Freebsd Fortunes 2

        It seems there's this magician working one of the luxury cruise ships
for a few years.  He doesn't have to change his routines much as the audiences
change over fairly often, and he's got a good life.   The only problem is the
ship's parrot, who perches in the hall and watches him night after night, year
after year.  Finally, the parrot figures out how almost every trick works and
starts giving it away for the audience.  For example, when the magician makes
a bouquet of flowers disappear, the parrot squawks "Behind his back!  Behind
his back!"  Well, the magician is really annoyed at this, but there's not much
he can do about it as the parrot is a ship's mascot and very popular with the
passengers.
        One night, the ship strikes some floating debris, and sinks without
a trace.  Almost everyone aboard was lost, except for the magician and the
parrot.  For three days and nights they just drift, with the magician clinging
to one end of a piece of driftwood and the parrot perched on the other end.
As the sun rises on the morning of the fourth day, the parrot walks over to
the magician's end of the log.  With obvious disgust in his voice, he snaps
"OK, you win, I give up.  Where did you hide the ship?"

        It seems these two guys, George and Harry, set out in a Hot Air
balloon to cross the United States.  After forty hours in the air, George
turned to Harry, and said, "Harry, I think we've drifted off course!  We
need to find out where we are."
        Harry cools the air in the balloon, and they descend to below the
cloud cover.  Slowly drifting over the countryside, George spots a man
standing below them and yells out, "Excuse me!  Can you please tell me
where we are?"
        The man on the ground yells back, "You're in a balloon, approximately
fifty feet in the air!"
        George turns to Harry and says, "Well, that man *must* be a lawyer".
        Replies Harry, "How can you tell?".
        "Because the information he gave us is 100% accurate, and totally
useless!"

That's the end of The Joke, but for you people who are still worried about
George and Harry: they end up in the drink, and make the front page of the
New York Times: "Balloonists Soaked by Lawyer".

        It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built,
everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But by then the investment
was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it has
cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing.
        There are at present no plans to replace it, since it was never
really needed in the first place.
        I expect every installation has its own pet software which is
analogous to the above.
                -- K.E. Iverson, on the Leaning Tower of Pisa

        It was the next morning that the armies of Twodor marched east
laden with long lances, sharp swords, and death-dealing hangovers.  The
thousands were led by Arrowroot, who sat limply in his sidesaddle,
nursing a whopper.  Goodgulf, Gimlet, and the rest rode by him, praying
for their fate to be quick, painless, and if possible, someone else's.
        Many an hour the armies forged ahead, the war-merinos bleating
under their heavy burdens and the soldiers bleating under their melting
icepacks.
                -- "Bored of the Rings", The Harvard Lampoon

        Jacek, a Polish schoolboy, is told by his teacher that he has
been chosen to carry the Polish flag in the May Day parade.
        "Why me?"  whines the boy.  "Three years ago I carried the flag
when Brezhnev was the Secretary; then I carried the flag when it was
Andropov's turn, and again when Chernenko was in the Kremlin.  Why is
it always me, teacher?"
        "Because, Jacek, you have such golden hands," the teacher
explains.

                -- being told in Poland, 1987

        Joan, the rather well-proportioned secretary, spent almost all of
her vacation sunbathing on the roof of her hotel.  She wore a bathing suit
the first day, but on the second, she decided that no one could see her
way up there, and she slipped out of it for an overall tan.  She'd hardly
begun when she heard someone running up the stairs; she was lying on her
stomach, so she just pulled a towel over her rear.
        "Excuse me, miss," said the flustered little assistant manager of
the hotel, out of breath from running up the stairs.  "The Hilton doesn't
mind your sunbathing on the roof, but we would very much appreciate your
wearing a bathing suit as you did yesterday."
        "What difference does it make," Joan asked rather calmly.  "No one
can see me up here, and besides, I'm covered with a towel."
        "Not exactly," said the embarrassed little man.  "You're lying on
the dining room skylight."

        Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she
lived with was made up of idiots.  Remember?  One of them was always
getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to
the farmhouse to alert the other ones.  She'd whimper and tug at their
sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do
you think something's wrong?  Do you think she wants us to follow her?
What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead
of every week.  What with all the time these people spent pinned under
the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever.
They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the
applications for.
                -- Dave Barry

        Leslie West heads for the sticks, to Providence, Rhode Island and
tries to hide behind a beard.  No good.  There are still too many people
and too many stares, always taunting, always smirking.  He moves to the
outskirts of town. He finds a place to live -- huge mansion, dirt cheap,
caretaker included.  He plugs in his guitar and plays as loud as he wants,
day and night, and there's no one to laugh or boo or even look bored.
        Nobody's cut the grass in months.  What's happened to that caretaker?
What neighborhood people there are start to talk, and what kids there are
start to get curious.  A 13 year-old blond with an angelic face misses supper.
Before the summer's end, four more teenagers have disappeared.  The senior
class president, Barnard-bound come autumn, tells Mom she's going out to a
movie one night and stays out.  The town's up in arms, but just before the
police take action, the kids turn up.  They've found a purpose.  They go
home for their stuff and tell the folks not to worry but they'll be going
now.  They're in a band.
                -- Ira Kaplan

        Listen, Tyrone, you don't know how dangerous that stuff is.
Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back?  Eh?
        Ho, ho!  Don't I wish!  What do you think every electrofreak
dreams about?  You're such an old fuddyduddy!  A-and who sez it's a
dream, huh?  M-maybe it exists.  Maybe there is a Machine to take us
away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of
the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the
other souls it's got stored there.  It could decide who it would suck
out, a-and when.  Dope never gave you immortality.  You hadda come
back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat!  But We can live
forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld.
                -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"

        Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL
character named Jack.  Jack and his relations were poor.  Often their
hash table was bare.  One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices
are sparse.  You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some
BASICs."  She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it
to him.
        So Jack set out.  But as he was walking along a Hamilton path,
he met the traveling salesman.
        "Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman
in high-level language.
        "I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips
and Apples," commented Jack.
        "I have a much better algorithm.  You needn't join a queue
there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now."
        Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house.  But when
he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she
started thrashing.
        "Don't you even have any artificial intelligence?  All these
kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the
window...
                -- Mark Isaak, "Jack and the Beanstack"