A farmer has to transport a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river. She can carry only one item at a time. If left together, the fox will eat the chicken, and the chicken will eat the corn. How does the farmer do it? The farmer begins by carrying the chicken across the river. But, as she does so, she notices her reflection in the water. She can barely recognize the person staring back at her, holding a chicken. “What’s happened to me?” she asks herself. She hasn’t picked up a paintbrush in more than a year. Now she’s carrying farm animals and sacks of grain across rivers. Is this why she spent two years at risd? ~ Ethan Kuperberg

Chuck Norris keeps his friends close and his enemies closer. Close enough to drop them with one round house kick to the face.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199710161537.IAA07828@wall.org>

Reyna d’Assia: The Key to Immortal Consciousness 71. Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.

Think of your family tonight. Try to crawl home after the computer crashes.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses. -- Simone Weil

When you get your PH.D. will you get able to work at BURGER KING?

"Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the universe again..." An unusually long pause followed, "...but I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship. "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious." -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"

how nemo got honored in his patria a metadrama in three parts i - solo A bows to the audience stiffly and repeatedly for a minute. ii - duo A and B bow to each other stiffly and repeatedly for a minute. iii - solo B bows to the audience stiffly and repeatedly for a minute. ~ Dick Higgins [NYC, Sept-Oct, 1985]

Reactive: the property of a website wherein it is made possible to view it on a smartphone-sized screen by adding so much bloat that it is no longer possible to render it on a smartphone CPU or cache it in a smartphone’s RAM

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

Here is the price of freedom: Your every drop of courage, ounce of pain, pint of blood. Paid in advance. - Sebastian Lee, "The Rising Tide", AFC 271

Give your very best today. Heaven knows it's little enough.

X windows: The ultimate bottleneck. Flawed beyond belief. The only thing you have to fear. Somewhere between chaos and insanity. On autopilot to oblivion. The joke that kills. A disgrace you can be proud of. A mistake carried out to perfection. Belongs more to the problem set than the solution set. To err is X windows. Ignorance is our most important resource. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. Built to fall apart. Nullifying centuries of progress. Falling to new depths of inefficiency. The last thing you need. The defacto substandard. Elevating brain damage to an art form. X windows.

Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took *thousands* of words to say it. Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world power. I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words: * "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you. * "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy. -- Dave Barry

The computer industry is journalists in their 20's standing in awe of entrepreneurs in their 30's who are hiring salesmen in their 40's and 50's and paying them in the 60's and 70's to bring their marketing into the 80's. -- Marty Winston

There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. -- Malcolm X

A positive attitude means all the difference in the world. -- Jenny Holzer

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic." - Eric Fromm, Swiss Psychologist (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded. -- Simone Weil