Freebsd Fortunes

        GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY #21 -- July 30, 1917

On this day, New York City hotel detectives burst in and caught then-
Senator Warren G. Harding in bed with an underage girl.  He bought them
off with a $20 bribe, and later remarked thankfully, "I thought I
wouldn't get out of that under $1000!"  Always one to learn from his
mistakes, in later years President Harding carried on his affairs in a
tiny closet in the White House Cabinet Room while Secret Service men
stood lookout.

        Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the
month.  According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people
are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China.
        The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either
(depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax
tadpole".
        Bite the wax tadpole.
        There is a sort of rough justice, is there not?
        The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's
hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to
bite a wax tadpole.  Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad,
but broad satiric vistas do not open up.
                -- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle

        Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who's
willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop
for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location.  Notice I say
"shop for", as opposed to "obtain".  This is the major drawback of home
centers: they are always out of everything except artificial Christmas
trees.  The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise
because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every
object -- every board, washer, nail and screw -- in the entire store ...
        Let's say a piece in your toilet tank breaks, so you remove the
broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if he has
a replacement.  The employee, who has never is his life even seen the
inside of a toilet tank, will peer at the broken part in very much the
same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at
an electronic calculator, and then say, "We're expecting a shipment of
these sometime around the middle of next week".
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

        How many seconds are there in a year?  If I tell you there  are
3.155  x  10^7, you won't even try to remember it.  On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury.
                -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs

        Hug O' War

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
                -- Shel Silverstein

        Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small
misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of
the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to
see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or
background. It can be programmed to behave as if it were working with
uncertainty, but -- underneath, at the code, at the circuits -- it
cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that
remains unknown. In the painstaking working out of the specification,
line by code line, the programmer confronts an awful, inevitable truth:
The ways of human and machine understanding are disjunct.
                -- Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine"

        "I cannot read the fiery letters," said Frito Bugger in a
quavering voice.
        "No," said GoodGulf, "but I can.  The letters are Elvish, of
course, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which
I will not utter here.  They are lines of a verse long known in
Elven-lore:

        "This Ring, no other, is made by the elves,
        Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves.
        Ruler of creeper, mortal, and scallop,
        This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop.
        The Power almighty rests in this Lone Ring.
        The Power, alrighty, for doing your Own Thing.
        If broken or busted, it cannot be remade.
        If found, send to Sorhed (with postage prepaid)."
                -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings"

        I disapprove of the F-word, not because it's dirty, but because
we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently
leads to violence.  What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say,
in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we've had
time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the
library, we could call each other up:

     You: Hello?  Bob?
     Bob: Yes?
     You: This is Ed.  Remember?  The person whose parking space you
          took last Thursday?  Outside of Sears?
     Bob: Oh yes!  Sure!  How are you, Ed?
     You: Fine, thanks.  Listen, Bob, the reason I'm calling is:
          "Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and ..."  No, wait.
          I mean:  "you may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill
          and ..."  No, wait.  (Sound of reference book thudding onto
          the floor.)  S-word.  Excuse me.  Look, Bob, I'm going to
          have to get back to you.
     Bob: Fine.
                -- Dave Barry, "$#$

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