Freebsd Fortunes

                        Chapter 1

The story so far:

        In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

                        DELETE A FORTUNE!

Don't some of these fortunes just drive you nuts?!  Wouldn't you like
to see some of them deleted from the system?  You can!  Just mail to
"fortune" with the fortune you hate most, and we MIGHT make sure it
gets expunged.

                        Get GUMMed
                        --- ------
The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April
1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above
the ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps.  Members will grep
each other by the hand (after intro), yacc a lot, smoke filtered
chroots in pipes, chown with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek
nice zombie processes, strip, and sleep, but not, we hope, od.  Three
days will be devoted to discussion of the ramifications of whodo.  Two
seconds have been allotted for a complete rundown of all the user-
friendly features of Unix.  Seminars include "Everything You Know is
Wrong", led by Tom Kempson, "Batman or Cat:man?" led by Richie Dennis
"cc C?  Si!  Si!" led by Kerwin Bernighan, and "Document Unix, Are You
Kidding?" led by Jan Yeats.  No Reader Service No. is necessary because
all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we
could tell them.
                -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84

                        Pittsburgh Driver's Test

(7) The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light
    but a steady left tail light.  This means

        (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn
            to call the problem to the driver's attention.
        (b) the driver is signaling a right turn.
        (c) the driver is signaling a left turn.
        (d) the driver is from out of town.

The correct answer is (d).  Tail lights are used in some foreign
countries to signal turns.

                        Pittsburgh Driver's Test

(8) Pedestrians are

        (a) irrelevant.
        (b) communists.
        (c) a nuisance.
        (d) difficult to clean off the front grille.

The correct answer is (a).  Pedestrians are not in cars, so they are
totally irrelevant to driving; you should ignore them completely.

                        Has your family tried 'em?

                           POWDERMILK BISCUITS

                 Heavens, they're tasty and expeditious!

           They're made from whole wheat, to give shy persons the
           strength to get up and do what needs to be done.

                           POWDERMILK BISCUITS

        Buy them ready-made in the big blue box with the picture of the
        biscuit on the front, or in the brown bag with the dark stains
                         that indicate freshness.

                      THE STORY OF CREATION
                               or
                         THE MYTH OF URK

In the beginning there was data.  The data was without form and null,
and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
was moving over the face of the market.  And DEC said, "Let there be
registers"; and there were registers.  And DEC saw that they carried;
and DEC separated the data from the instructions.  DEC called the data
Stack, and the instructions they called Code.  And there was evening
and there was morning, one interrupt ...
                -- Rico Tudor

                     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.