/************************/ /* phloem's quotes file */ /************************/ "You can fit the end of a wire coathanger into an electrical outlet, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea." --Fluffy, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet "Reality is the ultimate rorschach." --Principia Discordia "Usenet isn't groupware. Groupware isn't Usenet. Strawman knocked down and trampled." --Timothy Miller, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet "A picture may be worth a thousand words, but usually consumes the bandwidth of more than two thousand." --Gym Quirk, news.groups "If you think [The Other Sister] was made to demonstrate that the mentally handicapped can love just like the rest of us, it's time to stop pouring NyQuil over your morning corn flakes." --Mr. Cranky "Here's an idea: tell [James Bond] he's got three minutes [to escape] and actually give him three seconds and blow his martini-drinking ass into a million pieces." --Mr. Cranky, reviewing 'Goldeneye' "Once you have tasted flight, you will walk this earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you long to return." --Leonardo da Vinci "Pay no attention to the man brushing the ethical questions present under the curtain." --Liam Stitt "There certainly isn't a goony 'Touched by a Muslim' show on CBS prime time, with Cat Stevens traveling the country doing good deeds while paying lip service to the virtues of his religion." --placidden@aol.com, alt.tv.er, on the insecurities of Christians "DAMN WHO MESSED WITH MY CAPSLOCK KEY that's better." --geoff lane, , asr "People openely advertising on Usenet the availability of child porn are either law enforcement agents or possessed of the approximate IQ of an avocado." --Russ Allbery, news.groups "Hi, I'm Marc Andreesen, and after a hard day working on our piss-poor browser, I need to relax with a piss-poor beer!" --Malcolm Ray, on Marc's Miller Lite beer ads, asr "Tree stuck in cat; firefighters baffled." --Simcity 3000 "Good will triumph over evil because evil can't aim." --Skye Allen "Nikos Drakos. The only guy I know who tries to write LISP code in Perl." --Stephen Harris, asr, on the author of latex2html "We in medicine, and in emergency medicine in particular, have come to accept death as a passive experience. We like our patients to die when we're not at the bedside, when we're not doing anything, and when we haven't done anything lately." --Ron Walls, MD, FACEP "Duuuh....George...why have you not used system(), George?" --Liam Stitt "Usually when people get fucked this hard they use KY Jelly as a lubricant. It sounds like you're asking for them to mix metal shavings with it." --Ellis Vener, photo.net (in a deleted thread, sadly) "HAPPY99.EXE proved there were a lot of stupid people on the net. [W97M_Melissa] proves that not only are they stupid, they won't learn." --Jay Denebeim, news.groups "Bayliss: What, you don't trust me to drive my own car? Pembleton: No, I don't. You might get tailgated, and end up shooting at a school bus." --Tim Bayliss & Frank Pembleton, "Happy to be Here" "What do you expect? The man is on the mean streets of Baltimore, stalking the big game, which is Dinty Moore in a can.. of course he's going to be armed." --Det. John Munch "Do be a milk drinker; don't be a crack addict." --Det. Kay Howard "I spent years in front of that frickin' tube, and she never once saw *Beau* in the magic mirror. That bitch." --Det. Beau Felton, complaining about 'Romper Room' "I'm never sharing with you guys again." --Det. John Munch "The POP3 server depends on the SMTP server service, which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully." --Windowns NT Server v3.51 "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead." --RFC1925 "I don't eat soup with a fork, so why should I e-mail with a Web browser?" --Patrix Radman "If anoyne in the plot had even the slightest intelligence, the story would implode." --Roger Ebert, reviewing 'Jawbreaker' "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the works of shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." --? "I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the mail gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week. Time to die.." --Peter Gutmann, sdm "The biggest problem with driving in Houston is the fact that people seem predisposed to leave their old mattresses and couches lying around in the middle of the road. Bad drivers are less of a hazard than the furniture." --? "The fact that there are a million cockroaches per human being on the earth does not necessarily mean they are a superior form of life." --Tracy Reed, providing perspective on an advocacy war "Sarah [McLachlan], of course, still has the most discrete way of describing the pleasure of submission in sex: 'And that line in Possession -- 'hold you down, kiss you so hard' -- could be nasty, could be nice.'" --Jennifer H. Davidow "If Unix is the revenge of the nerds, then the rest of the industry is the football team and the cheerleading squad trying to produce a science project, and expecting an 'A' because they're the football team and the cheerleading squad." --? "'Since spammers are using Usenet, they are Usenet users.' 'Since robbers visit convenience stores, they are 7-11 customers. And since they get their money there, 7-11 is a bank.'" --Dave Hayes and Rick Buchannan, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet "I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but THEY LIVE HERE TOO, AND THEY'RE LOTS SMARTER THAN YOU ARE, WHICH IS WHY THEY'RE REAL ROCKET SCIENTISTS" --Gharlane of Eddor, rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, on the non-dangers of Cassini and other nuclear-powered spacecraft "Running Windows NT as a server because it's easy to use is like hiring Miss America to run your payroll because she's cute." --Peter da Silva "You see this?! This is what happens to you when you drop out of school and start smokin' reefer!" --Det. Leo Shannon, "DaVinci's Inquest" "Remember, there's no problem so complex it can't be solved by killing everyone even remotely associated with it." --ljd, Scorched Earth Party "Anyone who says 'disk is cheap' deserves to be shot." --Linus Torvalds "It's, well, a big dumb hippo that eats people that whack it on the head too many times. Don't get me wrong: I love the Hippo, but it really has no concept of who or why it's being whacked on the head, just that it has happened a lot." --Brian Moore, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, on Spamhippo "It's about damn time that all of us who actually give a damn about Usenet stand up and tell the people who don't to fuck off and die." --Russ Allbery ".. and by *GOD* I know what this network is for, and you can't have it." --Russ Allbery "We aren't heroes from any one call that we go on. We're heroes because we keep going back at it day after day." --Jeff Vaughn, misc.emerg-services "What are all these things that just spew out of your head? Could you at least use your brain as a filter?!" --Ally McBeal "Love, couplehood, partnership: I think I need to believe that it works -- the idea that when two people come together, they stay together. I have to take that with me when I go to bed at night, even if I am going to bed alone." --Ally McBeal "I think that the indefinable space between happy and sad is the most moving and compelling place for an artist to be. If there's anything I consistently strive for, it's a melancholy limbo. That's my favorite state." --Shawn Colvin /* Megan Patricia Jamieson: a woman so smart she dropped out of MIT */ "Relationships on the net are different from relationships in the real world. On the net, you're only as far away as the longest router hop." --Megan P. Jamieson "Physical and emotional distance between two people is not the same thing; the people I am emotionally close to are usually the ones who are the furthest away from me." --Megan P. Jamieson "Too much research is wasted because the people who did it looked at their results, got scared, and dumped their data. Half of progress is getting over your fear of what might be on the other side." --Megan P. Jamieson "Visual languages -- bah. Giving a student a visual language to learn in is like giving a kid velcro sneakers: he can put his shoes on, but he still doesn't know how to tie them up. None of these introductory languages -- including Java -- provide any mechanics for learning knots, which are useful for more things than just putting on shoes." --Megan P. Jamieson "I know who you are. I saw what you did. I've got the root password." --Megan P. Jamieson, trying out her BOFH license "All I know is that I once felt something meaningful about my work, and suddenly that feeling wasn't there anymore. Outside of a few visionaries, computer science has been woefully deficient at providing something useful for humanity. Most computer science students would do better to take up bartending or drug dealing for what good it will do them and the world." --Megan P. Jamieson "We may eventually dream our way out of this darkness, but the dreams that lift us will not come from the places we traditionally associate with dreaming. Like love, that dream will come from a most unexpected direction. They will not come from the universities, because students there have been conditioned to think in a particular way which I find inhibits dreams. It will instead be some kid, somewhere in the world, with a radical idea or message.. and that kid will change everything." --Megan P. Jamieson, not drunk enough "'I will accept you for all that you are, and all that you might become. I will stand by you in good times and in bad; I will be with you when you need me, and I will go away when you want to be alone. I will believe in you with my heart and soul. I will keep and cherish your heart with all that I am and all that I am capable of, and there will never be a moment when you will be far from my mind. That is my promise to you, my love, my darling, my angel of happiness. I love you beyond any words that I could say.' Wow. *That* is a declaration of love." --Megan P. Jamieson "Can I make an observation? Take the wrapper off whatever it is you're smoking." --Megan P. Jamieson "If it's more than 400 feet from the car, it's not photogenic." --Edward Weston? "Little Miss Muffet Sat on her tuffet Eating her curds and whey She anaphylaxed Turned blue and collapsed And the ambulance whisked her away." --Little Miss Milk Allergy "Given a choice of the negative or positive aspects of any symbol -- sea as life-giving mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth, tree as what falls on your head -- Canadians show a marked preference for the negative." --Margaret Atwood, "Survival" "A novel about unalloyed happiness would have to be either very short or very boring: 'Once upon a time John and Mary lived happily ever after, the end.'" --Margaret Atwood, "Survival" "Again and again we find [Susanna Moodie] gazing at the sublime natural goings-on in the misty distance.. only to be brought up short by disagreeable things in her immediate foreground, such as bugs, swamps, tree roots, and other immigrants." --Margaret Atwood, "Survival" "According to Hollywood logic, none of the actual Titanic passengers was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk up that attic." --Libby Gelman-Waxner, Premier magazine "I have no interest in seeing Doug [Ross] torn apart in post after post, mostly by men viewers who are jealous of George [Clooney]'s looks, talent, and success." --errossfan@aol.com, alt.tv.er, trying out for the "Usenet Idiot Child" poster contest "It's nice to see that Benton has a heart. I assumed the guy ran on batteries." --chrisnospam@ultralink.com, alt.tv.er "Bitch! Bitch, bitch, bitch. Bitchy, bitch, bitch. Idiot bitch. You know, I really hadn't taken a personal grudge against Judith Fitzgerald.. I thought that was pretty clear." --Sarah Andrews Cook, sf-fumblers "I've never understood why women douse themselves with things that are alleged to smell of roses/tulips/freesias. What exactly are they trying to attract? Bees?" --Tanuki the Racoon-Dog, sdm "Both Doug and myself have been here long, long before you were. It's *you* who are invading our turf, not the other way around. Now go hump your poodle." --Jay Denebeim, news.groups "In Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates, [twit] is motionless and the black hole is an event in his future.. which runs up and eats him (taking an alarmingly finite time to do so)." --Alex Elliott, adfp "Get it straight: a police detective, a man who gets paid government money to put you in prison, is explaining your absolute right to shut up before you say something stupid." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "It's one thing to be a murdering little asshole from southeast Baltimore, and it's another to be stupid about it, and with five little words you have just elevated yourself to the ranks of the truly witless." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "Landsman waves again and the message becomes clear: Yo, assholes. My white bitch ass is going home tonight to an air-conditioned rancher and a woman and a dozen steamed crabs and a six-pack of beer. You're going to a 98-degree cell for a steaming week of lockdown. Bon voyage, you simple motherfuckers." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "At his cluttered desk on the fourth floor of Courthouse West, Lawrence C. Doan rearranges a stack of legal pads and runs one finger along the bottom of his dark bangs and then back over the top, carefully reassuring himself that all is in place. No cowlicks today. No antigravitational shift in the tie's Windsor. No lint on the lapels. No problem whatsoever, save for the fact that today he's going to try to prosecute a murder in the city of Baltimore, which is a little like trying to drive a Winnebago through the eye of a needle." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "Doan buries his head in his hands, contemplating the known realities. The federal budget is out of control, the ozone layer is being depleted, twelve pissant countries have nuclear weapons, and I, Lawrence Doan, am trapped in a small room with Rich Garvey, ten minutes away from opening arguments." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "How many system administrators does it take to change a light bulb? None. Just remove the rights of everybody allowed to go into the room." --Ross Clement "ftping from a filesystem you can mount is like having phone sex with a girl you're in bed with." --Nate "You are in a twisty maze of Motif Widget resources, all inconsistent." --Paul Tomblin "A retrospective of the 'good 'ole days' of the Net when men were real men, all computers ran Unix, and the Web seemed like a good idea." --third in a list of ideas for articles about the history of the Net by Paul Stephanouk "What is a 'broken killfile'? One that only wounds messages rather than killing them?" --Craig Dickson "Unfortunately, the crud passed off as 'operating systems' for 90% of the desktop market (including W95) basically spread their legs and scream 'infect me! crash me! corrupt me!'" --Walt Buehring "I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on tape somewhere." --Hemant Shah "The Internet is a powerful example of free speech and the free market in action; it is curious that the net has alarmed the lawmakers of a nation founded on those principles." --Denise Caruso "People who think chess is a wimpy sport have never been hit over the head with a solid marble chessboard." --Thomas Boutel "Geeky F mathematician with lots of bell curves seeks M, standard deviant, for statistically significant activities. Your Laplace or mine." --Ilana Stern, "Poissonal Ads" "Whatever our positions lost in logic might be recovered with invective. If you never quit an argument, presumably you never lost." --Patrick Buchanan, displaying the wisdom of a grizzled Usenet Warrior "When in doubt, use brute force." --attributed to Ken Thompson "Everybody knows that it's still September '93 on the net.. and that means I don't have to meet these deadlines for *years*." --Alan Bostick "If you get mail from someone called MAILER-DAEMON, please do not send mail back to it. The mailer-daemon is a program and gets cranky when people mail it." --MOTD from Stony Brook's Instructional Computing Network "The Pope is the Ed Wood of theology." --Robert Anton Wilson "Remember kiddies, rocks have more clues than lusers. i.e. they don't phone you up. Ever. Unless you've been smoking crack." --John Vaughan "The world is complex. sendmail.cf reflects this.." --Robbie Honerkamp "The command line is not a bug." --John Flinchbaugh, alt.unix.wizards "In Murray Hill did Dennis Khan the might Unix code decree where Ken and Russ and Brian ran it on a pee dee pee.." --Peter da Silva "You need the computing power of a P5, 16 MB RAM and 1 GB harddisk to run Win95. It took the computing power of approx 3 Commodor 64 to fly to the moon. Something is wrong here, and it wasn't the Apollo." --Deon Ramsey "Life's not fair, but the root password helps." --BOFH " is one [tag] I'm considering for the 'user we hate you' build option." --Alan Cox "It's aetually pretty de1ightfu1 if y0u have ever rcad the doeumentatjon of 0rigin's U1tima 1-V1 Enc0re Co11ection CD." --Linards Ticmanis, commenting on OCR software "Lately I've been saying, 'have you got there yet?'" --Mike Stella, taunting Windows users "I don't *care* if there's been a nuclear holocaust -- Usenet news hasn't been received for 36 hours and I'm moving to another ISP." --Joe Chew "Immediate opening for window manager. The successful applicant will be able to handle several hundred clients. BS/X11 required. Own colormap a plus. Send cover letter & resume to.." --Andrew Carey "Next week: tactile load monitoring! Start up emacs and crush your sysadmin!" --Wim Lewis "But the second or third time I read news on Panix Jim mentioned to me that rn had been installed since I'd last looked. He noticed I was 'more'ing the news spool." --Mara Chibnik "Give a man a piece of working code and you solve his problem. Teach a man to write code and you give him a lifetime of new problems." --Timothy J. Luoma "Get either a killfiler or a gun (God's own retroactive moderator...) and a shitload of ammunition." --Keith M. Lucas "If the NSA has time to read my e-mail, I wish they'd send me a bloody monthly summary!" --Jef Bryant "Any member of the public who trusts Usenet is at best gullible." --Seth Breidbart "People who read 'Wired' are *exactly* everything that's wrong with the net." --Thor Lancelot Simon "I kinda like the paper stock. 'Wired' is one of the few magazines where the ink *doesn't* bleed through to the opposite side. And given the amount of ink they put on their average page, this is a good thing." --Daniel Rosenbaum "X.400 was designed by people who really didn't want to communicate with each other in the first place." --Michael J. O'Connor "Remember, SCSI is not black magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why it is necessary to sacrifice a goat at midnight in order to get a SCSI device working properly." --Arnoud Engelfriet "If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one." --John Barrow "I think I'd like to see a Simpsons episode start up with Bart Simpson writing 'I will not attempt to undermine the Usenet Cabal.'" --J.D. Falk, sdm "A gangrenous limb is still full of life. I wouldn't call it thriving." --Peter da Silva, discussing the state of alt.sex.* "S'nice to find somebody who speaks fuckin' English out here onna Innernet. Not like dem goddam fancy pants talkers from fuckin' England or someplace." --tariat@aol.com "If it's not real, why does it take up disk space?" --Wednesday "Wow! 'Wired' has text? I think 'Wired' is the anti-'Playboy': I only read it for the graphics." --Ron Echeverri "An hour into flight, I discover the computer is on and the battery is 80% used. This is irritating (!) and perhaps dangerous, although none of my flights has crashed." --Edward Holden, comp.risks, on in-flight use of electronic devices "Some day the US is going to face an enemy who *didn't* put their armed forces together the way PHBs put together computer systems, by looking in catalogs and listening to salesmen and going 'I want that' without listening to the technical guys going 'but that won't work with the stuff we already have.'" --Paul Tomblin, sdm "When flying, you will generally be the one to kill yourself. When driving, there's a much better chance that someone else will kill you." --Kyler Laird, rec.aviation.misc, explaining accident statistics "Ever poke a dog in the eyes? You *really* should try it sometime. You will *not* get a Three Stooges reaction." --Kyler Laird, rec.aviation.piloting "If 'Casablanca' was made in today's climate, Rick and Ilsa would escape on the plane after avoiding a hail of gunfire (Rick would probably be doing the two-fisted gun thing that John Woo loves)." --James Berardinelli "This is a standoff with federal officers! A peaceful settlement is, 'Put your guns down, you're under arrest!'" --Josh Lyman, "The West Wing" "Attila is less hated than Hitler, better known than Franco, and lacks Mussolini's comic charm." --Bill Cole, sdm, on why Attila gets picked on "You'd have to say 'hey, remove my stuff, or I'll whack your server in the knee with a metal pipe!'" --Sean Yamamoto, on the photo.net copyright infringement goon squad "Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of smart terminals." --obs@burnout.demon.co.uk (seen in a .sig) /* Anita Liberty: teaching me to be angry all over again */ "Samantha once asked me which experience I thought would be scarier: seeing a ghost or being abducted by aliens. Here's my answer: Neither. Nothing could ever be as terrifying as finding myself at the same party as Mitchell and his new girlfriend. Since that happened last night, I guess I can live the rest of my life without fear." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Mitchell broke my heart. So I broke his marble coffee table." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Never went outside today. Didn't clean my apartment. Didn't shower. Didn't write. Didn't watch television. The phone didn't ring. Not once. I didn't get any mail. Oh. That's not true. I got a Chinese menu. Someone was thinking about me." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Slipping slowly, deeply, down the drain of my life. Consumed by the darkness of my unfulfilled dreams. Black heat surrounds my lonely -- oh, desperately lonely -- body. My existence has become a blur of dissatisfaction and I feel nothing but what I don't have and that is everything. Don't feel bad -- I mean, it's not like it's your fault or anything. Oh yeah, actually, it is." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "When your self-esteem is low, do not call someone who has rejected you in the past. The chance that that person will say something that will make you feel worse is great. The chance that that person will say exactly what it is that you need to hear is slim." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "You're a bad habit. I want to kick you. Hard." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "I wish we were back together.. for just one night.. so I could.. push you out of my loftbed while you were sleeping." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Now that you're gone and never coming back I feel that I can be honest about the fact that you were never very good in bed." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "If you're over thirty, you don't *have* to take your parents' advice. You can. Of course. If you want to. And if taking it doesn't make you feel like you're still a child. And if somehow you are able to convince yourself that their advice is solid and grounded and takes into account how well they know you and how right they've been in the past. If you can take their advice under those conditions, well, lucky you." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Compromise: Lowering my standards so you can meet them." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "If you run into someone who's broken your heart, act like you don't know him. Act like you've drawn a blank. Act life you've never seen him before, even if you really want to whack his fucking black baseball cap off his ugly head and kick his ass when he bends down to pick it up." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "I know what people say about me. 'Anita Liberty's so angry.' 'Anita Libery's so angry at men.' 'Anita Liberty just needs to get laid.' And I'm like, you know.. duh!" --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Never call a first date a date. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't had a bad *date*, you've just met someone with whom you don't intend to waste any more of your time. If it does work out, then you can call it a date after the fact. Fail-safe." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "Don't trust anyone who, after knowing you for all of four hours, tells you that they've never felt so connected to, so moved by, so comfortable with, someone as he/she feels with you. It's just not true. Well, he/she may think it's true. And you are pretty great, but he'she's just looking for something that he/she will find out you can't deliver and then he/she will discover that you're just a normal person. A really sexy, cool, well-adjusted normal person, but a normal person all the same. And he/she will realize this and stop calling. Just stop calling. And his/her desperation to see you again and desire to spend every minute with you will fade away and be replaced with a palpable ambivalence. And then you're the one who ends up getting disappointed. Avoid that." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating "I used to have dreams that Mitchell came back to me. I still do. But now I call them nightmares." --Anita Liberty, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating /* Philip Greenspun: my hero */ "Our strategy in dealing with CTOs was to ridicule them in front of their bosses. `You're not sure if Unix is the right operating system? What is next on the meeting agenda, are we doing to talk about the color of the power cord used to plug the server in?'" --Philip Greenspun "Let's get real. Poverty sucks. If you claim to be an expert on modern information systems and you aren't rich then most people will infer that you are stupid." --Philip Greenspun "Progress in computer science is made with the distribution of revolutionary software systems and the publication of revolutionary books. We don't need a fancy information system to alert us to these grand events; they will hit us in the face. Another good excuse for ignoring the literature is that, since everyone has strong beliefs about fundamentals but can't support those beliefs rationally or consistently convince non-believers, computer science is actually a religion." --Philip Greenspun "Computers are the tools of the devil. There is no monotheism strong enough that it cannot be shaken by Unix or any Microsoft product. The devil is real. He lives inside C programs." --Philip Greenspun "The companies making Unix machines were accustomed to building proprietary systems and hence they couldn't resist introducing annoying incompatibilities among their versions of Unix." --Philip Greenspun "Digital, HP, and IBM sold big systems to big customers and laughed at Sun. The people at Sun became so depressed that they decided to put all the other Unix vendors out of business." --Philip Greenspun "I told all of my friends how they were losers for running Unix. They should switch to NT. It was the future. That was more or less my constant refrain until one pivotal event changed my life: I actually tried to use NT." --Philip Greenspun "You might think that the user interface of Unix sucks. But, thanks to X, it doesn't get any worse if you stay in your comfortable office or cozy house and drive your web server remotely." --Philip Greenspun "By contrast, anyone who has learned to install Microsoft Word on a Windows NT machine is suddenly a $150/hour consultant. Now that all the nerdy high school kids have all gone over to Linux, there is no pool of cheap expertise for NT." --Philip Greenspun "A true Windows NT expert is making $175,000 a year rebooting a financial firm's e-mail servers; he isn't going to want to bother with your personal web server." --Philip Greenspun "When you have 11 million users, life begins at 50 million hits/day/service, and you don't have too much patience for bogus 'scalable application server' products." --Philip Greenspun "Until Microsoft is able to get Windows NT to work at its own sites (e.g., hotmail.com), it is probably safest to rely on a Unix server." --Philip Greenspun "Armies of hardware engineers will work anonymously in cubicles like slaves for 30 years so that the powerful computers used by pioneers in the 1960s will be affortable to everyone. Then in the 1990s rich people and companies will use their PR staffs to take credit for the innovations of the pioneers in the 1960s, without even having the grace to thank the hardware geeks who made it possible for them to steal credit in the first place." --Philip Greenspun "Conventional wisdom in Italy has it that 'there are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it.' Based on my survey of the computer industry, the third strategy seems to be the most successful." --Philip Greenspun "You are a Web publisher. On the cutting edge. You need the latest and greatest in computer technology. That's why you use, uh, Unix. Yeah." --Philip Greenspun "So you've gotten your pathetic Web site up and are proud of yourself for your wimpy little SELECTs. You had planned to live on the advertising revenue from your site, but find that $1.37 a month doesn't go very far in Manhattan." --Philip Greenspun "I didn't want to write a dead trees book but I figured that ordering lobster was my only chance of getting anything out of Ziff-Davis, which had been copying my images off my Web site and running them without credit or payment in its magazines." --Philip Greenspun "Some people like a one-truth world. If you have a huge advertising and PR budget then you can control your public image very effectively in a literate world. Ford Motor Company has enough money to remind you 2,000 times a year that 'Quality is Job One;' unless you lost a friend in a Pinto gas tank explosion, you probably will eventually come to agree. Microsoft via the genius of Bill Gates invented the mouse-windows user interface, reliable operating systems, affordable computing, and the Internet; if you don't think all of that is true, ask someone who has never used a computer and whose only exposure to the industry is through mass media." --Philip Greenspun "Since publishers don't pay real money for computer books, the only people who are attracted to work as authors are the clueless and unemployed. If I actually know something about Web publishing, why should I write a book instead of consulting for $1,000/day? But if I've never typed a line of SQL in my life, that makes me the perfect candidate to write a book about databases. Yes the publisher is only going to pay me $10,000 but it works out because I get an excuse to learn a bunch of new things. Maybe I can get a job as a junior database programmer when I'm done." --Philip Greenspun "My principle home computer is a Windows NT 4.0 box that I don't understand. I once tried to buy a book on NT that explained something about the philosophical underpinnings so that I'd be better prepared to use the on-line help. But all the NT books at my local Micro Center were 1200 pages long. I don't have time to read a 1200 page book. I am afraid to even let one in my house." --Philip Greenspun "Suppose that you are up all night tearing your hair out because something has gone wrong with your RDBMS. You turn to your technical bookshelf and thumb through all the dbadmin guides. Perhaps you do find some useful information but you become enraged by the cheerful tone of the book. You are in this mess because the RDBMS vendor skimped on the design and implementation of a critical system component. This skimping may well have been documented somewhere, but you didn't see the relevant caveats before the skimping brought down your service. Partly this is because tech books don't have sections like 'design idiocies that are likely to fuck you over.'" --Philip Greenspun "Amazon had apparently expected to get real writers but most of the authors who'd stumbled upon the form as of May 1997 were hack writers of tech books. You'd think that lying on their college applications would have prepared these people to answer this question with something like 'Every summer I sit on the beach and re-read Proust. It recharges my creative batteries.' But apparently they'd lost all the skills they'd had at age 17." --Philip Greenspun "The book the Ziff folks sent me as an example of their art was 'Late Night VRML 2.0 with Java,' 700 pages + CD-ROM, published February 1997. I was personally acquainted with more movie stars than people who might conceivably have wanted to buy this book or any book like it." --Philip Greenspun "Another good thing about Morgan Kaufmann is that I will be their stupidest and most commerical writer. Seemingly everyone else who writes for them has a Ph.D. and a professorship. They don't have a 'DOS for Dorks' series with potential to sell 200,000 copies/year. So when they do get their appointment with the buyer for Barnes & Noble, my book will be the one that gets pushed rather than 'Atomic Transactions: In Concurrent and Distributed Systems'." --Philip Greenspun "Fuji has done great things to promote this format. They make 645 lenses that are just as good as Hasselblad's 6x6 lenses. They charge less than half the price. Then they throw in a perfectly good body behind the lens for free! Sometimes Fuji puts a meter in the body, something that apparently costs 'Blad about $5,000 extra." --Philip Greenspun "At noon, an ugly mob of users assembles outside your office, angered by your introduction of frames and failure to include WIDTH and HEIGHT tags on IMGs. You send one of your graphic designers out to explain how `cool' it all looked when run off a local disk in a demo to the vice president. The mob stones him to death and then burns your server farm to the ground." --Philip Greenspun, describing what should happen to all bad Web designers "It's bad form to arrive at a scene [of a fire] with sparks and smoke already INSIDE the cab of the truck." --Jason Low "So our first-ever WRC (Water Rescue Call) alarm after buying and training with our rescue raft 2 years ago came today, as mutual aid to another local department, and we got cancelled halfway to the scene because the patient had sunk. Nobody really wanted to try to grab hold of a 400 lb baby COW anyway.." --Jason Low "This looks like a hardware issue with the monitor. Physical intimidation of your computer, while sometimes satisfying, should not be necessary." --Michael Riley, AST Technical Support, in an e-mail to me "I managed to get [a netscape session] to crack the 100M mark once. I don't know how. I think it was just hungry." --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "Heck, that's nothing. I remember a while back jwz posted about how proud he was when Netscape passed XEmacs in resident footprint." --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "It's that [netscape has] taken on Gates' philosophy toward resources: If your machine has more resources, they must be for me to use, so I will." --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "They've dealt with it in every revision. Each major new version of a M$ OS has improved upon the Microsoft inevitable-crash(tm) feature. It becomes more reliable with every revision." --Justin Sheehy, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "Emacs, the right tool for the right job... no matter what the job!" --Justin Lloyd, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "Don't you mean the new "Inevitable-crash(tm) Wizard"? Improve your productivity - use new M$ Overbloated Product(tm) - does all those jobs you'd never wish to do with as much enthusiasm as you'd have too! Eats your resources! Upgrade your machine now and all that spare time you'll gain from Overbloated Product(tm) can be used to reboot. Many times." --Darrell Ottery, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "Is this such unusual behaviour in any other field? I think not. No, it's down to the fact that computers are deemed 'hard' and 'difficult to use' when the truth of the matter is that they are no harder to operate effectively that a car is. You don't *have* to understand how a 4-stroke IC engine works to drive a car, you just need to know how to drive. It's no different in any other field. Just seems to me that people aren't willing to make any effort these days. Feh." --Darrell Ottery, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "If you wear a bulletproof vest, you should by that logic have no complaint if people shoot you every day." --Ron Schwarz, news.admin.net-abuse.usenet /* Jennifer Heather Davidow: a woman who keeps hounding me to put more of her in here */ "There are pictures. There are pictures telling me that it's dialing, connecting, checking a password, etc. Every fucking thing has an icon. In theory, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel utterly condescended to." --Jennifer H. Davidow, griping about AOL "They also had a UNIX option for 2 cents a day for 1 mb, so I caved. I can't deal with the idea of NOT having a system that I barely know yet somehow use religiously." --Jennifer H. Davidow "Life wouldn't be life for you if I didn't come in every now and then and give you advice that could potentially make you sleep in your office again." --Jennifer H. Davidow "I have said on not too few occasions that I remember when I used to be smart. For 12 years of my life I was officially labeled 'gifted AND talented.' Now I'm lucky if I can get myself to school without getting lost." --Jennifer H. Davidow "I think there needs to be more of me in your quotes file." --Jennifer H. Davidow "Predictability comes by habit; stability comes by choice." --Jennifer H. Davidow "I realized I have SUCH a perfect relationship bed and nobody to have a relationship in it with." --Jennifer H. Davidow (hopelessly out of context) ">Now let us never speak of this incident again. Except for right now. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Dork." --me & Jennifer "I should be reading property AND keeping my phone line open, which explains why I'm online." --Jennifer H. Davidow "I'm exhausted and stinky." --Jennifer H. Davidow (still hopelessly out of context) "But I like [the sigquote] so much I had to quote it back. I'm famous. Should I look at your .plan again?" --Jennifer H. Davidow "Let's throw some chlorine in the gene pool." --Jennifer's friend Nicole Brodie "Trent Reznor uses shock to increase the effect of his music; Marilyn Manson uses music to increase the effect of his shock." --Jennifer H. Davidow (I mangled the quote; sorry) "Someone needs to take a melon baller and scoop out all the crap from inside me and get it out in the open, and then I will feel clean again." --Jennifer H. Davidow "So good for you to choose anger. Fuck her. She had no right to make you question your life like this." --Jennifer H. Davidow, Real Angry at my ex "My firm paid $1,475 for me to take this course and learn about q-tips." --Jennifer H. Davidow, on bar review "I love having fun with you. You're too easy." --Jennifer H. Davidow, waaaaay out of context "There was nothing good about the Challenger disaster, but it did happen on the day that L. Ron Hubbard died and it blew that useless, evil, rat bastard's obituary off the front page and that, at least, wasn't bad." --Penn Jillette "DVD has two sides, and I don't just mean the discs: it's an entertainment medium like video tape, and it's a computer medium like CD-ROM. So people are going to have DVDs in their computers, and with the buzzword 'convergence,' they're going to want to use those drives to read movies and audio DVDs. This raises a security problem, because as everyone knows, the Internet is full of evil hackers who will infringe upon copyright owners' God-given rights just for the sheer hell of it." --Matthew Skala, "DVD Crypto Considered Harmful?" "Bandwidth is highly asymmetrical and if you run a server that pumps out anything like as much output as it takes input, then you'll saturate the upward pipe and your wanker neighbours who only want to look at, um, 'content,' on commercial servers, won't be able to transmit their HTTP requests." --Matthew Skala "Just _how_ many signs of the apocalypse does this cover at once?" --Liam Stitt "Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feeling or in actions.. while virtue finds and chooses the mean." --Aristotle "Usenet is essentially a HUGE group of people passing notes in class." --R. Kadel "To err is human; to really fuck things up requires the root password." --someone in the sdm "Sarah McLachlan's more of a 'this is a dark place.' Tori Amos is a little 'is it dark? I think so,' and Trent Reznor's the guy who kicked the lightbulb out in the first place." --John Shephard, fumbling-towards-ecstasy "What's worse than a broken version of sendmail? An *antique* broken version of sendmail that's giving an error that isn't in the Fruitbat Book. And doesn't understand the -d switch. Whoever ported IBM's version of sendmail to OS/2 should be shot. Anyone out there using AIX, is your sendmail this bad?" --someone in the sdm "If you do not have a defragmenting tool for Windows NT, you can defragment the disk or volume by backing up to tape, reformatting the volume, and restoring from tape." --Windows NT 4.0 on-line help, demonstrating what Microsoft thinks is a good idea "Emergency medicine demands the most intense involvement personally and intellectually. Every area of clinical medicine is practiced, every emotion is taxed. The challenge is in managing an unlimited variety of disease or trauma at a level of immediacy that is rarely approached in any other specialty." --? (Peter Rosen?) "Love is not a potato. You can't throw it out the window." --old Russian proverb "Incidentally, the Muppet Show is being revived and one of the recurring bits on the new show will be a 'barnyard medical drama' called (I swear I'm not making this up) `E-I-E-I-O/R.'" --someone on alt.tv.er "Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like." --Mark Stern "An' then Chicken@little.com, he come scramblin outta the terminal room screaming `The system's crashing! The system's crashing!'" --Uncle RAMus, 'Tales for Cyberpsychotic Children' "Don't assume that Windoze'95 suffers from extreme bloat because it _tried_ to implement these features... it suffers extreme bloat because of 15+ years of band-aid solutions on top of QDOS." --someone on comp.os.os2.advocacy "By the time you learn vi, you have to be a psychologist, neurosurgeon, and voodoo priest as well as a crack programmer." --Mark Morely "To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet." --Scott Adams "If not for the compulsions of engineers, mankind would never have seen the wheel, settling instead for the trapezoid because some Neanderthal in Marketing convinced everybody it had great braking ability." --Scott Adams "Here's a hint - if it starts to explode, you've gone too far." --Derran, to me, during a Robotech campaign "If it can't overheat, it doesn't have enough fire power." --an alternate Jason "Peace through superior aerial fire power!" --an alternate me "D'you think a referral to Dr. Kevorkian is inappropriate right now?" --Dr. Beth Greenspan, imitating me "If only to maintain our faith in ourselves and our families, we are honor bound to believe each tearful young mother, to pray for the dog-and-helicopter searches and to wear psychological, if not literal, yellow ribbons. But even as we do so, again and again, we are coming to realize that the climax of such searches is seldom a tearful reunion or even an apprehended bad guy. Far more often, it is a recanting, a tormented regression from 'she was stolen' to 'she fell' to 'I may have dropped her' to 'I hit her with a big rock.'" --David Van Biema "Look on the bright side - if all he can complain about in your essay is the font size used on the paper, then you're in pretty good shape." --Emily Shoichet "Tom the cat is chasing Jerry the mouse across a table surface 1.5m high. Jerry steps out of the way at the last second, and Tom slides off the edge of the table at a speed of 5 m/s. Where will Tom strike the floor and what velocity components will he have just before he hits?" --C.D. Scarfe, phys102 "Social psychology is in danger of becoming The Study Of The Things People Do When They Think They're Doing Something Else." --Dr. Janet Bavelas, psyc201 "I hate it when the people who correct me have no clue what they're talking about." --Andrew Toppan, sci.military.naval "Well, we know about this trend, and it's something we all feel.. but because of the limited data collection capabilities we have, we can't *prove* it." --Norma Jones, RN, illustrating why statistics are important "You didn't let her down. 99% of what they teach you in med school is bullshit, yet they don't find time to teach the three fundamental tenets of medicine, the ultimate reason we are who we are, our responsibilities above all else: to cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always. If you forget everything you've been taught in the last three years, remember this, live by it, and you will never, ever go wrong." --Dr. Eric Leggat, ucalgary oncology, circa 1992 "If I got shot, and someone was going to dig a bullet out of my leg, I would hope to God that they'd give me something for the pain. 'Cause.. it hurts." --Dr. Steve Larson, upenn emergency medicine, circa 1995 "That's not right. You give a guy analgesia if you're going to do that. I mean, this isn't the Civil War or anything - we don't tell people to gnaw on a piece of wood." --Dr. Steve Larson, upenn emergency medicine, circa 1995 "Do you have any recommendation to make regarding the management of any patient that does *not* include the words 'Prozac,' 'haloperidol,' or 'refer to Dr. Kevorkian'?" --Dr. Neil Anderson, to me on a bad day "Fuck OJ." --Xochitl Ruiz, summing that affair up quite nicely "Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who its friends are." --Kyle Hearn "VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix." --davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM "Unix is not an 'A-ha' experience, it is more of a 'holy-shit' experience." --Colin McFadyen, sdm "A Unix system will not understand you if you shout at it." --Don Stokes "If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine." --MAP@lcs.mit.edu "DO NOT DISRUPT MY CAREFULLY CONTROLLED PATTERN OF HYPE, OR YOU WILL BE PUT INTO A BOX WITH BILL GATES AND SHAKEN!!!" --Leader Kibo "The new Canon EOS-1V is taller than the EOS-1N.. the extra height also signifies the strength of the latest professional EOS camera. If you look at it more closely, you will agree that its contours, from the pentaprism and both sides of the top plates, are shaped like the neck and shoulder areas of a muscular man." --Canon promotional material (I'm unsure who their target demographic is for this camera) "When a Windows machine got into trouble, the old command-line interface would fall down over the GUI like an asbestos fire curtain sealing off the proscenium of a burning opera. When a Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw it." --Neal Stephenson "Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose big problem is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations." --Neal Stephenson "Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture." --Neal Stephenson "In hard contact wounds, the immediate edges of the entrance are seared by the hot gases of combustion and blackened by the soot. This soot is embedded in the seared skin and cannot be completely removed either by washing or by vigorous scrubbing of the wound." --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques" "In firearm deaths, the individual may attempt to make the suicide appear to be an accident. This generally takes two forms. The first of these is the `gun cleaning accident.' The individual is found dead of a gunshot wound with gun cleaning equipment neatly laid out beside them. The proof that one is dealing with a suicide and not an accident is usually the nature of the wound -- contact. An individual does not place a gun against the head or chest and then pull the trigger in an attempt to clean the weapon." --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques" "Occasionally an individual will use two totally different methods in an attempt to commit suicide. Thus, one finds individuals dead of a gunshot wound with potentially lethal levels of drugs. Apparently the drugs do not work fast enough, and the individual decides to shoot himself." --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques" "The fact that an individual can be mortally wounded, yet still be capable of aggressive actions and a threat, sometimes for a prolonged amount of time, is not appreciated by the public whose concepts of shootings is derived from television and the movies. This is periodically manifest by outcries from the public and the news media against the police when an officer shoots a perpetrator multiple times." --Vincent J.M. DiMaio, "Gunshot Wounds: Practical Applications of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques" "We discriminate upon intelligence because it is the one metric which truly matters. In a blind discussion of this nature, all you bring is your mind, and all we have to evaluate you on is what and how you display it." --Liam Stitt "I don't myself believe in astrology. However, I think that's because I'm a Libra and Libras are always skeptical." --Philip Greenspun "HTML and GUI browsers are doing the very same thing for Internet communications that Citizen's Band has done for two-way radio communications. Specifically, to aid morons to pack rainbows up each other's ass." --Charles Miller "There is one sector of e-commerce that is pretty much guaranteed profitability: pornography." --Sean Yamamoto "CAUTION: This device contains an explosive charge and disperses approximately 180 3/8" pellets in a 360-degree area. Proper eye and ear protection is recommended. For outdoor use only." --literature for Def-Tec Stinger crowd control device "The vulnerability exists because it is possible, under very specific conditions, to violate IE's cross-domain security model in order to allow a web site to read data that it should be prevented from reading." --Microsoft, on an Internet Explorer bug "Huh?" --Megan P. Jamieson, reacting to Microsoft's reaction "It's still broken, and they're not going to fix it." --me, trying to clear up Megan's confusion "You may have seen reports in the media claiming that Windows 2000 contains over 63,000 defects. I'd like to assure our customers that these reports are inaccurate. Microsoft is committed to delivering high quality products, and we believe Windows 2000 is the most reliable operating system Microsoft has ever shipped." --Microsoft Vice President Jim Allchin, in recognition of Overwhelming Irony Month "People say they are religious, of course, in the same way they say they don't masturbate." --Bill Maher "At the Republican debate last night, all the presidential candidates said Elian Gonzalez should not be returned to Cuba. Gary Bauer said Republicans believe very strongly in the family unit, but when Daddy's a commie, that changes the whole equation." --Bill Maher "The fact is that we don't need a bunch of Spicolies who can't go to register to vote on their own when they can't even find the next place to pierce or tattoo." --Debbie Schlussel "Who cares who votes? Everybody's always whining about `Oh, we've got 38% --' yeah, you know, you can't get three out of ten people to agree on pizza toppings, much less the leader of the country." --Dennis Miller "Who needs dynamite when we've got IPOs?" --NetSlaves Combat Manual "No, no, no -- that's right. That's right. I'm 99% sure you're a wacko, but I'm not positive. I could have that 1%, can't I?" --Penn Jillette on certainty "Hi, I'm Bill Maher. I'm a TV celebrity, so I wanna tell you how to vote. Now, this past Tuesday, Californians rejected a proposal that would have overturned Prop 10, and thank God! Prop 10 was the anti-smoking proposition, which sent a powerful message, a message that we support identifying smokers, taxing all they money away, and giving it to other people's kids. Why? Because we're good, and they're bad. And we want to make sure that when they get cancer, they can't afford health care. And sure, it's been fun, but have we really done enough? Well, the answer is no. And that's why I'm endorsing Proposition 10A. Now, Prop 10 was good; it hit smokers in the pocketbook and, combined with laws banning smoking, even in bars and outdoors, have made smokers feel like pariahs in a land swimming with obnoxious habits and vices. But that's not enough. With Prop 10A, when smokers buy cigarettes, the woman behind the counter will slap them hard right in the face. Also, the cigarettes will be kept in a case under the counter that takes a very long time to unlock, causing the purchaser to miss their bus. And, when the cigarettes are finally ready, the sales person will throw them on the floor in front of the smoker, and, when the smoker bends over to pick them up, he or she will be kicked right in the ass. Also, smokers who attempt to avoid being slapped and kicked, by buying cigarettes from vending machines, will have their genitals photographed by hidden X-ray cameras, and the photos will be posted on the Internet and laughed at by minors. And pack-a-day smokers will have to register with the police so decent families will know where they live. And Camel smokers will literally have to walk a mile. I urge you to join me in supporting Proposition 10A, a law that helps smokers by making their lives a living hell. Prop 10A also legalizes Indian prostitution on tribal lands. Thank you." --Bill Maher "Who needs script kiddies when you've got backhoes?" --Dan Hollis, on nanog "I think I'm going to start an e-commerce company and make pillows." --Sarah McLachlan, on what she's doing on her vacation from music "You are in a maze of twisted packages, all dependent." --advent RedHat-style, Peter Dalgaard, sdm "> Sadly, the web has turned into an area where lusers roam freely. Um, `turned'? Has it ever been anything *but*?" --Abigail and Stewart Stremler, sdm "Linux is probably one of the most Posix-compliant OS's out there (except in those instances where Linus considers Posix to be broken).." --Anthony W. Youngman, comp.unix.admin "I remarked to Dennis [Ritchie] that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, `We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, `Hey! Reboot it!''" --Tom Van Vleck "Favorite Irish stereotype: a) Drunken brawlers. b) Devout morons. c) Knack for explosives." --abc.go.com/pi/poll/index.html "Darva [Conger] is now going to strip -- no, she's going to be naked in `Playboy.' And I'm sure after the shoot, she'll be sobbing, saying, `I didn't know there was film in the camera!'" --Super Dave Osborne, PI 03/15/00 "[George W.] Bush is not stupid. But if he needed a kidney transplant, he could call Quayle and not even do a blood test." --Super Dave Osborne, PI 03/15/00 "I hope that someday someone annihilates something you truly care for out of ennui. Just so you can share in this feeling too. What can I say, I'm a sharing kinda guy." --John Dillick "Rotate all alphabet characters by 13. Crude form of encryption to prevent excess hostility from easily offended control freaks who believe in Truth, God, and Censorship." --Tom Dell, waffle BBS source for the rot13 function "Excessive use of this function will result in diminished memory, Alzheimers, or worse. Is there another name for this?" --Tom Dell, waffle BBS source "Your modem must disconnect the line when DTR is dropped. Some modems require a &Dx or &Cx sequence; others will require flipping a small DIP switch inside or at the back of the modem. If neither of these is the case, throw your modem from a tall building (we recommend the Oakland Hyatt Regency)." --Tom Dell, waffle BBS documentation "Error message format, displayed in response to an unrecognized command. By default, this is something to the effect of `Monkey + Keyboard = %i.%|' Sick people who want to play reverse psychology can throw a %Z in there: make error, get cookie. Yum." --Tom Dell, waffle BBS documentation "Now, why would you want to do this? You're wondering where all your disk storage went, and want to find those UUENCODED GIFs someone posted so you can delete them. Some people like to look for larger articles that may be of substance, such as FAQs and other interesting texts. Surprisingly, this is a quick way to find lots of cool things." --Tom Dell, waffle BBS documentation, on statistics "The infinite wisdom of Microsoft, Inc. has given us the horrible ^Z-as-EOF character in MS DOS. There is no rhyme or reason to this. Note, I did not want to have this misfeature, however numerous complaints and confusion have made it necessary. The ^Z in MSDOS is a bug in MSDOS. Appending a ^Z by any editor is a bug in that editor." --Tom Dell, waffle BBS source "Management is not responsible for lost luggage, minds, virginity..." --Tom Dell "Be safe or die." --MIT PSFC, Office of Environment, Safety and Health "Okay, the celibacy is over. Now I want you to squat on my lalijamba. That is right. And while you're at it, put your fist in my gingee-gingee." --Dana Carvey, on swamis and gurus, PI 03/23/00 (read in bad East Indian accent for big laughs) "But we should congratulate the really big winner, which was `American Beauty.' That won all the awards. Best picture. I don't know if you saw it, but it's a terrific movie. It harkens back to a simpler time, when high school kids' parents were shooting each other." --Bill Maher "The man has been in the closet so long he has a pet bat." --Joan Rivers, PI 03/27/00 "I'm upset by all the angel pictures, because none of them know that angels don't have bodies. Denzel Washington comes back and says, `Boy, I haven't had a pizza in 30 years.' I'm thinking, if you are an angel, you've *never* had a pizza." --Roger Ebert, PI 03/27/00 "Why *wouldn't* God drink beer?" --Roger Ebert, PI 03/27/00 "For years, I thought God was Tab Hunter. But that was just me... that was my own vision. God was a great big blond gorgeous guy with a surfboard." --Bruce Vilanch, PI 03/27/00 "What it means is that two people -- usually young people, high school, college -- who are not seeing anyone romantically, but who want to have sex, they just make a sort of quasi-business arrangement that `Look, we're not romantically involved with anybody else, but we need to have sex, let's just be buddies of a certain order.' Where was this when *I* was in high school is what I want to know." --Bill Maher, on being friends with "priviledges" "As you can see, you are NOT dead!" --Half Life: Opposing Force "Mexican restaurants are the only place you can drink abusively with your meal and not look like a lush." --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn "You can tell a place is really cool if they don't give the address. After all, their address is common knowledge among the truly hip. Why are these places paying to advertise to people who are already customers? Do they think poserus don't own phone books?" --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn "You know you're in trouble when you start trying to predict what the next drink will do to you. I need a wider variety of drugs. God, I miss college." --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn "Why the hell did you drink a whole bottle of scotch anyway? Oh, right, you already told me. A writer." --Why I Hate Saturn "Why do vegetarians spend so much time trying to make vegetables taste like meat? Do monks buy a lot of inflatable sex dolls?" --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn "There's a bar that Ricky and I refer to as the `Crap Bar', which must be one of the seediest dives in town. Located in a basement, it's got poor ventilation, exposed plumbing, which bursts regularly, and everything is sticky. Naturally, it's one of the more exclusive bars downtown." --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn "I wonder if they sell pitchers of scotch." --Anne Merkel, Why I Hate Saturn "Why is it that when we see something beautiful, we want to possess it? We end up killing it, destroying the beauty that made us want it in the first place." "You fool! That's the whole *point* of relationships!" --Why I Hate Saturn "You ain't seen ugly until you've seen a goth cross-dresser." --Joey Lindstrom "I arrived in Venice in January with a slight cold. Water fell on me from the sky and rose up from the sea to cover my shoes. Then it started to snow. After a few days of this, I was giving demonstrations of my maladies in Venetian pharmacies. I ended up taking four different Italian drugs that I couldn't pronounce, much less read the lengthy instructions. I sent email to my friends telling them that `I either have AIDS or am Jewish.'" --Philip Greenspun "Eventually the key broke in half and I learned a whole new set of Italian words (none of which one could learn at Berlitz) while watching the local mechanics spend an hour drilling the lock out." --Philip Greenspun "This underlines one of the more depressing things that have happened to Usenet since we started letting morons on." --Liam Stitt "I have a better idea: Winter Daylight Losing Time. Late March, we set the clocks *back* one hour. Advantages are that you get to sleep an hour later than sun time (or be woken an hour early an hour later), you have less daylight to contend with in the evening (vitamin D is a Communist plot, right up there with fluoride), nightclubbers have a much better chance of going home at dawn, and if you need to blame your bad mood or random acts of senseless violence on something there's always seasonal affective disorder." --Red Drag Diva, sdm "DEAR MR. WEB DEZINUR: PLZ WUD YOU UPLOD RAZL SO I KIN LOOK AT BEAVR. THANKU." --Wednesday, afw "Gore versus Bush: Isn't this how they decide whether a movie gets an R or an NC-17?" --Denis Miller "I pick a president the way I pick a driver to get me to the airport: Which one will cost me the least and not get me killed." --Denis Miller "Deployment of critical software under NT experiences continuing troubles; film at 11 unless the player BSODs." --Liam Stitt "Share the screwdriver. Lift with your legs. 256 MB DIMMs are pricey.." --james@arsdigita.com, on hardware maintenance "In his acceptance speech, Bush made a clumsy attempt at pandering without seeming to pander. `The polls say tax relief is not popular,' he said. `I'm not proposing tax relief because it's the popular thing to do. I'm proposing tax relief because it's the right thing to do.' Of course. It's *courageous* to tell voters you're going to give them money." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 10 March 2000 "It seems you just can't call people Christ-bashing sexual deviants anymore without them getting all upset about it." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 20 August 1999 "I upbraided myself for not having a gun. (Sorry, NRA. I'm still here, obviously, and I'm still not getting one.)" --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 13 August 1999 "On several occasions when I've been driving and had a brainstorm or heard some useful bit of information on the radio, I've whipped [my Palm Pilot] out in the middle of traffic to jot down a few words, rather than try to make a mental note that will be forgotten as soon as I've made it through the next red light. Yes, this is dangerous, but there's a simple solution: if you see a blue 1989 Toyota Tercel weaving back and forth, assume it's me, and stay the hell out of the way." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 23 July 1999 "No doubt Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would never have embarked on their murderous rampage if the principal had been allowed to post THOU SHALT NOT KILL next to the football schedule." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 2 July 1999 "Of course, in the world of local school-board politics, the right of 86 people to keep their children enveloped in a haze of unreality (a haze that in all likelihood exists only in the parents' minds) supersedes the right of the majority to have their children introduced, in school, to important, difficult literature." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 2 July 1999 "Cable sucks. Certainly cable TV has done a good job of accomplishing its basic mission, which is to drain $30 to $100 from you every month for something that used to be free." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 14 May 1999 "Math IS hard, as Barbie noted." --Philip Greenspun "It is apparently not OK to remove A-bombs from Los Alamos property. Nor are we allowed to gamble or use drugs here. Nor can one use a fire extinguished unless one has been trained with a `real dummy fire extinguisher' and `real dummy fires.' Then we were shown a 10-minute video on how to use the fire extinguishers we weren't allowed to use. At the end I raised my hand and asked `since we aren't allowed to gamble, are we going to get a video on how to card count in six-deck blackjack also?'" --Philip Greenspun, "Footsteps" "Those of you who've seen me cry like a baby and run to Mommy Maple for even the simplest calculus problems will be shocked to learn that I was the nerdiest person hired [at Los Alamos National Laboratories] that week." --Philip Greenspun, "Footsteps" "The overhead at [LANL] isn't very different from what it is at MIT, which is remarkable when you consider that MIT doesn't have to maintain hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence and enough guards and heavy guns to repel the entire PLO." --Philip Greenspun, "Footsteps" "Major road hazards specific to the Netherland Antilles and Aruba are hidden and poorly maintained street signs, disoriented direvers not familiar with where they are going, and goats wandering onto roadways." --United States Department of State Consular information sheet "The State Department has evidently never been to Massachussets." --Megan P. Jamieson "One fact, two sharp edges. You're going to need an extra-large box of Band-Aids." --Adam Schiff, "Law & Order" "Peering is a poker game. The more of it you can get, the more people will want to use your services, and the more networks will want to peer with you to reach those customers. As you go along you add bigger peers and drop the smaller ones. Lather, rinse, repeat, until your network IS the Internet because you've got everyone else's customers and they all want to peer with you to get them back." --Martin Cooper, NANOG "If I were a cop and I had seen both `Scream' and [`I Know What You Did Last Summer'], I'd be at writer Kevin Williamson's house searching it for drugs. If I didn't find something, I'd plant a kilo of heroin in his ass for writing this piece of crap." --Mr. Cranky reviews "I Know What You Did Last Summer" "Any film that inspired Dan Aykroyd to lose weight is okay with me. I mean, we're talking about a guy who was getting so fat that people were starting to wonder not whether he was still married to Donna Dixon, but whether he had eaten her." --Mr. Cranky reviews "Blues Brothers 2000" "Since both [Michael] Bay and [Jerry] Bruckheimer appear to have degrees in auditory desnsitization, you can be damn sure that when the movie calls for science and logic, science and logic go right out the window in favor of `bitchin' tunes.'" --Mr. Cranky reviews "Armageddon" "Is Jennifer Love Hewitt's career goal to be an actress or to test the elastic limits of the Wonderbra? Hey, don't get me wrong; I'm all for skin on screen, but Hewitt's breasts are pushed so far up into her face that her chin looks like the head pin in some sort of peculiar game of dual flesh bowling -- a definite strike against this movie." --Mr. Cranky reviews "Can't Hardly Wait" "[Director David] Koepp has obviously been in Los Angeles too long because when his power goes out, he apparently runs down the street picking off neighbors with an Uzi." --Mr. Cranky reviews "The Trigger Effect" "Basically, the film is banking on me being spookified by its X-Files-like weirdness. Unfortunately, I don't find it weird at all. I find it stupid. Mr. Cranky doesn't believe in ghosts. What Mr. Cranky does believe is that those who buy such supernatural nonsense tend to run around spouting witticisms they picked up from astrology columns and passing that off as `knowledge.' If being trapped in a room with 200 such yammering nimrods is your idea of an ideal evening, then by all means go see `The Sixth Sense.'" --Mr. Cranky "`Jackie! Those Mounties took my beaver pelts and cursed at me in French. Get them!' Since Jackie was already in Vancouver in the first place, why not have him beat up Canadians? He would have garnered a much bigger box-office take since Americans take great joy in watching people of other nationalities beat the crap out of each other. Jackie could have destroyed socialized health care while he was at it and elicited enthusiastic cheers from millions of Americans, who, as a general rule, resent any country where poor people actually have access to health care." --Mr. Cranky reviews "Rumble in Vancouver^Wthe Bronx" "Hey! A lot of theories don't work out! The lone gunman.. communism.. geometry.." --Joey Tribiani, "Friends" ".. fuck you, Mike, and the horse you rode in on." --Phyl Behrer (I just like to quote out of context) "I don't like the looks of this doctor. I bet I've lost more patients than he's treated." --Zoidberg, "Futurama" "Please don't hit me! I'm brittle!" --Zoidberg, "Futurama" "Hint to Ferrari engineers: I heard that this `knob' idea is going to catch on." --Philip Greenspun "I felt a hurricane blast of cold wind in my face. The joy of open-window motoring? No. The result of leeting a Samoyed adjust the ventilation controls with his paws." --Philip Greenspun "Not using M$ products is a moral choice. Don't blame me if you don't have the guts." --petro, sdm "The day that any real sysadmin, especially one who works with or around Exchange servers, needs a *newsgroup* to tell them about a massive virus outbreak is the day that sysadmin needs to go back to Burger King." --Mike Sphar, sdm "I'm glad you are committed to your philosophy of doing what Jesus would do. I assume that includes writing insulting letters to cartoonists on company time." --Dogbert "Apparently Microsoft couldn't quite figure out how to make an application written for Solaris 2.5 or 2.6 work on 2.7. And you'd think they'd be able to, as masters of the ever-changing API. But I guess they can't do that trick if it's not _their_ API." --Steve VanDevender, sdm, on IE 5 for Solaris "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!" "You can't *own* property, man!" "I can! That's because I'm not a penniless hippie!" --Farnsworth & hippie, "Futurama" "The point is, you shouldn't eat things that feel pain." *BONK!* "Ow!" "Okay, we won't eat you!" --hippie & Bender, "Futurama" "You're vegetarians! Who cares what you do?" --Leela, "Futurama" "If I speak at one constant volume, at one constant pitch, at one constant rhythm, right into your ear, you still won't hear; you still won't hear." --Faith No More, "A Small Victory," perhaps describing Usenet "A lot of people in this forum are saying they are willing to take `a little' risk of data loss in exchange for speed. I promise you, you will stop saying that after a data loss happens." --Tim Keating "If you're simply backing up the files, and the database engine is in the midst of updating a series of tables that reference each other, you'll end up with inconsistent data. The filesystem backup program has no knowledge of either implicit or explicit write locks on the tables being changed. If you can't see how that will frequently lead to inconsistent backups, I don't really care." --Don Baccus "When I read the words `you will quickly find that transactions can be easily reproduced via code,' I get a full-body shiver." --Jay R. Ashworth "This comment is idiotic: `MySQL has carved out a very interesting niche: raw speed and simple to setup/use/maintain database backend for online applications.' I'll tell you what, if I was able to strip out 30% of the functionality of enterprise-level [relational database management systems], they would be pretty damned fast too." --Matt Warden "Which again proves that NT swervers are the most secure, since they're down so much. Can't hack a down server." --Philip Newton, sdm ">he knows how to turn the PC on - still doesn't understand the >difference between netscape and IE. That's ok; it often seems that the people at netscape have forgotten too." --Alan J. Rosenthal, sdm "I'm not an alcoholic. I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings." --Sarah Keating, MD (not out of context, sadly) "Oh, great. Now we have to pee in the boat." --Ron Walls, MD, FACEP "You can tell by the way I use my walk / I'm a Linux geek, no time to talk / Ah ah ah ah coding in perl, coding in perl..." --Paul Tomblin, sdm, making fun of the Bee Gees "Modifying the GNU C Library to work with other `make' programs would be so hard that we recommend you port GNU `make' instead. *Really.*" --glibc-2.1.2 INSTALL "One alternative is to regard unwrapped lines, HTML, 20 line sigs, and ms-tref as scoring; they help you evaluate the poster, as well as her/his post." --David Lesher, NANOG "Hey. We don't take no shit from a machine." --Information Society, "Mirrorshades" "You can thank me later for that unhelpful bit of advice when it ultimately proves useless." --Luke Carson "I wish I had the kind of power that ER's music person or persons have. Just plug a song into a scene on ER, and the Internet will be swarming with people who *must* know it. `Baaa! Baaa! Must find song title and buy CD! Baaa!'" --Philip D. Fitzgerald "Position for an `Internet Test Engineer.' `Try it now!' *revrevrev* `Nope, still busted.'" --Wednesday, afw "Nude scenes should be inspired by the libido, not the box office. That's why I object to the phrase `gratuitous nudity.' In a movie like this, the only nudity worth having is gratuitous. If it's there for reasons thare clankingly commercial, you feel sorry for the actresses, which is not the point." --Roger Ebert reviews "Road Trip" "Together we figured out what had happened, which was useful, but not the sort of conversation you should be having. When a movie doesn't have a brain in its head, it's kind of unfair to require thought on the part of the audience." --Roger Ebert reviews "Road Trip," take 2 "Films are supposed to be made because somebody wants to tell a story, not because somebody wants to try out a new computer technique." --Mr. Cranky reviews "Dinosaur" "One successful robbery, at knife point again but in Bali this time, in which we both left happy, me with a rapidly beating heart but otherwise OK and my new friend with exactly ten of my dollars. Hell, I would have paid double that for my life." --Richard Johnstone, photo.net "Please buy a gun for me so I can start shooting people." "HEY. WAIT. You live in the gun-happy country, not me." --Phyl Behrer and me "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it." --Roger Ebert reviews "North" "We are giving you the root password, a pat on the back, and a goodbye kiss." --ArsDigita "And God looked down upon the masses and said, `Let there be Large Format.'" --Daniel Taylor, photo.net "I'm too damn sober." --Det. John Munch "This AI Olympics thing, it's all about getting to know each other, no? Can you think of a better way to do that than rubbing up against each other? That krazy `UniHoc' was fun. And now you can do it again, to the beat of the world's most generic music! (Plus, you get to participate in flooding a Boston club with 80 CS people.)" --MIT AI Olympics '99 "I'm not going to be a place that allows viruses to go unpunished. Anything virus-ridden gets cleaned, anything that can't gets deleted. Period. Fuck anyone who doesn't take heed. This is my network." --ben@lspace.org, sdm "You may now return to bashing UNIX and its smug complacent users. We in return will return to our smug complacency -- after all, we don't have any machines to disinfect this weekend." --Jim Hill "Love means never having to say, `Does that twenty include the spanking?'" --? "We pointed the error out to the cashier, who was probably barely old enough to be legally employed, and her response, if she speaks for her generation, was ominous, even terrifying: `It does that because ... because it's a computer.' An entire generation is growing up believing that the current sorry state of affairs in information technology could ever be accepted as _normal_!" --Zygo Blaxell, RISKS-20.89 "Physics is hard. MIT freshman physics is where I learned that I was stupid." --Philip Greenspun "The Internet is not an attention charity. Go away." --Liam Stitt, offering to answer my e-mail "You can't beat mass destruction as a way of entertaining everyone." --Rick Farmer "And in today's lesson, we learn: -that if you use override options to force CVS to accept your commit even though you haven't merged with the lastest changes, bad things will happen to you. -`bad things' include a large bellowing red-headed developer who is wondering where his entire last week's worth of work has gone." --Paul Tomblin, sdm "If this is what one of your dreams is like, leave me out of them from now on, ok?" --Briareos, "Altered Appleseed" ">May [DeScribe] rest in peace. Along with its bonehead licensing scheme." --Adam Thornton & Matt McLeod, sdm "Calgary is definitely Alberta's class act. Edmonton is so ugly that people are apparently discouraged from taking photographs: despite having roughly the same population, Edmonton does not have the high quality photolabs that Calgary has." --Philip Greenspun, "Travels With Samantha" "It was nice of you to let me reattach your arm." --Zoidberg, "Futurama" "You are arguably the brightest, most talented freshman class in the nation. But you did not come here without struggle. Many of you have known bitter loneliness all your life; we affectionately label people like you `losers.'" --Voo Doo welcomes the MIT class of 2001 "That language is C++. <-- use this space for cheap shots" --Liam Stitt "Hey, you pays your $50 through an auction site for a Paul McCartney T-shirt and you takes your chances. But if you sign up for live, streaming video of masturbating nymphets, then that's exactly what you're going to get. It's called truth in advertising, pal." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 8 June 2000 "Alcohol is just another in a long line of things that have fallen victim to `condomization,' the mistaken belief that by outlawing the instruments, you can stop the music. Make it hard to get condoms, kids won't screw. Ban drugs, kids won't get high. Criminalize teen alcohol use, and make parents criminals for serving a beer to a minor, and kids won't wrap themselves around telephone poles on graduation day. Clearly, this line of thinking has yielded remarkable results so far." --Kris Frieswick, Boston Phoenix, 8 June 2000 "Explosive alarm clock -- guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it." --Q, "License to Kill" "My Macintosh was a friendly little toy computer that I used for years for everything from writing a book about North America to Common Lisp programming to PhotoShop. Despite the 1950s style operating system, I was a reasonably happy camper until I connected my Mac to the Internet and watched various network applications shoot each other in the knees." --Philip Greenspun, "My Life as a Microsoft Achiever" "I unboxed a genuine Intel-brand dual Pentium 166 server. NT 3.51 was pre-installed so I couldn't mess anything up. It was the biggest computer I'd seen in years. I felt like calling up some women to impress them, but figured I'd better have Netscape installed first. So I downloaded a couple of .EXE files from ftp20.netscape.com. They wouldn't self-extract. I turned the machine off and went hunting for a copy of PC Solaris." --Philip Greenspun, "My Life as a Microsoft Achiever" "I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now: the Constitution, jazz music.. and baseball." --Gerald Early "Who's left to buy tickets? Maybe those dwindling numbers who admire movies for their daring and wit, and do not expect to be congratulated and reinforced by the characters on the screen." --Roger Ebert reviews "Citizen Ruth" "It is played everywhere -- in parks and playgrounds, and prison yards, in back alleys and farmer's fields, by small children and old men, by raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed, the only game in which the defence has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectency of spring time, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home." --Ken Burns, "Baseball" "Speed hump my ass." --L.S.H. Carlson, hopelessly out of context "Caution: It is almost impossible to swallow cyanoacrylates. The adhesive solidifies and adheres in the mouth. The lips may be stuck together." --GluStitch's MSDS (well, *that's* encouraging to know) "Portable code is code that compiles on compilers that actually exist." --Peter da Silva, sdm "Lay people assume that medics must hate and fear working with AIDS patients. Not really. All medics treat AIDS patients all the time, I don't think too many are scared of contracting the disease from a patient. You wear gloves. You watch what you do with the needles. And, most important, you don't have sex with the patient." --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic" (what?! no sex!? --phloem) "The EMS radio was squawking. The P.D. radio was blaring updates. I cranked up the volume on the FM stereo as K-Rock began its psychedelic six-pack, six songs from the sixties. I'm pretty good at listening to everything at once." --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic" "After we drove back to the hospital, I had to write out an incident report. Roosevelt loves incident reports. I've written hundreds of them. This one read: `While responding to a report of an unconscious female, a red Plymouth wouldn't get out of my way. So I hit him.' Signed Paul Shapiro." --"Paramedic" "I don't want to sound like a bigot or deny the right of anyone to celebrate his heritage or homeland, but where does it say you have to be bombed out of your mind to do it?" --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic" "All the stories I tell sound horrific, but quite frankly, they're not much worse than assisting a childbirth, which is a very oogy process. Babies are bloody and mushy. Nobody's happy: the mother's screaming, the baby's screaming, the father looks like he's going to keel over and seize." --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic" "We heard EMS dispatching a shooting call on West 75th Street to New York Hospital medics Fifteen Victor. Normally that area would be covered by Fourteen Young. I didn't know where the Rosy medics were, but I was sure Lucy and I were closer to the call from Fifteen Victor. I grabbed the EMS radio and advised Dispatch that we were coming out of Roosevelt and would pick up the job. As Lucy was driving there with lights flashing and siren blaring, EMS advised us that it was possible that there were two people shot and that the gunman was still on the scene, possibly on the roof, shooting at pedestrians. Dispatch advised us to `use caution.' `No shit,' I said to Lucy. `You think we can give this one back to Victor?' she asked." --Paul Shapiro, "Paramedic" "If I'm horny, I go to work. If I want affection, I've got my cats." --Stacy Valentine, quoted by James Berardinelli "CS is about lofty design goals and algorithmic optimization. Sysadmining is about cleaning up the fscking mess that results." --Graham Dunn, sdm "I'll hear a call delivered to Fire first because of the way 911 takes the call, and for them, it's a delta call. Let's say, chest pain. Then EMS gets delivered a call and the address is off by a couple of digits, in an important way. (38 Something Street is actually 30 A Something Street.) Their calltaker gets the information, follows the EMD cards, as he's supposed to, and determines it's only a Charlie call. By this time, the pump's been on the air for 5 minutes, and the medic too. The pump gets cancelled, because they only go on Delta calls and MVAs, and the medic is told to continue Charlie to 30 A Something. The pump *turns around in the driveway of 38* and heads home, and the medics have to call back 2 minutes later for an address change. Finally, they get the right address, and get there, and find that there's not much chest pain left, inasmuch as it's progressed into a full-blown MI and code. So they both get to work on the pt. and one of them stops long enough to get dispatch to re-send the pump (which has just booked off at the hall by now) delta for a driver. They get there and for some reason the medics need not only a driver but 2 more firefighters as helpers. In any case, they end up leaving the captain there with the pump as the ambulance drives off. The captain calmly gets on the radio and tells Fire Dispatch he needs someone to come over and drive his pump home because he started on the department before they gave everyone an airbrake couse, and he can't drive it." --Jason Low "The Internet is fulfilled mit Hai-Teg elektronische equippment. Fallen leichte pakete aus shtreckers and laden der Ruckgrat mit Frihsticksfleisch und mich-auch uber. Auch schweres kreuzanhangen und flammen sein forbidden. The mauseclicking kuhle Brandunger must leaving hir hande in dem taschen; elsewise you will be clipped off. Also: Please sitzen still and only watchen astaunished the fluchtigblinken." --attributed to Wolfgang Schelongowski "Okay, I only wanted to open an account so I could cancel the bastards right on their own server, but that's besides the point." --Rick Buchanan, nan-au "Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam." --Bill Bradford (I leave translation up to the reader) "> Does anyone have any good, factual information on tradeoffs between a > NT and UNIX environment when setting up an E-Mail service? An NT server can be run by an idiot, and usually is." --Tom Holub "Hello. This is a response to your newsgroup message posted in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings, on 1/30/98, advertising your goods and services. You are not on a list, nor will you be contacted again." --bozotic spammer, as reported by Podkayne Fries, nan-au "We are not liars, we are telling the 100% truth (with some exceptions)." --attributed to Sean Jorden, alt.politics.white-power (seen in a .sig) "Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?" "Because we use vi, son. They use emacs." --Iain Scott "Bill Gates isn't the Devil - Satan made sure Hell worked before he opened it to the damned..." --attributed to Michael Fleming "tr is faster -- not least because you don't have to wait for Perl to put on its makeup and walk the dog before running your script." --Brandon Allbery, sdm "Civilization won't *die* from Y2K. It'll be more like Civilization goes out drinking and the next morning discovers the importance of drinking gin out of smaller containers." --Chris Adams's .sig (sdm) "Unemployed Californian Larry Ellison: After being divorced by his first wife because she said that he would never amount to anything or make any money, started Oracle Corporation, world's leading supplier of relational database management software (Note to academic computer scientists: don't worry if you aren't sure what an RDBMS is; it isn't necessary for running Microsoft Word)." --Philip Greenspun, "Aid to Evaluating Your Accomplishments" "If a site has pages that cause your browser to restart, don't go there again." --Microsoft, trying to be helpful on the subject of browser stability "I defy anyone to find a mountain whereupon the dew is this particular colour, and then return to tell me about it. And no fair wearing rad-suits for the journey." --Carl Jacobs, sdm, on Mountain Dew and false advertising "I don't think it's possible to be more ham-handed in fiction than Kenneth Starr has been in reality. The place I'd like to see some nuance is in the real-life Office of the Independent Counsel. Starr's been a cartoon-quality nemesis for the past two years, playing Wile E. Coyote to the president's Road Runner. I think Clinton should respond to all future allegations with a two-word statement: `Beep! Beep!'" --Walt MacPhearson, alt.tv.homicide "There's nothing unnecessary about ridiculing someone's poor-me sob story about how the liberal media is forcing unwanted opinions down his throat. If you think I've held back from expressing disagreement with something stupid that's posted in alt.tv.homicide, you should go back and reread some of my replies to you." --Walt MacPhearson (again) "I know why you're here, Neo. I know why you try to pick up IRC chicks. Why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer listening to mp3s." "Because I'm a big dork?" --Trinity and Neo, detonate.net/matrixse/ "What did I do to deserve this? It's not like I integrated my browser into a mainstram OS and used strong-arm tactics to stifle competition!" --Neo, detonate.net/matrixse/ "You'll notice that I wear my sunglasses indoors. In a normal world, this would make me look foolish, but since this *is*, after all, a science fiction thriller, they serve to make me appear menacing. Can you dig it?" --Agent Smith, detonate.net/matrixse/ "I.. *hate*.. this Internet, this world-wide-web, whatever you want to call it.. It's the porn pop-ups! I feel.. saturated by them. And every time I surf the web I fear that I have somehow become an S&M fanatic." --Agent Smith, detonate.net/matrix/ "Where do you want to go today, Mister Anderson?" "@#%$ you! I run Debian!" --Agent Smith & Neo, detonate.net/matrix/ "Why, sir! I'm an MCSE! I can design, deploy, and maintain enterprise-class NT solutions!" "I've got no use for an arrogant NT admin. What I need is someone who can speak the convoluted language of Slashdot geeks." "My secondary function is to be an eggdrop! I can glean a fair understanding of UNIX from #linuxhelp in no time!" --C3PO and Owen, detonate.net/sw4/ "4. If you are not wearing large headphones on the bus, people WILL try to talk to you. This does not sound inherently bad except: Anyone that wants to talk to YOU on the BUS is a raving lunatic." --cr0bar's "Why the Bus Sucks" "Even more than Michael J. Fox, Rush is the anti-Elvis. Any band that writes an instrumental with a drum solo should be condemned to play State Fairs in Idaho for the rest of their lives." --Echo Love, Voo Doo Magazine "The favourite interview question of one fellow I know is: `You're locked in a room with Adolf Hitler, Bill Gates, and Eric Allman. You have a gun with one bullet. What do you do?'" --Anthony DeBoer (coincidentally, sendmail 8.11.0 was released days after I added this to the archive..) "Get outta here. Really? That would be my fondest fantasy made real. Besides the one about having my way with Joan Chen in a sandbox filled with cocaine, I mean." --Olin Shivers, on people distributing scsh apps "The plot line is the usual hacker-meets-girl,-girl-turns-out-to-be-hacker, -girl-gets-hacker fantasy that never happens in real life because real hackers would get distracted by an interesting challenge somewhere between events one and two." --Rob Slade "About 51 percent of those responding to the Freedom Forum's most recent survey think `the press in America has too much freedom,' a decline from 53 percent last year. Hey, you still hate us, but maybe not quite as much." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 13 July 2000 "It is possible.. to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow these things -- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring -- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine.." --Raymond Carver "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." --Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" "Hey, this is just like Usenet: some loser is arguing with me." --Philip Greenspun "If you want to get a Web site built on time, the best strategy is to take 4 MIT students and say, `Let's talk about your plans to graduate on May 10th.'" --Philip Greenspun "[Under this model], Levi Strauss will never tell you, `you are now a fat slob.'" --Philip Greenspun, explaining the design philosophy of ikhakis.com "`We've telnetted to your couch, Mr. Greenspun, and our load bearing sensors have indicated that you now weigh 300 pounds. We think you would benefit from our "Lard-Ass" option..'" --Philip Greenspun reveals a bright future for Laz-E-Boy ".. and they all lived happily ever after, until they died." --Kimberly Hlina "As a result of Congressional shortsight, lack of amusement is not actionable under current copyright statutes." --Philip Greenspun "To me one of the most exciting things in the world is being poor. Survival is such an exciting challenge. There was a study done about twenty years ago, I think at Harvard, which said the average family of four could live on $68 a year. That's a balanced diet -- everything they need for a year. Now today that might be $250 or $300, but when we see these people in line at supermarkets with all these food stamps, buying potato chips and snack foods and ice cream, I mean, give me a break! *THAT'S* poverty?" --Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, quoted in "The Rich Are Different" (I love these kinds of quotes) "Everything that gives us pleasure also gives us pain to measure it by." --The Residents, "Pain and Pleasure" "All our lives we love illusion, neatly caught between confusion and the need to know we are alive." --The Residents, "Pain and Pleasure" "The morale will continue until the beatings improve." --Benno, as quoted by Skud, sdm "And rather than place the blame on the drive manufacturers for making shoddy equipment, he's been ranting like Robert McElwaine on crack about how the Linux IDE driver needs to be rewritten to prevent drives from being told to self-destruct, not that it would actually protect the drive given that root can still have its way with any hardware attached to your system. It's almost enough to make me swear off Linux, except the BSD zealots emit just as much stupidity. Indeed, they all suck, in all sorts of ways." --Steve VanDevender, sdm ">UNIX is Yugoslavia. And BSD is Bosnia." --Steve VanDevender, sdm "If your kids like Pokemon, there's probably something really wrong with them. Maybe you were too busy firing off e-mail to film critics while Junior was guzzling the Drano under the kitchen sink." --Sick Boy reviews "Pokemon 2000" "I find the whole thing offensive. I don't *want* some special day once a year when people are nice to me for no good reason. They aren't nice to me on my birthday, why should they be nice to me for something even more arbitrary?" --Matt McLeod, sdm, on sysadmin appreciation day "Although the [Alaska] Highway is mostly paved now, the local economy is based on delivery of three services: windshield repair, tire repair, and (most worrisome) welding. I expected to need the first, didn't think I'd need the second, and prayed I wouldn't need the third." --Philip Greenspun "We are reasonably satistfied with the events we have seen. Overall, I would rate it a C+ -- OK, not great. As a result, we will not destroy your planet." --Omicronian Overlord, "Futurama" "HP good. Yamaha bad. Other brands YMMV." --Soleil Lapierre, on how to pick a CD-R "Stop chasing Ganesh! You're just going to get more wrath!" --Ganesh^WHomer Simpson, 5F04 "During my PhD thesis defense, a professor complained `this isn't science.' My response? I know I'm not good at science because I haven't been offered a job in the new Biology building. I know I'm not good at hype because I haven't been offered a job in the Media Lab. Since I don't want to believe I'm not good at anything, I'm trying to be a good engineer." --Philip Greenspun, "Why Teach Software Engineering?" "It's funny because it's poisonous!" --Zoidberg, "Futurama" "Finally, I have a good claw! See? Three human females, a number, and a king giving himself brain surgery!" --Zoidberg, "Futurama," on the ideal poker hand "All humans are vermin in the eyes of Morbo!" --Morbo, "Futurama" "So.. humans have easily injured knees. My race will find this information very useful indeed. Mwahwahahahaha!" --Morbo, "Futurama" "Drugs are bad because if you do drugs you're a hippie, and hippies suck." --Eric Cartman "All right. Right now, I'm going to be totally serious with you, okay? If you call me piggy one more time, I'm going to leap out of this chair, and rip your goddamn nuts off with my bare hands!" --Eric Cartman "A woman just stuck her tongue down my throat. I'm not even listening to you!" --Chandler Bing "Learn what you know. Share what you don't." --the *real* DejaNews motto, according to many people "Pull out right now." --Liam Stitt, hopelessly out of context "Camera make good slide. Slide make good print. Slide print make good dent in wallet." --Okello Dunkley, photo.net [a meteor is about to crash into the planet] "Execution?! What are you going to get by executing us?" "You are going to be executed for causing this situation. People are ignorant. They'll feel better if someone is punished." "I take back what little praise I had for this damn jackass!" --Barret & President Rufus, "Final Fantasy VII" "You know, when the Devil's spawn are susceptible to steak knife attacks, evil has a problem." --Mr. Cranky reviews "Bless the Child" "Using the Internet to Pick up Babes and/or Hunks -- because sometimes getting fucked by Unix isn't all that satisfying." --Philip Greenspun offers dating advice for nerds "We live in a time when Hollywood shyly ejects weekly remakes of dependable plots, terrified to include anything that might confuse the dullest audience member. The new studio guidelines prefer PG-13 cuts from directors, so now we get movies like `Coyote Ugly' that start out with no brains and now don't have any sex, either." --Roger Ebert "Satan vs. God. Evil against good. The spiritual war is at the heart of Christian mythos, but leave it to Hollywood to present it with all of the taste and intelligence of a WWF grudge match." --James Berardinelli reviews "Bless the Child" "I'd long for the days when the net was used by people at universities and so who could be presumed to have a few more braincells, but then I remembered what universities are like and scrubbed that idea." --Zebee Johnstone, sdm "The end of the e-commerce boom was foreshadowed by Priceline.com's announcement last spring that customers would be able to put in bids on, say, boxes of Froot Loops, or lettuce. Wow! A head of iceberg for 49 cents! We're having salad tonight, baby." --Dan Kennedy "It is very important that you understand that these binaries are not complete programs. They might crash on startup. They might delete all your files and cause your computer to burst into flames." --mozilla.org/binaries.html "The only difference between those with tatoos and those without tatoos is that those with tatoos are much, much cooler and can kick your ass." --seen in Devin Ganger's .signature "You might keep an eye out for the real Erin Brockovich, who plays a waitress in a short scene at the beginning of the film. She serves the fake Erin and her two fake kids some breakfast with a look of abject horror that's not exactly apropos for a waitress. I believe it's called the `if I knew Julia Roberts was going to be playing me in the movie version of my life, I would have just drunk the water too' look." --Mr. Cranky reviews "Erin Brockovich" "Q. Do you feel bad for seeing eye dogs? A. I don't feel bad. They are like any other dog. They probably feel useful. They have a job." --Bill Maher "[Socialism] sounds like fun, and so does Santa Claus. But he lives at the North Pole, which is melting." --Bill Maher "You want more than 50% taxes!? I'm going to kill you! That's insanity! 50% is way too much as it is! Where's Steve Forbes when you need him?!" --Joe Rogan, to a socialist "Mother Nature is one of the most politically incorrect people I have ever met in my life." --Bill Maher "A naive person would probably ask, `if I let an arbitrary program from the network run on my computer, what stops that program from getting into my personal files, snooping around my local network, etc.?' Sun Microsystems assures you that its Java engineering staff has thought of every contingency and that Java is completely safe. This is the same company that was unable to make their operating system's mailer secure. Thus Robert Morris, a graduate student at Cornell, was able to write a simple program that took over every Sun Unix workstation on the Internet (plus most of the other Unix boxes, except for Digital's). If you trust a Unix vendor to assure you security, please send me e-mail. I have some waterfront property in Florida that I would like to sell you." --Philip Greenspun "Usenet does not change the fundamental nature of interpersonal interaction. It lets people reach more people, different people, and communicate in slightly different ways, but at the end of the day insulting or attacking something is just as often wrong on Usenet as it is in real life, which is most of the time." --Russ Allbery "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." --Doug Gwyn "As long as you're suffering, wouldn't you rather do it with the occasional good hard boning from a big strong man? Sure you would. And afterwards, we'll never ask you, `Hey, what are you thinking?' And not out of respect for your privacy -- we just don't care." --Bill Maher taunts Anne Heche, PI 08/25/00 "Men are entirely visual today; it's only looks that count. That's why men only want thin women, because to the eyes, thin is in. To the hands, meat is neat." "Were you a rapper in a former life?" --Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Danny Bonaduce, PI 08/25/00 "You wrote a book about sex and you don't know what comes after the liquor?!" --Danny Bonaduce, PI 08/25/00 "Many of the politicians who say that marijuana is a `gateway' drug (leading to cocaine and crack use) apparently smoked marijuana themselves when they were younger. By their logic, this makes them crack-heads and we should pay no attention to what they say." --Harry Browne, on the War on Drugs "Some men have muscle cars. I have a stapler, because sometimes there are attractive women in my classes who have to staple something they're about to hand in, and it's nice to be able to say, `Here, use *my* stapler!' `Ohh, what a big stapler you have!'" --Matthew Skala "If you started logging all of Usenet from the very start, how many years would it be before you filled 1.6G? How many hours would it take to fill it if you started right now?" --Matthew Skala (Answer: The feed size today is 220GB/day. That works out to 9GB/hour. So, to fill a 1.6GB storage device, I figure it would take about ten minutes.) "I was watching a television program before, with a kind of roving moderator who spoke to a seated panel of young women who were having some sort of problem with their boyfriends -- apparently, because the boyfriends had all slept with the girlfriends' mothers. And they brought the boyfriends out, and they fought, right there on television. Toby, tell me: these people don't vote, do they?" --President Bartlet, "The West Wing" "It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." --Mr. Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964) "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. "There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." --John F. Kennedy, at Rice University, 12 September, 1962 "I'm a moral carnivore; I only eat things that have a chance of fighting back." --T.M. Pederson, sdm "Of course, the stock market, even the new economy NASDAQ, is nothing more than old-fashioned gambling. And the NASDAQ, properly understood, is nothing more than bingo for yuppies. The difference is that for this generation, bingo is a game in which everyone is entitled to win all the time." --Rex Murphy, 17/04/2000 "The MPAA counts the beans but never tastes the soup. Make a worthless movie but limit the nudity and language, and get a PG-13. Make a movie where the characters live with real problems and try to figure out what to do, and God forbid our children should be exposed to such an experience." --Roger Ebert, reviewing "Crime and Punishment in Suburbia" "He was elected governor of Texas, and before that he ran a baseball team and lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business. But what has happened in the intervening five years to make people believe he'd be a good president? What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" --Ronald Reagan Jr., on George W. Bush "Men fear solitude as they fear silence, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness." --? "You can get custard pie throwing permits?" --David Formosa, news.admin.net-abuse.policy "Did you ever wonder if Chicken Little had an agenda? I mean, was Chicken Little running around telling all the other chickens that the sky was falling out of pure, disinterested altruism? Or was there something Chicken Little wanted? And once Chicken Little had all the other chickens convinced that the sky was falling was there, all of a sudden, a Federal Department of Falling Sky? And did Chicken Little get appointed Secretary of Things That Hit You on the Head?" --P.J. O'Rourke "This guy's got about seven broken bones in his hand, if you want to give him an aspirin or something.." --President Bartlett, "The West Wing" "Mr. President, I have to ask you a few questions.. do you have any medical conditions?" "Well, I've been shot.." --"The West Wing" "I keep asking people if money has changed me, but they assure me that, no, I'm still the same obnoxious asshole I always was. So at least there's that." --jwz.org/gruntle/corleone.html "What the government is doing [with health care] is breaking your legs, then handing you a crutch and saying, `See, we saved you.'" --Carla Howell, Massachusetts Libertarian Senatorial candidate "Permission does not mean, `I once conned the user into giving out his/her e-mail address, so now I can do as I please.'" --Jakob Nielsen "The Internet is out of money. Pack your stuff and go home." --fuckedcompany.com "The most common activity for visitors to a [Web] site is fleeing." --Edward Tufte, apparently studying my browsing habits "Please look at the forest and don't try to force all of the trees to grow the same way." --Russ Allbery "A mouse is a device used to focus xterms." --Pim van Riezen, on nanog "George W. Bush *is* the Yankees -- old money in pin-stripes with a history of a drug problem." --Bill Maher "Good movies are works of art, not links of sausage." --Roger Ebert "An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he'd have someone to look up to." --Gene Fowler "Everyone needs an editor." --Tim Foote, commenting on the fact that Hitler's original title for "Mein Kampf" was "Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle against lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice" "I really look forward to the extreme, crushing disappointment you're going to have when things *don't* go your way. The only thing that will mar that enjoyment is that it most likely, based on your past record, won't be enough to sour you on Usenet entirely and make you just go the hell away." --Devin Ganger, news.groups "Modern databases use buffering in RAM to speed up access to often requested data. You don't have to do anything special to make this happen, except tune your database well (which could take the rest of your life)." --Perrin Harkins "I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery, as sanctioned by Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophmore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?" --President Jed Bartlet, "The West Wing" "For the authentic Kyoto experience, you probably ought to stay in a ryokan. These are traditional Japanese-style inns. Meals are included in the price but probably best not to ask about why there is no 10Base-T jack in the tatami mats." --Philip Greenspun "Part of the fun of being alive is knowing that you're annoying the hell out of someone else." --Matt Groening "If you don't like ACS, debug it, enhance it, port it -- don't whine. It's Tcl, SQL, and GET and POSTs, not assembly coding for a NASA rocket." --Li-fan Chen /* American Presidential Election 2000 */ "People might be divided on who they want to be president, but they're probably united in their belief that there ought to be *a* president." --Tucker Carlson, CNN 08/11/2000 "Bob Bruce of the King County elections office said he was glad that the presidential race in Florida was attracting national attention away from Washington's Senate cliffhanger. Otherwise, Bruce figured, the national media would be camped in his office. `Now everyone's down in Tallahassee and bugging them instead of me, and I'm delighted,' Bruce said." --Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 09/11/00 "Let me explain something. Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this." --Al Gore, to George W. Bush, 08/11/00 (according to AP) "I did *NOT* vote for Buchanan." --anonymous protestor's sign on CNN, 09/11/00 "By covering the Gore-Bush race as if it were the inevitable result of forces beyond anyone's control -- rather than a contrivance foisted on the public by the two major-party establishments -- they failed in some pretty crucial and fundamental ways." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 08/11/00 "Republicans who hate Clinton are going to vote for a guy who is a good ol' boy, a draft dodger, likes to party, and when the going gets tough, isn't afraid to lie." --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 06/11/00 "Witness a horrifying AP photo, posted on Salon, of [Gore] trying to re-enact The Kiss outside a Tennessee voting booth. Tipper seems natural enough; but Gore, open-mouthed and slack-jawed, looks like he can't decide whether to slobber all over her or bite her." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 08/11/00 "Maybe, despite all his faults and his Clintonian baggage and his pandering, Gore will still wind up as president. The fact remains, however, that it never should have been this hard. Running on a record of peace and prosperity, against an opponent who thinks `misunderestimated' is a word, Gore now finds his political future hanging by a thin thread." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 09/11/00 "This margin is so thin, it should be on the cover of `Cosmo' and making itself throw up." --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 10/11/00 "Warning! The US Presidential election is a satirical examination of democracy. Some viewers, and a drunk governor of Texas, may not share this sense of humor." --This Hour Has 22 Minutes, 13/11/00 "Yes, the same bad ballot caused problems four years ago. Therefore, it should have been fixed at the time. Since it was not, redress is now due, when the bad ballot may actually subvert the outcome of a presidential election. The Bush-Baker position is like saying, `Firstone tires killed people four years ago and there was no outcry then, so why are you complaining this year?'" --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 13/11/00 "Those who call for a Gore concession say it would be `for the good of the nation.' What will be good for the nation is if the legal winner of the presidential election is sworn in as president." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 13/11/00 "We should put George Bush and Al Gore in a room with Elian Gonzalez, and whoever that little boy runs to -- that should be our next president." --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 13/11/00 "I do know that election results are announced on the basis of exit polls all the time, and those calls are almost always right -- even when the numbers are incomplete and the final tally is close. Yes, all the finger-wagging lessions of Election Night remain true. The networks shouldn't make a call unless they're absolutely sure. Exit-poll results shouldn't be announced when they could affect the outcome of the race. Blah blah blah. Still, when all this is over and the post-mortems get under way, the media ought to consider the possibility that maybe -- just maybe -- they weren't as wrong in Florida as everybody thought." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 13/11/00 "These lawyers that do come in from out of state and from within are not there to determine the accuracy of the vote. They're there to make sure their candidate wins." --Gary McIntosh, Washington state elections supervisor, quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 13/11/00 "Bush ran his campaign under the slogan `he trusts the government; I trust the people.' Except, apparently, when it comes to voting." --Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect, 13/11/00 "Bush's attempt to stop the recount is an act of desperation by a man who is so removed from the electorate thate he can't be bothered even to *appear* to care about the will of the people." --Boston Phoenix editorial, 16/11/00 "Former secretary of state James Baker spends the night in Florida. So does former secretary of state Warren Christopher. If a diplomatic crisis should break out between, say, Fort Meyers and For Lauderdale, we've never been in better shape to resolve it." --Steven Cooper, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00 "`But Daddy, you promised! Make Jeb fix it or I am going to throw a tantrum! Waaaaah! My point: Bush would do the same thing if the shoe was on the other foot.. It is unfair to accuse Gore of whining when he is within his legal rights to fight this." --viewer e-mail, quoted by Steven Cooper, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00 "Al Gore is to John F. Kennedy as `Meet the Parents' is to `Bringing up Baby.' And George W. Bush is to Richard Nixon as the 1998 remake is to the original `Godzilla.'" --Robert David Sullivan, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00 "The broadcast media haven't been much help in sorting things out, probably out of fear that they'll alienate viewers on either side of the debate. Last weekend, the cable news networks were careful to give equal weight to the Bush campaign's claim that machine counts of punch-hole ballots are more accurate than hand counts, despite the near-universal opinion among election experts that the reverse is true. The way things are going, I expect to see a CNN documentary on the space program in which equal time is given to experts who say the moon landing was a hoax. (I almost feel sorry for former secretary of state Jim Baker, who made the case against hand-counting last weekend. After a lifetime of public service, during which he presumably worked to introduce democratic values to less civilized nations, he can't be delighted that the first paragraph of his obituary is going to describe him as a Bush family retainer who asked the federal government to snatch ballots away from local officials trying to get an accurate vote count in a presidential election.)" --Robert David Sullivan, Boston Phoenix, 16/11/00 "In short: All forms of government sucks. Side note: Lack of government sucks, too, because of all the lusers out there. You'd almost think government was some kind of software." --Arvid Grotting, sdm, 16/11/00 "You are going down to the Governor's Ranch with Colin Powell.. what's on the agenda?" "Lunch." --Bernard Shaw and Dick Cheney, CNN Inside Politics, 29/11/00 "I didn't vote for Gore, all right? But I swear to God, I've wound up feeling sorry for Gore because of the way Bush is going around like Veruca Salt in `Willy Wonka' saying, `I want to be president, and I want it now.'" --John Fugelsang, Politically Incorrect, 11/12/00 "It will be to George W. Bush's advantage if he's President that the expectations are so low, because he can only pleasantly surprise --" ".. I'm proud to be an American today.." --Dennis Prager & John Fugelsang, Politically Incorrect, 11/12/00 "WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. HTML IS LAYOUT." --Tor Iver Wilhemsen "The Internet is overflowing like a septic tank full of rotting condoms, and every day more and more people standing there with their finger in the dike are realising that the thing on the other side isn't the sea." --Peter da Silva, sdm "It's like someone took a bag of weasels and shook it up and let 'em loose in the room." --Dominic DaVinci, "DaVinci's Inquest" "If you don't mind, I'd rather not get drunk and kill things... staying sober would let me appreciate it more." --Skud, sdm "Baldrick, you couldn't spot a subtle plan if it were to paint itself purple and dance naked atop a harpsichord singing `Subtle Plans Are Here Again.'" --Blackadder "Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in the field of psychology or marketing, not an article on information technology." --John Kirch "They have a scheme to kill and clone Hank, Adam's friend, but by mistake they clone Adam instead, leaving the movie populated by two Arnold Schwarzeneggers who both think they're the real thing. Since that is how most Schwarzenegger movies feel, this is not as confusing as it sounds." --Roger Ebert, reviewing "The Sixth Day" "In `Walden,' Thoreau said, `I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.' Were we to maintain this attitude in the decidedly non-utopian world of cardiac surgery, we might find outselves, unlike Thoreau, not only lost in the woods, but sinking in the pond." --Daniel J. Waters, DO "Poopykins, it's time to stop preaching damnation to everyone, sweetie." --Mrs. Cartman, "South Park" 411 "Many of you knew Kenny McCormack; he was a playful school-going 8 year-old boy. And yesterday, he was SMACKED DOWN by the Lord -- God bitchslapped him right to the firey depths of hell!" --Cartman the lay preacher, "South Park" 411 "Right here we have a little girl who is very, very ugly! Do you believe He is going cure your face of the uglies?! He's going to take that ugly face and make you reasonable to look at again!" --Cartman the faith healer, "South Park" 411 "And now I am receiving a message directly from God. God is telling me that each and every one of you is to walk up to this stage and give me one dollar! I want everyone to feel the love of God by coming up here and putting a dollar in the box!" --Cartman the televangelist, "South Park" 411 "It breaks your heart. It is *designed* to break your heart. It begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it the most, it stops." --A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind" "That is why it breaks my heart, that game -- not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray pricesely what it promised. Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun." --A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind" "Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little latter, on even more adverse terms than at present." --Winston Churchill, in a letter to Lord Moyne, 1938 "Somebody said that all reporting is investigative. I disagree. In television, next to no reporting is investigative. Especially the stuff billed as investigative. Generally speaking, investigative reporting on local news is general assignment reporting with a few extra buzzwords and ominous pauses in the delivery. For example, `Our investigation revealed that these convenience store snacks are made mostly (ominous inestigative pause)... of *sugar*.' `We took our hidden camera into this daycare center, and discovered that every afternoon, the staff makes the children take naps (OIP)... on *floor mats*.'" --Michael Carpenter "When a female coworker looks at you, narrows her eyes, and says, `Eat shit,' it doesn't mean `I am trying to conceal the deep, relentless longing I have for you, but which I am afraid to acknowledge -- even to myself.' It just means, `Eat shit.' My therapist says I'm unusually perceptive, but it took me 18 years to figure *that* out." --Michael Carpenter "One of my favorite [promos] is one in which the anchor jumps into the copter, looks at the pilot and dramatically *points at the sky*. Like, where the hell *else* are they going to go?" --Michael Carpenter "Being a news anchor is a lot like being one of the Backstreet Boys, anyway. You look great, get a lot of money for displaying a modicum of talent, and everyone else looks at you and wonders why it's happening." --Michael Carpenter "To some degree, I actually sympathize with Tigger. How he stands living with these mentally challenged animals is anybody's guess. Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore form sentences slower than George W. Bush before his morning eight-ball. And that little kiss-ass, Roo, won't stop following Tigger around. Tigger should have punted his punk ass into a wall." --Mr. Cranky reviews "The Tigger Movie" "Dave Bowman has his run-in with the monolith and suddenly we've got the quinessentially '60s interpretation of infinity: a bad LSD trip and a lava lamp." --Mr. Cranky reviews "2001" "Set up your _OWN_ global backbone! I just checked. ALLKNOWINGFRUITCAKE.NET is available and would be very appropriate." --John Fraizer, NANOG "I worked Tour 3 (mine was 1700-0100). As a single guy it was the greatest! We used to finish the tour, then close down a couple of places near Bellevue and then take a ride east... We used to park under the FDR along the East River near Stuyvesant Town. Sometimes a little further north near the heliport. Once in a while a Tour 1 unit joined us taking in the lights and smell of salt water until the sun came up. That was a magic time... you felt at one with the City. Or maybe I was just tired and hung over." --Steve, misc.emerg-services, on being a New York City paramedic "Well, I gave it a whirl and I have to say, I'm very impressed with the layout and usability. However, the fact that it DOESN'T WORK kinda upset me." --Tim Wilton, on Netscape 6 (cleaned up, from "Joel on Software") "The procedure described would extract the l-meth from the inhalers and collect it and that's it. I'm sorry, but the Isomer Fairy can't wave her magic wand and reverse the chiality of the molecule." --Speed Raver "> Congress within the next five years will enact legislation mandating > minimum standards for reducing downtime and improving system > reliability. Jeez, if that's all it takes, why didn't they do it years ago?" --Sean Donelan and Bill Woodcock, NANOG "Look, Ben! It's a toy that protects US oil interests overseas!" --Ross Gellar, "Friends," describing G.I. Joe "Dear Dr. Lovemonkey: When someone says that they love you, does that mean that they truly love you? --In Love, but Worried." "Dear In Love, but Worried: Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. There are times when people believe that they love someone, but are merely infatuated. Sometimes they don't know themselves. Then there's this little quirk that many people have picked up on. It's called `lying.' Amazingly, some people do it all the time. For instance, Dr. Lovemonkey was walking down the street the other day, and this guy came up to me and explained that his car had run out of gas, and he needed about $5 to make it home. I gave him the money, but instead of returning to an automobile and driving to a nearby gas station, the guy went into the closest liquor store." --Dr. Lovemonkey, Boston Phoenix, 30/11/00 "I think [the Internet] gives [people] a feeling that they're a little less identifiable, so they might tend to even do things that they might not do in person." --Special Agent Bruce Towers, United States Secret Service, in an interview with CBC Radio, on people who threaten the President via e-mail, 01/12/00 "Women like stuff." --Lisa Loeb displays a remarkable grasp of the obvious, Politically Incorrect, 01/12/00 "Dating your ex? Have you lost all self-respect? This can only end badly, Fry. Marriage, kids, a house.." ".. a home invasion by a former roommate.." --Farnsworth and Bender, "Futurama" "All right. If it'll make you happy, I'll overthrow society." --Fry, "Futurama" "I find this post-apocalyptic wasteland to be very confusing." --Fry, "Futurama" "Can I have my old job back?" "Why, I'd forgotten why I'd fired you." "'cause he destroyed your business, your home, and all your possessions." "Oh, that's right. Get lost!" --Fry, Farnsworth, Bender, Farnsworth, "Futurama" "Is today's lifestyle making you tense and impatient?" "Shut up and get to the point!" --Bender, "Futurama" "Calculon! A fight scene has broken out at the special effects warehouse! Come quickly before a firey explosion chases someone down a hallway!" --"Futurama" "Infidelity: It's an equal-opportunity employer, boys!" --Faith Yokas, "Third Watch" "There was an asshole, see, and it's his fault. I forget which asshole, because that was a time of many assholes." --Wednesday, afw "If it asks you for a password, you can bypass it by typing `emergency override,' and if you ask it a too difficult question, the factory-fitted black powder and magnesium dust charges in the chassis are triggered." --Lionel Lauer, sdm, ranting about movie computers "Even hardened nuclearphiles had to shake their heads in the aftermath of the September 30 criticality accident at Tokai Mura, Japan. It wasn't so much the accident itself -- although that inexcusable consequence of institutionalized stupidity was mind-boggling enough -- as the apocalyptic rendering it received in the public mind and the media that feeds it. The phrase `worse nuclear accident in Japan' rulled off the lips of phlegmatic news anchors around the globe, with very few (if any) asking what the second worst accident was. Or, how dangerous is a technology whose worst national accident claims two or three casualties?" --Jeremy Whitlock "No, the kernel should be rewritten in Tcl/Tk. 'boot wish -f /kernel/unix'." --Logan Shaw, sdm "He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse wihtout one of those boxes with a pinhole in it." --Joseph Romm "We're gonna take your land! / You guys can sleep in the sand! / We're gonna build on every inch of rock! / And give you guys the chicken pox!" --Rap Replinger explains the colonization of Hawaii "I'm new in the Islands, and I don't have a dance partner.." "That's 'cause you ugh-leee." --Rap Replinger, "Piano Bar" "If no copyright is intended or indicated on the product, or at least it's intended for non commerical reproduction purposes, I don't get what all the paranoia is about. Again, if you don't want your proofs copied, then put your damn logo on them, and start charging prices based on services rendered and not street drug economics." --Scott Eaton, photo.net "Go away, you sad sad excuse for a piece of shit." --Thorfinn, to a clue-challenged dip in the monastery "This is not `one of those newsgroups.' This is THAT newsgroup. You'd better remember it, too." --David P. Murphy, sdm "Anyway, in this dream, I distinctly remember receiving a Christmas card with instructions saying `If you do not want to receive further Christmas cards from us, reply to this card with the word 'REMOVE'.'" --Tanuki, sdm "He has about as much charisma as hyrax turd." --Adam Thrasher "Christmas is wonderful unless you're a tree, a turkey, or a Jew." --Bill Maher "It amuses me to no end that Disney can make movie after movie about kids yakking to farm animals and teapots and shrimp, and yet they're completely bewildered by the concept of kids talking to their own parents. Probably has to do with the fact that Michael Eisner is obviously an alien." --Mr. Cranky reviews "The Emperor's New Groove" "Side note to parents: Anyone who thinks `Dude, Where's My Car' is more appropriate for children than `American Pie' because it obtained a PG-13 rating needs to stop trusting the MPAA." --James Berardinelli reviews "Dude, Where's My Car?" "`So this is that *actual real world use* of geometry that they told us about! I didn't believe it! I never expected to see this happen!' Hear that, kids? Stay in school." --jwz "Oh, I see. You've been a net menace and an idiot for decades. That makes it all better." --piglet@panix.com, alt.polyamory "So, Aleks just said that he thinks I've been picking on Lou a lot lately. Well I just want to make it clear that I think you're all idiots, and I hate each and every one of you. I don't mean to single anyone out." --jwz "When animal-rights activists and right-to-life protestors are marching outside your laboratory, then you know you've definitely made progress with your artificial life research." --Donald A. Smith "I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string." --jwz, in the xkeycaps source "The great thing about being a writer is, you can always just write another one. It sucks when someone beats you to the punch, but shit happens. Apply ass to chair and type `FADE IN:' The rest'll come to you as you go. Provided you don't ventilate the back of your skull first." --Steven J. Weller, misc.writing.screenplays "If you really want to get a rise out of a Texas patriot, say `Let's face the truth: For most of its history, Texas was a place where northern cattle barons sent their sheep to shit for the summer.'" --John Jackley, "Hill Rat" "Rep. Newt Gingrich entered our lives with a vengeance. He loomed large over us like a malevolent force as we considered plans and strategies for 1989, a man who resembled Ted Koppel's evil twin with the energy of a methedrine addict but with less conscience." --John Jackley, "Hill Rat" "Here is a pound of weapons-grade plutionium. You now have ten hours to build me a nuclear bomb." --Liam Stitt, offering a suggestion for "Scrapheap Challenge" "Geez. For someone who has made drug use a lifestyle, admitting you can't find any must be pretty humiliating." --Jeremy Nixon, supernews.general "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." --Dave Clark "Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be a million US dollars per mile." --Shawn McMahon, nanog "Oh my god! What have I told you children about drugs?!" "That there's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college." --Chef & the kids, "South Park" "This Message Can Not Be Considered Spam, Even Though It Is. Some Law That Never Was Enacted Says So." --RISKS 20.21 "Never, under any circumstances, let your advisor talk you into going out `for a few beers' the night before your thesis defense. It is not a tradition. It is not an expected rite of passage. It will not `relax you and help you do better tomorrow.' Your advisor is, in fact, a lying son of a bitch. Trust me on this one." --Olin Shivers "I remember standing there before my defense started. I was having cold sweats, couldn't balance well, and was unsuccessfully trying to get both of my eyes to focus in the same plane. While the rest of my committee sat there looking on and snickering like a bunch of jackals, Newell stepped up with a big, solicitous smile and said, `Say, Olin, you look like you could use a nice tall glass of cold pork gravy.' My complexion instantaneously shifted from dead white to pale green, my mouth flooded with saliva, my stomach tried to turn itself into a Kline bottle, and it took all my control to just stand there and mutter, `Damn, Allen, did you really punch out that hooker in the bar last night?' After that, the rest of the actual presentation was a piece of cake. (And, actually, it turned out it was Peter Lee that had started the bar fight, as you probably expected.) Professional academia is not pretty. I just wanted to get you clear on that." --Olin Shivers "Of course Buckaroo is bi. New Age men are supposed to be unhindered by the petty restrictions and neuroses that bedevil our generation. The guy is a neurosurgeon, physicist, rock-n-roller, and martial artist. Doesn't he strike you as the sort that keeps his options open?" --Olin Shivers, on Buckaroo Banzai "I tried to use Dri-Slide to lube my M16. How come my advisor says Dri-Slide is for momma's boys and Stanford profs?" --Olin Shivers, "Graduate Student's Guide to Automatic Weapons" "Does the way Jon Webb keeps flicking the safety of his Mac-10 on and off at thesis defenses make you nervous, too?" --ibid "I am very fond of Berkeley. I think that while LA represents the dark, twisted climb-the-water-tower-and-start-shooting-until-the- Marines-settle-it side of California weirdness, Berkeley represents the very best of the pure, innocent-killer side of it all." --ibid "Looks like a great idea but, in Columbus, people can't even get a license to sell booze on Sunday, let alone run a nuclear plant. Can you imagine going to your city councel and saying `The good news is that we're getting rid of the generator that everyone has been complaining about. The bad news is that we want to install a nuclear plant.'" --John Fraizer, NANOG, commenting on "yo yo yo! i'm a l33t linux pimp penguin!" --Wednesday, afw "*Some* adventure games would try to impose their author's misguided sense of ethics on you at this point, telling you that you don't feel like picking up the key, or you don't have time to do that, or that it's against the rules to even possess a master key, much less steal one from some other student's pants that you happened to find in a laundry, or even more likely that you are unable to take the key while wearing that dress. However, you're the player, and you're in charge around here, so I'll let you make your own judgments about what's ethical and proper here... Taken." --Ditch Day Drifter responds to a "get key" command "Kodak has claimed emulsion improvements with Royal, but they've been subtle at best and seem to be in terms of improving the grain structure and not so much the dye-set. This is quite unlike Fuji's scream and leap philosophy towards consumer print films where you need to call dial-a-psychic to figure out what's in the box." --Scott Eaton, photo.net "Some people say the cell phone is as dangerous as alcohol. I think this is a slander on booze." --Rex Murphy "Part of creating a beautiful image is to *not* render it exactly as it appears at 10:30 on a slightly overcast day with your high school physics teacher in the frame holding a gray card to prove you got it exact. Sometimes art involves abstracting key elements of something, enhancing others, diminishing others." --Laurance Reed, photo.net "This is a radio. It's so my friends can find me and shoot you." --Daniel Jackson, "Stargate SG-1" "Hello. You've reached Mike Feldman in the office of the Vice President. Due to a small but significant clause in the US Constitution, I will be out of the office from January 21, 2001, until January 20, 2005." --Gore political advisor Mike Feldman's voicemail "Ever wonder why `bus error core dump' is the standard C program crap out? Because C freely hands out random pointers to anyone that asks. Slut." --Olin Shivers "`Road Runner' cartoons are allegories of the antinomies inherent in technology. Wile E. Coyote is constantly relying on advanced ("Acme") technological solutions toward achieving his goal of capturing the Road Runner. The stratagems and devices never work as intended, in the way that formal systems such flush out weaknesses in axiomatization. The discovery of these flaws is repeatedly dramatized in bold visual objective correlatives." --Lee Brownston "The first time I visited some of my wilder friends in Paris, they discovered that I wanted to see Versailles. This discovery was made at 1:30 AM. I forgot to mention to them that by saying `I want to go see Versailles' I really meant `...during the daytime, when it's open.' So there we were, 2:00 AM, not very sober, climbing the castle walls. I didn't know which consequence of getting caught I was more frightened of -- having to explain it all to the American Embassy, or having to explain it all to my mother." --Olin Shivers "I also fondly recall Paris because that's where I learned to debug Zetalisp while drunk. But that's another story." --ibid "It's exactly this sort of thing that shows what a terrible idea gun control legislation is. If my child opened up on *me* with a .38, I'd sure want to be in a position to return fire." --ibid "Well, I like discipline as much as the next guy, but I'm not much for self-discipline. I know which side of the riding crop I like to be on." --ibid "Pop-Freudian analysis is the last refuge of the insecure. Not to mention kind of dated. It is perhaps noble or idealistic to be stuck in the '60s, but to remain mired in the '70s is pathetic at best." --ibid "Jeez, who let all the assbiting newbies in? 1990 or thereabouts. Is anyone here who remembers when Usenet servers were written as Bourne shell scripts?" --Joe Foster, supernews.general (I do! I do!) "misc.emerg-services, the perfect place to get complex legal advice, especially when the consequences of being wrong involve things like tax penalties, bankruptcy, federal prison..." --Carey Gregory, me-s "The best argument for not voting for Shrub? The Dallas Morning News editorial staff nearly wet its collective undies a few months back when the paper made a big deal on how Shrub would become the first President with a Masters of Business Arts degree. Considering that the man couldn't keep a business going without handouts from family and friends, and that MBA degrees exist almost solely to make sure that the rich kids too lazy or ignorant to get any other degree come home from college with something besides a cocaine habit and syphilis, we shouldn't be scared. We should be bowel-loosening terrified." --Paul Riddell "Based on previous experience, making these comments guarantees that some flat-footed fantasy fanatic is going to write up, sniffing `Well, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you can't join the SCA, and we'll keep you away from the Renaissance Festivals, too.' Oh, please, Brer Fox, don't throw me in that briar patch." --ibid "All love is unrequited." --Susan Ivanova, "Rising Star" "Smoke makes debugging [hardware] easy." --Sean Donelan, nanog "Who am I? Well, at the moment what I mostly am is a graduate student of Computer Science. But I'm not just any comp sci grad student. I'm the grad student you were warned about. I'm the one with the Reputation." --Matthew Skala "If you *are* such a powerful witch, *why* are you using AOL?" --Andrew Bullene, alt.tarot, by way of mskala /* High Fidelity (the movie version) */ "My relationship with Alison Ashmore lasted six hours: The two hours after school before `The Rockford Files,' for three days. But on the fourth day.. Kevin Banister. It would be nice to think that since I was 14, times have changed -- relationships have become more sophisicated, females less cruel, skins thicker, instincts more developed. But there seems to be an element of that afternoon in everything that's happened to me since.. all my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one." --Rob Gordon, "High Fidelity" "It's sentimental tacky crap, that's why not. Do we look like the kind of store that sells `I Just Called To Say I Love You'? Go to the mall." "What's your problem?!" "Do you even know your daughter?! There is no way she likes that song! Oh oh oh, is she in a coma?" --Barry & customer, "High Fidelity" "Why'd you tell her about the store?" "Oh, man, I'm sorry, I didn't know it was classified information. I mean, I know we don't have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing. Not, like, a business strategy.." --Rob & Barry, "High Fidelity" "Mr. I. Raymond. `Ray' to his friends, and more importantly to his neighbor. The guy who, until about six weeks ago, lived upstairs. I start to remember things about him now. His horrible clothes and hair, his music -- Latin and Bulgarian, whatever world music was trendy that week. He had *rings* on his fingers. Awful cooking smells. I didn't like him much then, and I fucking hate him now." --Rob Gordon, "High Fidelity" "You are as abandoned and noisy in a porno film. You are Ian's plaything, responding to his touch with shrieks of orgasmic delight. No woman in the history of the world is having better sex than the sex you are having with Ian.. in my head." --Rob Gordon, "High Fidelity" "Just because she moved in with some Supertramp fan doesn't make me five grand richer." --Rob Gordon, "High Fidelity" "So I asked *her* if she ever thought about meeting other people, and she said `of course.' So I admit that yes, I daydream about it from time to time. Now I can see that what we were really talking about was her and Ian, and she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer's trick, and I fell for it.. because.. she's much smarter than me." --Rob Gordon, "High Fidelity" "What if I was doing something that couldn't be cancelled?" "What are you ever doing that can't be cancelled?" "That's not the point!" --Rob & Laura, "High Fidelity" "I've been thinking with my guts since I was 14 years old, and frankly, I've come to the conclusion that my guts have got shit for brains." --Rob Gordon, "High Fidelity" "One of the most important things about knowing the rules is that it makes it possible to evaluate whether breaking the rules is worth the consequences." --Joel Baker, nanog "There are few things quite as disguisting in this world as a young lady who might otherwise be described as `attractive' coming in to purchase chewing tobacco for herself." --my friend Jay "You can bet that dozens of kiddies all over the world are diffing stuff. Maybe you'll be faster than them, find the specific problem, develop a patch that's different from `install 8.2.3', and deploy it before you're hit." --Paul Vixie taunts DNS administrators on nanog "Most people I know who listen to a lot of MP3s will download a lot of different songs. And if they like the song, they'll go out and buy the album." --Moby, hopelessly optimistic (well, he's half right..) "You fall in love with perhaps half a dozen people in your life, and a like number of people fall in love with you. But the affections are rarely mutual and almost never contemporary. It is the most irresponsible thing that can be done to let such a coincidence pass and not act upon it." --P.J. O'Rourke, "The Ghosts of Responsibility" "It'll be good. I can tell her much I've been thinking about her. That I haven't stopped thinking about her since the moment I met her. That I'm so fantastically, over-the-top, wanna-slit-my-own-throat in love with her, that for every minute of every hour of every day I can't believe my own damn bad luck that you met her first!" --Chandler Bing "The Internet is not free. It just has an economy that makes no sense to capitalism." --? "A great triumphalist shout echoes around Washington these days. The adults are back in town! The Clinton staff, characterized as ill-mannered kids in jeans who liked to kick back and eat pizza (between back-cracking bonking sessions) has been replaced by close-cropped, suit-wearing Republicans who eat with both feet on the floor, and perhaps have sex the same way, though only at home, after vespers." --Dave Shiflett, National Review "If the Bush administration really wants to change the Washington scene.., it should consider distancing itself from its longstanding image as the party of coat, tie, and tassel. Rule one might be to outlaw the wearing of bow-ties by anyone under 55. There is no creature more hideous, at least to real Americans, than the young right winger in a bow tie. The first reaction is to slap the guy and say, `That's from your dad.' The fact is, most American parents would rather come home and find their sons picking the lock to the liquor cabinet than gazing into the mirror while tying a bow around his pretentious little neck. It is difficult to think of a more grating affectation." --Dave Shiflett, National Review "Americans look in two directions on Super Bowl Sunday as they consume 12 million pounds of potato chips while watching 60 minutes of football congealed within six hours of the best advertising money can buy and the worst kitsch pageantry popular culture can produce." --George Will, Washington Post "Robin Williams says cocaine is God's way of telling users they have too much money. The XFL is God's way of telling America that it has too much leisure time." --George Will, Washington Post "[Bush] had Democrats traveling to the White House, almost on their knees, and coming out and declaring, `Well, he's not such a boob after all.' After the bitter acrimony of the post-election period, any Democratic comment about Bush that doesn't use the word `thief' sounds pretty good." --David Corn, editor of Nation, quoted in the Washington Post "Joe Lieberman says the word `god' more than a nymphomaniac at an orgy!" --Bill Maher "[MIT] got $20 million from them. We're going to name our new building after them. Damned if anyone I work with is going to call it by that name. (Welcome to MIT. Please take a number.)" --Garrett Wollman, on the new CS building at MIT funded by Bill and Melinda Gates "It's as if the production was a fight to the death between bright people with a sense of humor, and cretins who think the audience is as stupid as they are." --Roger Ebert reviews "Head Over Heels" "The scene betrays a basic ignorance of a fundamental principle of humor: It isn't funny when innocent bystanders are humiliated. It's funny when they humiliate themselves. For example, `Head Over Heels' would be funny if it were about the people making this movie." --ibid "Thursday at 15:32 EST my link dropped. Not 'our router has gone insane' dropped, but 'the DSLAM has been repossessed' dropped. There's nothing on the other end of that wire." --Bill Cole ">Yeah, that kind [tornado] scares me. Smart enough to unbolt the >engine block from the frame and transmition, leaving all the other >parts? Damn. God is probaby hidding the fact he needed that 351 for >his mustang. Hey. Jesus built my hotrod. That's where that 351 was going." --Brian and Steve, sdm "There is a little router here, saying `arp... arp...' A 3l33t-war3z-dude throws a DOS-attack against you." --Tanuki imitates advent, sdm "Hey, Mike, you think you can toss me my calculations? *thwap* Thanks! Ah, here it is: `Breach hull, all die.' Even had it underlined." --Crow T. Robot, in the middle of a hull breach "Well, believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid.. and I went ahead anyway." --Crow T. Robot "Hey! This isn't shot day-for-night! It's more like 4:30-for-5:15!" --Tom Servo "Crow, you big dope! You can't *run* through space!" --Tom Servo "It's the amazing Technicolor cheese wedge!" --Tom Servo "Puppet wranglers? There weren't any puppets in this movie." --Crow T. Robot "I am a pro-life liberal who agrees with pro-choice Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in his criticism that too many pro-lifers act as though life began at conception and ended at birth. It is entirely reasonable to question how we can call ourselves pro-life if we do not defend and protect the powerless among us, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker." --Mark Shields, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 05/02/01 "The series is set for a 65-show run through May 4. That's right, oh bloodshot ones. Sixty-five chances to see walking, talking jocks in their socks. Take that, `Temptation Island!' Near as we can tell (advance tapes weren't available), no one gets voted off `Preps' unless somebody decides to turn pro after third-period algebra. In which case he becomes eligible for the NBA's own reality show, `Perps.' Just kidding. `Perps' remains in development until the league has a sufficient backlog of plea-bargains to guarantee a full-season run." --John Levesque, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 05/02/01 "But now the whole Round Table is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world, And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds." --Tennyson, "The Passing of Arthur" "We can compensate for many problems in the way pages render in a given browser. Authoring incompetence is not chiefly among them." --Wednesday "I don't hate black people! I hate hippies!" --Cartman "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, in rec.humor.funny "Guns don't kill people. Physics kills people!" --Dick Soloman, "Third Rock From The Sun" "[Photography is] all about the relationship between the photographer and the subject, not the lens or camera and the subject." --Jeff Spirer, photo.net "We're not afraid of the Internet. We think it's a very cool way to reach our fans. If a band sells 12 million albums, what are we supposed to say? `Oh, maybe we could have sold 13 million of we had just been Internet Nazis.' Frankly, at some point, you have to say, `hey, let the people have the music.'" --Dexter Holland "> Let us hope that when they ship the backup tapes, they use a bit of > care and don't lose any of it. (I can see the headlines now: Cargo > Plane/Truck Carrying Entire Usenet Archive Crashes In Freak > Storm/Freak Traffic Accident) Perhaps they will ship it via a redundant array of inexpensive trucks." --Bruce Tomlin and Ben Pfaff, sdm "Concentrate on the tools and materials. People are awfully good at figuring how to do something, but they have a hard time imitating a roll of tape." --How to Get Around MIT (1999-2000) "Brute force is the last refuge of the incompetent. Carrying master keys is extremely stupid and unnecessary. Things are not always as they appear. This is true of locks, doors, walls, and people." --ibid "PhotoAlley is great. Why buy an EOS-3 from B&H for $879 when you can get it from PhotoAlley for $1300? You don't really need that extra $420, do you?" --Jamie Curtis, photo.net "Coming from a cough syrup slurping user who reads news with Outlook Express, `get a clue' does not hold much water." --Matt Schnierle, supernews.general "It does sometimes matter whether you know how many logs it takes to float a Land Rover." --Joe McCormick, MD, on hunting diseases in Africa "I say those people are right to be disturbed. Disturbed, when a dig site used to hold a building erected by the military. Disturbed, when the site turns out to have contaminated soil. Disturbed, when the digging is funded by Bill Gates. Disturbed, when the diggers generate the smells of hellfire and brimstone. Disturbed, when the elements of every bad horror movie are present *right* *next* *door*." --Jeremy H. Brown, gsb announcement "`Richard Stallman' is provided `as is' without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose." --Philip Greenspun, gsb announcement "I have 360 joules worth of `bite me' slung over my shoulder, and I say otherwise!" --Bob Czagrinski, EMT-D, to Death "You're not real -- you're a hallucination induced by caffeine and lack of sleep. I get them all the time. Last week, I worked an extrication with the Easter Bunny. He sucks at spinal immobilization, by the way.." --ibid "I'm tempted to buy one share of stock, then show up a shareholders' meeting and complain about the (probable) fact that they spend more money arguing with people about this than it would cost them to start filtering it at the borders." --Shawn McMahon, nanog, on uunet's inability to filter rfc1918 traffic "I think the biggest risk to Usenet is the chance that all these straw men laying around might catch fire." --Rich Lafferty, news.groups "I should have added this before, but 2001 is already shaping up to resemble a Stanley Kubrick film. The sad part is that the Kubrick film is `Full Metal Jacket.'" --Paul Riddell "The truth shall make you odd." --Flannery O'Connor "The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws)." --Doug Gwyn "And though the static walls surround me, you were out there and you found me.. I was out here listening all the time." --Dar Williams, "Are You Out There" "Room can always be found for sin." --Howard C. Berkowitz on NANOG, hopelessly out of context "[user]'s complaint about photo.net not being worth supporting is fairly typical of what we've gotten over the past 8 years of volunteering our time and effort. It is amazing how many people who haven't got the energy to write a single tutorial for the rest of the Internet, not even a Geocities page, do have enough energy to criticize the work of others!" --Philip Greenspun "Your code sucks, Branimir, not to put too fine a point on it." --Philip Greenspun "WinTelnet is one of those situations in which both fish and firearm are firmly bracketed to the barrel itself, in perfect alignment, and actually walking up and pulling the trigger starts to fall into the `Why Bother?' category." --Anthony de Boer, sdm "If an emergency physician standing in the woods orders mannitol, and there is no neurosurgeon around to hear him, is he still wrong?" --David Harrison, MD "The Supra is a dolphin on crystal meth. The M5 is a 250lb. street thug in a business suit with an Ivy League PhD." --Frank Sheeran "I'm here to welcome you bastards to the next four to ten years of your life. You probably enrolled in university because it's a haven for free thought and reason. You might even still think that after you've been transformed into a bunch of softheaded yes-men. Pretty soon, you'll be sucking up to profs, squabbling for marks, and complaining about the political incorrectness of words like `orientation.' Welcome to paradise, you fucking robots!" --Space Moose initiates the freshman class "I got some email from my broker yesterday. Her comment could be summed up as, `Holy shit you're spending a lot of money! When's it going to stop?' I wish I knew. But at least there was some news that brought a giddy smile to my face today. As you may recall, two of our neighbors here on 11th street, The Transmission Theatre (a nightclub) and Twenty Tank (a brew-pub/restaurant) closed their doors recently, and transformed into office space for internet companies. Well I can gleefully report that *both* of those companies have *already* gone out of business! Bring on the recession!" --jwz gets a serious case of schadenfreude "You know how you should never go grocery shopping when you're hungry? Well, you should also never let someone talk you into buying lights when you're out at a club watching a light show." --jwz "What I think is, this project really screams `endless time-sucking rathole.'" --jwz "Due to EARTHQUAKE, the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) was closed as of Feb 28 at 19:00 UTC. The date/time when the airport is expected to reopen is not known." --FAA System Command, 28/02/01 "Due to TOWER EVACUATED, departure traffic destined to BFI AIRPORT will not be allowed to depart until at or after 1pm PST." --FAA System Command, 28/02/01 "To Britain: Maybe meat is just not your thing." --This Hour Has 22 Minutes, 05/03/01 "> Through strategic relationships with leading Internet Service > Providers ... over 16 million users will have access to the New.net > domains. oooo. a whole 16 million users!" --Jim Mercer, NANOG "I find it sad to see Thomas portraying himself as the eternal victim once again. I am not sure of what to make of it. I have long suspected that maybe it has something to do with being raised black and poor with the name `Clarence' in an era in which most other boys have boring names like `Bill' or `George' or `Al' or `Colin.' Having endured all that at the same time as Thomas, I sympathize. Any guy could be a Bill or a Bob. One has to fight relentlessly against an assault of unwanted nicknames for the name `Clarence.'" --Clarence Page, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 06/03/01 "Yes, the background is ugly. Coyote ugly. But what do you expect sports photographers to do, drape a clean backdrop across the fence and block the spectator's view?" --Darron Spohn, photo.net "Do you need anyone to be verbally sniped? Perhaps a nasty letter needs writing? Having trouble writing e-mail dripping with vitriol and spite and vindictiveness and that difficult to achieve caustic aura of complete contempt? I might be able to help! Unfortunately, I can't guarantee the letter will actually be *relevant* to your issue.. most likely, you'll receive a vicious rant against Bill Gates, Microsnot Developer Foolio and its Noxious VC++ 6.0 compiler, the braindamage called OLEDB, why MFC is the source of all evil in the world today, and so on. What more can you expect for $15, though?" --Matthew Francey, photo.net "The baggage-wrapping controversy is emblematic of MIA's woes. For three years, county commissioners have been pondering the earth-shattering question of who is most qualified to bind luggage in cellophane. This highly sophisticated process requires expert skills in the handling of both suitcases and Saran Wrap. A baboon can be trained to do this in about four minutes. If only we'd had baboons instead of nitwits on the commission, the deal would have been done ages ago." --Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald, 07/03/01 "We need a nanog-variant of Godwin's law, with the trigger phrases `ICANN' and `UDRP.'" --Joe Abley, NANOG "In this case, it is not even better than a documentary of the same actors ordering room service while fighting the stomach flu." --Roger Ebert reviews "Company Man," 09/03/01 "Recently I received mail from a producer at a late-night comedy program informing all of his contacts to change his e-mail address to a new address. It was the same as his old one, except with one letter removed. `Unfortunately, I'm getting so many junk emails that I need to change my email address,' he wrote. `Sorry for the inconvenience.'" --Aaron Barnhart, tvbarn.com, 09/03/01 "The pig numbering system presented by BoarSemen.Com is for the swine farmer who doesn't like a lot of paperwork -- all pigs are identified by clipping chunks of their ears off to generate numbers from 1 to 161. I find this deeply offensive: A nine-bit system like this should be able to represent 513 numbers." --cruel.com, 05/03/01 "And if next year I post newsite submissions from heaven!god and hell!satan to net.general, there would probably be those who would bite on them, too. (`See, I TOLD you there was a God and now there's proof!')" --steve@zinfandel.UUCP, net.general, 11/04/84 "Present day (i.e., the future)." --"Futurama" "And the winner is.. Number 3, by a quantum finish!" "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!" --"Futurama" "Sea Tac aiport information echo.. seismometer reading 0.0 on the Richter scale, peak tremor 6.8, aftershocks all quadrants; runway elevation 426 MSL variable, 329, 437, 378, 416.. arriving and departing aircraft contact the US Geological Survey 127.8.." --Klyde Morris, 05/03/01 "Some of us run operating systems where the distinction is still made between the OS kernel, the system libraries, and the application's libraries and plugins..." --Valdis Kletnieks, NANOG "Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of the clue, I shall fear stupid users, for thou aren't with me; thy large aluminum bat and thy homemade Prozac they comfort me." --phloem 23:4 "I'm a socialist." "You are not." "How do you know I'm not a socialist?" "You drive a Lexus." ".. it's a lease." --"Made in Canada" "I wonder why stories of degradation and humiliation make you more popular..?" --Homer Simpson, 7F05 "The risk is, I think, being a private high-school student a week after a high-profile school shooting, and having a Web site." --Jamie McCarthy, RISKS 21.27 "The prevailing dress style tonight tends towards tight-fitting pants and tops. It's cold in the club, and more than once I find myself thinking, `Ooh, high beams,' and then: `14! 14! 14!'" --Chris Wright, Boston Phoenix, 03/15/01 "Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists upon." --Robert F. Kennedy "If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that's just about all. But a direct lift aircraft can come in and save his life... it would be right to say that the helicopter's role in saving lives represents one of the most glorious pages in the history of flight." --Igor Sikorsky "Finally, we have a president who knows how to run the government like a business. Presuming the business is Pets.com." --Gail Collins, New York Times, 03/16/01 "Mr. Bush arrived in the White House just as the nation was plunging into a stock market dive and the California utility crisis. Since he is a guy known for setting priorities, nobody was surprised when he immediately honed in on taxes and energy. Then we began noticing that while the country needed to quickly stimulate consumer spending, Mr. Bush was fixated on eliminating taxes on the wealthy in 2011. The California crisis is mainly about natural gas, and Mr. Bush keeps taking about drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve. The president seems to be governing some other country. Maybe Belgium is the place that needs to eliminate the estate tax." --Gail Collins, New York Times, 03/16/01 "Here's the interesting thing we learned about dumpsters: You need a permit to park it on the street. But if you only keep it overnight, the City doesn't really care, so nobody bothers getting a permit if they only intend to have it for less than a day. However, it turns out that it's not practical to keep them longer than overnight anyway, because apparently the city is full of marauding bands of carpet installers who drive around looking for dumpsters to dump their old carpets in. So if you have a dumpster for more than a day, it will fill up with carpet. How fucked up is that?" --jwz "We finally got a bid for how much it would cost to pour new concrete for the front wall, and it was even more insane than we expected, like, the cost of constructing a small house. My first reaction was, `Does Marcellus Wallace look like a bitch?'" --jwz "Heroism is nothing more than working hard in a job that nobody else wants." --Virginia Robinson, MD "I honestly think I'm more offended at the site's horrible design than I am at the fact we're being boxed in by it." --me "Overachievers are rare in the space business. The Mir didn't know the meaning of the word `quit.' (Possibly because it spoke Russian.)" --Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, 03/23/01 "Warning: Jean Chretien put Hedy Fry into cabinet to fight western alienation. Some westerners may not share this sense of humor." --This Hour Has 22 Minutes, 03/26/01 "You know there's a downside to not eating fruits and vegetables?" "Yeah. That's how you get scurvy." ".. how long does that take?" "About six months." ".. I'm okay with that." "Me, I'd be more worried about ricketts." --"Made in Canada" "If you've ended your movie and have to resort to explaining in text what happened after you ran out of film you need to get a job as a subtitle technician or something. The film has *ended*, you steaming lump of cat crap." --Mr. Cranky "I got to use a jackhammer today!" "Where did you get a jackhammer?" "We rented it." "You can just rent those?" "Yeah, there's no background check, or cooling off period, or anything." "I mean, they don't come with a guy? Or lessons or something?" "Well, it's pretty self-explanatory: plug it in, hold the handles, squeeze the lever to make it go, and keep your toes away from the pointy end." --jwz and friend "Well, how that happened is, the electrician convinced Barry that we needed it, and after several meetings where I expressed my complete disbelief that we need any more power now than we had before, I just got completely sick of arguing and said `fuck it, I don't care anymore' and let them spend my money so they'd shut up and leave me alone. Not the soundest business decision I've ever made, surely, but what can I say: It was a bad week." --jwz "Clicking sounds. Sounds that reveal the presence of radioactive rays." --"Atomic Alert," 1951 (thanks for the tip, Encyclopedia Britannica) "I think it's conceivable that someone might think you're hot." --Fox Mulder, to Dana Scully "Romance is dead. It was acquired in a hostile takeover by Disney and Hallmark, homogenized, then sold off piece by piece." --Lisa Simpson "This is an alpha test only. Play with it as much as you like, but don't blame us if it melts your computer into a pile of scrap metal or steals your girlfriend." --Winamp 3 alpha warning message "The fact that you can download a 100 megabyte file from halfway around the world should be viewed as an accident and not a right." --Adrian Chadd "What's scary to me is that writing this bullshit made me realize how blurry the line is between saying something and saying nothing." --Dave Ragsdale "Each year, a week in April (or is it May?) is designated National EMS Week in honor of the men and women who, like priests and nuns, take a vow of poverty to serve their fellow man. And each year someone comes up with a moronic slogan that restates the obvious. This year is no exception. This year's catchphrase is `2001: An ER Space Quandary.' The runner up entry was `Stop Whining, We'll Be There Soon.'" --Flatline 2001 "Thou shalt not take moochers into thy.. hut." --Homer Simpson, 8F21 "Indignant-fuckknuckle-with-a-modem #349 wrote:" --PD's way of starting an e-mail "When they came for the Trekkies, I said `Hey, you guys missed a couple. See, there's one right over *there*.' When they came for the OS flamers, I said `Guess what they run in Hell, buddy!' When they came for the spammers, I said `Glad to see my tax money at work!' When they came for the MMFers, I said `I thought you got those guys last time you stopped by.' When they came for the AOLers, I said `October came late this year.' When they came for the people who post their messages in HTML, I said `So, you guys hiring anytime soon?' When they came for the 3L1T3 Hacker D00dz, I bought them a round of beer." --Jake Kesinger "Evil trick of the day: % nohup y > /tmp/bigfile & % rm /tmp/bigfile" --Dane Jasper (if you don't know what this does, don't do it) "And if Donald Trump delivered the mail, you could send letters for 12 cents, and also gamble with the stamps." --Howard Stern "Hence the `Urgent' labels plastered in large letters on the `Express' envelope, explained Caplan. It's urgent to EarthLink that the company get your attention to sell its products. Logic of that kind makes me want to throw things." --Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News, 04/03/01 "Flattery is sincerest form of imitation." --my mom "Although she may not admit it publically, [Maria] Cantwell knows very well that it was the Clinton administration's attack on Microsoft that has caused the economic slowdown. It is no coincidence that the NASDAQ took a dive the day after Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson sided with the Clinton administration." --Aimee DiGiovanni, Seattle Post-Intelligencer letters, 03/20/01 (paranoid, much?) "Under our system, even conservatives need some plausible theory to qualify for victim status, from which all blessings flow." --Michael Kinsley, Washington Post, 03/01/01 "If you had a UNIX dildo, it would lie lifeless in your hands during any romantic interludes, and then, late at night, when you were blearily wobbling to the bathroom, it would leap on you and fuck you silly." --KPG "The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things." --Richard P. Feynman "C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce." --Scott McKay "Since I'm not the professed yuppie here, I'm deferring to your judgement." --Frink, to me "You're going to gloat about this behind my back, aren't you?" "I'd never do anything so mean. I'm going to gloat about this to your face." --me & Linds "There's a town in Alabama --" "They want to make the Ten Commandments into law. I heard." "What do you think about that?" "Coveting thy neighbor's wife is going to be a problem." "Also, if I were arrested for coveting my neighbor's wife, I'd probably bear false witness." --Sam & Leo, "The West Wing" "First of all, you're wrong. Second of all, shut up. Third, I went to Hoynes with your thing and he said he wasn't the one who talked to you and I believe him and he's really pissed at me and he's right. And fourth.. shut up again!" --C.J. Cregg, "The West Wing" "The only Internet skill that matters is ." --Philip Greenspun "Raven works on a program called Flash that lets you embed cheesy animations into web pages. Chris works on a program called Chrome that lets you embed cheesy 3D effects into web pages. Are you noticing a pattern here? Where is the product called `Boondoggle'? Are they going to be attending trade shows named `Junket'?" --jwz "Being a Unix system administrator is like being a tech in a biological warfare laboratory, except none of the substances are labeled consistently, any of the compounds are just as likely to kill you by themselves as they are when mixed with one another, and it is never clear what distinction is made between a catastrophic failure in the lab and a successful test in the field." --Michael Tiemann "Who could have thought the idea of stopping salmonella testing on the beef that children eat would fly politically? What administration wants to be known as pro-salmonella, especially after you've been accused of being pro-arsenic and pro-carbon dioxide? What, we weren't supposed to notice?" --Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 04/06/01 "This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML is the pity description on paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan." --Neal Stephenson, "In the Beginning was the Command Line" "Good grief, the level of ineptitude is awesome. For a show that takes delight in ridiculing failure and humiliating losers, `Weakest Link' seems to have been put together by an awfully accident-prone crowd itself. This show is `Titanic' with a twist; not content with having hit one iceberg, the captain and crew set off across the Atlantic looking for others and ramming as many as they can find." --Tom Shales, Washington Post, 04/16/01 "Why buy saline when you can stock up on Big Macs?" --Cecelia "I can scream at my loved ones and friends 24 hours a day just fine without the help of a diet." "You need to stop running around the block and have a beer. Or get some breast implants, or something." --me and Cecelia "We should run `perl -i -pe 's/(\S)\(\s)/$1!!!!$2/g'**/*.tcl' over her files." --Jin Choi "I have no respect for him as a sysadmin. Not that I'm saying I'm a lot better, but if you compare him to someone like Scott Blomquist, no contest. You just tell Scott, `I need this, this, and this' and he'll respond that he installed 1 and 2 yesterday and will have 3 by the end of the day. Oh, and he noticed that 4 was missing, so he fixed that too." --Jin Choi "QT and GTK are so last year, man. GNUstep is sexier. You see, GNUstep is what we call a `player.' It's got mad skills, bitch. I do have to give mad props to Motif for keeping it real old-school style." --Jin Choi "I came of age in the 70s, and there were few crueler things you could inflict on a person. The music: bad. The culture: dreck. The politics: miserable. The world: nasty. Hair: unspeakable. Architecture: the worst it had ever been in human history. No oil. No fun. Syphilis and Fonzie. Yes, there was Charlie's Angels, but Charlie's Angels was stupid." --James Lileks "Kids today think the 70s were fun. They think the 70s were cool. They think that 70s stuff looks kip. Let me put this as delicately as possible: kids today are idiots." --James Lileks "I'm just sorry there's nothing nasty enough that I can write in this review to suitable repay everyone involved in the ruination of 90 minutes of my life. I have gotten better entertainment value from a colonoscopy." --James Berardinelli reviews "Freddy Got Fingered" "Why is the service free? Granite Canyon Group provides the public domain name service in keeping with the Internet traditions of cooperative computing. It is our reaction against incrementally larger fees charged by Internet service providers for fewer and smaller services. It's our small effort to practice random and senseless acts that foster Internet community over commercialization. Or, if you think that is too verbose, because we can." --Public DNS FAQ "Who would have believed that a huge ocean could be crossed more peacefully and safely than the narrow expanse of the Adriatic, the Baltic Sea, or the English Channel? Provide ship or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void [of space] .. So, for those who will come shortly to attempt this journey, let us establish the astronomy: Galileo, you of Jupiter, I of the moon." --Johannes Kepler "Hello, my toaster is connected at 192.168.5.44 and it was hax0red. My social security number is 275-53-4678, and my favorite color is blue. How pointless is this mail-list?" --Jade E. Deane, nanog "Go and use a library. If you don't know what a library is, it's sort of like the Internet but with better pictures." --Struan Gray, photo.net "He stole my money! I'm gonna beat the crap out of him!" "You're a cop. Shoot him!" --Jan and Frank, "The Job" "The Democrats aren't going to nominate another liberal academic former governor from New England.. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not *that* dumb." --Josh Lyman, "The West Wing" "Hey, did I mention that TV-Turnoff Week was.. last week? I didn't? I am *so* sorry." --Aaron Barnhart, tvbarn.com, 04/30/01 "> Just kill me now, ok? I can't get your PID from here." --me and Soleil "It's no good. When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts which adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed-over British Rail sandwich?" --Helen Fielding, "Bridget Jones's Diary" "Four months ago, CBS Television president Les Moonves kidded that he was looking forward to the 18th and 19th editions of the show. If the juggernaut gets that far, sometime around 2009 by my reckoning, I can't imagine I'll be joining Les on the divan. Not unless, in a fit of inspiration, CBS comes up with a `Celebrity Survivor' edition and we can look forward to Martha Stewart redecorating the tribe's yurt in the Gobi desert while Jennifer Lopez is treated for exposure after wearing nothing but an immunity necklace and fossilized ginkgo leaf." --John Levesque, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 05/04/01 "I'd rather listen to [Sir Isaac] Newton than [Microsoft VP Craig] Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less." --Linus Torvalds "It wouldn't have made sense, but making sense can be highly overrated, as `Twin Peaks' proved (well, tried to prove) several years ago." --Tom Shales, Washington Post, 05/05/01 "Virtually all users of Linux (and all other forms of Un*x) are unkempt, longhaired, beast-bearded dirty GNU hippies, and I am sick and tired of having to deal with them." --"Linus Torvalds," linux-kernel, 04/01/01 "I travel to escape the rotund, belligerent light of the foothills, the knife of high cerulean blue. Light is seldom muted in Calgary, sometimes gray if snow or rain plunge over the city, but that temporary reprive seems aberrant, and until the dazzle returns, people look puzzled. Visitors arrive in order to shade their eyes at the teeth miraging the western skyline. Fall and spring are best, for then the mountains are sharp echoes outlined with snow." --Aritha Van Herk, "Restlessness" "There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." --Martha Graham "Yes, we *admit* we're using a large hammer. Bouncing your e-mail didn't get your attention. Maybe irate users will get your attention. But I am doubting it." --Valdis Kletnieks "All three political weeklies -- the left-liberal Nation, the moderate-liberal New Republic, and even the moderate-conservative Weekly Standard -- have been on Bush like a pissed-off loan shark." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 24/05/01 "Q276304 - Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords" --Microsoft "`Pearl Harbor' is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 25/05/01 "Many restaurants have a `No shirt, no shoes, no service' sign out front. Perhaps they lose the business of shirtless and/or shoeless persons. But it's their business to lose. Outsider busybodies have no right to override the expressed wishes of business owners." --Paul Vixie, NANOG, 25/05/01 "SMTP does not mean `bulk binary file transfer protocol.'" --Dan Hollis, NANOG, 25/05/01 "Coming soon: MSNBC presents Nude Dateline with Fuckin' Stone Philips." --Jason Snell, teevee.org, 29/05/01 "No, I don't think that, which is why I didn't say that. You are (probably deliberately) being obtuse. Please go away now. We have things to discuss and you're getting in the way." --Jeremy Nixon, news.admin.net-abuse.policy, 31/05/01 "Imagine if Linux was as fscked-up as the mindless lusers who support it on Slashdot?" --Lionel Lauer, sdm, 31/05/01 "As far as I'm concerned, if I have images that I want to be *absolutely sure* will not be `shared' (either on the Web or with law enforcement authorities) then I develop them myself. Frankly, sending a picture of your baby sprawled atop a pile of marijuana and money to a Walmart minilab is the surest proof yet that drugs cause brain damage." --Peter Nelson, photo.net, 31/05/01 "America's 4,000-mile border with Canada is basically defended by a couple of fire trucks, and most Americans think that's about all we need. The southern border is half as long, has the equivalent of an army division patrolling it, and many Americans say it should be buttoned down even tighter." --Time, 05/06/01 "What kind of moron does this stuff by *inclusion*? What kind of moron writes HTML that doesn't degrade gracefully? The language was *designed* that way. That's why unrecognized tags are *ignored* by default. I mean, just let it through! It'll probably work anyway. It might not have the snazzy space-age layout, but the *text* will actually show up. Oh, there's my bias -- I was assuming the text was the important part. More the fool I." --jwz "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to using Windows for mission-critical applications." --what Yoda meant to say "Let's face it: Bill Gates is a monacle and a Siamese cat away from being a James Bond villain." --Dennis Miller "And here we see the Chinese police forces making sure a demonstration is peaceful before opening fire on it. You want democracy? Up against the Great Wall, motherfucker." --Dennis Miller "Yes, I am being deliberately confrontational in this essay and am going out of my way to piss off certain segments of our readership, although not necessarily the same ones we have historically done a good job of pissing off." --me "I should have grabbed him by the ears and yelled, ``I could have you killed!'' but I didn't, because I actually wanted the phone." --jwz "`Deconstruction' is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Godel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties." --Chip Morningstar, "How to Deconstruct Anything" "What the Army needs to do is take a few cues from those `Image is Nothing' Sprite commercials. They should make commercials that are cynical and ironic, with techno soundtracks, and filled with attractive soldiers, who with a sneer seem to say the words: `We're so cool we wouldn't even hang with you.' You think an average teen could resist that? I don't think so. Of course, if that doesn't work, they could always change their slogan to my choice: `Join the Army or We'll Draft Your Lazy Asses.'" --Mike Barber, teevee.org "Send it in the form of a text message in an e-mail, *not* as an attachment. People who send in attachments will be hunted down by former Diff'rent Strokes cast members and punished severely." --The Vidiots, teevee.org "An audiophile club is like a chess club without the chess, except if you are lucky they will have decent imported beer at meetings, possibly with food." --cyclesoft.com/Audiophile.html "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning.. and the response would be, `We're sorry, here's a coupon for two more.'" --Mark Minasi, quoted by Brock Meeks "Fukui-San! Nakamura says he's using the lungfish liver to make ice cream!" --Ohta Shinichiro, "Iron Chef" "What the fuck is wrong with these people? An innocent bystander might understandably believe that Microsoft is stuffed to the brim with anal-retentive control freaks who will not rest until every web page on every web site, every transaction through every e-commerce engine, every e-mail and every instant message lead inexorably back to Big Brother Bill." --Deborah Branscum, on Microsoft and SmartTags "I'm willing to cater to people who are using software with basic capabilities and prevent my users from doing things that break those capabilities in significant ways. I'm not willing to cater to people who are using substandard software from the stone age. Maybe they'll get sick enough of it to stop using software written by companies that don't understand the application space." --Russ Allbery, news.admin.net-abuse.policy "`Starnes ordered Pruitt to put his hands up and exit his vehicle. Pruitt (has) stated that because of his criminal history, he decided that he did not want to go back to prison, and he also did not want Starnes to find the stolen weapons in his vehicle,' Volitta Fritsche, a Morgan County chief deputy, said. I am pretty sure that shooting a cop in Indiana is NOT a good way to avoid jail." --Kurt Ullman, misc.emerg-services "It takes a million monkeys at typewriters to write Shakespeare, but only a dozen monkeys at computers to run Network Solutions." --Patrick Delahanty "I like mass entertainment. I've written mass entertainment. But it's the opposite of art because the job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce, and flatter consumers -- to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's re-examine it." --David Mamet "Science may never comprehend the full extent of what dogs know about language, problem solving, the past, the future, God, time, or philosophy. In the end, we must content ourselves with the fact that dogs know enough to be dogs -- which is all that is required of them." --Stanley Coren, "What do Dogs Know?" "I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter." --Nicholas Petreley "Oh gee, look at that: Pictures of a tipped-over truck and the cops and the firemen and everybody running around in a tizzy. We see it in the opening tease for the news, we see it just before each commercial. We see it and see it and see it and then they finally show it to us -- huh? Again, there's not much more to it than what we've already been shown innumerable times. And it turns out the truck tipped over on a remote highway in Ruritania or something. But those news devils got us to wait, didn't they? They got us to sit through the stupid-ass weather radar and the loudmouth, tiny-minded sportscaster." --Tom Shales "Some people sell razors. Other people sell razor blades. Microsoft sells shaving cream containing 5% hair growth hormone." --sigwinch on kuro5hin.org "Almost every girl on these tapes is from Georgia or New Orleans or some Southern area where it seems there is a very high likelihood they were born in a trailer, live in a trailer, or have existed in a trailer for some period of time. How exactly did we come to the point in modern civilization where very young women have decided to sacrifice their personal dignity for cheap beads?" --Mr. Cranky reviews "Girls Gone Wild" "What part of `death camps' don't you understand, comrade?" --Liam Stitt, on the dangers of communism "In the process of pulling the PC out from its home-office corner I noticed the utter rat's nest of cables coming and going every which way. Cleaning it all up, I discovered at least three power supplies that are no longer attached to anything. Go figure." --Dan Gillmor "The split between biologically alive and having a life has to do with the way you perceive time, and the way you perceive your information environment. I think people used to think time was a constant, like gravity or the speed of light, but as it turns out it's entirely relative. Used to be that if a person was alive for 71.3 years, they got to experience all 71.3 years of life. Now people aren't experiencing their 71.3 years of life anymore, and I think they're maybe freaking out." --Douglas Coupland "I used to have this fantasy that I'd go into a coma for one year, and when I came out of the coma I'd have a year's worth of magazines and pop culture to catch up. It'd be like information crack and really fun, but now every day is like waking up after a year of having been in a coma." --Douglas Coupland "200 years ago people assumed life would never change from year to year -- the way birds and animals see time, as something eternal. Modern people see tomorrow as this place that will be totally and utterly different from today, with new hairdos and clothes and architecture and ideas and weather." --Douglas Coupland "Name the two dominant activities of life 20 years from now." "Going shopping, and going to jail." --Jennifer Cowan & Douglas Coupland "You never hear an animal saying, like, `Hey, I think I'm going to move to San Diego and change the color of my fur and lose 20 pounds and change my identity.' I think human beings are the only animals that think they can change who they are simply by moving to a different place." --Douglas Coupland "I don't think it was uncalled for-- you're a dick. I'm not representative, I DEFINE it, bitch. I'm the president, co-founder and creative director for the company and we didn't get where we are by taking lip off of snotty little web surfing fucks like you." --Tim Miller, blur.com "So this was the second time in a bit over a year that I've been fingerprinted. The first time was when I got the liquor license, and now because I'm a licensed security guard. Note to self: wear gloves when doing crimes. At some point during the training, some shitworm tagged our door. How's that for ironic? The only people in the club were a dozen security guards, and that's when Mr. `Shamrock Express' chose to autograph our building." --jwz "You don't want to stay in school and get your education?" "Nah. I'm white. Nobody'll mind." --Sam & Josh, "The West Wing" "We have no confidence in this fire commissioner's ability to run this department. It's not running because of him. It's running in spite of him." --Peter Gorman, on FDNY Commissioner Thomas Von Essen "Michael Heath, executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine, .. said at the same hearing, `While sex is a good, God-ordained human activity, lust is not.' In Heath's world, it's okay to get it on as long as you don't enjoy it." --Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix, 28/06/01 "It's not like we were being gentlemen or anything. They were hot! Plus, *hello!* Mariners tickets! Man.. I felt like the luckiest dude alive." --Darrin Haus, quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 28/06/01 "But the mistake was to run Bush against everything people hated about Clinton rather than against the subset of things people hated about Clinton but that Bush probably wouldn't repeat. After all, every successful politician doles out favors, makes contradictory promises, relies heavily on pollsters, and raises money with mercenary zeal. Clinton just did them more effectively than most. What most successful politicians don't do is have kinky flings with over-eager interns and then lie about it when they're outed (though there seems to be more of this going around lately)." --Noam Scheiber, New Republic, 26/06/01 "And after being asked by the [Washington] Post to explain the difference between Clinton's political activities and Bush's, Fleisher ingeniously pointed out that Clinton personally read polls and made political decisions while Bush lets Karl Rove read the polls and make his political decisions." --Noam Scheiber, New Republic, 26/06/01 "Bet you twits think you had fun last night, eh?" --Jay, to me "Male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user-interface problem." --Daniel Underwood, "Microserfs" "I was really hoping they'd still have the haircuts from the old days, but it was not to be. In fact, the only member of Flock of Seagulls now that was in the band back then is lead singer Mike Score. And he's gone from having a big swooshy wave of hair to being one of those guys who wears a baseball cap and ponytail to convince you that he's not going bald. Someone should tell these guys that the cap-and-ponytail is exactly as convincing as a combover. Someone should also tell them they look silly. But I guess he doesn't look any siller than he did in 1982, because that's not physically possible." --Monty Ashley "Marriages don't break up on account of infidelity. It's just a symptom that something else is wrong." "Oh, really? Well, that `symptom' is fucking my wife." --Jess and Harry, "When Harry Met Sally" "[O]ver a decade ago, it was easily predictable that the folks in Redmond lacked clue, especially when it came to networking, cooperative networking, and security. Today, it is more clear than ever. Unfortunately, when it comes to computers, the people making the decisions seem to know little enough about them that they accept `Our car will allow you to do over 300 MPH' as a good thing, ignoring the fact that the car lacks the ability to turn away from a brick wall, or that the car requires that you buy all of your gasoline from the dealership." --Owen DeLong, nanog "Don't you have anything better to do than interrupt a perfectly good Satanic Kiddie Porn editing session with this drivel? I have a crack habit to pay for fer crying out loud. My God-dammned wife isn't bringing in enough cash whoring to keep me stoned enough, and I can't move any of my `My Horny Pony' shows to save my life. Well, I have to go, I have 3 Korean women and 2 big, black ex-cons waiting for me in bed." --Charles Herbig, sdm "There's a lot of spammers out there that just fell out of a tree and haven't learned that 'ietf@ietf.org' is not a good target..." --Valdis Kletnieks, nanog "Because `Our Song' deals with the daily reality of many girls under 17, it has been rated R by the MPAA, so that they can be prevented from learning from the movie's insights." --Roger Ebert "The Buddha said that desire is the root of suffering but that is because they did not have PCs or Flash animation in the 5th century BC." --Philip Greenspun "When everyone you employ is a pinhead, you are very grateful for a cushion." --Philip Greenspun "Nobody cares what my answer is anymore." --Bill Clinton, on why he's happy to answer questions these days "It's Giuliani time!" --"Shaft" (2000 version) "Kirk's mind raced as he quickly assessed his situation: the shields were down, the warp drive and impulse engines were dead, life support was failing fast, and the Enterprise was plummeting out of control toward the surface of Epsilon VI and, as Scotty and Spock searched frantically through the manuals trying to find a way to save them all, Kirk vowed, as he stared at the solid blue image filling the main view screen that never again would he allow a Microsoft operating system to control his ship." --Mike Rottmann "With echoes of `fee, fi, fo fum' still hurtling about the cavernous dining chamber, the giant, breath reeking of l'orange, narrowed his crimson-rimmed eyes till they appeared as slits carved haphazardly into his beefy, liver spot-stained visage; set his prey back upon the floor; drummed his bulding, sausage-like fingers against his substantial belt; and signaled to the small boy that he was free to leave, at which point Jack, scurrying toward the towering open door before them, realized he'd learned the lesson a lifetime: sometimes, there were advantages to being Canadian." --Julie Stangeland "Her low-cut, revealing gown was black -- black like her heart, although not really because everyone knows that a heart is just an internal organ whose natural pigment is pink just like the lungs, except, of course, for the lungs of a long-time smoker which may be as black as her low-cut, revealing gown." --Jennie Powell "`Excuse us, a psychic? That's right, one of Regan's guests was James Van Praagh, a so-called spiritual medium (though to judge by the picture on his Web site, we'd say he's a small rather than a medium). As the Skeptic's Dictionary explains, Van Praagh says he talks to the dead -- and the dead talk back. By providing a forum for such occult claptrap, Fox manages to insult anyone who believes in God, science, or both. And this is hardly an isolated incident. Fox has put at least three other psychics on the air in the past two weeks alone.' We are getting a communication from Edward R. Murrow. It's fuzzy, but something about spinning in his grave." --Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 25/07/01 "Movies are not stocks, of course, although with tickets now $10 in many Manhattan theaters, shares of Lucent begin to look like a bargain." --Tim Race, New York Times, 30/07/01 "The notion of `cultural identity' is dangerous. From a social point of view, it represnets merely a doubtful, artificial concept, but from a political point of view it threatens humanity's most precious achievement: Freedom. ... The concept of identity, when not employed on an exclusively individual scale, is inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure." --Mario Vargas Llosa, "Foreign Policy" (Jan/Feb 2001) "Never underestimate any shark, and never overestimate any human. These are two life forms that were never meant to fraternize. It's telling that the supposedly advanced species is the one initiating eye-to-eye contact." --Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald, 12/08/01 "The sole source of public apprehension is the toxic overload of Britney Spears Pepsi commercials on the broadcasts, which is probably doing more for Coke than the discovery of half a mouse in a Pepsi can." --Art Thiel, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10/08/01 "I have an electric car. It's great, I love it. It's in the shop right now; I'm having a gas engine put in it." --Kevin Nealon, PI, 17/08/01 "It's the virus, stupid!" --David Ho, MD "The basis of animal activism is, at heart, a hatred of scientific education. It is profoundly anti-intellectual, and seeks to view the world in terms which are basically spiritual and magical. Any discipline which opposes magical thinking is anathema to animal activism, and there is hardly anything more threatening in this context than a science which seeks to apply technology and mathematics to biology. Talk of the pain the animals feel is a smokescreen. Animal activists have cats that eat mice in their yards, and they don't really give a damn about the pain the lab mice feel. What they care about is the pain *they* feel when they have to take statistics to get that degree they need to buy that house in that suburb which used to be the woods or fields outside of town. What they really want is a world where such a thing (statistics, bioscience) does not exist, and is replaced instead by shamanism. Understand that, and you'll understand what they're really about." --Steven B. Harris, MD "The difficulty of science is that it requires attacking IDEAS, without paying so much attention to character." --Steven B. Harris, MD "The First Amendment guarantees the right to assemble and speak out freely. It does not guarantee sharing air time with Ricky Martin and Celia Cruz." --Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald, 22/08/01 "Hmm, nice. We have a toxic, unstable, corrosive, detonatable fluorinated oxidizer and an unstable detonatable fuel. Is there any way we can make it radioactive?" --Doug Jones, sci.space.tech "[T]he Affleck character defines the Internet for Jay: `It's a place used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography together.' This is a much more sophisticated view of the Net than we find in high-tech cyberthrillers, where the Net is a place that makes your computer beep a lot." --Roger Ebert reviews "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" "Horror movies require an existential age. We live in an age of irony. Therefore, we laugh at what we should dread." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 26/08/01 ".. probably a decent little public service for the little redneck punk-ass kids in the square states." --chickeninthewoods (hopelessly out of context) "My primary comedy influences are George Carlin, Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and Carrot Top. Well, all except Carrot Top, who'd I'd like to sit next to Carson Daly and Kane (from VH1) on a busride to the bottom of the sea." --Wil Wheaton (yes, *that* Wil Wheaton) /* Black September stuff */ "So the guys who took over the aircraft were gay feminist Islamic extremist pagan abortionists? I'm surprised there were enough of those in the world to seize a *single* plane." --Rob Hansen, rec.arts.sf.fandom, reacting to Falwell's ignorant remarks "We have the site, the World Trade Center site, the rescue action, and the rebuilding of the fire department, the people. The remaining people deserve it. They love it. We're going to rebuild. We'll come out of this, someday." --NYC Fire Chief Daniel Nigro, 20/09/01 "AVWeb is one of the few places I can say this where people will understand: The sight that upset me most on September 11th was seeing something as beautiful as a 767 being used as an instrument of evil." --Bob Thomason, writing in AvMail, 19/09/01 (and boy, do I understand) "There will be no more curbside check-in, [Norman Mineta] said. I suddenly imagined a group of terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping coffee, also watching CNN and laughing hysterically: `Hey boss, did you hear that? We just blew up Wall Street and the Pentagon and their response is no more curbside check-in?'" --Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 13/09/01 "When the filmmaker Michael Moore speculated about the terrorists' motives, for example, his rambling ruminations touched on missile defense, America's withdrawal from the Durban conference on racism, and even our rejection of the Kyoto accords on global warming. Evidently, Moore believes we are being attacked by European diplomats." --Jesse Walker, Reason magazine, 21/09/01 "I went to the ballgame Friday night, took in Dvorak's `New World' Symphony at the Kennedy Center Saturday, took my girls out to breakfast in Washington Sunday morning, and then flew to the University of Michigan. Heck, I even went out yesterday and bought some stock. What a great country. I wonder what Osama bin Laden did in his cave in Afghanistan yesterday?" --Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 25/09/01 "America's Time of Trial: Who fucking wants some? You? Do you? How 'bout you?" --The Onion, 26/09/01 "Islamic law states, `An eye for an eye.' By that logic, we should one of Osama bin Laden's skyscrapers. Problem is, he doesn't have any, because he lives in fucking underground caves." --The Onion, 26/09/01 /* Back to other things.. */ "You mean you're going to throw me in the water and see if I can swim?" "No, you don't get it. We're about to throw you off a cliff and see if you can fly." --Bob and Larry, "The Big Kahuna" "I give this episode 3 Ben-Wa balls and a dildo." --Dave Ragsdale, hopelessly out of context "Some assembly may be required." --IKEA goes for an understatement award "Recommandations complementaires: Us et coutumes -- eviter les remarques sur l'accent quebecois." --the French government offers advice for visitors to Canada "After the tragic events of last month, it is natural to wonder if this weekend's Emmy Awards have lost some of their meaning. The answer is no. The Emmy Awards are just as meaningless as they were before the tragedy." --Aaron Barnhart, tvbarn.com, 05/10/01 "Damnit, Hermes! Just jump already! Stop hogging that healthy liver!" --Farnsworth "Archie is not fucking Mr. Weatherbee!" --Banky Edwards, "Chasing Amy" "Bitch, what you *don't* know about me I can just about squeeze into the Grand Fucking Canyon. Did you know I always wanted to be a dancer in Vegas?" --Silent Bob, "Chasing Amy" "Saving Queen Elizabeth: A platoon of time-travelling WW2 American G.I.'s join forces with Shakespeare to rescue the Queen from a Proto-Nazi prison camp." --David Horsey offers filmmaking advice, Seattle P-I, 21/03/99 "This is the widget you've been waiting for! It slices! It dices! It can vote in Florida!" --ArsDigitans get silly "I heard somebody mention that it's going to take a miracle for us to win this. I've seen miracles. I've seen the birth of two of my children. I actually held them during birth. Those are miracles. We just need to go out there and play like we're capable of playing. We need to have confidence to execute what we've been doing all year. Let God worry about miracles." --Tom Lampkin, Seattle Mariners, 19/10/01 "Well, sometimes a story needs a submachine gun." --Raymond Carver "There is only one person in this world who could make us not want to watch beautiful and talented Junkyard Wars co-host Cathy Rogers.. and that person managed to get himself on the only show where we get to see her. Don't try to tell us that Satan wasn't involved in that deal." --teevee.org "Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with a rare and mysterious animal: A WebTV post that makes sense!" --Ben Ramm, alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners "After being mocked in the tabloids for forecasting a return of the American League Championship Series to Seattle for Game 6, Piniella had a rare team meeting before Game 3 Saturday. Instructions were given on the heretofore hidden art of, as the Mariners manager put it so vividly Thursday, kicking Yankee asses." --Art Thiel, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 21/10/01 "The Florida Legislature, which has been merrily cutting taxes for the last three years, is now staring at a monstrous $1.3 billion shortfall in revenues. This means that the state soon won't have enough money to operate, which is what happens if you're foolish enough to slash taxes at a time when government's income is dwindling." --Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald, 21/10/01 "During the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, Time magazine columnist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that the United States shouldn't get too smug about its women's rights record, considering that American women are still far from achieving parity with men in business or politics. Of course, women who risk being murdered by their ``dishonored'' relatives for the crime of being raped could only wish they had something like the glass ceiling to worry about." --Cathy Young, Boston Globe, 17 October, 2001 "[Ichiro Suzuki] is the only guy who can single to the catcher. Consistently." --Bret Boone, Seattle Mariners "At One Police Plaza, a few blocks from Ground Zero, NYPD officer D. Cruz stands guard outside the front door of police headquarters. He is the second checkpoint before entering. In these times of high security, he carries a standard-issue rifle. Baseball is on his mind, but not like most in his city. `The Mariners better win,' he said, `because I'm not a Yankees fan. I'm a Mets fan.'" --Dan Raley, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 22/10/01 "``As a company, we've grown closer,'' says a pilot in one United ad. I think he meant to say, ``As a company, we've grown SMALLER.'' In another scene, one of those guys who works on the tarmac (so indicated by his bright yellow vest) says, ``As long as we stick together, nothing can come between us.'' Well, other than the frequent pink slips, of course." --Aaron Barnhart, TV Barn 22/10/01 "You are mean and nasty and I'm taking my toys and going home. Except for when I'm coming back." --Phyl Behrer, making fun of suicide usenet posters "It is important for people to remember that when they send their problems to the political system to be solved, that that political system can be described in two words -- Gary Condit." --P.J. O'Rourke "Well, libertarians don't take a third of our income and run the entire world (badly). Although meetings of libertarians can be pretty hilarious when you get cornered by a high school algebra teacher who wants to talk about privatizing the sidewalks for an hour. Although for all I know he might be right." --P.J. O'Rourke, on why libertarianism isn't quite so stupid "Years ago in an advice piece you wrote on romance, you advised that the most important step in a new relationship was ``getting her drunk.'' Does this advice still hold in a new century?" "Not only do I deny ever saying that, if you ever tell my daughters that I did say it, I am coming after you with my duck gun. PS: One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling." --interlocuter & P.J. O'Rourke "``13 Ghosts'' is the loudest movie since ``Armageddon.'' Flash frames attack the eyeballs while the theatre trembles with crashes, bangs, shatters, screams, rumbles and roars. Forget about fighting the ghosts; they ought to attack the sub-woofer." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 26/10/01 "To produce antimatter, by all methods currently known, the basic requirement is lots and lots of electric power. Whether you get that power through controlled fusion or by a very large number of trained hamsters running in exercise wheels doesn't matter." --Henry Spencer, sci.space.tech, 24/10/01 "The worst thing about being an actor is not working. The second worst thing about being an actor is knowing that your whole life could turn around in a second, with one phone call. No wonder so many of us end up dead, or in a cult." --Wil Wheaton "I'm saying somewhere out there is a registered voter who's thinking, ``You know, I thought I really liked this Bartlet fellow, but now that I see he's in favor of *fire*..''" --Jed Bartlet, The West Wing "I hate to admit it. I know it's wrong to find joy in other people's misfortune, but I, for one, am glad the prime minister grabbed that buddy by the neck. And after watching buddy's press conference, I hope he does it again soon. In fact, just as he was accusing the prime minister of permanently staining democracy for all time, I was hoping Chretien would pop out from behind the curtain and go for round two." --Rick Mercer "Uh, did they just say they re-implemented telnet in Java?" --me "What is that?" "It's ``Chicken Soup for the Soul.''" "You should read ``Tomato Sauce for Your Ass.'' It's the Italian version." --Tony Soprano & Irina, "Knight in White Satin Armor" "The farcical failures of these two cabinet secretaries are not merely those of public relations -- though Mr. Thompson often comes across as a Chamber of Commerce glad-hander who doesn't know his pants are on fire, and Mr. Ashcroft often shakes as if he's not just seen great Caesar's ghost but perhaps John Mitchell's as well." --Frank Rich, New York Times, 27/10/01 "In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have had that sixth glass of pinot noir, seeing as I had planned to pump some iron at the gym afterwards. It's always a bit embarrassing when you have to scream for someone to come and life the barbell of your chest. Passing out in the sauna isn't too cool either." --Chris Wright, Boston Phoenix, 01/11/01 "I used to work with a tech who said that he could tell when the X-band system was running (this was a system with around 1MW erp and a fairly tight beam), by the sound. He said he could hear the microwaves. We did an A/B test and he actually could tell. He described the sound that he heard. It turns out the effect was caused by his skull expanding due to internal tissue heating effects. Moral of the story: Don't put your head in the feedhorn." --Scott Dorsey, sci.engr.radar+sonar "Take the trauma scores, for instance. Trauma scores are *wonderfully* predictive rules for determining survival. Except, of course, when they're not." --me "You are now entering a rights-free zone. You are assumed guilty until proven innocent. Shut up. No questions. Your body and property are ours to search. Disclaimer: Our procedures may be pointless. In case of a hijacking, be prepared to tackle a terrorist." --David Horsey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer cartoon, 16/11/01 "While I have a great deal of admiration for Star Trek's quest to boldy explore the limits of politically correct casting (our next crew will consist of a 7 year-old Asian boy, an old man in a wheel chair, a monkey, and Louis Farakhan), I really don't see why they should include the Wesley character in any further Star Trek endeavors. ``Whiny and annoying'' is *not* an ethnic grou (despite what some Republicans may believe)." --Whelp, plastic.com, 14/11/01 "And that was the day that we knew, oh! In the world there is a new disease called AIDS. I thought surely this will be the greatest war we have ever fought. Surely many will die. And surely we will be frustrated, unable to help. But I also thought the Americans will find a treatment soon. This will not be forever." --Dr. Jayo Kidenya, Tanzanian physician, quoted in "The Coming Plague" "Your actions don't support your words. Otherwise you'd just start your own root zone with no NS RR's except those to your own TLD's, and you'd publish it to like-minded people, and you would not have a ``fallback'' domain that ends in .ORG, and you would not concern yourself with reachability by folks who follow the actual DNS specification and thus recognize only a single unique namespace. In other words, the fact that I am able to listen to your rants is proof that you do not believe what you're ranting about." --Paul Vixie, nanog "It's not MY obligation to unsubscribe from all the things I never subscribed to." --J. Levin "> There cannot be freedom without equality and here we do not have > equality. Yes, we do. All NSPs have the equal rights to filter out your posts. One might wish that more would do so." --Giovanni Greco and Arthur Rubin, news.groups "Giovanni, please mail me some of your money. I think we're not equal, and therefore you're suppressing me." --Neil Crellin, news.groups, in the same thread "If you are confused about the diffraction sharpness loss, I refer you to all the physics textbooks that I read and didn't understand at MIT." --Philip Greenspun "If the silly policy of a Ramadan pause had been adopted, the citizens of Kabul would have still been under a regime of medieval cruelty, and their oppresssors would have been busily regrouping, not praying. Anyhow, what a damn-fool proposal to start with. I don't stop insulting the Christian coalition at Eastertime." --Christopher Hitchens, The Guardian "Hello? Hello? There's a message here: It's democracy, stupid!" --Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 20/11/01 "Hello, I'm U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. When you rob a bank, you're not just comitting a federal crime. You're taking away the checking and savings accounts of hardworking Americans who could use that money to buy toasters and new luxury automobiles. And when you commit murder, you're forcing police and investigators to spend valuable time they could be enjoying with their families searching for clues and evidence. And when you broadcast a baseball game without the express written consent of the commissioner's office, you're depriving Major League Baseball of rights fees that it could then, in theory, turn around and donate to a charity in your community. And that's the *real* crime." --Philip Michaels "If there is a difference in latency between MPLS and IP switching you need to beat your vendor, and/or change vendors." --Leo Bicknell, nanog "I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you." --Roy Croft "Keeping up with the literature is essential for being a leader in medicine. Yet who has the time? We suggest, therefore, that good pretending is an essential clinical skill that should be taught in medical school, practised during patient care, and honed at CME courses. Ironically, faking your way through the literature may also be a near-optimal use of time given that research is rarely definitive. Most studies won't stand the test of time, and realizing this encourages rational clinicians to ignore them all." --Redelmeir DA, Shuchman M, Shumak SL. How to read clinical journals: IX. Sounding like you've read the literature when you haven't read a thing. CMAJ 1998;159:1488-9 "Although it is plainly evident that Patterson and Weijer's conclusion is not supported by evidence and argument, they have broached an important issue and are to be commended for that. And since they have established a precedent for publishing unsubstantiated opinion in CMAJ, I feel at liberty to do the same." --Yeo M. To boldy go: We have to look beyond the Simpsons for a true medical hero. CMAJ 1998;159:1476-7 "In this paper we presented 8 techniques that may be of help in dealing with a colleague who is, well, um, wrong. If employed properly and used judiciously, these techniques may help avoid embarrassment for all and might even allow you to convey some valuable information. Perhaps one day hospital disciplinary committees might also adopt some of these points of diplomacy. Furthermore, by using these approaches, you may be able to create for yourself a reservoir of good will among your colleagues. This may prove to be of immense help when *you* make a mistake." --Shumak SL, Redelmeier DA. How to read clinical journals: X. How to react when your colleagues haven't read a thing. CMAJ 2000;163:1570-2 "Critics suggest that our study participants were too drunk to recognize or report symptomatic ischemic episodes and didn't live long enough to develop coronary atherosclerosis. Our response: Rubbish! Critics also contend that the high rate of adverse effects makes the routine use of either agent inadvisable; however, we feel these are minor problems given the fact that study subjects liked the taste of their medication and had more fun during the study period." --Innes G. Cost-effectiveness of beer versus red wine for the prevention of symptomatic coronary artery disease. CMAJ 1998;159:1436-6 /* "Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science," by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt */ "We refuse on principle to take sides in the dispute over the literary canon, in the fights over affirmative action, in the question of whether or not it is well to have ``studies'' departments for subpopulations with a history of victimhood. It's not that we don't have opinions on those questions: We do; but they are simply not what this book is about." --p.9 "Though of little historical consequence, these demonstrate how the habit of assuming that ``society'' is a tractable category, analytically and politically, had become ingrained in Western thought. They demonstrate almost equally well the rough equation of a more ``scientific'' social order with a more egalitarian one, and the opposition between a view of the world informed by science and one occluded by stagnant tradition. This observation takes on particular poignancy when we consider the curious intellectual trajectory of Karl Marx, an epochal thinker who eagerly admired science in the abstract, envied the inevitability of its logic, conscripted its prestige for his own polemical purposes, and still managed in the end to misunderstand it thoroughly." --p.22 "These arguments do have moral force. They have to be reckoned with (although not to the exclusion of countervailing ideas) by anyone concerned with equity and the redress of historical injustice. Nevertheless, the aroma of sour grapes is in the air. The urge to redeem slides easily into an eagerness to debunk for the sake of debunking. New candidates for veneration -- writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, historical figures, non-Western ``ways of knowing'' -- are put forward not for what they are but for what they are not -- white, European, male." --p.26 "We are unkind enough to wish to compare the academic left's recent attempt to advance perspectivist accounts of science to the ``cargo cults'' that flourished on some Pacific islands in the wake of World War II. During the war, a number of technologically primitive tribal cultures acquired new neighbors in the form of military bases of the warring powers. What chiefly impressed the indigenous peoples were the airstrips where giant machines would periodically land to disgorge vast quantities of goods, some of which found their way into native hands by barter, as gifts, or simply be being left over when the armies departed. After the war, sects grew up around the idea that the airplanes, with their loads of precious goods, could be induced to return by magical means. In some places, the tribesmen built their own ``airplanes'' with the idea that ritual might transform them into the real thing. In our view, the model of ``science'' constructed by perspectivist theorists is a lot like the wicker-and-mud mock-up of a C-47 built by the cargo cultists. It bears only a vague and superficial resemblance to the real thing, and its internal logic is laughably different. Still, those who built it hope, with the aid of their theoretical magic rituals, to gain control over the real thing." --p.40 "``Consumerist society'' means a society in which -- brace yourself -- there are lots of things to buy, and lots of people who want to buy things. And this is just so horrible. We shouldn't want DVD players -- no, we should all pack into overheated theaters and watch scratchy prints of the movie the theater owners want us to see, at a time of the theater owners' choosing. We shouldn't want computers, or extra sweaters, or peppermint-chamomile hand lotion, or cellphones, or leather briefcases, or that nice lamp that would go perfect with the chair in the living room, or a food processor that saves a few minutes of chopping onions by hand, or an Elmo doll for the baby, or a camcorder that lets us record the days of our lives for our descendants, or *anything* besides flat bread, a Koran, a change of socks and underwear, a gun to kill Jews and Monsanto executives, and maybe some new batteries so we can listen to Mullah Omar's cassette-tape lectures on the need to beat women for wearing toenail polish." --James Lileks, 10/12/01 "Good Lord, I'd say the entire bio is the definition of trouble; it's a wonder they didn't find her in Tora Bora with furry legs and feral eyes, clutching a copy of ``Steal This Plane'' by Atta Hoffman." --James Lileks, 13/12/01 "Well then, you might need to use the incredibly futuristic and cutting edge technology of the hot air balloon." --Christopher Jones, sci.space.tech "The good news is that there are many federal agencies working on all of these issues. The bad news is that there are many federal agencies working on all of these issues." --Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, R-Tenn, on bioterrorism response "Greed will win over fear. There's a point at which a fare is just too good to resist." --Richard Copland, American Society of Travel Agents "I hate it when you go somewhere and 9 million people are staring at you." --Britney Spears (cry me a river) "We all need to take a deep breath and think about being a Bush daughter and having that cross to bear. I'd go out and have a couple of drinks too." --Julia Roberts "My second day as chairman, a plane I lease, flying with engines I built, crashed into a building that I ensure, and it was covered with a network I own." --Jeff Immelts, new head of General Electric, redefines a bad day "Submarining is probably safe in this war, since Al Qaeda's depth charges probably consist of a guy with a lit stick of dynamite in his pocket and a cinder block in his arms." --James Lileks "I love to be stalked! Lonely, desperate humor fan seeks same. Age, weight, race, sex unimportant. I like to play hard to get, so don't be discouraged by my unfriendly attitude or my calls to the police. Hurry! I'm waiting for YOU!" --Modern Humorist gets mean "One should be careful to use the right tool for the right job -- for example, one should never use a big wrench to pound in a nail, when a little wrench will work just as well..." --Gordon D. Pusch, sci.space.tech, 16/01/02 "There was something about the moment that was highly American: the guy was North African, speaking heavily accented English, young, cheerful, completely plugged in, and happy to talk about the device to the curious North Dakotan. I'm sorry, I forgot -- this is a racist country that grinds people down into small soul-crushing jobs." --James Lileks, 15/01/02 "I do not mind Elmo. I think he's actually cute -- although of course if I had no idea what Elmo was, and he turned up in the basement, I would beat him with a shoe." --James Lileks, 25/01/02 "I'm saying you got a darkness -- you, Tim Bayliss -- you got a darkness inside of you. You gotta know the darker, uglier sides of yourself. You gotta recognize them, so that they're not constantly sneaking up on you. You gotta love 'em, 'cause they're part of you, because along with your virtues, they make you who you are. Virtue isn't virtue unless it slams up against vice. So consequently, your virtue's not real virtue. Until it's been tested.. tempted." --Frank Pembleton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "I didn't know Crosetti at all. I didn't want to. What ticks me off is that I'm beginning to realize how little I know about myself. I don't know enough about who I am or how I do the job that I do to ask the right questions from my fraternal brothers to figure out what one of us is about. I keep trying to remember Crosetti. His desk was 3 feet away from mine and I can't even remember if we said any more than ``hiya'' to each other for a whole entire year." --Stanley Bolander, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Okay, here's the deal: I'm going to take Mary home right now. Then I'm going to find Lewis. And when I find him, I'm going to kill him. I'm a very clever detective and I will kill him in such a way I will not be caught. He will simply disappear. And like all sphincters before him, he will not be missed." --Frank Pembleton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Munch? Oh. You're the one who took too many drugs and damaged his brain. I'm so sorry." --wedding guest, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Bayliss threw me out. Lewis says I'm wrecking his marriage. Everybody hates me. I'm going to go live in a cardboard box." "Just try and get one from a Frigidaire 28ZGE. They're the biggest." --Brodie and Howard, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Well, you're a girl. A woman. A woman. A woman with wild, red hair. I can't stay with you." "What are you afraid of? I'm going to chain you to the bedpost and cover you with butter?" --Brodie and Howard, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "From the tracks on his arms, the large caliber wound, the proximity to a heroin market.. I'd say it was a heated dispute about the symbolism of red and blue in eighteenth century French romantic poetry." --John Munch, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Okay, show of hands! Who here saw what happened and wants to step forward and cooperate fully with the police officers investigating this crime? [pause] Hep. That's it. Our work is done." --Meldrick Lewis, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Arrested once, hey, you're entitled. Arrested twice -- it's Baltimore, home of the bar brawl. But arrested three times for assault in one year.. maybe it's time for you to start admitting that you have emotional control problems." --Frank Pembleton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Okay, we got multiple chest wounds, an open door, and a weapon halfway across the living room." "It's going to be hell writing this one up as a suicide, I'll tell you that much." --Pembleton and Cox, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "New rule! If we have a suspect in custody, it's murder. And if the suspect is unknown, it's the worst case of suicide I've ever seen. Huh? That's my new rule. I think it's going to make us all very happy." --Meldrick Lewis, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "So does the violence make them stupid, or does the stupidity lead to violence?" "Well, that's chicken-and-egg semantics. The important point is that we win certain cases because our brains are repositories for intelligence, and their brains are day-old banana pudding." --Bayliss and Munch, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Stupid killers are a gift from God." --John Munch, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Oh my God, you quit smoking. You committed this madness without consulting me first? Are you nuts? You're selfish. You ex-smokers are more relentless than AA or the Moonies or those born-again vegetarians. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not gonna let you bully me about this. I don't wanna hear about how your lungs are pinker than a newborn baby's or how you're free of mucus and phlegm. It's all a bunch of nonsense. It's all a bunch of crap. I don't want you counting the number of days you've got without a cigarette when you're supposed to be watching my back. You put my life on the line. I'll put in for hazard pay. No, you know what? I'll put in for another partner." --Beau Felton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Finding love is like solving the perfect crime. You look at every shred of evidence, you talk to every witness, follow up on every lead, but more often than not, what wins in the end is pure, dumb luck. And you, my friend, are just not lucky." --Frank Pembleton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "You know, every day I get out of bed and drag myself to the next cup of coffee. I take a sip and the caffeine kicks in. I can focus my eyes again. My brain starts to order the day. I'm up, I'm alive. I'm ready to rock. But the time is coming when I wake up and decide that I'm not getting out of bed. Not for coffee, food, or sex. If it comes to me, fine. If it won't, fine. No more expectations. The longer I live, the less I know. I should know more. I should know the coffee's killing me. You're suspicious of your suspicions? I'm jealous. I'm so jealous. You have the heart to have doubts. Me? I'm going to lock up a 14 year-old kid for what could be the rest of his natural life. I got to do this. This is my job. This is the deal. This is the law. This is my day. I have no doubts or suspicions about it. Heart has nothing to do it anymore. It's all the caffeine." --Frank Pembleton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "See, the thing is, we the Murder Poh-leece, and we have but one given, and that is that everybody is a liar. Me? See, I rely on the most sensitive machine there is. [taps heart] See, it knows when somebody is lumpy and when somebody is telling the truth. And this. [taps head] This is smart enough to trust what this can detect. And I would much rather take you out to dinner than this machine here." --Meldrick Lewis, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "If a murder is committed in Baltimore and no homicide detective takes the call, did that homicide actually occur?" --John Munch, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "We're like a real family: Opinionated, argumentative, holding grudges, challenging each other. We push each other to be better than we are. That kind of thing doesn't happen at barbecues or ball games. It happens on the job, where it's supposed to. Putting down a murder -- the work itself is the most important thing. What we do is important. We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves and you're not gonna ever find anything like that anywhere, not in LA, or patrolling the grounds at Disneyland." --Frank Pembleton, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "I remember when I was working as a beat cop. Our job was to clear the corner. No big deal. Just tell people to move along, and most of the time, the police will tell you to move along, that's what you're going to do, you're going to move along. But every once in a while, there's gonna be some knucklehead fool, wanna keep standing on your corner talking trash. And he told me, don't you ever, ever let some knucklehead stand on your corner and shame you. 'cause once you've done that, you're done as a beat cop. So what he suggested I do was that I take out my billy club and smack him upside the head so hard, that everybody who heard it knows who had the last word." --Meldrick Lewis, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "I've spent my life trying not to feel sorry for myself. See, Adena Watson, Janelle Parsons, Tonya Thompson.. every murdered child, every abused child, I understand, 'cause all those children are me. Yeah, I know what that's all about. You see, my uncle, my father's brother, I was five years old, and he would follow me into the bathroom and he would close the door and he would take my hand in his and he would... after he was done, he would smile and he would say what a good boy I was and oh, yeah, shh... and this went on for years, years. My -- my parents, they couldn't understand why I cried at every holiday, every family get together. So when I was eight years old, I told my father what had been going on, and I remember it was a struggle to get those words out and my father just stared at me and he asked my why I was lying. And he was my father and he was supposed to protect me, Frank, but he didn't. See, for him, whatever was happening, it was like an inconvenience. See, to him, I wasn't a real person, and he never saw me, he never really looked at me. Ever." --Tim Bayliss, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "You remember when you were young, and the most exciting thing that you thought of was that girl in your French class. You hoped she's talk to you, let you walk her home, maybe even let you hold her hand." "Every time you looked at her, you got embarassed." "You couldn't imagine sleeping with her. All you could think about was reaching down for her hand, weaving your fingers together, have her palm touch your palm. We forget what that was like. We have sex, get married, fight, get divorced; somewhere along the line, we forgot how wonderful it is to hold another human being's hand. What happens to us that we take things like that for granted?" "I don't know. We get older, I guess." "We get older, forget who we used to be, what we used to believe in. Love, peace, the Colts would always be in Baltimore. Here's to all the Helen Rosenthals of the world." --Munch and Kellerman, "Homicide: Life on the Street" ("Kaddish") "We don't close this case, it's on me. I should've known it wasn't a suicide. I let the case get cold because I believed the worst of Beau, I believed he was capable of killing himself, and I hated him for that. For his being weak, selfish, everything I hated about him when we were partners. But with Beau, it was always when I was hating him the most, that he would turn around and do something incredibly, stupidly, sweet. Just got to hate him all the more. .. Don't tell anyone I cried." --Kay Howard, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Without metaphors, what are we left with? We have a riddle, surrounded by a mystery, wrapped inside an enigma, and stuffed inside a body bag." --John Munch, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Who the hell are you? You didn't hold their hands when they were screaming and hollering all night long. You didn't mop up any mucus or their diarrhea or their vomit. You didn't clean the pus out of anybody's sores, or throw your body across theirs to keep them in bed when they were thrashing around in their death throes, with bile and blood gushing from every orifice. You didn't comfort their families who will never, ever, get over their loss. Detective, how dare you presume to speak for my patients? They didn't need you then, and they sure as hell don't need you now." --Dr. Roxanne Turner, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Oh, I get it. You don't feel anything at all. You're the type of guy that two weeks from now, you'll be stopped at a traffic light and all this will hit you and when it hits, it'll hit hard. It'll hit you so hard your heart will burst into a hundred pieces." --Al Giardello, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "What I learned in Baltimore is that people get murdered for all kinds of reasons, but a dead body is still stone cold." --Kay Howard, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself." --D.H. Lawrence, "Self Pity" "At the rate public education is bending to the zephyrs of political correctness, I've no desire to pay $100,000 for her to come home on break, show off her skull studs and tongue tattoos, and lecture me on the historical atrocities of the gynophobic oligarchs -- especially when I can buy a dose of daddy-dissing theory at the local university for a fifth of the cost." --James Lileks "I will ask him for my place again; he shall tell me I am a drunkard! Had I as many mouths as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unblessed and the ingredient is a devil." --Othello, II.iii "Well, after all those unfair things I wrote about Weaver and Legaspi, I realized that it really *was* because I was straight and didn't get it. So now I'm on the Down Low and my horizons are expanding (along with other things)." --Dave Ragsdale "The cashier ran the items over the scanner: one pound of meat and six pounds of ketchup. He said nothing. Thank God." --James Lileks "Eminem raps about busting gay men's heads; he gets Grammies. Ashcroft admits that his religious beliefs don't sanction homosexuality, and he's a hatemonger. Obviously, Bush appointees have to learn to rap." --James Lileks "My two greatest enemies, Ross: Rachel Green and complex carbohydrates." --Will, "Friends" "Philip was often a huge pain in the ass, but at least he had vision. Allen Shaheen probably couldn't manage his way out of an empty parking lot, and brought along a cast of losers." --aD Castaway, fuckedcompany.com "If you want to hire schlubs off the street who took a ``Teach Yourself How To Rub Java Manuals Between Your Legs in Perl For Dummies in 24 Hours,'' you have to use the software everyone else uses. If you're smart, you can use any software you want. If you make it a point to hire smart people, they won't have a problem learning your system, and if they're smarter than you, they won't have a problem improving your system. The downside is there are a lot of fucking schlubs, and not a lot of smart people." --EYE RED WIB 2 JO, fuckedcompany.com "As for the ``very smart'' VCs, Greenspun said watching them try to run the company was like watching some grade school kids sit in a cockpit of a 747 flipping switches and trying to get the plane to fly... at least they didn't crash aD into any tall buildings." --Tom Fly, fuckedcompany.com "The twisty maze of perl scripts that keep the web site updated continues to grow. I fear someday it will become conscious and strangle me in my sleep." --jwz "Oh, a few shows have managed to eke out a meager existence on the WB. The Steve Harvey Show and The Jamie Foxx Show lingered on the prime-time schedule for years, thanks to a combination of inertia and fear of Kweisi Mfume pulling up in front of network headquarters with a megaphone and a busload of picketers." --Philip Michaels, teevee.org "Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest." --Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and overman -- a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore." --Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" "And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair, or not." --Soren Kierkegaard, "The Sickness Unto Death" "Heaven lasts long, and Earth abides What is the secret of their durability? Is it because they do not live for themselves That they endure so long?" --Lao Tzu "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." --Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason" "There are only two ways in which we can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: Either experience makes these concepts possible, or these concepts make experience possible." --Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason" "That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" "I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breath or love or twich again. So wouldn't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity, the universe has spared us this moment." --Bertrand Russell "Some would ask, ``How could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil?'' They have missed a greater conundrum: Why would a perfect God create a universe at all?" --Miriam Godwinson "Therefore a wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him." --Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince" "The wicked have told me of things that delight them, but not such things as your law has to tell." --St. Augustine, "Confessions" "We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains." --Li Po "For Ms. Spears, an outstanding question is whether she's a little better or a little worse than Mariah Carey in the acting arena -- and, considering the additional exposure to both that would be required to make such a determination, that's one contest I don't want to judge." --James Berardinelli reviews "Crossroads" "Yes, in 1995 people often got drunk at work; it was part of the culture, don't you know. Their narrow ties would become askew, their shotglasses smeared with Brylcream, and everyone had a slight hack from smoking ten Pall Malls over the steak-and-liquor lunch. Then they'd all go back to their Madison Avenue offices and run something up the flagpole, just to see who might salute, and then everyone would go home, have a martini, kiss Doris Day, and sleep in pajamas in small separate beds." --James Lileks, 26/02/02 "There's a reason why I like Rolie Polie Olie as much as my daughter -- when Olie feeds Precious The Chicken some of the vitamins reserved for the larger animals, and Precious grows to gigantic dimensions, Pappy does not hobble over and give a lecture about genetically engineered feed." --James Lileks, 26/02/02 "As little early babies are apparently wont to do, she fell asleep in the middle of the feeding, requiring me to spend half an hour muttering nonsense and repositioning the bottle. Adult equivalent: You've just finished an entire pizza. A giant shows up, wakes you from your nap, and attempts to shove another slice down your throat while singing tunelessly." --James Lileks "It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ``And this, too, shall pass away.''" --Abraham Lincoln "Wrongful death?! Look, if a waiter comes out and shoves a chunk of meat down someone's throat, I'll buy into wrongful death, but otherwise they just cook it and serve it. They're not responsible for your ability to eat." --Carey Gregory, misc.emerg-services "Reader, beware: This section is highly mathematical. Well, maybe not _highly_ mathematical, but it's got a bunch of symbols and scary-looking formulas. You have been warned." --sci.crypt FAQ "And after you and your team and all the other field folk and background support personnel have done all this work and sweated off pounds and pounds and burned out your transmissions and climbed five flights of stairs (up both ways) and then had to track down the junkies who stole the heart out of your ambulance... the surgeons get all the credit." --Danny Burstein, misc.emerg-services "With cash like this, who's going to argue?" --Martian leader, "Futurama" "I'm now down to five pieces of nicotine gum a day. According to the Master Plan in the nicorette box, I should be down to none by now. Screw it. I like my gum. A friend at work says he chewed the stuff for two and a half years. Why not? Beats smoking. And here's my nasty little secret: at the end of the evening, sometimes I sit outside and chew a piece reeeeeally quickly: whee! Bzzzzz. Living on the edge, I am. Now, if I can just stop mainlining heroin. It's after a meal that you really want to shoot up, you know. And the media images! They're everywhere. You watch those old movies, everyone's shooting up. Saw an old Bogie film the other night; he's tying off Bacall's arm, slapping the vein, giving her the spike. It's quite romantic." --James Lileks "Back during the last abduction, the Zeta Reticulans told me personally that it was a project MOGUL balloon and not a crashed alien spaceship. First off, no Zeta Reticulan spaceship has been shot down or otherwise crashed in over eight thousand years. Second, they shot down the balloon themselves. It was blocking their view of Venus, so they let have it with an Explosive Space Modulator. The wreckage fell near Roswell, and the ZR's let it lie. And I work in a Secret Air Force Research Facility, so when I go public with my understanding of these things I am automatically credible. So There." --John Schilling, sci.space.tech "Yes, it's true immunization weakens the immune system. That's how it works, don't you know. Getting the real bug is better, as a few million people discovered to their delight in 1918 and 1919. As you lie in bed wheezing, and feeling the virus inflame the covering of your brain so that your head feels like a Kasava mellon, do remember that your immune system is thanking you. Perhaps then you'll start to vomit. Pay it no mind! It's mother nature, who only has things to teach you. Things you won't learn here on the net, but can only get by real experience. Yes. Call the wife to bring you your children. Time for School of Hard Knocks 101." --Steve Harris, sci.med "I remember a candida expert some years ago who was of the opinion that people with systemic candidiasis had something wrong with them, and that most ordinary people had candida colonizing them all the time, and that it was harmless. To prove this to his students, he drank a pure culture of candida. A few days later he was in the ICU, candida growing out of everywhere. If it hadn't been for amphoterrible, he'd have been a dead duck." --Steve Harris, sci.med "It's been 22.3 years.. AIDS is finally funny!" --"South Park" "Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity. Fashion is good when it helps you look sexy, but it's bad when it makes you feel stupid or fat because you don't have a Gucci dog bowl and your best friend has one." --Tom Sachs "Provocation has a bad name these days. Howard Stern is a provacteur. Listening to him is like having a beer for breakfast. He's a little bit lowbrow, but he gets people thinking. And that's a good thing." --Tom Sachs "Steve Knopper, I am just about fed up with you and your gosh-darned opinions! Its bad enough that you're a liberal, but do you have to keep using your First Amednment rights to express your crazy views all the time? And if you were half as smart as you seem to think you are, you'd know that everyone in the country is not a conservative Republican, and SHOULD be, Mr. Smarty-pants! I am deeply offended by the existence and expression of views other than my own, and it just galls me to think you can just keep churning out this stuff every day. If this were truly a free country, you and your kind would be immediately jailed, stripped of all your rights, and silenced forever so you couldn't ever question the status quo or authority again! And if the Conservative movement in this great nation finally gets around to dominating all aspects of life here, that's exactly what'll happen, so just you don't get too cocky, Mr. I Know It All! Hmpph." --attributed to John Birch "Someday, we'll look back on this.. and wonder how the fuck I managed to be so goddamn stupid." --me "It's not much of a ``theory,'' per se, since it's pretty self-evident, but it's still funny." --me "I'm so shallow. It's like discovering the girl you have a crush on has a hotmail address.." --me "I'm not complaining, mind you. But I think we need to give up pretending that I understand what I've been doing for the past few years. Because it's eminently clear to me that I don't." --me "The gist of it is obvious enough: I'm right now, I always was right, and the rest of you idiots can shut up." --me "A tip for the criminally minded: Try to keep your dope in the truck. Don't let a big bag fall out and end up on the median of Interstate 5. And for heaven's sakes, don't go running after it as a federal agent drives by." --Seattle Post-Intelligencer "As previously noted: The problem is that (present administration excepted) people are not rats." --Alwin Hawkins "I, of course, have never been in a strip club. I'd be too embarrassed. Lots of poorly medicated people running around with hardly any clothes on, their bottoms hanging out in the breeze. Bleary-eyed people with cups in their hands watching them in the middle of the night. It'd be like paying to go to work." --Alwin Hawkins "I think TiVo's just taunting me at this point. It knows I can't live without it, so it feels free to mess with my head." --Monty Ashley, teevee.org ("Stupid TiVo! Bad! No!") "It's apparently selling well, and good for him; I always enjoy seeing class warriors kicked into the 38% tax bracket." --James Lileks, on Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" "Discontent: the sign of a Serious Person. If you're Deep and Real and Concerned with the way things are, you're *pissed off*. Unless you're angry about taxes, race-based government policies and the inefficiencies of the public education system, in which case you are an Angry White Male who has to pick gravel out of your knuckles every night. Remember: the Right is full of people who are Resentful and Angry, but the Left is Pissed and Discontented, which is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT." --James Lileks, on Michael Moore "We have ``the masses,'' that big doughy heap of sodden proles, heads bent from their daily lashing by The Man, wondering if they'll have enough left over after they've paid off Consolidated Coal and Gruel so they can pool pennies with the rest of the tenants of State Housing Block 432 and buy a copy of Moore's book -- they say a light shines from the pages when you open it! Brother Sam was reading it at the Borders before the police beat him with clubs for browsing, and now he can cure your chilblains just by describing the book's typeface!" --guess who? "Modern animists believe that trees should be spared because of their age, which confers some sort of wisdom. By this logic, Strom Thurmond should be reelected until he actually falls apart in his chair." --James Lileks "Spring training is usually a time for sleuthing phenoms, new studs and budding heroes. Certainly, Mariners springs for more than a decade have been lit up by Juniors, Units, A-Rods and Ichiros. But reserve a moment of appreciation for the prevailers, the guys everybody missed, the ones who truly savor the meaning of standing on the Yankee Stadium mound in the playoffs, yet still delivering the improbable." --Art Thiel, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 21/03/02 /* sent to server: 22 March 2002 */ "Death comes on every passing breeze, He lurks in every flower; Each season has its own disease, Its peril -- every hour." --Reginald Heber "We are a Usenet site; we herd ones and zeros around inside metal boxes. We are not the police, Feds, etc, even if we may be seen in proximity to black helicopters from time to time - _mere_coincidence_, that. The police herd perps (ok, alleged perps) around inside boxes with metal bars." --Dahniel Baker, supernews.general "From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no man lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea." --Algernon Charles Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine" "I was called for jury duty, but I didn't want to go. My friend said, ``Why don't you write something inappropriate on the form, like `I hate Chinks.''' But I don't want people to think I was racist, so I just filled out the form and I wrote, `I love Chinks.'" --Sarah Silverman (sort of, anyway, and I think this is hilarious) "Conspicuous flaming idiocy is often treated by bloggers like a shank of meat thrown into Blofeld's piranha pool.." --James Lileks "Rational observers (of the Republican persuasion) agree -- the Enron scandal is a non-starter! Sure, this was a company which paid less in taxes than the average McDonald's counter person, which was able to rewrite key regulations to its own liking, and which helped formulate the Bush energy policy, such as it is -- *AND* whose CEO encouraged his employees to keep buying Enron stock when he KNEW it was about to tank, leaving them with nothing but the money they might make selling their old company memorabilia on eBay.. but come on. It's not like anyone had sex with an intern here.." --Tom Tomorrow "Libertarians are valuable, even if you don't agree with us, because our minds don't turn to pliable mush when someone suggests that our lives will be safer if only we'll just expand the police power. We ask whether it's worth giving up liberties for safety, whether the liberties involved are ``essential'' and not to be forfeited, and whether we'll even get any safety in the exchange. We think about whether we want those powers to be in place when the emergency has passed and the inevitable has set in. We think about whether we'd want those powers in the hands of those who might use them against domestic political enemies, for petty purposes of their own. In other words, we ask unpopular but important questions." --Virginia Postrel (growl!) "A man behind me expresses his relief that the backwards rubes from Arkansas have been replaced by worldly sophisticates from Texas." --Tom Tomorrow, on the 2001 inaugural ceremonies "He who corrupts a system's police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system's police stations." --Samuel Huntington, quoted in The Atlantic "Terry isn't very good at Usenet yet. He's _great_ at mindless arrogance, though, and at being too dull to check his work before making a fool of himself again in public; you have to give credit where it's due." --Kent Paul Dolan, news.groups, on Terry Austin "Playing rules lawyer on Usenet is like watching Captain Hook wanking." --Brian Mailman, news.groups "It is easy to dismiss Michael Moore as a self-aggrandizing, intellectually lazy gasbag. He is all that, and less." --J. Peder Zane, Raleigh News & Observer "The tone of the writing is typical for those who approach commercial culture determined to show us sheep how we're really being led by wolves. (Vampire wolves. Vampire *Republican* wolves.)" --James Lileks, 19/04/02 "Why is Osama's blog not listed at Warblogger Watch? There is no more pro-war blog than ``osama's bin bloggin.'' Heck, I started the whole war back on Sept. 11 with my sneak attack on America. Well, okay, I didn't start the war -- it has been a low-intensity conflict for decades -- but I did take it to a whole new level of violence. And daily I'm exhorting Muslims everywhere to take up arms and crush the infidels. So why am I not listed at the anti-war Warblogger Watch blog? Arafat tries to convince me not to feel slighted. After all, Pudge tells me, the WarBloggerWatch is designed to undermine the warblogs of our enemy. But Osama still feels snubbed." --"Osama bin Laden" "``The complacency of fools with destroy them!'' --Proverbs" "``Get out of my house!'' Um.. Exodus!" --"King of the Hill" "From a brief scan of their marketing PowerPoints, it looks as though the Java/J2EE folks have realized that interfacing to other languages will be necessary. They want everyone to learn and use CORBA! That should provide us all with many years of entertainment." --Philip Greenspun "The kind of person who thinks [Thomas Mann] a great writer and [P.G.] Wodehouse not a great writer is precisely the kind of person who would believe that professional credentials are necessary to make such judgments." --Roger Ebert "Brian Linse wants to know when I'll criticize Wayne LaPierre for comparing gun-controllers to Osama bin Laden. Right now. Comparing gun controllers to bin Laden is just silly. He wants to blow Jews up, not disarm them." --Glenn Reynolds "Really, if NBC wanted to really innovate, it would be better off taking its three new shows, throwing them into a blender, and hitting ``liquefy.'' Give me a show about a talented young TV producer who moves in to his father-in-law's suburban home to work on the lowest rated cooking show in Miami while pitching woo with a risque grandmother. That way, I have only one rotten show to assiduously avoid next fall instead of three. And I don't have to find nearly so many synonyms for ``banal'' in my thesaurus." --Philip Michaels, teevee.org "You know why they call it community college? Because anyone in the community can go: crackheads, prostitutes, drug dealers.. come on in! Community college is like a disco with books: `Here's $10. I'm gonna get my learn on!'" --Chris Rock "Ain't that some sad shit? A black man failing black history? That's sad, 'cause you know fat people don't fail cooking." --Chris Rock "The only thing I know about Africa: It's far. It's far, far away. Africa is like a 35 hour flight, so you know that boat ride was real long." --Chris Rock "You think I've got three guns in my house 'cause the media's outside? Oh shit, Mike Wallace! Run!" --Chris Rock "You know what's so sad? Martin Luther King stood for non-violence. Now what's Martin Luther King? A street. And I don't give a fuck where you are in America, if you're on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there's some violence going down." --Chris Rock "They shouldn't even call it insurance. They should just call it `in case shit.' I give a company some money `in case shit' happens. If shit don't happen, shouldn't I get my money back?" --Chris Rock "Nothing more racist than an old black man. You know why? Because the old black man went through some real racism. He didn't go through that `I can't get a cab' shit, he *was* the cab. White man just jump on his back: `Main street!'" --Chris Rock "A thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code." --The Programmer's Little Red Vade Mecum "As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his ``chair'' in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." --New York Times, 1920 "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house." --Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" "Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month." --Wernher von Braun "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation." --Johnny Hart "In a world where civil disobedience was treated with toleration, that might be a good strategy. But we're in a world where disobedience is treated with felony convictions. The idea that you are going to get lots of civil disobedience against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just crazy. You're going to get lots of prosecutions and people going away to jail. The cost of disobedience has become too high, and I'm not sure it's a viable strategy anymore." --Lawrence Lessig "It's been a bad month when I get excited about being able to do laundry. Wheee! Soap!" --me "Just remember their creed: sticks and stones may break my bones, so we need to enter into international treaties with nations whose main industrial product is sticks-and-stones delivery ststems. We need to find a common ground with countries that put sticks and stones on the national flag, and sing the national anthem ``Our Sticks and Stones Shall Break Their Bones'' at mass rallies celebrating the President's 37th year in power. If you shoot someone who's shooting at you, you're worse than he is -- why, you could have run away. If these people had their way, the only Purple Hearts ever given would be for wounds toe to the back and the foot." --James Lileks "These people live in mud huts made waterproof with cow dung, yet they make more sense than any Berkeley sociology professor. The Masai truly rock." --Tim Blair "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me." --Pete Conrad, Apollo 12, 115:22:16 MET "If a Jamaican drug dealer falls in an alley and there's no one to hear him, does he make a sound?" --Det. Meldrick Lewis, "Homicide: Life on the Street" /* sent to server: 7 June 2002 */ "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." --Brillat-Savarin "Dude: Less blood, more fruity drinks." --Turk, "Scrubs" "He was up all night with a high fever, cramping and crying -- oh, my bad. Punching the wall all manly and angry-like." --Turk, "Scrubs" "Carla totally gets me. That's why I've been systematically trying to drive her away." --Cox, "Scrubs" "You know, I did get it there, Bob, and at first I just threw it away. But then I decided that wasn't a grand enough gesture so I made a replica of you out of straw, and then I put my lab coat on it with your memo in the pocket, and then I invited all the kids in the neighborhood to come over and light it on fire and whack it with sticks." --Cox, "Scrubs" "Well, I haven't had my coffee yet, so I'm finding it hard coming up with a more colorful way to say ``who gives a crap?'' Actually, that wasn't half-bad." --Kelso, "Scrubs" "You'd better watch it, Bambi. You don't want a hundred pound white girl mad at you. You'll flinch every time you hear a Range Rover." --Carla, "Scrubs" "I was just wondering how you comb your hair so the horns don't show." --Cox, "Scrubs" "GOOD MORNING DR. FALKEN. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR BGP?" --James Smith, nanog "I could get all hurt and defensive and whiny about this, and call Rabbit a bad name that rhymes with ``slitch'' and say that she may be having fun now but there's the kind of girl men like to have fun with and the kind they want to marry and we'll see how much fun she's having in ten years when everything starts to sag, and oops! I've stumbled into a Lana Turner movie again. Instead, I'm just going to be hurt, because I love Rabbit. .. And I want to say that just because some people write for NPR, and some people are about a million times finnier than me, doesn't mean that some people couldn't be a little kind once in a while. And if I should happen to be found floating in, say, the Hudson River, with, say, a laminated card stapled to my lifeless carcass reading ``Take that, Rabbit!'', I just hope that some people will take that valuable opportunity to rethink their life and the way they treat people. That's all I'm saying." --Megan McArdle "For fun English majors, you want the kind of English major who is an English major because being an English major leaves them more time for fun. Unexpected things happen when you are around this kind of English major; spontaneous, amusing events, like contests to see who can eat the most jalapeno peppers or get the most phone numbers from doctors in the intensive colon care unit, sudden trips to Mississippi to see if it's really there, or applications to business school." --Megan McArdle "Spoken word artists, poets, visual artists, and several playwrights -- a powerful coalition of the ignored and irrelevant -- have signed a petition decrying the War on Terror. Three things about this: Is there nothing more impotent and egotistical than the modern activist petition? Nobody pays attention. Nobody cares what these people think. A petition signed by the United American Corner Grocers would carry greater weight. Point two: Ever notice how the Artistic Wank Left, who constantly invoke the greatness of the Common Little Citizen, somehow imagine that their own views are of such importance that a petition bearing their names will shift US policy? Give it up, Ed Asner." --Tim Blair "Hollywood never flags in its lack of invention; on July 3, we'll get Lil' Bow Wow in ``Like Mike'' as a small kid who stars in the NBA, with many of the same jokes appropriately adapted. What's next? A dog that plays basketball? Only joking. We've already had that one." --Roger Ebert reviews "Juwanna Mann" "Our so-called freedom of scientific inquiry unshackled from religious strictures is a sham -- Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church, wasn't he? Didn't every American moon shot end in failure because we believed the sun revolved around the earth and we failed to account for the gravitational pull? Stupid Pope!" --James Lileks "Did you know ``hashish'' comes from the Arab word for ``assassin''? Seriously. I read that in this book. They used to smoke it before they went out and waxed a dude. They'd get like totally baked and see paradise and then go take care of biz-niz. It makes you wonder if the Arabs an' all call liquor ``Johnny Walker'' 'cause that's what the Mafia dudes drink before they do a hit. Or maybe they call it ``hitman.'' Like, ``dude, we got so fucked up on hitman last night there was this car on fire outside and I was like, whatever.''" --James Lileks "You remember that famous, horrible photo of the young girl fleeing naked from a napalm attack in Vietnam. You may know that she was treated in Saigon by an American-staffed hospital. She survived, was held up as a heroine by the Communists, sent to Cuba to be educated -- and then she defected *to the West* for freedom the first chance she had. Describe, in as many words as necessary, the likelihood of a neighbor of Israel giving intensive medical care to Gal, granting her citizenship, appointing her to an international human rights board, and writing stories -- for domestic newspapers -- drenched in shame for the trauma she suffered. Assume, for the sake of argument, that Gal is alive." --James Lileks "Yeah, I voted for Bush. Almost wish I hadn't, 'cause now I have to lie." --James Lileks "``You do realize we are pressing sexual harassment charges against you because you used the phrase `digitally inserted' when talking about a woman of gender.'' ... ``Go ahead. I'll tell the board I saw you in the campus bookstore trying to put a copy of Ann Coulter's `Scandal' on the shelves.''" --James Lileks "Hey hey ho ho! Your intra-procedural hijacking of the grievance modality structure with its systemic appeal to patriachial notions of male-defined Logic has got to go!" --James Lileks "It's one of those forms of gentle poetry that runs through our lives, and makes the more important issues of living bearable. You have to have moments that give you pleasure with your children or your hobbies or your games; life can't all be big issues and heart surgery. Something has to bring joy into the day. I've always thought that the six months during the baseball season there was something in the day that wasn't there the other six months in winter. It was not that you had to listen to the game, but that you could, if you needed it." --Thomas Boswell "The fun of recalling something that you saw five days ago or five years ago or a lifetime ago -- knowing that it's there to be plucked back into your life in an instant -- oh, God, that's rare." --Daniel Okrent "You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there -- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads -- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love." --Donald Hall "Baseball is an odd little game that has nothing to do with moving an object from side to side on a rectangular playing surface. In fact, if the foul lines on a baseball diamond were extended indefinitely, the playing field would represent infinity itself, and baseball would be symbolic of something esoteric that escapes me right now, and George Will, master of erudition and the infield fly rule, would have to come in and write the rest of this column." --John Levesque, Seattle Post-Intelligencer "Bob, this is Gene, and I'm on the surface; and, as I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come -- but we believe not too long into the future -- I'd like to just say what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." --Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17, 170:41:00 MET "Owning newspapers is not the same thing as forcing them to share the owner's political or personal DNA. Firing people for honestly and professionally doing their journalistic jobs and only because they haven't echoed your deep wisdom is brutal, mischievous, short-sighted, and silly. And no, I didn't call Bob Rabinovitch, the current emperor of the CBC to see what he thinks of this, mainly because I don't have to and he doesn't care, which is incidentally, public or private, the way it must be." --Rex Murphy "Last on the list is somehow almost always contriving a clash with the police who are there in force only because previous protests have shown that it has become more and more necessary to be there in force. Having set up the clash, there is then the ritual and pious whine about police fascism and how it is only the actions of a few that are coating the protest, and how it is so awful that the corporate media only cover the violence. It's a game, and as I say, it's grown stale. But it's a costly game, whether in Calgary or Seattle, Quebec City or Genoa. Cities close down, some get thrashed, millions are spent and normal citizens wonder sometimes whether it's safe to go about their own city. And for what? So a cluster of dubiously enlightened activists can flash their rear ends in front of a Gap store and then complain about the coverage of their uncoverage?" --Rex Murphy "The anti-globalists are all theatre and no play, all tactics and no plan, attitude by the bucket, ideas by the gram. They know everything that they're against but they haven't the slighest clue finally what they're for. They make a really big deal about democracy which would be a whole lot more convincing if it included a dose of respect for the cities in which their stage their confused and often violent protests." --Rex Murphy "Most people can take being disliked. What really jams their sprocket is being taken for granted. The assumption by someone else said you can always be counted on to go along for the ride, or second the motion; that they don't even have to ask, is one of the great exasperations of the human condition." --Rex Murphy "So when you count parking and the drink and the sandwich, it cost me about $180 to sit around the airport all day. That's funny, I know. Hilarious. But it gets better. Where's my luggage?" --James Lileks "While the technology for most big-rocket *subsystems* is still around, in a very real sense, the technology of the big rockets *themselves* has been lost and would have to be reconstructed." --Henry Spencer, sci.space.tech "It's kind of funny how often the longer people spend in alt.config, the more people want to turn alt.* into the Big Eight while still loudly claiming that they don't like the Big Eight." --Russ Allbery, news.groups "It was an OK first day, I guess, but I really missed shoveling snow then coming into Tech Square to stare at a UNIX box until 3 a.m." --Philip Greenspun, on spending time in the Caymans "Yeah, it's what, 5.5 K/9, right there with Glavine and Lowe. Who both also suck." --Derek Zumsteg, on Jeff Weaver's strikeout average "I've always thought that the phrase ``blogging will be light today'' is akin to saying ``the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today.'' It's still free ice cream." --James Lileks "There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't stay still, So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest." --Robert Service, "The Men Who Don't Fit In" "The HIV muppet is brand new, and will be first introduced to South African Sesame Street viewers. Adding this element of reality to the popular children's series raises troubling questions. How will the character's contraction of the disease be explained? Sharing a needle with Oscar in his squalid street dwelling? Sex can be ruled out -- Muppets don't have genitals. A blood transfusion doesn't make much sense; where would any donated Muppet blood come from? Each Muppet is the only living example of its species. The fluid oozing through Big Bird's avian veins is unlikely to sustain whatever the hell Elmo is. Do these brutes even have blood? From what I've seen, most of them don't even have eyelids. Or normal lifespans. The only Sesame Street fatality so far is old Mr. Hooper, whose 1982 cancer death was brought to you by the number 4." --Tim Blair "Yes, it's wrong to steal, and yes, the music companies have legally binding copyrights. But the reality is that it's not good business to annoy both your customers and your suppliers -- especially if you're an intermediary whose added value is questionable." --Esther Dyson "If he starts to win, shoot him!" --Darph Bobo "Gaaaaa! How can anyone put up a Web site and not update it continuously for my personal amusement?" "Yeah. Some overworked chump voluntarily maintaining it in his spare time should be fired for this." --"Zits" "Right now, I'm thinking about holding another meeting.. in bed." --McBain "And thank you most of all for nuclear power, which has yet to cause a single provable fatality. At least in this country." --Homer Simpson "Oh, great. That's just perfect. A stupid asteroid is on its way to kill us all. Way to go, space." --Tim Blair "Given the current facts, would you really favor imperiling thousands or even hundreds of thousands of American civilians because people in Washington didn't get their paperwork right? If you were gravely ill and rushing to the hospital in an ambulance, and you found out that the vehicle's registration had lapsed and the driver didn't have a license, you would certainly have a beef with the ambulance service. But would you really tell the driver to pull over and let you out on the street?" --Brink Lindsey "Part of the reason why flight testing seems to have picked up is that people have more confidence that they can get the design in the right ballpark before flight, using modern computing. (This confidence may or may not be justified...)" --Henry Spencer, sci.space.tech "Ron, each time I drive past the closed paper mill in Rome, I'll think of how you and your evil Japanese masters cost that city thousands of jobs, and I'll get angry. Then I'll realize that the entire west side of the city no longer smells like rotten eggs, and my anger will pass." --Charles Oliver "Since when did the word ``opinion'' come to mean, ``a baseless statement that should not be criticized as baseless''? It's like once someone waves the opinion flag, they want to be insulated from someone pointing out their thoughts are based on inadequate observation or faulty logic." --Ben Ramm, alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners "You always hear, ``it's a beautiful book.'' Is it really? I have been reading it on and off for the past few years, and I can tell you, it is the most tedious thing I have ever endeavored to read. What keeps me going back is that there is some really weird shit in there." --Adam Thrasher, on the Bible "Of course, there is the Livermore space-debris-removal technique. ``Some people have the same answer to every problem.''" --Henry Spencer, sci.space.tech "A life is not important except in the impact it has on onther lives." --Jackie Robinson "I am pleased God made my skin black. I only wish He had made it thicker." --Curt Flood "All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it." --Richard P. Feynman "The things I saw beggar description. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda." --Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1945 "In Canada, the answer to every problem is a tax. I swear to God, if you ask a Liberal cabinet minister, ``What's the square root of seven to four decimal places?'' he'll say, ``I don't know.. but I'm pretty sure it's a tax!'' ``Who was the chancellor of Germany in 1930?'' ``TAX!'' ``What's the scientific name for the bridge of your nose?'' ``TAX!''" --Colby Cosh "I placed the ball decidedly in the reader's court. If the reader decided to pick up that ball and smash it repeatedly against his forehead, well, that was his decision to make and none of my concern. If I tell you that you can find some damn stinky stuff in an open sewer, don't blame me when you jump on in and discover that I was telling the truth. You made your own decision; deal with it." --Nathaniel Fairbairn, former editor, The Gateway (UofA student paper) "The TCPA/[Palladium] designers don't much care whether the person who has custody of the machine trusts it. They've been shipping untrustworthy software for years. The thing they care about, probably the only thing they deeply care about, is whether _they_ can trust the machine while it is in _somebody else's_ custody." --John Denker, cryptography@wasabisystems "Into love and out again, Thus I went and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen: Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head?" --"Theory," Dorothy Parker "When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." --"The Peace of Wild Things," Wendell Berry "Free speech in Canada? Ha ha ha! What are we, *Americans* or something?" --Colby Cosh, 21/08/02 "There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold The arctic trails hvae their secret tales That would make your blood run cold. The northern lights have seen queer sights But the queerest they ever did see Was the night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee." --Robert Service /* new since 22 August 2002 */ "In the thick of the Spiro T. Agnew scandal of 1973, Justice Stewart, a Cincinnati Reds addict, asked his clerks to send him batter-by-batter bulletins on a Reds playoff game while he was on the bench hearing oral arguments. During the afternoon, one note read: ``Kranepool flies to right. Agnew resigns.''" --David J.W. Vanderhoof "For decades Canadians have been hamming it up with souvenirs for sale to tourists -- teepees, Mounties, rugged mountainscapes -- but it's only been since around 1980, just over a century into our nationhood, that we began selling ourselves to ourselves. Beer is still the most ruthless product category when it comes to manipulating Canadian imagery to further its own aims. And this isn't a put-down -- good for them, I suppose. As well, in the 1990s, Disney, of all entities, was given the franchise to license all RCMP spinoff merchandise. But this is iffy territory. We have to watch out, because our reservoir of myths is far smaller and far more fragile than those of some other nations. Once the supplies dry up, they dry up. What happens then is that you start recycling myths, which turn into cliches; and before you know it, history has turned into nothing more than clip art." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "In a similar vein, on December 26 we have a holiday called Boxing Day. Whenever Americans ask what Boxing Day is -- and I've been asked this maybe a dozen times -- I tell them that it's the day after Christmas, and that there's no ritual or costumes or anything else attached to it -- it's simply called Boxing Day. And the Americans always think that I made up the holiday on the spur of the moment." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "My father has a cache of tinned food he takes with him every time he goes hunting or fishing. Part of his cache is this one can of baked beans that quite honestly must predate the moonwalk. The thought of it sitting in his cupboard at this very moment is disturbing on a deep level. It's just sitting there, but what's going on inside it -- is it in permanent stasis? Is it breeding? Is it petrifying? Would eating it kill him?" --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "One sunny afternoon in the 1990s, Canada's prime minister was wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses. This was in Ottawa, on Parliament Hill, and he was walking from wherever to wherever, accompanied by a scrum of a crowd. During this walk, he was pestered one too many times by a persistent heckler who'd been on his case for a long time. The prime minister snapped, and a photo of him strangling the heckler went out on the wire services. The day it appeared in newspapers, I got three e-mails from Americans saying, ``Wow! It's so great that you have a prime minister who wears Ray-Bans and strangles people. I wish we had a president like that.''" --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "Visit the US where they pussyfoot like mad about tobacco (THE SURGEON GENERAL THINKS SMOKING MIGHT NOT BE THE BEST IDEA, BUT THAT'S ONLY ONE PERSON'S OPINION), or Europe, where they don't bother with anything at all, and it makes me kind of proud that Canada's telling the truth." --Douglas coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "In the 1970s one of the first things we learned when studying geography is that Canada lies between the USSR and the United States. World War III was slated to begin above the Canadian north -- that never seemed to be negotiable when decoding the strategies of both superpowers -- and thus Canadians were stuck with this grim geographical situation. Because back then there was no Star Wars or any other pre-emptive missile deterrent (if such a thing is even possible, I mean, these suckers are *fast*), the best Canada and the US could do was to construct distant early warning (DEW) systems, which could at least offer a fifteen-minute warning so that we could counterattack and ensure the end of civilization as we headed for the bunkers. Clever! And now that the Cold War is over and a new one has begun, it turns out the Soviets' defence line was essentially made of papier mache and their missiles were directed by McDonald's french-fry cooker computers." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "An Austrian TV journalist was in Vancouver doing a piece last year, and I was there to help out. He said to me, ``I hear that everybody in Canada is named Doug.'' I said, ``Ha ha ha, that's just a media myth.'' And then the hired three-man crew arrived, and they were all named Doug, and suddenly there were four Dougs there, and I had to drink a glass of cold water to make sure I wasn't dreaming, and in some intangible way it felt as if I were doing my national duty. I was then asked if Canada had a stereotypical girl's name. I had to think about it, but if we do, here it is: Kathy." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" (I disagree with this point. I think our stereotypical girl's name is Sarah.) "For centuries Canada has been an escape route for Brits who want to ditch the idicoy of the class system. Of course, once they're here, they pygmalionize into SuperBrits: accents move up a few notches, and gin is displayed prominently in liquor cabinets. I once assumed that English-Canadians would be thrilled to meet a fellow expat, but after a few disasters, I've realized this is the last thing they want. (``Did you see the way so-and-so was poshing it up in there? `Oh, look at me, look at me -- I'm so BBC2!''')" --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "The larger point is that while everyone has their blackfly stories, Canadians have *more* of them. At their most benign, flies are an annoyance. (To be fair, we can throw in mosquitoes and chiggers here, too.) They're a buzzing chorus that blankets the nation. Collectively, it feels as if nature is gossiping about us and not saying very nice things. At their worst, and in the most clinical sense, blackflies are the blood-sucking spawn of hell, intent on eating your flesh and laying their eggs inside of you so that the maggots can finish the job. They can wreck a trip to the outdoors faster than a forgotten can opener or wet matches. They want you. They are lying in wait for you. You can't run." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "The mania for straight lines reached its ridiculous apex in downtown San Francisco, where a grid was slapped onto a near-cliff -- We will dominate nature! Give us cable cars!" --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "To get cosmic here very briefly, the French-Canadian version of the French language is what you'd get if you took a band of village folk from the seventeenth-century Norman coast and stranded them on an asteroid for five cecnturies. Quirks ensue. Just look at Australia and its English. I think it's the same deal. And ask the Quebecois about their swear words -- they're very strange, and I'm not going to say much beyond that." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice. Canadian teams playing within the NHL are, in effect, a microcosm of Canada's ongoing process of trying to remain a country -- battling constantly not only against Americans but against other teams from within their own country. It's ugly and yet it's civil; and most tellingly, it's the one place where people still sing the national anthem." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "These days, if you're a Canadian over the age of twenty who looks even remotely middle class, you'll be fiercely grilled when entering the US, more for labour issues than potential terrorism or anything else." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" (oh, so *that* explains it) "Compounding the oddness of the ever-shrinking dollar is the government's continued assurance that there's nothing to worry about and that (this is so sick) the shrinking dollar is *good* for us, because it allows us to slut away our natural resources at discount prices." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "Moral? Americans want and need energy. Badly. And for the first time in years, Americans have remembered that: a) Canada exists, and, b) it has energy worth having, and then c) not only can they take the electricity, but they might as well take the water while they're at it." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "The dirty secret of the Canadian economy is that we don't actually *do* anything with what we reap -- we ship it somewhere else, and then other people apply brains and intelligence to it and make it something more valuable -- and sell it back to us." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "A lot of Canadian literature deals with small town or rural life and/or the immigrant experience. Metropolitan novels with characters who don't discuss the family barn or their country of origin are nearly non-existent. CBC national radio also feeds this trend, with a hefty number of programs ending with a moral along the lines of `I think we all know there's a small town in each of us.' The reason for this is simple: Outside of a handful of largish cities, Canada is a nation of small towns, far more than most other industrialized countries. Many Canadians are only one generation away from the farm. I remember standing in the receiving line at my brother's wedding in Winninpeg. After shaking about the tenth hand missing umpteen digits, I asked one of the Winnipeg relatives what was the deal. The one-word answer? Threshers. Everyone thinks small towns are folksy and cute -- and mostly they are. But having visited relatives who live in small towns, I acknowledge that you sometimes need to substitute ``bizzare'' for folksy, and ``scary'' for cute. I don't always have a soft-focus view of small towns -- there are too many of them in my ancestry to be totally comfortable." --Douglas Coupland, "Souvenir of Canada" "Prediction: within ten years, Homeland Security will be known as ``HLS.'' It fits on a Kevlar vest!" --Colby Cosh "How much per hour is it to get the Moose? Depending, I might consider hiring him to help with a special event, like painting my house, thatching my lawn, or even cleaning my gutters this fall." --David Schilling, alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners, reacts to the news that the Mariner Moose is available for special events "I can only describe the experience as, well... I felt like I'd been hit by a baseball bat. ... I am still waiting for a solicitous phone call from Mariners management and flowers from Edgar. In the meantime, if anyone sees a bat with my teethmarks in it, please use it to club the person who took it." --Karen, alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners, on getting hit by a flying bat "I'm framing you, and I'm doing a really excellent job of it, too." --Cecil Terwilliger "Of course I'm afraid. You think I'm reluctant because I'm happy?" --Sam, "Ronin" "I don't know her, but I was ready to splatter her brains all over the playground. But you.. I don't particularly like you." --Gregor, "Ronin" "One of the better snaps I've seen. His veins were popping out everywhere. He put a lot of fear in some people. It was straight rage. It was beautiful." --Jason Kendall (C) Pittsburgh Pirates, on manager Lloyd McClendon exploding after a sweep by the Marlins "Stephen Harper, you are officially on strike one with me now, pal. Presented with the committee's key finding -- namely, an overwhelming scientific consensus that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol -- Harper muttered something about not wanting his kids to smoke up. Oh, so *that's* why all those people are in jail: because Steve Harper can't be bothered to parent. Now I get it! "Incidentally, for those of you out East who couldn't swallow Stockwell Day's ``social conservatism,'' note that he favored decriminalization. But then, everybody who's used pot favors decriminalization, and I get the vague impression Stock must have spent about five years of his life constantly stoned. I'm not saying it was a mistake to swap Day for Harper, but I'd like an explanation of why I shouldn't just vote Conservative next time if the Alliance isn't going to get the government out of our lives. That's what you guys are there for, OK? Get the picture or get the hell out." --Colby Cosh "If I express a certain reluctance to spend the next week wallowing in the emotions of that day -- well, unless you were here, you have no idea. This wasn't something I watched on television. I experienced it all in glorious surround-sound three dimensional smell-o-vision, kiddos, and I don't need to buy the souvenir DVD -- I've already got the damn memories to last a lifetime. Am I a shockingly callous leftist, putting it all behind me, pretending it never happened, so that I can get on with the important work of denouncing American imperialism? Well, no. I'm a New Yorker, and like every other New Yorker, I've had to live with this one every minute of every day for the past year -- choking on the stench of that terrible funeral pyre for weeks; cringing at the sound of low-flying planes for months; and wondering what happens next for.. well, for the indeterminate future, that's for damn sure. So I'll be dealing with this on my own way, thank you very much, and you'll just have to fogive me if that includes taking a pass on the Great Vicarious Day of National Grief Hosted by Bryant Gumbel and Sponsored by the Refreshing New Taste of Pepsi Light." --Tom Tomorrow "Has anybody noticed how sexist the Pioneer 10 plaque is? ``Hey, I'll welcome the damn aliens -- I'm in charge of this here species. You just stand there, bitch.'' The female line drawing was probably just happy to get a break from her day job in the pages of The Joy of Sex. You have no idea how exhausting it is to perform the double reverse spearfish 24/7/365." --Colby Cosh "``If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.'' Oh thank you! You've solved it. All my problems and neuroses summed up in one stupid phrase. Damn, that's good." --Davezilla "I've decided that I need theme music to accompany me. Like Shaft, but a different song. I'm not cool enough to do the Shaft theme." --Davezilla "Oskar Schindler and I are like peas in a pod. We both owned factories, we both made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked, damnit!" --C. Montgomery Burns "The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he's going to be. You take a team with twenty-five assholes and I'll show you a pennant. I'll show you the New York Yankees." --Bill Lee "In the end it all comes down to talent. You can talk all you want about intangibles, I just don't know what that means. Talent makes winners, not intangibles. Can nice guys win? Sure, nice guys can win -- if they're nice guys with a lot of talent. Nice guys with a little talent finish fourth, and nice guys with no talent finish last." --Sandy Koufax "I don't care about the chefs. I want a shot at the goofball in the Palomino Jacket. He needs to be taken down. And the judges, oh, please, let me at them!" --Alton Brown, on "Iron Chef" "By the way, Lou Piniella said that you were an asshole. I don't have the reference handy, but if you want proof, do some research and I'm sure that you'll find it." --Doug Norris, alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners "Slow news cycle? Dispiriting lack of death and destruction, leaving your newspaper or broadcast oddly empty? Have we got plucky little killer whales and the like for you! Call Skeena Sally's Orca Orphanage." --Vancouver magazine "Convergence! Synergy! And other wobbly business models that were never quite thought out by the boys, bless them, with ``broadband'' and the ``digital'' and the thing with the fibers. How could I say no? Contact Izzy in Winnipeg. No Arabs." --Vancouver magazine "Who bought this year's troll supply from Costco? For future reference -- one or two would have been fine. Buying them in ten-packs to get a lower unit cost isn't helping anyone." --Derek Zumsteg, alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." --John Maynard Keynes "Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification. The burden of proof should always be on people who want to restrict the individual's liberty and responsibility. That's different from conservatism. In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ``I hate strangers and anything that's different.'' But in its better forms, conservatism simply says that the structures of society, both civil and political, religious and so on, are the result of a long series of trial-and-error experiments by millions of human beings, not only all over the world, but through time. And that you should toss out received wisdom only very carefully. Obviously there are some ideas that were around for centuries that were not good (slavery comes to mind). But when people have been doing something for a millennium or two, there is probably a reason. And you better be pretty careful before you just throw it out." --P.J. O'Rourke "Going from Rolling Stone to a magazine where I don't have to explain to the readers who Jane Austen was, and that she doesn't have a city in Texas named after her, and so forth is just about heaven. It's a great relief to write for people who, like myself, have no idea who Blink 182 is -- and even less interest in finding out." --P.J. O'Rourke, on writing for The Atlantic "I came out of college with lots of trappings of '60s radicalism that had been tempered somewhat by the fact that almost all the real radicals I knew were assholes. You know, the guys who were ``for the people,'' but really just seemed to hate people. And guys who wanted to be in Weatherman mainly so they could get into fights." --Dave Barry "It probably sucked, so.. fuck it." --Phyl Behrer "Always carry a short length of fiber optic cable. If you get lost, you can drop it on the ground, wait 10 minutes, and ask the backhoe operator how to get back to civilization." --Alan Frame "If you're having half as much fun reading the reviews as we are writing them, well, then, we're having twice as much fun writing the reviews as you are reading them." --Dave Ragsdale "I have never understood why I am supposed to feel threatened or abused by this. ``Father Flaherty thinks of me as a unique human person with a distinctive, precious soul. WHY, THAT SON OF A BITCH!''" --Colby Cosh "So, yesterday I had that rare chance to experience what every girl dreams of: I got to hear what conservative America thinks of my rack, courtesy of Freerepublic.com." --Sara Rimensnyder "Final note: Unqualified Offerings does not want to ruffle any partisan feathers even though it has just spent an entire item implying that most congressional Democrats are weenies and that Republicans are spineless dumbasses, even using a famously-insulting sobriquet for them. So let UO clarify that it believes the Republican Part is Evil *and* Stupid, while the Democratic Party is just Evil. Generally, Evil has a tactical advantage over Evil and Stupid, of course, though it somehow squandered that advantage this time. Is everybody happy now?" --Jim Henley "That would surprise me, since that would be rather silly and I have a hard time imagining why he'd think I'd care one way or the other. But regardless, if it was a veiled threat, it was way too veiled for me, thus robbing it of whatever point it was intended to carry." --Russ Allbery, news.groups "So rzr_grl hurt her Mac bad the other day: so bad that just after Happy Mac made his appearance, the screen got blasted with an honest-to-god kernel panic, almost as if it were a real computer. I said, ``Sweet! Don't touch anything, I have to write this down so I can put it in the BSOD screensaver!'' I don't think she saw this as quite the opportunity that I did." --jwz "But now I've taken my leave of that whole sick, navel-gazing mess we called the software industry. Now I'm in a more honest line of work: now I sell beer." --jwz "The purpose is to preach, by means of semiprivate language, to the choir. Well, the choir gets damn sick of it after a while and starts thinking that maybe macrame would be a hobby which doesn't involve so much self-satisfied sniggering." --Colby Cosh /* new since 21 October 2002 */ "A great disaster has occurred. It is the establishment during the last decade or so of the MBA as the moral equivalent of the MD or the law degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not the mark of scholarly achievement.. the prebusiness economics major, who not only does not take an interest in sociology, anthropology, or political science, but is also persuaded that what he is learning can handle all that belongs to those studies." --Alexander Cockburn (!) "Will I do it again? Yes, despite the annoyances. Because it's more important than the annoyances. But next time, I'll make my own sign. It will read ``PEACE NOW / SOCIALISM NEVER'' and anyone who doesn't like it can kiss my ass." --Jim Henley "MacOS X is sounding better every day. At least then I'd be being fucked over merely by a soulless megacorp, rather than a bunch of teeangers who think my desktop is their learning experience. Is this an improvement? I can't decide, but I think so." --jwz, on gnome 2 "My personal observation is that Apple gets one development environment/API/methodology right every ten years. Maybe writing for Cocoa won't suck *right now*.." --vordark "Of course, it's not done yet. But if it happens, it'll be a little sad. At the same time, we can't worry about it. We have business to take care of. If Lou shows up across the field some day, we'll just have to kick his butt, too." --Bret Boone, on Piniella's departure to manage Tampa Bay "I think this picture pretty much sums up the Calgary Flames, don't you? A deranged idiot getting his hoo-hoo mashed while a bunch of horrified sluts look on." --Colby Cosh "Okay, so the yuppies are stupid because they're traumatized. Well, then, let's talk to someone else." --Angus Quinn "You know what must really suck? Being a Nigerian official trying to send legitimate e-mail." --Jim Henley "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." --Bishop, "Aliens" "When you combine metals with jumpy organic groups like azide, you get another list of poisonous things that blow up when you stare at them hard." --Derek Lowe "While there are many jungle remedies out there, only a smaller subset of these are for anything that corresponds to a recognized disease, or produce any useful medical effect. There are, though, any number of things that will make you throw up, for example. That may be a useful adjunct therapy, but it's not a billion-dollar market." --Derek Lowe "DUH is why I said ``dang,'' duh." --Phyl Behrer "Guns 'N Roses was the last rock band. They rocked hard, they burned out quickly, ``Appetite for Destruction'' is one of the top 100 albums of all time, they pissed off *everybody's* parents, they had the drug problems and the supermodel girlfriends and the overproduced, yet still competent later albums.. the only place they didn't succeed in being the ultimate rock band is they're all still alive. If they'd managed to kill themselves in a spectacular way -- if Axl Rose had spontaneously combusted on stage, taking out the first 20 rows of the audience, for instance -- then, they would have been perfect." --ivorjawa "By this point, I have probably provoked enough flamage to destroy several medium-sized cities." --Edward Felten "Stupid pico! Be more like emacs!" --me "Me so war-ny! Me bomb you long time!" --"Get Your War On" "Remember while Nepal has Maoists, Washington DC recently had snipers." --Gordon Cook, on relative travel risks "Unqualified Offerings thought the strongest argument was ``if we don't conquer Iraq, the hawks will run McCain against us in the primaries and hello one-term presidency.''" --Jim Henley "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." --8F13 "This sort of lame troll works better if you don't post it to newsgroups full of people who are willing to point out that you're making things up, and that what domains people own is completely irrelevant to PGP signatures." --Russ Allbery, news.groups "Don't get me wrong; I love Megan, but I will never forgive her for making me administer those boxes. Never, never, never. *Never*. Could have been worse, I suppose. It could have been AIX. Whoops, too late. It was, at one point." --me, on IRIX-induced fear and loathing "This week Al Gore said the obvious. ``The media is kind of weird these days on plitics,'' he told the New York Observer, ``and there are some major instutitonal voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party.'' The reaction from most journalists in the ``liberal media'' was embarrassed silence. I don't quite understand why, but there are some things that you're not supposed to say, precisely because they're so clearly true." --Paul Krugman, New York Times "Yes, the panel was a success, if being talked about makes a panel a success. By the same standard, the Disclave where the hotel was flooded ('97) was the most successful Disclave, with the possible exception of the one that was raided by a SWAT team ('80)." --Keith Lynch, rec.arts.sf.written "Bear-baiting is distasteful, especially for the bear." --Charlie Stross, rec.arts.sf.written "It's ass-covering day!" --"DaVinci's Inquest" "Feeling powerless, I wanted to bargain with my doctors. ``If the medical student is going to rectalize me, then I want you to make the pain go away.'' Unfortunately, trauma victims bring little to the bargaining table." --Jeffrey Wu, MD "Eric [Raymond]'s got more will to importance than he's got genuine contributions to back it, either in s.f. or in the Open Source community (where he trashes Stallman who has done so much more than he has)." --Rebecca Ore, rec.arts.sf.written "I'm happy to debate this with you if you feel like the hiatus should be dropped, but a necessary prerequisite for us to have such a debate is for you to actually read the messages that I post." "...and here I thought you knew a lot about how Usenet worked." --Russ Allbery and Gary Callison, news.groups "This is obviously totally out of control. In order to run a program across the fucking network I'm supposed to be typing in strings of hexadecimal digits which do god knows what using a program that has a special abbreviation for *MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1*?? And what the hell kind of a name for a network protocol is THAT? Why is it so important that it's the default protocol name? Fuck *THIS* shit." --David Chapman "Don't *ever* believe the installation instructions of an X server extension. Just don't, it's an utter waste of time. You may be thinking to yourself, ``I'll just install this piece of code and recompile my X server and then X will be JUST a LITTLE BIT less MORONIC; it'll be EASY. I'll have worked around another STUPID MISDESIGN, and I'll be WINNING.'' Ha! Consider whether chewing on glass might have more of a payoff than what you're about to go through." --jwz "You'd think that I could simply tell X Windows that it has two displays, the left one and the right one, but that would be unthinkably simple. After all, if toys like Macintoshes can do this, Unix has to make it much more difficult to prove how advanced it is." --Steve Strassmann "Those of us who participate in Usenet for reasons other than being an asshole tend not to have much difficulty grasping this one." --Jeremy Nixon, supernews.general "What actually happens is that somebody suggests that the 'Gun' shouldn't have been in space in the first place, then somebody else says that the second guy would have been fine - if he'd had a gun to defend himself with. There then follows a 80 post thread during which (among many, many, other arguments) the comparative crime rates in Mir vs. ISS are used to support their arguments." --Paul Blay, sci.space.tech "Turn up the good! Turn down the suck!" --Dean, "FUBAR" "As it stands, Plan B is to just keep on givin'er." "What exactly does that mean?" "Giv'er. You just go out, and you giv'er. You keep on working hard." "Is that a plan?" "Yeah. That's a plan right there." --Dean and Farrel, "FUBAR" "I'm not a scientist.. I can't.. fuckin' pull out a burner, and burn up some stuff, and figure it out." --Terry, "FUBAR" "I recommend you try another sport! Like knitting!" --Dean, "FUBAR" "More tears, more beers. That's it, that's all." --Dean, "FUBAR" "I'll give you a gummer, an' then I'll giv'er. An' then I'll come an' give it. Come an' give it for it to come an' giv'er Deaner. Give'er, give it, Deaner!" --Dean, "FUBAR" "I swear to God, I'm going to pistolwhip the next guy who says ``Shenanigans.''" "Hey, Farva! What's the name of that restaurant you like, with all the goofy stuff on the walls and the mozzarella sticks?" "You mean Shenanigans?" "oooooh!" [guns come out] --"Super Troopers" "The bulletproof cup? I invented this gag, Mac. Only in my day, the rookie got naked. [blam!] And we also used blanks! You're a sick motherfucker, Mac." --O'Hagan, "Super Troopers" "Excuse me! Um.. bear fucker!" --"Super Troopers" "Arlo, why don't you sit on Uncle Rabbit's lab for a minute?" "I don't think that's such a good idea, Thorn!" --"Super Troopers" "I was an undergrad at Caltech when the ``math is hard'' thing was making the news, and fuck, I had to agree with Barbie." --phygelus "I think I need one of those eight dollar beers." --Hank Hill "What you're doing is the opposite of help!" --Shrek "A paranoid is a person in possession of all of the facts." --William Burroughs "The woman is here because she had the misfortune to be inside a garden apartment in the Purnell Village complex on Gatehouse Drive, where a Jamaican drug dealer named Carrington Brown played host to another Jake by the name of Roy Johnson. There was some preliminary talk, a few accusations delivered in a lilting West Indian accent, and then a considerable amount of gunfire." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "Television has given us the myth of the raging pursuit, the high-speed chase, but in truth there is no such thing; if there were, God knows the Cavalier would throw a rod after a dozen blocks and you'd be writing a Form 95 in which you respectfully submit to your commanding officer the reasons why you drove a city-owned four-cylinder wonder into an early grave. And there are no fistfights or running gun battles: The glory days of thumping someone on a domestic call or letting a round or two fly in the heat of some gas station holdup ended when you came downtown from patrol. The murder police always get there after bodies fall and a homicide detective leaving the office has to remind himself to take his .38 out of the top right desk drawer. And, most certainly, there are no perfectly righteous moments when a detective, a scientific wizard with uncanny powers of observation, leans down to examine a patch of bloody carpet, plucks up a distinctive strand of red-brown caucasoid hair, gathers his suspects in an exquisitely furnished parlor, and then declares his case to be solved. The truth is that there are very few exquisitely furnished parlors left in Baltimore; even if there were, the best homicide detectives will admit that in ninety cases out of a hundred, the investigator's saving grace is the killer's overwhelming predisposition toward incompetence or, at the very least, gross error." --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "``Can you believe a little shithead like this is able to stay on the run for so long?'' McLarney declares, returning from another unsuccessful turn-up of a Milligan hideout. ``You shoot a guy, hey,'' the sergeant adds with a shrug. ``You shoot another guy -- well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it's time to admit you have a problem.'"" --David Simon, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" "This does not mean that ``marijuana should be available by prescription.'' It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion." --Vin Suprynowicz, on drug legalization "Throwing mass at problems is usually much cheaper than throwing engineering manpower at them. But good luck selling NASA on that." --Henry Spencer, sci.space.tech "The advent of the internet has made so many things possible. Self-published recreational journalism has always been around; but back when you had to at least learn to run a mimeograph, and you had to pay postage to distribute your deathless prose, people who didn't actually have much to say for themselves found other hobbies." --Teresa Nielsen Hayden "Just because the fucker's got a library card doesn't make him Yoda." --Det. David Mills, "Se7en" "Banning any fictional words is not a step on the slippery slope. Banning any fictional words is the pit at the bottom of the slippery slope." --Matthew Skala "I'll support regime change in Iraq once we have a regime in Washington that can remotely be trusted not to fuck up the aftermath." --D-Squared "People seem to be faintly drawn to the idea that there might be more political dimensions than just ``left'' and ``right''. Bullshit. Being in favour of allowing other people to take drugs, shag each other or read what they want isn't a political position; it's what we call ``manners'', ``civilisation'' or ``humanity'', depending on the calibre of yokel you're trying to educate." --D-Squared "About a year ago, I told someone that my political position could be summarised as ``in favour of more meat in the pies, more booze in the beer and fewer hours in the day, and against more or less everything else''. It's still a decent summary." --D-Squared "The official position of D-Squared Digest on the subject of Napster, Gnutella and all similar is that copying is theft, theft is sin, sin is forgiven, so get stuck in. In other words, the fact that copyright law means that upstanding citizens are committing theft by sharing their music, is a good thing about theft, not a bad thing about the law." --D-Squared "Contrary to his image as some kind of conservative ideologue, [Bill] O'Reilly is just a long-winded cab driver with a TV show and no real interest in policy, ideas, or facts." --Virginia Postrel "Funny that having a Japanese ballplayer just ain't cool until the Yankees get one. Then they'll tell you they invented Japan." --Marty, alt,sports.baseball.sea-mariners "There is, in general, no such thing as a charter in an unmoderated group in the sense that you're using the term. The fact that you read groups where there are lots of anal-retentive people who refuse to deal with this fact and who harass you and others about such things is a social problem within those groups, not a Usenet administration problem." --Russ Allbery, news.groups "I like to hit. But it's pretty hard." --RHP Freddy Garcia, Seattle Mariners "I was overheard by a writer for Hollywood Reporter, who included it in his coverage about how badly the film was received, and that is another reason Gallo has put the heebie-jeebie on my colon and prostate. I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than ``The Brown Bunny.''" --Roger Ebert "You belligerent fuck!" --Space Moose "If they wanted to show footage of Keanu and Carrie-Anne squonking it, I can't think of anyone who would object: why ruin it by intercutting it with what appears to be Burning Man as imagined by Maxfield Parrish?" --Skot, Izzle Pfaff "If you want a drink that makes you more out-going, drink it outside." --label on a bottle of Lipton unsweetened iced tea "Adding PKeys to Yellow Pages merely lets you get scammed *confidentially*. Verisign doesn't help -- they don't check anything in meatspace. They're not liable. You can't sue them. ``Kosher meat certified by that vegetarian catholic up the street.''" --David Honig, cryptography "BMW has the best fuel injection so I'll get BMW fuel injection. I really like those big Jeep wheels so I'll get Jeep wheels. I like the Mercedes best engine and I'll put it all into a Porsche body. I'll have the best car in the world because each component is best-of-breed. ... People buy cars from one company at a time. This is why cars are cheap and reliable. Computers were supposed to make people more productive but because of the way people buy software, our industry has created a worldwide labor shortage." --Larry Ellison, on buying computer systems "Hi. I'm Derek, and if Freddy continues to pitch as well as he did against the Braves, I'm announcing that I like my crow served to me crisply fried, seasoned only with a dash of salt and pepper." --Derek Milhous Zumsteg /* Sent to server: 17 June 2003 */ "Put down your crack pipes and beer bongs, and pay attention!" --Nixon, s04e03 "All right. It's Saturday night, I have no date, a two-liter bottle of Shasta, and my all-Rush mix tape. Let's rock!" --Fry, s04e03 "I used to be an individual, but then all these posers showed up." --jwz "Why aren't you shooting?!" "We're not being shot at yet!" "How can you tell?" "A hiss means it's close. If you hear a pop, then -- *pop pop* -- *NOW* they're shooting at us!" --"Black Hawk Down" "Colonel! Colonel! They're shooting at us!" "Well.. shoot back!" --"Black Hawk Down" "What's the matter, Danny? Something you don't like?" "No Specter gunships. Daylight instead of night. Late afternoon, they're all fucked up on qat -- what's not to like?" "Life is imperfect." "For you, circling at 500 feet in the air is imperfect. Down in the street, it's unforgiving." --"Black Hawk Down" "We're not going to some white collar resort prison! No! No! No! We're going to federal POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS prison!" --Michael Bolton, "Office Space" "I cannot believe what a bunch of losers we are. We're looking up ``money laundering'' in the dictionary!" --Peter Gibbons, "Office Space" "We can rest assured that his interview didn't include any kind of actual game testing, because -- and I mean this entirely seriously -- given identical teams I would kick Box's ass playing any baseball simulation in a seven-game series. Diamond Mind, Strat-o-Matic, whatever you want, set us up and I will make him cry like an unhappy, soiled, hungry baby." --Derek Milhous Zumsteg "She was cute." "Yeah, in an axe-wielding way.." --"Rockpoint PD" "Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end, and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you." --Fry, "Futurama" "It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?" --Fry, "Futurama" "Forget your stupid theme park! I'm gonna make my own! With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the theme park!" --Bender, "Futurama" "No, Bender, wait! We're the lamest frat on campus. Even Hillel has better parties than us. Please, you've gotta stay and teach us how to be cool!" "Hmm. Okay, but I'll need ten kegs of beer, a continuous tape of ``Louie, Louie,'' and a regulation two-story panty-raid ladder." --"Futurama" "Oh, I always feared he would run off like this! Why? WHY? WHY didn't I break his legs?" --Farnsworth, "Futurama" "Why is Zoidberg the only one still alone?" "Because he's a loser, that's why. He's the lobster equivalent of Fry." --Leela and Bender, "Futurama" "I got two guns.. one for each of you." --Doc Holliday, "Tombstone" "[OpenSSL is] also hideously overabstracted. That, to my mind, is why it's both hard to use and hard to maintain. Unfortunately, its ``API'' is the only one that is in wide use on Unix systems, which means that any alternative would probably be forced to duplicate a frightening amount of OpenSSL's internal complexity in order to present its _external_ complexity." --Thor Lancelot Simon, cryptography "Wally would never kill me! He told me so. That kind of communication is very important in a father-son-style relationship." --Bill Dautrive, "King of the Hill" "The ever-generous Mal has been spending days here sweating out half his weight in fluids while tinkering with my firewall, and has determined that what's going on is that the state table in the firewall keeps filling up, causing no end of trouble. And since I'm running OpenBSD 2.8 with ipf, there's no way to increase the size of that table without rebuilding the kernel. (Ease of configurability being a sign of weakness to these people.) And rebuilding/upgrading the kernel is a sketchy proposition since that release of the OS has been disavowed for quite some time. Those of you who have been following along for a while may recall that the thing that made me switch from Linux to OpenBSD for the firewall in the first place was the pathetic state of affairs in the Linux world with respect to networking: basically, the motto of that group seemed to be, ``your security is our learning experience!'' Every release of Linux came with a rewritten-from-scratch firewall system, with incompatible config files: so every time you upgraded, you got to rewrite your rules. YAY. So I switched to OpenBSD, because they weren't playing those games, and generally seemed to take the whole thing more seriously. "So what happens? Six months after I start using OpenBSD (the OS whose motto is now ``__0__ days without an on-site injury'') , some ego battle or other caused Theo to switch to a new, incompatible firewall package. YAY. "So maybe next I'll switch to FreeBSD or something, since apparently they still use ipf. (Hey, so does MacOS X...)" --jwz "When I said my quarters were cold, I did not mean, ``Ooh, I think it's a little chilly in here; perhaps I'll throw a blanket on the bed.'' No, I said it was COLD! As in, ``Oh, look, my left arm has snapped off like an icicle, and shattered on the floor!''" --Londo Mollari "I'm afraid that if I try to go back and figure it out, I will start bleeding from my ears." --Londo Mollari "This is like being nibbled to death by, uh.. what are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long bill, webbed feet, go ``quack''?" "Cats." "Cats. Like being nibbled to death by cats." --Londo Mollari "I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head, and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave, like this.." [waves] --Vir Cotto "Zathras is used to being beast of burden to other people's needs. Very sad life. Will probably have very sad death. But at least there's symmetry." --Zathras "Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This.. is wrong tool." --Zathras "You now realize - that each of us has put more thought into that sentence than all the people who wrote it, approved it, and read it in public." --Jeff Schmidt, dissecting a White House statement "When Scooter drove up from Buffalo to meet me at the game, the Canadian customs agent at the border asked him what he planned to do in Canada. Scooter told him he was going to see the Blue Jays. ``Oh,'' the customs agent said, ``I love the Jays.'' Before waving Scooter across the border, he asked him an important question: Should the agent have traded Shawn Green for Corey Patterson in his fantasy baseball league? Scooter began analyzing the deal, then stopped and asked whether he was holding up everyone else trying to cross the border. ``Don't worry about them,'' the agent replied. ``They can wait.'' And they call baseball America's pastime." --Jim Caple, ESPN "The last time someone called himself ``Lord'' on this planet, he got crucified. And we know where the hammer and the nails are. We could put you up in a couple of minutes." --Denis Leary, on Michael Flatley "When the surgeon came to talk to us, I didn't recognize him. The same thing had happened earlier: people look different in those little blue berets they wear during surgery. Jeremy's surgeon is very young, much younger than I am, and I admit that his youth made me a little nervous. Jeremy reminded me that they let me handle murder cases when I was that guy's age, to which I replied, ``Yeah, but I wasn't very *good* at it.''" --Xeney "Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine." --Homer Hickam, Jr., "Rocket Boys" "There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta." --Sir William Osler, 1900 "To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients it not to go to sea at all." --Sir William Osler, 1901 "There is no more difficult art to acquite rhan the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert. Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of the manifestations of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first." --Sir William Osler, 1919 "Always note and record the unusual. Keep and compare your observations. Communicate or publish short notes on anything that is striking or new." --Sir William Osler, 1919 "Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "The chief function of the consultant is to make a rectal examination that you have omitted." --Sir William Osler, 1900 "Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis." --Sir William Osler, 1895 "Absolute diagnoses are unsafe, and are made at the expense of conscience." --Sir William Osler, 1900 "One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician." --Sir William Osler, 1900 "Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "We doctors have always been a simple, trusting folk! Did we not believe Galen implicitly for fifteen hundred years, and Hippocrates for more than two thousand years?" --Sir William Osler, 1909 "There are only two sorts of doctors: Those who practice with their brains, and those who practice with their tongues." --Sir William Osler, 1906 "To wrest from nature the secrets which have perplexed us in all ages, to track to their sources the causes of disease, to correlate the vast stores of knowledge, that they may be quickly available for the prevention and cure of disease -- these are our ambitions." --Sir William Osler, 1902 "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism." --Sir William Osler, 1902 "The young physician starts life with twenty drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for twenty diseases." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "But know also, man has an inborn craving for medicine. Generations of heroic dosing have given his tissues such a thirst.. for drugs. As I once before remarked, the desire to take medicine is one feature which distinguished man, the animal, from his fellow creatures. It is really one of the most serious difficulties with which we have to contend. Even in minor ailments, which would yiled to dieting or simple home remedies, the doctor's visit is not thought to be complete without the prescription." --Sir William Osler, 1895 "One should treat as many patients as possible with a new drug while it still has the power to heal." --Sir William Osler, 1901 "I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds.. ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one kind or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or another; like their birth, their death was a sleep, and a forgetting." --Sir William Osler, 1904 "When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught -- both are in the same class, the one a little more advanced than the other." --Sir William Osler, 1905 "One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell." --Sir William Osler, 1889 "Start out with the conviction that absolute truth is hard to reach in matters relating to our fellow creatures, healthy or diseased, that slips in observation are inevitable even with the best trained faculties, that errors in judgement must occur in the practice of an art which consists largely in balancing probabilities -- start, I say, with this attitude of mind.. You will draw from your errors the very lessons which may enable you to avoid their repetition." --Sir William Osler, 1892 "In no way has biological science so widened the thoughts of men as in its application to social problems. That throughout the ages, in the gradual evolution of life, one unceasing purpose runs; that progress comes through unceasing competition, through unceasing selection and rejection; in a word, that evolution is the one great law controlling all living things, ``the one divine event to which the whole creation moves,'' this conception has been the great gift of biology to the nineteenth century." --Sir William Osler, 1894 "Of the altruistic instincts veneration is not the most highly developed at the present day, but I hold strongly with the statement that it is the sign of a dry age when the great men of the past are held in light esteem." --Sir William Osler, 1897 "Modern medicine is a product of the Greek intellect, and had its origin when that wonderful people created positive or rational science." --Sir William Osler, 1902 "But by the neglect of the study of the humanities, which has been far too general, the profession loses a very precious quality." --Sir William Osler, 1897 "The daily round of a busy practitioner tends to develop an egoism of a most intense kind, to which there is no antidote.. The mistakes are often buried, and.. successful work tends to make a man touchy, dogmatic, intolerant of correction and abominably self-centred.. The medical society is the best corrective, and a man misses a good part of his education who does not get knocked about a bit by his colleagues in discussions and criticisms." --Sir William Osler, 1897 "Experience in the true sense of the term does not come to all with years, or with increasing opportunities. Growth in the acquisition of facts is not necessarily associated with development. Many grow through life as the crystal, by simple accretion, and at fifty possess, to vary the figure, the unicellular mental blastoderm with which they started." --Sir William Osler, 1894 "While medicine is to be your vocation, or calling, see to it that you have also an avocation -- some intellectual pastime which may serve to keep you in touch with the world of art, of science, or of letters. Begin at once the cultivation of some interest other than the purely professional. The difficulty is in a selection and the choice will be different according to your tastes and training. No matter what it is--but have an outside hobby. For the hard working medical student it is perhaps easiest to keep up an interest in literature." --Sir William Osler, 1899 "Care more particularly for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease." --Sir William Osler, 1899 "The training of the medical school gives a man his direction, points him the way, and furnishes him with a chart, fairly incomplete, for the voyage, but nothing more." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade, a calling, not a business, a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practise medicine, but it is not astonishing how badly he may do it." --Sir William Osler, 1901 "The art of the practice of medicine is to be learned only by experience; 'tis not an inheritance; it cannot be revealed." --Sir William Osler, 1919 "Think not to light a light to shine before men that they may see your good works; contrariwise, you belong to the great army of quiet workers, physicians and priests, sisters and nurses, all over the world, the members of which strive not neither do they cry, nor are their voices heard in the streets, but to them is given the ministry of consolation in sorrow, need, and sickness." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "You cannot afford to stand aloof from your professional colleagues in any place. Join their associations, mingle in their meetings, giving of the best of your talents, gathering here, scattering there; but everywhere showing that you are at all times faithful students, as willing to teach as to be taught." --Sir William Osler, 1894 "In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs." --Sir William Osler, 1903 "It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them." --Sir William Osler, 1909 "I suppose that being a real lawyer, and a real grownup, means that I was not supposed to spend the day worrying about the cookie I ate as a reward for winning my case. Or maybe real lawyers aren't supposed to reward themselves with cookies; they never covered this shit in law school. But it was a really big cookie, and I have been so good on this diet for months and I am, I have to admit, almost skinny. I am getting no exercise, though, and I am afraid that it will all turn out to be a tragic mistake (like that law degree on my wall, or the deed to this house that for some weird reason has my name on it) and my fat ass will come back and I will have to eat more kale." --Xeney "Folks, if you thought the Mariners gave Ken Griffey Jr. both barrells as he left town, you haven't heard anything yet. I intend to give Pat Gillick *hundreds of barrells*. Yes, I don't know how I'm going to pull this off, but I think it involves standing at the top of a construction platform with a hostage of some sort and throwing them down at him. There's no way Gillick will be able to ascend the various tilted levels and ladders while I toss barrells at -- well, now, here's the problem with writing down the road from Nintendo's lawyers, they're only a minute or two away... Oh well." --Derek Milhous Zumsteg /* new since 17 July, 2003 */ "Buying a Unix machine guarantees you a descent into Hell. It starts when you plug the computer in and it won't boot. Yes, they really did sell you a $10,000 computer with an unformatted disk drive. There is only one operating system in the world that will run on your new computer, but the vendor didn't bother to install it. That's how you are going to spend your next couple of nights. You'll be asked dozens of questions about disk partitioning and file system journaling that you couldn't possibly answer. Don't worry, though, because Unix vendors have huge documentation departments to help you. Unfortunately, your computer shipped without any documentation. And, although the marketing department has been talking about how this vendor is God's gift to the Internet, the rest of the company still hasn't jacked into this World Wide Cybernet thing. So you won't find the documentation on the Web. So you decide to save some trees and order a documentation CD-ROM. You plug it into your nearest Macintosh or PC and.. nothing happens. That's right, the documentation CD-ROM isn't usable unless you have a completely working Unix computer made by the same company. A week later, you've gotten the machine to boot and you call over to your Web developer: ``Set up the Web server.'' But it turns out that he can't use the machine. Everything in Unix is configured by editing obscure incantations in text files. Virtually all competent Unix users edit text in a program called Emacs, probably the best text editor ever built. It is so good that the author, Richard Stallman, won a MacArthur genius fellowship. It is also free. But that doesn't mean that it meets the standards of Unix vendors. No, the week-long installation process has left you only with VI, an editor that hardly anyone worth hiring knows how to use. So you download the Emacs source code over the Internet and try to compile it. Good luck. Your computer didn't come with a compiler. The most popular C compiler for Unix is GCC, another free program from Richard Stallman. But it would have been too much trouble for the vendor to burn that onto their software CD-ROM, so you don't have it. At this point you are in serious enough trouble that you have to hire a $175-per-hour consultant just to make your computer function. Two days and $4,000 later, your computer is finally set up the way a na?ve person would assume that it would have shipped from the factory. That's what setting up a Unix box is like. If it sounds horribly painful, rest assured that it is." --Philip Greenspun "As the libertarian, I'll be arguing for selling heroin out of vending machines to small children and contracting out the war on terrorism to the guys who place those want ads in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. As the conservative, Emily will be arguing that George W. Bush is brilliant and articulate and that we should invade France and rename it ``Reagan.''" --Gene Healy "A system admin's life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over emergency room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards." --Michael O'Brien "Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." --Adlai Stevenson "We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming." --Werner von Braun "Boston fans like to believe their suffering was first sung by Homer, but I'll tell you that we stood and cheered for the M's when they had no chance at all facing Boston, when you hoped to be surprised by a good game, and every ticket you bought was a leap of faith that Alvin Davis might hit four home runs and pitch nine good innings, or something equally improbable would happen and the M's would pull one out. Boston's fielded winning teams since I was born, but the Mariners -- to be a long time Mariners fan has required faith, and boundless hope, and a love for baseball, even bad baseball by a bad team in a bad dome, supplied by a bad owner." --Derek Milhous Zumsteg "You can have a powerful semi-automatic rifle... but it can't look exactly like a military ``assault rifle''. You can get a machine gun but you need to fill out some forms. You can buy a pistol but unless you fill out the right forms you can only kill 5 people with it before popping in another magazine. These then are the achievements for which the Democrats have sacrificed their relevance to American government." --Philip Greenspun "I regained consciousness and lay huddled in a corner until Mike came over and pulled the bread out of my hand. We didn't want to waste the bread, so Jane came up with a plan to dilute the Vegemite with another Kraft product, Pimento spread. The pimento spread diluted the taste of the Vegemite with its own terrible taste. This was like trying to extinguish a burning pile of hair with patchouli oil." --Rob Cockerham "It doesn't matter what a client says, Verithief's ``stub'' mail server says 220, 250, 250, 550, 250, 221-close. This is presumably the SMTP equivalent of flipping one's finger over one's lip and going ``buh buh buh''." --Richard Todd "It is easy for U.S. agencies (NSF, DOD, NASA), corporations (Raytheon, Holmes & Narver, Lockheed-Martin), and citizens (Bob, Paul, and Mary) to surmise that since they are all in league together, in the same place, at the same time, with the same passports, and knowing the same Creedence Clearwater Revival songs, that for daily purposes Antarctica is pretty much the United States, but with fewer TV channels." --Big Dead Place "It should be an impeachable offense to act in any way which makes it at all likely that any senior member of the administration can be found in circumstances under which it would make sense to say ``And I would have got away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!''" --Bruce Baugh, quoted by Jim Henley "Yesterday we did a five-mile conditioning hike along the W&OD trail in Herndon. My new comrades were able to fit me out with everything except pants and a pack - including period shoes and an Enfield rifle. I'm here to tell you: we have better shoes now. I'm pretty sure we have better guns too." --Jim Henley "While we're on the subject, Jane goes out on a limb and predicts exactly how this story will play out. It is a rather wide limb, and she doesn't go out too far on it. And it's all of about 3 inches off the ground, and there's a huge safety net under it, and she's got several harnesses preventing her from slipping, and since no one paid the gravity bill this month she can't fall anyway." --Andrew Northrup "We're now seeing ``he's a four-star liar!'' and ``he's not a real Democrat, he voted for Reagan!'', but I'm afraid that, when the general election comes around, those dogs won't hunt. In fact, not only will they refuse to hunt, but they're going to dig up your flower garden and then take a big, steaming crap on your down comforter." --Andrew Northrup "Man, that's hot. Is that supposed turn you off on GM stuff? Because it sure as hell isn't working." --suppafly, on an anti-GM ad featuring a four-breasted woman "Do *you* come with the tax-deductable donation receipt?" "Oh you! Hee hee hee hee!" --mykwud "OSI is still the answer, but we still haven't figured out the question." --Howard Berkowitz, nanog "I've never had much interest in the various libertarian schemes to set up a libertopia on an island, an oil platform or an American state. I've always suspected a real-life Galt's Gulch would be like a Trek convention with fewer girls." --Gene Healy "I hate the fact that PCs are all so ugly and noisy. In a market with 1000 vendors you might expect that 995 of the products are cheap, nasty, and ready for the shelves of Walmart but you'd expect at least 5 vendors of products that would cost $250 extra and (a) be cooled with liquid and heat sinks (i.e., be silent), and (b) look reasonably nice in a home setting. But just as with my posting on why aren't there a handful of single fathers to go with the single moms, it seems that we end up with a Gaussian distribution, centered on ``ass ugly and friggin' noisy'', with a standard deviation of 3 dB on the noise and 0.05 ass on the aesthetics. It might seem unreasonable to blame Microsoft for the ugliness of hardware that they don't, after all, manufacture. But one of the burdens of monopoly is that people blame you for everything! (And I bet if Bill Gates said to Michael Dell ``would you mind building me a silent not-too-ugly PC'' it would happen.)" --Philip Greenspun "I may not have a precise and bulletproof definition of ``terrorism'' in my hip pocket, but I do know this: a disruption that does not require me to get out of my chair isn't ``terrorism'', it's an annoyance." --Patrick Nielsen Hayden "It's not like sneering and cheap shots are only contemptable if you've never done them yourself. I'm an inveterate cheap-shot artist, and I thought you were right on the money. In fact, that's how I knew. As proof of this, allow me to note that only a Canadian would say something so undeniably true, and then apologize for it. I'd rather read 2000 posts about how bloggers are abunch of sad inadequates than one more word about how the crappy blogosphere is changing the world forever through their heroic fact-checking of asses." --Andrew Northrup "This year, viewers do not have to wonder how on Earth the producers will shoehorn Bauer's ultra-duncey daughter into the plot, because she's actually joined the Counter Terrorist Unit, where Daddy works. Thus it will be much easier for her to become a hostage or a pawn or just a nuisance. The CTU must have the easiest entrance exam in town." --Tom Shales, on the third season of "24" "Okay, here's the deal. I'm hung over. Does anyone know what that means?" "Doesn't that mean you're drunk?" "No! It means I was drunk yesterday." "It means you're an alcoholic." ".. Wrong!" "You wouldn't come to work hung over unless you were an alcoholic. Dude, you got a disease." "Hmm. What's your name?" "Freddy Jones." "Hmm. Freddy Jones. .. Shut up!" --"School of Rock" "Hey hey hey hey. Miss Dumbum ain't your teacher today, I am. And I got a headache, and the runs, so I say, ``Time for recess.''" --Dewey, "School of Rock" "Are you going to teach us anything, or are we just going to sit here?" "Just do whatever you want." "I want to learn from my teacher." "*Besides that!*" --"School of Rock" "Style?! You're going to talk to me about style? You can't even dress yourself! Look at that bow tie!" "Hey! Don't you be talkin' about my bow tie!" --"School of Rock" "You can try. But in the end you're just going to lose, big time, because the world is run by The Man. The Man. Oh? You don't know The Man? He's everywhere -- in the White House, down the hall.. Ms. Mullens? She's The Man. And The Man Ruined the ozone, he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called Rock and Roll. But guess what? Oh no! The Man ruined that too, with a little thing called MTV! So don't waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome, 'cause the man is just going to call you a fat, washed up loser, and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!" --Dewey, "School of Rock" "Dewey, I'm not a Satanic sex god anymore. I'm a working stiff." --Ned, "School of Rock" "I pledge allegiance.. to the band.. of Mr. Schneebly.. and will not fight him.. for creative control.. and will defer to him on all issues related to the direction of the band." --Dewey, "School of Rock" "The thing is, we're not supposed to get started until next quarter, but I think we should get a leg up on the competition, don't you? Who else wants to go for the gold? All right! But if anyone finds out what we're doing in here, we'll be disqualified, so let's just keep it on the down low, shall we?" "Can we tell our parents?" "NO! Just trust me, they don't want to know anything about this." --"School of Rock" "Morning, Summer." "Groupie?!" "What's the matter?" "You want *me* to be a groupie?" "Well, groupie's an important job." "I researched groupies on the Internet. They're sluts! They sleep with the band." "Noooo, that's not true! They're like cheerleaders!" --"School of Rock "The first thing you do when you start a band is talk about your influences. That's how you figure out what kind of band you want to be. So.. who do you like? Blondie?" "Christina Aguilera." "Who? No! Come on. What?! You, Shortstop." "Puff Daddy." "Wrong. Billy?" "Liza Minelli?" "What are you -- you guys! This project is called ``rock band!'' I'm talking about bands that rock! Led Zepplin.. .. don't tell me you guys have never gotten the Led out. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant.. ring any bells? What about Sabbath? AC/DC? *MOTORHEAD*?! OH, WHAT DO THEY TEACH IN THIS PLACE!??!" --"School of Rock" "New schedule: 8:15 to 10, rock history. 10 to 11, rock appreciation and theory. And then band practice until the end of the day." "What about math?" "No. Not important." "World cultures?" "Not important! You guys, we need to focus here." --"School of Rock" "Your homework is to listen to some *real* music, get inspired.. For Blondie, Blondie. For Lawrence, Yes. That's the name of the band. Listen to the keyboard solo on ``Roundabout''.. it will blow the classical music out your butt. For you, Rush: ``2112,'' Neal Peart, one of the great drummers of all time -- study up." --Dewey, "School of Rock" "You guys have been doing real good in here. If I was going to give you a grade, I would give you an A. But that's the problem -- rock ain't about doing things perfect. Who can tell me what it's really about? Frankie?" "Uh.. scoring chicks?" "N-no! See? No. Eleni?" "Getting wasted." "N-come on. No. Come on. Leonard?" "Sticking it to the man?" "Yes! But you can't just say it, man. You gotta feel it in your blood and guts." --"School of Rock" "What makes you mad more than anything in the world? Billy?" "You." "Billy, we've already told me off. Now let's move on." "You're tacky, and I hate you." ".. okay, you see me after class." --"School of Rock" "That was incredible! That was incredible! Oh my gosh, the lights, the guitar solos.. was it really you playing?" "So you're not mad?" "MAD?! I'm FURIOUS! I'm horrified, but it was incredible! It was so great, you guys are so amazing!" --"School of Rock" "As soon as I talk to the band, I'll get back to you. .. Well, if you're so desperate, quit low-balling us!" --Summer, "School of Rock" "I'm just saying -- name two great chick drummers." "Sheila E.? Meg White from the White Stripes?" "She can't drum." "She's a better drummer than you. At least she has rhythm." --"School of Rock" "Wow! If I wasn't such a fucking hack, I'd resent that thinly-veiled kow-towing. Umm.. do you have anything original to say at all?" --"Truth in Advertising" "You guys should lay off of W, he's just quoting his favorite philosopher, Jesus H. Christ. Don't you remember when the Romans were coming for him and his apostles wanted him to flee? He was all, ``Fuck that shit, bring those mothers on!'' But then Judas hit him with an aluminum chair and it was all over for him. Or was it? Dun dun dun!!!" --bardp "See Dick. See Dick go EVA without his pressure suit. See Dick go blind as his intraocular pressure blows his optic nerve out the back of his eyeball. See Dick get a bad bad sun burn and funny lumps on all his major organs. See Dick get one REALLY BIG BRUISE over his entire body. See Dick gasp for air as his blood tries to take the path of least resistance out of his lungs. Don't be a Dick: Wear your space suit." --somebody in sci.space.tech "I left the hotel shortly thereafter and, very soon after that, I fell in love. Love was frightening and it hurt -- not only during, but afterward -- when I fell out of love. But that is another story. I'd like to fall in love again, but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me too often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that I get curious to experience something more extreme -- whatever that might be." --Douglas Coupland, "Life After God" "``Let's still be friends.'' That's kind of like being freed from a kidnapper who says, ``Keep in touch!''" --Caroline Rhea, on breakups "My god-daughter is two and a half. She saw her father in the shower the other day, and came running out. ``Mommy! Mommy! Daddy has a tail!'' I'm the evil single girl. ``Was it a big one? Show me with your hands. Oh, mommy's very lucky.''" --Caroline Rhea "I'd make you swear on a Bible, but I know how contact with holy stuff makes your skin sizzle." --Cox, "Scrubs" "This time, try not to scare off the doctor." "I did not scare off the last guy." "You bit him!" "I tripped, and my teeth hit his shoulder." "Uh-huh, and once that happened, did you clamp down a little bit? Jordan? Oh, you come on!" "Well, he had a bad attitude!" --Cox and Jordan, "Scrubs" (03x04) "What do you want?" "Well, we're looking for a new pediatrician for our son." "And you figured that even though my patient load is full, since you're on the board of directors, and Dr. Cox here is not only an attending at the hospital but also an internationally renowned pain in the ass, you both could show complete disregard for my schedule and make me want to cause you grievous bodily harm even before we were properly introduced? Hello! I'm Dr. Norris." --Norris and Jordan, "Scrubs" (03x04) "Yeah, that'll come off. You won't have to get laser surgery, or skin from your ass." --JD, "Scrubs" (03x04) "Well, if it isn't Dr. Haircut and her not-ready-for-prime-time players?" --Kelso, "Scrubs" (03x04) "Don't worry about it, son. Those things are a dime a dozen. In fact, if you get bored, why don't you just hijack an ice cream truck and drive it through our brand-new pathology lab? But do me a favor, and spare the paper shreder. Because I'll need that to turn your next twelve paychecks into a clown wig you can wear for the rest of your internship." --Kelso, "Scrubs" (03x04) "Office hourse, tomorrow, five o'clock. Bye bye!" "I'm gonna go ahead and put this in a language you can understand. ``You had better see my son now, or I'm gonna kick your ass!''" --Norris and Cox and hand puppet, "Scrubs" (03x04) "JD, can I offer a little constructive criticism?" "(Kick him in the crotch, damnit! The crotch!)" --Sean and JD, "Scrubs" (03x04) "Just wanted you to know I don't have a problem with you. I just can't resist a good storm-off." "Oh, who can?" --Turk and Sean, "Scrubs" (03x04) "Cox has taught me the most since you've been here, right? Do you really think he gives a damn whether you like him or not?" "I'd like to think so --" "Out of my way, space-waster! *thunk*" "I felt the love." --Turk, JD, and Cox, "Scrubs" (03x04) "I'm having second thoughts about our giant nanny. She's lovely and all, but everytime the fridge is empty, she looks at our son like he's a plate of ribs." "Well, you should have let me hire the really skinny model. At least if she ate Jack, she'd throw him up right after." --Jordan and Cox, "Scrubs" (03x07) "I'm going to go ahead and tell you how it ends. Dr. Phil says, ``And how.. is that working out.. for you?'' And then a big fat lady cries. Waah! All right. I'm sure you're wondering why I accepted the position of residency director, considering my disdain for, well.. all of you. Is it the extra $4.00 a week in my paycheck, or is it the fact that I finally have a chance to make a difference in this godforsaken hellhole? It's all about the $4.00, trust me. And seeing as how my money is contingent on you lemmings actually doing your jobs, I would say that now is a pretty good time for you to scurry on back to work so I can continue to afford the antidepressants that keep me so damn jolly. Oh, ha ha ha ha! *GO*!" --Cox, "Scrubs" (03x07) "It's come to my attention that some family members of our critically ill patients have been complaining because of the relatively small amount of time you all spend with their loved ones. Of course, in Dr. Murphy's case, that's probably a good thing." "Sir, if I could just take this opportunity to explain my disturbingly high mortality rate.." "Why don't I do that for you? You're a bad doctor." --Kelso and Murphy, "Scrubs" (03x07) "But Dr. Cox, earlier today, Dr. Kelso was telling us --" "Shh! I don't ever want to hear anything that's come out of that man's mouth. Unless, of course, it's ``Oh my god.. I'm dying, now I'm moving towards the light, but wait a minute. There's been a mistake. This is hell. Hello, Hitler! Hello, Mussolini! Captain Kangaroo?! That's weird.'' Don't you see, Barbie, I'd rather listen to you go on and on about the joys of dolphin sex --" "Dolphin *trainer* sex. My boyfriend is a dolphin *trainer*." "And here, that's a shame. Because the whole dolphin thing used to make you so interesting. Too bad." --Elliot and Cox, "Scrubs" (03x07) "Baby, I hate Pac Man." "REALLY? Because you have bedsheets that indicate otherwise.." --Turk and Carla, "Scrubs" (03x07) "Hey! Somebody say something about cheese? 'cause if you gonna make a cheese run, holler at me, dawg." --Turk, "Scrubs" (03x07) "Perry, the fact that these residents are spending most of their time buzzing around that one patient makes me think you told them to disobey a direct order from me." "Bob Kelso, that's just not true. Here, I told them to disregard *all* direct orders from you." --"Scrubs" (03x07) "So black people can get black eyes too. Who knew?" --JD, "Scrubs" (03x07) "Newbie, maybe I wasn't clear enough with you on Ms. Barto over there." "Here it comes: I'm incompetent. I'm a girl. I'm a little girl. I'm a little girl with pigtails that rides a tricycle." "No. Well, yes." --Cox and JD, "Scrubs" (03x07) "I like guns. You got a gun, you don't have to work out. I ain't working out; I ain't jogging. You got pecs, I got Tecs." --Chris Rock "All bullets should cost $5,000. You know why? 'cause if a bullet costs $5,000, there'd be no more innocent bystanders. Every time somebody gets shot, you'd be like, ``He must have been doing something. I just put $50,000 worth of bullets in his ass!''" --Chris Rock "People would think before they kill somebody if a bullet cost $5,000. ``Man, I will blow your fuckin' head off.. if I could afford it. I'm gonna get me another job, I'm gonna start saving some money, and you a dead man! You better hope I can't get no bullets on lay-away!''" --Chris Rock "I have heard from several quarters that I did not produce a ``smoking gun.'' How this phrase irritates me. What would have been a ``smoking gun'' in this context, I wonder? A photograph of someone from the Citizens Centre wearing a black turtleneck and cap and clutching a bag labelled ``$$$''?" --Kevin Michael Grace "Someone has come to me out of the past.. reviving a feeling long since forgotten. He says cryptic things, and is gone abruptly.. again. What is this I'm feeling? Is this pain? Panic? Pleasure? Am I hungry? Who's hungry?" --Debi, "Grosse Point Blank" "They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they've all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I going to say? ``I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How've you been?''" --Martin, "Grosse Point Blank" "You're a psychopath!" "No! No! Psychopaths kill for no reason. I kill for *money*. It's a *job* -- that didn't come out right." --"Grosse Point Blank" "Hi! Remember me? I'm not married, I don't have any kids, and I'd blow your head off if someone paid me enough." --Martin, "Grosse Point Blank" "``Ah, what a piece of work is man, how noble..'' oh, fuck it. Let's have a drink and forget the whole thing." --Mr. Newberry, "Grosse Point Blank" "Life is like a box of chocolates: A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an english toffee but they're gone too fast and taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits of hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers." --Cigarette Smoking Man, 4x07 "OH-kay! Now, just because Jordan thinks it's cute that you're violating her little sister doesn't mean you can use my guest room for your nerdy, G-rated sexcapades." --Cox, "Scrubs" 03x08 "I'm about to set a new distance record for projectile vomiting." --Cox, "Scrubs" 03x08 "As far as your love life goes.. Normally, I couldn't care less who's laying your quivering body down by the fire while your lips whipser ``no no, no,'' but your eyes scream ``yes, yes, oh big daddy, yes!'' But when you're dating Jordan's sissy-poo, it forces me to spend time with you outside of the hospital, and I just won't have that. So here's the deal: Don't wanna have dinner with you, don't wanna go bowling with you, and I never, ever again want to walk into my kitchen and hear you say, ``It's waffle time, it's waffle time, won't you have some waffles of mine?''" --Cox, "Scrubs" 03x08 "Sweet dancing Jehova! I've punctured my brain!" --Kelso, "Scrubs" 03x08 "Well, you have done it. It's Friday night, and instead of being at home drinking whisky through my son's sippy cup, I'm actually at a carnival with you, surrounded by.. piles of manure, even though I've yet to see a single animal." --Cox, "Scrubs" 03x08 "Can you believe that Elliot give me all that attitude?" "You know, two weeks ago, an OR nurse with like 20 years experience started telling me I was tying the wrong suture." "But I bet you listened to her, right?" "Naw, I kicked her ass out the OR." "But I bet you were nice about it, right?" "No, I made her cry." --Carla and Turk, "Scrubs" 03x08 "Come on, Peggy! We've got to get to Dallas before the gangs wake up!" --Hank Hill "Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you're crazy! It has no feelings!" --IKEA "Why the attempt to deflect the conversation from jobs/titles? First, if I start telling them about my job at MIT they might tell me about their job. Once you retire you sort of lose interest in peoples' jobs/titles/etc. If they are lion-tamers or performance artists it could be interesting, of course, but if they work for a big company it is tough to feel anything other than amazement that anyone could tolerate 2000+ hours/year at a desk. Second if you take the job/title stuff off the table people can talk about art, literature, music, travel, etc. Third, it is rather embarrassing to be associated with IT circa 2003. Business people associate IT with cost overruns, promises unkept, bugs, downtime, etc. Consumers associate IT with crashed Macs and Win98 machines, glacial AOL modem sessions, and collapsed 401k plans. Young people ask ``Isn't that something that is better done in the Third World?'' Nobody ever says ``Wow, what a cool job programming SQL must be!''" --Philip Greenspun "If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave" --Ernest Hemingway "I hope you haven't eaten yet, 'cause I'm about to force-feed you a can of my homemade whoopass!" --Turk, "Scrubs" 309 "Hey, look, Ghandi: Now just because you broke out your little Fisher Price surgery set and somehow managed to not kill somebody for once doesn't mean you're queen of the world." --Cox, "Scrubs" 309 "Are you okay?" "Come on! I'm simply posing so your boyfriend can get a picture of me for his ``People Who Make Me Feel Like A Little Girl'' scrapbook." --Carla and Cox, "Scrubs" 309 "I've been thinking about what you said this morning, and you're right: We have not been having enough sex lately." "Turns out yes, yes we have." "No we haven't. And tonight, we're going to do it the way you always fantasized about." "Laying down in a big tub of ice?" --Jordan and Cox discuss sex with a back injury, "Scrubs" 309 "I'm old." "Yeah? Well, I'm older. Now would you please get me down to my damn car?" "Sure, let's get your big Irish ass to your car so nobody knows you hurt your back. Let's not worry about MY back!" --Carla and Cox, "Scrubs" "He had mentioned an interest in paintball, so one afternoon we sat down to see how to ship high-grade paintball-gun equipment into Kazakhstan, as a surprise gift. Courier companies seemed to regard this as a hilariously impossible problem, once I had convinced them that ``Kazakhstan'' existed. Finally, I talked to DHL, which not only treated the question as sensible but I think produced a price quote on the spot. Mind you, their quote was something like $2000 (I believe it would have been technically easier to ship regular non-paintball guns to Kazakhstan, since there is probably a vertical industry dedicated to that), and they added some fishy warnings about potential ``customs'' duties that smelled a lot like ``bribes''. We quickly gave up on the plan, but now I know who to call in similar cases." --Evan Kirchhoff "We all have sex. Why do we let people sell it back to us?" --Penn Jilette "Doesn't all that twisting and flexing hurt, says Penn, as if he didn't know? Oh. Sorry. I just read the stage directions out loud." --Penn Jilette "We're broke. Really broke. Despite the highest rate, pre-Campbell, of personal income tax in the world. The attitude of labour? Our money is their money. I pointed out to Jim Sinclair, head of the B.C. Federation of Labour, that the tax cut only returned people's money to them, and I paraphrase. ``That was our money,'' he cried. ``No, it wasn't,'' I said. ``Yes, it was,'' he said, before breaking down in confusion. If you remember only one thing about British Columbia, pre-Campbell, please remember this exchange." --Elizabeth Nickson "Since the customer is always right, I hope, at some future date, to re-submit this site after much-needed improvements are made. I've got a few in mind: more frequent calls for the death of anti-war protestors, trademarking and copyrighting my own inane blather, comparing the Medicare drug benefit to Russian pogroms and/or Nazi death camps, developing an arcane military ranking system for commenters and contributors, and, of course, detailed posts about Italian ammunition and soldier-of-fortune opportunities in the former Belgian Congo." --Norbizness complains about poor reviews "Linux is only free if your time has no value." --jwz "Thank God the family finally moved him over to surgery, where you guys were good enough to help him kick that nasty oxygen habit he had once and for all." --Cox, "Scrubs" /* New since 23 December, 2003 */ "Next thing you're going to tell me that Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby--Dick Cheney's chief of staff and a PNAC member who's usually ID'd as a leading neocon--is Jewish. Well, I don't believe it. No self-respecting Jewish man would adopt a WASPy moniker like ``Scooter.'' He sounds like the preppy villain in a John Hughes film -- you know, the kind of guy who tells Andrew McCarthy not to date Molly Ringwald because she comes from the wrong side of the tracks." --Gene Healy "In any event, to the extent there's an ethno-religious component to the current debates over foreign policy, it isn't driven by Jewish Americans, who tend to have more moderate views on preemptive war and the Middle East than the country as a whole. The more interesting story is the apocalyptic vision shared by many on the Christian Right. I liked them a lot better when all they wanted was prayer in school." --Gene Healy "If you believe that marriage is ``largely a religious matter,'' shouldn't you want the government out of the marriage business entirely? Why do you think the government should enforce your religion's dictates? Wouldn't you be a tiny bit worried that the government that enforces your religious beliefs today might turn around tomorrow and enforce someone else's?" --Scott Rosenberg "That's weird. It seems like you just went to a swap meet, and got yourself a Big Boy spine." --Cox, "Scrubs" "It's just a matter of time, my friends. This weekend is Christ-Fest, the single largest gathering of Christians in the midwest -- each one of them a walking, praying wallet full of cash." --Cartman, 714 "You don't even know anything *about* Christianity!" "I know enough to exploit it." --Stan and Cartman, 714 "Soon enough, I predict, all DVDs will come with user licences specifying exactly how many people may be in the room when you watch them. Scofflaws will face the wrath of the FBI and Interpol." --Kevin Michael Grace "Hey mister, I bet you can't guess what I have in this box." "A human head?" "Wrong. An atomic bomb. Wanna see?" "Not really." --"The Manhattan Project" "Take it easy, you're fine." "No, I'm a terrorist. Haven't you been watching television?" --"The Manhattan Project" "Oh, you people really *do* live in your own world." "That's because we don't have the luxury of living in yours." --"The Manhattan Project" "Aw, damn! I missed the annual sleep over, didn't I? That wonderful time of the year when you two crazy kids throw caution to the wind and make sweet, elbow-y love to each other! Don't you be shy! You can tell Uncle Coxy about the naughty." --Cox, "Scrubs" "There are questions about Garcia's work ethic and preparation, and it's particularly awful to see him when he comes completely unraveled. There's a look on his face as if he's already checked out for the game as he serves up fastballs hitters can smoke, and I start to wish Bob Melvin would walk out to the mound, ask Freddy if he was injured, and then kick him in the balls so he can call in an emergency replacement from the bullpen." --Derek Zumsteg, Baseball Prospectus "If for some reason Sports Illustrated did a behind-the-scenes portrait of Baseball Prospectus and I said in an interview that: ``I hate our brown-eyed readers. They're the worst, they're all a bunch of stupid genetically deficient freaks who should at least have the courtesy to wear colored contacts so the rest of us don't have to be sick at the very sight of their hideous appearance,'' should I be surprised when Huckabay & Co. show up at my doorstep with a blackjack, a canvas sack, a good length of high-strength rope, and tell me it's time for a trip to the waterfront?" --Derek Zumsteg, Baseball Prospectus "The movie stars Mandy Moore, a singer-actress of precisely Britney's generation, who has undeniable screen presence and inspires instant affection. Britney used to inspire instant affection herself, but now inspires instant alarm and concern." --Roger Ebert, reviewing "Chasing Liberty" "[Mark] Harmon is singularly unconvincing as the President, not only because he recklessly endangers his daughter's life and his country's fortune, but also because he reads the newspaper, and there's no telling where that could lead." --Roger Ebert, reviewing "Chasing Liberty" "You know, Jamie, there are a lot of ways to grieve.. but last time I checked, ``wheelbarrow style'' wasn't one of them." --JD, "Scrubs" "We arrested Pee Wee Herman for jerking off in a porno theatre. HELLO!? That's what you do there!!" --Carlos Mencia "Let me understand this correctly: You can get *fired* from your job for getting a fucking *blowjob*? Well, goddamnit, I quit!" --Carlos Mencia "Nothing happens in baseball? Are you out of your fucking mind? Free agents are signed every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love, people lose it! For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone gets traded. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in baseball, then you, my friend, don't know crap about baseball! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious minutes with your blog? I don't have any use for it. I don't have any bloody use for it!" --Peter J. White channels "Adaptation" "Some people smoke pot, some people bungee jump, some people chant. What do you do to be happy?" "Nothing. I'm not." --Helen and Jessica, "Kissing Jessica Stein" "For it is not simply because of mere sluggishness alone that human relationships repeat themselves from case to case in such unspeakably monotonous and unrefreshed ways; there is also a certain shyness for new, unforeseeable experiences generally, because one doesn't feel up to them. But only for the one who is on the lookout for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatic, will the relationship to another become something alive and speak to the whole potential of one's existence." --Ranier Maria Rilke "You're not Catholic, and you took Communion?" "Yeah. ..Is that wrong?" "If my God wins.. you're screwed." --Pembleton and Bayliss, "Homicide: Life on the Street" "Thieving slut! I bet he's the one who stole my Yoplait from the fridge!" --"King of the Hill" "I have just one question for the press corps: Where the fuck have you been?" --Jon Stewart, 09/02/04 "Apparently, the rocket-propelled grenade is the Iraqi equivalent of ``aloha.''" --Jon Stewart "Baseball people generally are allergic to new ideas. We are slow to change. For 51 years I have judged baseball by personal observation, by considered opinion, and by accepted statistical methods. But recently I have come upon a device for measuring baseball which has compelled me to put different values on some of my oldest and most cherished theories." --Branch Rickey, 1954 "How you played in yesterday's game is all that counts." --Jackie Robinson "It kills me to lose. If I'm a troublemaker, and I don't think that my temper makes me one, then it's because I can't stand losing. That's the way I am about winning; all I ever wanted to do was finish first." --Jackie Robinson "Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life." --Jackie Robinson "The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it." --Jackie Robinson "Didn't come up here to read. Came up here to hit." --Hank Aaron "I don't want them to forget Ruth. I just want them to remember me." --Hank Aaron "I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them." --Hank Aaron "My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging." --Hank Aaron "Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand." --Leo Durocher "God watches over drunks and third basemen." --Leo Durocher "I believe in rules. Sure I do! If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?" --Leo Durocher "If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I'd trip her. Oh, I'd pick her up and brush her off and say, ``Sorry, Mom,'' but nobody beats me." --Leo Durocher "If you don't win, you're going to be fired. If you do win, you've only put off the day you're going to be fired." --Leo Durocher "Every hitter likes fastballs just like everybody likes ice cream. But you don't like it when someone's stuffing it into you by the gallon. That's how you feel when [Nolan] Ryan's throwing balls by you." --Reggie Jackson "Fans don't boo nobodies." --Reggie Jackson "I was reminded that when we lose and I strike out, a billion people in China don't care." --Reggie Jackson "When you've played this game for ten years, and gone to bat seven thousand times and gotten two thousand hits, do you know what that really means? It means you've gone zero for five thousand." --Reggie Jackson "Show me a guy who can't pitch inside and I'll show you a loser." --Sandy Koufax "I'm mad at Hank Aaron for deciding to play one more season. I threw him his last home run and thought I'd be remembered forever. Now I'll have to throw him another." --Bill Lee "The laziest ``president'' in history thinks people are poor because they are lazy. This is slightly wrong, of course. People are poor because George Bush is lazy." --Avedon Carol "I'll sign anything (almost) that you want to see significantly decrease in value. Fair chance someone will attempt to do me bodily harm!" --Derek Zumsteg invites readers to meet him in bookstores "If things go well, players are supposed to be enthusiastic, peppy, into things. If things go badly, they're supposed to be serious, not depressed, but obviously considerate of the weight of the tragedy that just befell them all. They're evaluated on this -- it's part of ``makeup'', but it ends up being more about acting ability than temperament. I could be the best player in baseball, hit a series-winning grand slam home run, and I'd probably whine about the low quality of champagne being sprayed on me." --Derek Zumsteg "Graduating from Babe Ruth to varsity with only the slightest physical justification meant coping with an out-of-control hormonal arms race. A few of our players had sprouted sideburns, but their players retaliated by growing terrifying little goatees and showing up at games with wives and, on one shocking occasion, children. I still had no muscles and no facial hair, but I did have my own odor." --Michael Lewis "The rumors that Cheney is alive are somewhat exaggerated. It's Mark Twain in reverse." --Hans Blix "Blogger Kos, of The Daily Kos, made an hateful remark on his blog about the victims of the attacks in Falluja. Then people got really mad and started linking and writing and opining. (I know, this in itself is news, because bloggers hardly ever react in an extreme way.)" --Wonkette "When Scooter drove up from Buffalo to meet me at the game, the Canadian customs agent at the border asked him what he planned to do in Canada. Scooter told him he was going to see the Blue Jays. ``Oh,'' the customs agent said, ``I love the Jays.'' Before waving Scooter across the border, he asked him an important question: Should the agent have traded Shawn Green for Corey Patterson in his fantasy baseball league? Scooter began analyzing the deal, then stopped and asked whether he was holding up everyone else trying to cross the border. ``Don't worry about them,'' the agent replied. ``They can wait.'' And they call baseball America's pastime." --Jim Caple, ESPN "Maybe that's what family really is.. a group of people that miss the same imaginary place." --"Garden State" "I thought you killed yourself!" "What?" "That wasn't you?" "... no, that wasn't me." --"Garden State" "I thought your sole duty was to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate." "That, and protecting the space-time continuum. Read the Constitution." --Fry and Al Gore, "Futurama" "Friends! Help! A guniea pig tricked me!" --Zoidberg "There's nothing wrong with a little murder. Just as long as you let Bender wet his beak." "You're blackmailing me?" "Blackmail is such an ugly word. I prefer extortion. The X makes it sound cool." --Bender and Leela "It's beautiful!" "So's a peacock, but you don't eat it until it's cooked." --Leela and Fry "Sometimes the shepherd needs the comfort of the sheep." "I'm going to try hard not to understand the implications of that." --Philip and Elena, "The Ice Storm" "Rob, top five musical crimes perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s, go. SUBquestion, is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins? Is it better to burn out or to fade away?" --Barry, "High Fidelity" "How about the Jesus And Mary Chain?" "They always seemed.." ".. they always seemd WHAT? They always seemed really great, is what they always seemed. They picked up where your precious Echo left off, and you're sitting around complaining about no more Echo albums. I can't believe you don't own this fucking record. That's insane. Jesus." --Barry, "High Fidelity" "I don't know why Seattle (or any other great city) feels the need to act like they're a bunch of goat-roping hicks, but they do. They play some twangy hillbilly music loop more suited for a mid-50s Warner Brothers B-list cartoon where Bugs gets involved in a family fued in the Appalachians." --Derek Zumsteg, Baseball Prospectus "There's a reason why Bud's America's best-selling beer. You can drink 10, 20 of these things and not think twice until you go to get up for the bathroom and topple over the coffee table, putting your head into the TV, shattering the tube into your skull, resulting in a trip to the ER where they'll refuse to anesthetize you because your blood-alcohol level's already too high and instead hold you down while they pick the shards of glass out of your drunk skull as your friends laugh at you (you weren't drinking alone, were you?)." --Derek Zumsteg, Baseball Prospectus "My pilot decided to ``abort take-off'' on the runway in San Diego. I don't know about any of you, but ``abort'' and ``take-off'' are three words that I believe should be kept apart. He got the plane up to full speed and just when we were about to lift off, he jammed on the brakes. He came over the PA and announced that he was sorry, but he was still tripping his face off from an all-nighter on acid, and he could have sworn he saw a beaver building a dam across the runway." --Zach Braff "It would have all been fine from there except the little boy behind me had officially gotten the jitters. So when we eventually did take off, he muttered phrases like, ``this can't be good'' and ``this plane's too heavy to fly'' and ``we're going down, mom.'' I kid you not. He said a couple of other things too but they were in Korean so I can't really share them with you. Not because I don't speak Korean, but because they were too personal to post." --Zach Braff "And we all know that writing SPOILERS, DO NOT READ is the equivalent of writing PLEASE DON'T LOOK AT THE GLORIOUS YELLOW EAGLE NESTING IN MY HAIR." --Zach Braff "Ah, beautiful Diego. Whoever he was I'll bet he was really sunny and hung out with skinny blonde surfer chicks. This place is paradise. I think the entire country should just pick up and move here. It might be a little crowded, but it's so perfect here that maybe it would chill everyone out and we could all learn to surf and deal with the population problem by taking turns sleeping and not getting freaked out if a stranger needed to sit on your lap at dinner." --Zach Braff extolls the virtues of San Diego "As I write this -- at a quarter of 2, Pacific Daylight Time, on Monday morning -- the upstairs neighbors are playing some sort of tune that's popular with the kids these days at a volume loud enough to drown out jet engines. And on a school night! I am about to make the long trek upstairs to ask them, politely, calmly, even sweetly to turn that crap down. And let me just add, that if they show up at my door half-an-hour later holding a bag of McDonald's food, I will not be so touched by their selfless gesture that I will encourage them -- nay, beg them -- to crank their stereo up to 11. Instead -- and I realize that most courst will consider this premediation and sentence me accordingly -- I will murder them. Oh, I'll eat the Quarter Pounder. But only after the killing is done." --Philip Michaels, teevee.org "[24]'s still got a ways to go before I can devote my ``24''-watching time to more important questions -- like, say, whether Jack Bauer could take ``Alias'''s Jack Bristow in a fair fight. (I'm betting no. Bristow looks like a biter.)" --Nathan Alderman, teevee.org "I didn't think he was a player when I saw him. I thought he was bringing in the Pepsi machine. At 6-5 and 280 and bald, he looks like a lumberjack. He was walking around like he owned the place." --RHP J.J. Putz on his first impression of 1B/DH Bucky Jacobsen in Spring Training 2004 "I mean, they don't grade fathers, but if your daughter is a stripper, you fucked up." --Chris Rock "When did clear heels become the New Whore Uniform? When did that happen? Was there a big ol' ho convention, and all the hos got together, and said ``We need something new. Something that just says nasty.''?" --Chris Rock "You know those guys who go to the strip club in the daytime? If you're at a strip club, and the sun is out, you got some problems. You know those guys that eat at the strip club? Eat at the buffet! How the fuck could you eat at a nasty-ass strip club? Are you *that hungry*?" --Chris Rock "People always say rap music is misogynistic and degrading to women. But what I realize is, women that like rap don't give a fuck." --Chris Rock "The government hates rap. And only rappers get gunned down like this. I'll tell you right now: If Bill Joel, Elton John, and David Bowie got shot, they'd have Bruce Springsteen's house surrounded. The government hates rap! And only the good rappers are dead! Only the good ones! Biggie -- dead. Tupac -- dead. Vanilla ice -- still alive. The government hates rap! You mean to tell me they can find Saddam Hussein in a fuckin' hole, but you can't tell me who shot Tupac?" --Chris Rock "Michael Jackson lost his mind -- what the hell is wrong with Michael? Another kid? Another kid? I thought it was Groundhog Day when I heard that shit!" --Chris Rock "What the fuck is wrong with that boy? I'm done with fucking Michael. What the fuck?! Another kid!? That's like another dead white girl showing up at OJ's house. And OJ going, ``I know what you're thinking.''" --Chris Rock "The whole world's gone crazy, man. Sigfried and Roy -- the tiger bit the man in the head, and everybody's mad at the tiger. Talk about the tiger went crazy -- that tiger ain't go crazy, that tiger went tiger! You know when the tiger went crazy? When the tiger was riding around on a little bike with a Hitler helmet on!" --Chris Rock "Yea, and God said to Abraham, ``You will kill your son Isaac.'' And Abraham said, ``I can't hear you, you'll have to speak into the microphone.'' And God said, ``Oh, I'm sorry, is this better? Check check, check. Jerry, pull the high end out, I'm still getting some hiss back here.''" --Stewie, Family Guy "Red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, and iron spell, and a Babel of iron sounds." --Charles Dickens, "Bleak House" "I'm not a stereotype, okay? Just because I'm Chinese doesn't mean I go around building walls. I'm just a normal person like all of you. I eat rice and drive very slow just like the rest of you!" --City Wok Guy "Goddamnit! How come every time us Chinese put up a wall a stupid Mongolian comes and knocks it down?" --City Wok Guy "And you poly Objectivists think you're all kinky and shit. Hah! You guys are being outfucked by MORMONS!" --www.livejournal.com/users/michaelduff/214566.html "``Have you got any soul?'' a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues." --Nick Hornby, "High Fidelity" "I learned something about myself this weekend, while spending an hour not just watching Olympic badminton, but becoming engrossed in it. I learned that if it's a sport, and it's on TV, I'll watch it. BADMINTON, fercrissakes. If somebody would televise two drips of water running down a wall, I'd be sitting in front of the TV, pulling for the one on the left." --Paul, "Nice Guys Finish Third" "I've been bouncing around different methodologies for reacting to this election. One naughty option -- and it's the one that has frankly put the biggest grin on my face so far -- is to draw a line in the sand, put my back against the wall, and declare: ``Dam straight this is Blue America, fuck-o! Look how much fun we're having! Also, you get no more of my tax money, welfare queen.''" --Matt Welch "Once again, we liberals get to do all the good drugs (no meth here, buck-o!), play all the music (the junkie is identified on the website as ``Rock Star''), hang out with all the hot chicks, and feel free enough to dance with our asses hanging out. This is supposed to be an insult?" --Matt Welch "This was pretty much my experience with whichever of the Grand Theft Auto games I played, too: I understand that the point of the game is killing people and beating up prostitutes or something, but it wanted me to go through some ``training mission'' deal before letting me actually play, and the point of that seemed to be, ``drive a car from point A to point B, and drive slowly and carefully enough that you don't bump into too many fire hydrants, or you have to start over.'' Wow, that's great fun, let me tell you. Drive slow and don't hit things. I have *an actual car* in which I can play that game!" --jwz "Like a lot of people I've been speaking to lately, I've been limiting my cable news and Sunday morning talkshow viewing, not out of depression or sulky resentment, but because there's only so much inane twaddle a person can take. I have no interest in listening to a Chris Matthews panel speculate on who might replace this or that person in cabinet, as if they were engaging in Rotisserie League baseball. I assume whomever Bush picks will have horns, cloven feet, and a connection to an oil company, so who cares what name the minion goes by?" --James Wolcott "Once it's on a solar escape trajectory, it's _gone_. ``But what'' you ask ``about the alien beings around distant stars??'' Well, given the velocites waste packages would have (at most a few km/s once they're far from the sun; why waste energy beyond what it takes to make sure they don't come back) the travel times are of order 10^6 years. The aliens may wonder why we're sending them blocks of lead, but that's all..." --Jordin Kare, sci.space, on space disposal of nuclear waste "If you want a controlled and contained environment for the waste, you don't send it to a poorly-known faraway planet! If you're going to use another planet as a garbage dump, you pick the most useless planet around -- which is fairly clearly Venus -- and don't fret too much about exactly which areas of it get messed up." --Henry Spencer, sci.space "When you touch somebody's Microsoft box, you make it unstable. It was unstable before, too, but now it's your fault." --John Denker "The evolution issue is more politically charged than most (at least, I haven't noticed a well-funded political movement opposing heliocentrism. Even the Church has given up on that one...), but the public's ignorance of biology isn't especially bad, compared to their ignorance of science in general. Yeah, thirty-five percent of people surveyed think that evolution isn't supported by evidence. Big freakin' deal -- twenty-four percent think that sound travels faster than light. Wrap your head around *that*." --Chad Orzel "The lessons learned here, of course, are not to mix *two* crushed Butterfingers in with a pint of vanilla ice cream and chase the whole mess down with a Barq's root beer, and then expect the sugar buzz to wear off in time to do something serious." --OM, sci.space.history "I think someone should do Capitalism Camp: the theme of the camp will be to trade US Currency for Goods and Services. If anyone complains, tell them, ``Dude, radical self-indulgence! Stop harshing my mellow!''" --jwz, on the lameness of Burning Man "It's just a coincidence. Nobody ever does anything bad to win an election. Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell was just saying some idle, empty words when he promised to deliver Bush the Ohio electoral vote in November and he didn't mean anything by it so forget he said anything, and Yuschenko just happened to fall ill with a bizarre mystery face-eating illness at the exact moment he became embroiled in a hotly contested national election." --the last to know, reason.com "99% of journalists, and the public at large, think that science is just one rather boring topic for ``Crossfire''-style argumentation, where there's one side screaming one set of lies and the other side screaming another and everyone hates America and/or babies and now here's some ads for Matt Damon movies and dick pills. Admittedly, you have to be a howling retard with all the intellectual curiosity God gave a Sea Monkey to think this way, but let me introduce you to your fellow human beings." --The Poor Man "I could see how this tough-guy shtick -- which obviously wasn't entirely shtick, but a tough streak that had been refined into an urban lawman persona -- would impress fake swaggarts like, well, George Bush, who likes to play dress-up as a range hand and fighter pilot to show what a Hungry Man entree he is." --James Wolcott "Computing was fun back then -- computers mostly piss me off these days." --Gil Smith, nostalgic for the teletyped 300 baud days "Should I talk slower, or go get a nurse who speaks fluent Moron?" --Cox, "Scrubs"