Freebsd Fortunes 2

        Somewhat alarmed at the continued growth of the number of employees
on the Department of Agriculture payroll in 1962, Michigan Republican Robert
Griffin proposed an amendment to the farm bill so that "the total number of
employees in the Department of Agriculture at no time exceeds the number of
farmers in America."
                -- Bill Adler, "The Washington Wits"

        "Somewhere", said Father Vittorini, "did Blake not speak of the
Machineries of Joy?  That is, did not God promote environments, then
intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and
women, such as are we all?  And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with
good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God's
Machineries of Joy?"
        "If Blake said that", said Father Brian, "he never lived in Dublin."
                -- R. Bradbury, "The Machineries of Joy"

        Split           1/4 bottle      .187 liters
        Half            1/2 bottle
        Bottle          750 milliliters
        Magnum          2 bottles       1.5 liters
        Jeroboam        4 bottles
        Rehoboam        6 bottles       Not available in the US
        Methuselah      8 bottles
        Salmanazar      12 bottles
        Balthazar       16 bottles
        Nebuchadnezzar  20 bottles      15 liters
        Sovereign       34 bottles      26 liters

        The Sovereign is a new bottle, made for the launching of the
largest cruise ship in the world.  The bottle alone cost 8,000 dollars
to produce and they only made 8 of them.
        Most of the funny names come from Biblical people.

        Stop!  Whoever crosseth the bridge of Death, must answer first
these questions three, ere the other side he see!

        "What is your name?"
        "Sir Brian of Bell."
        "What is your quest?"
        "I seek the Holy Grail."
        "What are four lowercase letters that are not legal flag arguments
to the Berkeley UNIX version of `ls'?"
        "I, er.... AIIIEEEEEE!"

        Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.  Five years later?
Six?  It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that
never comes again.  San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time
and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something.  Maybe not, in the long
run...  There was madness in any direction, at any hour.  If not across the
Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...  You could
strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we
were doing was right, that we were winning...
        And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't
need that. Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting
-- on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest
of a high and beautiful wave.  So now, less than five years later, you can go
up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes
you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally
broke and rolled back.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson

        Take the folks at Coca-Cola.  For many years, they were content
to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage.  It was a good
beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up
drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a
nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves
and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!"  So Coca-Cola
was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to
improve ...
                -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"

        "That wife of mine is a liar," said the angry husband to a
sympathetic pal seated next to him in a bar.
        "How do you know?" the friend asked.
        "She didn't come home last night, and when I asked her where
she'd been she said she'd spent the night with her sister Shirley."
        "So?"
        "So, she's a liar.  I spent the night with her sister Shirley."

        "That's right; the upper-case shift works fine on the screen, but
they're not coming out on the damn printer...  Hold?  Sure, I'll hold."
                -- e.e. cummings last service call

        "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff
and blow, "is to learn something.  That's the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love,
you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your
honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for
it then -- to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is
the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be
tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.  Learning
is the only thing for you.  Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
                -- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"

        The big problem with pornography is defining it.  You can't just
say it's pictures of people naked.  For example, you have these primitive
African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have
to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam
k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest
in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach
front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be
interested in."
        So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes
color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding
one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever.
But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls
of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some
people would call it pornography.  But others would not.  And still others,
such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing
the wildebeest naked.
                -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"