Freebsd Fortunes

        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, "$#$

#^

!^

&@

@!"

        "I don't know what you mean by `glory,'" Alice said
        Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  "Of course you don't --
till I tell you.  I meant `there's a nice knock-down argument for
you!'"
        "But glory doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice
objected.
        "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor
less."
        "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean
so many different things."
        "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--
that's all."
                -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"