Freebsd Fortunes 2

        "We friends, yes?"  The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile
and looked into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a
trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had experienced
in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and
predatory.
        The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm
at the elbow.  He spoke in his dead junky whisper.  "With veins like that,
Kid, I'd have myself a time!"
                -- William Burroughs

        We have some absolutely irrefutable statistics to show exactly why
you are so tired.
        There are not as many people actually working as you may have thought.
        The population of this country is 200 million.  84 million are over
60 years of age, which leaves 116 million to do the work.  People under 20
years of age total 75 million, which leaves 41 million to do the work.
        There are 22 million who are employed by the government, which leaves
19 million to do the work.  Four million are in the Armed Services, which
leaves 15 million to do the work.  Deduct 14,800,000, the number in the state
and city offices, leaving 200,000 to do the work.  There are 188,000 in
hospitals, insane asylums, etc., so that leaves 12,000 to do the work.
        Now it may interest you to know that there are 11,998 people in jail,
so that leaves just 2 people to carry the load. That is you and me, and
brother, I'm getting tired of doing everything myself!

        "Welcome back for you 13th consecutive week, Evelyn.  Evelyn, will
you go into the auto-suggestion booth and take your regular place on the
psycho-prompter couch?"
        "Thank you, Red."
        "Now, Evelyn, last week you went up to $40,000 by properly citing
your rivalry with your sibling as a compulsive sado-masochistic behavior
pattern which developed out of an early post-natal feeding problem."
        "Yes, Red."
        "But -- later, when asked about pre-adolescent oedipal phantasy
repressions, you rationalized twice and mental blocked three times.  Now,
at $300 per rationalization and $500 per mental block you lost $2,100 off
your $40,000 leaving you with a total of $37,900.  Now, any combination of
two more mental blocks and either one rationalization or three defensive
projections will put you out of the game.  Are you willing to go ahead?"
        "Yes, Red."
        "I might say here that all of Evelyn's questions and answers have
been checked for accuracy with her analyst.  Now, Evelyn, for $80,000
explain the failure of your three marriages."
        "Well, I--"
        "We'll get back to Evelyn in one minute.  First a word about our
product."
                -- Jules Feiffer

        Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines
of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them...
        Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced
only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen.  In it his mind floated freely,
able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed,
undistracted by any outside disturbances.  Logical structures no longer
inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished.
All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important,
became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships
not evident to ordinary vision.  Like beads strung on a string of their own
meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by
all.  Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming
all others.  And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem,
destroying Subject-Object by becoming them.
        Time passed, unheeded.
        Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and
Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes.
                -- Wayfarer

        "Well, it's a little rough... it might not be necessary to drag him 40
blocks.  Maybe just four.  You could put him in the trunk for the first 36
blocks, then haul him out and drag him the last four; that would certainly
scare the piss out of him, bumping alone the street, feeling all his skin being
ripped off..."
        "He'd be a bloody mess.  They might think he was just some drunk and
let him lie there all night."
        "Don't worry about that.  They have a guard station in front of the
White House that's open 24 hours a day.  The guards would recognize Colson...
and by that time of course his wife would have called the cops and reported
that a bunch of thugs had kidnapped him."
        "Wouldn't it be a little kinder if you drove about four more blocks
and stopped at a phone box to ring the hospital and say, 'Would you mind going
around to the front of the White House?  There's a naked man lying outside
in the street, bleeding to death...'"
        "... and we think it's Mr. Colson."
        "It would be quite a story for the newspapers, wouldn't it?"
        "Yeah, I think it's safe to say we'd see some headlines on that one."
                -- Hunter S. Thompson, talking to R. Steadman on C. Colson,
                ex-Marine captain, now born again, of Watergate fame.

        "Well, it's garish, ugly, and derelicts have used it for a toilet.
The rides are dilapidated to the point of being lethal, and could easily
maim or kill innocent little children."
        "Oh, so you don't like it?"
        "Don't like it?  I'm CRAZY for it."
                -- The Killing Joke

        "Well," said Programmer, "the customary procedure in such cases is
as follows."
        "What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?" said End-user.  "For I am
an End-user of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me."
        "It means the Thing to Do."
        "As long as it means that, I don't mind," said End-user humbly.

        Well, there was this tiger, who woke up one morning, and just felt
great (yes, just like Tony the Tiger: GREAAAAAAT).  Anyway, he just felt so
good, he went out and cornered a small monkey and roared at him: "WHO IS THE
MIGHTIEST OF ALL THE JUNGLE ANIMALS?"
        The poor, quaking, little monkey replied: "You are of course, no one
is mightier than you."
        A little while later the tiger confronts a deer, and just bellows out:
"WHO IS THE GREATEST AND STRONGEST OF ALL THE JUNGLE ANIMALS?"
        The deer is shaking so hard it can barely speak, but manages to
stammer: "Oh great tiger, you are by far the mightiest animal in the jungle."
        The tiger, being on a roll, swaggered, up to an elephant that was
quietly munching on some weeds, and roared at the top of his voice: "WHO IS
THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL THE ANIMALS IN THE JUNGLE?"
        Well, the elephant grabs the tiger with his trunk, picks him up, slams
him down; picks him up again, and shakes him until the tiger is just a blur of
orange and black; and finally throws him violently into a nearby tree.  The
tiger staggers to his feet and looks at the elephant and whispers: "Man, you
don't have to get so pissed, just 'cause you don't know the answer."

        "We're running out of adjectives to describe our situation.  We
had crisis, then we went into chaos, and now what do we call this?" said
Nicaraguan economist Francisco Mayorga, who holds a doctorate from Yale.
                -- The Washington Post, February, 1988

The New Yorker's comment:
        At Harvard they'd call it a noun.

        "We've decided to have the budgie put down."
        "Oh, is he very old then?"
        "No, we just don't like him."
        "Oh.  How do they put budgies down anyway?"
        "Well, it's funny you should be asking that, as I've been reading a
great big book called `How to put your budgie down'.  And as I understand it,
you can either hit them over the head with the book, or shoot them there, just
above the beak."
        "Mrs. Conkers flushed hers down the loo."
        "Oh, you don't want to do that, because they breed in the sewers and
pretty soon you get huge evil smelling flocks of soiled budgies flying out
of peoples lavatories infringing their personal freedoms."
                -- Monty Python