Freebsd Fortunes

        The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood
as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all.
The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in
the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces.  Even though twenty-four parts in
twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.

        "Now about Lankhmar.  She's been invaded, her walls breached
everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a
fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one --
and equipped with all modern weapons.  Yet you can save the city."

        "How?" demanded Fafhrd.

        Ningauble shrugged.  "You're a hero.  You should know."
                -- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar"

        THE WOMBAT

The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.

        THEORY
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?
                -- Dorothy Parker

        There are some goyisha names that just about guarantee that
someone isn't Jewish.  For example, you'll never meet a Jew named
Johnson or Wright or Jones or Sinclair or Ricks or Stevenson or Reid or
Larsen or Jenks.  But some goyisha names just about guarantee that
every other person you meet with that name will be Jewish.  Why is
this?
        Who knows?  Learned rabbis have pondered this question for
centuries and have failed to come up with an answer, and you think you
can find one?  Get serious.  You don't even understand why it's
forbidden to eat crab -- fresh cold crab with mayonnaise -- or lobster
-- soft tender morsels of lobster dipped in melted butter.  You don't
even understand a simple thing like that, and yet you hope to discover
why there are more Jews named Miller than Katz?  Fat Chance.
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"

        Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire
rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better
than he does.
        As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about
it.  I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily
sane.  But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we
consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade.  Inwardly, he is
being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.
        The disease is fatal.  There is no known cure.  The most we can
do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his
honor.  From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can
be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public
relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter
Thompson's disease.  I don't have it this morning.  It comes and goes.
This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease.
                -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt
                   from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear
                   and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"

        To A Quick Young Fox:
Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp,
Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice?
Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp --
Zow!  Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice.
                -- Lazy Dog

        "Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly.  "In the past
year strange and fearful wonders I have seen.  Fields sown with barley
reap crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their
artichoke hearts.  There has been a hot day in December and a blue
moon.  Calendars are made with a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon
Holstein bore alive two insurance salesmen.  The earth splits and the
entrails of a goat were found tied in square knots.  The face of the
sun blackens and the skies have rained down soggy potato chips."

        "But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito.

        "Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made
good copy."
                -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings"

        WARNING TO ALL PERSONNEL:

Firings will continue until morale improves.

        We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength.
But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle
Haggard song at a French restaurant. ...
        I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of
her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile.  There had been a fight.  I
had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls.  Everyone
told him, "You ride the bull, senor.  You do not fight it."  But he was
lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull.  And then he
fought me.  And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing
what men must do. ...
        "Stop the car," the girl said.  There was a look of terrible
sadness in her eyes.  She knew about the woman of the tollway.  I knew
not how.  I started to speak, but she raised an arm and spoke with a
quiet and peace I will never forget.
        "I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the
tollway belle's for thee."
        The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was
a lie.  Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I
poured whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day.
                -- Peter Applebome, International Imitation Hemingway
                   Competition

        "What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty
teenager asked her mother.
        "Encouragement, dear," she replied.