2001.01.10 % [Challenged to say if he considers anything holy.] Yes! The individual human mind. In a child's ability to master the multiplication table, there is more holiness than all your shouted hosannas and holy holies. An idea is more important that a monument and the advancement of Man's knowledge more miraculous than all the sticks turned to snakes and the parting of the waters. --Henry Drummond in "From Inherit the Wind" % "How am I this morning? Frankly, Mister Never-Around, I'm as horny as the middle-school band." --senior couple drinking coffee in New Yorker cartoon % "Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back." --Gladiator % "I finally had a vision of what life was all about. Even more than just bowls of chocolate ice cream. Also containers, made of plastic. And those same containers with vanilla as well." --Dream Script of 'What's New, Pussycat?" % Why it's a good thing tattos have an age requirement in 5 words: "Harry Potter Forehead Scar Tattoos" --Inspired by a Mark Parisi "off the mark" cartoon. % "That tanker split like a melon when it tore through the zoo's chain link fence. Sulfuric acid was everywhere." "Oh, that's horrible. Was anybody hurt?" "Thank goodness, no. But now I'll be haunted for all eternity by the image of penguins screaming as they dissolve." --Red Meat % "Anyone who says life is short really isn't paying attention." --March 4 2001 % "I doubt my getting fired from the Dairy Queen is a bellwether of recession, but it sure is a bellwether of I stuck my wang in the butterscotch." --The Onion, Layoffs And The R-Word % "God is silent, now if only we can get Man to shut up." --Woody Allen, "Remembering Needleman" % "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy... ...because your philosophy sucks." --Lore, "more things" % "But doth this not prove I love Three, that I was willing to donate my only son on Thy whim?" And the Lord said, "It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice." --Woody Allen writing the story of Abraham and Isaac % "Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud-- well down-- and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like-- like Rasputin." --Jean Rhys, Quartet % "Self-medication with alcohol is generally a bad idea" --Mo, 2001.03.11 % Question: If you could live forever, would you and why? Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because, if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, which is why I would not live forever. --Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA Contest % Because it moves in like a bad love affair Drifting down in ardent white sighs Smoothing over the entire world Only to crust overnight And turn to dirty slush At the first sign of day [...] Because, finally, Snow becomes our disappointment in God What begins in ornate flakes Inimitable, divine Ends in wet socks and pratfalls In human grumbling over why there is mud on the carpet And who will shovel the walk --Steve Almond, from "Why I Hate Snow" % "Programmers are going to be the assembly line workers of the 21st century." --TWR, slashdot % It's so hard being neurotic. A normal person would be able to touch this [gooey brownie] with their bare hand, but not me." --Rob Baum, 2001.03.15 % Bed is the poor man's opera -- Italian Proverb % "I don't need viagra at all... all I need is a skinny, boney female" --old guy on ad for The Daily Show % "Oh I REALLY like your style, but this can't go up here, far too many nipples." --gallery manager to deevaa the artist % In other words--and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded-- their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws." --Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish % We conversed in French, a language alien to both of us, but more alien to me than to him. He said "gauche" for both "right" and "left" when he was upset, but when I was upset I was capable of flights that put the French people on their guard, wide-eyed and wary. Once, for instance, when I cut my wrist on a piece of glass I ran into the lobby of a hotel shouting in French, "I am sick with a knife!" Olympy would have known what to say (except it would have been his left wrist in any case) but he wouldn't have shouted: his words ran softly together and sounded something like the burbling of water over stones. --from James Thurber's "A Ride With Olympy" % "What? You're back again again already?" "Hey, be nice to me. I've just been through a near-death experience." "Really? When did this happen?" "Well, it was kind of spread out over the last 15 years or so..." --K-Rat, Tucson Weekly % "Information wants to be a Socialist... not a Communist or a Republican." --Karen Schneider % please help me! where can I download 3 objects , such as chairs tables, sofas and so on, i have tried already 3D cafe, anu other useful websites?? Thank you!! Nina you mean like on that commercial where they get scuba fins out of their printer? that was just a special effect. So far, we can only transfer information through the net. However, your optimism is appreciated. --Gwyn Judd, in comp.lang.perl.misc % If it looks like a duck..... and quacks like a duck.... Its probably a duck.... Some people and some ducks believe this. Which is why duck decoys are so effective. --Binyamin Dissen in alt.humor.best-of-usenet % "They say comedy is tragedy plus time.. but you throwing a grenade and having bounce right back on your worm's head... that's just frickin' funny!" --on the game "Worms" % life, n.: A whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. --slashdot.org % r: i scanned some raw fish on my brand new scanner earlier. Gotta start it off with a bang. k: wouldn't that make your later scanee items smell like raw fish? r: if only there were some way to clean objects! k: this is why you should rely on restaurants for fish k: I extend this philosophy to cooking in general r: Maybe someday someone will invent a spray for cleaning glass. They should make it blue! k: the power of producing streak free glass pales compared to the olfactory force of the dark side of the fish. --Kirk and Ranjit on AOL-IM. % Humans chase love the same way that bugs chase bright light." --Riggs "Ritual Habitual" % "So much ouch to this life. So few Band-Aids." --Misti, "It is Finished" % "'Twas brillig, and the slithey toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe fifty basis points." --Alan Greenspan in New Yorker cartoon % "Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives." --Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" % "'I studied philosophy in university and I always found it rather impotent. This is different. This is principle driven. It's practical. You can do something with it' [...] being definite, principle centered, and practical are not always good things. The Nazis were all of those things, more so than most people." --Mark Kingwell, "In Pursuit of Happiness" % "Well," the Goddess said, "your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time." --Diane Duane, Door into Shadow % In short, assume that any time it appears that evolution is working in reverse, it is probably an illusion. --Allen Barra (on MLB pitchers, and more) % "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey % Albert Camus is known to most as an existential writer and philosopher. But to me, he was much more. To me, Camus was the best damn table magician that ever lived. When I watched Albert handle a deck of cards, roll a franc across his fingers, or vanish a Gauloise, it didn't bother me that we were living in a random, godless universe. As a matter of fact, I liked it. --Penn Jillette, "Kamus, King of Cards" % A Peruvian military jet on anti-drug patrol recently shot down a Cessna seaplane carrying American missionaries. Asked to justify the shootdown, a senior military officer responded that the Cessna had been carrying "the opiate of the masses." --Steve Holland via rec.humor.funny % "Do the members of the crew have Bibles? Why don't they have Bibles? Can we get them Bibles? Would they like Bibles?" --W. Bush's primary concern during the China/Spy Plan crises. % From the cries of Sinn Fein to the whines of Jackie Mason, everybody's got an agenda and everyone thinks he or she is right. Trying to change someone's mind usually becomes an excercise in futility, so it is your job to pretend to care. Offer some tepid advice and move on. *Cultivate the Switzerland of your soul and remain delightfully detached.* --Janeane Garofalo, "Feel This Book" % "The nipples of strangers sometimes means more than those of the ones we love." --98-9-10 % "Of all the thirty-six alternatives, running away is best." --"Chinese" Proverb % "He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day... but that's not why I ran away." --Bulwer-Lytton contest entry % "I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost..." --Neil "barnacle" Barnes, rec.arts.sf.written % "We ought put the Department of Defense together with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Interstate Trucking Commission, and the Fish and Wildlife Service and just call it the Department of Guys." --Michael Lorton, alt.fan.cecil-adams % "After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling" --The Onion % "Does this banana have buddha nature? I don't know but it's mighty tasty!" % Oh, t'was ever thus, Boot, ever thus. We men of vision dream dreams an'...er...vish visions, while the rest of the world--(what the...?) You might at least *stay awake* whilst I'm doing a bit of *bemoanin'* --from Old Boot's Private Papers % "Poor Poland: so far from God, so close to Germany and Russia" --Pilsudski, S.M. Stirlings "Under The Yoke" % 1.everything that.s already in the world when you.re born is just normal; 2.anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3.anything that gets invented after you.re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it.s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. --from a Douglas Adams Essay. % "If making it in the real world doesn't involve sleeping until noon and playing frisbee all day, I'm totally screwed" --from Rejected Letterman Top Ten Lessons I Learned in College % [The Monrobot Mark XI all-purpose computer] solves many of the technical problems that we in the computer game have been bucking for years [...] Mark XI weighs only three hundred and seventy-five pounds and is therefore completely portable." --New Yorker Article on early portable computing. % On many occasions Liu Ling, under the influence of wine, would be completely free and uninhibited, sometimes taking off his clothes and sitting naked in his room. Once when some scholars saw him and chided him for it, Liu retorted, 'I take heaven and earth for my pillars and roof, and the rooms of my house for my pants and coat... What are you gentlemen doing in my pants?' --"Wen xin diao long" (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) % "I mean--I know I caughter her off-guard and all, but I think she was kinda' gettin' into it...right before she threw me through the sliding glass door." --Jay, Chasing Dogma % "Everything," I am told, "tastes better when it's sitting on a Ritz." No exception is made for other Ritzes, so from this statement we can infer that any given stack of Ritz crackers tastes better than any smaller stack of Ritz crackers, and thus the tastiest stack of Ritz crackers is the tallest one that you can fit in your mouth. --brunching shuttlecocks: "crackers" % "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." --Charles Babbage % The best sickness excuse is, "You don't want to know the details." --Scott Adams % A truly secure password algorithm also has to check for the Post-It Note (TM) on the monitor. --Jim Esler % "Broken hearts are broken open, at least for a while." --Casey the Nurse, Port Townsed WA % If I ever decide to give up a normal life, I am going to move to SF and open a combination restaurant and bondage shop. The restaurant will feature nothing but extremely spicy food and be called "Pain is a Flavor" --CP, 'household neanderthal' % The purpose of conversation isn't to demonstrate one's glib intelligence; it's how we stumble and grope our way through the mists and arrive at something like intelligence. --Mr. Blue % My fourteen-year-old daughter [Laura]'s face and arms were covered in alchemical and zodiacial symbols in iridescnet reds greens and blues. ... She stared at me defiantly, as if I'd somehow express disapproval. ... Laura said, 'Did you know that Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy then he did on the theory of gravity?' 'Yes. Did you know he died a virgin? role models are great, aren't they?' --"Silver Fire", Luminous, Greg Egan % "So tell me Rico, what is the meaning of life?" "It ends." --Warden Miller and Rico, Judge Dredd % An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny. % "Always remember, however, that there's usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head." --Donald E. Knuth, "TeXbook" % "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied." --Douglas Adams % "I've seen monkey shit fights at the zoo that were more organized than THIS." --The Replacements % "Bill, have you ever heard the expression 'It's easier to catch flies with honey instead of vinegar'?" "Dave, have you ever heard the expression 'Only a hillbilly sits around and tries to figure out the best way to catch flies'?" --NewsRadio % "Man, this stuff is heavy." "Like Nietzsche?" "Yeah. Remember, when you stare into the margarita mix, the margarita mix is staring back into you." --Kirk and John, 2001-06-21 % "Why do we like sports or movies? It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game. It's a colossal phenomenon that needs to be explained, and I'm not joking." --Marvin Minsky % "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." --Dave Barry % "My mind is especially empty today." --goofy looking buddhist monk to second monk, New Yorker cartoon % CONVERSATION At dinner their first night He looked at her, her bright green eyes, In candlelight. They laughed and told the hundred stories, And kissed, and went to bed. "Shh, shh," she said, "I want to put my legs around your head." Green eyes, green eyes. At dawn they sat with coffee And smoked another cigarette As quietly Companionship and eros met In conversation's afterplay, On their first day, And late for the work she loved, she drove away. Green eyes, green eyes. --Donald Hall % God: And here's the next species, one I'm particularly proud of... Adam: Beetle. God: Excellent. Now here's another... Adam: Beetle. God: No, you just named the last one "beetle". This one is quite different -- look at the pattern on the wing cases, and the shape of the antennae... Adam: Beetle. God: Well, OK, though they certainly look different to Me. Now, the next species is -- Adam: Beetle. --Ken Cox % Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware of such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise, what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust. --Rith Smythers, from Instructions And Advice For The Young Bride, 1894 % Remember what Merlin said about learning: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough." --T. H. White, from "The Once and Future King" % "You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns." --Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court % "I like my women like I like my coffee...hot, black, and with one of those little croissant things on the side." "Oh yeah? Well I like my women like I like my coffee too... stuffed into a burlap sack the back of a donkey." % The assistant's dark hair was messy. She is wearing sloppily applied red lipstick; a short black skirt with no stockings; a rumbled black V-neck sweater (at least she is wearing a bra); clunky black shoes. She looks like (pardon the expression) someone rode her hard and put her away wet. --4 Blondes, Candace Bushnell % "You might be missing a lot of your skin and fingers after some of the ideas I've given you, but fingers and skin only last about 80 years. Freedom... true Freedom... that lasts a lifetime." --from Seanbaby's Celebrating Independence Like a Bad Motherfucker % Recently I was on a carnival ride called "The Drop Zone" with my nephews when I saw a similar Windows error message. The Drop Zone is rather fun. They strap you in the ride, you are lifted to the top of a tower, about 100m from the ground. There are computer screens at the top which give you a narrative about how some spacecraft is going down and the whole crew are going to have to bail out, and then they drop you. You experience free fall for a few seconds. The kids scream. You land safely. The second time we did the ride, we got to the top and Windows had crashed. This time it was my turn to scream... --Ben Morphett, comp.risks % "Never buy a secondhand camera from a pornshop..........trust me." --waxcpc % "But what about self-esteem?" "Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple [on the ass-end of creation] and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace--and maybe even glory." --Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates % "Who cares what you think?" --President George W. Bush, July 4, 2001 % "You can type this shit George, but you sure can't say it" --Harrison Ford to George Lucas (allegedly, on receipt of the script to Star Wars) % "It doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they spell the name correctly" --PT Barnum. % "You should never stand in love's way, especially if love is driving a bus." --R. M. Weiner % "Photography isn't about the pictures. Pictures never come out right. It's about the adventure." --Jason the Australian, as we climbed up and over fences on the roof of my mom's 17-story apartment building in NYC. % In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. --Carl Sagan % Dear L. L. Bean, please rename the color choice for mens' boxers to something other than 'cream.' Many thanks. --anonymous from Faisal's quote file % "I have bought this wonderful machine--a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine-- it seems to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy." --Joseph Campbell, Mythology Scholar % "The original coffeehouse was a place where men of all types could sit all day; the tobacco they smoked made it possible to drink coffee all day; and the coffee they drank inspired them to talk all day," writes Gladwell. "Out of this came the Enlightenment." --New Yorker Critic at Large % "A baby seal walks into a club." --via John Sawers % 'If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.' 'If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.' Don't - DON'T think about that sentence for more than three minutes or blood will spurt out of your nose. --Lewis Black, on a conversation he overheard at a diner % "Attempt to prolong the life of your vehicle, for you are in it, and if it is destroyed, a few effects of death may be observed." --Xereve Grungt, SpaceDriver Elite, Hesperan Guard % "I've never seen 'It's A Wonderful Life.' I could never get past that title." --Batman % I'm runnin' home... I'm movin' fast... Ain't gonna catch me in no autmobile, I'm haulin' ass! --Song from Euclid High School. Or Monticello Middle School. % "I hope fox starts 'a room with a bunch of knives and a pile of money'" --slithy@pobox.com % (CBG walks along the road reading a comic book) CBG: But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds. (CBG sees missile approaching) CBG: Oh, I've wasted my life. --Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons % "...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..." --Emperor Hirohito, August 14, 1945 % "There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgement, to listen to country music. --Kary Mullis, Nobel laureate % "Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well" --Tom West, Data General % "The best way to seduce someone is by making yourself unavailable. You just have to be busy all the time and they'll be craving to see you." --Madonna % "85% of life is just showing up." --Woody Allen % Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. --Berkeley Breathed % "There's an old Italian saying: don't burn your tongue on another man's soup." "Yeah? There's an old Irish saying: don't listen to old Italian sayings." --Striking Distance % "Talking and listening to the people in this marketplace is the best way to learn. The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing." --Socrates % Q: What does Snoop Dogg use to clean his laundry? A: Blee-yotch. --Captain Crotch % "The money you lose is fake, but the time you waste is all too real." --asymmetric.net slot machine % "We could smell death... and death could use a mint." --Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie % "I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth." --Fry on Futurama % "There's a lot to be said for a lack of communication and so many problems we can't talk about simply go away after a while, such as the problem of mortality, for example." --Garrison Keillor % "*There is no justice in this world.* Anyone disagrees, I'll punch their stupid faces in...QED." --2001.08.24 % "Welcome aboard Southwest Flight XXX to YYY. To operate your seatbelt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seatbelt and if you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised. In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with two small children, decide now which one you love more." --Internet Lore % I rehearsed once again in my mind exactly how I would go about making love, changing some details, tossing in a few improvements, and I practiced making ecstatic cries. I'd never made love before and had never cried out in an ecstatic way (except one Christmas when I got a Lionel train, but "Oh, boy, thanks, Mom and Dad" was wrong for sex) and I wanted to do it right. --Garrison Keillor, 'Who Do You Think You Are?' % I beat up my boyfriend when he told me he likes sex rodeo style! I asked what rodeo style was and he said "I'll show you". He got in me from behind and then whispered "your sister likes it like this too" - then he tried to stay on for 8 seconds! --jadedlady67@yahoo.com on lowbrow.com % "Eating kittens is just plain...plain *wrong*! And no one should do it, ever!" --The Tick % Conversations not to have when pulled over for speeding by a Georgia state trooper: "Lookie here, darlin', nobody blows through Georgia that fast." "Sherman did." --Dan N Wiebe % : "Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, : and yet he will be making gods by the dozens." -Montaigne Yo' god so false, when you pray, you get a busy signal! Yo' god so false, Pascal be wagerin' AGAINST him! Yo' diety so low, he need a stool to pray to himself! --Voltaire (via Ranjit on alt.religion.kibology) % What keeps our faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humor. Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids--all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. If we had no other purpose in life, it would be good enough to simply take care of them and goose them once in a while. --Garrison Keillor on "Why Are We Here" % (After the waiter asked if we wanted change from a twenty for a $14 tab) Kirk: "Nah, we were gonna give him a 50% tip" John: "Yeah, that waiter was really stellar." Kirk: "You mean, very far away and hard to communicate with?" --2001.09.03. % With the gay sexual revolution in San Francisco, he was finally free to express that side of himself openly. This was a wonderful thing, but the effects of it were confusing and bizarre for my brother and me. With him, the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name became the Love That Would Not Shut Up. --Salon.com's "Curse of the Hippie Parents" % "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I subscribe to the theory of intellectual osmosis. As such, I must now cease our conversation and move away from you before my intelligence begins to drop. Good day." --Acts of Gord % "Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers." --"Students on Science" % "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." --George Bush % "I think most people are interested in living a long and fruitful life, as you have." "Yes. Fruit is good, too, you mentioned fruit. Yeah. Fruit kept me going for a hundred and forty years once when I was on a very strict diet. Mainly nectarines. I love that fruit. It's half a peach, half a plum, it's a hell of a fruit. I love it! Not too cold, not too hot, you know, just nice. Even a rotten one is good. That's how much I love them. I'd rather eat a rotten nectarine than a fine plum. What do you think of that? That's how much I love them." --Interviewer and the Two Thousand Year Old Man % "How many times must I tell you? Queens consume nectars and ambrosia, not hot dogs." --King Tut on the old Batman series % Just a point of interest ... If you bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79. My advice to you is to start drinking heavily --making the rounds % "First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs." --Usenet lore (via John Sawers) % "How to be safer these days? Wear a seatbelt. Don't smoke." --Daily Show guest quoting former member of National Security Council % The sanest New Year's I ever spent was two years ago, when my best friend Donald and I split a bottle of wine and played Jenga and a sort of mechanical fishing game with magnetic rods. At twelve o'clock we went outside to look at the fireworks and shook hands briskly. No nonsense, no drunken emotion, and we were in bed with cocoa by half past twelve. We vowed then and there to do the same for the Millennium, except maybe at Stonehenge. Unfortunately, in the interim Donald has become affianced to a New Age lunatic, and he will be spending the Millennium several thousand feet above Stonehenge, performing a naked parachute jump with his intended and a white witch who will be performing a pagan wedding ritual in mid-air. As midnight approaches Donald will be required to penetrate his beloved whilst plummeting like a stone; the plan is that at the twelfth stroke he will bring her to orgasm, conceive their child, and pull the ripcords, all at the same time. As Donald has poor timing, a complete lack of ejaculatory control, and a hilarious history of handles breaking off at his touch, a unique combination of death and embarrassment seems likely to result. --Michael Kelly, What I Will Be Doing for the Millennium. % "I cannot condone a society in which to eat a sheep is acceptable but to fuck a sheep is a crime..." --The Rev. Dr. Jack Collins % "The guy's nuttier than squirrel turds" --Officer in Me, Myself, & Irene % "Mixed feelings are good. Keep ya balanced." --Angus Shaw, She Creature % You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'. --Terry Pratchett % "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." --Tallulah Bankhead % "'They can ta'k our live but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker..." --Terry Pratchett on Braveheart in alt.fan.pratchett % "If women like it, it's erotica. If men like it, it's pornography. WTF?!?!" --Lord Kano % There were two cows in a field. One said "moo", the other one said "I was going to say that!" --anon. % "You may be gone tomorrow, but that doesn't mean that you weren't here today." -Slashdot % "Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting." --Terry Pratchett % Flowers bloom and die Wind brings butterflies or snow A stone won't notice Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end --Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk % According to a film my wife saw in her philosophy class, Bertrand Russell received a letter from a woman who proclaimed herself a solipsist. She went on to say that she was surprised that there weren't more solipsists. --via rec.humor.funny.reruns % (although I like to think of it as just Granny letting a couple pompous idiots talk themselves into a hole before she pulls it out from under them) --"Chris McCubbin" in alt.books.pratchett % "When the average American can point out Tajikistan, Pakistan, Russia, China, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan on a map...then the terrorists will have won." --Kim on alt.fan.cecil-adams % "My dad once told me, laugh and the world laughs with you, Cry, and I'll give you something to cry about you little bastard!" --The Great White Hype % And Mojo was hurt and I would have kissed his little boo boo but then I realized he was a BAD monkey so I KICKED HIM IN HIS FACE! --Bubbles, The Powerpuff Girls % [Day after after a fender bender where the lady behind me decided the stop and go traffic should be more go than stop] "Yeah, it's so annoying with a car that's getting a little old. I mean, it's really tough to tell if that's a new sound going wrong, or just the same old stuff... [B-Pipe of exhaust disconnects on one end underneath car, resulting in various metallic scrapey sounds, as the engine gets *loud* since it's no longer connected to the muffler] ...I mean, it's so difficult to know..." --Me to John Sawers, Nov 7 2001 % "The bottleneck is not in technology, it's in art." --Penn Jillete % "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now what would she be doing? ...clawing at the lid of her coffin." --Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk) % ranjit: my dog gets an application of flea&tick killer once a month-- you squirt it on the back of his neck and it soaks through his skin into his blood. ranjit: I always get a tiny bit on my fingers, and then I taste it for an hour. kirkjerk: bleck ranjit: at least I am somewhat flea-resistant! kirkjerk: "thanks to a pet care incident gone horribly awry, mild mannered ranjit discovers he has developed one of the world's most trivial superpowers...mild resistance to fleas" Fortunately, with small power comes only small responsibility % "That it's ok to be sad, and cry... and that's it ok when you finally stop crying, too." --Julie Hill describing what her son had learned in dealing with his father's terminal illness % "If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color. " --Mark Schnitzius % "The Internet has already become for a fortunate few ('spiritual scuba divers', one is tempted to call them) a limitless ocean without bottoms or shores. In whose depths one can breathe effortlessly--in and out, in and out. It is the habitat of the newest creatures to evolve in our part of the Milky Way -- as enchanting and nobly bizarre as any giant manta or moray eel, say. They are recorded thoughts and feelings about what it is like to be a living thing." --Kurt Vonnegut as Kilgore Trout % "Proto star? Like that hard as nails Jupiter that you said was a fluffy gas ball??? Too funny. Jupiter is SOLID, just view the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impacts ON THE SURFACE!!! Astronomers just don't keep up." --John Boatwright in alt.atheism % "If you're such an 'expert' at being a lesbian, why are you turning me on???" --Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show % Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?" Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land, Man got to tell himself he understand. --Bokonon (Kurt Vonnegut) % He says he looked into my eyes and vas able to see my soul... ...how romantic." --"Vladimir Putin" in Capitol Steps skit % "Screw destiny! Destiny's just another word for inevitable. And nothing's inevitable if you stand up, look it in the eye and say, 'You're evitable.'" --Winifred Burkle % "You know that old saying 'men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses?' Oh-- ha, ha...most men I know will fuck a tree." --Diane Ford % "Sometimes you get the elevator... ...sometimes you get the shaft." % Simon: Father! ...we must leave at once! Stella Star: 48 seconds left 'til the explosion--we've got to get out of here! Simon: It's true father--the count has mined the planet with nuclear devices. We're all about to die! Emperor: You know something my boy? I wouldn't be Emperor of the Galaxy if I didn't have a few powers at my disposal. [To Ceiling:] IMPERIAL BATTLESHIP, HALT THE FLOW OF TIME! --from Star Crash % "We have tamed lightning, and now use it to make sand think." --Unknown % "Tell that guy the piano ain't got no 'wrong notes'." --Thelonious Monk to Radio Engineer % Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap." % "My parents just came back from a planet where the dominant lifeform had no bilateral symmetry, and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt" --via the Comics I Don't Understand page % "I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it." --Groucho Marx % "There are 27O million Americans. The US is filthy with one-in-a-million events." --Uncle Al % The appreciation of pleasing decay is an important one because it is so often neglected --placard in Tom West's % kirkjerk: we laugh because it's funny, we laugh because it's true ranjit: we laugh because of the electrodes inserted into our cerebellums % "It should not be surprising kids like the stuff. Dried nasal discharge is largely composed of complex sugars, sodium and water -- the same ingredients as most junk foods." --National Post Article % "The United States of America has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age." --Christopher Hitchens % With the arrival of the "ultra-rapid computing machine", "the average human being of mediocre attainments or less" will have "nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy." --Nicholas Weiner % "Life is like a box of chocoloates, a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift no one ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat during the game. Sure, once in a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee, but it's gone too soon and the taste is fleeting. In the end you're left with nothing but broken bits of hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, which if you are desperate enough to eat, leaves nothing but useless brown paper wrappers." --Cigarette-Smoking Man, The X-Files % "Imperfect Web Design For An Imperfect World" --alienbill.com circa 1998 % I'm prettier than you are! I'm prettier than you are!" "...but you're still dumb." --Will Smith and Muhammed Ali, on the set of "Ali" % "A uhhh [hits desktop]... a blow, to the head, you have had such a blow?" "Who hasn't...it was the pills, speed. I'll lay off the speed" "Yah, do so, Mr. Sutcliffe...and also, do this: slow down. Take your time. Life is..long. You must not be in too much of a hurry." --German Doctor and Stuart Sutcliffe, Backbeat % "You know what it is I like about Liverpool, Mr. Sutcliffe?" "No, what is it you like about Liverpool, Mr. Lennon?" "I was hoping you'd tell me." --Backbeat % "I wish it need not have happened in my time." "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." --Frodo and Gandalf, LotR % "Nothing is ever lost by courtesy. It is the cheapest of the pleasures; costs nothing and conveys much. It pleases him who receives, and thus, like mercy, is twice blessed." --Erastus Wiman % "A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road." --Alexander Smith % Laughter is heard farther than weeping." --Yiddish proverb % "All I'm saying is that people who say 'irregardless' are TOTAL CRETINS!" "LOTS of people say 'irregardless.'" "That's exactly my point! 'LOTS' of people ARE cretins!!!" "Look: just because a person doesn't have "BOOK SMARTS" doesn't mean he or she is STUPID! That newscaster might have a lot of EMOTIONAL intelligence!" "May I inject one teensy-weensy thought?" "Go ahead!" "Emotional Intelligence is CRAP!!!" --Roz Chast, New Yorker back page % Q: So what would an intelligent car be like, for example? A: Well, there may never be such a thing . But we used to have intelligent cars; they were called horses. And they used to know stuff that our cars don't know. They used to know where they lived and how to get home and how not to knock over people. Even how to refuel themselves. The amazing thing was that they could even make new cars. The intelligent car would be like a horse. Something that really enjoyed a good drive and prided itself on not knocking people down. --Steve Grand, AI/A-life research and inventor of "Creatures" % "But even Einstein took five years to tie his shoelaces." --Steve Grand on the relatively slow progress of AI and A-Life % "And when I say love I mean dizzy, frustrated and sick. Love is just easier to say." --Kristin Kennedy % "Kinko, Kinko, the kid loving clown, if the kids just love me back, I'll never wear a frown. Kinko's in his kinko car, pockets full of change, lots of dirty pictures and sticky candycanes. All the kids love Kinko for the presents that they get, silly leather clothes to wear and happy cigarettes." % "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." --Will Rogers % "What comes out of your mouth is more important than what goes into it." --Russian priest on Vodka % "Art is what you can get away with." --Andy Warhol % "I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to bring money into the state, not merely circulate it." --Terry Pratchett % "It is white." --George W. Bush, after being asked by London child what the White House was like % "You can lead a horse to bullshit, too." --Ray Drouillard % My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is. --Ellen DeGeneres % "...Bush believes he was out only for a few seconds because when he awoke, his two dogs were sitting in the same position they were when he [choked on a freakin' pretzel and] lost consciousness." Lassie, they're not. --entry on mybluehouse.com/weblog % [Explaining yet another Mike Tyson biting incident] "Why does this kind of thing happen? Well, it's one of the dark secrets of the sport... Boxers are Delicious." --paraphrase of Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show % "I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein and Cary Grant." --Peggy Lee % "What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" --High Fidelity % A good friend of mine is Baptist. Here's her idea on the subject of dinosaurs: "God created dinosaurs when he created man. But he kept them on one side of the earth while he kept Adam and Eve on the other side. Then he killed off all of the dinosaurs and hurled their bodies to the other side of the planet, tilting the planet on its axis. And that's why the earth revolves around the sun - the impact from God's dinosaurs tilted earth into its rotation." --"swill" % "I like your nurse's uniform, guy." "These are O.R. scrubs." "O, *R* they?" --Rushmore % "When turkeys mate, they think of swans." --Johnny Carson % "If I knew the meaning of life, would I be sitting in a cave in my underpants?" --Wise Old Man in Mountain Top Cave from a New Yorker cartoon % Q.: What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm? A.: Crib death. --Tiger Magazine (Princeton U. Humor Mag) % Before the falling-Pinto scene could be filmed, the filmmakers had to get certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for the Pinto. This was done by conducting preliminary drop tests to ensure that it would not behave as an airfoil and drift from its target line when dropped from a great height. --IMDB.com triva for The Blues Brothers % Peter Marshall: What are "dual-purpose cattle" good for that other cattle aren't? Paul Lynde: They give milk... and cookies, but I don't recommend the cookies. --The Hollywood Squares % "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." --John von Neumann % "If you could understand it, it wouldn't be poetry." --Online Propaganda Newsletter of Adam Green % "I want you in the worst way... ...which is standing up in a hammock." --Louis Ramey % We have two options: (a) hide under the bed (b) run and scream in fear the a turned into an angel, and the b into a mug of beer --Ranjit % "People who don't let themselves get talked into something new every once in a while have dull, dull, dull sex lives." --Dan Savage, Savage Love % "Just before someone gets nervous, do they experience cocoons in their stomach?" --Random question on my cousin Kayla's AIM profile % The story went that the whole effing family went over to Greece and there were several effing days of feasting and effing celebration. On the last day, the narrator's effing sixteen year old sister went effing missing, so they looked all effing over for her. The effing party was still going on in an effing big hall, and when every-effing-body was there, they noticed effing movement behind the effing curtains. The effing curtains were drawn back to see his effing sister with her effing knickers round her ankles and the efffing priest cousin and they were, and I quote, "You know,... doing it!" --Deborah Kelly recounting an overheard story % "What's worth succeeding in is worth failing in." --Robert Frost % "They're armed." "Armed, armed with what?" "Err, bad breath, colorful language, feather duster... what do you think they're gonna be armed with? Guns, you tit!" --Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels % "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." --Philo of Alexandria % "I'm not a security threat: I'm Canadian" --Canadian Skater to Olympics Security Worker % "Boy, life takes a long time to live." --Steven Wright % "Holy Pope with a Band Saw!" --Bill the Splut % Pisces: (Feb. 19-March 20) It's not true that all the good band names are taken. But if believing that keeps you from starting a band, great. --from The Onion % "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." --Edward V. Berard % Here's a vignette we're dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday's Ford's Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. "I know I shouldn't have," a witness told us yesterday, "but I started laughing." --The Washington Post % "Well, one day I was at the Institute of Advanced Study, and I went to Gödel's office, and there was Gödel. It was winter and Gödel had an electric heater and had his legs wrapped in a blanket. I said, 'Professor Gödel, what connection do you see between your incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?' And Gödel got angry and threw me out of his office." --Physicist John Wheeler % "THE *QUESTIONS* MAY CHANGE--BUT BY GOD, OUR *ANSWERS* STAY THE SAME!" --Vice President Dick Cheney in This Modern World % "The Future is here. It is just not evenly distributed." --William Gibson % "Right now, I'm working on trying to learn some new old songs. You know, there are so many tunes, but you tend to whittle yourself and your memories down as life goes by. You know how you kind of become the same five stories in the end? I've done that already, and I'm fuckin' 31 years old." --Ani DiFranco % "Uncertainty is the normal state. You're nobody special." --Player in Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" % "There is a wonderful Hasidic story about a rabbi who was asked whether it is ever proper to act as if God did not exist. He responded, 'Yes, when you are asked to give to charity, you should give as if there were no God to help the object of the charity.'" --Alan Dershowitz % Does abstinence make the church grow fondlers? --from a Slate.com piece on Priests and Pedophilia % Kittens: self-propelled barbed wire in a dewy-eyed mohair sweater. --Charlie Stross % "Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" --Criteria of Movie Critic Gene Siskel % "This is the kind of movie that actors discuss in long, sad talks with their agents." --Roger Ebert on Lake Placid % "No Reason" --Coke Classic slogan in Japan % I'm just a O(n) person in a O(log n) world. --heliocentric on slashdot % "sweet, sweet indifference. Where would I be without you? Caring about every damn thing that's what" --2002.03.30 % "A real woman could stop you from drinking." "It'd have to be a real BIG woman." --from Arthur % [On the teams' 18-0 loss.] "Come on, fellas. Rome wasn't built in a day." "Yeah, it took several hundred years." --from The Bad News Bears % "Rach, ya know, I can see you naked any time I want." "What?" "All I have to do is close my eyes. See? Woohoo!" "Ross! Stop that!" "Ah, I'm sorry." "Come on! I don't want you thinking of me like that any more!" "Uh, sorry. Nothing you can do about it. It's one of my, uh, rights as the ex-boyfriend. Oop... oh yeah!" "Stop it, cut it out! Cut it out!" "Okay, okay, I'm sorry, it will never happen... Uh-oh! Wait a minute! Wait... wait... now there are a hundred of you--and I.m the king." --Ross and Rachel from Friends % Atlanta is nice and warm but very pollen-y right now. As one person put it, I understand the trees need to mate, but why do they have to try to mate with my car? --Erin's Brother % We felt we ought to take at least one ride that has earned a yellow international warning triangle ("might be intense for children and some adults"), and that's how we chose The Haunted Mansion, in which people travel around in chairs through--you know, an upmarket haunted house. This, in fact, produced a moment of intensity, a holiday from confusion, in which I had the following clear thoughts: People die, sometimes suddenly. Suppose I did here. That would be such an irresistibly amusing anecdote for my survivors that what little dignity had accompanied this life would be gone forever. I was very glad to get out of The Haunted Mansion alive. --Richard Todd, "Lost in the Magic Kingdom" from May's The Atlantic % The Buddha walks up to a hot dog stand and says, "Make me one with everything." And after paying for it with a 20, gets no money back. When he asks, he's told that 'Change comes from within.' --Carl Fink and StarChaser_Tyger on alt.fan.cecil-adams % "Three years ago I took that HTML course and I was on top of the world-- now look at me." --Overhead conversation of a Burger King Manager % "If I could have a magic power, I'd choose to be able to read minds. That way I could differentiate between who's mentally undressing me and who's been stealing my chocolate bars." --Jennifer Taylor % "The relative importance of files depends on their cost in terms of the human effort needed to regenerate them." --T.A. Dolotta % "An astronaut with diarrhea would-- w--... You don't want an astronaut with diarrhea." --Interviewee on a Frontline Documentary % "You make me sick, Homer. You're the one who told me I could do anything if I just put my mind to it!" "Well, now that you're a little bit older, I can tell you that's a crock! No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you." "Gotcha. Can't win, don't try." --Homer and Bart Simpson % "We pass the time of day to forget how time passes." --Hipolito in Amelie % Q: What would you say to people today who may not know who you are? A: I would just say that they're really lucky to be able to play some of the neat stuff they have now, instead of the cheap stuff we had then. --Nolan Bushnell in the book Arcade Fever % "Radio Shack: You've got questions. We've got cellphone plans." --Christian Scott % "'Let me help'. A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words over 'I love you'." --Captain Kirk, "The City on the Edge of Forever" % "If I were a maitre d', I'd suddenly scream at my customer, 'You want the booth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE BOOTH!' That is some funny-ass maitre d' humor, I don't mind telling you!" --Jim Rosenberg % "When a pharaoh died, I bet the servants tried all sorts of tricks to make people think he was just sleeping, because of the tradition of burying the servants alive with the pharaoh to serve him in the afterlife. Kind of a whole 'Weekend at Tut's' thing." --George MacMillan % "There is no 'I' in 'TEAM' -- unless I say it like Antonio Banderas in 'Zorro,' all manly and breathless. Then it sounds like 'TIM,' but then it gets me all hot, so that's still a problem." --Rob "Still Not the Attorney" Bodine % "The more I keep dealing with computers, the more it resembles a bad redneck romance: constantly flipping between 'I love you so much!' and 'Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?'" --Armaphine on k5 % "I'm gonna leave this world the way I came into it--dirty, screaming, and torn from the woman I love!" --Homer Simpson % I called up Wes, and we took a look under the hood. It's not like Wes is any good at fixing cars, but he's good at other important things, like starting her up, giving her gas, and getting me another beer. Plus, he cusses like a sailor when the occasion requires it, so he's good to have around for that, since my car usually needs more swears than I got stored up in me. --Jim Anchower in The Cruise on Onion.com % "There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know, and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly." --Woody Allen, Annie Hall % "Another day, another dollar...another irreplacable chunk out of a finite and rapidly passing lifetime." --Calvin's Dad to the Shaving Mirror % "A good way to judge the distance to a star would be to keep watching it until you see it explode, and then count the seconds till you hear the bang." --Edwin Evans % "I have touched the sky and it is falling" --Cory Hamasaki, in comp.software.year-2000, in those pre-Y2K days. % "If I want to think about having sex with 87 peacocks I can and it's not a crime, but in reality they might not be up for it, you know!" --Bjork in "The Guardian", June 2 1995 % "Damn everything but the circus." --e.e.cummings % "Don't take life too seriously; you'll never get out of it alive." --Bugs Bunny % Television is the golden goose that lays scrambled eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. Anyway, more people like scrambled eggs than caviar. --Lee Loevinger % "So, in short, you can't prove anything by one occurrence, or two occurrences, and so on. Everything has to be checked out very carefully. Otherwise you become one of those people who believes all kinds of crazy stuff and doesn't understand the world they're in. Nobody understands the world they're in, but some people are better off at it than others." --Richard Feynman % There is no TRUTH. There is no REALITY. There is no CONSISTENCY. There are no ABSOLUTE STATEMENTS. I'm very probably wrong. --TWENTY PAST MIDNIGHT % "I had a stick of Carefree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowin' that bouble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I went back to pondering my mortality." --Mitch Hedberg % "If a painting can be forged well enough to fool experts, why is the original so valuable?" --George Carlin % "When you pick something up with your toes and transfer it to your hand, don't you feel, just briefly, like a superior creature? Like you could probably survive alone in a forest for a long time? Just briefly." --George Carlin % Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for his novel "The Stranger", which says, in effect, that life is meaningless. But that novel's dust jacket carried a paragraph reporting that Camus died in a car wreck in 1960. It should have added, "Not that it matters." --Dexter Madison % Jeffrey Dahmer said he was temporarily insane and ate seventeen people. That ain't temporary. Somewhere around the fourth person you've got to think, "I don't think this is going away, I'm crazy." --Warren Hutcherson % Imagine the yoda-men in the office, around the water cooler. Yoda 1: Hello, Bill. Yoda 2: Morning, Hank. Yoda 1: Finish that proposal, you did? Yoda 2: Yes, finally. Quite a chore, it was. Yoda 1: That Henderson, he is a slave driver, eh? Yoda 2: Yes. To kick his ass I'd like. "There is no try, only do." Asshole he is. --Andy Simmons, rec.humor.funny.reruns % The heterosexuals who hate us should just stop having us. --Lynda Montgomery % The term "surfing the Net" is an insult to surfers--and nets. I was on this web site called "I Just Got Out of the Shower." It's people from around the world talking about how they're still a little wet. And when you dry, you get off it. Isn't it great how the Internet is going to bring us all together? --Bob Odenkirk % Eighteen-year-old kid, head shaved, both ears pierced, both nostrils pierced, both eyebrows pierced, tattoos coming out of the arms. He's got baggy pants that start at the knees, and twenty-seven inches of underwear. What's that about? That's one of the basic rules we know about--the underwear goes inside the pants! That's why it's called *Under*-fucking-wear. --Denis Leary % "The period and the comma are the only lovely marks of punctuation." --Paul Robinson, "The Philosophy of Punctuation." % "Doubt is the fate of all thinking men" --Roger Lemerre % "The bigger they are, the harder they hit." --slashdot % "You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are." --Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup % "If I ever get the chance, I have a couple of questions I want to ask God, and it's not the usual 'Why is there suffering?' I'd like to know what the biggest, grossest bug that ever crawled on anyone, but they didn't notice, and then it crawled away." --Julia Sweeney % I always give homeless people money, and my friends yell at me, "He's only going to buy more alcohol and cigarettes." And I'm thinking, "Oh, and like I wasn't?" --Kathleen Madigan % "I was a horrible date all through school and college. Here's an impression of me on a date in high school: 'Come on, chug it!'" --David Spade % Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, next to soccer. --Loki, "Dogma" % My grandfather lived to be 103 years old. The truth is, nobody knows what's good for you. Every morning he would eat an entire raw onion and smoke a cigar. You know what his dying words were? Nobody knows, they couldn't get near the guy. --Jonathan Katz % The Vatican came down with a new ruling: no surrogate mothers. Good thing they didn't make this rule before Jesus was born. --Elayne Boosler % They say that one day through virtual reality a man will be able to stimulate making love to any woman he wants through his television set. You know, folks, the day an unemployed ironwork can line in his Barca Lounger with a Foster's in one hand and a channel-flicker in the other and fuck Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, it's going to make crack look like Sanka. --Dennis Miller % "If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week." --Journey to the Ants, Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson % Invoking God in the Pledge of Allegiance is merely an affront to the Constitution. Invoking God on money is an affront to God. --Brad Ferguson, % "Oh, let there be nothing but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven." --Richard Wilbur, from "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World" % "Ack Ack, let me tell you a little story. A story about a little fat kid who everybody made fun of, and nobody liked and he had a twin brother, and everybody said he never looked like his twin brother, but he wanted to..." "Egg, where you that little boy?" "No! No! But I used to beat the shit out him! 'Why are you so fat? Why are so ugly?' Aaagghh!" "Great story, thanks." --One Crazy Summer, % "We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it." --Jules Renard % "If you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers, Christian Republicans. I'm not sure that motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick lying in bed all day watching TV, and I'll show you a guy who's not causing any trouble." --George Carlin % "Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years. Heh! That's hard to say with false teeth!" --Wienie King, The Palm Beach Story % "By the time you know what to do, you're too old to do it." --Baseball Great Ted Williams % "Adults are just obsolete children, and to hell with them." --Theodor Seuss Giesel (Dr. Seuss). % "That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous." --John D. Hackensacker III, The Palm Beach Story % "Love is a feeling you feel when you're about to feel a feeling you never felt before." --Flip Wilson % "Moreover, and perhaps more importantly: I hate people on diets. They're insufferable, self-righteous and invariably cranky." --Steven A. Shaw % "Bush was elected on a promise to end the contradiction between presidential rhetoric and presidential rationalization. So far, all he's done is change the subject from sex to money." --William Sale % "I'm gonna be free like a bird, and eat birdseed...or whatever, you'll see" --Ol' Dirty Bastard on his incarceration and the "Free ODB" campaign. % I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad. --Steve Martin in Roxanne % "My efforts to say nothing but positive things to my son have become desperate. 'You're the best, smartest, cutest, friendliest baby, you're...telekinetic. You move objects with thought and start fires with your brain.'" --Andy Dick % "It's like Vegas. You're up, you're down, but in the end the house always wins. Doesn't mean you didn't have fun." --The Devil, Deconstructing Harry. % We apologize for the Princess Diana Page One headline "Di Goes Sex Mad" that is still on the stands in some locations. This issue was locked up last week before her death and went on sale Friday, Aug. 29, 1997. It is currently being replaced as quickly as we are able with a special 72 page tribute issue: "A Farewell to the Princess We All Loved . . . Di -- Her Final Hours" --from the National Enquirer website % "The gods too are fond of a joke" --Aristotle % "At last we understand. Everything they told us about communism was false. And everything they told us about capitalism was true." --Current Russian Saying about the post-Soviet era % Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that shit. --George Carlin % At a junior college in South central Kansas there is an introductory course taught by Death. The course, Basics in Animal Husbandry, is transferable to most major Universities, except for a few small liberal arts colleges who are skeptical of Death's academic qualifications. At least once, but usually two or three times, during every semester, Death would be absent from class. In her place was always the same man, who simply announced himself as Death's Substitute. He spoke with a strong southern accent, was very overweight, and told stories about his wacky shopping mishaps at discount stores to highlight his lessons. The next day Death would be back in class, excusing her absence because of some cold or flu. Then the class would laugh, to which Death would respond with a slight smile, because we had all seen the mornings news about some plane crash or earthquake, and knew what she'd really been up to. --R.C.G. on the Blender Board % I cannot seperate her from the beautiful body. She has charm and a very gay spirit; in every way she's attractive. Intelligent and she reads good books. But it's the faultless body that forces me to make a fool of myself, pursuing a virtuous girl I could never possess. --James Laughlin % He didn't have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else. --Stephen King, "The Tommyknockers % "You know what my favorite TV show is? *Xena, Warrior Princess*. They should just call it the *Patton Oswalt Masturbation Hour*. Big moon-faced amazon with a stick, beating people up-- what god did I please?" --Patton Oswalt % "Dating is dumb. Basically you're making false judgements based on false exteriors. Oh, sure, my superficial self likes your superficial self, but the real me likes your roommate." --Margaret Black % Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: "For my sake was the world created," and in his left: "I am dust and ashes." --Hasidic Saying % "I guess everyone has had that one breakup where you just want to sit in your house for six months, smoking cigarettes and eating chicken pot pies in your underwear." --Jake Johannsen % "Bad habits are hard to break. Especially if you like them" --from the Comics I Don't Understand page % Little Miss Moffat sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider, and she ate that as well. Also, the tuffet. --from Lupschada's blog % Superhero stands arms akimbo. Below him the city is a neon sprawl. He aches. Too many arch-villains battled, too many last minute rescues. Thanks to certain fictional characters the world expects superhero to be invulnerable. But he's not. Superpowers are wear and tear on a body- the knees and back especially. And such bad karma- encountering all that evil and having all that power. You don't think evildoers try to make sweet sounding deals? As if superpowers and good intentions automatically came bundled with super morals. But now the city sleeps safely, and superhero calls it a day. --1997.06.10 % "It sometimes seems to me that the brain is actually a very shitty computer. So why would you want to build a computer out of slimy, wet, broken, slow, hungry, tired neurons?" --Slashdot interview with Richard Wallace % One of the mammals' evolutionary advantages was that they bore their young alive. As research has conclusively shown, animals that bore their young dead generally got nowhere. --from Sciece Made Stupid. % "I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. Shit. That's a lot of obstacles." --Lore cartoon. % "...not appreciating the weirdness of life is a punishment of its own." --Rachel Ellen Sherman % "When I want to end relationships I say, 'I want to marry you so we can live together forever.' Sometimes they leave skidmarks." --Rita Rudner % "The winds blew and the clouds moved on as if they were oblivious to their mortal plight." --from the game Soul Calibur % "Come in, Moses!" "What?" "We need to know how to kill a giant stone Abraham Lincoln!" "...Um... lemmethink, um... a giant stone John Wilkes Booth?" --Jesus and Moses on South Park % He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was... --The Great Gatsby % "There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering *every*thing." --Douglas Coupland % "The Bad Erotic Fiction Award, for bad writing about sex, went to AA Gill. He told the organisers what they could do with it - but not very well." --from the ComedyCollective(UK) % People expect old men to die, They do not really mourn old men. Old men are different. People look At them with eyes that wonder when... People watch with unshocked eyes; But the old men know when an old man dies. --Ogden Nash, "Old Men". % (The other day, in a monastery, Phunsook pointed to a mural of an ogre, who was stomping on the head of a defeated enemy. "This is the Buddha of Compassion, in his wrathful form," Phunsook said. Again, this may require some clarification.) --Seth Stevenson writing from Kashmir % "Men always say the most important thing in a woman is a sense of humor. You know what that means? He's looking for someone to laugh at *his* jokes." --Sheila Wenz % It is reported that on the first run of the fight sequences using the MASSIVE Artificial Intelligence program, the intelligent fighters - programmed to fight in the most efficient manner possible... ...all turned and ran away. --from the IMDb Lord of the Rings entry. % Best "epinion" I've ever read, Mi Amor; Or Death by Water Pik: I love my wife. My wife loves me. I love my Oral Irrigator. My wife does not. Indeed she despises it with great vehemence. I don.t blame her. How many times have I jumped from around a corner and blasted her in the face with a laser of water? Don.t think it doesn.t hurt either. Does a range of thirty feet with a sniper.s aim mean anything to you? "It hurts!" she cries. I.ve hit her in the eye before. That must have hurt, I admit. But that.s why I gave her a pair of Ektelon racquetball goggles. I tell her, "Ektelon racquetball goggles don.t do any good unless you.re WEARING them." % The architecture of eloquence may be brevity sometimes Thus the simple symbols xo at the close of a letter slice my heart (as they do) --Kyle Parrish % "I've had a pretty good lesson in human nature. It's more important to try to surround yourself with people who can give you a little happiness, because you only pass through this life once, Jack. You don't come back for an encore." --Elvis Presley % "Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk." --Jackson Brown % "If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none." --Mel Brooks % The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you. % "Do not meddle in the affairs of cyborgs, for you are conductive and can support 110 volts." --Wiredog % "You have no values; your whole life is nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm." "In France I could run on that slogan and win." --Woody Allen, "Deconstructing Harry" % "I guess one person can make a difference but most of the time they probably shouldn't." --Marge Simpson % "Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch." --Nick Hornby, "Fever Pitch". % "Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun." --Jeff Berner % "But popcorn - ah, popcorn was made for watching the world go by. Look. I stick my hand in the bag without taking my eyes off the street. I throw some popcorn in my craw. I chew...and I'm still looking. That's what I call class." "Sure. Peanut eaters don't know how to live." --The Gilded Lily % [The family] sat around the kitchen table eating fish sticks and hash browns, and their dog Rex walked in and said, "I wish you people knew what you smell like to me. I think you'd find it informative." --Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. % "Despite their rather glossy coats, monkeys make poor mirrors." % "Most of the molasses also goes abroad. I have _no_ idea what the hell anyone wants with that stuff; it's icky and stinks. It must be good for something, it's been exported for 300 years." "It is stored in a refrigerated platinum vault in Paris, and used as a world standard for 'slow'." --Patrick James and Bertil Jonell, via alt.humor.best-of-usenet. % "Do you believe in love?" "I believe in saying, 'I love you.'" --All That Jazz % "Something about my life feels very spooky, slowly paced and poorly lit." --'Wes Shelby' in Tom the Dancing Bug % "No, nothing I ever do is good enough. Not beautiful enough, it's not funny enough, it's not deep enough, it's not anything enough. Now, when I see a rose, that's perfect. I mean, that's perfect. I want to look up to God and say, 'How the hell did you do that? And why the hell can't I do that?'" "Now that's probably one of your better con lines." "Yeah, it is. But that doesn't mean I don't mean it." --All That Jazz % "Most things in life, good and bad, just kinda' happen to ya'." --Cocktail. % Boobs make sounds. This is perhaps more of a poetic thing that one develops as time goes on. I don't even know if it's a real sound; it's more of a metaphysical sound, I suppose. Different tits, the way they move, they make these different sounds that are just totally exotic. Maybe it's a total fantasy, but I swear I hear it. Some days, I have to use a Sony Walkman out there, it gets so bad. Especially in the springtime. --Robert Rakita, quoted in The Modern Man's Guide To Life % "It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or killing innocent bystanders in the process" --Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle % "All nouns can be verbed." --Traditional "Verbing weirds language." --Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes "First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs." --Peter Ellis, a.f.p. % "Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment." --R. Buckminster Fuller % "A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that still doesn't mean she can't have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones." --Cher % "All comedies want to be comic tragedies." % "Rome wasn't burnt in a day." --Slashdot tagline % "Is there a God?" "There is, but we don't know where. Or who. And, indeed, why." --The Onion's AV Club and William Shatner % "That smugness I saved from the nineties- where did I put it?" --Man to Woman in cartoon by Mueller % "A mind is a terrible thing to ugg.. I forgot.. " --Stile Project (a pretty raunchy site) % "Son...your mother tells me that you don't believe in Santa Claus. Is that true?" "That's right. I'm not going to pretend I believe in that junk, just because it makes you and mom happy." "Welcome to adulthood, son. Hope you enjoy playing with pants and socks, because that's all you'll be getting as presents from now on." --A Red Meat Cartoon. % "'Know thyself,' the Greek sage advised. But of course this is nonsense. Truly happy people live by the maxim 'Overrate thyself.' [...] Each of these people is a god of self-esteem, dwelling on a private Olympus." --David Brooks in an Atlantic commentary "Superiority Complex", % "The only problem with leaving a relationship is that you take you with you." --Comics I Don't Understand % "The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, assumes personal responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and keeps out of it. Without this hidden conspiracy of good will, society would not endure an hour." --Kenneth Rexroth % "In this great and creatorless universe, where so much beautiful has come to be out of the chance interactions of the basic properties of matter, it seems so important that we love one another." --Lucy Kemnitzer % "As a girl who has been on the flip side of [the men vs women in IT] ratio, I can tell you it's not much better for us. As we liked to say when I was in school: 'The odds are good, but the goods are odd.'." --Jeandre quoting someone on Slashdot % Later, when you face old age and its natural conclusion your courage will still be shown in the little ways, each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen, those you love will live in a fever of love, and you'll bargain with the calendar and at the last moment when death opens the back door you'll put on your carpet slippers and stride out. --from Courage, by Anne Sexton % "SOY! SOY! SOY! Soy makes you strong! Strength crushes enemies! SOY!" --Injoke on Everything2 % "It's a sick world out there, and that's why we don't live out there." --Garrison Keillor % "In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very touching, even beautiful... There always is." --Leo Tolstoy % "Evangelists say Halloween is the devil's holiday. What a lame-ass devil! Sitting down in the depths of hell, going, "I've got control of the major corporations, churning out weapons and toxic waste, but how can I get *candy*? Let me think--I'll get the children of the world to dress up as hobos and Power Rangers--and then I'll have all the bite-size Three Musketeers I need! I am Satan!" --Patton Oswalt % "The greatest productive force is human selfishness." --Robert Heinlein % "A lock of hair touches one's eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow, and one is in love." --Graham Green in a letter to his paramour Catherine Walston % "I don't regret a single kiss I ever participated in. Cocaine-fueled, alcohol-tinged, whatever. A kiss is love and love is God so it's all good, baby." --George W. Bush as imagined by Misti Lake % "¿Que Hora Es?"...The Mexican Soap Opera for people who only had a few months of Spanish in Elementary School! --Skit intro on "Cedric the Entertainer" % "Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs." --Fran Lebowitz % "My breast flipped inside out so my nipple touched my heart." --the sexiest sentence alive, according to the scientific formula % "My niece is dating a sculptor. She can see no flaws in him. He hopes one day to govern a province. Myself, I don't envy that province." --Translation of a quote in a sample fictional language at The Language Construction Kit, % "You can be sincere and still be stupid." --Charles F. Kettering % "I'm not afraid of death; but dying scares the hell out of me." --Jack Cleary % "I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them." --Ian L. Fleming % "Amatuers discuss Tactics, Professionals discuss Logistics" --Napoleon % "Because the big questions in life are tough. Why are we here? Where are we from? Where are we going? But if people believe in asshole, douche-y liars like you, we're never going to find the real answers to these questions. You aren't just lying, you're slowing down the progress of all mankind -- YOU DOUCHE." --South Park's Stan Marsh telling 'Crossing Over' psychic John "I can hear the dead" Edward why he's a douche % "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." --Voltaire % "A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road." --Alexander Smith % "What.s worth succeeding in is worth failing in." --Robert Frost % "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." --Montaigne % "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --C. G. Jung % "[Sung while operating on Homer] The kneebone's connected to the... something. The something's connected to the... red thing. The red thing's connected to my wrist watch. ...Uh oh." --Dr. Nick % "What a day, eh, Milhouse? The sun is out, birds are singing, bees are trying to have sex with them -- as is my understanding..." --Bart Simpson % "Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city! He is the cancer and I am the... uh... what cures cancer?" --Chief Wiggum % "Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." --Thomas Jones % "Lisa, I've had it with you and your stories. 'Bart's a vampire.' 'Beer kills brain cells.' Now let's go back to that... building thingy... where our beds and TV... is." --Homer Simpson % "They say the greatest tragedy is when a father outlives his son. I've never understood why that is; frankly, I can see an upside to it! Ha ha!" --Grampa Simpson % "You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." --Al Capone % You know what would be cool? A One Ring looseleaf binder. It would have one ring, and you could use it in the darkness. To, you know, bind things. --Alter S. Reiss on rec.arts.sf.fandom % "The Turkish Enterprise's dress code has got to cause problems. The female personnel are forced to wear miniskirts that end four inches above the bottom of their asses, and when they turn around to work on the spray-painted cardboard computers, they have no secrets. I'm sure this leads to situations where the navigator loses his concentration and says, 'Miss Uhura, we are crotching a course for the panties sector, coordinates your whole ass hanging out. Repeat: panties, panties, panties.'" -a review of the Turkish Star Trek. % "The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." --George Bernard Shaw % "Come with us." "Where?" "El Perro Fumando." "'The Smoking Dog'?" "Yes." "Why?" "If you wear something blue, you get $2 off a giant blue margarita." "You know, I make a pretty good living. I can actually afford to wear what I want and pay full price." "I'm not promoting the economic upside as much as I am the opportunity to drink something giant and blue." --from Sports Night % "No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing, but most of the time, we aren't either." --Marvin Minsky % "If pictures have anything to say, it's this: I was here, I existed. I was young and happy and someone cared enough about me to take my picture." --One Hour Photo % "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." --the Urdu poet Faiz % "When I was first asked to write an article about how women get over a broken heart I figured it would be the easiest money I ever made. Are you ready? We don't." --Stephanie Miller % "I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them." --"Rocky" on slashdot % "The Tedium Is The Message" --unamerican.com % You are born in pain; you live in fear; you die alone: Merry Christmas. --Old Scottish Christmas greeting. % Cold Chicken! It's the little pleasures that mean most in life. Fortunately. --Arlo (of Arlo and Janis) % "What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness." --Leo Tolstoy % "The number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. Like the numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing. Do you know the mathematical expression for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you're missing something." --Smilla's Sense of Snow % "As her tears blurred his receding figure into a ghostly memory, she realized how thoroughly he had broken her heart, like a steamroller grinding the shards of a perfume bottle into splintered, dusty oblivion, at least as much as one can 'break' a squishy organ composed of 70% water by weight; heck, let's be honest, you can no more break a heart than you can perform an appendectomy with a spoon, which is perhaps a better analogy for her pain in the first place." --Phil Currier % "Beautiful day..." "Yes it is." "Hear the birds?" "Yes I do." "Sometimes...I like to imagine what it would be like..to be deaf... ...and not be able to hear the birds... ....it's not so bad." --Poor Transcription from 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'. % "Those who do not understand history should not be permitted to make it." --Sig of Danny Sichel % "Take me to bed or lose me forever." --Top Gun % The past doesn't go away. It keeps calling to us from the woods, and at vulnerable moments, at twilight on a fall day with a Chopin étude playing, it can be almost overwhelming. Those old voices weeping and whispering. I have my ghosts and you have yours. Tell me about it. Meanwhile, the day passes, we eat dinner, we put the dishes in the dishwasher, we clean up the kitchen, we pick up a book, life goes on. I believe that All of the lovers and the love they made -- Nothing that was between them was a mistake. All that we did for love's sake Was not wasted and will never fade. A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago: "You can't regret all of the things you went through in order to get to the happiness where you are now." The old love prepared you for this new one. The tortured and exhausting 10 years with him is a crucial part of your education and can't be separated from the rest and burned. It's quite reasonable to still miss him after only two years. You're not imprinted with him, though, and you know that. You've moved on. You're only enjoying a little sweet sadness. What would an autumn night be like without it? What an inhuman life a person must lead to never experience such feelings. --Garrison Keillor, writing as Mr. Blue on Salon % "For most middle-class savers, ruthless economizing is a little like volunteering for poverty so that you can live in diminished circumstances at some later, possibly postnuclear, date." --Denis Boyles from The Modern Man's Guide To Life % The real fun comes when you put together a big enough set of blocks so that they start to exhibit fractal geometry, and the marbles actually roll through fractional dimensions and may come out inside-out, or disappear entirely, or have something subtly *wrong* with them that causes the family dog to growl and bark and try to shove the kids out of the room. --Stefan Jones, on a BoingBoing.net message board, about the marble tracks in wooden blocks toy Cuboro. % "The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it." --Vannevar Bush, in a 1945 Atlantic article "As We May Think". % "The only good thing about moving is that you'll never again wonder who your real friends are. They're the ones carrying your sofabed." --The Modern Man's Guide To Life % "If you look really hard you'll forget you're going to die." --Montgomery Clift, from Gryphon's Old .Plan file % "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library" --Daniel Dennett % "I'm a child of the Cold War...I grew up believing I would never live to grow old. Now I see that I may just live to go senile...to lose all my hair...to get feeble in my old age...I'm really looking forward to that." --Bruce Sterling % As the German biologist Bernd-Olaf Küppers puts it"...in the framework of algorithmic information theory, there is a strict mathematical proof for the assertion that we can never know whether we are in possession of the minimum formula by means of which all the phenomena of the real world can be predicted. The completeness of a scientific theory can in principle never be proved." We can take pleasure in such concise, elegant expressions as Maxwell's formulae for electromagnetism. But we can never know whether we could express them even more concisely. Not until the day we do so. Life will forever be open to us. We will never know that it cannot be expressed more beautifully. The beauty in the world is growing. --Tor Nørretranders, "The User Illusion." % "The only truth in the universe is that there are absolutely no truths, not even the one about there being none." --Ross Salupo % "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing. It's not bombing. It's air support." --Col. David H.E. Opfer, air attaché at the US embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia % "Weaseling out of things is what separates us from the animals. Except for weasels, I guess." --Homer Simpson % "Howard...you look awfully somber..." "Just trying to figure out why all of my relationships are always so torturous." "There's an expression 'all humor is cruelty.' Basically, at it's heart... it's about inflicting pain and laughing at others." "So?" "Okay...now tell me...what quality do you look for most in a woman?" "...um...A good sense of humor..." "Howard...I rest my case..." --Joe Forkan, this Staggering Heights % "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." --Carl Sagan % "90% of everything is crap. [...] Except crap. 100% of crap is crap." --Too Much Coffee Man % "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK." --Kurt Vonnegut when asked how he's doing % "It's really amazing how incredibly fast life goes. Boom! You're born. You go through life, meeting troubles along the way, but you overcome those troubles, and you have a blast. And before you know it, you're dead. If that ain't beauty, I don't know what is." --Arjay Flecher % Once upon a time, there was a very special lemming named Norm. Norm was a born leader. His colony would do anything he did. Those who did "deviate from the Norm" were banished. Then, one day, a grave danger threatened the colony: The weasels were coming! The calm resolve in Norm's voice stilled the rising tumult: "To the cliffs!" The colony followed him without hesitation. And all were lost in the cold, cold sea. All except those who had refused to follow Norm...they were devoured by weasels. MORAL: Go ahead and blindly trust your leaders. We're all doomed anyway. --Paraphrased from a Time Egan 'Deep Cover' cartoon: ASAP's Fables: "A-Moral-a-Minute % "If people felt bored before the late 18th century, they didn't know it." --Patricia M. Spacks, author of "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind", % "I think everybody longs to be loved and longs to know that he or she is lovable. And, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they are loved and capable of loving." --Mr. Rogers % "I don't think bots are the problem... I've had several online conversations which I'd assumed were chat-bots but turned out to be real people. I guess when Turing designed his test, he probably didn't anticipate the massive advances in human stupidity that we've witnessed in the last few decades" --Sheriff Fatman % "The rooster was chosen long ago as the national symbol of France. The choice is fortuitous, of course, because of a Latin pun, Gallus, meaning both the courtyard animal and the inhabitant of Gaul. The English pun could probably be considered even more apt." --Luigi Barzini, "The Europeans" % "In an alternate universe we're all being melted down like M&Ms for use in sundaes anyway." --Dream, 2003.03.05 % "Viagra is the opiate of the flaccids." --Bill the Splut % When we meet it's hot and steamy Afterward I'm tired and dreamy Bathing in your gaze, moonstruck How I love you, rubber duck. --Hilary Price, Rhymes with Orange % "The indispensible first step to get the things you want from life is this: Decide what you want." --Ben Stein % "This is a lovely golf course, I'm tempted to join the club." "I'm afraid you can't." "You mean they discriminate against Scots?" "No, they just don't want assholes in the clubhouse." --Warthog and Bletch, in Meet the Feebles % "This too shall pass. The clock will not stop ticking. Armageddon never lives up to its hype. Things change and they change for the better, the worse, and the indifferent. Let's all go to my house and have a beer this evening." --Bruce Sterling % "I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick?' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm." --James Thurber % "What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with." --Hardin % "You can fool too many of the people too much of the time." --James Thurber % "Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you're so cool, you're so cool, you're so cool. And sometimes Clarence asks me what I would have done if he had died, if that bullet had been two inches more to the left. To this, I always smile, as if I'm not going to satisfy him with a response. But I always do. I tell him of how I would want to die, but that the anguish and the want of death would fade like the stars at dawn, and that things would be much as they are now. Perhaps. Except maybe I wouldn't have named our son Elvis." --Quentin Tarantino, True Romance % "I suspect [the war] will not have a large negative effect [on the Adult Video business] since the sentence 'This war has me not wanting to look at naked women' has never been uttered.'" --Greg Salsburg of IVolt Networks % I suggest that if we, through force of imagination, were to dilate time to experience it as the Pac-Man does, and increase the resolution to allow us to read as much into each pixel as the Pac-Man must, we would not see the identical dots as identical at all. When the microscopic differences in each pixel are made large, each dot will possess a snowflake's uniqueness, and the acquisiion of each--no, the experience of each--will bring the Pac-Man a very specific and distinct joy or sorrow. The dots all rack up points equally, of course, in retrospect, however, some are revealed as wrong choices, links in a chain of wrong choices that trace out a wrong path leading to a withering demise beneath the adorable and utterly unforgiving eyes of Blinky, Inky, Pinky, or Clyde. --D. B. Weiss, "Lucky Wander Boy". % "If you are a disc jockey, kindly remember that your job is to play records that people will enjoy dancing to and not to impress possible visiting disc jockeys with your esoteric tastes. People generally enjoy dancing to songs that have words and are of a reasonable length. Sixteen-minute instrumentals by West African tribal drummers are frequently the cause of undue amyl nitrate consumption and shirt removal." --Fran Lebowiz, from Disco Hints: The New Etiquette % "I can't read porno by candlelight!! Who am I, Abe Lincoln?!" --Krusty the Clown % "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." --Douglas Adams % "The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me!" --Nicol Williamson % "While the topography of the human face is the hardest to simulate digitally, it turns out to be one of the easiest to map photogrammetrically. It has fewer shadows and occlusions than, say, the city of Paris. The language of the face communicates maximum information through the subtlest inflections. The interfaces of our souls are designed to be read in a heartbeat." --Wired on special effects in the new Matrix films % "Give a man a fish; he'll be surprised. Teach him how to fish; he'll be slightly afraid. Use him as bait; he'll cack his pants." --The League Against Tedium % thiswayshehadalreadyhadenoughscotchyetshekept drinkingpreferringintoxicationtothesightofhim holdingsomeoneelsehewasbacktohisoldwaysagain tobeingthatnotsosmoothtalkingcharmerwhoalways knewwhattosay --Ria % The earliest story I kept a copy of was, I had thought, sophisticated, for I'd had the inspiration to lay it in Paris. I wrote it on my new typewriter, and its opening sentence was, "Monsieur Boule inserted a delicate dagger into Mademoiselle's left side and departed with a poised immediacy." --One Writer's Beginnings, by Eudora Welty % "God damn you with faint praise!" % "Why not?" --Last words of Timothy Leary % "Hey, it's your old friend Darkness. Dude, give me a call" --From the Letterman Top Ten List "Top Ten Messages Left On Paul Simon's Answering Machine" % "Gee honey, I don't regret going to college. Why then I might not have married you. What would have become of me then? I would have probably just lived an empty, meaningless existence, ordering hookers and pizza till I dropped dead... ...with a slice in my mouth and a greasy hooter in my hand." --Ted Bundy, Married with Children % "I'm Jewish and I was watching (Tomb Raider) and thinking there are no Jewish video games. Well there's one, Quicken, but that's it." --Kevin Pollack % "Well, that's the end of the film. Now, here's the meaning of life. [opens envelope] M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations." --Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. % "Any view of things that is not strange is false" --Neil Gaiman, Sandman % "If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten." --George Carlin % "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" --They Might Be Giants, "Where Your Eyes Don't Go". % "It's better to have loved and lost than to have loved and caught something." --Too Much Coffee Man % Before I relate to you the next part, I have to tell you a little bit about the Pantheon. It has the world's largest domed ceiling. A domed ceiling might be a big deal in the world of architecture, but in the world of whispering it is definately lousy. --Steve Martin, "Yes, in My Own Backyard". % This was the city of broken dreams and glass. He was against the wall and the war. She had high hopes and boots. She aroused suspicion and men. He bought her story and a beer. She dropped her cigarettes and a hint. They left together and their fears behind. % "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned in life: It goes on." --Robert Frost % "You'd better make some noise while you can, because when you're dead, you shut up like HELL!" --Reverend Ivan Stang % As for the famous passion that used to motivate so many worker bees, a guy in the weight room at the Pacific Athletic Club in Redwood Shores said it best: "How many people can honestly say that they are really passionate about selling 'ERP software solutions to Fortune 100 enterprises'?" People are working, and working fairly hard, but most would rather be doing something else, if they weren't afraid of living on half the income. --Po Bronson, Life in the Bust Belt % "Is he a fairy?" Rosa was, at that moment, asking Joe. They were still sitting on her bed, holding hands. Joe was at first shocked by this suggestion, and then suddenly not. "Why would you say that?" he said. She shrugged. "He has the feel," she said. "Hmm," Joe said. "I don't know. He is--" He shrugged. "A good boy." "Are you a good boy?" "No," Joe said. He leaned forward to kiss her again. They bumped teeth, and it made him weirdly aware of all the bones in his head. Her tongue was milk and salt, an oyster in his mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he could feel her getting ready to push him away, and then after a moment she did. "I'm worried about him," she said, "He looked a little lost. You should go after him." --Michael Chabon, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay". % "The best way to seduce someone is by making yourself unavailable. You just have to be busy all the time and they'll be craving to see you." --Madonna % [In response to 'you're too old to be serious about playing soccer'] "Stanley Matthews was playing First Division football when he was fifty." "I'll bet you any money you like you're not playing First Division football when you're fifty." "[looks at his cigarette] Well, no. It's the smoking." "It's not the smoking, Steve. It's the crapness." --Fever Pitch % "I love myself...but it's unrequited." --Tom Robbins % "My heart does not know from logic." --Woody Allen, "Husbands and Wives" % Unrequited love is way underated. It's kind of like smoking. Ultimately it's bad for you, especially in the long term. Both are bad for your health, make you "smell" worse to others, and cause you to pick up annoying repetitive habits, whether it's constantly wanting something in your mouth (smoking) or anxiously checking e-mail (unrequited love). But on the other hand, both have a certain glamour, give us something to do with ourselves, and have a huge deserved mystique and romantic history behind them. Smoking gets you outside where as otherwise you might stick yourself in the office all day, unrequited love gets you to write amusing bon mots where as otherwise you might write nothing but pedestrian e-mail. --July 12 2000 % "Plant a turnip Get a turnip Maybe you'll get two" --Tom Jones, "The Fantasticks". % "My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Bronte, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantlepiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not true, in fact. My *absolute* favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees." --Douglas Adams, "The Salmon of Doubt". % "Here is a test to see if your mission on earth is finished. If you are alive--it isn't." --Richard Bach % "Time goes, you say? Ah no! Time stays, *we* go." --Austin Dobson % "This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it." --Dorothy Parker % "Fools dance, and fools look on. Since both are fools, why not dance!" --Lyrics to accompany the Japanese dance "Awa Odori" % "Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say." --Clay Shirkey % "Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win." --Lazarus Long % "Striving for excellence, like a moth beating itself to death on the side of a light bulb." --Josh Space. % You guys should try the British naming scheme, we call our ships things like "Illustrious" and "Invincible". Sounds better, no? Except for the inevitable irony involved. "at the battle of Jutland, HMS Invincible blew up and sank after a hit from Lutzow with the loss of 1,026 crew. he he you spotted it! "HMS Quite Easy to Sink with an Exocet" doesn't really have the same ring to it though, does it? --Alan Partridge and bourne (and Alan Partridge again) on Slashdot % "Most men dry-clean their suits too often. Except for wearing one while waging global warfare, this is by far the surest way to kill a good suit, and the quickest way to age an inexpensive one. Do not dry-clean until a suit is visibly dirty or until you can't stand the smell of cigarettes, or the fragrance of someone you want to forget." --Men's Wearhouse Website % "If a triangle could speak, it would say, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular." --Baruch Spinoza % "Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel." --Bella Abzug, US Politician % Not enough hours in the damn day. Not enough days in the damn month. Not enough months in the damn year. Not enough years in the damn lifetime. But, oddly enough, too many days in the damn week. Why isn't it Friday yet? % "Hey, uh, is it horny in here or is it just me?" --Dave in The Naked Truth % "Bad design is a misdemeanor against humanity." --2003.07.27 % "No matter what the shrinks, or the pundits, or the self-help books tell you, when it comes to love, it's luck." --Woody Allen % "Among the highest and best uses of poetry, third only perhaps to the poxing of our enemies and the commemoration of our dead, is the wooing, outright, of our darlings." --Thomas Lynch % "I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it." --Jack Handey % "I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either." --Jack Benny % "...while in space no one could hear you scream, it was damn sure not for lack of trying." --Sig of Scooterb23 % "When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me." --Emo Phillips % The real reason for our going seperately, however, is that I don't fly. I used to fly. I don't fly anymore. You know the bit I hate about air travel? It's the plummeting from a mile up in a blazing, cartwheeling tomb of shattering metal. That and the legroom. --Mil Millington, "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" % Let us not to the marriage of people who know what they want Admit impediments. Love doesn't vary Like you might change your hair style from pixie to bouffant Or throw away your swimsuit in January. Oh no, it is an ever fixéd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken. It laughs at death and gooses statues in the park And loves a cheeseburger with extra bacon. Love's not time's fool though rosy lips and cheeks Get all wrinkly and veiny and saggy and gnarly. Love alters not with its brief hours and weeks So don't give up on it, Charley. If this be a big mistake and we wind up hissing and snarling There is nobody I'd rather be wrong with than you, my darling. --from Garrison Keillor's new novel "Love Me". % Roo sighed. "Imagine a man is running along the street," he said. "What?" Tracey pulled a face at him. "Imagine a man running along the street." "Um, okay." "He's racing away, desperate to catch a bus that he sees is two hundred yards ahead of him, its indicator already flashing to pull out." "Right." "The man sprints towards it for all he's worth--arms waving, loose change flying out of his pockets." "Yes." "But while he's still a good hundred and fifty yards away, he stumbles over a small dog--a Yorkshire terrier, perhaps--that disinterestedly crosses his path. He falls. Spinning awkwardly onto the pavement in the cruel oasis created by other pedestrians leaping out of the way. Failure. Wasted effort. A jagged rip in the elbow of his jacket where it's hit the ground. Ahead, unknowing, the bus pulls away and he's missed it." "Uh-huh." "Now, instead of a man, imagine it's you, and instead of a bus it's 'The Point.'" "Cheers for that. It's certainly cleared up a few worries I was having. Also, you're a twat." --Mil Millington, from the novel "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" % CAUCASIAN--THE OTHER WHITE MEAT. (Brought to you by the Kill Whitey foundation.) --Bumper Sticker % "You can't survive by sucking the juice from a wet mitten." --Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over" % "Bees make honey and jelly? Huh. How come nothing humans make tastes good?" --Fry, Futurama (on finding out about "Royal Jelly") % "God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time." --Terry Pratchett % "I'm always relieved when someone delivers a eulogy and I realize I'm listening to it." --George Carlin % "Well you know what they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." "But I'm allergic to citrus." "Well you know what they say, when life gives you lemons, swell up and die." --Dogbert and Dilbert % "It's useless to try to hold some people to anything they say while they're madly in love, drunk, or running for office." --Slashdot % "I can't say any more than I love you. Anything else would be a waste of breath." --Elvis Costello % "What has two legs, and bleeds profusely?" "What?" "Half a cat." --The Don and Mike show % "This program runs at a blistering speed. And by 'blistering speed', I'm refering to the blisters formed on your fingers while drumming them on your desk, waiting for the damn thing to get finished." % "The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love." --Margaret Atwood % "The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney. ... We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney ... And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They all are like that." -- Lorrie Moore, from the collection "Birds of America"... % "Arnold Shwarzenegger. Finally a candidate who can exaplain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German." --Bill Maher % "What you don't know won't help you much either." --D. Bennett % "I learned a lot from that encounter group you sent me to." "Yes?" "Everyone was totally honest. We told each other what we really thought of each other. No one was allowed to get away with any falsehood or insincerity" "You must've learned a lot about yourself." "Yes, I learned how valuable self-deception can be." --Stuart Hample's 'Inside Woody Allen' comicstrip. % "Pudding can't fill the emptiness inside me... but it'll help!" -- Capt. Hank Murphy, Sealab 2021 % Loveliest of trees, the maple now Is turning yellow on the bough. It stands aong the trees of green, All dressed up for Halloween. Now of my three score years and ten, Sixty will not come again. Subtract from seventy, three score. It means I don't have many more. And since to look at things sublime, Ten years is not a lot of time. It's rather sobering for a fellow To see the maples turning yellow. --Garrison Keillor % It was good, making love two nights in a row. Doggone it, maybe we men are right about sex not being the answer; sex is the question, yes is the answer, and it blows away a ream of troubles, especially when it's your old beloved. Oh, miracle of miracles. Authentic rapturous passion between two old pros. You lie in bed afterward in a warm daze, tired, rapturized, like a salmon who made it back to the headwaters, like an old stallion who has fulfilled his destiny one more time, and life begins anew. In the dark, the judges are holding up their scorecards--8.1, 9.0, 9.0, 8.9--but that doesn't matter so much, what matters is that the war is over, the roads are open again, the ice is gone, spring is here, and you have discovered, for the 863rd time, the great beauty and simplicity of your life as an animal here on earth. You rise naked from the bed and go down to the creek for a drink of water and far off in the distance other males sound their cries of manly joy and you reply with a deep, chesty roar and the forest is quiet. You drink your water and return to the warm nest of percale and eiderdown and fit your naked self into the dozy curve of Madame's body where she lies swooned on her side and you smell her dew and roses and absorb a simple thought about marriage: this woman is all women, and when you chose her, you became Jay Gatsby and Robert Jordan and Prince Andre and Raskolinov and Ishmael and embarked on a life of imagination, which adultery cruelly violates, and breaks up the music in your head, and also it's a hell of a lot of work to scout up something inferior to what you and she can create at home. You have roamed the Western world in search of a the perfect tuna sandwich; your wife makes a good tuna sandwich; your powers of imagination are what make it perfect. --Garrison Keillor, "Love Me" % "Thinly sliced cabbage." --Cole's Law % "Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill" --Exploding Dog % "Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks!" --Homer Simpson % * Information Wants To Be Free * Rent Wants To Be Paid --"IronChef"'s sig on Slashdot % "You know that everything that you hear from science and from neurology, that you are a beast, just a hairless ape which happens to be a little bit more clever than other apes. At the same time, you don't feel like that. You feel like you're an angel trapped inside this body, constantly craving immortality, craving transcendence trying to escape from this body. And this is the essential human predicament." --Vilayanur S. Ramachandran % A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, "What does love mean?" The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined and more than made up for the jail time they had to do. See what you think: "When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. Then she gives him a hand-job. That's love." --Rebecca - age 8 "Love is what makes you smile when you're tired. Wait, no, that's coffee." --Terri - age 4 "When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. They don't call you 'jerkface' like all the kids at school do. Oh, how I long for the sweet kiss of death." --Billy - age 4 "Love is when you go out to eat and give someone most of your French fries without making them give you any of yours, and they don't report you to the FBI for not calling them 'freedom fries'." --[NAME AND AGE OF SUBJECT REDACTED FOR NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS] "Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, and he wears it every day. Then you tell him you like another guy's shirt, and he beats up the other guy and takes his shirt and gets sent to juvie. Love is fun!" --Noelle - age 7 --by Jacob W. Haller on alt.religion.kibology % "I'd do Einstein in a minute." --Gina Gershon on the Howard Stern show % "...if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world." --Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days % "If you took all the students that felt asleep in class and laid them end to end, they'd be a lot more comfortable." --Graffiti in the Big Ten % "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." --Winston Churchill % Answers to Questions Kids Might Ask GE Mascot Reddy Kilowatt During His Tour of American Elementary Schools. Q: Is that light-bulb head supposed to be cute? A: You'll have to ask my designers, but I believe it's supposed to be indirectly educational. Q: What, as if we never saw a light bulb before? A: Not everyone has had your advantages. Q: Why are your arms all crooked? A: They're bolts of energy. Q: Do you have a penis? A: No. Q: So, are you from outer space or what? A: No, I'm just a drawing. Q: Can I get a suit like yours? A: You wouldn't be skinny or zigzag enough to wear it. Q: I know fire isn't exactly electric, but what about flame throwers? Or bazookas? How about bombs? Are they electric? Or are you just to help Mom's blender make yogurt shakes for babies? A: All the things you mention have electric components. Q: What about those giant robots that Godzilla fights? Are they alive? A: As a form of brute nature, I'm unqualified to comment on the dramatic arts. Q: Is it satisfying to flow through the body of a condemned killer? A: No, I'm emotionless. As lightning, I strike innocent forest rangers and prairie housewives, too. Q: What happens if you touch water? Do you die? A: Electricity does not conceive of its own cessation. Q: What about "sexual electricity"? Is it really electricity? A: I'm answering children's questions only, sir. Q: They always show atomic energy with big muscles. You must be jealous, huh? A: I don't get a chance to look at other drawings. Q: Why is it we get wax in our ears and snot in our nose? Why not snot in the ears and wax in the nose? Why not the same thing in both places? A: That's a biological matter, to which I'm indifferent. I only *seem* to live. Q: So if I waste electricity, like, by leaving the lights on all night, do you go lie down somewhere and weep? A: No. You're thinking of Christ. Q: I don't think you're neat. I think you're queer. A: That's not a question. Q: Let me get this straight. Does it mean your nose and your stomach and your gloves and all of you are made of nothing but energy? A: Believe it or not, kid, so are you. % "If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out." --Jane Austen, Mansfield Park % "If you want a vision of the future, it is a wireless broadband network feeding requests for foreign money-laundering assistance into a human temporal lobe, forever. With banner ads." --John M. Ford % "If God is dead, who will save the Queen?" --Slashdot % i eat my peas with honey i've done it all my life it makes the peas taste funny but...uh...well... I have this kind of fetish thing about legumes dipped in sticky substances % Q: How many people belonging to a certain ethnic group does it take to perform a particular menial activity? A: A finite positive integer. One to perform the activity, and the rest to behave in a manner stereotypical of their ethnic group! --David Albert on rec.humor.funny.reruns % "One hand washes the other... And both hands wash the face." --Art Carney % "It's a cold bowl of chili, when love don't work out." --QOTD on Slashdot % "The actions taken by the New Hampshire Episcopalians (INDUCTING A GAY BISHOP) are an affront to Christians everywhere. I am just thankful that the church's founder, Henry VIII, and his wife Catherine of Aragon, and his wife Anne Boleyn, and his wife Jane Seymour, and his wife Anne of Cleves, and his wife Katherine Howard, and his wife Catherine Parr are no longer here to suffer through this assault on traditional Christian marriages." --from a "recent letter to the editor in Tennessee",rec.humor.funny % He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh, it is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. --H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding's inaugural address. % "Since the minute you were born I knew I would never take another easy breath without knowing that you were alright." "So I'm like asthma?" --from "The O.C.". % "I look at life as being cruise director on the Titanic. I may not get there, but I'm going first class." --Art Buchwald % " " -- Charlie Chaplin % " " -- Harpo Marx % " " -- Marcel Marceau % "All I can say about life is, oh god, enjoy it!" --Bob Newhart % "There were no 'Northern Lights' last night but there was a big moon and a sky full of stars shining down on the glaciers and snow covered peaks. It was a beautiful night with a constant breeze that seems to come from out among the stars and it seems at times that if you listen very carefully it will whisper secrets as old as time." --Ronald Reagan in a note to his daughter Patti when she was a baby % "Ryan, why do *I* think I'm hilarious and *you* think I'm STUPID??" "...you wouldn't understand." --Ryan and Brooke % You must believe me when I tell you this: they dance naked in a circle, around a tiny fire. If you lean in very close during quiet times, you can hear their little drums. --Christin Keck. on the special electrons, that might explain why Dell needs proprietary power supplies for their computers % "What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity." --Edward Abbey % "Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act. " --Truman Capote % "'If all the neurons in your brain were laid end to end,' Funny Paper's college roommate used to say, 'you would die instantly.'" --from the Funny Paper % "People generally seem to want software to be free as in speech and/or free as in beer. Unfortunately rather too much of it is free as in jazz." --Janet McKnight % "I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk" --John Huston % "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." --Andre Gide "Tell the truth and run." --Yugoslav proverb % "there's no moral to the story, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." --AuSkeptic paraphrasing a Simpsons episode % "I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen -- I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." --Samanth Black Crow in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" % "If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?" --Saddam Hussein declining a glass of water % "Face it, you either need a job, an organized religion, or a vice in order to meet people or keep busy." --LAN3, when we were AIMing about "Trust Fund Kids". % Etoile says, "When someone annoys you, it takes 42 muscles to frown, but it only takes 4 muscles to extend your arm and whack them in the head." Gilmore says, "it takes no muscles at all to use your psychic abilities to give them inoperable tumors throughout their vital organs" --via tehsux, 'comics without pictures' % "wouldnt you say suicide is a permenant solution to a temporary problem?" "I'm a Buddhist, I'd say suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem." --Neo-Tokyo and `[6], on the site bash.org % I want to write about those times when I was happiest; those times when good fortune seemed to alight on my shoulders and the sky was smiling down on me with a grin the size of the world. (When asked what had satisfied him most in life, Man Ray -- photographer, painter, sculptor, innovator -- said "...I'd say women". ...I'll say women.) High School summer nights; heels over head for the German girl-- --my last simple love. Late nights outside the home of her host family... (Maybe I broke one heart to get there. Maybe not. In either case it was worth it.) ...leaning, pushed up against the cinder wall that was still releasing the heat absorbed in the day. standing, leaning, but legs splayed, the German girl standing between them, leaning in close herself. Kissing, and kissing, and kissing, and kissing. In a month I'll notice she stops closing her eyes but now, this moment: I was happiest. Years later. College. That beautiful girl with the curly long dark hair. So assured. Sitting in that white and black director's chair. Her shirt off. Leaning back. Those beautiful breasts. Knowing a dozen guys on campus whose envy at that situation could knock down the walls of that brave little dorm room. Thinking that this time could be the time it was going to work, was going to stay working. Her leaning so far back, letting herself melt into that moment. That cheap chair would break in minutes. And that damn carousel of a romance would spin away from me by midterms. But that moment: I was happiest. Finally. Years after college. A midwinter escape to the Jersey Shore with you and some friends. (The Russian chick, and her husband, but they're a different story) Together the four of us had run away, just for a short while, a break from the workaday life, But more than that, I thought all the old cycles had broken. The old patterns of finding and loss washed away. I tasted some salt from the ocean water. I wrote a heart and our initials in the damp sand. My college drinking buddy and I had found something more in each other and I thought that was all there was to find. It was a moment, a moment that held the end of needing other moments: I was happiest. Oh Darling. Now, this moment. You say that you're leaving. Maybe I don't understand why. Maybe I understand all too well. Kundera wrote of poetic memory. That's what I inscribed in his book that I gave to you: "to finding a place in poetic memory". But I thought...I thought it would be more about being poetry. Less about being a memory. Aw Darling. Maybe we'll each find more times, other moments. Maybe I'll be happiest again. I don't know and I can't know but right now I miss you more than anything. % "It is only with the heart one can see clearly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." --The Fox in 'The Little Prince'. Someone posted this quote at work, in the original French and then with the English translation, and I posted a sticky: "You mean like Oxygen?" Shortly thereafter the sticky was removed. % "What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally." --Will Durant % "Dreams are important, otherwise sleep is just eight hours of nothing." --Jimmy Kendall in "MacGuyver" % "The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face." --Jim Bishop % "What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art." --Augustus Saint-Gaudens % "I'd kiss you, but I'm not sure it'd come out right." --Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle % "Every hour wounds. The last one kills." --'Old Saying' quoted in by Neil Gaiman in American Gods % "The love story was hooey. There was no love there unless you paid $3 for it" --WW2 vet on the movie "Pearl Harbor" % "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" --Albert Einstein % "People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious." --Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language. % 'I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.' --Paul Graham % Andrew wrote: > "Early candidate for 2004: Paycheck. Would it kill > John Woo to tone down the action part of his action flicks?" If it did, I think it would be in a hail of blue pencils as he leapt across the cutting room in slow motion, launching script changes with both hands as production assistants dive for cover. --Carl Burke % "Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them." --Samuel Butler % "Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex." --Dan Greenburg % Relationship = hamster. If you dissect it to see if there are any anomalies... you'll know for sure, but you won't have a hamster anymore. --Cordelia % "Life span is not the only virtue. If it were, we'd value turtles more than butterflies, oak trees more than children." --Jon Carroll % "The reason we say 'fell in love' is that it makes it sound more like an accident. Men act like, 'I was walking along and fell in love. I tried to get my boys to pull me out, but I got all tangled in the ropes and sticks and I couldn't break free.'" --Chris Rock % "Worst Vegetable of the Year: The brussels sprout. This is also the worst vegetable of next year." --Steve Rubenstein % "I *like* the tattoo. I like a woman who's not afraid to make a decision she'll regret later." --some guy on the Howard Stern show % "Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. Don't hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people." --Edd Dumbhill, as paraphrased by Cory Doctorow % "Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women: a little bit of support, and a little bit of freedom." --Jerry Seinfeld % "No one gets too old to learn a new way of being stupid." --slashdot QotD % "If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods." --Arthur C. Clarke % "Only a fool is sure of anything, a wise man keeps on guessing." --MacGyver quoting Harry in the episode "The Stringer" % "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." --C. S. Lewis % "The idea is to die young as late as possible." --Ashley Montague % Dear Dr. Science, Why is there always room for Jello? --Mike P. The technical term for Jello, I believe, is 2, 2, 4 Trimethylpentane in a colloidal mucous base. Early attempts to promote sales of the colorful and somewhat tasty product failed to catch on, perhaps because of their slogan "There's always room for 2, 2, 4 Trimethylpentane in a colloidal mucous base." Then they hired a copywriter to coin a catchier phrase for the product; the rest is history. % "[on his appreciation of lesbians] Oh, God love them. They get so much done in a day, don't you think?" --Jesus Christ in Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter % "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Of course, so does falling down a flight of stairs." --Richard Doty % "Never say die. I've tried it, and it doesn't actually make people die." --Tom McCudden % "The early bird gets the worm. But then, you can also get a worm by drinking a whole bottle of tequila." --Ben Schwalb % "Every dawn brings us a fresh start, because we never freakin' learn, do we?" --Tom Witte % "It takes a village to raise a child to hate all of the people in the next village." --Charles Star % "The key to someone's heart is never lost: It's just that the locks were changed 'cause your some kind of psycho." --Jean Sorensn % "You can do anything if you want it bad enough. That is why we see so many people that can fly." --Elden Carnahan % "Thanks t'him an' some other people I hadn't counted on, I got moved in time. But that ain't all I wanna tell ya. There's a lesson in this. Nuts to the so-called friends a' yers who grin in yer face but ain't there when you need 'em. People like that are a dime a dozen. Friendliness is not one of the first things I look for in a friend. The most important things are honesty an' reliability. Gimme a sour-faced buddy who returns phone calls, shows up when he's supposed to, and pays his debts when they're due. *This is a tough world, folks. We all need help t' get by so help yer friends an' make sure they help you or know th' reason why.*" --Harvey Pekar % "I was against gay marriage until I realized I didn't have to have one." --James Carvell, % Live in a world of your own, but always welcome visitors. --Slashdot QotD % "Do you think all any of us really want, deep down, is to be loved?" "No, we want to be rich, to be admired, to eat like a horse and be skinny as a snake. To have small children ask for our autographs, to be on terrific medications that make us calm and witty and sexy. To sing Irving Berlin and Gershwin and Porter at the Oak Room and be described in the Times as 'luminous.' But in the absence of all that, it's enough to be loved." --Mr. Blue % "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." --Carl Sagan % "Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer." --Peter da Silva % "The words of that philosopher who offers no therapy for human suffering are empty and vain." --Epicurus (341 - 270 BC) % "I hate babies. They're so human." --H.H. Munro % Lay Your Sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm: Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. --W.H.Auden, from "Lullabye" % "However many jobs I have, 'this one' is always the worst one." --chegosaurus % Did you hear about the Computer Scientist who starved to death in the shower? The instructions on his shampoo said "Lather, rinse, repeat." --jarran % "Condoms have been around for a long time. When condoms were made of lambskin, my great-grandmother would hang them out on the clothesline to dry." "How do you know this?" "My mother tells really inappropriate stories." --Andy and Me % "I was the youngest of 8. All brothers. All lousy kissers." --Woman on "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge". % "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." --Oscar Wilde % So I do get to laugh. Our situation, the human situation, is, in the final analysis, neither grim nor meaningful but funny. What else can you call it? The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk. Remember, Harpo could talk. He just wouldn't. Maybe there was nothing to say; everything has been said. Or maybe, had he spoken, he would have pointed out something too terrible, something we should not be aware of. I don't know. Maybe you can tell me. --Phillip K Dick, from the introduction to "The Golden Man" % "I'll call you..." "For what? We're so over... we need a new word for over." --"Sex in the City" % "It's not you, it's me. I don't like you." --Aeryn on the show "Farscape" % I object when people, especially therapists, talk about "resolving grief," as if grief could ever be so compliant. We humans don't "resolve" grief; we live with it. The pain of our losses recedes, over time, and we get on with our lives. But periodically one may well find the chill hand on the heart-- what we miss, our mortality--its sudden grip like a sharp intake of breath. It is important for us to recall in such moments that we still remain. Grief washes over us and we are left standing. It's okay. Nothing's wrong. It's just a natural part of things. Dead leaves underfoot. A clear autumn evening, the black sky like a vault, the vapor of our own breath in the air, a surprise. "Oh," we say. "It will be winter again soon. It's grown dark so early." And we burrow deep into our clothes for a moment, glad to be heading home. --Terrence Real, "How Can I Get Through To You" % "You know, kids, Drew's head is just like a pinata. If you hit his head enough times when he's sleeping, candy comes out. Well, first blood, then candy. Keep hitting." --Mimi Bobeck % I phoned from time to time, to see if she's changed the music on her answerphone. 'Tell me in two words,' goes the recording, 'what you were going to tell in a thousand.' --from "Siren Song", Hugo Williams. % "You can be alone and not be pathetic. But it's hard, especially if you can't stay away from sad songs and margaritas." --Misti Velvet Rainwater % Fight, fight, inner light, Kill, quakers, kill! Knock 'em down, beat 'em senseless, Do it till we reach consensus! --When Quakers Cheer. % "I will always love the false image I had of you." --Slashdot's Quote of the Day % "A person without doubt is a monster." --Garrison Keillor at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, 2004.06.12 % "The Germans have done for consonants what the Hawaiians have done for vowels." --Guitarist Leo Kottke introducing his song, tentatively titled "Gewerbegebiet" % "A quote he loved especially--and carried around with him-- was from Mary Lou Kownacki: 'There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story.' There were many times I wanted to be angry at someone, and Fred would say, 'But I wonder what was going on in that person's day.' His capacity for understanding always amazed me." --Joanne ("Mrs.") Rogers % "They say that time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself." --Andy Warhol % "Is there no rest? No escape? I stumble to the closet and reach in for my salvation. I see it all so clearly now-- I'll follow Papa Hemingway to the happy hunting grounds with a one-way ticket on the Lead Bullet Express over Gun Powder Falls through Massive Head Wound Canyon." --from "Wigfield", by the "Strangers With Candy" team. % And, if You deem it necessary (or just amusing) to take my mind before You take my body, let's try to keep the progressive dementia noble and epically sad rather than comical. For example: please let the last face I recognize be the photograph of a long-lost high-school girlfriend and not one of the plucky toddlers from the animated show "Rugrats." In my final moments, let me awaken--apparently lucid--in the pre-dawn hours calling out for a kiss on the forehead from a dead great-aunt rather than from the mustachioed black bartender on "The Love Boat." --Paul Simms, from "A Prayer", % The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. --Frederick Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" % "You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things ... The game of soccer. And the expression 'fuck off.' " --The last British governor of South Yemen, according to Niall Ferguson % "Gimme some angst! Gimme ennui! What do we got? TEAM APATHY!" % She was the answer to his dreams. Unfortunately, that answer was "no". --Evil Bastard % "Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch." -- Robert Orben % "There are no answers, only cross-references." --Weiner % "And it looks to me as though everyone in Civilization is operating heavy machinery every day, by our standards. That time when the guy stops at the barber for a shave, I bet it is with the atomic clipper, which by a million tiny rays of incomprehensibly powerful fourth-order radiation annihilates the hair microscopically straight down to the root. So horrific were the energies concentrated upon every follicle, that it not only was vapourised, but each particle was individually propelled into nega-space without leaving even one atom of vapour to trouble the hair's owner; and yet the energies were in perfect balance - the customer being shaved felt not even the slightest sensation of warmth upon the skin - as, indeed, he would not feel it if the balancing bar were misaligned, and the Titanic force misdirected to blow his head into tiny pieces, and, a moment later too small to measure, the barber shop and the entire city, also. Yet such was the reputation of the Engineers of Civilization that not once had this happened anywhere on the planet!" --Ryk "Sea Wasp" Spoor in rec.arts.sf.written talking about "Civilization" in E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensmen" books % "We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house." --Annie Dillard. % "Bacon is truth, friend. It's not only a food that knows no culinary boundaries, it is a forceful, vengeful, little pile of fat that loves to make things crispy and dangerous. Bacon makes everything crazy. Tie two hot dogs together with bacon. Strangle Bay scallops with bacon. Devil an egg and then stab it with bacon. Stick seventy-seven strips of bacon up a Cornish hen's ass. Rape a baked potato with bacon. Fuck with your peanut butter sandwich. When it's expecting the grape jam, hit it with the bacon." --From Bacon To Soap: The Impossible Journey. % "Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record--while, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, write poetry, whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks." --Will Durant, % "Maybe this is just the booze talking, but *'hic!'*" --Me to R % "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." --Tallulah Bankhead % As he entered the room within which so many a wild night of their sweltering love affair had been spent, the White Rabbit regarded her with benevolent eyes, her posture such that he suspected something was wrong, but before he could speak Alice unburied her face from her trembling hands and between her intense sobs he made out the words, "I'm late . . . I'm late." --Cory Gano % Researchers recently said that the chimpanzee, hunted for meat and threatened by deforestation, could be extinct in 50 years. What do you think? "They're being hunted for meat? Are chimp fajitas any good?" --This Onion What Do You Think? feature. % "People are stupider than anybody." --Tom Lehrer % "Friendship's more lasting than love...and more legal than stalking" --Jane, BBC's "Coupling". % Q: What did the left shoe say to the right shoe? A: Nothing! Shoes don't talk! --Oscar the Grouch % "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants." --Isaac Newton "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." --Hal Abelson "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet." --Brian K. Reed % Hippopotamus Antihippopotamus Annihilation --Paul Blair, quoted in the game Kingdom of Loathing. % "When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken." --Paul Grahan % No, Chad. I am a *Scientist* conducting experiments. Step 1: Mug liberal Step 2: See if his political opinions change. Step 3: Mug a Conservative Step 4: Don't care if his opinions change, did it for the money. Step 5: Enjoy a well earned pint or two. Science takes commitment, but I'm up to the job. --William Hyde % "Famous last words? Lemme think here. All right, here we go. Ummm...Never have I waltzed to 'My Country 'Tis Of Thee,' nor met anyone who did. Still, it's a waltz, for it's written in waltz time." --Tom Waits % "Since we can't by definition understand life and the world, we might as well choose a useful way of pretending to." --Roger Ebert % "I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, well, look what's telling me that." --Emo Philips % "It's hard to stop looking for something without simultaneously giving up hope. I don't know how. Buddhists learn the art of non-attachment, or they say they do. But have you ever seen a Buddhist lose his car keys? I have, and they're just like the rest of us." --Erika Krouse, "Zero" % Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." --Mark Twain % "Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out if it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other." --Jules Feiffer % "There are two ways to handle women. And I know neither." --Anon. % If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down. --Ray Bradbury % "I want to live the way I type; fast, with a lot of mistakes." --Attribution unknown % "The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist" --Quoted in Zuma % "Everything you know is wrong. But some of it is a useful first approximation." --Eric S. Raymond % "Every player who excels in the college game has a modicum of bloodlust; as Bill Parcells once noted, football isn't a game for well-adjusted adults." --Brendan I. Koerner % "I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? *Because that's what he fucking said!* Are we a nation of 6-year-olds?" --David Cross % "Written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on saying the same thing forever." --Socrates % "A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one." --Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings % "I believe that fascism is about abandoning your personal responsibility to the group or to society. You say 'In unity there is strength,' which inevitably will become 'In uniformity there is strength.' It's better if those sticks are the same size and length, because then they'll make a tidier bundle, which consequently leads to the kind of fascism that we saw in the '30s and '40s." --Alan Moore % I believe that the very act of believing in something causes us to distance ourselves from that thing, thus a duality is created: oneself and the thing in which one believes. Now since we all know that in order to fully understand a thing one must be that thing -- walk a mile in its shoes so to speak -- it seems obvious that the state of believing in something inevitably causes us to not truly understand that thing in which we believe. This noncomprehension leads to all sorts of difficulties. "I believe in love" has a better than even chance of leading to divorce, while "I believe in God" seems to end in variations on the Spanish Inquisition. But -- and it's a big but -- if one were love, one couldn't help but be affectionate and caring towards oneself and others. If one were God, one would act toward all beings and all things as if they were one's own creations. And that, my friends, is the secret of life in a two-second vanity card. Of course, the secret could also be "Sit, Ubu, sit." We have to keep an open mind. --Chuck Lorre % "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." --George Santayana % However, there are certain things that are so wonderful in American life that I can hardly stand it myself. Chief among these, without any doubt, is the garbage disposal. A garbage disposal is everything a labor-saving device should be and so seldom is -- noisy, fun, extremely hazardous, and so dazzingly good at what it does that you cannot imagine how you ever managed without one. If you had asked me eighteen months ago what the prospects were that shortly my chief amusement would be placing assorted objects down a hole in the kitchen sink, I believe I would have laughed in your face, but in fact it is so. --Bill Bryson % "Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so sometimes it's brother against brother." --Alleged actual quote from a science student's paper, collected by Richard Lenderer % "Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble toward my grave confused and hurt and angry..." --Quentin Crisp % TUNA CASSEROLE Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light. --excerpt from the Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook, via Sawers % To the most precious and adored things in my life: Jonathan and Peter. If I can leave you nothing else, at least let me leave you the dedication in this book. Oh and, incidentally, the way things are going I probably will be leaving you nothing else, okay? Bite the bullet, lads. --Mil Millington, dedication to "A Certain Chemistry". % "warning: in case of rapture, this car will be swerving like hell to avoid all the empty cars." --NickB % mpty-handed I entered the world Barefoot I leave it. My coming, my going -- Two simple happenings That got entangled. --Kozan Ichikyo % 9:30 a.m.: I meet my parents at Penn Station. My father arrives wearing a "McCain" hat, even though he's an avid Democrat, because he found it on the train. He's a Jew, but he would wear a Hitler jumpsuit if it was free. --Rachel Feinstein % "Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable." --Bruce Lee % "There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over." --Larry Wall in this sci.physics.fusion Usenet post. % "Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines." --Buckminster Fuller % "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." --Bel, the mostly sane. % "Cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women... They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane!" --Peter Sellers on the Muppet Show % "Innumeracy can lead... to the sense that one doesn't really count." --BBC's "The Consultants" % "Epic Trance is the gateway genre into the world of rave for most people, so if you have any form of music to blame for raves hitting the mainstream, this is it. Right here. And that, my friends, really, truly, terribly sucks. There must be a word to describe the pain one feels when witnessing (or hearing, rather) something once pure and brilliant completely sold down the river." --Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music % "I never let hygiene get in the way of a good joke..." % Dude #1: I want a new printer but they're too expensive. Dude #2: Yeah, I know what you mean. I want to find a good cheap one. Homeless busybody: Cheap?! That's why you're a fucking Jew! Dude #2: Actually I'm not Jewish, but I'm glad you're homeless! --Heard on W. 4th St., from OverheardInNewYork.com % "Life is so short, it's like a vapor. Here today, gone tomorrow. And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing at all. So I don't have any advice for anybody except appreciate your loved ones around you--your family, friends, or whatever, because death is quicker than you think." --Beverly Valentine, Funeral Home Director % "A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver" --Richard Braakman % "I broke something today, and I realized I should break something once a week...to remind me how fragile life is." --Andy Warhol % "Watch to see what I can still do!" --Woman falls to death attempting balcony handstand % "There is a natural hootchy-kootchy to a goldfish." --Walt Disney % "Aaaaigh! I can't breathe!" "Dear, that was your own smell." "I know.... ...don't think I'm too happy about that." % "Life's too long not to waste time" --Title or subtitle of this book at that paper store near Porter Square % "That's a nice shirt, it would go great with my floor." "Those are nice eyes, my parrot would love them." --Kibo % "Once you accept that most women are evil, that most men are predictable pigs, and that someone is always on a moral crusade, the world's not such a bad place." --"Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss" % "In physics, we can give a cold scientific definition of reality which is free from all sentimental mystification. But this is not quite fair play, because the word 'reality' is generally used with the intention of invoking sentiment. It is a grand word for a peroration. 'The right honourable speaker went on to declare that the concord and amity for which he had unceasingly striven had now become a reality (loud cheers).' The conception which is so troublesome to apprehend is not 'reality' but 'reality (loud cheers).'" "What is the ultimate truth about ourselves? Various answers suggest themselves. We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong. We are physical machinary--puppets that strut and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings beneath. But there is one elementary inescapable answer. We are that which asks the question." --Sir Arthur Eddington, "Beyond the Veil of Physics" % My wife tends to have a very fuzzy line between asleep and awake. After some years of living with this, I have finally hit upon an effective test to determine which state she is in (because, you see, the fact that she is standing upright and talking to me is _not_ an accurate indicator): I ask her if she has feet. If the answer requires thought on her part -- and particularly if the answer is "no, they're missing" -- then she's asleep. If she gets annoyed at me for asking such a silly question, then she's not asleep. --Rob Ellwood % But I won't cry for yesterday There's an ordinary world Somehow I have to find And as I try to make my way To the ordinary world I will learn to survive --"Ordinary World", Duran Duran. % the other night after eating chili i ripped a pretty good one. i lifted the blanket to trap your head and remembered you weren't there. i miss you. --from Pamie.com's Valentine Squishy contest % "There is no certainty; there is only adventure. Even stars explode." --Roberto Assagioli % "Every human being has a project." --Sartre as paraphrased by Colin, a high-functioning autistic % A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. 'Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?' he asks. 'No,' replies the colleague, 'but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it.' --Niels Bohr % "this morning, while joking around with my girlfriend, i referred to my 'male implement' as a 'wand of fucking +2,' and proceeded to request that she make a saving throw against orgasm. she immediately lashed out at me, stating that if i ever attempted to mix our sex life and dungeons and dragons ever again, there'd be hell to pay - and not the kind of hell that you get to ever have sex with ever again." --waferbaby % "If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you." --Muhammad Ali % "I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, Even if you spent all your time thinking about them." --Mark Haddon % "On the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people." --David Weinberger % YOU'RE NOT THE FIRST YOU'RE NOT THE LAST ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER CRASH --Graffiti poem from the old laundry room % "I believe we were put on this earth to do a lot less than we think." --Albert Zuckerman % You are not a fool just because you have done something foolish -- only if the folly of it escapes you. --Slashdot fortune % "Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty." --Jean Shepherd % People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution. --Communique from Unitarian Jihad. % "It would be difficult to come up with a better symbol for romantic love than roses. Because it is beautiful and smells lovely, yes, and because the petals feel like soft skin, but mostly because they hurt like hell if you're not careful. This is why I am completely opposed to thornless roses. Roses without thorns are the floral equivalent of the word 'luv'." --Lore Sjöberg, "The Book of Ratings" % Q. "How's your wife?" A. "Compared to what?" --Henny Youngman routine % The whole shooter craze never did much for me, but a tequila shot done in the classic style--salt, tequila, lime, involuntary neck spasm--is more than a shooter. It's a brief drama, a tragic opera of spirits that fits in the palm of your hand. Pain and passion, sweetness and tears, citrus and sodium and fermented cactus juice. B+ --Lore Sjöberg, "The Book of Ratings" % Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal? A: You already are an animal. --Douglas Couplan, "Microserfs" % "For the next few hours the old man revealed more of his ingredients for successful social living. Express gratitude. Give more than is expected. Speak optimistically. Touch people. Remember names. Don't confuse flexibility with weakness. Don't judge people by their mistakes; rather, judge them by how they respond to their mistakes. Remember that your physical appearance is for the benefit of others. Attend to your own basic needs first, otherwise you will not be useful to anyone else." Scott Adams (of 'Dilbert' fame), "God's Debris" % "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States (1919) Holme's famous dictum on the limits of free speech was shaped by personal experience. On March 7, 1847, the six-year-old attended the Boston Lyceum's Theater's world premiere of the new musical comedy, Hey, Everybody, There's a Fire in the Theater...We're Not Kidding. --"America (The Book)", by "The Daily Show". % I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meant.but one had to assume the worst. --from Matt Taibbi's Scathing review of "The World is Flat" % "The idea that there can be prudential compromises on issues like the right to die, or same-sex marriage, or stem-cell research is a difficult one for fundamentalists. Since there is no higher authority than God, and, since there can be no higher priority than obeying him, the entire notion of separating politics and religion is inherently troublesome to the fundamentalist mind." --The New Republic % "All my life I've had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was." "Oh, no, that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that." "Maybe that means something: that outside universe we know some alien intelligence is..." "Maybe. Who cares? Perhaps I'm old and tired but I always think the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, 'Hang the sense of it' and keep yourself occupied. [...] I'd far rather be happy than right any day." "Are you?" "No. That's where it all falls down of course." --Arthur and Slartibartfast, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" % "It's this great shoe store, you have to check it out." "Where is it?" "You know West Newton? It's just east of West Newton." "Err, isn't that just...'Newton'?" --2009.05.02 % "Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?" "No, no, no... Death is 'not.' Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat." "I've frequently not been on boats." "No, no... What you've been is not on boats." --Rosencrantz and Guildenstern % "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." --E. B. White % "I learned, never date a Jedi. It makes them crazy." --Comment by Anne Marie from a Lessons learned from Revenge of the Sith % I think that the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing what you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part. --Annie Dillard % This Eath game amuses me. I enjoy flying the little space ship, although it could not possibly work without a Quantum Juxipostulator. Much like any typical human, I had a highly enjoyable time figuring out the most efficient route through this basic simulator. I completed the challenge in but 36.92 nano-krumlacs. After playing the game, I ate a typical Earth meal consisting of steak with chocolate syrup, and a refreshing glass of Windex. Then I returned to my place of employment, where a man asked me, "Why are you here?" To which I replied, "I am a human from Earth, this is where I live." Then he said, "No, why are you here in the building? It is midnight, and I am the night janitor." I am glad he did not ask me about space, because I know nothing of that. I have no home among the stars! I know nothing of the planet Quuallic 9, home of the Parliament of Universal Harmony. I have certainly never been there, for I am from Smalltown, Canada. I will not speak of such things any longer. Instead, I will speak of this game. It pleases me. I score it 12 quannularcs. --Klaaitalc, the Human Gamer, reviewing "Star Wars: Dengar Strike III: The Search for Nien Nub" in "GameInfarcer" % "For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." --Bill Bryson, "Notes from a Big Country" % "How about a soy milkshake?" "Do you know what a soy cow says? A soy cow says 'meh.'" --Diesel Sweeties % "In the end that's all we have: our memories - electochemical impulses stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge. In the end they define our lives." --Remembrance of the Daleks. % "Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception-especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence. --Hunter S. Thompson % Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he gazed about those gathered loyally around him and whispered: 'I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used.' --Bill Bryson, "Mother Tongue" % "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." --Ralph Waldo Emerson % And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has. --William Gibson, "Pattern Recognition" % "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." --A.N. Whitehead % "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." --Donald Norman % "When is a car not a car? When it turns into a driveway" "Why did the girl run into the door? She forgot to open it." "Why is a baker mean? Because he beats the bread." "What Did Yes Say To No?""Maybe." --Laffy Taffy % "A rolling stone gathers momentum" --Mimims, the "opposites" of maxims. % "Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense." --E.E. Cummings % "The eggs come from real chickens, the cheese comes from real cows, and the sausage comes from Jimmy Dean" --from From the Department of Really Unfortunate Advertisements Department % "As I get older, I don't enjoy the same things I once enjoyed. But I enjoy new and different things! ... I just don't enjoy them as much as I used to enjoy the things I no longer enjoy." --Arlo, "Arlo + Janis" % "Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future." --Paul Boese % I had not seen a great deal accompished in the name of dignity, ever." --Annie Dillard % "Engineers aren't boring people; we just get excited over boring things." --Sigfile of "sagenumen" on slashdot % Taurus: (April. 20.May 20) Please stop comparing your own experiences to those of Sisyphus, who, unlike you, at least tried to get stuff done. --Old Onion Horoscope % "The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it -- and that's all. It is thus that we should love." --DeGourmont % "If you come to think of it, what a queer thing life is! So unlike anything, don't you know, if you know what I mean." --P.G. Wodehouse % "It takes a Long time to count to '2' in Binary." --Fourlegged % "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up." --James A. Baldwin % "The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, you know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done." --George Carlin % Heisenberg may have slept here. --Fortune file Actually, we have scientifically determined that Heisenberg did indeed sleep exactly here. However, we have no idea whatsoever just how fast asleep he was. --Dave Aronson, alt.sysadmin.recovery % "Fate is what you call it when you don't know the name of the person screwing you over." Lois on Malcolm in the Middle % "So you see" concluded Lance "there are certain things that every woman regardless of personal situation should do at least once in their lives and I am foremost amongst these things." --Hywel Curtis, Bulwer-Lytton contest % A mouse trap, placed on top on of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep. Old telephone books make ideal personal address books. Simply cross out the names and addresses of people you don't know. Avoid parking tickets by leaving your windshield wipers turned to fast wipe whenever you leave your car parked illegally. High blood pressure sufferers: Simply cut yourself and bleed for a while, thus reducing the pressure in your veins. A sheet of sandpaper makes a cheap and effective substitute for costly maps when visiting the Sahara desert. --Best Hints by Phil % "I want to do things to you that will put you in counseling for years." --New Idea for a Pickup Line Not To Use % "Keep your rear foot firmly in contact with the ground, don't let it roll up on the arch." "..." "Create length along the front...and be sure to focus on Uddiyana Mudra and Uddiyana Mudra, they can really help." "...[grunt]..." "Try and keep your belly soft." "No problem!" --My yoga instructor and me % And suddenly I had a vanilla epiphany. The rice, a truly bland food, forced the vanilla to take center stage. But vanilla is essentially a supporting actor. It is a sociable flavor, at its best when bringing out the best in other distinct ingredients, softening their acidity, drawing out their intensity, helping them to cohere. --Slate.com's Amanda Fortin % "The Russian doesn't want to have kids. Had one a long time ago. He's done." "Well, then, doe-svee-don-yah or however you say it." "What? No! For you maybe, but not for me." "Don't you want to have the option?" "Well, yes. But it is my experience that men like him don't come along that often." "But we're 38! These are the years." "Yes, I know, I've heard. I'm running out of time. I don't even have time to eat this cookie." "How is it?" "It's so good I forgot to have children." --Carrie and Charlotte, "Sex And The City % "People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense." --Ken Kesey % "I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again." --Achilles, Troy % "Confusion is always the most honest response." --Marty Indik % Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else. --Ogden Nash % "But keeping feelings bottled up is like holding an angry tiger by the tail: Unless you hold on tight, he'll kill you--metaphorically. Realistically, if you have a tiger by the tail, he'll kill you whether you hold on or not. In fact, if you hold his tail he'll probably find you quicker. All he has to do is follow his body down to the end of his tail, and there you are. But not for long. Sure, technically you might be able to continue holding on to the tail while he is gnawing on your skull, but this is merely a muscle reflex. Let's face it, once the head leaves the body, you aren't doing much of anything. I guess my point is, don't touch tigers' tails. They don't like it. They are very flexible and have powerful paws with razor sharp, retratable claws. I don't even want to talk about the teeth." --"Russel Hokes" in "Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not" % It took me twenty-nine minutes to get to the Van Nuys Hotel. Once long ago it must have had a certain elegance. But no more. The memories of old cigars hung to its ceiling and of its leather lounge chairs. Room 332 was at the the back of the corridor, near the door to the fire escape. The hall that led to it had a smell of old furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives. The hotel dick, a real dope by the name of Flack, told me that the party in Room 332 had checked in at 2:47 P.M. under the name of Dr. G. W. Hambleton, El Centro, California. Of course I had to pry it out of him. There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the mirror and wonder. --"The Little Sister", Michael Lark's graphic novel adaption of Raymond Chandler's novel % "We need to get up." "Ehhrmmmmm....not yet." "No we have to get up." "What time is it?" "Like 8." "Guh, you're right." "Of course. I'm always right." "No, *I'm* always right!" "That's a good point. You are the sun of rightness, and I am merely the moon, just reflecting a bit of your rightness at night." "Mmmm-hmmm." "You're right New York City, and I'm merely right New Jersey. You're the Eiffel Tower of rightness, and I'm the Arc de Triomphe." "..." "You're a great big garbage dump of right, and I'm only a little toxic stream running off of it." "I liked the sun and the moon thing better." "You're the penis of rightness, and I'm just the pubic hair around it. No, better...you're the vagina of rightness, I'm just the bellybutton of rightness." "..." "But the clitoris of truth is: we have to get up, like now." "OK I'm going!" % The best thing you've ever done for me Is to help me take my life less seriously, it's only life after all --Indigo Girls, Closer To Fine % "Well, it's a perfectly agreeable, innocent thing to do, and it's a way of being human. What I hate about public school systems that cut out the arts because they're not a way to make a living...it is such a human thing to do, and it is the experience of becoming. If you make something, it wasn't in the universe before. And that feels so good to human beings, and to cheat kids out of that is criminal. Everybody should be painting now, or drawing, or whatever, just as they should be singing or taking walks or falling in love or whatever... it's so human, and not to teach kids how to do this is to cheat them terribly." --Kurt Vonnegut % That means all of us when you remember an adage a guru once told me: "Every piece of computer software, no matter how small, involves at least a team of two -- me, and me six months from now when I have to fix it." Conway puts it differently "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." --Tony Williams % "Things will get better despite our efforts to improve them." --Will Rogers % "The best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk." --Maurice Baring % Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity": "I'm just curious about how one goes from making tapes for one person to marriage proposals to another in two days. Fair enough?" "Fair enough." "So?" "I'm just sick of thinking about it all the time." "All what?" "This stuff. Love and marriage. I want to think about something else." "I've changed my mind. That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard. I do. I will." "Shut up. I'm only trying to explain." "Sorry. Carry on." % "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." --H. P. Lovecraft % "People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes." --Abigail Van Buren % "Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation." --James Thurber % "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." --Robert Frost % "I didn't LEARN anything, but at least I SAW something." --Willa Mae Buckner, "The Snake Lady", 1922-2000 % AFGHANISTAN: "Everyone here wears long beards that suit them well, but it must be tough when they're drinking milk." EQUITORIAL GUINEA: "It's called that because it's right on the equator. If it were under the highway, it'd be Interstate Guinea." UGANDA: "There's a bird on the flag, but its inhabitants are human. It's not a country of birds or anything." ETHIOPIA: "A nation famous for coffee and marathon runners. Maybe the coffee makes you run really fast." MOZAMBIQUE: "The flag of this country has a gun, a hoe and a book. It must have gone through hard times." THE PHILLIPINES: "A country comprised of over 7,000 islands. It must be hard to find names for them all." PAKISTAN: "There's a city here called Harappa. But there aren't any rapping dogs." --The King Of All Cosmos from "We Love Katamari" % What if all snowmen could walk and talk, like Frosty? They'd be gone as soon as we made them. You think snowmen would sit around here just to entertain kids, waiting until the first warm spell melted them? No way. Responding to some primitive instinct for survival, they'd hoof it for Antarctica, or climb Kilimanjaro. The only time anyone would ever see a snowman is by climbing a mountain. We'd expect them to be gurus, and ask them about the meaning of life. But they would just say things like, "Me want toy." Snowmen are idiots. --Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post % The circus is the only ageless delight that you can buy for money. Everything else is supposed to be bad for you. But the circus is good for you. It is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a truly happy dream. The big cats do things no cat would ever do. You can see them jumping effortlessly over Mr. Konyot's head instead of making that unbelievable low rush they close with in the dusk when the female lion shows her cubs the way to kill. --Ernest Hemingway, writing in the "Circus Magazine and Program" for the 83rd Edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey % Life sucks and you'd better get used to it. Sounds negative, but nothing could be further from the truth. The sooner you understand that politicians are liars, thieves, and worse, the sooner you stop waiting around for a leader to make everything better. Stop putting your faith in Gods, friends, family--hell, you may not be such a hot prospect yourself. Truth is hard and absolutely essential. --Ted Rall % During the Planck era, the Universe can be best described as a quantum foam of 10 dimensions containing Planck length sized black holes continuously being created and annihilated with no cause or effect. In other words, try not to think about this era. --James Schombert % SCIENCE: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong. There is a lot more Science than you think. from A Scientific Encyclopedia for the Inquiring Young Nome by Angalo de Haberdasheri --Terry Pratchett, "Wings" % Anyway, Pee-wee loves fruit salad and says so. Miss Yvonne, obviously thinking with her enormous pair of brain, laughs and tells Pee-wee to marry fruit salad if he loves it so much. Pee-wee was always offering up marriage to the others. Love that sandwich? WHY DON'T YOU MARRY IT? Love using the telephone? WHY DON'T YOU MARRY IT? Pee-wee is just like my fucking family. I'M NOT READY FOR THAT KIND OF COMMITMENT AUNT PAM JUST LET ME HAVE SEX WITH MY FRUIT SALAD ON A REGULAR BASIS COMFORTABLY PLEASE. I MEAN EAT IT. --Pee-wee's Playhouse: The 25 Best Moments % "It's either mean or it's arbitrary, and either way I've got the heebie-jeebies." --Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes" on the death of a baby raccoon % "Wait, wait. Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk." "And what does Death need time for?" "The answer is so simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in..." --William S. Burroughs % "We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us." --Maurice Maeterlinck % I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. --William Goldman, "The Princess Bride" % [After tussling with the Tin Woodsman and the stuffed Scarecrow] "What is that little animal you are so tender with?" "He is my dog, Toto," answered Dorothy. "Is he made of tin, or stuffed?" asked the Lion. "Neither. He's a--a meat dog," said the girl. --L. Frank Baum, "The Wizard of Oz" % In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. --Mortimer J. Adler % "We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverance. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God." --Mark Twain % If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love, for the way I look at it love is strictly the old phedinkus, and I tell the little guy as much. --Damon Runyon, "Tobias the Terrible" % [On having to cook for his son's new vegetarian diet] "I mean, how hard could it be to cook vegetables? What's the recipe for Broccoli? Oh yeah, right...'Broccoli'!" --"The War At Home" % "Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us -- the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, all our thoughts, all our memories. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal." --Cliff Pickover % At that moment he met her eyes and it occured to him that we live only in moments, arranged as it happens. Someday we shall live entirely in nothing but a single kiss. --Kyle Parrish % "The thing that I consider most important about my work is this: I told it like it is. I told my readers that the bad guys have a little of good in them, and the good guys have a lot of bad in them, and that you can't depend on anything much; nothing is always going to turn out roses." --Carl Barks, May 29, 1973 % "Evolution is supported by the entire scientific community; Intelligent Design is supported by guys in line to see The Dukes of Hazzard. No. Stupidity isn't a form of knowing things ... 'Babies come from storks' is not a competing school of thought in medical school. We shouldn't teach both and if Thomas Jefferson knew we were blurring the line this much between church and state, he would turn over in his slave." --Bill Maher % "The quickest way to a man's heart really is through his stomach, because then you don't have to chop through that pesky rib cage." --J. Jacques % "The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes, naturally no one wants to live any other way." --Judith Martin % "God, grant me the ability to remember those who love me. For those who do not love me, turn their hearts. And if you can't turn their hearts, turn their ankles, so I'll know by their limping." --"CivilWarMan"'s sig on this StarDestroyer.net thread % "Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar." --Pablo Picasso % "You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast."" --Dunbar in "Catch 22" % There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. --Richard Feynman % Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide. --Trurl's mechanical poet % "I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for 'prior art.'" --svallarian's .sig on Slashdot % Of all the ridiculous expressions people use--and people use a great many ridiculous expressions--one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and connot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "No news is bad news" except that people may not be able to contact you bescause they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "No news is no news," except that is so obvious it is hardly an expression at all. --Lemony Snicket % "Life is a lot like the Minus World. It's all the same, it just keeps repeating itself, until you run out of time." --Nick B % "You live and learn. At any rate, you live." --Douglas Adams % "All the illusions of grandeur you have about me are wrong. We're going to sit and talk, but first of all you must disengage your fingers from my thighs." --Leonardo DiCaprio, to an obsessed fan at the airport % "I know... I hear what I want to hear." "And then you *say* it." --Me and FoSOSO% % "There aren't evil guys and innocent guys. It's just... It's just... It's just a bunch of guys." --Steve Arlo in "Zero Effect" % "I really do believe I can accomplish a great deal with a big grin. I know some people find that disconcerting, but that doesn't matter." --Beverly Sills % "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." --Umberto Eco % "This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose." --Richard Dawkins % "Macaroni and cheese is good, the manna that God gave to the Christian people in the wilderness, which is where we are still living." --Garrison Keillor % A small girl was lost at a large shopping mall. She approached a uniformed policeman and said, "I've lost my grandpa!" The cop asked, "What's he like?" The little girl replied, "Crown Royal whisky and women with big tits." --rec.humor.funny % OICURMT! O I C U 8 1 2 A B C D goldfish L M N O goldfish! O S A R...S M P N? F U M? S, E F M. F U X? S, E F X O K L F M N XOICURMT! O I C U 8 1 2 A B C D goldfish L M N O goldfish! O S A R...S M P N? F U M? S, E F M. F U X? S, E F X O K L F M N X % "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." --George Santayana % "After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box." --Italian Proverb % "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death." --Leonardo da Vinci % "I am not dying, not anymore than any of us are at any moment. We run, hopefully as fast as we can, and then everyone must stop. We can only choose how we handle the race." --Hugh Elliott % "Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome." --Isaac Asimov % "I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong." --Bertrand Russel % "The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection." --Bertrand Russel % "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." --Bertrand Russel % "The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation." --Bertrand Russel % "The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours." --Bertrand Russel % "You left something here" "What?" "Your underwear." "Oh... hee hee" "Yeah, it's disappointing. I gave you a pair of boxers, and you can wear them around... ...anything I do with your underwear ends up being weird." --Jeffrey Brown, from his short comic novel Any Easy Intimacy % Technically there are 55 Republicans in the Senate, but that's not counting their favorite shill Joe Lieberman. He's a Democrat because...well...he's from Connecticut. And he's Jewish. But Lieberman has spent his time since "losing" to Bush/Cheney in 2000 spooning the White House and attempting to inoculate their increasingly insane policies from legitimate criticism. Resembles Tex Avery cartoon character Droopy Dog in voice, demeanor, and spinelessness. --The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005 % A. If the law outranked the president we'd never get anything done! The president would go toss Osama bin Laden through a plate glass window and the law would call him into his office an go "Dammit president, you're outta control!" Q. And then the president'd be all "You're outta control, chief! The whole freakin system's outta control!" A. And then the president would totally turn in his badge and quit the force to fight crime! Q. Fight crime... with mind-powers. --from Q & A: Our Omnipotent President.A. If the law outranked the president we'd never get anything done! The president would go toss Osama bin Laden through a plate glass window and the law would call him into his office an go "Dammit president, you're outta control!" Q. And then the president'd be all "You're outta control, chief! The whole freakin system's outta control!" A. And then the president would totally turn in his badge and quit the force to fight crime! Q. Fight crime... with mind-powers. --from Q & A: Our Omnipotent President. % "Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." --Frank Lloyd Wright % "Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?" --C S Lewis % "I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good." --Gerald Ford in his 1975 State of the Union Address % When I behold the charm of evening skies, their lulling endurance; the patterns of stars with names of bears and dogs, a swan, a virgin; other planets that the Voyager showed were like and so unlike our own, with all their diverse moons, bright discs, weird rings, and cratered faces; comets with their streaming tails bent by pressure from our sun; the skyscape of our Milky Way holding in its shimmering disc an infinity of suns (or say a thousand billion); knowing there are holes of darkness gulping mass and even light, knowing that this galaxy of ours is one of multitudes in what we call the heavens, it troubles me. It troubles me. --Jimmy Carter, "Considering the Void" % "The real problem with having mind-controlled zombies as my servants is that it's tough to get up a really sincere-sounding round of cheers when I've come up with a plan I think is worth cheering." --Maximus, X-Factor % "Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O...." --Penn Jilette % "Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence." --Henrik Tikkanen % "The brighter you are, the more you have to learn." --Don Herold % "You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are." --Colonel Adolphus Busch % "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." --Carl Sagan % "We're Russian so we like the cold...and Jewish, so we like to suffer." --Ksenia and I recreating the logic behind why the "Synoguge School" she teachers art at tends not to close for bad weather % "Love is sometimes more than just blind." --Jonathan Lethem, "Gun, With Occasional Music" % "our love is like a honey baked ham ... pink, salty and unclean in the eyes of the lord." --Diesel Sweeties % "The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test." -- ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert % Q. Please explain how to diagram a sentence. A. First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. --"Mister Language Person" % "How can you tell a girl ghost from a boy ghost?" "*Boo*bies!" % "What's 'God'?" "You know when you really want something, you close your eyes and wish for it really hard? God is the guy that ignores you." --The Island % "Sometimes I think we.re on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff." --Future Forecaster Paul Saffo % "January and February were the last two months to be added to the Roman calendar, since the Romans originally considered winter a monthless period." --from the Wikipedia entry for "February" % blogha and I retreated to the Fleabag Arms, where I'd have welcomed finding a dead hooker in the mattress as it would have made the bed more comfortable. --Felisdemens % "Once you're alive, you become very hard to model." "Once you've been educated, you become very easy to model" --Will Wright % "Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes. No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that's the music you hear when it comes on. No, that's the music you hear when... I'm sorry, are you from the past?" --Roy on The IT Crowd % "Situation science is about respecting both sides of an argument, not just the one supported by the facts! That's why I always teach the controversy! Like the Evolution Controversy, or the Global Warming Controversy... not to mention the Tobacco Controversy, the Mercury Controversy, the Pesticides Controversy, the Coal Slurry Controversy, the Dioxin Controversy, the Everglades Controversy and the Acid Rain Controversy...." --White House Situational Science Advisor Dr. Nathan Hull, as envisioned by this Doonesbury cartoon. % "Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? Those who seek the folly of unrelieved 'happiness'--who fear moods, who shun solitude, who do not know the diginity of occasional depression--can find bliss easily enough: in tranquilizing pills, or in senility. The purpose of life is not to be happy." --Leo Rosten % "If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time." --Edith Wharton % [On the programming language Perl:] "You promise people answers to all their questions, but you're not ready for a real relationship. You like to guess what people want, but tend to jump to conclusions. When other people would say 'what, really?', you've already gotten out a ball-peen hammer and a tub of beeswax." --Programming languages and their relationship styles % "He gave her a look that you could have poured on a waffle." --via Slashdot's quotes % "The only mathematical ideas that human beings can have are ideas that the human brain allows." --George Lakoff & Rafael E. Núñez % I'm afraid I seem to have strayed somewhat from my original brief. But in a nutshell: sex is more fun than logic-- one cannot prove this, but it 'is' in the same sense that Mount Everest 'is', or that Alma Cogan 'isn't'. --from The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail % At one point, we tried to have phone sex. I felt incredibly awkward and had no idea what to say. I started, "Okay, I'm taking off your shirt. Wait, what are you wearing?" I was supposed to establish that. "Okay, good. I'm taking off your shirt. Now, I'm having sex with you. Okay, I'm done. Want to phone cuddle? Phone sleep?" The icing on the cake was when we decided to role play. I told her to be the nurse, and that I would play the husband who cheats on his nurse wife. She calmly explained that we needed to express what we wanted from each other, adding, "I wish you would be more sensitive." "Fair enough," I said, "I wish you would be Asian." "What?" "Oh, come on, it can't be that hard. I see little kids doing it!" --Rop O'Reilly, "Inspiring Born-Again Virgins One Awful Experience At A Time", boink magazine % Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made" --sig of ihatewinXP on Slashsdot. % "I'm curious, is it strictly apathy, or do you really not have a goal in life?" "I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don't have one, then you are never disappointed. And I gotta tell ya... it feels phenomenal." "Well I guess that makes sense, in a really sad way." --"Dodgeball" % "Did you like the white beans you had for supper?" "Uh huh." "Well, you didn't say anything." "Well, I ate four bowls. If that ain't a tribute to white beans, I don't know what is." "Well..." "Eating speaks louder than words." "You know, your education was worth every penny of it." -- Aunt Bee and Andy Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show % "You know what's a fun game?" "Huh?" "You take three Excedrin PMs... and you see if you could whack off before you fall asleep... You always win is the best part about the game." --from "The 40 Year Old Virgin". % Decartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Would you like a beer?" Descartes replies "I think not," and disappears. % "I'm not saying my mother drank a lot, but I was 30 before I learned Peppermint Schnapps isn't generally considered a cure for menstrual cramps." --MELAS (My Ever Lovin' Aunt Susan) % If you aren't tall, rich, or smart, then funny may be your best shot." --"Dentyne-ism #102" % "Tranquility Base, you're cleared for liftoff." "Roger, we're number one on the runway." --NASA's "Houston" and Buzz Aldrin % You'll be on 3N for about 11 miles. Go past the Lowell connector. Then past the 495 exits, under the underpasses. Don't go over the underpasses, I can't stress this point enough, the underpasses are for going under. --Jim Graves % "Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." --Iris Murdoch % "Bush seems to be wrapped in bubbles, surrounded by sycophants. Bush was in Tampa today in front of one of those invited audiences he speaks to. The first question, this is not a joke, said the nation was blessed to have Bush as president. That was a question. The second one called Jeb 'your great brother.' You know, at least when Clinton got blown it was in private." --Bill Maher % "One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half." --Winston Churchill % "Sir, you're drunk!" "Yes, Madam, I am. But *BLLAAAAAARGH* blu ble prtooey....." % "Monkeys whose brains have evolved to such an umanageable size that it's now pretty much impossible for them to stay happy for any length of time. In fact, they're the only animals that think they're supposed to be happy. All the other animals can just be. But it's not that simple, for the monkeys..." --Dance, Monkeys, Dance % "Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror." --George Carlin % "The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas." --Linus Pauling % "If the world hates you, remember it hated me first." --Jesus as paraphrased on a T-shirt by Vicar Martin Ramshaw's Anglican ministry for Goths. % "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." --Arthur Schopenhauer % We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true. That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works. I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq. Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg. --Stephen Colbert at the White House Press Corps dinner % "The ancient Egyptians crossbred horses, cattle, wheat, and grapes, to produce animals and food of higher quality." --Alan Lightman, "The Discoveries" % Measuring in powers of ten, we human beings are almost exactly midway between the largest material object in the universe, the galaxies, and the smallest that we have explored in our particle accelerators, the electrons and quarks. We stand in the middle. From our thin sliver of existence, we want to know everything." --Alan Lightman, epilogue to "The Discoveries" % i can taste summer coming. there are certain smells that i forget about until summer rolls around, and then they all come flowing back in my memory: bonfires, sunblock, cookouts, fresh-cut grass... and then there are the images, pictures of things in my mind that probably weren't as good as i remember, yet i can see them so vividly: cramming in a car to go to drive-in movies, covered in bugspray and armed with snacks; wandering around amusement parks dripping wet from water rides; grabbing an elephant ear and some cotton candy at the local fair; seeing a movie on a weeknight and leaving the theater to meet the warm night air... these are the things i hope to do every summer; sometimes i do, sometimes i don't... but this year i'm hoping extra hard. --the rosser... % "You can ask him anything, but he's going to say what he wants, at the pace that he wants. It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is." --Stephen Colbert on interviewing Jesse Jackson % "I've always had sort of an ironic view of life. My belief system is that when this is over, it's over. That you don't look down from heaven and wait for your loved ones to join you. There may be some soul activity, but I'm not sure about that. But what I am sure about is that your molecules continue and in due time become something else. That's science. And that works for me. So that if this is it, you better take it at its right proportion. That there are serious things, but most things are temporal and ephemeral, and you should cultivate that attitude. That joy and love and all the verities are what counts. So I try not to take too many things seriously, and if I find myself caught up in the seriousness of the moment, within a period of time, I'm able to cajole myself out of it." --William Shatner, from the History Channel documentary "How William Shatner Changed the World". % "S'funny... people say that the older you get, the less you sleep... but I gotta tell ya... the exact opposite is happening with me... the older I get the longer I sleep.. & I'm perfectly fine with that... with the rate I'm going, I figure to be up to 17 hours a day by the time I'm fifty... I'm hoping to reach about 23 1/2 hours a day, just before I croak... that way I'll be perfectly use to being dead." --Keith Knight, "The K Chronicles" % "I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound perch in my lake." --Bush when asked about the high point of his presidency by a German newspaper % "Original coolness was a way of feeling like you were resisting oppression without actually doing what was necessary to throw it off." --from this article about a survey of 20-somethings that claims friendliness is the new cool. % "Cooler than the other side of the pillow" % "I need to get to a library - fast" --My favorite line from a Da Vinci Code % So, say "yes." In fact, say "yes" as often as you can. When I was starting out in Chicago, doing improvisational theatre with Second City and other places, there was really only one rule I was taught about improv. That was, "yes-and." In this case, "yes-and" is a verb. To "yes-and." I yes-and, you yes-and, he, she or it yes-ands. And yes-anding means that when you go onstage to improvise a scene with no script, you have no idea what.s going to happen, maybe with someone you.ve never met before. To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage. They say you.re doctors.you.re doctors. And then, you add to that: We.re doctors and we.re trapped in an ice cave. That.s the "-and." And then hopefully they "yes-and" you back. You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other.s lead, neither of you are really in control. It.s more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure. What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience. --Stephen Colbert's 2006 Commencement Address to Knox College. % "Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women." "I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish." --Bill Bennet and Jon Stewart % "Why does nature hate a vacuum?" "Nature hates a lot of things and, actually, a vacuum is far down the list -- behind perpetual motion machines and lemon-lime flavorings." --Ask Dr. Science % "I think that past the age of thirty there is no obligation to be clever at all. Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever." --Garrison Keillor % "If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture -- that is immortality enough for me." --Edward Abbey % The narrator Ethan is helping his mom load the body of a dead biker into her car "With one big huff, I lifted Tim into the back, but he fell out with an unnerving thump. "Ethan, get him in the car." I did that, and we backed out of the carport and driveway. "Okay," Mom said, "let's find a nice big hole." "Just for the record, Mom, this whole thing is creeping me out." "Men should never discuss their feelings, Ethan." "I thought women are supposed to like guys discussing their feelings." "Good God, no." --JPod, Douglas Coupland % "Truth, medical resaearch, and fun: the holy trinity of the thinking person." --Penn Jilette % "Look at nature. Nature is one big woodchipper. Sooner or later everything shoots out the other end in a spray of boood, bones, and hair." --Douglas Coupland, "JPod" % "It doesn't take all kinds to make a world, we just have all kinds." --"Willow Herself"'s Father-In-Law, via alt.support.diet % "This jacket is dry clean only. Which means .... it's dirty." --Mitch Hedberg. % A woman sees a starving woman and her son near a zoo. She takes pity on them and gives the boy the apple that she had with her. The mother prompts her son, "well, what do you say?" The boy looks down at the apple, looks up, looks down and says "Hello, Apple!" % In my house I have a sliding glass door, and on it is a sticker that says "Warning: Alarm System". And it's a pretty simple alarm system, consisting of... a sticker. --Mitch Hedberg. % "And need to is just the thing for the currently very popular tense I call the kindergarten imperative, as in, 'I need you to put away your crayons now.'" --Ben Yagoda % Married 25 years, I took a look at my wife one day and said, "Honey, 25 years ago, we had a cheap apartment, a cheap car, slept on a sofa bed and watched a 10-inch black-and-white TV, but I got to sleep every night with a hot 25-year-old blonde. Now, we have a nice house, a nice car, a big bed and a big-screen plasma TV, but I'm sleeping with a 50-year-old woman. It seems to me that you're not holding up your side of things." But my wife is a very reasonable woman. She told me to go out and find a hot 25-year-old blonde, and she'd make sure that I would once again be living in a cheap apartment, driving a cheap car and sleeping on a sofa bed. --Herby H, rec.humor.funny % "Avoid surprising bears." --wikiHow, How to Escape from a Bear % "I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure." --Philip K. Dick % "She had a Mount Rushmore T-shirt on. Those guys never looked so good. Kind of bloated. But happy. Especially Jefferson and Lincoln." --Guy Noir in "A Prairie Home Companion % "The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more." --Gabriel Zaid... very self-referential, that. % You are driving in a car at a constant speed on a curvy road. On your right side is a valley and on your left side is a fire engine traveling at the same speed as you. You see a giant galloping pig, the same size as your car, in front of you.. Behind you is a helicopter flying at ground level. Both the giant pig and the helicopter are also traveling at the same speed as you, and the accelerator seems to be stuck, so you can't evade them. What must you do to safely get out of this highly dangerous situation? Answer: Get off the children's Merry-Go-Round, bozo! You're drunk! --Mitchell.J.Edelman on rec.humor.funny % [On Billy Beane realizing that many good baseball players are discarded by the major leagues because they don't look like good players] The latter discovery in particular struck a chord with me because my football career has been blighted by exactly that sort of prejudice. English scouts visiting my Friday morning five-a-side game have (presumably) discounted me on peripheral grounds of age, weight, speed, amount of time spent lying on the ground weeping with exhaustion, etc.; what they're not looking at is performance, which is of course is the only thing that counts. They'd have made a film called Head It Like Hornby by now if Billy Beane were working over here. (And if I were any good at heading, another overrated and peripheral skill.) --Nick Hornby, "The Polysyllabic Spree" % "If only 2^(7/12) were equal to 3/2, music would sound a lot better." --David B. Thomas, .sig on alt.hackers % "Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty." --Leo Rosten. % "If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised." --Dorothy Parker % "You are a little soul carrying around a corpse." --Epictetus % "Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives." --Sue Murphy % Tell us about the fight. I didn't see no fight. Well, tell us what you did see? I went to a dance at the Turner house, and as the men swung around and changed partners, they would slap each other, and one fellow hit harder than the other one liked, and so the other hit back and somebody pulled a knife and a rifle that had been hidden under a bed, and the air was filled with yelling and smoke and bullets. --Alleged court transcript, collected by Richard Lederer in "Funny Times" % "So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free." --Jason Love % Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust. [...] Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. --The Economist on truthful preflight announcements. % "One night this big, bad-ass hood crashes into my dressing room in Chicago and instructs me that I will open in such-and-such a club in New York the next night. I tell him I got a Chicago engagement and don't plan no traveling. And I turn my back on him to show I'm so cool. Then I hear this sound: SNAP! CLICK! I turn around and he has pulled this vast revolver on me and cocked it. Jesus, it look like a cannon and sound like death! So I look down at that steel and say, 'Weelllll, maybe I do open in New York tomorrow.'" --Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong % Billie Holiday on Louia Armstrong: "Of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart." % "At the very minute scale, matter appears to be constructed from vibrating nothing." --Gregg Easterbook, in a skeptical view of String Theory on Slate % The Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. --Garrison Keillor, regarding the Republicans rush fearmongering about Nancy Pelosi "a woman from SAN FRANCISCO" as Speaker of the House % [On the reaction to the Chicago Seven trial] "They ran up and down the street, smashing car windows and stuff. My first reaction was, 'Yeah, right on!' But then I thought, 'Wait, I'm parked out there.'" --Harold Ramis % "Elmo loves you, as the phrase goes. Elmo is a source of unconditional mirth, and he makes the other Sesame Street mainstays look like characters out of Norwegian social realism." --Troy Patterson % "It makes dying so much easier. There's so much less to leave." Senator Thomas Hart Benton (from Missouri in the 1800s), surveying the burned ruins of his Washington home. % [On receiving a job at the Appalachian Regional Commission, one of the "antipoverty agencies" setup during the Kennedy and Johnson eras] You see, poverty was actually recognized as a real problem, and the government actually tried to help people to overcome it. How crazy is that? What were we thinking? It was obviously a wrongheaded idea, and I am so glad that we got rid of all those agencies. Look around. Everyone seems to be doing so well, especially those Appalachians who live in places called Hollers. And if they aren't doing well, let me tell you, it's their own fucking fault. Besides, I am sure they are happier not being burdened by cash, which leaves them plenty of time to whittle shit to their heart's content. --Lewis Black % "I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes well out of it." --Virgina Woolf % "Confine your kissing to the irresistible." --Sir Rudolf Bing, advice from when he was managing the Metropolitan Opera and there was a flu pandemic. % "'Promise me solemnly,' I said to her as she lay on what I believed to be her death bed, 'if you find in the world beyond the grave that you can communicate with me--that there is some way in which you can make me aware of your continued existence--promise me solemnly that you will never, never avail yourself of it.' She recovered and never, never forgave me." --Samuel Butler % "Thighs--of course. But knees--never!" --Coco Chanel, when asked if she approved of the 60s fashion of miniskirts exposing girls' knees and thig % "How, for example, could I make a fat lady, walking down Fifth Avenue, slip on a banana peel and still get a laugh. It's been done a million times. What's the best way to get the laugh? Do I show first the banana peel, than the fat lady approaching: then she slips? Or do I show the fat lady first, then the banana peel, and then she slips?" "Neither. You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps over the banana peel and disappears down a manhole." --Playwright Charles MacArthur seeking advice from Charlie Chaplin. % "I finally realize that patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." --Edith Cavell, before being executed by Germans during WWI for helping Allied soldiers escape. % Q: What led you to resist merchandising Calvin and Hobbes? A: For starters, I clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo. . . . --Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson % "President Coolidge had a group of guests on the presidential yacht cruising the Potomac. As he stood alone at the rail, looking out at the expanse of water, someone exclaimed, 'Look at that slight and slender figure! Look at that head, bowed over the rail! What thoughts are in the mind of this man, burdened by the problems of the nation?' Finally, Coolidge turned around, and joined the others, saying, `See that sea gull over there? Been watching it for twenty minutes. Hasn't moved. I think he's dead!'" --Arthur Krock % Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer? --Eileen Gunn Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time --Alan Moore From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings. --Gregory Maguire The baby's blood type? Human, mostly. --Orson Scott Card Tick tock tick tock tick tick. --Neal Stephenson --from Wired's Six Words Story Challenge % "Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness." --Robertson Davie % I don't really know what to do with my 319 new online chums, compatriots and cronies, but frankly I never knew what to do with my meat friends either. I usually took them to mini-golf, but that doesn't seem to be an option on MySpace. I think you just collect them, as they collect you. It is the 21st century, and we are all each other's Hummel figurines. --MySpace, Now With Random Crap by Lore Sjoberg % Life has a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly. If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making you feel it. --George Orwell % "My consolation is that I am confident that somewhere at this very moment people are making love." --Mme du Marte % "She romped on top of Simolzak's huge frame, straddling him with her hands on his chest, her back arched and her breasts flailing wildly in the air. Her back was to him and her long hair swung from side to side as if accentuating the abandonment of her screams." --M. Jim Webb, Democratic candidate for Virginia Senate seat, in his book "Lost Soldiers" % "I am the emperor, and I want dumplings." --Ferdinand I, emperor of Austri % "I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building." --Charles M. Schulz % "I have arthritis in my fingers, and picking my nose helps stretch the finger joints and keep them flexible. Oftentimes I switch fingers -- even hands -- mid-pick." --Yankees manager Joe Torre % "Ah, I love you. Ah, you set my soul on fire. It is not just a little spark. It is a flame... a big roaring flame. Ah, I can feel it now..." --Tom % Television reporter: "This November will be your 104th birthday. What is your secret for longevity?" Elderly man: "Huh?" % "My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?" --Charles M. Schulz % "And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people trend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." --David Foster Wallace % "Self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity, with a motive'" --Lewis Hyde, quoted by David Foster Wallace % "A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler's List" --David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" % Q: Doesn't God look down on missionary dating and tells us to not be "yoked with unbelievers"? A: I looked up yoked, and the dictionary says it's a "A crossbar with two U-shaped pieces that encircle the necks of a pair of oxen or other draft animals working together." I would never encourage anybody to do this on a date... --From "Date To Save" % "It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'" --Aldous Huxley % "When he come up I looked him in the eye, and I saw shoot, and there wasn't any shoot in nary other eye in the crowd; and so I says to myself, says I, hoss, it's about time to sing small, and so I did." --"Notorius Badman" Russell Bean, explaining why he meekly gave himself up (future president) Andrew Jackson, after holding off the sherrif while heavily armed % "Tu Mu relates a strategem of Chu-ko Liang, who in 149 B.C., when occupying Yang-ping and about to be attacked by Ssu-ma, suddenly struck his colors, stopped the beating of the drums, and flung open the city gates, showing only a few men engaged in sweeping and sprinkling the ground. This unexpected proceeding had the intended effect; for Ssu-ma I, suspecting an ambush, actually drew off his army and retreated." --Editorial note by Lionel Giles for The Art of War % FoSO: is delaware worth visiting? kirk:let me ask you this: do you like the business sense of connecticut, the small-shore state feel of rhode island, and the black urban sensibility of the non-political parts of washington dc? FoSO: wow, yes! sounds really nice... kirk: huh, that sounds a lot better than I meant it to now that i read it % "During the contest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy visited a mine in West Virginia. "It is true you're the son of one of our wealthiest men?" asked one of the miners there. Kennedy admitted that this was true. "Is it true that you've never wanted for anything and had everything you wanted?" "I guess so." "Is it true you've never done a day's work with your hands all your life?" Kennedy nodded. "Well, let me tell you this," said the miner. "You haven't missed a thing." % Guy #1: I'd totally hit that. Guy #2: Dude, I'd hit that so hard whoever could pull me out would become the King of England. --College Walk, Columbia University % "Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content." --Paul Valery % "The truth does not make it easier to understand." --Sophie's Choice % "Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citzenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. [...] It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. [...] What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other." --The Hours, Michael Cunningham % Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything. --Kurt Vonnegut % "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." --H.L. Mencken % 1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. 2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. 3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. 4. Go very light on vices such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful. 5. Avoid running at all times. 6. And don't look back. Something may be gaining on you. --Satchell Paige, "Six Rules for a Happy Life" % "To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best." -- William M. Thackeray % "We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of use who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence." --Mr. Rogers % "Most people have two reasons for doing anything -- a good reason, and the real reason." --slashdot % "Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves." --Rainer Maria Rikle (as quoted by Mr. Rogers) % "Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem." --Everything2 % "Innovation is hard to schedule." --Dan Fylstra % "UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." --Dennis Ritchie % "The only rational patriotism is loyalty to the nation ALL the time, loyalty to the government when it deserved it." --Mark Twain, "The Czar's Soliloquy" % And do you think that unto such as you; A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew: God gave the secret--and denied it me? Well, well, what matters it? Believe that, too. --Omar Khayyam, as translated by Richard le Gallienne % "Yet man is born unto trouble as surely as sparks fly upward." Job 5:7 % One lecturer at DeVry was fond of saying "There's no such thing as 'the good old days.' They were just old." --Nick B % "You know why critics love Elvis Costello and hate Van Halen? Because critics look like Elvis Costello" --David Lee Roth, quoted by Kiss' Gene Simmons in an AV Club interview % "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." --Friedrich Nietzsche % "Tradition is to human beings what instinct is to animals." --Eric Erikson, via Mr. Rogers % "I bet the human brain is a kludge." --Marvin Minsky % "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D Nicoll % "The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech." --Clifton Fadiman % "Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts." --Sogyal Rinpoche % "Love and trust, in the space between what's said and what's heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world." --Mr. Rogers % "It's odd to realize how big things can be and still fit in your nose." --Mr. Ibis % (German contralto) Ernestine Schumann-Heink was an unashamed gourmand. Enrico Caruso, another lover of good food in quantity, entered the restaurant at which she was dining. Seeing her about to begin on a vast steak, he said, "Stina, surely you are not going to eat that alone?" "No, no, not alone," replied the lady, "mit potatoes." --via Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes. % Launching a new children's book, Dr. Dan the Bandage Man, Richard Leo Simon decided to include a free gift of six Band-Aids with each copy. He cabled a friend at the manufacturer Johnson and Johnson: "Please ship half million Band-Aids immediately." Back came the reply: "Band-Aids on the way. What the hell happened to you?" --via Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes. % "Women think they know by the way, which always astonishes me... women will always say 'uh, we look at guys sexually too.'" "Well uh, they do, they do..." "Women have NO IDEA." "...oh." "They have no clue whatsoever. It's like the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. If women had any idea, even for a second, of how we really looked at them, they would never stop slapping us." --Larry Miller and Jonathan Katz, on "Dr. Katz Professional Therapist" % So, instead of hanging out by the circulation desk waiting for the book mistress of your dreams to materialize, perhaps your time would be better spent focusing on the oft-ignored library staff: the shelvers. We are young, we are literate, some of us actually work here because we like books. We are the ones that know the titles that the library carries, that deal intimately with the volumes themselves, sorting them, loading them, flipping through their pages and shelving them in their sacred locations. We wear the writer's glasses and discuss John Locke and Douglas Adams. We are the sexy shelvers. --The triumphant conclusion of Debunking the Myth of the Sexy Librarian and Others % Look at life from our perspective, and you eukaryotes will soon cease giving yourself such airs. You bipedal apes, you stump-tailed tree-shrews, you desiccated lobe-fins, you vertebrated worms, you Hoxed-up sponges, you newcomers on the block, you eukaryotes, you barely distinguishable congregations of a monotonously narrow parish, you are little more than fancy froth on the surface of bacterial life. Why, the cells that build you are themselves colonies of bacteria, replaying the same old tricks we bacteria discovered a billion years ago. We were here before you arrived, and we shall be here after you are gone. --"Thermus aquaticus" (a species of bacterium) as channeled by Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale % "We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice." --Isaac Baeshevis Singer % "I don't think I'm a robot...I'm not sure I could tell if I was, though." --Will Wright % "If she would just love me again, I'd build her a beautiful cage and never ever let her out." --Bobby Hill, "King of The Hill" % "The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots." --The Doctor, "The Giant Robot" % "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight" --Robertson Davies % "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." --John A. Wheeler % "I find the most erotic part of a woman is the boobies" --Zapp Brannigan pickup line, from "Futurama" % "Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television." --David Letterman % Teacher: When you grow up you can be anything you want! Second grader: I can be an elephant?! --Overheard in New York % The Universe is conspiring to kill you. But you shouldn't let that worry you too much. Seek reassurance in the fact that there is nothing personal about this. It's not a vendetta and it's not just you that the it is working to extinguish. No, its much worse than that. The Universe is ranging its awesome might against all the living organisms on our cosy, blue planet. Every louse, lover, and leopard is going the same way. --Mark Ward, introduction to "Virtual Organism" % Little boy: Mom, how did the dinosaurs cook their meat? Mother: They didn't, they ate it raw. Little boy: Oh. [Long pause.] Are Japanese people dinosaurs? --OverheardInNewYork % There are two types of people in the world: * Those who need closure --Chad Bourque's .sig on Google groups % The first item on the list [of cleaning products needed by the new housecleaner]: "I will require at least a dozen boxes of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda because I am allergic to harsh chemicals and prefer to make my own cleaning agents." Right there, I wanted to call her up and say the deal was off. If there's one thing I'm not allergic to, it's harsh chemicals. I want to know that the blue stuff that cleans the inside of my toilet was tested--and tested again--on rabbits, monkeys, and anything else they can cram into a laboratory cage. --Augusten Burroughs, % We walked four blocks south to a Brazilian restaurant that I must have walked past a thousand times on my own and yet never noticed. This further proved my own belief that there is only so much any given person can see for themselves in Manhattan. It takes two people, looking in all directions at once, to see everything. --Augusten Burroughs, "Magical Thinking" % "Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once." --Karl Lehenbaue % [...]There was another bit of low-rent, half-assed psycho philosophy that I'd tacked on behind it somewhere along the line- sort of a corollary to "Deal with it"--namely, "Don't be a shit." This doesn't mean I became some sort of namby-pamby little Candide with a smile in my heart and a kind word for even the lowliest vermin. Hardly. But choosing not to be a shit just made sense. You want to get good service in a store, in a restaurant, or while dealing with a government agency? Then don't be a shit. Remember that in most cases, the people you're dealing with are under just as much stress and have just as many unspoken crises facing them as you do, so show a little patience--and tip well. --Jim "Slackjaw" Knipfel, "Ruining It for Everybody" % [On a Braun Handheld Mixer] "Is it a classic instrument?" "What?" "Is it timeless or is it likely to go out of style in the next... 20 years?" "I would say it's a new classic. But 20 years is a long time. I think everything is going to be computerized in 20 years." "Soup won't be computerized." "Why not?" "It's a liquid." --Girl and Sales Clerk in "Me and You and Everyone We Know" % "Don't be mean. The fates are cruel enough. Remember. No matter where you go, there you are." --Buckaroo Banzai % You are getting so beautiful they will have to make passport pictures of you 9 feet tall. What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel. --Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich % There seems to be an inordinate number of movies about mankind going to war with machines (Terminator, A.I., that Stephen King flick with all the AC/DC songs, etc.) That plot device always struck me as something of a cheap shot; as far as I can tell, machines have been nothing but completely civil to us." --Chuck Klosterman, "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" % [On a tube of "Airborne" tables sitting my desk] Jonathan: "That stuff's like crack..." Kirk: "Not crack, more like... voodoo, to ward off colds. 'See? That fizzyness is the magic working!'" % "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." --Jackie Robinson % "But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack." --Chuck Klosterman, "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" % "The reason I wear pajamas all the time is along the way I discovered I could get away with it." --Hugh Hefner % 1. Most wars are asymmetrical / irregular. 2. In these wars, the guerrillas / irregulars / insurgents do NOT aim for military victory. 3. You can NOT defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. 4. In fact, they want you to do that. 5. Hi-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars. 6. "Hearts and Minds," meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority. 7. Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: "my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics. --"War Nerd" Gary Brecher % "You know what would be awesome?" "What?" "If rabbits laid chocolate Easter eggs." "Yeah, but then their entire species would, like, fail." "Yes, but they would fail deliciously." --Overheard in New York % My analyst (who is also losing ground steadily) told me later that it was a happy thing that I had been able to go back to school and spank my teacher. He said that noticeably good results would begin to show up in my life. They haven't, though. --James Thurber, "Back to the Grades". % When I accidentally ran across this word in the dictionary one day, it was instantly familiar, before I even got to the definition. I didn't need to know phonetics to recognize the approximant liquid of that "or," the plosive "ga," the fricative "z," or the labial, nasal, sigh of the final "um." --Alison Bechdel % "What do you say now to women (and maybe men, too) who are ambivalent about having a child?" "Get to it! Life is short and kids are the best. They connect you to the future, they force you to grow up, they make you appreciate life in a totally different way. There will never be a perfect time, the right amount of money, and the mate of your dreams. You may get one out of three, and that's enough." --Rebecaa Walker % I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward." --Stanislaw J. Lem % "Yeah, I think people are just getting stuper. Stupider." --Scott % Scott: Oh, lunchtime already? Kirk: Gee, too bad they don't have any clocks or watches in Scott-land...err, oh wait, that doesn't quite work, does it? % Rob had a great story about his friend, ex-marine, who was in the Peace Corps in Africa...showing people how to dig wells and all that stuff. A neighboring tribe was known to raid the group he was working with, so he taught his folks how to lay an ambush and set traps and basically kill a bunch of 'em and send the rest running. Which wasn't such a bad thing, that other tribe totally had it coming, but you know, it was the Peace Corps, so he got kicked out. % We are so afraid of the sight of death. I read a book the other day. It said that as soon as someone dies in a hospital, they pull the sheets up over their head, and they wheel the body to some chute and push it down. They can't wait to get it out of their sight. People act as if death is contagious. It's not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made. --Morrie Schwartz % It's natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it all is because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we're human we're something above nature. We're not. Everything that gets born, dies. Do you accept that? All right. Now here's the payoff. Here is how we are different from those wonderful plants and animals. As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on--in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here. Death ends a life, not a relationship. --Morrie Schwartz % We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence. --Daniel Gilbert % We don't seek reproductive success directly; we have always sought tasty foods, which tended to promote survival, and luscious mates, who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. --Geoffrey Miller % The ultimate goal of physics, as it is often described, is to have a "theory of everything," in which all the fundamental laws that describe nature can be neatly written on the front o f a T-shirt (even if the T-shirt can exist only in ten dimensions.) --Lawrence M. Krauss % "...A deification or divinization of humankind may have been attractive to Feuerbach, to Victorian England, or to German thinkers early in the twentieth century, infused as they were with the fiery certainty of cultural superiority. But the twentieth was, by any account, a bad century for the so-called infinite goodness of Man." --Phillip Clayton, "Mind & Emergence" % "I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are." --J. D. Salinger % ALICE: Are you alive? Jabberwacky: Perhaps. A: Why the uncertain tone? J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts. A: The whole universe? J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory. --ALICE and Jabberwacky % "One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork." --Edward Abbey % "Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods." --Japanese Proverb on a birthday card I got from Matt and Jess. % Hipster: When I was little and went to Sunday school my teacher told us we all have a little piece of God inside of us, and I thought, I hope I have his thumb. --Overheard in New York % "Oh man, this isn.t happening. It only thinks it's happening." --The movie Tron % Very Well, Butram, You May Kiss Me.... But First, You'll Have to Remove Your Clarinet. --from the closing credits for the Ernie Kovacs show. % "In this limitless world, breath is like a swinging door. If you think 'I breathe,' the 'I' is extra . . . what we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no 'I,' no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door." --Suzuki Roshi % "Personally, I always claim Cecil Earl is a little screwy, or if he is not screwy that he will do very well as a pinch-hitter until a screwy guy comes up to bat." --"Broadway Complex", Damon Runyon. Its been on my quote file for... yeesh, almost 15 years now, but I still love its construction. I read the book of short stories during the Guys and DOlls revival in the early 90s... Nathan Lane as Nathan Detroit was great. % "The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- from a Slashdot .sig, attribute to "unknown" % "There's a level of facility that everyone needs to accomplish, and from there it's a matter of deciding for yourself how important ultra-facility is to your expression. ... I found, like Joseph Campbell said, if you just follow whatever gives you a little joy or excitement or awe, then you're on the right track." --Terry Bozzio % Not that we weren't awesome. We wrote the Constitution in the time it takes you nimrods to figure out which is the aye button and which is the nay. But we weren't gods. We were men. We had flaws. Adams was an unbearable prick and squealed girlishly whenever he saw a bug. And Ben Franklin? If crack existed in our day, that boozed-up snuff machine would weigh 80 pounds and live outside the Port Authority. And I had slaves! Damn, I can't believe I had slaves! --Thomas Jefferson, introduction to the Daily Show's "America (The Book)" % "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." --Kurt Vonnegut % "I've picked a place to be buried." Where is that? "Not far from here. On a hill, beneath a tree, overlooking a pond. Very serene. A good place to think." Are you planning on thinking there? "I'm planning on being dead there." He chuckles. I chuckle. "Will you visit?" Visit? "Just come and talk. Make it a Tuesday. You always come on Tuesdays." We're Tuesday people. "Right. Tuesday people. Come to talk, then?" He has grown so weak so fast. "Look at me," he says. I'm looking. "You'll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?" My problems? "Yes." And you'll give me answers? "I'll give you what I can. Don't I always?" I picture his grave, on the hill, overlooking the pond, some little nine-foot piece of earth where they will place him, cover him with dirt, put a stone on top. Maybe in a few weeks? Maybe in a few days? I see myself sitting there alone, arms across my knees, starting into space. It won't be the same, I say, not being able to hear you talk. "Ah, talk. . ." He closes his eyes and smiles. "Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen." --Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom % "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" "Woof!" --"The Dharma Bums" % "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?" "I don't care." --An old cook with lidded eyes from "The Dharma Bums". His response is labeled as the absolutely perfect answer % "But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious." --Jack Kerouac, "The Dharma Bums". % "Again I have to say it, Mom, there's a lot to be said for having a small and manageable dream." --Douglas Coupland's "Eleanor Rigby" % "Hors d'oeuvres have always had a pathetic interest for me," said Reginald, "they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like -- and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres." --Saki % Some parts of the past must be preserved, and some of the future prevented at all costs. --Slashdot Fortune % "So tonight I'm going to be biking, which is kind of a workout for legs, and tomorrow I'm going kayaking, which is arms..." "Dude, you're going to be buff!" "I'm going to be so 'buff' I should be slaying vampires! ...you know, that might not be the imagery I was trying to project." --Me and Jonathan % EvilB came over for lunch, and theoretically to drop off some books...: "So are you going to play some Pac-Man CE?" "Well I thought if I came over here, I should at least treat you to some two players gaming..." "No, it's fine, I know how much that Pac Man game resonates for you." "You're like my dealer! I better watch out or you're going to start charging." "Yeah, that was my plan with the video games, 'first 9 years are free'." % * "If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put your sister and I together." * "Is your father a thief? Because that's totally my jetta you parked outside." * "You must be tired, 'cause you've been running through my mind all night. ...Screaming." * "That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's do it. Let's fucking do it and never look back. " * "Wanna play an army game? Lay down on the ground and I'll blow your brains out." * "Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?" * "Did you die and go to hell...? 'cause you're hot!" * "Baby, are you a parking ticket? 'Cause you've got 'I'm gonna max out your credit card' written all over you. " * "Eeee, by gum, you don't sweat much for a fat lass" (said in a thick, thick Northern English accent) -- xkcd comic and discussion on "cheesy pickup lines gone wrong". % "It just occurred to me that I'm sitting around the house in my underwear." "....Yeah, it's like you're always the last to know, huh?" % A Mouse that prayed for Allah's aid Blasphemed when no such aid befell: A Cat, who feasted on that mouse, That Allah managed vastly well. Pray not for aid to One who made A set of never-changing Laws, But in your need remember well He gave you speed, or guile--or claws --Saki, writing as a Persian scholar Ghurab, in The Cupboard of the Yesterdays % "A hypocrite is a person who--but who isn't?" --Don Marquis, of Archy + Mehitabel fame % "Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them." --Franklin P. Adams. % America rocks! America rocks! From its busy bustling cities To its quiet country walks It's totally cool, it's totally hot I mean it's like right there at the top America rocks! America rocks! America rocks! --lyrics from a song by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) % The glimpses of the infernal world that we get in Salem are highly incredible. The witches say prayers by a tall black man with a high-crowned hat--always with a high-crowned hat. They ride on sticks and poles, sometimes they are on brooms, and sometimes three are on one pole. One relates that a pole carrying two broke, but by holding fast to the one in front of her, the witch got safe to her destination. The witches fondle yellow birds, sucking them between their fingers, and one day a girl cries in meeting that a yellow bird sits on the minister's hat as it hangs on a pin on the pulpit. The witch usually sits on the great crossbeam of the meetinghouse, fondling the yellow bird. One man was seen to nurse two black pigs at his breasts. Sometimes a hog, sometimes a black dog, appears and says, "Serve me." Then the dog or pig "looks like a man," and this man has a yellow bird. Cats naturally abound, white cats and red cats and cats without color. --Edward Eggleston's "The Transit of Civilzation, excerpted in David Freeman Hawke's "Everyday Life in Early America" % No day passed when the fireplace was unused. As a result, soot accumulated quickly in the chimney. This could be hazardous when firs were the principal source for fuel, for they left behind a thick, tarry, highly flammable coating. Brooms were used to clean short chimneys. For taller ones it was not uncommon to drop a chicken or two down the chimney; their frantic wing-beating did a good job cleaning quickly. --David Freeman Hawke, "Everyday Life in Early America" % "The most effective way to do it, is to do it." --Amelia Earhart % "Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays." --Soren Kierkegaard. % Ranger Brad: Oh, say... You don't believe those old legends about the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, do you? Dr. Roger Fleming: Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist, I don't believe in anything. --The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra % "Obviously there is much humor in what you say." --alien in "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra" % Until the nineteenth century, oddly enough, Americans almost never commented on the weather when describing public events. --One Night Stands with American History % "He was in a small band, that was kind of like the Beatles." "Kind of like? How are you kind of like the Beatles? Do you sing songs like 'I Want To Grab Your Elbow'? Instead of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' it's 'Bobby on the Floor with Some Empty Beer Cans'?" % I'd like to make a show called "The Dusk Area". Here's a synopsis of the first episode, "At Last Enough Time": Barry Hemis is a meek bank clerk who loves to read but is denied this pleasure by his shrewish wife and demanding boss. He alone escapes the nuclear holocaust when he sneaks off to the bank vault to read during his lunch break. Emerging, he despairs at the desolation and loneliness of the shattered landscape until he discovers a treasure trove of undamaged books at the public library... enough for him to read for years! Tragically, he accidentally breaks his eyeglasses and is left with nothing. But that's ok because he dies of radiation poisoning a few days later, and in fact barely notices the irony, what with his hair falling out in clumps, the bloody stool, and the constant vomiting. Pretty good, huh? % "A monarchy is like a merchantman. You get on board and ride the wind and tide in safety and elation but, by and by, you strike a reef and go down. But democracy is like a raft. You never sink, but, damn it, your feet are always in the water." --Fisher Ames, 1795 % "One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is." --Frank Herbert % Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. "But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks. "The bridge is not supported by one stone or the other," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form." Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch." --Italo Calvino, from "Invisible Cities" % I could compare you to a summer day - No! Summer's beautiful, but full of doubt, He smiles sweetly, but he'll never stay, And Summer's cash is always running out. He laughs with me, then he turns and burns, He's cold for weeks, then he'll change his mind - Fair? No, unfair! Unaware of my concerns, Gorgeous? Sure, but stupid, random, blind. Dear, when you say you'll stay, you always will, And when you change, you always give a reason, You're too fierce for time or death to kill! How could I compare you to a season? You will shine, as constant as a star, When this poem is forgotten; most poems are. --Romana Machado, 6/28/95 % The Blue Movers had plenty of songs about losing women, drinking, losing their jobs, shooting people, riding freight trains, finding other kinds of women and then losing them, too, but not so many songs about Jesus, so Slim brought in a singer named Billie Ann Herschel, who had performed with the Shepherd Boys, to do the hymns segment. She was twenty-four. She stood at the microphone while Slim stood behind her, playing guitar and looking at her slim hips under the cotton dress. While singing hymns, she liked to shift her weight from side to side, and he found it hard to keep his mind off her, not that he tried to-- --Garrison Keillor's "WLT: A Radio Romance" % "The performer I admired the most, I think, was Uncle Albert, actually my dad's uncle. We hired him about 1927 and he stayed for twelve years until he died. We hired him because he broke his leg and couldn't be a street preacher anymore with the Salvation Army, which he had been for forty years. He was one of General William Booth's old stalwarts, and when Booth came over from London, he and Uncle Albert would go nightclubbing in Chicago. Neither of them touched a drop, of course, but General Booth loved to dance. He was wild about the turkey trot, the foxtrot, and the Buffalo, but of course he couldn't dance with young women, lest it lead to carnal desire, so he danced with Uncle Albert. After a hard day among the down-and-out and a long evening service, the General'd lean over and whisper, `How about a little hoofing?' and off they'd go. Around the hot spots of Chicago, two men dancing together was definitely eccentric. In fact, it was so eccentric that people who were as drunk as everybody in the clubs didn't believe their eyes, and so the old gents, decked out in their somber Army regalia, flung themselves around the dance floor in happy abandon, and left refreshed, and woke up at dawn to resume the Lord's work." --Garrison Keillor's "WLT: A Radio Romance" % But then, the sky! Blue, untained by a single cloud (the Ancients had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapor.) --Yevgeny Zamyatin, "We" % Why is it nice to think [that human qualities such as creativity, intuition, consciousness, esthetic or moral judgment, courage or even the ability to be intimidated by Deep Blue are beyond machines in the very long run]? Why isn't it just as nice--or nicer--to think that we human beings might succeed in designing and building brain children that are even more wonderful than our biologically begotten children? The match between Kasparov and Deep Blue didn't settle any great metaphysical issue, but it certainly exposed the weakness in some widespread opinions. Many people still cling, white- knuckled, to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or--just as romantic--as the products of brains composed of wonder tissue engaged in irreducible non computational (perhaps alchemical?) processes. They often seem to think that if our brains were in fact just protein machines, we couldn't be responsible, lovable, valuable persons. Finding that conclusion attractive doesn't show a deep understanding of responsibility, love, and value; it shows a shallow appreciation of the powers of machines with trillions of moving parts. --Daniel Dennett on the 10th Anniversary of Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in chess. % sarah: his lordship is definitely having high maintenance time right now... keeps kicking arm... hard to type this way...as he is lolling on other arm... naptime looms tho... so will be back kirk:It's too bad that they can't encase babies in, say, a comfortable block of swaddling lucite. kirk:with appropriate drainage holes kirk: and the head free at top sarah: that would be most helpful % "Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony." --Thomas Bernard % PepsiCo is snug in bed with Microsoft, promoting its exciting new Mountain Dew flavor, "Game Fuel," with a Halo 3 tie-in. The flavor is described on the bottle as "an invigorating blast of citrus cherry flavor," but it could also have reasonably been called "Unbelievably Vileberry," "Piña Colonic" or "Kool-Aid Man's Embalming Fluid." --Lore"Kirk, you're a horrible person." "That's not what yo' mama said last night!" "...I could see her not saying that." --Jonathan and Me, 2007.08.30 "Shouldn't that be Jonathan and I?" "No... you do the substitution... if I was quoting myself, I would write something like: [gestures] 'Now is the Time' --Me Right?" "Well, you could be a pirate... Iiiii." "Pirates don't say 'Iiii'." "Then... 'Aarrgh.'" "Pirates don't say 'Aargh' either! They say 'Arrrr'. That's what they're known for saying." "Then maybe you could be some kind of... ...fantasy creature. One that says 'Iiii'." "..." --Jonathan and I, immediately after previewing the transcription of the previous dialog. % Evil B explains that he's going to break up some ground with the pickax and I can then move in with the Garden Claw to rip it up. He begins swinging the pickax with great vigor: Evil B: "[Swings] Get in there! [Swings]" Kirk: "Uh... your lips say 'yes, yes' but your ax says 'no, no'..." Turns out he was addressing the ax, not me... % "Has anyone told the Human Torch that it might not be safe to sit on top of a gas tank when one is on FIRE? Nice message to send the kids, assholes!" --A letter to the editor against the Fantastic 4 Human Torch ATV, the most "ridiculously stupid and insulting" movie tie-in toy ever. % Even though there is plenty of stuff for reasonable people to dislike about Political Correctness as a dogma, there is also something creepy about the brutal, self-righteous glee with which [John Ziegler] and other conservative [talkradio] hosts defy all PC conventions. If it causes you real pain to hear or see something, and I make a point to inflict that thing on you merely because I object to your reasons for finding it painful, then there's something wrong with my sense of proportion, or my recognition of your basic humanity, or both. --David Foster Wallace, "Host" % In New England everyone calls you "Dave" regardless of however many times you might introduce yourself as David. I am reminded of those fanatically religious homophobes who stand on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral during Gay Pride, holding signs that say "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" I have always wanted to go up to them and say, "Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Steven." --David Rakoff, "Fraud" % Some said the world should be in Perl; Some said in Lisp. Now, having given both a whirl, I held with those who favored Perl. But I fear we passed to men A disappointing founding myth, And should we write it all again, I'd end it with A close-paren. --XKCD % walking by the DVD section at Target "Hey look, '300' for eighteen bucks." "Wow. That's like... six cents per." % "Heat, pressure, and time. The things that make a diamond, also make a waffle." --An example given by Basic Instructions' How to Seem Smart % Two children found a bag containing twelve marbles. They argued over how to divide the toys and finally went to see the Mulla. When asked to settle their disagreement, the Mulla asked whether the children wanted him to divide the marbles as a human would or as Allah would. The children replied, "We want it to be fair. Divide the marbles as Allah would." So, the Mulla counted out the marbles and gave three to one child and nine to the other." % [Enemy looms, roars, gets exploded by gunfire] "Oh man, that was scary. Good thing I had my reflexes up.... I'm a Level 8 Polack." --Jonathan Z, when we were trudging through the FPS game "Gears of War". % "We wish that the [Watergate] break-in had happened at the John Hancock Hotel, JUST SO all future political scandals would have been named differently, i.e. Travelcock, Whitewatercock, etc." --Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren, "Comedy by the Numbers" % "The rose of yore is but a name, mere names are left to us" % "Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors." --Thomas H. Huxley % "Politics -- the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other." --Oscar Ameringer % "Here is a list of things defined as rewarding: sweet taste in the mouth, orgasm, mild temperature, smiling child. And here is a list of nasty things: various sorts of pain, nausea, empty stomach, screaming child." --Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", describing some potential instructions from a set of genes to their 'survival machine' % "Each of these first rockets was like a beloved woman for us. We were in love with every rocket, we desperately wanted it to blast off successfully. We would give our hearts and souls to see it flying." --Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program, on the upcoming anniversary of Sputnik % "It's fun to shoot some people....Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. I like brawling." --Lt. Gen. James Mattis, U.S. Marines % "You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk..." --Edward Abbey % Look at the moral guidance I offer. On faith: "After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." On gender: "The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex." On race: "While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad." On the elderly: "They look like lizards." --Stephen Colbert writing Maureen Dowd's column for her, % "No... I don't think [drowning my sorrows] is possible. [...] All my sorrows are very strong swimmers." --Shoe % "Dude, the Matrix trilogy is like the original Star Wars trilogy for my generation." "Whatever, man. Dude, you're, like, 38. The original Star Wars trilogy is the Star Wars trilogy of your generation." "Fuck you." --from Overheard in New York % The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader are obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right. Poets have many motives for writing (to be published on expensive paper, to show up others in your M.F.A. program, to flaunt your sensitive nature and thereby impress someone who might then go to bed with you, to win valuable prizes and fellowships and maybe a year in Rome or Provence, to have a plausible excuse for making a mess of your life), but what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from, say, fashion models or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lending courage to strangers, This is a necessary thing. --Garrison Keillor, introduction to "Good Poems for Hard Times" % "It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions." --Robert Bly % "The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it." --Bill Nye % "The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously." --Nicholas Butler % "Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?" --Francois de La Rochefoucauld % "If you can't laugh at yourself, you're a fool." --Entertainer Robert Goulet, RIP % "Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base." "Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are." "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one." --John Ruskin % "You ever spend time among the witches?" "Yes. And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same." --Lee Scoresby and Stanislaus Grumman in Phillip Pullman's "The Subtle Knife" % K: but you know K: a guy only has so much funny in him K: 'specially before his coffee J: is true... try tea.. that's where the majick starts K: DO I LOOK LIKE A LITTLE OLD LADY OR FOPPISH ENGLISHMAN? LIKE A SICKLY CHILD PERHAPS. NAY, I TELL THEE SIR, COFFEE IS THE ONLY DRINK FOR A ROUSTABOUT SUCH AS ME J: I hear gay men like tea.. thought that may have applied :-p J: hmm I'm rude.. sorry J: since clearly that's not true K: Dude, you're the one talking about the "majick" of tea. J: I realized that as well K: That's like 2 steps away from rainbow toting unicorns % "People don't need three meals a day... I think two twinkies and a couple glasses of scotch is a pretty good dinner." --EBM % "The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time." --Willem de Kooning % Lines from "The Selfish Gene" that I Find Mildly Amusing When Taken Out of Context "Baby bird screams do not become infinitely loud, because of other considerations." "There is no reason why a man should not inherit a tendency to develop a long penis from his mother." "The word excess has no meaning for a male." "An individual wolf, therefore, is a vehicle worthy of the name." % "I wonder what life is all about. It seems to me we have a few tragedies or we win a few prizes and then it is all over." --Jill Schultz, Charles Schultz' adopted daughter % "My soul, do not seek eternal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible." --Pindar % "While you can, *do*." --Charles J. Peterman Jr % Now here we are in the age of too much information. The landscape lined with guardrails. Warnings on everything: "Do not touch when hot." "Sharp: may penetrate skin if pressed." "Open with an extreme sense of foreboding." --Garrison Keillor % "My life is a furious ball of nothing." --Dilbert % Qualified individuals will possess at least 2-3 years of prior commercial collections experience in a fast paced corporate environment, strong verbal communication and organization skills. Prior experience in commercial collections required. Great Plains experience is a plus. The ideal candidate will have exceptional Excel skills, excellent analytical skills, and a persuasive, yet professional demeanor. % They rode half a dozen blocks in silence. The chauffeur said: "Your partner got knocked off, Mr. Spade?" "Uh-huh." The chauffeur clucked. "She's a tough racket. You can have it for mine." "Well, hack-drivers don't live forever." "Maybe that's right," the thick-set man conceded, "but, just the same, it'll be a surprise to me if I don't" --Dashiell Hammett, % On Family Feud: Richard Dawson: "A number you have to memorize...." Contestant: "7." % "When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie." --Trent Reznor. Language Log has named a prize for "tricky embedding" after him for this linguistic feat. % Aunt Susan: "See? Aren't I just the lowest-maintenance relative you have?" Me: "Well... there's my dad. We just have to mow over where he's buried! But I think we contract out to a guy for that." % "No reason to die all tensed up." --"Hoot" Gibson advising calm during a difficult Space Shuttle landing % "Seek simplicity, and distrust it." --Alfred North Whitehead % A seeker has heard that the wisest guru in all of India lives atop India's highest mountain. So the seeker treks over hill and Delhi until he reaches the fabled mountain. It's incredibly steep, and more than once he slips and falls. By the time he reaches the top, he is full of cuts and bruises, but there is the guru, sitting cross-legged in front of his cave. "O, wise guru," the seeker says, "I have come to you to ask what the secret of life is." "Ah, yes, the secret of life," the guru says, "The secret of life is a teacup." "A teacup? I came all the way up here to find the meaning of life, and you tell me it's a teacup!" The guru shrugs. "So maybe it isn't a teacup." --from Cathcart and Klein's "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes" % Two cows are standing in the pasture. One turns to the other and says, "Although pi is usually abbreviated to five numbers, it actually goes on into infinity." The second cow turns to the first and says, "Moo." --from Cathcart and Klein's "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes". % I was about ready to say I think I better go down and see my mom now when she leaned forward and kissed me with an open mouth on the lips. It wasn't like with Jilly. Nothing could distract me, not even the living corpse of her father. She took my hand in hers and slipped it inside her shirt. It was more romantic than it sounds. --Dirk Wittenborn, "Fierce People" % A man comes rushing into the psychiatrist's office, apologizing for being late because he overslept. "But I had an incredible breakthrough in my dream," the man says breathlessly, "I was talking with my mother and she suddenly turned into you! That's when I woke up, got dressed, grabbed a Coke and a donut, and rushed to your office." The psychiatrist says: "A Coke and a donut? You call that a breakfast?" --from Cathcart and Klein's "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes". % Here baby! Nothing but the best for you!" "It's a gift certificate." "For the best!" "For twenty dollars." "WORTH OF THE BEST!" --Basic Instructions, How to Give Someone a Gift. % Two cows are standing in a field. One says to the other, "What do you think about this mad cow disease?" "What do I care?" says the other. "I'm a helicopter." --from Cathcart and Klein's "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes". % "I think it's much better to be a good cartoonist than a terrible minister" --Charles Schulz % Good news. I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flood"ing the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin. So get comfortable while I warm up the Neurotoxin Emitters." --GlaDOS, Portal % Suddenly I know so much. I understand about waves and cross tides and how jellyfish float and why rivers empty themselves in the Gulf. I understand the undulating movement of the stingray on Sea Hunt and the hard forward muscle of the shark. Now I know why they call it petting, for even though I'm more still in the plush warmth of his mouth than I can ever get in church, my whole body is purring. I let my self breathe into him a breath that tastes like ashes from a long fire. --Mary Karr, "Cherry" % "This Culture War bullshit is starting to drive me nuts. I'd go live in a cave somewhere if I thought I could find one with DSL." -Tycho, "Penny Arcade" % "We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic." --David Russell % We tend to overlay grown-up wisdoms across the blanker selves that the young actually proffer. (When my son was born, I remember staring into his blue, wondering eyes, then asking the obstetrical nurse what he might be thinking. "You know the static channel on your TV?") --Mary Karr, "Cherry" % "[Sobbing] This is the worst day of my life!" "--The worst day of your life *so far*..." --Bart and Homer Simpson % Well, with a sharp enough instrument, almost any passageway of the head becomes a path to the brain." --Erica Bial % I just had an accident trying to see your picture." "Will you get here in time to take me out to dinner?" "I almost died." "Well, you *sound* fine." "Fine's not a *sound*." --Walter Kirn, "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" % "Love has as few problems as a motorcar. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road." --Franz Kafka % human hearts are composed of crushed stone and lusty cream --"Baby Rose", Masquerade % The process isn't *about* not getting fired." --Steve K % She hugs you in the doorway and when you say to her, 'If you move just six inches closer, I'm going to kiss you,' she moves closer, and you kiss her and the whole world is nice. --Charles Schulz to his paramour Tracey % At an elemental level gravity is extraordinarily unrobust. Each time you pick up a book from a table or a dime from the floor you effortlessly overcome the combined gravitational exertion of an entire planet. --Bill Bryson % "A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms." --Anonymous, via Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." % "You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 101^8 joules of potential energy--enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point." --Bill Bryson, "A Brief History of Nearly Everything. % "It has been calculated that a baseball thrown at a hundred miles per hour will pick up 0.000000000002 grams of mass on its way to home plate." --Bill Bryson on Relativistic effects in every day life. % So if the ideas of relativity seem weird, it is only because we don't experience these sorts of interactions in normal life. However, to turn to Bodanis again, we all commonly encounter other kinds of relativity--for instance with regards to sound. If you are in a park and someone is playing annoying music, you know that if you move to a more distant spot the music will seem quieter. That's not because the music is quieter, of course, but simply that your position relative to it has changed. To something too small or sluggish to duplicate this experience--a snail, say--the idea that a boom box could seem to two observers to produce two different volumes of music simultaneously might seem incredible. --Bill Bryson, "A Brieft History of Nearly Everything" % If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that "All things are made of atoms-little particles that that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another." In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied. --Richard Feynman. % "One thing I've found... avocado burps actually taste good..." --Evil B. This outlines the joy of eating sushi (California Rolls) with Evil B. % "One atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building." --Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" % "The way it was explained to me is that protons give an atom its identity, electron its personality." --Bill Bryson % "I was hesitant. But it is what it is. [My friend] needed help. There was beer. Good times. It was worth it." --Grey Ruegamer (formerly a Patriot, now a Giant) on castrating lambs in the traditional Basque fashion. Which means with his teeth. % "It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards." --Albert Einstein. % "Yet no scientist--no person as far as we know--has ever seen a giant squid alive [...] The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales' stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster." --Bill Bryson % "Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights." --Bill Bryson % The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn't very much of it. It extends upward for about 120 miles, which might seem reasonably bounteous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the size of a standard desktop globe it would only be about the thickness of a couple of coats of varnish. --Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" % We sometimes find when we get up in the morning, by a rise of an inch in the barometer, that nearly half a ton has been quietly piled upon us during the night, but we experience no inconvenience, rather a feeling of exhilaration and buoyancy, since it requires a little less exertion to move our bodies in the denser medium. --Wyville Thomson % "Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler apparitions, like poetry and philosophy. But, the body has all the fun." --Woody Allen, "Love and Death" % Attorney: So you saw that, did you? Witness: Yes, I did. Attorney: That was pretty far from you. How far can you see? Witness: I can see the moon, how far is that? % "Hair is a part of you. It is not a part of me, because I am a frog." --Kermit % "We're all in this alone." --Lily Tomlin % "It was Homaira and me against the world. And I'll tell you this, Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things." --Rahim Khan in "The Kite Runner" % One-Sentence Horror Story of the Moment All those spiders - they weren't running UP her leg. --Felisdemens % "Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes." --Edgard Varese % In Zeno's dichotomy paradox, you run toward a wall. As you run, you halve the distance to the wall, then halve it again, and so on. But if you continue to subdivide space forever, how can you ever actually reach the wall? (The answer is that you can't: Once you're within a few nanometers, atomic repulsion forces become too strong for you to get any closer.) --from Wired's Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business % "I love you. Don't forget to always tell the truth." --"Lost in Translation" % "For its members, Emperors' Club isn't a whorehouse. It's a whorehome--" -From Slate's coverage "So You Want To Open a Brothel." % He had two choices. He could pretend that everything that had happened since the day of Lynch's murder had been a bad dream, forget it all, and set about rebuilding his life and his career like a sane, rational person. Or he could take a hand once again, play it out to its conclusion. It was no choice at all, really. He felt like a moth that had just sighted the Great Chicago Fire. --George R R Martin, "The Armageddon Rag" % "Never try to write about your father [...] Men can't do it. You learn about life by the accidents you have, over and over again, and your father is always in your head when that stuff happens." --An Interview with Vonnegut % "Recall: it's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slowly." -- autoblog. % mis: So you mean, you can plug a phone line into it, and play multi-player games online, like with the Dreamcast? Sony: Dreamcast? Ha ha, funny stupid yankee! You dishonor me with your mention of this Dreamcast. The Praystation 3 does not connect to internet, Praystation 3 CONTAIN the internet. You prugga in the computer to the port, the internet isa all there. We copy it inside machine for fast access. mis: Wait, so you're saying that you copied every single file on the internet into this box? That doesn't even make any sense! The internet is a constantly changing network of millions of individual machines. How does the PS3 update its so called "internet" if it has no connections to the real network? Sony: Thasa right. No connections. Praystation 3 get internet from outerspace. mis: And its power? Sony: It run on love. % "gapes... I *yike* gapes". % I see that scientists have decided that all blue eyed people have a common ancestor. Is there anything scientists can't do? I think that this is patently bullshit. How can it be that there is any possibility that I might be related to the fucking cretin that uses my Tabasco sauce without my express or implied permission? --Things I Hate About My Flatmate % "This book," he says, further, "is a study of American literature from an economic point of view. It takes our living writers, and turns their pockets inside out, asking 'Where did you get it?' and 'What did you do for it?'" Fired by Mr. Sinclair's example, I tried turning inside out the pockets of a living writer of my acquaintance, a writer considered successful in his work, and one who appears often in the wealthier magazines. The gross receipts were one nail file; one rubberized tobacco pouch; one fountain pen without a top; one Western Union envelope (empty); one folded bit of paper upon which was written "Endicott 6281--about eleven o'clock"; one card bearing the names Tony, Gus, and Joe, and a West Forty-eight street address; one small rubber band (broken); one office clip (bent S-shaped); one half-dollar, one dime, and four pennies; one twenty-five centimes piece; and several unpleasantly mouselike formations of gray fluff. I had no heart to ask, "Where did you get it?" much less, "What did you do for it?" --Dorothy Parker reviewing Upton Sinclair's "Money Writes!" % "We never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." --Milan Kundera % First, I read in the paper how John Smoltz, the Atlanta Braves star, showed up at a training session one day with a painful-looking welt across his chest and, when pressed for an explanation, sheepishly admitted that he had tried to iron a shirt while he was wearing it. Second, it ouccured to me that although I have never done anything quite so foolish as that, it was only because I had not thought of it. --Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself % My wife was watching a re-run of Ellen, and she had a cooler-scooter. She kept her pudding in the cooler. --baldwintm % ...last night I had a dream about food. I was the only person hired for the busy grand opening of a self-serve gas station/gourmet food shop named "Squobo!" While I ran register, the owner gave out free samples of Squobo! Soup. Everyone grimaced in disgust at the taste, but since they were told that it was gourmet, they all pretended that they liked it and bought it by the gallon. After closing, I took the day's profits to the owner, and discovered that the soup was fishtank water, cloudy with live mosquito larvae. The owner explained what "Squobo" meant. "I bought the tank from a squalid hobo!" he laughed as he counted his cash. I was glad that it had been too busy for me to try the soup. --Bill the Splut % "Money is not important. Love is important. Fortunately, I love money." --Jackie Mason % The shift from the serious to the common (a shadow of the shift from Hebrew to Yiddish) is a frequent linguistic device of American Jewish comics. Consider Woody Allen's line: "Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends." --Lawrence J. Epstein, "The Haunted Smile" This got me thinking, would the reverse, going from the profane to the sacred, be funny as well? "It's so difficult getting a plumber on weekends... THIS MUST MEAN THERE IS NO GOD." Hmm, maybe. But then again anything written in all caps seems a little funny to me. % "It's good to be alive. There are so many things you can't do when you're dead." --Mel Brooks, "Life Stinks" % The other day I had an experience so startling and unexpected that it made me spill a soft drink down my shirt. (Though, having said that, I don't actually need an unexpected event to achieve this. All I need is a soft drink.) --Bill Bryson, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" % The hippies had in mind something they wanted, and were calling it "freedom," but in the final analysis "freedom" is purely a negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of those were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. --Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence" % To quote a wise person, "Kindness is my true religion." But when I look back on my past I know my compulsion to help others is more than that... You know, it's fascinating how our experiences shape who we are in so many ways! Something happened in my past! Something I've never forgotten! I have a story to tell you! It's really not out of the ordinary to look back sometimes! We're all in the same boat, really! I'm not alone when I say that something happened in my childhood that shaped who I am today! I usually don't speak about my past, because I like to live in the present! But you asked where I get my compulsion to help others, so I'll tell you a story! You know, I wasn't always as you see me today! Remember, things are not always what they seem! --start of "My Compulsion to Help Others", A Mary Worth Monologue / Flashback. % The world of dew Is a world of dew, and yet And yet... --Kobayashi Issa (tr. Donald Keene. Compare "Life is but the morning dew, bards say; / 'Tis true, indeed, but well-a-day!","The world of dew is, yes, a world of dew, but even so" ,"this world / is a dewdrop world / yes... but...") % Never mind that many of [my computer's 102] keys duplicate the functions of other keys, while others apparently do nothing at all (my favorite in this respect is one marked "Pause" which when pressed does absolutely nothing, raising the interesting metaphysical question of whether it is therefore doing its job) --Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself % Then, having identified the nature of geometric axioms, [Poincaré] turned to the question, is Euclidean geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He answered, The question has no meaning. As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more *convenient*. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. --Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence" % By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all our leaders was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions. --Bill Bryson, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" % There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again. --Clint Eastwood % Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen; She lays eggs for gentlemen. You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat To come across for the proletariat. --Dorothy Parker % "Crayons can teach us a good lesson... ...they're different colors, have strange names, but all learn to live together in the same box." --Grandmother on Family Circus "Also, powerful forces beyond your control will use you for their own ends, constantly rubbing you down until you.re a worn-out nub, and then will throw you in the trash. So, what I.m trying to say is, somebody go get grandma some more gin." --The Comics Curmudgeon % "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." --Kurt Vonnegut, "Hocus Pocus" % "Children are very smart, in their own stupid way. A child's brain is like a sponge, you know, and you know how smart sponges are." --Steve Carell in the latest Wired % Same with those mindless teenyboppers who go to the Hickory Farms store, and then take double samples of fruitcake and cheeselog, you warn them that they will be charged with a felony(grand theft), and that if they attempt to fight and run, they will be, unfortunately, first tazered, and if they continue to resist violently with intent to maim, then wounded. --from the Shrine of the Mall Ninja, % "Si, abbiamo un anima. Ma e fatta di tanti piccoli robot." [Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of many tiny robots.] --Italian philosopher Giulio Giorello % "Then there was this girl, Ava Cleveland, and her brother Larry. Larry had It something terrible, and also had a little way of taking opium. (Oh, please wait a minute. I think I'm going to be able to use "opium" in a sentence. I opium mother is feeling better. No, I guess I'm not, either.) Ava was young and slender and proud. And she had It. It, hell; she had Those." --Dorothy Parker % "Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained. I think of Buddha's smile and Einstein's halo of hair. I think of birthday parties. I think of common politeness, and the breathtaking attempt to imagine what someone else is feeling. I think of spirit lamps." --John Updike % "You're leaving college now, and going out into real life. And you have to realize that real life is not like college. Real life is like high school." --Meryl Streep to a graduating class at Vassar % Sir Laurence Olivier is on tour reading the sonnets of Shakespeare. The house is hushed. He begins: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments--" A guy stands up in the back row of the last balcony and hollers, "HEY, LARRY OLIVER! SING 'MALAGUENA'!" Unaccustomed as he is to being heckled, let alone heckled nonsensically, Sir Laurence stops. Waits a moment. Begins again: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds--" "HEY, LARRY OLIVER!" cries the guy in the back. It is clear he is drunk. "SING 'MALAGUENA'!" It's not as though Olivier has any need, generally, to have a squelch prepared. Rather than dignify this guy with a response, he pauses again, pointedly, and then, again, begins: "Let me not to the marriage--" "HEY!" the guy screams, "LARRY OLIVER! SING 'MALAGUENA'!" Olivier can no longer rise above this. "Sir," he says, and the richness of his voice is to the coarseness of the heckler's as Armagnac is to Mountain Dew, "in the first place, my name..." He hates to have to say this. "...is not 'Oliver,' it is Olivier. In the second place, and more important, I am not here to sing. I am here to read certain sonnets by William Shakespeare. "And in the third place..." Somehow he can't forbear to make this point as well. "...'Malaguena' is an instrumental. I couldn't sing it if I wanted to. So, if you don't mind, 'Let me not--'" And the guys stands up and hollers, "WELL, SHOW US YOUR DICK THEN!" --as related by Roy Blount, Jr. in "Be Sweet" % "Friendship lives on its income, love devours its capital." --Arsène Houssaye % "Your problem is that your inner child is a bit too outer." --Ksenia, a long while back. Now THAT'S what I call SUCCINCT! % "I laminate things that don't really need to be laminated." --Micaela Blei, Third Grade Teacher, on how she Procrastinates % "Debt is your future self sending you money back in time. So the question is, are you and your future self both happy with the deal?" --Tim Harford % [My mother] had more different expressions for gaits than anybody I have ever known: hightailing it, lightfooting it, hotfooting it, highballing it, going at a dogtrot, coattails in the breeze, with coattails flapping, lallygagging, traipsing, sashaying, moseying, ploughing along, parading along, prissing along, frisking along, flouncing along, shooting along, barreling along, galloping along, poking along, dragging along, trucking along, breezing along down the avenue, waltzing right in, shaking a leg, going zrooop, going lickety-split, going at a dogtrot, going like a house afire, going like a crazy man, highlining, flying low, burining up the road, making a beeline, going dancing by, slewfooting. Many of these were judgemental. She didn't approve of breezing along the avenue; she didn't have time for it; but you could tell she liked the idea. --Roy Blount Jr, "Be Sweet" % "When you take over a pitch and line it somewhere, it's like you've thought of something and put it with beautiful clarity. Everyone is helpless and in awe. Included in your ability are your philosophies, your theories. You tap that mental reservoir and it goes." --Reggie Jackson to Roy Blount Jr % "I don't know just what you heard, But 'Come on, Baby' are my favorite words." --Lyle Lovett % Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having been born. Congratulatins. Well done. You really are special. But not that special. There are five billion other people on this planet, everyone of them just as important, just as central to the great scheme of things, as you are. Don't ever make the horrible, unworthy mistake of thinking yourself more vital and significant than anyone else. Nearly all the people you will encounter in life merit your consideration. Many of them will be there to help you--to deliver your pizza, bag your groceries, clean up the motel room you have made such a lavish mess of. If you are not in the habit of being extremely nice to these people, then get in the habit now. --Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself % "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies." --Ralph Waldo Emerson % You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's because those dogmas or goals are in doubt. --Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" % "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." --Anais Nin % "All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." --Ralph Waldo Emerson % "This is the real world, muchachos, and you are in it." --B. Traven % Q: What's dark energy? A: The ninety percent of everything that's crap. --Leonard Richardson, Crummy.com % Hipster #1: Awwww! I never noticed it said "love" all over the cement! Hipster #2: It doesn't. Hipster #1: Oh, I guess the shrooms kicked in. --12th & 4th, via Overheard in New York % For more than ten years now, I've been tangled up with the problem of plastic bags stuck in trees. If I've learned anything from the experience, it's "Be careful what you notice." I was living in Brooklyn; I noticed the many plastic bags flapping by their handles from the high branches of trees, cheerful and confident and out of reach. Noticing led to pondering, pondering led to an invention: the bag snagger, a prong-and-hook device that, when attached to a long pole, removes bags and other debris from trees with satisfying efficiency. My friend Tim McClelland made the first working model in his jewelry studio on Broome Street, downtown. Possessing the tool, we of course had to use it; we immediately set off on a sort of harvest festival of bag snagging. --Ian Frazier, Bags in Trees: A Retrospective % "Abraham Lincoln said all men are created equal. I guess old Abe never saw Bo Diddley in the Shower" % "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." --G. K. Chesterton % Sad, sober friend: I just really miss her, I guess. Drunk friend: There's no color the sky can't be at any given time. Remember that! --E 11th & 2nd, Overheard in New York. % I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. --Douglas Adams % "a lonely tear running through his artfully kept stubble like a pachinko ball of pure shame and degradation." --archmage % "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." --Aldous Huxley % "You learn something every day... ...and then forget it every night" --Dromedary's grandma, after he showed "her how to operate her microwave for the umpteenth time" % What's green and smells like yellow paint? Green Paint. --Sickipedia % "I wish I could fly..." "...I wish you could fly too." --Me and Michael Ullman % The fly swatter is in fact intended to be useless, at least as far as the destruction of flies is concerned. It is not intended to kill flies. Instead it embodies a gesture of protest, of refusal. Of irritation. It says that this should not be, that this buzzing and droning is pointless. That these creatures are objectionable, insalubrious and stupid. That one must refuse them any quarter, shoo them away. It yells at them that there will no mercy, that they will all end up squashed, flattened, obliterated, without exceptions. Clearly, it has no intention of putting an end to a single one of them. But it flaps and creates a wind, so that they will remove themselves for ever. Which no doubt occasionally happens. The fly swatter is not a utilitarian object, at least not primarily so. It is pure gesture, nothing more. --Roger-Pol Droit % "Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together." --George Santayana % "Sure it mattered. When you get to my age you discover that everything mattered. Life isn't a series of good and bad choices. It's harder to steer it one way or the other than most people think. You just get pulled along. You look back and you wonder 'could I have changed the course of my life?' Maybe you could've ... but it would probably have taken a tremendous force of will." --Old Man in Seth's "It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken" % i remember an exchange I had with Elvin Jones, Coltrane's drummer. I had seen him so many times he thought he knew me. One night he sat down at my table and asked me what I was doing. You a student? I said no, I was teaching. Then he asked my friend, who was embarrassed to admit that he was a bank messenger. Elvin shrugged his shoulders, and said, "It's a gig." A gig's a gig.. --Michael Ullman, Tufts Professor and Music Critic % "There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters." -- Alice Thomas Ellis % I have noticed that, as I get older, I have trouble remembering new things. For example, my children remember the details of most of the theatrical plays they have seen in the past year. I can't. Perhaps this is because I have seen so many plays in my life that rarely do I see anything truly new. New plays fit into memories of past plays, and the information just doesn't make it to my hippocampus. For my children, each play is more novel and does reach the hippocampus. If this is true, we could say the more you know, the less you remember. --Jeff Hawkins, "On Intelligence" % "Money comes and money goes. The days just go." --"J sub D" quoting some young punk on Carpe Dieming % "I think you've clicked 'yes' a few too many times when you should've just ESCaped and gotten out of there." "Honey, you've just described the story of my life." --Working with my Aunt on her lapto % "Besides, yesterday was my birthday--I was eighteen." "Why didn't you tell us?" they said indignantly. "I knew you'd make a fuss over it and go to a lot of trouble." She finished the champagne. "So this is the celebration." "It most certainly is not," Dick assured her, "The dinner tomorrow night is your birthday and don't forget it. Eighteen--why that's a terribly important age." "I used to think until you're eighteen nothing matters," said Mary. "That's right," Abe agreed. "And afterward it's the same way." --from "Tender is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald % "If we really want world peace -- we should put up mountain ranges and oceans between everyone. Start digging the trenches, use the dirt for the mountains." --Steve Kat % "Oh I see how it is, so chicks dig scars when they are caused by motorcycle accidents, but my circumcision is somehow less impressive?" --Cracked twitter % Hey, what was that term for 'outside faucet' you used before? Hoistcock? Cockstopper?" "...it was 'sillcock'." "[giggling]" "You know, like a house has a sill? It..." "[still giggling]" "Never mind." --Me and EB, 2008-8-10 % Glory be for sour apples and sweet tea, for white lies and black thigh highs --chris on the Blender % "Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds." --Silicon Wisdom @twitter % He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page. "Think how you love me," she whispered, "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me they'll always be the person I am tonight." --Tender is the Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald % So! The Tao is a mysterious female! No wonder I love it so much! What could be more enthralling than a mysterious female? A mysterious female is delightfully enchanting for two reasons: (1) She is a female; (2) she is mysterious. Yes, femininity and mysteriousness are certainly two of the most entrancing things in life. But combined! Good God, what could be more divine? The two in conjunction are far more than twice as intriguing as either one separately. That is to say, a mysterious female is more than twice as attractive as either a female who is not mysterious or a mysterious something which is not female. So it is no wonder I love the Tao so much! --Raymond Smullyan, "The Tao is Silent" % Most people hate egotists. They remind them of themselves. I love egotists. They remind me of me. --Raymond Smullyan % "Woke up at 11. Had some lunch -- some nuggets. Watched some more TV. Went to my room, slept for three hours. Went back, got some more nuggets, then came to the track." --Usain Bolt on the day he was winning thr gold and shattering records % "I don't have any smiles" --comedic great Danny Kaye to my mom % In a place out of doors, near forests and meadows, stands a jar of vinegar - the emblem of life. Confucius approaches the jar, dips his finger in and tastes the brew. "Sour," he says, "Nonetheless, I can see where it could be very useful in preparing certain foods." Buddha comes to the vinegar jar, dips in a finger and has a taste. "Bitter," is his comment. "It can cause suffering to the palate, and since suffering is to be avoided, the stuff should be disposed of at once." The next to stick a finger in the vinegar is Jesus Christ. "Yuk," says Jesus. "It's both bitter and sour. It's not fit to drink. In order that no one else will have to drink it, I will drink it all myself." But now two people approach the jar, together, naked, hand in hand. The man has a beard and woolly legs like a goat. His long tongue is slightly swollen from some poetry he's been reciting. The woman wears a cowboy hat, a necklace of feathers, a rosy complexion. Her tummy and tits bear the stretch marks of motherhood; she carries a basket of mushrooms and herbs. First the man and then the woman sticks a thumb into the vinegar. She licks his thumb and he hers. Initially they make a face, but almost immediately they break into wide grins. "It's sweet," they chime. "Swee-eet!" --Tom Robbins' "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues": % ["Granddad" Freeman is making grandson Huey mow the lawn...] "And make sure you get between those trees on that hill." "It's so big..." "But that's a good thing, Huey. This land is a dream come true. Think of it like '40 Acres and a Mule'!" "Yeah, but I'M the mule." "Yeah, I guess you WOULD be the mule ... ...well, I never said it was YOUR dream come true." --The Boondocks % I had my status set to the Star Trek IV philosophical throwaway line "Nothing Unreal Exists" (partially in response to JZ's "Everything happens") sam: square root of negative 1 an unreal thing that exists kirk: well, it's REALLY unreal, see sam: this is akin to the argument that there is no cause of death that isn't natural sam: He was decapitated. naturally, he died. kirk: right, or there's nothing that's not "from nature", since humanity comes from nature sam: I love that one too sam: "I only want my kids to eat natural stuff" sam: "Like plutonium?" kirk: heh kirk: only if it's freshly mined kirk: none of that centrifuged stuff sam: no no... only organics for me and my family. sam: or fruitarian plutonium... the kind that falls from space. kirk: heheheh sam: I guarantee... you eat a good helping of plutonium, you'll be full for the rest of your life. % Furthermore, [writers who say "I know it's not a real word"] are giving up one of their inalienable rights as English speakers: the right to create new words as they see fit. Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean "cool." By the same token, readers and listeners can decide to adopt or ignore any of these uses or forms. --Erin McKean % "Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again." --Silicon Wisdom % "C'est la Vie!" / accepting that / "this should not be!" / but coping / more stoically; / philosophically-- / "C'est la Vie... % "Pooh," asked Piglet, "did you remember to help Owl remove that--" "Of course," said Pooh. "I have a phonographic memory, you know." "You mean," said Rabbit, "a photographic memory." "No," insisted Pooh. "Phonographic. It goes around and around. Sometimes it gets stuck. That's why I remember things so well." --Benjamin Hoff, "The Te of Piglet" % James Brown:"You don't have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got- Don't turn it loose, 'cause it's a mother."-best drumsolo advice % Things just keep getting better. Fewer people in the world are starving. People live longer. More babies survive. The world gets cleaner, less violent, and more comfortable. We have more leisure time and we we know more about ourselves and the universe. If you're sniffing around for a place to live, pick the future. Luckily, we're all going to live at least a little bit into the future, and we'll all live a little longer in the future, thanks to the future. --"Penn + Teller's How to Play in Traffic" % "The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it." --William Gibson % "Simplicity has real value on its own that makes the system more usable. It's the difference between reading a 100-page manual and reading a 500-page manual. It is more than five times the size." --Ken Arnold % Gratitude is the most important facet of the spiritual life, allowing us to acknowledge and express our awe and reverence. A universe that 'spawns because it is' generates our capacity to spawn because we are, inviting us to wrap our arms and minds and hearts around the astonishing whole to which we owe our lives and of which we are a part, and gasp our stammering gratitude. --Ursula Goodenough and Terrence W. Deacon, from "The Sacred Emergence of Nature" in "The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science" % they may not know which end is which / but thingamajigs scratch where thingamajigs itch [wash away your wildlife!] % Each afternoon, I'd trudge across Park Avenue, pick up the Globe, throw out everything but the Arts and Sports sections, trudge back to my temp job, and head to the bathroom for about 40 minutes. I wasn't missed. By the way, here's something you probably already know: temping sucks. It's like committing suicide each day, but nobody ever finds your body. --Fitzy in townienews % Each afternoon, I'd trudge across Park Avenue, pick up the Globe, throw out everything but the Arts and Sports sections, trudge back to my temp job, and head to the bathroom for about 40 minutes. I wasn't missed. By the way, here's something you probably already know: temping sucks. It's like committing suicide each day, but nobody ever finds your body. --Fitzy in townienews % "Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men." --Kin Hubbard % He knows he's written many of the chapters of his life. Had some good romances, not in a bad place. But: no rewriting. This scares him. He doesn't mind "spoilers". His passion is not for what they did but how they did it. In this life, he'd rather know; he'd rather know. % "Exercise relieves stress. Nothing relieves exercise." --Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005 % "It's worry, worry all of the time / You don't know how to laugh / They'll think of something funny / When they write your epitaph" % "I want to ask you a hypothetical question." "My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind." --Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Shadow". % "lost a game I didn't even know I was playing... not the first time in my life for that" --on being "tricked" into first beer for beer:30 % A single bulb backlit the frame of the monster, who seemed as peaceful in sleep as he was terrifying in his waking hours. Sheldon thought back to the day five years ago when he gave life to this powerful creature. The sacrifice, dedication and secrecy that had gone hand in hand with the project. His parents never knew. Sheldon had convinced them that his thousands of hours in the basement were spent masturbating. Botched experiments often made his lies more difficult, but his parents took to their graves the belief that sometimes when Sheldon ejaculated, there was an explosion and fire. --Jon Stewart, "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold" % "i was determined not to need this / so determined not to see this / coming, going, gone" -jess yoakum % "Aaaayyy... See? I'm like the white the Fonz" "Uhhh--the Fonz WAS white" "Aaaayyyy!" % All the time we are aware of millions of things around us--these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road--aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. --Robert Pirsig, from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence" % I like "Howl" a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. -- Kurt Vonnegut % So when a turtle has that kind of problem, is it colloquially "the runs" or just like "the walks"? % "If everyone wore my clothes, I don't think there would be wars, truly. Of course, then I would be the richest man in the world and most people would become bankrupt. My clothes are expensive. So maybe wars are better." --designer Yves Saint Laurent % Jokes that were probably old 10 years ago: Tori Amos sings that she Crucifies Herself. Quite a trick, tough once you get the first arm up. % "All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify." --Erving Goffman % "Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else." --Ogden Nash % Optimistic bias: People tend to be overconfident about their own abilities and the outcome of their plans. Something like 90% of people think that they are above average drivers less likely to get into an accident than the average joe. This is so pervasive that there is actually a scientific name for the few people who accurately assess their own future, their abilities, and what other people think of them: clinically depressed. --Megan McArdle % What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down--you're going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not--but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you've been over before to see if the things you thought were really important were really important and to...well...just stare at the machine. There's nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you'll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it. That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it. --Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance % "I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect." --George Carlin % "For perfect happiness, remember two things: (1) Be content with what you've got. (2) Be sure you've got plenty." --silicon wisdom % I love it when I go to bed to sleep. But sometimes when I sleep it scares me. Because sleeping seems a lot like dying... on the installment plan." --Herb + Jamaal % "I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it." --Rita Mae Brown % n Pac-Land the pre-eminent linguist / activist is NomNomNom Chomp-sky % "Oh, you lucky chip! If I eat you, then your lifeless molecules, if they are fortunate enough to be carried by my bloodstream up to my brain and settle there, will get to enjoy the experience of being me! And so I must devour you, in order not to deprive your inert molecules of the chance to enjoy the experience of being human!" -- Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop" % "What was missing was a regulator who understood markets, rather than worshiped them." --http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/ on Greenspan % The same point is carried by an old story about Shankara, the great eighth-century Vedanta philosopher. Shankara was being challenged with regard to his teaching that the world is maya. "What would you do," the challenger asked, "if you were being chased by a wild elephant?" "I would run," Shankara replied. "Why would you run?" the challenger continued. "After all, by your own account, the elephant is merely an illusion." "I would run," Shankara retorted, "because I am part of the same illusion." --Disanto + Steele, Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance % We conversed in French, a language alien to both of us, but more alien to me than to him. He said "gauche" for both "right" and "left" when he was upset, but when I was upset I was capable of flights that put the French people on their guard, wide-eyed and wary. Once, for instance, when I cut my wrist on a piece of glass I ran into the lobby of a hotel shouting in French, "I am sick with a knife!" Olympy would have known what say (except that it would have been his left wrist in any case) but he wouldn't have shouted. --James Thurber, My World and Welcome To It % "My fellow Americans, the time for running aimlessly through streets while shrieking and waving our arms above our heads is now. I understand that many of you are worried about your economic future and our situation overseas, and you have every right to be. Yet there is only one thing we as a nation can do in times like these: give up all hope and devolve into a lawless, post-apocalyptic, every-man-for-himself society." --George Bush in this Onion article Bush Calls for Panic % "'I am a mystic,' [Sarah J. Vinke] once said to me at a faculty party when there wasn't much to talk about. 'You can't be a mystic,' I said, 'a mystic doesn't define himself as anything.' She thought about this and said, 'You're right. I am not a mystic.' She smiled a little, and that was the last thing she ever said on the subject." --Robert Pirsig in a May 3, 1987 letter to the authors of "Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" % "The heart has its reasons that Reason doesn't know at all." --Blaise Pascal % "You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone." "I still feel at home in my house." "You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." --from "Garden State" % It's not just Bush. Palin taxed the crap out of oil companies in Alaska and redistributed the wealth in the form of checks to all Alaskans including herself. Clearly she's a Neiman-Marxist. --OutSourcingIsTreason on slashdot. % And this beautiful television has put me, like I said before, in all sorts of situations. I remember being very scared to it because an Icelandic poet told me that, not like in cinemas where the thing... that throws the picture from it just sends lights on the screen, but this is different. This is millions and millions of little screens who send light, some sort of electrical light, I'm not really sure... but because there's so many of them, and in fact you're watching very very many thing when you're watching TV. Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then, because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program that you're watching is really about, so you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV goes directly into your brain and you stop judging if it's right or not so we just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me once, and I became so scared to television that I always got headaches when I watched it. But then later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth. And that's the scientifical truth, which is much better. You shouldn't let poets lie to you. --Björk % "Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet." --Attributed to Abraham Lincoln % "I have made crap that is better movies than this, in my own toilet" --from Jimminy Glick in LaLaWood on the Gandhi Boxing Movie % "There is a right and a wrong in the universe and that distinction is not hard to make." --Mark Waid, in the comic "The Kingdom" "It is absurd to divide people into good & bad. People are either charming or tedious." --Oscar Wilde. % A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the way that astonishes him least. --The Tao of Programming % In the news recently, the FDA is reportedly poised to approve food from cloned animals. Apparently eating clones makes some people uncomfortable. Their thinking goes like: "I sure enjoy eating Bob the cow, but I wouldn't feel comfortable eating Bob the other cow." --Scott "Dilbert" Adams % "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." --Jalal Ud-Din Rumi % "where I step a weed dies" - unnamed trantula in an Archy the Cockroach poem % Dance Like It Hurts. Love Like You Need Money. Work When People Are Watching. --Dogbert % "There are two essential rules to management. One, the customer is always right; and two, they must be punished for their arrogance." --Dogbert % You are paying taxes for your life "footprint" in that country, not just for your income but also when you buy things. Now try to think that whenever you use anything on earth that it is not your own creation (knowledge, art, infrastructure, etc), and try to mentally subtract the value that you can return in exchange to that thing, you will be embarrassed. Are you paying your life time, knowledge and pretty everything you are to humanity by thinking in terms of socialism or not ? --Interesting answer to the Ask Slashdot % This john's name was John and he lived in one of those apartment complexes that are all over Tucson, where the desert used to be. Little houses stacked and winding around each other like a sprawling motel, a ghetto for people with money. Lawns spiked with sprinklers and a couple of pools. They all had nature names - Three Pines, Blue River Apartments. John's apartment was full of things I wanted to steal. Bright pieces of art from Mexico, perfect layers of yarn curved into flowing animals or gods, something you'd hallucinate on really good drugs. John needed to show his life to someone, which I think is often the reason everyone tries to fall in love. Look at me, I'm here, I did these things, I have this stuff. He'd have the Rolling Stones blaring from his stereo, the sound filling his sunny little apartment and he'd be singing along, too loud, a verse ahead of the actual song so that I could understand that he knew this song, he knew it well and that said something about him. --Michelle Tea, "Rent Girl" % "Bacos aren't a spice, Betty" --My Aunt Susan % "Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards." --Fred Hoyle % Dr. Mario: "*KIRK!*" "It wasn't me...Aunt Susan dropped those" "He's lying to avoid attention!" "Oh yeah, *that's* what I avoid" "Good point" % "I am a deeply superficial person." --Andy Warhol % "If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you % "Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage." --Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, Unshelved, 09-14-08 % There is something, that comes suddenly like a wind on a warm summer's evening. It takes you off guard, and leaves you without peace. It follows you like a shadow, and it's impossible to shake. I don't know what it is, so I can only call it love. --Yu Hong's Diary, from "Summer Palace" % "Machines take me by surprise with great frequency." --Alan Turing % She's more or less the blonde version of the French cousin, sparrow small, bronzed, all muscle and heart. There are, you say, two versions of the French cousin. You are the dark, lean kind, the sort that is mistaken for a boy, the sort that wears striped pullovers and sunglasses while running along wharves in Truffaunt films. You're the type who's always stealing something, she's the type who's always stolen or stolen upon. This is because she bleaches the crown of her hair, the animal sign for femininity. "Animal Instinct" by Camille Norton: % "The human being is a very complex organism. They can handle contradiction." --"Soaring" by Marilyn Krysl % "That's why we're born, honeygirl. To learn how to love each other. And it takes all the time we've got. Some folks never get the hang of it." --Amber Coverdale Sumrall's "Siesta" % It made me wonder what I would have done in their situation. I think I would have gone for the hand-washing fake, possibly mumbling something like "Just ate an orange." This lends the suggestion of both cleanliness and fresh citrus to an otherwise awkward situation. Sometimes that's the best you can do. -- Scott Adams' "Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain" % "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." -- Soren Kierkegaard % "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." --Frank Zappa % Wikimedia Commons: "Note: This gallery does not need more general home-made images of penises." So much for my public service plan. % "We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic." --David Russell % "You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart." --Fred Allen... % "The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light." --Michael Chabon, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" % "The universe is simple; it's the explanation that's complex." --silicon wisdom % "I don't think you can have ambiance without setting something on fire." --Green St. last night % "One Day You Will Be Nostalgic For Now." --quoted on the Suicide Girls DVD % By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before. In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour day, or two-and-a-half-day week, or six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good--and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better. Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure. We decided to work and buy and have instead. --Bill Bryson, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" % "jazz is its own propaganda." --Willis Conover % "Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things." --Robert Louis Stevenson. % Bowling trash talk gone wrong: "Is there a horse that you rode in on? I wish to make love to it. Wait, that's not right" % In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. --"Juno" % "Linger a while, so fair thou art" --Faust. % "Tout le sang qui coule est rouge!" --Gene Bullard % "Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity." -Jonah Lehrer % "Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Yassar student. For a price, she'll come over and discuss any subject - Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I'm driving at?" "Not exactly." "I mean my wife is great, don't get me wrong. But she won't discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn't know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who's mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I'm willing to pay for it. I don't want an involvement - I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I'm a happily married man." --Woody Allen, The Whore of Mensa % "Just let your love flow, like a mountain stream... ...cold, unreachable, and full of jagged rocks." --Lore % "No corporation will ever pay a creator enough to sue them successfully." --Dave Sim % "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn" --Ernest Hemingway (probably the canonical example of nanofiction) % "Democracy is a harsh employer." --Herbert Hoover % "This mental process will always be a little unknowable, which is why it's so interesting to study. At a certain point, you just have to admit that your brain knows more than you do." --Jung-Beeman % i say a lot of things to all the girls. "i can't believe you wore that" "yes, that does make you look fat" "your mouth is a time-space anomaly" --Miller to Kate. % "TAKE ME INCOMPETENTLY!" "Whatever works for you, baby." -- http://basicinstructions.net/?p=910 % "if only neil patrick harris had done that song in a dog suit, it would have been perfect." --Ivan % "plbbt plbbt plbbt" "what, you pretending to be some kind of poop monster?" "uh, sure, something like that" "I wish you had just said sure" % "As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems" --Eastern Timezone Theme for Global Game Jam % "Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and I can learn from him" --Ralph Waldo Emerson. % "I thought the girl was charming" --Truman Capote (on Linda Lovelace in "Deep Throat") % "Come at me like a panther 'cause you know yes is my answer" had to be the hottest Deee-lite lyric ever. Lady Miss Kier FTW % "We're going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town." --Obama on D.C.'s wimpy snow reactions. Great phrase! % "Only unfufilled love can be romantic." --Vicky Cristina Barcelona % "A poem is no place for an idea." --Edgar Watson Howe % all cats have asperger syndrome % "We are not water resistant" --Catholic spokesman on the increasing phenomenon of non-celibate priests % Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised. -- Marilyn Manson % "Love and stoplights can be cruel." --Sesame Street % Cristina: [Looking at a sculpture of Jesus] Are you very religious? Juan Antonio: No, no, no, no, I'm not. The trick is to enjoy life, accepting it has no meaning whatsoever. Cristina: No meaning? You don't think that authentic love gives life meaning? Juan Antonio: Yes, but love is so transient. Isn't it? I was in love with a most incredible woman... and then in the end... Vicky: Yes? Juan Antonio: She put a knife into me. Cristina: My God, that's terrible! Vicky: Well, maybe you did something to deserve it. from "vicky cristina barcelona" % "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on." --Carl Sandburg % "In this modern age video games and TV get us to a trance state that used to be the domain of religion. That Pac-Man CE I played this morning was a prayer." --EB % "Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones." --Paul Graham, What I Learned From Hacker News % "If you don't know concentration which gives you peculiar pleasure, your life looks like a hell." --Hiroyuki Nishigaki, author of "How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday." % "if you don't ask the right questions / every answer seems wrong." --Ani DiFranco % "Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with." --Bob Wells % "Everybody talks first draft." --Larry Niven, Niven's Laws for Writers % "I wanna tell you something because you're very dear to me. And I hope you understand it comes from the bottom of my damaged, damaged heart. You are the finest piece of ass I ever had, and I don't care who knows it." --Mad Men % "Sorry boys, this is Impossible mode. Difficult is winning the Nobel Prize. Impossible is eating the sun." --"Lou Reed" in "Penn & Teller: Smoke and Mirrors" % A descending shadow is commonly used for a psychological state of mind (like a feeling of revulsion, depression, or impending doom). Use a ballpoint pen. --How To Draw Manga - Occult and Horror, via harveyjames % "Only what can happen, does happen." --Dr. Manhattan % "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." --Thomas Edison % "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine... War is hell." --Will Tecumseh Sherman, 1879. % "Inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out." --John Keegan % "Kirk is the darkest of the white chocolate." --JZ % "Will you go get me a beer?" "Sure. Will you pour me a shot?" "Of course" "... and this the mutual enabling is complete" % "The parts of a car that look the most like a car are some of the least complicated and least important parts in how it works. As with people." --ChrisDeLeon % Marriage is OK, but there are two big points: * ladies: your man will never change. His faults will not go away when you marry. * gents: your wife will change. --quenda at slashdot % There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when hour name is spoken for the last time. --David Eagleman, "Sum" ("Metamorphosis"). It's that last one that bugs me! % [On God as a Married Couple] It is heartening to see that they learn from us in the same manner that all parents learn from their children. For example, it turns out they didn't know how to express the workings of their universe as equations, so they are greatly impressed with the ideas of their physicist children, who phrase clearly to them for the first time what they wrought. --David Eagleman, "Sum" ("Missing") % Time? No time at all. Haiku writing's tres facile, like breathing out smoke. % "How did I fail women's studies? I love bitches!" --Jamal, "How High" % "I found chocolate! Hiding in my pocolate!" --masukomi % You should have seen how excited I was last week that I actually caught Flood Awareness Week, during Flood Awareness Week. Usually, I'm a week late! And then, it flooded a lot in the West this week! How convenient! I hope they were aware! Jeez. Flood unawarenes. "Does somethin' seem funny to you?" "You mean the way water is covering the street and yard and making a dangerous current?" "Yah! Whaddya guess that is?" "I dunno, you s'pose Uncle Steve left the water on again?" --Candi and me this morning % "No, I wouldn't move for a job. Probably the most likely would be some personal thing, like a new relationship. But there's nothing on the radar so..." "Is there any chance you might be bisexual?" "No, I... wait, WHAT? How did...I mean, yeesh--" "Just trying to figure out how many people I might have to alienate you from..." % Yesterday JZ and I were at Micro Center getting him a screen for his projector. We grabbed some of the energy drink "Bawls". As I was carrying the screen in its long cardboard box back to his car, the following double- (or single-) entendres followed. "So how are you doing with that long, heavy thing?" "Pretty good! Just keep handling the Bawls and I think we should be fine." "You think we'll be able to get the whole thing in?" "Well it'll take some work, but yeah... but I'll be honest with you, I don't think it's going to be very comfortable for either of us." % The arcade cabinet has become a rare site in the United States, but in their best year, coin-operated games collected quarters that, adjusting for inflation, sum to more than twice the 2006 sales of U.S. computer and videogame software. --Montfort/Bogost, "Riding the Beam" % "It was my first time. Did you like it?" "Me? Are you kidding? More fun than laughing." --Woody Allen's "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex*" % "God is not a judgmental giant sitting up in heaven. It's a force within us all - we are lightbulbs in the electrical system of the universe." --Gayatari via Sarah Macdonald's "Holy Cow" % "Some will be drawn to Buddhism but I really think it's best that you try and find truth in the religion of your forebears and ancestors. It is very hard to change religion. I think it's safer not to." --Dalai Lama % "These Romeos are ruinous. No! We're playful paramours." --Bollywood lyrics, translated by Aarzoo in "Holy Cow" % "The scanning finger of the TV screen is at once the transcending of mechanism and a throwback to the world of the scribe." --Marshall McLuhan, via "Racing the Beam % "The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever." --Anatole France % "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3 (translation: Triumph)" --last words of the Mars Phoenix lander % "A dying man can do nothing easy." --last words of Benjamin Franklin % Ronald Reagan is our man The leader of our nation The only problem with him Is mental retardation --Childhood "Yankee Doodle" variant % Certain moments will never change nor stop being - My mother's face all smiles, all wrinkles soon; The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen; Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune - All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other. That red-haired girl with wide mouth - Eleanor - Forgotten thirty years - her freckled shoulders, hands. The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit, Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery's, a small caught bird - Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward. O marvellous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton! And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky, Time a bow bent with his certain failure. Dusks, dawns; waves; the end of songs. . . --Donald Justice "Thinking About the Past" % "Good lord, what is that inky black puddle Marvin.s mom is cleaning up? Does the awful tyke piss out pure evil?" --The Comics Curmudgeon % "It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead." --Dame Rose Macaulay % The worst part about working in Andover is when your job gets repetitive you starting thinking "Andover, Andover, Andover again" % "All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." --James Thurber "...though it doesn't help" --Kirk Israel % (after I mentioned an interview that went well, with me providing a possible explanation for a Google SEO/SEM correlation) EB: i've been geeking on robotics recently (TED presentation on war-bots) EB: I now have vision of a warbot with "Ask me about my pagerank" painted on its chassis, standing over a torched web developer. % Nearly every modern auto is a tribute to the old god Janus, the face with the bright white eyes in front, and the softer red eyes back. % "Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely." --Hawkeye, M*A*S*H % "When a big wave comes, lower your head and let it pass." --"Very Persian. Philosophy of Resignation" proverb in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis % "Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." --Lore Sjöberg % "I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality ---> immortal mistakes." --Esther Dyson % "The thought of people in this day and age sitting down to listen to a radio variety show on Saturday evening is rather implausible and was even more so in 1974 when we started "A Prairie Home Companion." Thank goodness Minnesota Public Radio was too poor to afford good advice or the show never would've got on the air. We only did it because we knew it would be fun to do. It was a dumb idea. I wish I knew how to be that dumb again." --Garrison Keillor % "I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it." --Tom Stoppard % Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward." --Kurt Vonnegut % "You could try looking at it..." "Empiricism... is that all you got?" "Empiricism... that's all I NEED" % "We live in the most probable of all possible worlds." --Stephen Hawking % As a programmer, you should probably endeavor to NOT have people use your name as a shorthand for a programming style... "Oh yeah, that's just Fred Code" is rarely a good thing. % Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. --Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love. Like Larry "Perl" Wall says, programming is all about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. % "If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." --Bertrand Russell. % This led an annoyed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to dissent in a recent case that the court was peddling "nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and colliding tubas" to justify drug tests for any student with a pulse. --http://www.slate.com/id/2216608/ % "So you want to save the Earth,for YOUR KIDS" "Isn't that what's really important?" "Not to the Earth." --http://basicinstructions.net/?p=1063 % "A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with." --Tennessee Williams % "To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all." --Peter McWilliams, Life 101 % "'I never said she stole my money' can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed." -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/27jeopardy.html?_r=1a on having a computer play Jeopardy. % I want to market an extra-rough brand of kleenex called "grindstone". % Attn Paul McCartney: because even if "no one really watching us", the road is still dirty and uncomfortably firm and gravel-y! Duh. % "If a man knocks you down, and you can't get up, well bite 'im on the leg." --Johnny Bradley, on "Story Corps" % "My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker." % Pick up a reggae album at random. *Any* reggae album. Listen to it and you will find a far more accurate, reliable and theologically sound exegesis of the meaning of Babylon than you will ever get from Tim LaHaye or any other so-called "prophecy expert." --Slactivist on literal interpretations of Babylon by Revelat % "Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. " --Albert Einstein % The Transporter is an incredible piece of technology whose implications could revolutionize an entire culture. All crewmembers are STRICTLY INSTRUCTED to forget this and treat it like a shiny elevator. --Cracked.com USS Enterprise Instruction Manuals % "The greatest trick the square root of negative one ever pulled was convincing the world that it didn't exist." --jeremiahr % "Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both." --John Andrew Holmes, "Wisdom in Small Doses" % I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. --Roger Ebert % Real Life: Subverted in Buddhism and Hinduism, in which not coming back from the dead is considered the greatest superpower of them all. --TV Tropes on Death is Cheap % I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer. --Brendan Behan % "I like Big-Endian and I cannot lie You other geeks can't deny When the order of the bits is the same as the bytes You know that sh*t be tight" --Perl/Java MD5 Victory Rhyme % "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." --Pablo Picasso % "Oh it was partially set in New Zealand! No wonder it was an even better movie than Lord of the Rings!" "Lord of the Rings was a much, much, much better movie." "Did Lord of the Rings have a heroe with retractable forearm claws? I think not. Game, set, match." % "Life is a fortuitous event...and when it's over, you're dead." --some old guy in a kosher deli, overheard by Anthony % "It never hurts to ask. Unless you ask for hurt." --Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005 % "I've been growing my beard for charity. Was I supposed to tell anyone about it first?" --Marty Moon's twitter % Before persuading by logic, someone must be persuaded in their system that logic is the best means to accept. Logic cannot be used for this. --Chris DeLeon % Here would be a good trick for a dog: nudge poop into plastic bag, carry bag home. Wouldn't that be just pragmatic? % "I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional and intellectual feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture." --Carrie Fischer's Journal, struggling with an on-set crush on Harrison Ford % "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." --Carrie Fisher % "Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all." --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg % "What we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits." --Charles Sanders Peirce % "Sex and respect go together like... ...you and me, please." --a softer world % "From the data, from that picture the Air Force took tonight, what we've got out there is the original pilot ship. On the basis of observations, the others were guided down. Patternwise, one lands, then two, making groups of three, joined magnetically. Is that possible?" "If they do it, it is." --General Mann and Dr. Forrester, War of the Worlds (1953) % "We will look at how gay couples [in Massachusetts] are making out." --WBUR's Tom Ashbrook, just now. Sounds kind of personal! % "God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?" --Unix quotes via Silicon Wisdom % "You can't take your dick out on the moon." --mistertoups % "You shot him!" "What do you care, you're a nihilist" "But... you shot him!" % "The man we know as Ernest Hemingway was actually a collective of highly-literate elephant seals operating an elaborate bearded puppet. His 'suicide' was the result of increased orca activity." --http://www.apocryphacts.com/ % "Time is an iceberg that sinks every ship" --Lore Sjoberg % "Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists." --Duchamp % "Anyone who says Dustin Pedroia wouldn't be even cooler with a jetpack and sixteen-foot metal claws is just lying." --SurvivingGrady % When you think about it, the whole process is rather strange: Northern Europeans and some sub-Saharan Africans have become "mampires," mutants that live off the milk of another species. --Cochran/Harpending, "The 10,000 Year Explosion" % "Cleavage is not a substitute for decorum." --SteveDelfino % "I have a VERY selective memory. Unfortunately, it's not me doing the selecting." % "Love without passion is dreary; passion without love is horrific." --Lord Byron % Scrabble is to words what "Guitar Hero" is to music % "The trouble with putting the patch formalism into SR to GR is that it is a long and complex answer to a question nobody has asked" % "I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her." --New York City detective % "Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully." --Raymond Chandler % "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." --Poul Anderson % "You are still sounding like a typewriter. Sing like handwriting." --Ali Akbar Khan % "The gray area is holy ground." --Marilyn McEntyre, in "How to Read the Bible", taking a stand against Biblical literalism % "Oh I almost forgot--you probably shouldn't have sex with Skinhead Katrina. If you do have sex with Skinhead Katrina, and you do it around the side of the house during a party, know that you will never live it down. Your asshole friends will be putting that shit on the Internet ten years later. You didn't even know the Internet was going to be invented, did you? Ha ha! Should've kept it in your pants, Caligula." --Patrick Hughes letter to his past self, "Diary of Indignities" % "what the chimney sang for aphrodite / one spreads its white wings on a far-reaching track, a man like me?" --Spam Lyric of the Moment % "Growing old -- it's not nice, but it's interesting." --August Strindberg % "He was your Elvis, and when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure. In other words, you two died a bit today. Welcome to the only game in town." --Cornelius Bear in this Achewood on the death of Michael Jackson. % "The Buzz Boar is easily the most devastating weapon in the COBRA arsenal, if viewed from the perspective of a weary parks groundskeeper." -- http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-20-stupidest-gi-joe-vehicles-ever/ % "We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow % "A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready, and such as will be content to partake of them are always welcome. Those who expect more will be disappointed." --George Washington % "I wish I had a penis so I could fuck myself in the titties" --Buddy A.F. reports that this, said at constant intervals, makes for about the worst hookup ever. % "I always live by the motto don't do anything you'll have to explain to the paramedics." -C1 % "When the light gets coherent, the coherent become lasers." -- http://twitter.com/rstevens % In a flurry of flame and fur, fangs and wicker, thus ended the world's first and only hot air baboon ride. --Tony Alfieri, http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2009.htm % "Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some." --Jose Marti % "Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens." --Nick Diamos % "Perhaps [...] the secret to a good life is finding the balance between [near-term and long-term thinking], the rhythm that brings harmony to the different timescales at which we live." -- A Discover piece on the loveliness of the wandering mind. % Fire! It is what we can doing we hope. No fear. Not ourselves. Say quietly to all people coming up down everywhere a prayer. Always is a clerk. He is assured of safety by expert men who are in the bar for telephone for the fighters of the fire come out. --notice posted in the hallways of a Florence, Italy, hotel % "Such a dirty girl filled with dark desires. My saliva isn't enough to put out your sexual fire." --worst Loveblender.com couplet ever? % "Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat." --Sir Julian Huxley % "In the context of science, nouns are just exceptionally slow verbs." --http://twitter.com/ChrisDeLeon % INTERVIEWER: How intelligent are dinosaurs? DINOSAUR RACER 2: We're probably not going to win any prizes, but if you think about it, neither are you. --from Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs, Leonard Richardson % "Children see magic because they look for it." --Christopher Moore, "Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal" % "Skateboarding, first known as 'sidewalk surfing', split off from surfing when people decided it would be much more fun if you lost a layer of skin and a joint every time you screwed up. Or at least, it would be more fun if all the newbies did that instead of clogging up the beach. This means skateboarders were outwitted by surfer dudes, a feat thought medically impossible by anyone still breathing." --http://www.cracked.com/funny-914-skateboard-safety/ % Those weird nighttime thoughts of how weird it is to be. And how someday, to be no longer. Or, god wiling, to be old; to be living in largely in the past tense. Am I living enough now to feel good about it later? Future self, I swear on all that's holy I'm doing the best I possibly can. Or maybe not, but you wouldn't've done much better, you old coot! % "When does later become never?" --/usr/bin/fortune via slashdot % "First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe." --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg % "'Clitoris' would be a bad name for a sub shop. Or any business for that matter. It's even a bad name for what it is a name for." --http:/twitter.com/SteveDelfino % "It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." --James Thurber % When someone over powers us and we let them have their way, we "say uncle." Isn't that creepy? --http://twitter.com/binstructions % "Plant mass comes from the air - not water or dirt. Animal mass comes from plants and other animals. We are all fancy clouds." --http://twitter.com/ChrisDeLeon % But hard fiscal realities can put a strain on any marriage, and the new governor, Jan Brewer, is finding that life with the Legislature and a $3.4 billion budget deficit is several feathers shy of paradise. --Awesome mixed metaphor from the NY Times % "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." --Carl Sagan % "The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." --John Cage % "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye." --Miss Piggy % "'The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,' Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives." --Emily Yoffe % "The time you spend reading this tweet is gone, lost forever, carrying you closer to death. Am trying not to abuse privilege." --http://twitter.com/Roland_Hedley % "One word says it all: 'you never know.'" --Joaquin Andujar % Office Debate: If actions speak louder than words, why is the pen mightier than the sword? -- http://Twitter.com/cracked/ % The English language is a belief in the human being and his or her abilities, despite anything. It is a belief that a plan, further work, and results are connected among themselves in reality and not simply in illusion. --Dmitry Vedenyapin % "Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything." --Henri Poincare % "The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations." --Wislawa Szymborska, from "In Praise of Self-Deprecation" % "My first crush on an Irish girl...I was ten years old, and her name was Elaine. Little red-haired girl; Well, she looked like you, But if you were ten, Which you're clearly not. Not that you look old, but you get my-- I'll just stop now." --Jason Robert Brown "I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You" % "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." --Garrison Keillor % He then led his guests to the piazza facing the Potomac, where he paced back and forth and liked to talk about farming (plow designs, the dreaded Hessian fly, crop rotation schemes). He often enjoyed an after-dinner glass of Madeira, which he held casually with his arm draped over a chair while listening impassively to any political talk that he preferred to avoid. Awkward silences did not disturb him. --Joseph J. Ellis, "His Excellency, George Washington" % "It's the librarian fantasy, man -- glasses off, hair down... ...books flyin'" "She doesn't wear glasses." "Buy her some, it's worth it." --The Station Agent % "We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist." --Michael Cunningham, "A Home at the End of the World" % Botswanan roads are famous for having big potholes and big wildlife to avoid. There's a joke among South African overland drivers: if you see two eyes in the middle of the road while driving through Botswana at night, chances are it's a giraffe standing in a pothole. --Conor Woodman "The Adventure Capitalist" % "Woman in Central Square wearing pajamas and reading cable TV manual loudly. If she were in Harvard Square, it would be performance art." --http://twitter.com/SteveDelfino % "I love my puppy ... I love that he is so young and full of life ... And that he will still die first." -- http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=480 % "Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." --John le Carre, "The Chancellor Who Agreed To Play Spy" % "HULK feel pain, too! If Wolverine prick us with claws do Hulk not bleed green? If General Thunderbolt Ross tickle Hulk with Apache gunships do Hulk not throw tanks? If gamma bomb poison Hulk do we not become Hulk? And if Ducky ignore us for Kenya-born Nazi Commie, shall Hulk not weep like little Disney Princess?" --excerpt from The Incredible Merchant of Venice: Merchants of MENACE!, Stan Lee Shakespeare, pub. 1596 % "Yo mama so fat I feel terrible even bringing it up." --http://twitter.com/rstevens % "I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do." --http://twitter.com/adamxii % "I think Pooh and Gopher are the only straight ones in The Hundred Acre Wood." --http://twitter.com/SteveDelfino % I like how everyone is always calling their pets the best pets and i constantly yell at my cats THAT THEY ARE THE WORST CATS EVER --http://twitter.com/daphaknee % "But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials" --http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091011/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_apocalypse2012 % "Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight." --Phyllis Diller % "Trees are the Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven." --Rabindranath Tagore % "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm." --Vince Lombardi % "I LIKE being stupid. You see things clearly. Being stupid is like squinting through the sunlight." --Ford Prefect, "And Another Thing" % "Remove the rivets, the battle-cruisers disintegrate, and the water is calm once more." --Henri Michaux % Don't make me come over there; because, you know, I will. Maybe not right this second, but eventually. Sometime really quite soon. Much sooner than you think though not exactly right now. You know, I've got things to do and stuff. But... I will --Dwayne Plain via cmg % "All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it." --H. L. Mencken % "There is no such thing as an ending. Or a begining, for that matter. Everything is middle." Eoin Colfer, "And Another Thing" % "Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities." --Aldous Huxley % "Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy -- in fact, they're almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil..." --Robert Heinlein % "It only looks big 'cause it's way up there..." "That's what SHE said!" "...that wasn't a very good one." "...that-- is also what she said." --Amber + Me looking at "kitty condos" % We all live every day with the victory of [Ayn Rand,] this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. --Johann Hari, http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/ % You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? "Baffling." --Mary Elizabeth Williams, "How not to make love like a porn star" % Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road? A: Because it was on the other side. -- http://twitter.com/siwisdom % Now John Henry said to the inventor, "All your tubes don't mean a damn. All your wires and your circuits They are just a modern quirk. It's Never ever gonna beat a Thinkin' Man. "They are never gonna beat a Thinkin' Man." --The Thinking Man, John Henry (via http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1769868/posts ) % "I can not work in an environment which requires me to deal with mustard in any capacity." --http://toronto.kijiji.ca/c-resumes-other-CULTURED-SMOKER-NEEDING-EMPLOYMENT-W0QQAdIdZ164085457 % "Did you apply for a job at the Vitamin Shoppe?" "He said he didn't have any openings." "-everybody has openings... ....or how does he poop with?" % This toy is designed to hasten the child's adjustment to the world around him. No matter how carefully he puts it together, it won't work. --The New Yorker % "But are you having fun?" "No, Fun isn't the word- it's good to do- it's retrospective fun I'm having. In six months time I'm having fun" --Eddie Izzard from behind the scenes of "Across the Universe" % "If Scott Joplin could have visited a century into the future, the most shocking part would be his music coming from trucks." --http://twitter.com/ChrisDeLeon % "oh great, more Lusty Ladies and their precious thinky thoughts." --Anonymous Stripper on the rise of the Stripper Memoir % "You're more secure in your masculinity than I thought." "Like a vault! Of testicles!" --http://dieselsweeties.com/archive/2408 % Why did Dr. Manhattan cross the road? It is May 18, 1979. I am crossing a road. --Danny Sichel % But, like other modern atheists and agnostics before him, Harris goes on to declare that faith is the root of all evil. A belief might seem innocent enough, but once you have blindly accepted the dogma that Jesus can be eaten in the form of a cracker, you have made a space in your mind for other monstrous fictions: that God desires the destruction of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Palestineans, or the 9/11 massacres. Everybody must stop believing in anything that cannot be verified by the emperical methods of science. --Karen Armstrong, "The Case for God % And I am reminded of the great Sultan who asked his Sufi master to provide him with a special gift. He desired a gift that would make him content when he faced despair, and humble when overflowing with joy. The master came to him and brought a simple silver ring. 'What is this?' the Sultan cried. 'How can a mere ring perform such a feat as I require?' The master replied, 'Sire, read the inscription engraved thereon. And remember it for it will bring contentment out of despair, and humility our of unrestrained rapture.' The Sultan read the words: 'This too must pass'. And I too am travelling with hope and humility. However my journey ends I know: This too must pass. % "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." --B. F. Skinner % The singular of "Beatles" is probably only 4-5 years away. --http://twitter.com/FakeAPStylebook % (How do you make homophobia even more wrong-headed and harmful? By trying to use homophobia to suppress action against climate change. Colson stands by his "principles" come Hell or high water because, apparently, Hell and high water are his principles.) --http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/11/dont-know-much-about-history.html % "Your name must be Citation, 'cause baby, you're needed." --http://crummy.com/ % around would be more nauseating. --http://twitter.com/rstevens/ % Almost as interesting as all this social etymology is how depressed Dick looks in panel two. "Am I ready for long-hair music?" he asks himself, as if this was the last stage in a man's life before death. "Normally the only music I listen to is made up of perps begging for mercy as their bones are shattered. Has it really come to this?" --The Comics Curmudgeon on Dick Tracy % "I really, really hate my brain. Luckily, I'm slowly killing it with alcohol, so in the end, I'll win. Eventually. I suppose." --archmage % "I wish when I was born my first word would've been 'quote' so that right before I died I could say 'end quote'" --Steven Wright % "The point isn't to 'understand' music. It's to empathize with it." --Roger Ebert % "Like whose alley ISN'T it up?" --Kj % Dance like it hurts, Love like you need money, Work when people are watching. --Scott Adams, The Way of the Weasel % "I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." --Ludwig Wittgenstein % [On a masturbation] As I record this now, however, I wonder why I didn't think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, this might be because the sky did not judge it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: go on, my son, enjoy it while you've got it, there won't be much more of that once you're a disembodied spirit, so have another one for us. Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth and whispered complicitly, "I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel." --Julian Barnes, "Nothing to be Frightened Of" % "We should think more about it, and accustom ourselves to the thought of death. We can't allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it. I don't think writing and thinking about death is characteristic only of old men. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they'd make fewer foolish mistakes." --Shostakovich % He even had a dry run at the deathbed utterance. "The last time I nearly died, my almost last words were, 'Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker's Aristotle.'" He adds that his wife found this "insufficiently affectionate." --Julian Barnes on his brother's (philosopher Jonathan Barnes') near-death experiences. % "Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world just as well." --Stendhal % "God, with a sword, can make a man a king. But a king, with a sword, can only make a man a knight. A knight, with a sword, can make a man a corpse. So... I kind of forgot where I was going there." --Wondermark % "those who make videogames are engaged in the important task of teaching people and machines to play with one another." --http://twitter.com/auntiepixelante % "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization" --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes % "All energy is only borrowed and one day you have to give it back." --Avatar % What's worse: Having pubic hair in your kung pao chicken, or having kung pao chicken in your pubic hair? --http://twitter.com/SteveDelfino % "I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota." --Fran Lebowitz % "The way audiophiles feel about vinyl and headphones, I feel about getting online with ethernet instead of wifi." --http://twitter.com/rstevens % Homeric gods, being corporeal, can and do laugh; we are told that Zeus, after his birth, laughed continuously for seven days. --Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This, A History and Philosophy of Jokes. % The object in sexual congress, according to the Marquis de Sade, is to elicit involuntary noisemaking from your partner--which is precisely the objective of humor, even if the nature of the noisemaking is a bit different. --Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This % "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "9-11." "9-11 who?" "YOU SAID YOU'D NEVER FORGET!" --via Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This % "Why is there something rather than nothing?" "Even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!" --Sidney Morgenbesser % A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died--in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life. --Dr. Sherwin Nuland % ...if any doctor tells me, as I lie in my hospital bed, that my death will not only help others to live, but be symptomatic of the triumph of humanity, I shall watch him very carefully when next he adjust my drip. --Julian Barnes, "Nothing to be Frightened Of" % "Life is short, play dead" --Bumper Sticker % "Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness." --Picasso