Freebsd Fortunes

                     JACK AND THE BEANSTACK
                          by Mark Isaak

        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 ...

                A Severe Strain on the Credulity

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 Editorial, 1920

                AMAZING BUT TRUE ...

If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end
across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.

                AMAZING BUT TRUE ...

There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
would completely cover the Sahara Desert.

                Another Glitch in the Call
                ------- ------ -- --- ----
        (Sung to the tune of a recent Pink Floyd song.)

We don't need no indirection
We don't need no flow control
No data typing or declarations
Did you leave the lists alone?

        Hey!  Hacker!  Leave those lists alone!

Chorus:
        All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
        All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.

                Answers to Last Fortune's Questions:

(1) None.  (Moses didn't have an ark).
(2) Your mother, by the pigeonhole principle.
(3) I don't know.
(4) Who cares?
(5) 6 (or maybe 4, or else 3).  Mr. Alfred J. Duncan of Podunk,
    Montana, submitted an interesting solution to Problem 5.
(6) There is an interesting solution to this problem on page 1029 of my
    book, which you can pick up for $23.95 at finer bookstores and
    bathroom supply outlets (or 99 cents at the table in front of
    Papyrus Books).

                DETERIORATA

Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice -- even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss -- and when.
Remember that two wrongs never make a right,
But that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on "HOLD".
Be comforted, that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
And despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.

        You are a fluke of the universe ...
        You have no right to be here.
        Whether you can hear it or not, the universe
        Is laughing behind your back.
                -- National Lampoon

                Double Bucky
        (Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")

Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun
        Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and Meta side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
        Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!

Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
        Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
        Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
        Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

                -- (C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr.

                Gimmie That Old Time Religion
We will follow Zarathustra,             We will worship like the Druids,
Zarathustra like we use to,             Dancing naked in the woods,
I'm a Zarathustra booster,              Drinking strange fermented fluids,
And he's good enough for me!            And it's good enough for me!
        (chorus)                                (chorus)

In the church of Aphrodite,
The priestess wears a see-through nightie,
She's a mighty righteous sightie,
And she's good enough for me!
        (chorus)

CHORUS: Give me that old time religion,
        Give me that old time religion,
        Give me that old time religion,
        'Cause it's good enough for me!

                MORE SPORTS RESULTS:
The Beverly Hills Freudians tied the Chicago Rogerians 0-0 last
Saturday night.  The match started with a long period of silence while
the Freudians waited for the Rogerians to free associate and the
Rogerians waited for the Freudians to say something they could
paraphrase.  The stalemate was broken when the Freudians' best player
took the offensive and interpreted the Rogerians' silence as reflecting
their anal-retentive personalities.  At this the Rogerians' star player
said "I hear you saying you think we're full of ka-ka."  This started a
fight and the match was called by officials.