Freebsd Fortunes

... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you
with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them.  Holiday
shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday
advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a
shopping bag.  If your children object to being tied, threaten to take
them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up.
                -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"

"... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
their C programs."
                -- Robert Firth

... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce
Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm.  One
thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition.  If
somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it
on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what
a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.
                -- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!"

... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those
who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent,
and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious
and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
                -- Voltarine de Cleyre

... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks.  Generally, their
procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as
to infest the waters.  I would estimate that the primary food source of
sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making
documentaries.  Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly
listless.  The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another
documentary."  So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking,
under the guise of Scientific Research.  "We know very little about the
effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply
scientific voice.  "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White
in the testicles with a cattle prod."  The divers keep this kind of
thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and
then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very
dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all
along.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"

... The Anarchists' [national] anthem is an international anthem that
consists of 365 raspberries blown in very quick succession to the tune
of "Camptown Races".  Nobody has to stand up for it, nobody has to
listen to it, and, even better, nobody has to play it.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"

"... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ..."
                -- Dave Barry

... the MYSTERIANS are in here with my CORDUROY SOAP DISH!!

... the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from
other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in
charity we can only call "inhuman."
                -- R. A. Lafferty

... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives
as well.  When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as
determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability.  Eighties people
buy imported dental floss.  They buy gourmet baking soda.  If an '80s
couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three
weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available,
they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent
restaurant.  If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of
excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going
off like crickets in the night.  An excellent restaurant wouldn't have
a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.
                -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"