Freebsd Fortunes

        THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #5: VALGOL
From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley,
VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry.

Here is a sample program:
        LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
        IF PIZZA = LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY = LIKE TUBULAR AND
           VALLEY GIRL = LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN
                FOR I = LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
                        DO*WAH - (DITTY**2)
                        BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
                SURE
        LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM
        REALLY
        LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW)
        IM*SURE
        GOTO THE MALL

When the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message:

        GAG ME WITH A SPOON!!

        THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK

This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi,
Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to
the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.

The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs
while they worked.  Unfortunately few programmers could survive there
because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and
Perrier.

Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle
and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower
case.  For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the
message:
        "i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that.  can
        you find the time to try it again?"

        The men sat sipping their tea in silence.  After a while the
klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream."

        "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other.  "Why?"

        "How should I know?  What am I, a philosopher?"

        The people of Halifax invented the trampoline.  During the
Victorian period the tripe-dressers of Halifax stretched tripe across a
large wooden frame and jumped up and down on it to `tender and dress'
it.  The tripoline, as they called it, degenerated into becoming the
apparatus for a spectator sport.

        The people of Halifax also invented the harmonium, a device for
castrating pigs during Sunday service.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"

        The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood
as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all.
The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in
the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces.  Even though twenty-four parts in
twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.

        "Now about Lankhmar.  She's been invaded, her walls breached
everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a
fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one --
and equipped with all modern weapons.  Yet you can save the city."

        "How?" demanded Fafhrd.

        Ningauble shrugged.  "You're a hero.  You should know."
                -- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar"

        THE WOMBAT

The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.

        THEORY
Into love and out again,
        Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
        Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
        All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
        Someone dropped me on my head?
                -- Dorothy Parker

        There are some goyisha names that just about guarantee that
someone isn't Jewish.  For example, you'll never meet a Jew named
Johnson or Wright or Jones or Sinclair or Ricks or Stevenson or Reid or
Larsen or Jenks.  But some goyisha names just about guarantee that
every other person you meet with that name will be Jewish.  Why is
this?
        Who knows?  Learned rabbis have pondered this question for
centuries and have failed to come up with an answer, and you think you
can find one?  Get serious.  You don't even understand why it's
forbidden to eat crab -- fresh cold crab with mayonnaise -- or lobster
-- soft tender morsels of lobster dipped in melted butter.  You don't
even understand a simple thing like that, and yet you hope to discover
why there are more Jews named Miller than Katz?  Fat Chance.
                -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"

        Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire
rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better
than he does.
        As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about
it.  I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily
sane.  But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we
consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade.  Inwardly, he is
being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.
        The disease is fatal.  There is no known cure.  The most we can
do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his
honor.  From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can
be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public
relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter
Thompson's disease.  I don't have it this morning.  It comes and goes.
This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease.
                -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt
                   from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear
                   and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"

        To A Quick Young Fox:
Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp,
Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice?
Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp --
Zow!  Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice.
                -- Lazy Dog