The Big Plan

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How to be a better person:

• Think
  • Pay attention
  • Express yourself clearly
  • Understand what the real issues are
  • Plan
  • Be prepared to change
• Feel
  • Practice compassion
  • Empathize: treat others as you'd like to be treated; don't treat others as you wouldn't like to be treated
• Act
  • Hold others responsible for their actions, accept responsibility for your actions
  • Avoid violence
  • Remain genuine

Clif J. (cmj@pixie.login.qc.ca) wrote:
: That is a good point. God inspired the bible he didn't write it. People
: base their lives around the manic scribblings of desert baked primitives
: who ate bugs and honey. Of course they saw God!
Nothing beats a good mix of sex, racism and religion. God, this is getting me hot.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding or slight discrepancy to defeat 20 pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than 10 normal witnesses on the other side; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries, to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

[...] "What is hateful to thee, do not do to thy neighbor." [...] the apparent obviousness of this does not entirely redeem it from contradiction. To Colonel Qaddafi and Charles Manson and Bernard Madoff, I want things to happen that would be hateful to me. Of what use is a principle that is only as good as the person uttering it?

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

In regards to Oral Roberts' claim that God told him that he would die unless he received $20 million by March, God's lawyers have stated that their client has not spoken with Roberts for several years. Off the record, God has stated that "If I had wanted to ice the little toad, I would have done it a long time ago."

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in the belief, and perhaps in some respects, both.

I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.

Generally, the documents suggest that a major cause of mankind's problems began 75 million years ago, when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeach, was part of a confederation of 90 planets under the leadership of a tyrannical ruler named Xemu. Then, as now, the materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation. Xemu, the documents state, decided to take radical measures to overcome the overpopulation problem. Beings were captured on Earth and on other planets and flown to at least 10 volcanoes on Earth. The documents state that H-bombs far more powerful than any in existence today were dropped on the volcanoes, destroying the people but freeing their spirits, called "thetans," which attached themselves to one another in clusters. After the nuclear explosions, according to the documents, the thetans were trapped in a compound of frozen alcohol and glycol and, during a 36-day period, Xemu "implanted" in them the seeds of aberrant behavior for generations to come. When people die, those clusters attach to to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves. Before a Scientologist can learn about thetans and how to eradicate them, he must go through a progression of costly programs.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination.

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast powers in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task.

The reason ESP, for example, is not considered a viable topic in contemporary psychology is simply that its investigation has not proven fruitful...After more than 70 years of study, there still does not exist one example of an ESP phenomenon that is replicable under controlled conditions. This simple but basic scientific criterion has not been met despite dozens of studies conducted over many decades...It is for this reason alone that the topic is now of little interest to psychology...In short, there is no demonstrated phenomenon that needs explanation.

The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.

David Brinkley: The daily astrological charts are precisely where, in my judgment, they belong, and that is on the comic page.
George Will: I don't think astrology belongs even on the comic pages. The comics are making no truth claim.
Brinkley: Where would you put it?
Will: I wouldn't put it in the newspaper. I think it's transparent rubbish. It's a reflection of an idea that we expelled from Western thought in the sixteenth century, that we are in the center of a caring universe. We are not the center of the universe, and it doesn't care. The star's alignment at the time of our birth -- that is absolute rubbish. It is not funny to have it intruded among people who have nuclear weapons.
Sam Donaldson: This isn't something new. Governor Ronald Reagan was sworn in just after midnight in his first term in Sacramento because the stars said it was a propitious time.
Will: They [horoscopes] are utter crashing banalities. They could apply to anyone and anything.
Brinkley: When is the exact moment [of birth]? I don't think the nurse is standing there with a stopwatch and a notepad.
Donaldson: If we're making decisions based on the stars -- that's a cockamamie thing. People want to know.

If you should assemble the ten wisest men of the world and ask them to find the most stupid thing in existence, they will be unable to find anything more stupid than astrology.

To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.

Former Orange County Treasurer Robert L. Citron managed the county's multibillion-dollar investments guided by a $4.50 astrology chart that predicted changes in the financial markets, recently released court documents revealed. Citron testified that he was having trouble digesting important information and suspected that his brain had been deteriorating since 1989. "My brain is unable to audit all the information necessary to make executive decisions," he testified.

The county sought federal bankruptcy protection in December 1994 after losing $1.64 billion from its central investment pool, a savings bank for schools, cities, water and sewer districts. It was the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

I've gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers' parlors, and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

I'm a Leo. Leos don't believe in this astrology stuff.

Virgo: (Aug. 23--Sept. 22)
One of your greatest problems is your inability to ignore oversimplified, arbitrary, and potentially unsound advice from dubious sources.

Pisces: (Feb. 19--March 20)
The stars indicate success for you, but they do so with enough ambiguity to cover any possible alternatives.

[Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted. As a matter of fact, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled. We're dealing with beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians. There's nothing there.... It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy. It's got technical terms. It's got jargon. It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing. The fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested and tested over the centuries. Nobody's ever found any validity to it at all. It is not even close to a science. A science has to be repeatable, it has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable -- you test it. And in that astrology is really quite something else.

Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked. Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence, what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way.... Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents the astrological influence.... If so, astrological predictions -- like those of any scientific field -- should be easily tested.... Astrologers always claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them.... I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by the firelight, afraid of the night.

Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around the sun. At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact. That all present life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is as firmly established as Copernican cosmology. Biologists differ only with respect to theories about how the process operates.

The evolutionary view has been built up painstakingly over a period of two centuries on the basis of scientific study, and it has behind it an enormous body of evidence and reasoning. All biologists, of any reputation at all, accept the evidence that present-day species have developed slowly from simpler forms; that the unit of life, the cell, has developed from precellular scraps of life; and that these, in turn, have arisen from nonliving materials by changes that are in accord with the laws of nature over a vast stretch of several billions of years.

The exact mechanism of evolution, the fine details, remain under dispute, since the process of discovery and development is not yet done and may never be entirely done. Even the most argumentative of those who quarrel over the details do not, however, deny the evolutionary concept itself.

Creationists, on the other hand, present no evidence in favour of their view. They argue entirely from the negative. They maintain that if the concept of evolution is found wanting, then that alone is sufficient to force acceptance of creationism. They then insist that the concept of evolution is indeed found wanting. They point out insufficiencies, contradictions, and uncertainties in the evolutionary arguments and say, triumphantly, "Thus we establish creationism!"

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about "intelligent design".

I think they should be allowed to teach "Intelligent Design" after they explain where their hypothesized Intelligent Designer was intelligently designed -- their entire point, after all, is the claim that the complexity of life and intelligence is beyond the abilities of evolution to accomplish. Therefore, since their proposed Intelligent Designer is by definition intelligent and complex...

[...] humans and mice share about 80 percent of their genetic material; humans and dogs, closer to 90 percent. And while Julia Roberts and Koko the chimp may look different on the outside, genetically, humans and chimps are almost indistinguishable, sharing 98 percent of their genetic material.

Of Bishop Berkeley's theory of the non-existence of matter, Boswell observed that though they were satisfied it was not true, they were unable to refute it. Samuel Johnson struck his foot against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, saying "I refute it thus".

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others ... over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

If compelled to choose, I'd rather be respected than liked.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

All glory is fleeting.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?

The less you do, the less you can do.

First you don't, then you can't.

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

You have three choices in this life: be good, get good, or give up. You've gone for column D. Why? The simple answer is: if you don't try, you can't fail.

Would you like fries with your New World Order?

C'est la vie, C'est la guerre, C'est la pomme de terre.

Violence. When all else fails, the human being can still depend on some variation of the stick or the stone to make its point - to set things straight, as it were. Violence is the "spare tire" we carry around in case the wheels of reason go flat.

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.

Into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going --
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Sorry, I can't undo that. What's done is done.

To get out of a hole, the first step is to stop digging.

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

"Don't truth me," said Boaz in his thoughts, "and I won't truth you." It was a plea he had made several times to Unk. Boaz had invented the plea, and its meaning was this: Unk was to stop telling Boaz truths about the harmoniums, because Boaz loved the harmoniums, and because Boaz was nice enough not to bring up truths that would make Unk unhappy. Unk didn't know that he had strangled his friend Stony Stevenson. Unk thought Stony was still marvelously alive somewhere in the Universe. Unk was living on dreams of a reunion with Stony. Boaz was nice enough to withhold the truth from Unk, no matter how great the provocation had been to club Unk between the eyes with it.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered.

The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.

Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well.

Nothing exceeds like excess.

I spent my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.

No good deed goes unpunished.

The end starts at the beginning.

Nothing demonstrates solidarity like actually showing up.

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Suicide is our way of telling God, "You can't fire me, I quit!".

When Christian artists pondered the most dangerous and subversive of the deadly sins, they weren't thinking of securities fraud. It was only natural that they should seize on the frankly sexual figure of Pan. [...] The trick in portraying Satan has always been simple enough. You want a critter of which one thinks: Ooh, that's scary. But also: You know, I can see the appeal.

It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Think of it. All those religions. They can't all be right? But they can all be wrong.

There is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following except change.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

What is frightening about the abyss is the idea of eternity, and the best way to avoid it is with a general anaesthetic. Think of death as a general anaesthetic to spare you from eternity.

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.

Hoping to make death less inevitable, at least for himself, Thiel also began to patronize the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which has been steadily freezing the corpses of moneyed narcissists in liquid nitrogen since 1976.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning.... All their mistakes are are due to excess and vehemence and their neglect of the maxim of Chilon ["Never go to extremes"]. They overdo everything; they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else. And they think they know everything, and confidently affirm it, and this is the cause of their excess in everything.

The problem with quotes on the internet is you can never be certain they're authentic.

I hate quotations.

Just how much information are we talking about anyway? Well the visible human project by the American National Institute of Health requires about 10 Gigabytes (that's about 10^11 = 100,000,000,000 "bits," or yes/no answers, this is about ten CD ROMs) to give the full three dimensional details of a human down to one millimeter resolution in each direction. If we forget about recognizing atoms and measuring their velocities and just scale that to a resolution of one-atomic length in each direction that's about 10^32 bits (a one followed by thirty two zeros). This is so much information that even with the best optical fibers conceivable it would take over one hundred million centuries to transmit all that information! It would be easier to walk! If we packed all that information into CD ROMs it would fit into a cube almost 1000 kilometers on a side! Enough said?

And way to go, placebo. Placebo, always a tough competitor, was nearly half as effective as the drug -- a gritty performance by the perpetual underdog.

At the banquet [of the International Information Theory Symposium], the meeting's organizers somehow persuaded Shannon to address the audience. He spoke for a few minutes and then -- fearing that he was boring his audience, he recalled later -- pulled three balls out of his pockets and began juggling. The audience cheered and lined up for autographs. Said [...] the chairman of the symposium: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference".

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Thomas Young in the early 1800s showed that light is a wave. He passed light through two closely spaced parallel slits in a screen, and on the far side saw several bright bands appear on a second screen. This was an interference’pattern caused by the interaction of waves emanating from the slits. If ordinary particles are used instead, two bands are seen.

When very small particles are used instead of light, the interference pattern remains, accumulating over many particle impacts, even if particles go through the slits one at a time. The particles seem to interfere with themselves. If we use a detector to measure which slit the particle goes through, the pattern vanishes just as with ordinary particles. And this is still true if we delay the measurement until after the particle has traversed the slits but before it hits the screen. If we make the measurement and then delete the result without looking at it, interference returns. It is the act of noticing that seems to make the difference, not the physical act of measuring.

I have always felt that there is something degrading in offering rewards for intellectual exertion, and that societies or academies, or even kings and emperors, should mingle in the matter does not remove the degradation.

Two things are certain about science. It does not stand still for long, and it is never boring. Oh, among some poor souls, including even intellectuals in fields of high scholarship, science is frequently misperceived. Many see it as only a body of facts, promulgated from on high in musty, unintelligible textbooks, a collection of unchanging precepts defended with authoritarian vigor. Others view it as nothing but a cold, dry narrow, plodding, rule-bound process -- the scientific method: hidebound, linear, and left brained.

These people are the victims of their own stereotypes. They are destined to view the world of science with a set of blinders. They know nothing of the tumult, cacophony, rambunctiousness, and tendentiousness of the actual scientific process, let alone the creativity, passion, and joy of discovery. And they are likely to know little of the continual procession of new insights and discoveries that every day, in some way, change our view (if not theirs) of the natural world.

When I opened the door I saw a hand stretched out energetically. His long hair was gray, his face tired and yellow, but he had the same radiant deep eyes. He wore the brown leather jacket in which he has appeared in so many pictures. (Someone had given it to him to wear when sailing, and he had liked it so well that he dressed in it every day.) His shirt was without a collar, his brown trousers creased, and he wore shoes without socks. I expected a brief private conversation. Quietly he took a piece of chalk, went to the blackboard and started to deliver a perfect lecture. The calmness with which Einstein spoke was striking. There was nothing of the restlessness of a scientist who, explaining the problems with which he has lived for years, assumes that they are equally familiar to the listener and proceeds quickly with his exposition. Before going into details, Einstein sketched the philosophical background for the problems on which he was working. Walking slowly and with dignity around the room, going to the blackboard from time to time to write down mathematical equations, keeping a dead pipe in his mouth, he formed his sentences perfectly. Everything that he said could have been printed as he said it and every sentence would make perfect sense. The exposition was simple, profound, and clear.

The most amazing thing about Einstein was his tremendous vital force directed toward one and only one channel: that of original thinking, of doing research. Slowly I came to realize that in exactly this lies his greatness. Nothing is as important as physics. No human relations, no personal life, are as essential as thought and the comprehension of how "God created the world". In this phrase so often repeated by Einstein with variations, was his peculiar religious feeling that laws of nature can be formulated simply and beautifully. When he had a new idea he asked himself: "Could God have created the world in this way?" or "Is this mathematical structure worthy of God?". Translated into ordinary language, this sentence means: "Is the theory logically simple enough?".

Einstein told me more about his mistake; it was less trivial than mine and difficult to detect. The dramatic aspect of the situation was emphasized by the fact that Einstein's lecture on his paper had been announced a week before in Fine Hall to be delivered just one day after he discovered his mistake. He had to lecture on his paper, but the paper did not prove anything.

In the afternoon of the same day the great lecture room in Fine Hall was crowded to the last seat. All lectures in the mathematical seminar are announced by a small card tacked to the bulletin board in the hall. The card contains the name of the lecturer and his subject. Einstein's lectures are the only exceptions. If there is a cryptic announcement: "On --- at 5pm a mathematical seminar will be held in Room 113," practically everyone at Fine Hall knows that Einstein will be the lecturer. The announcement of his name would be sufficient to bring a crowd of journalists and photographers from New York.

I admired the skill, charm, and honesty with which Einstein performed the difficult task of lecturing about a result which had been destroyed less than a day before.

The clue to the understanding of Einstein's role in science lies in his loneliness and aloofness. In this respect he differs from all other scientists I know. When, in 1905, Einstein formulated the special relatively theory his name was unknown to the world of science. He never had studied physics at a famous university, he was not attached to any school; he worked as a clerk in a patent office. Nowadays, to learn the scientific technique, to be in contact with masters, to go through a good school of physics, to learn the proper use of tools, is essential for every scientist. Thus the example of Einstein is unique. For him the isolation was a blessing since it prevented his thought from wandering into conventional channels. This aloofness, this independent thought on problems which Einstein formulated for himself, not marching with the crowd but looking for his own lonely pathways, is the most essential feature of his creation. It is not only originality, it is not only imagination, it is something more, which can be understood by a glimpse at the problems and methods of Einstein's work.

It is difficult to resist fame and not be influenced by it. But fame has had no effect on Einstein. Fame bothers him when and as long as it impinges on his life, but he ceases to be conscious of it the moment he is left alone.

Once we went to a movie in Princeton. After we had bought our tickets we went to a crowded waiting room and found that we should have to wait 15 minutes longer. Einstein suggested that we go for a walk. When we went out I said to the doorman: "We shall return in a few minutes." But Einstein became seriously concerned and added in all innocence: "We haven't our tickets any more. Will you recognize us?" The doorman thought we were joking and said, laughing: "Yes, Prof. Einstein, I will."

Once he told me: "I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university."

I remarked that this is difficult for other people. That, for example, when they meet him they feel shy and embarrassed, that it takes time for this feeling to disappear and that it was so in my case. He said: "I cannot understand this. Why should anyone be shy with me?"

The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone, both to the novice and to the experienced physicist. Even the experts do not understand it the way they would like to, and it is perfectly reasonable that they should not, because all of direct, human experience and of human intuition applies to large objects. We know how large objects will act, but things on a small scale just do not act that way. So we have to learn about them in a sort of abstract or imaginative fashion and not by connection with our direct experience.

In this chapter we shall tackle immediately the basic element of the mysterious behavior in its most strange form. We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot explain the mystery in the sense of "explaining" how it works. We will tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics.

The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

When anyone says "theoretically", they really mean "not really".

One experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

If I have made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Zener recalls that his choices of problems to pursue were often rooted in simple practical considerations. He recalls ruling out studies of fundamental physics early in his career after having a chance to dine with the great theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. After being dazzled by Oppenheimer, Zener says, "It was clear to me that when it came to fundamental physics, there was no point in competing with a person like that".

A 375-foot antenna would receive and transmit radio and television control signals; seven enclosed mirrors arrayed in a semicircle would reflect early bomblight to streak cameras in a heavily reinforced bunker two miles away on Bogalua. One of the turbine-driven streak cameras was capable of photographing 3.5 million frames of film per second.

... it weighed a relatively portable 23,500 pounds and had been designed to fit the bomb bay of a B-47 when it was weaponized. It was expected to yield about five megatons, but the group at Los Alamos that had measured lithium fusion cross sections had used a technique that missed an important fusion reaction in lithium 7 ... Bravo exploded with a yield of fifteen megatons, the largest-yield thermonuclear device the US ever tested.

This time the fireball expanded to nearly four miles in diameter. It engulfed its 7,500-foot diagnostic pipe array all the way out to the earth-banked instrument bunker, which barely survived. It trapped people in experiment bunkers well outside the expected limits of its effects and menaced task force ships far out at sea. "I was on a ship that was thirty miles away," Marshall Rosenbluth remembers, "and we had this horrible white stuff raining out on us. ... It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience." Bravo vaporized a crater 250 feet deep and 6,500 feet in diameter out of the atoll rock.

Time: 30 October 1961
Yield: 50 Megatons
Shown here in the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum, the "Tsar Bomba" was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. This three stage weapon was actually a 100 megaton bomb design, but the uranium fusion tamper of the teritiary (and probably secondary) stage(s) was replaced by one made of lead to eliminate fast fission by the fusion neutrons. The result was also the cleanest weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions.

So it was to be my first technical talk, and Wheeler made arrangements with Eugene Wigner to put it on the regular seminar schedule. A day or two before the talk I saw Wigner in the hall. "Feynman," he said, "I think that work you're doing with Wheeler is very interesting, so I've invited Russell to the seminar." Henry Norris Russell, the famous, great astronomer of the day, was coming to the lecture! Wigner went on. "I think Professor von Neumann would also be interested." Johnny von Neumann was the greatest mathematician around. "And Professor Pauli is visiting from Switzerland, it so happens, so I've invited Professor Pauli to come" -- Pauli was a very famous physicist -- and by this time, I'm turning yellow. Finally, Wigner said, "Professor Einstein only rarely comes to our weekly seminars, but your work is so interesting that I've invited him specially, so he's coming, too."

Back off man. I'm a scientist.

Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.

Gravity causes matter to clump together, defining an arrow of time that aligns itself with growth of complexity. Increasing complexity has one crucial side effect: It leads to the formation of certain arrangements of matter that maintain their structure over time. These structures can store information; Tim Koslowski calls them "records". Gravity is the first and primary force that makes record formation possible; other processes then give rise to everything from fossils and tree rings to written documents. What all of these entities have in common is that they contain information about some earlier state of the universe. A more complex universe contains more records than a less complex universe, and this is why we remember the past but not the future.

The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made on 14 September 2015. Efforts to directly prove the existence of such waves had been ongoing for over fifty years, and the waves are so minuscule that Albert Einstein himself doubted that they could ever be detected. The waves given off by the cataclysmic merger of GW150914 reached Earth as a ripple in spacetime that changed the length of a 4 km LIGO arm by a thousandth of the width of a proton, proportionally equivalent to changing the distance to the nearest star outside the Solar System by one hair's width. The energy released by the binary as it spiralled together and merged was immense, [...] radiated as gravitational waves, reaching a peak emission rate in its final few milliseconds [at] a level greater than the combined power of all light radiated by all the stars in the observable universe. The observation confirms the last remaining directly undetected prediction of general relativity and corroborates its predictions of space-time distortion in the context of large scale cosmic events.

If God had consulted with me during the six days of creation, I would have recommended a less complicated design.

Old School Reports of the Famous, #1: Richard Stallman.
He is an excellent pupil. Our only complaint is that he encourages all the other pupils to copy his work.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

It is better to have a poor plan than no plan at all.

The first thing to die in combat is your plan.

Everybody has a plan until they get hit [in the face].

Preparation starts with thinking. Unfortunately, that doesn't get most people very far.

Kelly Johnson had three simple management principles supporting a single fundamental belief: don't build something you don't believe in. His three principles:

• It's more important to listen than to talk;
• Even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision; and
• Don't halfheartedly wound problems - kill them dead.

On Meetings

1. Every meeting should be shorter than 60 minutes
   [Otherwise there are too many participants, participants are unprepared, or the focus has drifted]


2. The meeting leader should firmly but politely maintain focus and schedule, and eliminate distractions
   


3. An agenda should be distributed to attendees at least 24 hrs. in advance
   


4. Wrap up by reviewing what needs to be done and who is responsible, and soliciting questions

In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt.

Coding at the professional level is highly specialized and requires years of practice to master. That's why successful professional programmers almost always have a computer science degree and extensive programming experience. In short, the idea of a bootcamp for coding is just as practical as the idea of a bootcamp for surgery.

In the cafeteria just after lunch, (well, not just after, more like during lunch, about 12:28; say 12:30, give or take a few minutes), I leaned back in my chair (it was one of those aluminum chairs, good strength-to-weight, like titanium but not quite; but then of course titanium would be a bit of an overkill). Anyway, I heard one of the girls talking about how boring she thought engineers could be.

Path: sdcsvax!dcdwest!ittvax!decvax!mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
From: chernenko@kremvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.general,net.politics
Subject: USSR on Usenet
Message-ID: <0001@kremvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 1-Apr-84 11:02:52 PST
Organization: MIIA, Moscow

Well, today, 840401, this is at last the Socialist Union of Soviet Republics joining the Usenet network and saying hallo to everybody.

Kremvax really does exist. It's a Microvax II at DEMOS, the organization that administers RELCOM, the Soviet UUCP network. We get mail relayed through it frequently. Dmitry Volodin, the system administrator at DEMOS, has a nice sense of humor -- and he knows his Usenet lore...

It's a real uVAX ][ with 8Mb RAM, 2Gb of disk space, 21 2400 bps MNP-5 modems (try +7 095 2330062 if you don't believe me) [...] It's IP address is 192.91.186.8, though it's useless for you. The history of Piet Beertema's joke is well known. We choosed the "historical" name because this VAX was turned on at his new place at DEMOS at the 1st April 1991 (hm, could you call it by other name if you were me?)

Something this fun must be evil.

"I'm hot," Melanie said, squeezing his forearm. "For some reason, watching guys programming gets me hot." She slid her hand off his forearm and placed it on his thigh, rubbing gently. "I thought you knew."

Recycling systems for oxygen and water are being developed for space station Freedom. Ninety-eight percent of the water will come from urine. The hardware's final test will require the program manager to drink a glass of the output.

Noting that body fat, which supplies approximately 3,500 calories per pound, is a much more efficient fuel source than conventional food, Nelson proposed (in all seriousness, he tells me) hiring obese astronauts, who could live off their own blubber rather than haul along a bulky food supply. Not a bad idea, especially since 20 percent of Americans are now considered obese anyway. Off my case! you can tell people as you scarf another Ho Ho. I'm training for a mission to Mars.

From surveys and FDA incident reports [since the mid-1980s], hundreds of cases in the U.S. have been tallied of metal objects turning up in a magnetic resonance imaging unit because of the pull of the magnetic field. These objects included pens, jewelry, fans, tile cutters, vacuum cleaners, IV poles, gurneys, wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, and fork lift tines. It has been estimated that the incidents caused dozens of mostly minor injuries to patients or health care practitioners who were in the path of the objects as they were pulled to the unit. The phenomenon is known as the projectile effect.

NetHack 4.0 will be ready for beta testing in a few weeks. In addition to multi-player scenarios, a fully POSIX compliant operating system will be incorporated into the release. This should bring the package up to only 60 parts.

Every program expands until it can read mail.

Emacs is a good operating system, but it could use a better text editor.

The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques which put them into practice, the more is my amazement and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

Yesterday's systems Today, Today's systems Tomorrow

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you can't fix it, it ain't broke.

I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production.

The Saturn V, popularly known in the industry as "The Stack", was made up of three separate rocket motors, each with a special task. The bottom part, or first stage, was the most powerful working motor the world had ever known. Called the Saturn S-IC, it was built by the Boeing Company. Clustered around the base were five big Rocketdyne F-1 engines which pushed the 363 feet (110.6 metres) high, 3,000 ton vehicle from rest on the pad to 9 times the speed of sound (6,164 m.p.h.) in the first two and a half minutes, consuming 2,096 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen at a rate of 13.1 tons per second (12,710 litres per second) and producing an incredible 7.6 million lbs. (3.45 million kg.) of thrust!

Stop and look at those figures again... and visualise a vehicle the height of a 36 story building, the weight of a navy destroyer, taking off and breaking through the sound barrier in 40 seconds, then reaching 9 times the speed of sound in the next 90 seconds!! An awesome spectacle of brutal power and noise.

Although little is publicly known about what exactly the rocket will be carrying into space, analysts say it is probably a $1-billion high-powered spy satellite capable of snapping pictures detailed enough to distinguish the make and model of an automobile hundreds of miles below.

This is the second time that a Delta IV Heavy rocket will be launched from Vandenberg. The first time, in January 2011, a sound wave as loud as a freight train swept over nearby Lompoc, a town of about 43,000.

Some people reported hearing the rocket's roar as far away as 50 miles. Vehicles were pulling off and stopping on the southbound shoulder of U.S. 101 to watch it hurtle into the afternoon sky.

The rocket was built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. It made its maiden flight in 2004 and is capable of lifting payloads of up to 24 tons into low Earth orbit.

Three hydrogen-fueled engines - each roughly the size of a pickup truck - will guzzle nearly a ton of propellants per second to provide 17 million horsepower. When the engines do roar to life, more than 200 Aerojet-Rocketdyne engineers and technicians will be watching.

There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.

And when it [red fuming nitric acid, RFNA] is poured, it gives off dense clouds of NO2, which is a remarkably toxic gas. A man gets a good breath of it, and coughs a few minutes, and then insists that he's all right. And the next day, walking about, he's just as likely as not to drop dead.

In general, it is best to assume that the network is filled with malevolent entities that will send in packets designed to have the worst possible effect.

It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

He that fights with monsters should look to himself that he does not become a monster.

As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.

John P. Rouillard wants a style file to allow text to flow around floated figures. TeX is Turing-equivalent, so this is of course possible. The easiest way to do it is to write a TeX macro that simulates a Turing machine and then re-implement LaTeX as a Turing-machine program, adding the desired extra functionality.

Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

A designer knows when he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

OceanGate claimed that Cyclops II had "the first pressure vessel of its kind in the world." But there's a reason that Triton and other manufacturers don't use carbon fibre in their hulls. Under compression, "it's a capricious fucking material, which is the last fucking thing you want to associate with a pressure boundary," Lahey told me.

Double Bucky
(Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")
Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun
Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and Meta side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!
=====
Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.

More than anything, what bothered me is the feeling that my work doesn't matter one way or another. You get into software thinking you'll build cool things, but instead, it's about jumping through hoops for business school people with bad ideas.

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.

Writing programs needs genius to save the last order or the last millisecond. It is great fun, but it is a young man's game. You start it with great enthusiasm when you first start programming, but after ten years you get a bit bored with it, and then you turn to automatic-programming languages and use them because they enable you to get to the heart of the problem that you want to do, instead of having to concentrate on the mechanics of getting the program going as fast as you possibly can, which is really nothing more than doing a sort of crossword puzzle.

Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything.

A good USENET motto would be:
a. Together, a strong community.
b. Computers R Us.
c. I'm sick of programming, I think I'll just screw around for a while on company time.

Hast thou first presseth the "off" button and then the "on" button?

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug."

... furthermore, the gap between theory and practice in practice is much larger than the gap between theory and practice in theory.

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

A triumph of bloated theory over clean implementation.

Standards are like toothbrushes: everyone agrees they're a good idea, but no one wants to use someone else's.

At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it.

One hopes that whoever is responsible for including "tab" in the ASCII character set is now roasting in hell for his efforts. It has been suggested that building a system that allows the insertion of tabs into a text file should be a capital offense. I'm not that extreme; I think that ten years of writing COBOL code in Novosibirsk would be adequate punishment. Unfortunately, there are still unpunished offenders building text editors. Fortunately, there exist programs that will replace tabs by the appropriate number of spaces. Running them on all your files will save you much grief in the long run.

I'm not hiring him. He uses spaces not tabs.

The X philosophy is "mechanism, not policy", which translates to "here's some rope, bet you'll hang yourself".

The term "gadget" is second only to "widget" as the most aggressively meaningless bit of jargon ever promoted.

A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.

... and it's finished! It only has to be written.

You can eyeball a piece of code till you bleed, but there is no substitute for testing.

I love the smell of software in the morning.
It smells like ... hacking.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtapes.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines -- so go as far as possible from home to build your first buildings.

Lack of skill dictates economy of style.

In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Take the first three odd digits and repeat each one twice: 113355
Now take the second half and divide it by the first half: 355/113
This turns out to be Pi to within one part in 10 million.

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.

Numbers are the leading cause of statistics.

40.7% of all statistics are completely made up.

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS.

...all the good computer designs are bootlegged; the formally planned products, if they are built at all, are dogs!

It was just dumb luck that Unix managed to break through the Stupidity Barrier and become popular in spite of its inherent elegance.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

Write programs to work together.
Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Rule 6. There is no Rule 6.

Rule of Modularity

Developers should build a program out of simple parts connected by well defined interfaces, so problems are local, and parts of the program can be replaced in future versions to support new features. This rule aims to save time on debugging code that is complex, long, and unreadable.

Rule of Clarity

Developers should write programs as if the most important communication is to the developer who will read and maintain the program, rather than the computer. This rule aims to make code as readable and comprehensible as possible for whoever works on the code in the future.

Rule of Composition

Developers should write programs that can communicate easily with other programs. This rule aims to allow developers to break down projects into small, simple programs rather than overly complex monolithic programs.

Rule of Separation

Developers should separate the mechanisms of the programs from the policies of the programs; one method is to divide a program into a front-end interface and a back-end engine with which that interface communicates. This rule aims to prevent bug introduction by allowing policies to be changed with minimum likelihood of destabilizing operational mechanisms.

Rule of Simplicity

Developers should design for simplicity by looking for ways to break up program systems into small, straightforward cooperating pieces. This rule aims to discourage developers' affection for writing "intricate and beautiful complexities" that are in reality bug prone programs.

Rule of Parsimony

Developers should avoid writing big programs. This rule aims to prevent overinvestment of development time in failed or suboptimal approaches caused by the owners of the program's reluctance to throw away visibly large pieces of work. Smaller programs are not only easier to write, optimize, and maintain; they are easier to delete when deprecated.

Rule of Transparency

Developers should design for visibility and discoverability by writing in a way that their thought process can lucidly be seen by future developers working on the project and using input and output formats that make it easy to identify valid input and correct output. This rule aims to reduce debugging time and extend the lifespan of programs.

Rule of Robustness

Developers should design robust programs by designing for transparency and discoverability, because code that is easy to understand is easier to stress test for unexpected conditions that may not be foreseeable in complex programs. This rule aims to help developers build robust, reliable products.

Rule of Representation

Developers should choose to make data more complicated rather than the procedural logic of the program when faced with the choice, because it is easier for humans to understand complex data compared with complex logic. This rule aims to make programs more readable for any developer working on the project, which allows the program to be maintained.

Rule of Least Surprise

Developers should design programs that build on top of the potential users' expected knowledge; for example, `+' in a calculator program should always mean 'addition'. This rule aims to encourage developers to build intuitive products that are easy to use.

Rule of Silence

Developers should design programs so that they do not print unnecessary output. This rule aims to allow other programs and developers to pick out the information they need from a program's output without having to parse verbosity.

Rule of Repair

Developers should design programs that fail in a manner that is easy to localize and diagnose or in other words "fail noisily". This rule aims to prevent incorrect output from a program from becoming an input and corrupting the output of other code undetected.

Rule of Economy

Developers should value developer time over machine time, because machine cycles today are relatively inexpensive compared to prices in the 1970s. This rule aims to reduce development costs of projects.

Rule of Generation

Developers should avoid writing code by hand and instead write abstract high-level programs that generate code. This rule aims to reduce human errors and save time.

Rule of Optimization

Developers should prototype software before polishing it. This rule aims to prevent developers from spending too much time for marginal gains.

Rule of Diversity

Developers should design their programs to be flexible and open. This rule aims to make programs flexible, allowing them to be used in ways other than those their developers intended.

Rule of Extensibility

Developers should design for the future by making their protocols extensible, allowing for easy plugins without modification to the program's architecture by other developers, noting the version of the program, and more. This rule aims to extend the lifespan and enhance the utility of the code the developer writes.

Luck is the residue of design.

Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.

I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.

The conceptual floor is littered with the virtual carcasses of people who let their desire for high machine efficiency override other considerations, things like programmer and user productivity.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

If you have a good idea, you can bet someone else doesn't think it's good.

I was starting to get a lot of flak at Xerox for working on this project 'cause it didn't look like a copier. You have trouble at any company... if you're not making things like they're selling you're immediately suspect.

The customers don't care what's inside the box; it could be elves drawing the pictures so long as it's electronic.

It isn't how simple it is, it's how simple it is when it works. Internal combustion engines have tons of stuff going on inside. From a beginning standpoint you'd say why would anyone ever build anything like that. Well, but it does work, and that's key.

A little hard work takes you a long ways. To me, the exciting thing is you can't imagine enough. Even for technologists, when we think we're on the edge, we're not on the edge. We tend to set our own limits because we're afraid people won't believe us.

Only dead fish swim with the stream.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

What happens most of the time is nothing. You just can't have ideas often.

You can have it 1) soon, 2) well made, or 3) cheap. Pick any two.

Buy less, choose well, make it last. It's all about quality, not quantity.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

Why Does Almost Nothing Come With a Proper Printed Manual Anymore?

• Manufacturers are not interested in creating users who know what they are doing.
• Designers tend to be of the persuasion that if it needs a manual, it isn't user friendly enough, and writing one anyway makes them look like quitters.
• Users themselves just want a black box with a go button that takes them to pleasureville.

None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert -- because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible.

The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.

"Every bit of advice we've been given from the brightest brains and the smartest engineers... mathematicians... just have not been correct."
"They have all been completely wrong."

Of course good ideas alone are not enough. There are always plenty of good ideas. The real money is in taking existing ideas and twisting the idea just far enough to make it work in a fantastic new way. Think Google vs. AltaVista; Apple vs. all previously existing laptops and mp3 players; YouTube vs. all previously existing video sites, etc. In addition to ideas, you need creativity, resources, connections, and luck...

Cloud Print has a year to live, then it will be collating documents in heaven.

Whenever somebody says "the cloud", replace it with "someone else's computer".

Certain lending businesses in the New Jersey area have been using blockchain technology for decades. From time to time a client who was found to be in arrears pops off the chain and is discovered floating in the river.

This week, a marketing professor with New York University's Stern School of Business said in a TV interview that Yahoo should be "euthanized" and that Ms. Mayer was "the most overpaid CEO in history."

Regardless of how small the measurable, direct impact of additional flights caused by loyalty programs, their indirect cost is high. He said they reward people for flying, the worst possible single action you can take for climate change. "To get anywhere near the pollution of a flight, you'd have to continuously be eating hamburgers across the Atlantic," he said. (You'd actually have to eat hundreds.)

Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like Microsoft Word is. Word was done in 1974. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards - in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.

You want to get those [features] from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101.

The job of an operating system is to run arbitrary code safely. It's not there to tell you what kind of code you can run. Most operating systems have way too many features. The nice thing about UNIX when it was first done is not just that there were only 20 system commands, but the kernel was only about 1,000 lines of code. This is true of Linux also.

One of the ways of looking at it is the reason that WYSIWYG is slowly showing up in the browser is that it's a better way of interacting with the computer than the way they first did it. So of course they're going to reinvent it. I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Gutenberg invented his printing press around 1440; the modern paper jam was invented around 1960. During most of the years in between, jamming was impossible, because printing was done one sheet at a time. Traditional presses lowered inked type onto individual sheets of paper; their successor, the rotary drum, was hand-fed. In 1863, an inventor and newspaper editor named William Bullock created the Bullock press, which was fed by a single roll of paper several miles long. Bullock's press revolutionized the printing industry by vastly increasing printing speeds. Sadly, in 1867 Bullock's leg was caught in the press; it became gangrenous, and he died. There are jams worse than paper jams.

It certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive.

The more I see of men, the better I like my dog.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

The reason the death of a pet is worse than the death of a human is that you have mixed feelings about all people.

Shooting a law-enforcement dog is a felony crime.

"These dogs are more than dogs to their handlers," McGuinness said. "They're family members. They're with you 24 hours a day. Some of them have saved officers' lives, and they'll go to the ends of the earth to save their dogs."
He said CPR on a dog is "relatively easy -- you just keep his mouth closed and you blow into his nasal cavities. Then you just do, almost like a human, chest compressions, just back from the upper shoulder."

Gentlemen of the jury: the best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his worst enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it the most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.

The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous... is his dog.

Gentlemen of the Jury: a man's dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death.

No man can be condemned for owning a dog. As long as he has a dog, he has a friend; and the poorer he gets, the better friend he has.

My dog sees for me. He gives me more than ever he can receive, like all dogs.

I'd like to thank all my dogs, the ones that are here, the ones that aren't here anymore, because sometimes, when a man's alone, that's all you got is your dog. And they've meant the world to me.

I sort of self-destructed and everything came out about 14 years ago or so... the wife had left, the career was over, the money was not an ounce. The dogs were there when no one else was there.

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.

I can see stopping a car for a dog. But a cat? You squish a cat and go on. I think we're overcomplicating life.

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how dogs spend their lives.

If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.

Ever consider what they [dogs] must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

Remember, pets need regular food, exercise, love and attention. You probably should not be allowed to own one.

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.

Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

Andreessen said most of their doubts had abated in view of AOL's commitment to preserve Netscape's corporate culture. For example, at a meeting earlier this week with AOL president Steve Case, Netscapers were relieved to learn they would still be allowed to keep dogs in their cubicles.

Naming a major concern of some Netscape employees, he said workers will still be able to keep their dogs in their work cubicles. "This is a big deal," he said to laughter from the audience.

To err is human, to forgive canine.

I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

The disposition of noble dogs is to be gentle with people they know and the opposite with those they don't know... How, then, can the dog be anything other than a lover of learning since it defines what's its own and what's alien.

Since the victim act works for big-shot politicians, it's only fair that it's good enough for the puppy killer, Mayor Cookie, of the tiny Central Illinois burg of Milford. Mayor Cookie is the victim of thousands of animal lovers from across the country who are calling his office and demanding his resignation. Mayor Cookie's friends don't think that's fair.

He won fame for Milford by stopping Snoopy the beagle from barking. Snoopy was the pet of a 6-year-old boy named Jimmy Miller. But Snoopy escaped from his back yard and ran over to the grain elevator where Mayor Cookie is the boss. Snoopy barked at Mayor Cookie, who got aggravated. Instead of putting a rope on the puppy and calling the county animal control office, Mayor Cookie took decisive action. He grabbed a big scoop shovel and chopped Snoopy into pieces. After a few chops, Mayor Cookie figured that the pieces didn't fit together anymore. So, he chopped some more to put the pup out of its misery. He said it was the humane thing to do.

Now he's clinging to the Milford mayoralty on what I assume is the "Kill the puppies" platform. "I had a lot of businessmen come up to me today and say they wanted me to stay," Cook told Tribune reporter Flynn McRoberts. "These guys talked long and hard to get me to change my mind," Mayor Cookie said. "That made a big difference. There's some older guys who didn't totally agree with what I did, but they still stand behind me."

My my, la de la, come on now it ain't too far
Tell your friends all around the world
Ain't no companion like a blue eyed merle
Come on now well let me tell ya
What you're missing, missing, 'round them brick walls

So of one thing I am sure
It's a friendship so pure
Angels singing all around, my dog is so fine

Yeah, ain't but one thing to do
Spend my natural life with you
You're the finest dog I knew, so fine

When you're old and your eyes are dim
There ain't no old Shep gonna happen again
We'll still go walking down country lanes
I'll sing the same old songs
Hear me call your name

Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains
Of one
Who possessed Beauty
Without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man
Without his Vices.

The Price, which would be unmeaning flattery
If inscribed over Human Ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of
Boatswain, a Dog
Who was born at Newfoundland,
May, 1803,
And died in Newstead Abbey,
Nov. 18, 1808.

When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown by glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptors art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And stories urns record that rests below.
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his masters own,
Who labors, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonored falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power
Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennoble but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye, who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friends remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one and here he lies.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to repeal a state law that requires animal shelters to hold stray dogs and cats for up to six days before killing them. Instead, there would be a three-day requirement for strays. Despite Schwarzenegger's huge popularity, some political observers think the proposal will meet stiff resistance.
"There is no organized constituency of cats and dogs, but certainly the pet owners of America will find this reprehensible," said Barbara O'Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University, Sacramento.
"Cats and dogs are like mom and apple pie," she said. "Don't mess with the pets. Most people prefer them to other people."

Evolution, which produced humans who could think and were self-aware and knew loneliness, also in an act of serendipity produced dogs who could know us and love us. How strange that an animal could evolve as a wolf, self-select as a wolf who sought human company, and become an animal that values human company and considers its owners to be wonderful gods. People who do not like dogs do not know dogs. It is very difficult to dislike a being who worships you and would gladly die for you - especially when it is handsome and frisky and empathetic, and a good, good doggie, yes it is.

A young woman stepped forward from the throng and asked, "O' great prophet, tell us how we might find love that is unconditional, unwavering and unending."

The prophet did not answer right away. He looked off into the distance, gathering his thoughts. Silence descended upon the crowd. Then he turned his gaze upon the young woman and said, "Get a dog."

I saw a tramp last night
the way the old dog walked
with dotted, tired fur
down nobody's alley
being nobody's dog ...
past the empty vodka bottles
past the peanut butter jars,
with wires full of electricity
and the birds asleep somewhere,
down the alley he went--
nobody's dog
moving through it all,
brave as any army.

The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.

I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but it's definitely dirty. But, dogs got personality, personality goes a long way.

F-14 is the world's best total fighter.

Let me get my hands on the D-model (the F-14D) and there won't be a fighter on the planet that can stick with me.

The twin-jet F-14 is indeed some airplane. It was designed to range farther, fly faster, climb higher and pack more wallop than any interceptor ever built. While it possesses some of the features of a fighter, fighter pilots certainly would prefer to call it an interceptor. Its long suit is its fire control system and its missiles. With his AWG-9 radar and infrared-sensor-computer system, the backseat Missile Control Officer (MCO) of the Tomcat can track twenty-four separate targets, from sea level to one hundred thousand feet, up to one hundred miles distant.

Possibly the most complete fighter in the world today, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat first entered service in 1975. Armament consists of M61A1 20-mm rotary cannon plus AIM-9 Sidewinder short-range, AIM-7 Sparrow medium-range and AIM-54 Phoenix long-range air-to-air missiles. A combination of all these missiles can be carried at one time, making the F-14 capable of shooting down any flying intruder at any range up to 200 km (125 miles). The Phoenix missiles are operated in conjunction with the Tomcat's AWG-9 radar, and can hit targets at any altitude from ground level to over 2400 m (78,740 ft).

You are on the Landing Signal Officer platform of the USS Kitty Hawk, off the coast of California. It's a warm December night in 1993. Out of the starry black sky comes an ungodly roar followed by an enormous slab of a wing and huge vertical stabilizers. Thirty tons of Tomcat hurtles by, eclipsing the stars, trailing fire, feeling for the 3 wire. The beast slams onto the deck and instantly goes to full power (in case the hook misses), which rattles your very bones and literally takes your breath away. The airplane has just conveyed the message, "I am the biggest, baddest Grumman cat ever to fly off a carrier. YOU GOT THAT, you miserable civilian scum?"

It costs about $18,000 [USD] per hour to fly the A-10 attack jet. Other hourly costs are: $19,000 for the F-16; $24,000 for the F-15E; $42,000 for the F-35A; $44,000 for the AC-130J; $62,000 for the F-22A; $63,000 for the B-52; $77,000 for the B-1B; and $120,000 for the B-2, according to service statistics.

The 426 Hemi is unquestionably the king of the muscle cars, both for its speed and for its defiance. In the middle-to-late sixties, Chrysler wanted to win, wanted it bad. The 426 Hemi was a race engine based on the same basic 413-cubic-inch V-8 that powered the company's luxury cars, but almost all parts - except for the oil-pan bolts - were unique.

The Hemi won at Daytona in 1964, its first time out. When NASCAR banned it in 1965 on the grounds that it wasn't a production engine, Chrysler started production and stuffed the Hemi down Bill France's throat. That's the kind of want-to Chrysler had in those days.

The "Street Hemi" was a class act, very smooth, quiet at idle, tractable in traffic. Most of the moving parts inside were different from the official race hardware, but they were far more rugged than the usual high-performance street components. Hemi cars had specially reinforced bodies, too. Chrysler did the job right and priced the Hemi option accordingly - $907.60. In 1966, that was about half the price of a new VW.

"A quick stab at the throttle pedal - in any old gear - will send the needle flying around the tach. It doesn't feel like a seven-liter engine - except for the fact that you're suddenly doing 120 and you don't know how you got there."

For 1968, Chrysler helped the Hemi a bit. Output was perhaps 30 horsepower stronger, although the 425-hp rating did not change. No other production car has ever had an exhaust system of greater capacity, and the two in-line four barrel carburetors drew through an air cleaner about the diameter of a manhole.

In normal driving, the Hemi was quieter than many muscle-car engines of the day, but that changed when you stepped into the power. The exhaust pulses turned hard - "like machine-gun fire," said one engineer at the time - and they boomed loudly up through the floor.

Early in the 1969 model year, I ran a Hemi Road Runner automatic through the quarter-mile: 13.5 seconds at 105 mph.

In contrast, the Herlitz Barracuda was clean and largely unadorned, with a wide body and a hunkered-down stance that hinted at the considerable power available to customers who checked the right boxes on their order forms. When a huge V-8 engine was crammed into a coupe like this, its status changed to muscle car, capable of tire-smoking burnouts and blistering straight-line acceleration - but generally mediocre handling.

Today, the Herlitz-redesigned Barracudas of the early 1970s, especially Hemi 'Cudas with fearsome 425-horsepower engines, remain some of the most sought-after muscle cars. At collector-car auctions frequented by celebrities, bids have exceeded $2 million for Hemi 'Cudas with rare high-performance options.

In another indication of the timeless nature of the design, Chrysler is resurrecting the Barracuda's sister car, the Dodge Challenger, as a 2008 model. Chrysler shut down its Plymouth brand seven years ago, precluding a return of the Barracuda.

Mr. Herlitz followed up his 1970 tour de force with well-received makeovers of other revered performance cars, including the 1971 Plymouth Road Runner and the GTX. Then, as the muscle-car era wound down amid fuel shortages and new safety and emissions rules, Mr. Herlitz assumed ever-increasing responsibility in the Chrysler studios.

Dodge had the most memorable name on this one [1969 Plymouth Road Runner/ Dodge Super Bee] - 440 Six Pack - inspired by the three two-barrel carbs. The result was a torque motor that would rev, too, a fearsome street cleaner. A full-throttle TorqueFlite kickdown at traffic speeds felt like being rear-ended by a dump truck. A Hemi would get away at the high end, but on the avenues - particularly for a short burst - I'd bet on the Six Pack. ETs were about 13.6 at 104 mph, depending on the tires, of course.

GM finally overcame all its inhibitions in 1970 and allowed its largest displacement engines to be installed in intermediate cars. The most uninhibited of all was the Chevelle SS454, option LS6, rated at a nice, round 450 horsepower.

Chevrolet supplied one of these lunkers for a test late in 1969. This particular car had "Cowl Induction", a little trapdoor - located in the high-pressure area of the hood just forward of the windshield - that flipped open at full throttle to let cold air into the air cleaner. That flap should have been fun to watch from inside the car, but whenever it was open the 454 was making things big in the windshield so fast that I always forgot to check the hood.

The test car came with weedy little polyester-cord F70-14 tires. The automatic liked to surprise them with part-throttle downshifts in city traffic; it would bust them loose and make them howl. A guy had to show mercy or that 454 would have yowled them all the way to the redline. At the strip, this LS6, complete with cringing tires, cleared the eyes in 13.8 seconds at 104 mph.

Yet so huge is this car and how fast it can go, a Ford Mustang or Chevrolet Camaro will refuse to pull alongside any Demon sitting at a stoplight. Even sophisticated speed merchants, such as the Porsche 918 Spyder or Bugatti Veyron would be wise to shy away from a straight-line dance with the Demon, because they will lose.

The whole ensemble is ridiculous. Even without a compound-warming burnout, those fat sticky tires grab every pebble and piece of roadway grit, flinging it all against the underside of the un-upholstered trunk to clatter like marbles in a coffee can. You leave twin gray streaks on the pavement with every 40 roll, supercharger whooping the world's angriest slide-whistle solo as you rocket into the next time zone. The exhaust note roars just a few decibels beyond aggressive, resonating through the cabin unimpeded by the missing rear seat. You can see why Dodge sells this as a quarter-mile car - driven any further, you'd risk massive fatigue, mostly in your smile muscles.

There's no replacement for V8 displacement.

And now my friend, the first rule of Italian driving... [throws away rear view mirror] What's behind me is not important.

The Mustang 5.0 HO is a car built around a drivetrain, not a car built to serve as a grocery hauler.
Drive it loud.

Bad gas mileage, faulty engineering, plastic emblems that fall off... At the Large Detroit Car Company, these things are part of the standards that we set for ourselves. But we also know it takes people, working together. It takes lack of care, little or no craftsmanship. A really bad car doesn't just happen, it starts with an incredibly dumb design... right here, at our Faulty Engineering and Incredibly Dumb Design Center in Detroit, Michigan.

In the year 2000, the 15-year survival rate for the average Detroit-built vehicle was 26.8%, says Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants. In the year 2017, it was 46.0%... Japanese vehicle[s]... increased from 21.7% to 62.5% ... Korean vehicles... 4.0% to 21.9% and European vehicles 41.7% to 73.9%.

• Truly unencumbered by the engineering process. [Renault Dauphine]
• This car topped out at 45 mph. Since the minimum speed on the Florida Turnpike is 40, patrol cars would follow me, waiting for me to hit a hill so they could ticket me. [Renault Dauphine]
• When we traded it in my wife was upset because we didn't keep it long enough for her to buy a gun and shoot it. [Cadillac Cimarron]
• The car had all the quality and safety of a cheap garden tractor. [AMC Gremlin]
• I took this car to a high-crime shopping mall and left it unlocked with the keys in the ignition. I came back several days later and, much to my disgust, it was still there. [Ford Pinto]
• As near as I could tell, the car was built from compressed rust. [Chevy Vega]
• At least it had heated rear windows -- so your hands would stay warm while you pushed. [Winner: Yugo]

The Lucas motto: Get Home Before Dark.
Lucas: Inventor of the first intermittent wiper.
The Lucas three-position switch: Dim, Flicker, Off
Lucas: Patent holder for the short circuit
Lucas: Lord of Darkness

Airline industry motto:
We're not happy 'til you're not happy.

What you have discovered is the most diabolical conspiracy of all, the Anti-Destination League. This is a group of people, most of them driving Fnord Escorts, who roam the highways and byways of the world looking for people that they can keep from reaching their chosen destination in a timely manner.

The Anti-Destination League. Know them, fear them.

I'm talking about this habit people have of driving on interstate highways in the left, or "passing" lane, despite the fact that they aren't passing anybody. You see it everywhere: drivers who are not passing, who have clearly never passed anybody in their entire lives, squatting in the left lane, little globules of fat clogging up the transportation arteries of our very nation. For some reason, a high percentage of them wear hats. What I do, when I come up behind these people, is the same thing you do, namely pass them on the right and glare at them. Unfortunately, this tactic doesn't appear to be working, so I'm proposing that we go to the next logical step: nuclear weapons.

Specifically, I'm thinking of atomic land torpedoes, which would be mounted on the front bumpers of cars operated by drivers who have demonstrated that they have the maturity and judgment necessary to handle tactical nuclear weapons in a traffic environment. I would be one of these drivers.

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

I always had this saying: The first 10 ideas you get, throw them away. And that's what we used to do, is to just keep going until it was something you hadn't seen before or couldn't anticipate.

I saw David Chase yesterday at a homeless shelter in Newark and I asked him why he was there and he just said "Many Saints, whatever happened there".

This is the one Academy Award that has an opportunity to change a life. [...] These people will never be rich as long as they live. So this Oscar means something. Because all they do is tell stories that are important. Now, you all do it, but you also get rich. But these people, all they got - is this Oscar is going home in a Honda Civic. This Oscar is going to be the nicest thing they ever own in their life. It's going to give them anxiety to keep it in their crappy apartment.

The Stranger: It's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid.

Mordecai: What about after? ... What about after we do it? ... What do we do then?
The Stranger: Then you live with it.

The Schofield Kid: It don't seem real. How he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever. How he's dead. And the other one too. All on account of pullin' a trigger.

Munny: It's a helluva thing, killin' a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.

Egon: Vince, you said before you were waiting for a sign. What sign are you waiting for?
Vince Klortho: Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zools knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

Salesman: Have you thought much about luggage, Mr. Banks?
Joe: No, I never really have.
Salesman: It's a central preoccupation of my life. You travel the world, you're away from home, perhaps away from your family, all you have to depend on is yourself, and your luggage.
Joe: Yeah, I guess that's true.
Salesman: Are you travelling light or heavy?
Joe: Heavy.
Salesman: Fly?
Joe: Flying and by ship.
Salesman: An ocean voyage.
Joe: Yes.
Salesman: Ah, yes, so, a real journey.
Joe: And then I'll be staying on this island, and I don't even really know if I'll be living in a hut or what.
Salesman: Very exciting, as a luggage problem.

Joe: And I don't know who you are. I don't want to know. It's taken me all my life to find out who I am and I am tired now. You hear what I'm saying?

I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?
Harry, yeah Harry, but... but can he do the job?
I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?
I'm not arguing that with you.
I'm not arguing that with you.
I'm not arguing that with you.
I'm not arguing that with you, Harry.
Harry... Harry.
Yeah, Harry, but can he do the job?
I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?
I'm not arguing that with you.
Harry...
I am not arguing that with you.
Who said that? I didn't say that. If I said that I would have been wrong.
Maybe... Maybe.
I'm not arguing that with you.
Yeah, Harry, I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?
I'm not arguing that with you.
I am not arguing that with you.
I am not arguing that with you.
Who told you that? No! I told you that. Me. What?
Maybe...Maybe... Maybe... Maybe.

No. No. You were wrong. He was wrong! Who said that? I didn't say that. If I said that I would've been wrong. I would have been wrong. Isn't that right Harry? I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you. Listen, let me call you back. I've got something here, ok? Don't say anything until we finish our conversation, alright?

Doctor: You have a brain cloud.
Joe: Brain cloud?
Doctor: There... a black fog of tissue running right down the center of your brain. It's very rare. It'll spread at a regular rate. It's very destructive.
Joe: And it's incurable...
Doctor: Yes.
Joe: How long?
Doctor: Six months. You can pretty much count that being about that. It's not painful. Your brain will simply fail, followed abruptly by your body.

Joe: I don't feel good.
Mr. Waturi: So what! You think I feel good? Nobody feels good. After childhood it's a fact of life. I feel rotten. So what! I don't let it bother me. I don't let it interfere with my job.

Joe: You look terrible Mr. Waturi. You look like a bag of shit stuffed in a cheap suit. Not that anybody could look good under these zombie lights. I can feel them sucking the juice out of my eyeballs. Suck suck suck suck suck -- [slurp] -- Three hundred bucks a week, that's the news, for three hundred bucks a week I lived in this sink, this used rubber.
Mr. Waturi: Watch it mister, there's a woman here.
Joe: Don't you think I know that Frank? Don't you think I'm aware that there is a woman here. I can smell her, like, like a flower. I can taste her like sugar on my tongue. When I'm twenty feet away I can hear the fabric of her dress when she moves in her chair. Not that I've done anything about it. I've gone all day, every day, not doing, not saying, not taking the chance, for three hundred dollars a week. And Frank, the coffee, it stinks. It tastes like arsenic. These lights give me a headache. If they don't give you a headache you must be dead. So let's arrange the funeral.
Mr. Waturi: You better get out of here. I'm telling you.
Joe: You're not telling me nothing.
Mr. Waturi: I'm telling you!
Joe: Why? I ask myself why have I put up with you. I can't imagine. But I know it's fear. Yellow freakin' fear. I've been too chicken shit afraid to live my life so I sold it to you for three hundred freakin' dollars a week. You are lucky I don't kill you! You're lucky I don't rip your freakin' throat out! But I'm not going to! Maybe you're not so lucky at that. 'Cause I'm going to leave you here, Mr. Wahu Watusi. What could be worse than that.

I got a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anybody would miss you.

It takes all of your power
To prove that you don't care
I'm not Cordelia.
I will not be there.

Maybe your friends think I'm just a stranger,
some face you'll never see no more.
Let it all come down tonight.
Keep those tears hid out of sight, let it loose, let it all come down.

when you realize
she has nothing
no thing
to offer you
you'll let go
but as long as you hope
even though you know
you're still hers
and not
yours

We're sticking together, like it used to be!
When you side with a man you stay with him. If you can't do that you're like some animal! You're finished! We're finished! All of us!

Greetings my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these, will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?

"Because all you of Earth are idiots!"
"... You just hold on buster..."
"No, you hold on. First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your hand grenade. They began to kill your own people a few at a time. Then the bomb. Then a larger bomb.
...
But the juvenile minds which you possess will not comprehend its strength until it's too late."
"...You're way above our heads!"
...
"You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!"

My friend. You have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn't happen? Perhaps on your way home someone will pass you in the dark and you will never know it, for they will be from outer space. Many scientists believe that another world is watching us this moment. We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television. And how some of us laugh at outer space. God help us in the future.

It has been said that Plan 9 From Outer Space is a hymn to all those who have tried nobly to create something memorable and meaningful and failed miserably every step of the way.

If you're not appearing, you're disappearing.

At times, it can be a bit annoying, but who are you to get annoyed because people like you? Live with it, pal.

So there was a little meeting that night at Mick's house in Chelsea. There was Mick and me, and there was Keith. And Keith came over hearing of this and we were all sitting there, and Keith launched this vitriolic attack on Mick and me for being sissies, cowards, pussies, for giving in to whatever the prevailing wind was. And if Taj Mahal was not in the show, he wouldn't be either. [...] But this was with Keith at his very most aggressive, which I'm here to tell you, can be quite aggressive.

For a while, I thought Keith Richards kept staring at me because he was awestruck by the brilliance of my improvised contributions to their oeuvre. After a few songs, it finally penetrated my brain that the expression on his face wasn't really suggestive of profound musical appreciation. [I] quickly scuttled off, noting as I went that Keith was still staring at me in a manner that suggested we'd be discussing this later [and realized] it might be best if I didn't hang around for the after-show party.

I don't really like to hear people yelling at me and telling me it's music, AKA rap. I can get enough of that without leaving my house.

A lot of the time with records it's the experiences that people have been through while that record's been playing that make it special to them. Although they're interested and they'll buy the new record, it doesn't mean as much to them as the one they heard that magical night when they screwed fifteen chicks.

Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects.

I don't care what critics write about it, or anything like that, but one thing that disturbed me... A girl thought she recognized me and she came to say hello. And she was asking me about that particular song. She was on leave, just for an hour or so, from the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. [...] She said that that song was really a favorite of a lot of kids in her ward. At first I thought: Oh, man ... and this was after I talked with her for a while, saying it could mean a lot of things, kind of a maze or a puzzle to think about, everybody should relate it to their own situation. I didn't realize people took songs so seriously and it made me wonder whether I ought to consider the consequences. That's kind of ridiculous, because I do it myself; you don't think of the consequences and you can't.

Things to scream in stressful situations

Serenity now!

Computer, stop program!

Tired of lovingrecoveringlovingrecoveringlovingrecoveringlovingrecovering.

One sweet dream
Pick up the bags, get in the limousine
Soon we'll be away from here
Step on the gas and wipe that tear away
One sweet dream
Came true today

Show business is, is dog-eat-dog. It's worse than dog-eat-dog. It's dog-doesn't-return-other-dog's-phone-calls.

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed, you know, as a career. I don't want to do that.

"What would you do if you were me?"
"I don't know. I mean, I'm not you."
"Image that you are me."
"Well, that's hard. Sometimes I even have trouble imagining that I'm me, if you know what I mean."

The days go by and you wish you were a different guy
Different friends and a new set of clothes
You make alterations, affecting your pose
A new house, a new car, a new job, a new nose
But it's superficial and it's only skin deep
Because the voices in your head keep a shoutin' in your sleep
Get back, get back
Back where you started, here we go 'round again
Back where you started, come on and do it again

You'd say I'm putting you on
But it's no joke, it's doin' me harm
You know I can't sleep, I can't stop my brain
It's been three weeks, I'm goin' insane
You know I'd give you everything I got for little peace of mind

What's important
In this life?
Ask the man
Who's lost his wife.

So there's no simple explanation
For anything important
Any of us do
And, yea, the human tragedy
Consists in the necessity
Of living with the consequences
Under pressure, under pressure

I'll be short and brief but to the point the fighting has resumed
in that tone of voice the plague is exhumed

It's classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent.

The mass media is supported and sustained by commercial entities. And corn flakes and Shakespeare are simply not kissing cousins. Leonard Bernstein and living bras are incompatible. And you cannot sustain adult, probing, meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper.

Signals transmitted
Message received
Reaction making impact --
Invisibly
Elemental telepathy
Exchange of energy
Reaction making contact --
Mysteriously

Tarzan, The Ape Man (1981) C-112m. BOMB D: John Derek.
Bo Derek, Richard Harris, Miles O'Keeffe, John Phillip Law.
Deranged "remake" of original Tarzan film lacks action, humor, and charm -- and nearly forced editors of this book to devise a rating lower than BOMB.

And failure this thorough has a virulent effect that reaches beyond one mere film; it makes you question the cinematic form itself. Is this thing uniquely bad, or did movies always suck and I'm just now realizing it?

Selections from the Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979)
====================================================
Chase:
BOMB: Chase
BOMB: Ennea
BOMB: Pure Music
Flee.
Robert De Niro:
***: Soundtrack from Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver contains one monologue from the movie, the one with De Niro talking to himself in the mirror ("You talking to me? Ain't nobody else here!") and fingering some stranger offcamera. A must for paranoids.
Donny Osmond:
BOMB: Alone Together
BOMB: Disco Train
BOMB: Donald Clark Osmond
BOMB: Donny Osmond Album
BOMB: My Best to You
BOMB: Portrait of Donny
This is not the reincarnation of Shaun Cassidy. Well-crafted garbage -- trash is too elevated a description.
The Osmonds:
BOMB: Around the World Live in Concert
BOMB: Brainstorm
BOMB: Osmonds' Christmas Album
BOMB: Osmonds' Greatest Hits
BOMB: Phase Three
BOMB: The Proud One
For Mormon Tabernacle Choir fans only. Some of these were hits; all of them deserve to be melted, except maybe the occasional Jackson 5 imitations. The heavy rock on Phase Three epitomizes stupidity.

You hold the gun and I hold the wound
And we stand looking in each other's eyes
Both think we know what's right, both know we know what's wrong
We tell ourselves so many, many, many lies
We're not pawns in any game
We're not tools of bigger men
There's only one who can really move us all
It all looks fine to the naked eye
But it don't really happen that way at all

We asked San Diego's walking baseball encyclopedia, Dave Garcia, for his opinion. At 81, Garcia, now a scout, has spent six decades in the game and seen "every great left-hander going back to Lefty Grove."

Bill James [Baseball Abstract "stat guru"] rates Grove, the dominant left-hander of the 1930s (along with screwballer Carl Hubbell), the greatest left-hander ever. Garcia votes for Koufax. "Grove was good. And Hubbell was probably a better pitcher," he says. "But Koufax was the most overpowering left-hander I ever saw. Randy [Johnson] is good, but he didn't have to face the lineups Koufax did in the '60s. Put Koufax on the '62 Mets and he'd still win 20. If Koufax made 40 starts today, the only way he wouldn't go 40-0 is if somebody made some errors behind him".

... even on a staff that included fellow future Hall of Famer Don Drysdale, Koufax knew he was The Man every fourth day. When it came to the World Series, sometimes every third day.

Koufax was greater than the 21st century analysts understand... In the 20th century, you won the pennant or you didn't. In Koufax' time winning the pennant was the central challenge of the season. Koufax' contributions toward winning the pennant are, I would argue, greater than any other pitcher of the 20th century. There are three seasons in there in which, if Koufax had been JUST the best pitcher in the league, but not the best pitcher in the league by a wide margin, the Dodgers would not have won the pennant. There is no other pitcher in the 20th century who did that.

Given five or more runs to work with, Koufax was 18-1, about the same as Drysdale. Given four to work with, he was 8-2. That's sensational - you get four runs and win 80% of the time, you're doing the job. Given three runs to work with, Koufax was 9-0. Given just two runs to work with, Koufax was 6-3. And given only one run to work with, Sandy Koufax won three out of four decisions. Think about it. Given one, two or three runs to work with, Koufax was 18-4.

Everyone in both leagues knew about Koufax. Those three [1963,1965,1966] Cy Youngs he won came when there was just one Cy Young Award for all of baseball, not one for each league. Yet all three of his Cy Youngs were unanimous. Not only did all 10 National League voters vote for him -- so did all 10 in the American League.

Tim McCarver faced Koufax often, then later became [Steve] Carlton's personal catcher in Philadelphia. They were the first unanimous Cy Youngs. Here's what he says now about Carlton and Koufax: "To totally dominate a game, it wasn't even close. It was Koufax and [Bob] Gibson. They transcended more eras."

Imagine what it would be like if there was an actor of the year award that took into account everything - films, plays, television shows, you name it. Imagine it being more coveted than an Oscar or a Tony or an Emmy. Now, you have an idea how professional athletes perceived the old S. Rae Hickok Award.

How highly does Koufax think of the split-finger fastball?
"I wish I had known about it then," he said.
Then was Koufax's own career, capped by the most amazing five-year stretch any pitcher ever has had. In those five seasons, 1962-66, Koufax piled up five ERA titles, four no-hitters, three unanimous Cy Young awards, two World Series-clinching victories, and one unforgettable legacy. The powerful Dodgers' left-hander so consistently overwhelmed a National League full of Hall of Fame-bound hitters that in those final five seasons, he struck out more than four batters for every one he walked.
He did it all essentially with two pitches, a fastball and curve. The idea of Koufax having a split-finger fastball to go with those two pitches seems as daunting as the prospect of his being allowed to pitch with the mound moved 15 feet closer to the plate.

In 1963, the year Sandy Koufax became the most dominating pitcher in baseball, Los Angeles Dodgers statistician Allan Roth was asked to describe the brilliance of the 27-year-old left-hander. "It's reached the point now that when anybody gets a hit off him, people turn to each other and say `Gee, I wonder what he did wrong?'" Roth said.

On a typically pleasant September evening in Southern California, dead smack in the middle of the torrid 1965 National League pennant race, no one at Dodger Stadium had the need to ask that question. Twenty-seven Chicago Cubs stepped into the batters box that night against Koufax and 27 trudged back to the dugout shaking their heads as Koufax pitched the eighth modern-era perfect game in baseball history. Sandy Koufax could drive you to drink," said Ron Santo, Chicago's slugging third baseman, following the Dodgers' 1-0 victory. Added first baseman Ernie Banks: "He was just great, it was beautiful. He was getting the curve over real good the first five innings, then he got tremendous momentum. I thought he might weaken some later on, but he just kept throwing the ball right on through. And he was throwing strikes."

That season, Koufax led the major leagues in wins (25), earned run-average (1.88), strikeouts (306) and shutouts (11), threw his second no-hitter, and won the National League's Most Valuable Player and Cy Young awards. For an encore, he pitched two complete game victories to lead the Dodgers past the Yankees in the World Series. And he posted those numbers despite the fact that batters around the league considered him a pitcher who telegraphed his pitches. "We called every pitch he threw," said former Cub Ed Bouchee. "When Koufax threw his fastball, his hands would be way over his head during his windup. When his hands went way back, we knew it was his curveball. Still we couldn't hit him." Concurred former St. Louis Cardinal Tim McCarver: "With Sandy, you knew what was coming on almost every pitch. A batter could guess with him easier than any pitcher. That you still couldn't hit him was a credit to his greatness."

But in 1965, he was back in top form and while every team was helpless against him, the Cubs set a new futility standard. Koufax struck out the final six men he faced. In the eighth, Santo, Banks and pinch-hitter Byron Browne were the victims. In the ninth, Krug and pinch-hitter Joey Amalfitano went meekly and it was left for former American League batting champ Harvey Kuenn to break up Koufax's perfect game. As Amalfitano was walking back to the dugout, he passed Kuenn and whispered to him "It's not worth it, Harvey, you might as well not even bother coming to the plate." Kuenn went anyway, and he whiffed to end the game. "I've never seen Sandy throw as hard as he did when he struck me out in the eighth," said Santo. "He threw one fastball right by me and I was waiting for it. He seemed to get a burst of energy in the late innings."

The man threw a hundred and fourteen pitches! Warming up! One hundred and fourteen pitches! For about eighty-five or ninety or maybe close to a hundred of those pitches, he was scowling and grimacing and shaking his head, just really down. He couldn't find anything. He couldn't find his release point or his rhythm. Something was bothering the hell out of him. But he was gonna stay out there until he got things the way he wanted it. So after about ninety-five or so pitches, he started nodding his head and smiling. Sandy Koufax didn't smile. But now he's smiling at his catcher, who had his back to me. He started nodding his head, and I said, "Oh my God I'm in for it".

Interviewing Lou Brock years ago for a sports magazine, I asked him who were the toughest pitchers to steal against. "For me," he said, "it was Sandy Koufax." "Koufax?" I replied. "I always heard that his move to first wasn't all that good." "I wouldn't know," said Brock.

Sandy would strike me out two or three times a game. And I knew every pitch he was going to throw -- fastball, breaking ball or whatever. Actually, he would let you look at it. And you still couldn't hit it.

I think Koufax was probably the best left-handed pitcher I ever hit against.

I know Koufax's weakness. He can't hit.

As good as those guys were, Koufax was a step ahead of them. No matter who he pitched against, he could always be a little bit better. If somebody pitched a one-hitter, he could pitch a no-hitter.

In my lifetime, no one was better than Koufax at his best. I would pick Sandy for one game.

Either he throws the fastest ball I've ever seen, or I'm going blind.

I made a living hitting baseballs and in those days if I swing at five pitches, I'm going to hit at least one. But I didn't touch some of his pitches. He threw fastballs 96, 97, maybe 100 miles an hour, and the ball was moving.

Roebuck, who has seen all the great major league pitchers of the last half-century, said Koufax had the best curve of anyone. The reason, he said, was the speed of the pitch. "Let's say you have a 93-mile-an-hour fastball", Roebuck said. "The curveball would be about 77 or 78. Sandy was probably between 97 and 100 on his fastball and his curveball was way up there too, probably up around 85 or 86, and that's unheard of. That is hard to pick up with that kind of spin."

He was remarkable. And you knew he was pitching because you could hear it, whether it was his fastball or his curveball, you could hear it go, pffffft. That's rotation, or as they say, spin rate.

If anyone would like to make the World Series the best five out of nine games I would be willing to go on with it right now. But Koufax is murder. Great! The best I believe I have ever seen. You hate to lose, but we didn't disgrace ourselves. We were beaten by the best pitcher that there is anywhere.

Best game anybody ever pitched anywhere.

I've said this many times: There's one other pitcher that I recall that on any given day is unhittable and that was Sandy Koufax. I feel very strongly about that. There have been great pitchers, but Sandy Koufax was kind of unique, above the good ones and the great ones.

One time we were discussing the greatest pitcher he had ever faced, Santo said hands down it was Sandy Koufax. I argued that as great as Koufax was, Warren Spahn did it for 25 years and won 363 games. Koufax pitched 10 and won 165. "You never played, what would you know about it?" Santo said to me. "But let me tell you, nobody could hit Koufax. Not Mays, Aaron or Ernie, when Koufax was on, and he was on most of the time. By far he was the best.

Sandy was so much more powerful and advanced in pitching than any other pitcher of that era. The sixties were a great era for pitching, and he was just so much at a higher level than the rest of us it wasn't even close. I was just so impressed. To see him dominate our lineup [in the 1965 World Series, where Koufax threw two complete-game shutouts in a space of three days] was pretty impressive. I just felt he belonged in a higher league after seeing him for the first time like that.

"Every team has a No. 1 starter, but not every team has an ace," said Tommy John, now an instructor for the Yankees and once an ace for three teams. "Not everybody has the guy who makes you say, 'Whenever he's on the mound, we've got a pretty good chance to win,'" John said. "That's the way it was when the Dodgers had the Jewish kid from Brooklyn. He was the best I've ever seen."

He's Sandy Koufax. He'd pitch him the same way he pitched everybody else - curveball, fastball and I dare you to hit it.

If you're a lefthanded pitcher, getting Sandy Koufax to work with you is like being a priest with the pope's e-mail address. It may not be heaven, but it's close.

We need just two players to be a contender. Just Babe Ruth and Sandy Koufax.

I don't see how he lost five games during the season.

Pitchers are a photographer's dream. Their windup. Their throwing motion. Their follow-through. Their reaction of joy or sadness. On every pitch, their mound is a stage. And of all the pitchers, if not all the ballplayers, that Walter Iooss Jr. has photographed, Sandy Koufax was the most compelling subject. [...] "He was the best," Iooss says. "The best pitcher I ever saw, maybe the best pitcher anyone ever saw or will see."

Although it is true that most pitchers -- even the great ones -- are usually around .500 in one-run decisions, the true champions rise above it. If Sandy Koufax was pitching and the score was 1-0, 2-1, or 3-2, two out of three times he was the winner.

He threw one pitch that was impossible. No ball can get up to the plate that quick. Not even his. Then he threw it again.

Fifteen feet from home plate where the grass ends and dirt begins, it got an afterburner in its ass.

"Radio fastballs," Palmer said, still shaking his head at the memory some 33 years later. "You could hear them, but you couldn't see them. Everybody says the ball doesn't jump, that you can't get it to rise. Well, his ball jumped about six to eight inches."

I'll say only this. He is the best pitcher I ever saw in my lifetime.

Koufax. What do you think I am, crazy?

Koufax is the greatest. He's the best pitcher I ever saw.

I like Nolan [Ryan]. To me, Sandy Koufax was the greatest pitcher I ever saw.

You gave me some pretty good ones right there! I think the greatest pitcher I ever saw was Sandy Koufax. Fortunately, I was his teammate and didn't have to face him. When I knew he was pitching, I looked forward to coming to the park and watching him.

Zimmer, now a special adviser for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, played with Sandy Koufax. He played against Warren Spahn and Bob Gibson. He managed Greg Maddux. He managed or coached against Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez and Tom Seaver. We asked Zimmer whether Clemens, who is expected to return to the New York Yankees in another two to three weeks, is the greatest pitcher of all-time. "Nope," he said matter-of-factly. "Koufax was." "Look," he added, "for a five-year stretch" -- by which Zimmer almost certainly meant 1962-66, when Koufax went 111-34 with a 1.95 ERA and won three Cy Young Awards and a most valuable player award -- "he was the best in history."

You can talk all you want about all these other pitchers, Roger Clemens, guys like that. The only one was Koufax. He was so much better than anybody else, it's unbelievable.

Oh, a genius. Perhaps the only pitcher I have ever seen - and certainly broadcast - where after one batter I would think he might pitch a no hitter tonight - the only one. He was the only one who would go out to warm up and he would get applause similar to a symphony conductor who had just walked on stage, there was such respect as well as admiration. I don't think we'll see his likes for a long time.

He was an aristocrat in spikes, with a gentleman's carriage and an assassin's arsenal -- his fastball and curve. His last six seasons are mythic: 129-47 with a 2.19 ERA. He threw 27 complete games with a painfully arthritic arm in 1966 and then quit. He slipped into a private life fundamentally no different from his days as a beloved public icon: unfailingly true to his ideals. He always put team before self, modesty before fame and God before the World Series.

When I retired and I was announcing the CBS Game of the Week, I came up to him while he was warming up. And he was really making the catcher's mitt pop. So I went up and asked him, teasing him, "Where in the hell did you learn how to pitch like that? You can't be that damn good." He said, "Grab a bat and get your ass up there at the plate." So I did. Here I am standing with a bat in my hand in my street clothes and I never saw anybody throw that hard in my life, and I've faced some of the greatest in the game. He had pinpoint control. I said, "How is your control on the outside part of the plate?" I was amazed. He then said, "Do you want me to show you how good my control is inside?" I said, "Hell, no."

Koufax followed by hitting Brock in the left shoulder with his fastball. Drysdale thought the thud of Koufax's fastball against Brock was so loud it reverberated throughout the stadium. Brock, he said, fell like a deer that had been shot.

Koufax threw so hard during tryouts at the University of Cincinnati that two catchers quit the team rather than catch for him. During his tryout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he threw so hard that he broke the thumb of his catcher, the bullpen coach for the Pirates. Branch Rickey, then general manager of the Pirates, told his scout that Koufax had the "greatest arm I've ever seen".

As [Dodgers] manager Walter Alston and scouting director Fresco Thompson watched from the owner's box, Campanis assumed the hitter's stance at the plate. "He actually liked to stand in to get the feeling of the batter," Anderson said. "Koufax started to steam the fastball in on him. Al Campanis said -- and I'll never forget this -- 'The hair on my arms rose, and the only other time that happened was the first time I saw the Sistine Chapel.'"

To have missed his brilliance heightens the fascination. For me he is black-and-white newsreel footage shot from high behind home plate, and an inexhaustible supply of statistics that border on the absurd. A favorite: Every time he took the mound, Koufax was twice as likely to throw a shutout as he was to hit a batter.

Part of the mystique surrounding Koufax is that he did what few superstar athletes have ever done, and that is walk away from his profession at the peak of his abilities. He won 27 games his final season, struck out 317 hitters in 323 innings, posted a 1.73 ERA, and led the league in seven different categories.

It would mark the end of an era as Koufax announced his retirement due to arm troubles and Wills was traded [...]. Without Koufax and Wills, the Dodgers slipped to eighth place in 1967 and attendance dipped from 2.6 million to 1.6 million.

Sandy's problem was looseness in the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow, with bone chips and arthritis. It was getting worse and worse, and more painful, every time he pitched, and we simply didn't yet know how to fix it. Sandy wasn't the kind to hang on as a relief pitcher, so they made a joint decision for his retirement. He was just 31 years old [when he retired in 1966].

It was very, very unfortunate. I think we would have had a good chance to save his career if he came along maybe, ten years later, after the Tommy John situation. We may have given him another ten good years. Sandy's still a good friend, and he said that to me himself.

Koufax is the youngest player elected to the Hall of Fame. He was a first-ballot inductee in 1972 (344 out of 396 ballots, 86.87%). Only 40 members of the Hall of Fame have been elected in their first year on the ballot (he was the 6th so elected).

The travails of these athletes illustrate the ancient wisdom: Hubris and temptation, gentlemen, have laid low many a would-be hero. James goes by the nickname King James, which maybe should have been a tip-off to trouble ahead. Woods gave in to so much temptation that the tabloids fought to come up with the best annotated count of other women.
There is an ancient lesson, as well, to be understood in modern sports culture. The status of sports hero, to the extent that it existed, was conferred, not proclaimed. The greats of the past - Joe DiMaggio, Sandy Koufax, Johnny Unitas, Bill Russell, Hank Aaron - did not declare their own greatness; in their time, that was unseemly.

So were you at all surprised that Koufax ended up No.1 in The Times' poll of greatest sports figures in Los Angeles history? Shouldn't have been. This is not to take anything away from the others on the deserving list -- six others were from the Dodgers organization -- but Koufax is unique in Southern California sports history. Which is why he didn't just win, but won in a virtual blowout. He had 90 more first-place votes than No.2 Magic Johnson, 57 more than No.3 Vin Scully. The only mild surprise should be that most of those who voted, probably never saw him pitch.

Unlike Magic, he did not make his home in Los Angeles after he retired. Unlike Scully, he did not devote more than 60 years to the game (he pitched in Los Angeles for only nine seasons).

But Koufax and the birth of the Dodgers as a Los Angeles cultural treasure are intertwined so deeply, their roots have become one. When the team moved to Dodger Stadium for the 1962 season, Koufax was their star. And then he took it to another level. [...]

At a time when the Dodgers were capturing the hearts of Los Angeles for the first time, he was at the team's center, at its core. A love affair blossomed and he was its dark-eyebrowed heartthrob. And it was much more than numbers. It was the way he was held in awe, not just by fans, but opposing players. The way he demanded the ball. The way he stuck to his personal beliefs. The way he competed. The Left Arm of God, indeed.

He was the greatest left-hander in baseball history and Los Angeles' first true professional sports megastar.

Pitching is the art of instilling fear.

But in the end it always comes down to talent. You can talk all you want about intangibles, I just don't know what that means. Talent makes winners, not intangibles. Can nice guys win? Sure, nice guys can win -- if they're nice guys with a lot of talent. Nice guys with a little talent finish fourth, and nice guys with no talent finish last.

The game has a cleanness. If you do a good job, the numbers say so. You don't have to ask anyone or play politics. You don't have to wait for the reviews.

There is among us a far closer relationship than the purely social one of a fraternal organization because we are bound together not only by a single interest but by a common goal: to win! Nothing else matters, and nothing else will do.

I mean, the perfect game is very high among the highlights of my career, but nothing ever tops the World Series. Maybe if the perfect game had been my first no-hitter it might have carried more weight, but I think the things you share with your teammates like the World Series one game just doesn't mean as much as working together all year to get to the World Series, and if you win that nothing feels better.

That day in Orlando was the beginning of a whole new era for me. I came home a different pitcher from the one who had left. Before that game, it had been almost all bad. Afterward, it was almost all good.

By concentrating on where you want the ball to go, you seem to take the stress out of throwing. You are not pressing, you are not forcing the ball. You are taking nothing out of the physical effort, in other words, except -- again -- the grunt.

In the 1965 All-Star Game I was terribly wild. [...] There was nothing wrong with my arm. My arm was fine. My head was something else again. Knowing that I was only going to pitch an inning or two, I had thought, "Well, hell, I'll just go in and throw as hard as I can." And there I was, right back where I'd been ten years ago, wild high.

It is very difficult to work hard when there's nothing coming back, when you see no progress. When you finally put your foot on the ladder and begin the climb, it becomes easier and easier to work harder and harder.

Canada is the United States' largest trading partner, with more than $1-billion a day in cross-border trade, and is the number one trading partner of 35 states. But Mexico, the United States' third-largest trading partner, resonates politically and culturally in a way that Canada does not.

For some reason, a glaze passes over peoples' faces when you say Canada. Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something.

The Americans are our best friends, whether we like it or not.

Geography has made us neighbours, history has made us friends, economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder. What unites us is far greater than what divides us.

Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

When they said Vancouver, I was picturing a map and it was like all the way over to the left.

To the uninitiated, Cherry's "Coach's Corner" is a bewildering stream of bombast and reminiscence, prejudice and insight. He can make or break professional careers and has preserved an old-fashioned, hard-checking style of play in a vast Hockey Nation. For him, as for his skating flock, hockey is not simply the national pastime--it is the closest thing to a national religion, a touchstone of Canadian identity and a metaphor for life itself.

The irony of Cherry's popularity is that, in many ways, he appears to be everything Canadians are not.

In a country famous for politeness and peace-loving civility, Cherry's commentary bristles with belligerence. He has branded players as weasels and wimps and threatened to punch out the teeth of co-hosts with whom he did not agree.

Cherry's secret is that he's able to tap directly into Canada's national anxiety about losing its grip on the one big thing it used to do better than anyone else. His message: If Canada can't dominate in hockey, what's left?

And at the professional level, the gravitational pull of American money not only has driven expansion into cities that have never seen ice or snow but now threatens to rob Canada of most of the National Hockey League teams it has left. Nearly every NHL player was Canadian only a generation ago, but the figure has fallen to 57 percent as European players have come to dominate the net and the offensive lines.

When you walk around Washington, D.C., you can't help but be in total awe of the place. It is the epicentre of the last great superpower left standing. And boy ... do they know it.

But we should feel proud of them, happy for them, because America is our neighbour, our ally, our trading partner, and our friend. And sometimes you'd like to give them such a smack.

But we can't. If we tried, let's face it, they would kill us. And therein lies the problem.

Pierre Trudeau said it was a lot like a relationship between an elephant and a mouse. And Brian Mulroney, to give him the benefit of the doubt, felt that Canada could influence America more from the inside. Therefore he devoted most of his time in public life to trying to figure out a way to get the mouse up inside the elephant.

And let's face it, that is a period in our country's history we'd all like to forget. So what are we going to do? Well for starters, we have to start thinking differently. We have to erase this whole elephant-mouse analogy from our minds. America is not an elephant. For one thing, we are bigger than they are. And elephants never forget, whereas Americans don't really know much to begin with. Ninety percent of them can't even pick out their own home towns on an unmarked map.

And they have absolutely no sense of history. I mean, of all of the ones I've met down here, none of them have any idea that in 1814 a crowd from Halifax marched into Washington and burned the whole bloody west wing of the White House <fooomp> right to the ground.

You know, maybe that's our role in this whole thing. Maybe our role is to remind them of the little things, over and over and over again.

And if they get mad with us, well, we'll just have to take our name off the map and feel safe in knowing that they will never find us.

Twenty million dollars. That's what they're spending. What a bunch of babies. Twenty million dollars.

The Canadian Bankers' Association has announced they're going to spend twenty million dollars trying to convince average Canadians to stop hating them. Which you know, as an average Canadian, that just makes me hate them twenty million times more than before. And even though I'm not that good at numbers, I'm pretty sure that's a lot.

What I find amazing is that they would even think for a second that they could actually convince us to like them. I mean, why didn't they just come out of a room, get together, and announce they were going to turn water into wine. Because really, they'd have about the same chance.

So please, as an average Canadian, just let me say to the Canadian Bankers' Association, just this once, when you make seven and a half billion dollars, in twelve months, off average Canadians, average Canadians, they're not gonna like you.

You can spend twenty million dollars, you can spend two hundred million dollars, you can sponsor the Special Olympics until the cows come home. Doesn't matter. As long as you keep charging eighty five cents to write a check, a buck thirty to pay a bill, fifty cents to use one bank machine, a dollar eighty five to use another, we're not going to like you. Not only that - we're going to like not liking you.

So it's a very simple situation. You have two choices. You can keep gouging us or you can stop gouging us. We could call it the seven and a half billion dollar question. Although somehow I think we all know the answer already.

The movie is Canadian, and joins a list of other recent Canadian films about dread secrets, including "Exotica," "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Kissed." Although there's a tendency to lump Canadian and American films together into the same cultural pool, the personal, independent films from Canada have a distinctive flavor. If Americans are in your face, Canadians are more reticent. If a lot of American movies are about wackos who turn out to share conventional values at the core, Canadian characters tend to be normal and pleasant on the surface, and keep their darker thoughts to themselves. I don't know which I prefer, but I know the Canadians usually supply more surprises.

Hey, you're that Canadian guy, right? Shawn told me about you. You're not American, but you speak American. That's pretty wild!

Given all this, there is a question that needs to be answered, now that the clubs have been lugged all the way here: How do you build and maintain a challenging golf course in a place where people brag they can watch their dog run away for three days?

Our country reeks of trees,
Our yaks are very large,
And they smell like rotting beef carcasses.
And we have to clean up after them
And our saddle sores are the best.
We proudly wear women's clothing
And searing sand blows up our skirts.
And the buzzards, they soar overhead,
And poisonous snakes will devour us whole,
Our bones will bleach in the sun.
And we will probably go to hell,
And that is our great reward,
For being The-uh Ro-yal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen!

Canadians, for the most part, place importance on education, skill, modesty and politeness.

It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?

Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines."

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

There's a man who lives a life of research
Half his life has been a Ph.D. search
In every paper he writes
A hundred more he cites
Odds are he won't live to get his tenure
Ph.D. Man, Ph.D. Man
They've given you a job
But taken the fun away

Today is the first day of the rest of your thesis.

But school folk are in general perversely educated, and if not restrained by the rule of their superiors, are puffed up with infinite absurdities; they act with petulance, swell with presumption, judge of everything with certainty, and are unexperienced in anything.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Professors are "a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking".

The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.

One thing he said to me that was so, so nice... He adopted four children, you know. So I said to him, "When are you gonna quit? How many children are you going to adopt?" He says, "I'd like to adopt as many children as I have windows. So when I leave, I want a kid in every window, waving goodbye."

I was born in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn on December 30, 1935, the son of Jack and Evelyn Braun. My parents were divorced when I was three, and my mother married Irving Koufax when I was nine. When I speak of my father, I speak of Irving Koufax, for he has been to me everything a father could be.

In August, a group calling itself Internet Black Tigers claimed responsibility for "suicide email bombings" aimed at countering government propaganda sent electronically, the State Department said in its annual survey of guerrilla incidents last week.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The Fascist and Syndicalist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who "did not care to give reasons or even to be right", but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: "the reason of unreason."

Sixty-seven per cent of eligible voters cast their ballots, down from 69.9 per cent in 1993 and well below the average of 75 per cent over the last dozen federal elections.

Voter News Service projected that 49 percent of the voting age population cast ballots, which would make it the lowest voter turnout since 1924. The figure was based on exit polls, not actual vote totals. Turnout in 1992 was 55 percent, the highest since the 1972 election when it was 55.4 percent.

All those predictions about lighter-than-normal voter turnout Tuesday failed to materialize. Preliminary numbers by the Voter News Service indicated a 38 percent voter turnout, only slightly below the 38.8 percent turnout of the last midterm election in 1994. Since 1970, the voter turnout in midterm elections has fluctuated between about 37 percent and 40 percent.

Now, a bit more about Ernest, who was a Bernese mountain dog. He ran for Congress in 1996 in the Monterey Bay area, but he was not a politically lucky dog, as he was disqualified before the election for the obvious reason. Ernest's campaign treasurer was Calvin, Shugart's basset hound. Shugart said his effort to send a four-footed ambassador to Washington was for exactly the same serious reasons he is backing Proposition 23 -- to try to combat voter apathy.

By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

People who wish to commit murder, they better not do it in the state of Florida, because we may have a problem with our electric chair.

They are concerned about his hair catching fire and that there's smoke. They ought to put marshmallows on his head.

The last person to be executed in Europe, a Frenchman, was put to death by guillotine. In 1977. If that makes you shudder, while McVeigh's fate does not, perhaps it is worth asking why. The guillotine itself was invented as a more humane form of decapitation, ensuring a swift and painless death where previous technologies -- the axe, the sword -- had failed. Yet it would be unthinkable for the United States, in 2001, to behead anyone, by any means, for any crime. Why? Not because it inflicts any more suffering than lethal injection, but because it is more real.

A system of justice constructed on such rickety moral scaffolding -- that sterilizes the needle with which it injects a lethal substance -- cannot succeed, either as judge or teacher. Institutional absurdity is far more subversive of a moral order than the most determined felon.

Patino said Wiley's criminal record dates back to 1964 and includes convictions for drugs, weapons, bank robbery and operating a barber shop without a license in Oregon.

If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics.

For decades, scientists have hoped that organs from other species could replace faulty ones in humans, known as xenotransplantation. The US leads in this area, having legislated the right to bear arms.

They were killing each other over nickel-and-dime corruption in these villages, while the wealth of the entire community could be doubled with one high-school shop-class water-pump fix-it project. Understand that and you can understand the whole Third World.

"Do you consider yourself communists?", I asked. This is the only thing Americans ever really want to know. It's how we decide whether to send in Oliver Stone and his platoon of pals to atrocity everybody.

I think it was President Taft who once met with an old Indian chief and asked the chief if he had any words of wisdom for the president of the United States. The chief said, "Watch your immigration laws."

Yes, the great Winnepesaukee Indian chief that united the tribes of Great Lakes, created the first written Indian language, foresaw the defeat of Custer at the Big Horn and is immortalized by a large, V8-powered, corrugated box.

Mayor Richard Arrington of Birmingham, Alabama, had charged that Judge Jack Montgomery repeatedly allowed suspects with serious criminal backgrounds to be released by setting low bail. Arrington cited Isaac Peterson, arrested seven times for burglary and receiving stolen property. Now Judge Montgomery has boosted Peterson's $5000 bail in a theft case to $9 trillion. Said the judge: "I have a big mouth and people are always taking potshots at me."

Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.

Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is this: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. Is it right and proper that today there are 7,500 strategic offensive nuclear warheads of which 2,500 are on 15 minute alert to be launched by the decision of one human being?

The Finno-Soviet Winter War of 1939 ended with Soviet withdrawal, and [strategist Edward N. Luttwak] said it should now be a deterrent model for other countries, including Poland and the Baltic nations. "Do not try to stop the invasion," Luttwak said. "Wait for them to enter your country. Once the tank stops rolling forward, let the soldiers come out to cook or to pee, and then kill them." Finland suffered during the invasion and conceded territory in the peace treaty that ended the war three months later. But the Soviets lost about seven times as many men, and when they withdrew, they knew that occupying Finland again would mean frostbite, fear, and the chance of getting shot dead in the snow with your pants down.

Drummond said exploding munitions are causing problems for almost all of the armored vehicles Russia is using in Ukraine. He gave the example of the BMD-4 infantry fighting vehicle, typically manned by up to three crew and able to carry another five soldiers. He said the BMD-4 was a "mobile coffin" that was "just obliterated" when hit by a rocket.

One former attendee of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) described an invitation to the forum as "totally toxic" and compared it to being asked to join the annual reunion of Spectre, the criminal organisation run by James Bond's archenemy Ernst Blofeld. When Putin gives his plenary speech on Friday, the person said, the "most popular seats will be the ones in the back of the room".

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.

To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.

It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is IN the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.

Hawaii is a unique state. It is a small state. It is a state that is by itself. It is a -- it is different than the other 49 states. Well, all states are different, but it's got a particularly unique situation.

What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

The future will be better tomorrow.

Quayle stumbled in response to a question about his opinion of the Holocaust. He said it was "an obscene period in our nation's history." Then, trying to clarify his remark, Quayle said he meant "this century's history" and added a confusing comment. "We all lived in this century, I didn't live in this century," he said.

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is "to be prepared".

I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix.

[I will never have] another Jimmy Carter grain embargo, Jimmy, Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter grain embargo, Jimmy Carter grain embargo.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Blumenauer introduced a bill which would also give former Presidents and Vice-Presidents a voice in evaluating a President's mental stability. Of Trump, he said, "The serial repetition of proven falsehoods - Is this an act? Is this a tactic? Is he just wired weird? It raises the question in my mind about the nature of Presidential disability."

Lincoln was highly overrated. Didn't even make it through his term. Sad!

"Everybody's got to be covered^*," Trump said on 60 Minutes in 2015. Added Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney to CBS News in 2017, the legislation "will cover more people".^*

He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the rails. We're in crazytown.

I had no sense that he was the soulless bastard that he's turned into. He used to be kind of like the boob of New York that pretended to be wealthy, or we thought was wealthy, and now he's just a psychotic.

I absolutely do not think there is a chance that Donald Trump will be the president. I'm the only person I know who thinks that, including people that I know are far more informed because they're journalists. Everyone I know is very worried about it. I am very worried, but not about that, and no one would accuse me of being a cockeyed optimist. And I know there are a lot of morons in this country, I just don't think there are enough.

Echoing the reported opinion of former US secretary of state Rex Tillerson, Lebowitz thinks the biggest danger of Trump is that he is a moron. "Everyone says he is crazy - which maybe he is - but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."

[...] Although it's hard to predict what this guy's gonna do. We've never had an orangutan in the White House before. There's a lot of "What does this button do?" going on. It's scary.

These nurses and doctors -—I never knew there were this many saintly people, because I don't know them. The same way that at a certain point you thought, Really, there are this many morons? Are you kidding me? There are this many people who think that Donald Trump's doing a good job?
Here's what I do know: anything that anyone thinks will be happening when this is over, everyone will be wrong. Including me, who up until the election of Donald Trump had a firm belief that I was always right. I spent an entire year going around the country telling thousands of people, "He has zero chance of winning."” After that, I realized, not only are you not always right -—when you are wrong, you are the worst wrong you can possibly be.
Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It's not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it's the most dangerous thing.
His absolute belief in himself, that is something that is not going to ever change. And he doesn't care. When people say he's not showing enough empathy - he doesn't know what it means.

You know, it's an amazing thing. The man has not one redeeming quality. You could take some of the worst dictators in history and I'm sure that all of them, you could find one decent quality. [...] That's the hardest thing about the day, watching what comes out of this guy's mouth. It turns you into a maniac because you're yelling at the television.

I knew they would seize on this but felt it is such a great Military term, it should be brought back. Use often!"

[Former Defense Secretary] Mattis says he ultimately resigned after Trump announced he was withdrawing US troops from Syria, "when I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid".

I was asking the Air Force guys, I said, "How good is this plane?" They said, "Well, sir, you can't see it." I said, "Yeah, but in a fight? You know, a fight like I watch on the movies. A fight. They're fighting. How good is this?" They said, "Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it. Even if it's right next to it, it can't see it."

Trump, a shady guy surrounded by shady guys and professional morons.

But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre - the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

One former Treasury official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive agency deliberations, said officials are now "brushing up on options in the 'crazy drawer.'"

Before Donald Trump became president, he had a long history of tearing out pages from magazines (or printing out offending articles), scrawling some nonsense in Sharpie, and mailing it to the party he believed had wronged him. But while most people in his current position probably would have dropped the habit—which feels not dissimilar to a kidnapper's M.O. of cutting and pasting letters [...] this particular president has been using his Zodiac Killer–inspired method of communicating to conduct matters of U.S. diplomacy.

Axios reports that back in May 2017, Trump tore off the cover of Businessweek - which featured a picture of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and the headline "The Anti-Trump"—- and wrote, in silver Sharpie, something to the effect of "Looking good! Hope it's not true!" In spite of the concerns of some staffers, who were stricken with the crazy notion this was an inappropriate way to communicate with a foreign leader, the White House then sent the missive to the Canadian Embassy in Washington, where the Canadian ambassador thought he was being pranked. Per Axios, he called the White House to check, and was sadly told that the note was real.

We will continue to make arguments based on logic and common sense and hope that eventually they will prevail against an administration that doesn't always align itself around those principles. This is not about the American people. We have to believe that at some point, their common sense will prevail but we see no sign of that in this action today.

Trump isn't known for having friends, and he obsesses over who his enemies might be. He creates enemies so that he has a way to define himself. That process has been extended from his personal life to the U.S. political system and, from there, to the international order. His base wants more enemies. And I guess they'll take them where they can find them. It's hard to imagine how you work yourself up to hate Canadians, but we're living in times of great innovation.

His critics, most of the time, aren't wrong. Trump does bollix up countless things. He inflames what he ought to calm. He offers remedies worse than the ailment. He gets rolled in negotiations. He changes his mind on matters midstream. He runs through competent aides as if they were Apprentice contestants. He is, in too many ways to count, the wrong man for the job. But the right people for the job didn't show up or didn't act.

According to [Washington Post reporter] Fahrenthold, the donations Trump publicly promised to make -- including his pledges to make personal contributions to charities picked by Celebrity Apprentice contestants and to donate Trump University's proceeds -- would have amounted to millions of dollars, but only thousands could be confirmed.

Over the years, no other organization or charity has received as much financial support from the president as the Trump Foundation, with the largest donation amounting to $264,631 -- the cause being renovating a fountain at the Plaza Hotel, one of his properties. The smallest donation dates back to 1989 -- when Donald Trump Jr. was 11 years old -- was the $7 Trump seemingly used to pay for his oldest son's Boy Scouts registration fee.

At one point during the campaign, when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China, he gave Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, "Death by China", co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. (When he joined, Navarro was in fact the campaign's only economic adviser.)

A senior diplomat who has met with Trump several times said he has a "reptilian brain" and judges a person almost entirely by his or her appearance: "Straight out of central casting," he often says of his aides and of Vice President Mike Pence, who, according to Trump, looks just how a vice president should look. Cabinet members privately lament Trump's refusal to embrace an endearing trait in any politician: a willingness to be self-deprecating.

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's attorney-of-sorts, is either a blithering imbecile, or a subtle genius carrying out a brilliant defense strategy on his client's behalf. [...] In his latest startling comments, Giuliani confessed, and then frantically unconfessed, to an extremely damning set of facts for the president. [...] Of course, he's probably just an idiot. On the other hand, with a client facing as many points of legal vulnerability as Trump, is there really a better strategy?

Referencing a TV interview with Michael Pillsbury, a China strategist at a conservative think tank, he [Trump] said: "If you look at Mr. Pillsbury, the leading authority on China. He was on a good show - I won't mention the name of the show - recently. And he was saying that China has total respect for Donald Trump and Donald Trump's very, very large brain. He said - Donald, Donald Trump... they don't know what to do."

By choosing Herman Cain for the Fed, Trump has actually broken new ground. Moore was a shocker, but Cain represents a whole new level of Trumpiness. The two can seem similar, in that both are clearly unqualified and likely to be purely political animals. But there's more. Moore is an incompetent, dishonest hack. But he didn't come out of nowhere. The modern GOP wants people like him, and Moore -- along with Kudlow -- has been the party's go-to guy for hack economics for a long time. Trump was just rounding up the usual suspects. But while Moore was out there predicting hyperinflation, faking numbers for the WSJ and giving speeches to Freedomfest, Cain was selling phony remedies for erectile dysfunction. Some people inside the conservative cult probably didn't even know that Moore was a hack. Everybody knew, to the extent they thought of him at all, that Cain was a clown. So choosing Cain is an assertion that Trump can pick anyone, and expect the party to kneel down. The thing is, he's probably right. All indications now are that there is no nomination Trump can make that's so absurd that more than 1 or 2 GOP Senators will say no.

Not long after attending the president's June rally in Tulsa, Okla., the former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died of Covid-19. In August, whoever is maintaining Cain's Twitter account tweeted, "It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be."

Kudlow is a clown, and he hasn't gotten a single thing right in at least six months.” [...] There's never been an economic adviser who more closely resembled a used-car salesman, both in demeanor and honesty. [Kudlow is also] as close to a reality-TV star as you can get while still calling yourself an economist.

You've really put a great investment in our country. We really appreciate it very much, Tim Apple.

"It would go away without the vaccine, George," Trump told host George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, about Covid-19. "Sure, over a period of time. You'll develop like a herd mentality, it's gonna be... it's gonna be herd-developed, and that's gonna happen. It will all happen."

So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous -- whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light -- and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it [looking at Bill Bryan, head of the Department of Homeland Security's science and technology division]. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that too. Sounds interesting.

And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out, in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? 'Cause you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that, so that you're going to have use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me. So we'll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute... that's pretty powerful.

I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there is any way that you can apply light and heat to cure. You know? If you could. And maybe you can, maybe you can't. Again I say maybe you can, maybe you can't. I'm not a doctor. I'm like a person who has a good you-know-what [pointing to his head].

As Donald Trump made abundantly clear last week, by just coming out and saying it, he doesn't take "any responsibility at all" for the federal government's horribly botched response to the coronavirus. Of course, as president of the United States, he bears full responsibility, and for the most part, really has only himself to blame for a spiraling crisis that has killed 88 Americans so far. Still, there are definitely a few individuals along the way who deserve some subsidiary blame for the situation the country currently finds itself in. For instance, the aides too scared to tell him the things he didn't want to hear. Also: his idiot son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

We already knew that Kushner—who has no expertise in anything, save for wildly overestimating his capabilities and his work as a slumlord believes the deadly pandemic is "more about public psychology than a health reality." But according to the New York Times, he also advised Trump, in the early days of the catastrophe, that their favorite punching bag was basically making the whole thing up:

Mr. Kushner's early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media's coverage exaggerated the threat.

Rep. Nadler: On September 5th, President Trump brought up Special Counsel Mueller in an interview with The Daily Caller stating, quote:
And he's Comey's best friend, and I could give you a hundred pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other. You know he's Comey's best friend, close quote. Are you best friends with Robert Mueller?
Comey: I am not.
Rep. Nadler: On October 17th, the FBI responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for, quote, "photographs of former FBI Director James Comey and Robert Mueller hugging and kissing each other," by saying "no responsive records were located." I assume you're not aware of any such photographs?
Comey: I'm not aware of any such photograph. I have never hugged or kissed the man. Again, I'm an admirer but not that kind of admirer.

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle [...] Accomplished people lacking inner strength can't resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis's to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

As a former presidential speechwriter, my careful rhetorical analysis is that he's gonna get us all killed.

A couple of years ago, BuzzFeed asked a former White House official to explain the logic behind some bizarre Trump action. President Trump, the official said, is not playing "the sort of three-dimensional chess people ascribe to decisions like this. More often than not he’s just eating the pieces."

My function, really, as an economist is to try and provide the underlying analytics that confirm Trump's intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.

One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we're not necessarily such believers.
As to whether or not it's man-made and whether or not the effects that you're talking about are there, I don't see it.

I'm doing deals, and I'm not being accommodated by the Fed. They're making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.

But not the first time, there was a profound disconnection with Trumpworld, a place where the sun is always shining. Here, in meetings, ceremonies and rallies, the president basks in constant affirmation from fervent supporters and sycophantic staff. Such is the bubble of self-congratulation, it is perhaps not surprising Trump is baffled by the contempt and derision he glimpses outside it. He frequently asks bemusedly how a president with his record could be impeached.

Galston [a former deputy assistant to Bill Clinton for domestic policy, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington] said: I think there's an element of genuine incomprehension. He thinks he's the greatest president of all time and his protestations of injured innocence I take seriously as a representation of his inner state.

Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog's eye goo.

The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don't know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.

But the fact is, whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving. Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn't mean we won't have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly-elected President of the United States [...] But there is a process. It has nothing to do with the certain occupant of the White House doesn't feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there because the presidency is the presidency. It's not geography or location. So, so much for him. I wouldn't spend so much time on it.

My book actually uses science and real data and true psychological theory to explain why it is quite possible that this president is the most sound-minded person to ever occupy the White House.

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

Willard: It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.

But the sheer number of them [lies] make us numb to the offense -- and, potentially, to more serious ethical infractions. No one reacts when Mr. Trump tells a lie because explaining ethics to Donald Trump feels like explaining existentialism to a chicken. And if you didn't know he was a liar already, that's your fault.

A lavishly bewhiskered figure whose wonkishness and warmongering can make him seem like an unlikely hybrid of Ned Flanders and Yosemite Sam.

The week at the Environmental Protection Agency has been a brutal low point in what many staff members refer to as the most difficult year in its near half-century history. An avalanche of allegations of ethical misconduct by the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has heaped embarrassment upon a watchdog struggling to adapt to the industry obeisance demanded by the Trump administration.

"This sucks. It sucks big," said a senior EPA official who asked not to be named. "People are so done with these folks. We wanted and waited for some adults to show up. But the relentless tide of bullshit from Pruitt and his cronies is tough to deal with."

There is a REASON that the Secretary of Energy generally has a doctorate in physical sciences, and a major record of technical achievement (e.g., Steve Chu -- Nobel laureate in Physics). The orange thing, of course, appointed Rick Perry -- one of the stupidest men in the United States, who does not even hold an undergraduate degree in physical science.

Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, says fiscal policy is on an "unsustainable path," but such warnings are audible wallpaper - there but not noticed. The word "unsustainable" in fiscal rhetoric is akin to "unacceptable" in diplomatic parlance, where it usually refers to a situation soon to be accepted.

Despite today's shrill discord between the parties, the political class is more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. From left to right, this class has a permanent incentive to run enormous deficits - to charge, through taxation, current voters significantly less than the cost of the government goods and services they consume, and saddle future voters with the cost of servicing the resulting debt after the current crop of politicians has left the scene.

This is the only president in American history who incited an insurrection against Congress that could have resulted in assassinations and hostage-taking and, conceivably, the cancellation of a free presidential election and the fracturing of a democracy. That's a fact, and it won't change in 50 years. It's very hard to think of a scenario under which someone might imagine some wonderful thing that Donald Trump did that will outshine that. He did, literally, the worst thing that an American president could ever do.

The choice between Democrats and most Republicans these days is like a choice between a day-old baloney sandwich with a sad little pickle on a stale roll versus a plate of rancid chicken served with a sprinkling of anthrax on a bed of broken glass. I'll take the sandwich [Democrat].

Washington DC is twelve square miles bordered by reality.

The sort of prime minister that makes people leave reviews like "Amazon, why is it not possible to give zero stars?"

Signs that the government was rowing back its rhetoric on the protocol came amid mixed messaging over a trade war, with Johnson allies claiming he had a "conciliatory" call with Ireland's taoiseach last week. However the Irish Times on Saturday reported Irish sources describing it as "the single worst call he has ever had with anyone".

Don't underestimate Liz Truss, we kept hearing. And yet, why not? It saves time. I underestimated her, and you know what: I still overestimated her.

Sunak comes across as a sort of robo-carer, whose display reads, "We're doing everything we can." The impression is of an administration that has stopped trying to fix problems and is now trying to convince people that they need to live with them. It's palliative politics, giving the tacit impression that the best the UK can be offered is a sort of end-of-country care.

Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate - what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.

People listen to "The Body" and say he is no moron. But really, he is a moron.
What is wrong with these people?

Mr. Powell had honed his style years before, when Mr. Carter was governor. Responding to a critic who accused his boss of "communistic" tactics against opponents of the busing used to desegregate schools, Mr. Powell wrote that one of a governor's burdens was having to read "barely legible letters from morons."

"I respectfully suggest that you take two running jumps and go straight to hell," he continued.

I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.

Capitalism run amuck is no better than Communism run amuck. The problem is the "amuck" part.

If you can persuade your customer to tatoo your name on their chest, they probably will not switch brands.

No, if anything it improved it. What they say about "no such thing as bad press" is true. Subway has gotten a lot of bad press the last two years and we've been busier in comparison.

They see an article about Subway Spokesman is a Pedophile, they think "Oh, I haven't had Subway in a while."

But last year's performance was no great triumph: Any investor can chalk up large returns when stocks soar, as they did in 1997. In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.

So what's our duck rating for 1997? The table on the facing page shows that though we paddled furiously last year, passive ducks that simply invested in the S&P Index rose almost as fast as we did. Our appraisal of 1997's performance, then: Quack.

People say, "Well, I saved all this money all my life and now I can only get 1% on it, what do I do?" And the answer is you learn to live on 1%, unfortunately. [...] People are reaching for yield, there's no question about that, and that's stupid. And it has consequences over time. [...] It can take a lot longer than you'd think but eventually you get to midnight and everything turns to pumpkins and mice.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Well, it's probably rat poison squared.

Now if you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything [unlike apartments or farmland]. Assets, to have value, have to deliver something to somebody.

Well, I like cryptocurrencies a lot less than you [Buffet] do, and so to me it's just dementia, and I think the people who are professional traders that go into trading cryptocurrencies; it's just disgusting. It's like somebody else is trading turds and you decide, I can't be left out.

In my life, I try and avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad in comparison to somebody else -- and bitcoin does all three. In the first place, it's stupid because it's still likely to go to zero. It's evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve System... and third, it makes us look foolish compared to the Communist leader in China. He was smart enough to ban bitcoin in China.

Stocks have a real interest in real businesses. Crypto is an investment in nothing, and the guy who's trying to sell you an investment in nothing says, "I have a special kind of nothing that's difficult to make more of". I don't want to buy a piece of nothing, even if somebody tells me they can't make more of it. I regard it as almost insane to buy this stuff or to trade in it. I just avoid it as if it were an open sewer, full of malicious organisms. I just totally avoid and recommended everybody else follow my example.

It's partly fraud and partly delusion. That's a bad combination. [...] The country did not need a currency that was good for kidnappers.

At least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.

From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined. [...] In March 2022 [...] North Korean hackers broke into a sort of crypto exchange affiliated with Axie Infinity and made off with $600 million worth of crypto. The heist helped Kim Jong Un pay for test launches of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. officials. Instead of providing a new way for poor people to earn cash, Axie Infinity funneled their savings to a dictator's weapons program.

It's not hard: watch what poor people do, and don't do that.

We save a lot of money spending money we don't got.

Leave the children enough so that they feel they can do anything but not enough that they can do nothing.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I feel like im in a car going down a hill without brakes. or more like a sinking ship without a life-boat.lets start pumping the water out before it goes under. they better fix this thing quick or were all going to be in deep water.ok take a deep breath count to ten and relax there thats better.now just think of all the good stock you made money on. and all the money your going to lose on this one. but if we all stick together we can get are price. you no how that goes wich rat is going to jump ship first. insider already did im going to stick it out HELP

The company's lack of anti-money laundering controls was so blatant that one undercover U.S. agent created an account under the name "Joe Bogus" from "Completely Made Up City" and sent funds to another undercover agent with the memo "for the cocaine".

In the marijuana space, I see people on boards of directors that I wouldn't dream of buying a used car from, let alone putting on a public board. [...] There are some very shady characters who have been given governance and oversight responsibilities for cannabis producers and they're woefully underqualified and lack the integrity to uphold that responsibility and that's a profound responsibility.

God is in the details.
The Devil is in the details.

As for the argument that glass slippers must be a mistake because they aren't realistic ... no shit, Sherlock. Why do you think they call these things fairy tales?

"Who do you work for?"
"Work for - I don't work for anybody. I'm just having fun."

McCoy: The release of emotion is what keeps us healthy. Emotionally healthy.
Spock: That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently unhealthy for those closest to you.

Pink tender morsel
Glistening with salty gel
What the hell is it?

Old man seeks doctor
"I eat Spam daily," he says
Angioplasty

Pink beefy temptress
I can no longer remain
Vegetarian

Gelatinous hunk
of pink, inspires me to retch
I cannot swallow

Did you know that plastic dinosaurs are made from real dinosaurs?

A slim jim. Its like an old piece of sausage and you chew on it and you're like, oh wow there's a lot of grease in there. And then you realize you just ate a pig snout. Why dont they just come out with pig snout??

"Soft drinks make no nutritious claims," said James Finkelstein, a spokesman for the National Soft Drink Association. "We are simply one of the nice little refreshments people can enjoy as part of a balanced diet.
Grocery Manufacturers of America officials, in a statement, called the attack on soda "another tiresome tirade" and asked, "Is there any treat that is safe from their wrath?"

If they are behaviorally addictive or habit-forming, they are much more like caffeine, or in my case, Gummy Bears... I love Gummy Bears... and I want Gummy Bears and I like Gummy Bears and I eat Gummy Bears and I don't like it when I don't eat my Gummy Bears, but I'm certainly not addicted to them.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

There are two rules for success:
1: Never tell people everything you know.

Every now and then it helps to be a little deaf.

               ,.;.        squirrels: a source of campus nutrition
     |\__/|  .~    ~.      
     /o=o'`./      .'      recipe for squirrel au vin:
    {o__,   \    {         ingredients:
      / .  . )    \          1 squirrel (remove hair)
      `-` '-' \    }         1 bottle of Boones Strawberry Hill

craps-man-ship (noun)

1. The quality of being a poor craftsman
2. An example of shoddy work

My new jeans fell apart after only one month.  Nice crapsmanship!

The following letter to the editor appeared in the Boston Globe this week:

Bear Hug
In a recent column Susan Trausch [Globe columnist] referred to Smokey the Bear. It is true that Smokey the Bear deserves praise for his campaign against forest fires. But nobody ever mentions the boy scouts he kills for their hats.

(signed) Martin H. Slobodkin
Cambridge

... but seal penis is increasingly hard to come by.

I forgot to take my homeopathic medicine and I overdosed.

"It's obviously very square and boxy. It's like a box of popcorn".

How to deal with bears:
If it's brown: just lay down.
If it's black: fight back.
If it's white: goodnight.
If it's gummy: yummy!

Black bears rarely attack, and when they do, playing dead will only accelerate your actual death.

Years ago, Carol (Mrs. Matthau) talked Walter in going to Dachau (a Nazi death camp). They started fighting on the train about something or other. They went through Dachau, still not speaking. They were still arguing when they got back to the hotel. When they got up to their rooms, Walter said to her, absolutely straightfaced, "I just want you to know that you ruined my trip to Dachau!"

she loves me.
shovels me.
shoves me.
hoves me.
hose me.
hoe me.
oh me.
o me.
me.
m.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

> Well, here's some trivia about a film he wasn't in: when George
> Lucas was narrowing down the final casting decisions for "Star Wars",
> Walken was one of the two or three choices remaining to play Han Solo.
> Walken lost to Harrison Ford, who has made many a lucrative movie since
> then. But then, perhaps you knew that already.

Nope, I didn't. But that casting would have changed many of the scenes. Whereas Ford would meet Vader and look around, give the stooges' "woo-woo-woo", and then look "devilish", Walken would stop, give a blank expression, walk up to Vader and say something like, "You seem to be under a misimpression, sir. I am not in any way 'trapped'. It's YOU who are TRAPPED HERE WITH ME. Now, I'll ask you this one last time. Where is my chicken?" Refreshing, I think.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

You can't write, you can't spell, you can't read, and you have the attention span of a gnat. It seems only reasonable that you have understood and experienced all that is important today.

> From: euafri@eua.ericsson.se (Fredrik.Ostman)
> Newsgroups: alt.sewing
> Subject: Re: Freak Problems
> Date: 23 Oct 91 15:19:21 GMT
>
> Underlining and Interfacing are two different things, aren't they?[1]
> Interfacing is used to increase strength in hems and collars etc.,
> whereas Underlining is a layer of lighter fabric cut with the same pattern
> as the _fabric_, and "sandwiched" with this to improve the _fall_ of the
> garment and also to hold pattern markings, hems and interfacing. :-)[2]
> This is a haute couture[3] technique, so you don't fuse the intefacing[4]
> but stitch it into place. :-I
> ______ _~ [5]
> (_/_ _ _ _/) _ . /) / ) , _/) _ [5]
> __/ _/(_(/_(/__/(_/_/Z_ (_/_/)_/__/))_(I_/)_[5]
Poor Fred. He's doing just about everything wrong. First off, he makes the near-fatal error of getting way too technical. This, coupled with the ultra-macho sentence structures is gonna end up leaving Fred high and very dry. That technical buzzword approach might come up with some tail in alt.power.tools or alt.farm.equipment, but alt.sewing? Forget it. Prepare yourself for another long, lonely night by the Singer, perfecting what history will call the "right hand occupied stitch".

Now, on to specific errors:
[1] & [2]: Asking a question and then answering it yourself. Not only is this passive-aggressive behavior of the worst sort, it's a real turn-off as well. Oh yeah, and nix the smiley. A post from a guy in alt.sewing is by definition a smiley.
[3]. You were on the right track here, dropping in a little French, but you introduce it so unsubtly that we really feel like puking. Next time, try "My older sister points out that this is a haute couture technique. Thanks, sis. I washed and folded your clothes, BTW. Kiss, kiss." Note how much better this is. Not only do we introduce the character of the older female sibling, but we also imply incest. The reader is of course free to infer tongue-action, if that be her thang.
[4]. Nothing sucks the life from a post like a typo.
[5]. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Here then, is the revised post:

> Growing up in a house with four older sisters can be pretty hard on a guy
> [Note how we generate sympathy and empathy for the author here, and
> sneak in the phrase 'hard on'. Always thinking] I used to hate all the
> teasing I would get at the schoolyard, but now that I am older I see
> things through very different eyes (though they remain steely blue). I
> realize that the countless hours I spent learning to sew while the other
> boys were in the Little League was not for naught, but rather. . .

Hope this helps.

Kalbo is filipino for "bald guy." Bald guys of the world, unite!

I'm too much of a perfectionist to claim that I am one.

Good from far, but far from good.

Personally, should I ever form a globe spanning conglomerate, I intend to do it fairly and without malice or dirty politics. I hope you fellows don't make that too difficult a task; I would have to have you all killed.

The best way to be an organ donor is to buy a motorcycle and ride it without a helmet. The severe brain damage that follows results in slow death, and emergency services often arrive fast enough so that good, healthy organs can be taken. In fact, this is such a common method that people working in organ transplants refer to motorcycles as "donorcycles".

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Top Ten Rejected Movie Lines, as read by Arnold
10. My, what a lovely lace doily.
9. Ow! A papercut!
8. Man-Oh-Man! Do I love fudge!
7. When I think of you, I touch myself.
6. Do you have any of those "Ouch-Less" bandaids?
5. Can you please open this jar of olives for me?
4. Time to make the doughnuts, you bastard!
3. Can you just let me keep the credit cards?
2. Help me, Letterman, help me!
1. Who else loves show tunes?

You don't have to read a long, boring file that insults your intelligence and sucks your slack. Just send me $1... or KILL ME.

Mister Dip Lip, which is made from a material that feels very much like the Glow-In-The-Dark Squid, is a realistic replica of a human mouth that opens up, via levers in the back, to reveal, in vivid detail, the various alarming developments that can occur if you use tobacco products. If you knew somebody who was just about to wake up with a terrible hangover, you could creep into his bedroom, hold Mister Dip Lip's mouth one inch from his eyes, and then, while moving Mister Dip Lip's mouth levers, shout: "HI, BOB! WELCOME TO HELL!" This gift is too good to give away. Keep it yourself.

Manly men never piss alongside each other, unless they absolutely, positively have to. Two urinals is the canonical distance; any further, and you're a wussy; any closer, and you are liable to be asked for a date. Moreover, manly men are supposed to concentrate on the graffiti on the wall in front of them; if they look sideways, they are fags checking out dicks; and looking downwards is a sign of insecurity about their own equipment. Many of us are far too soft to be able to follow the great pissing code; no matter: manly men press on, battling adversity and bashful kidneys with their dicks in their hands. For, while the prohibition against looking is absolute, there is nothing wrong with displaying one's manly pissing skill. That's why the manliest pissing place there is, is the observation desk of the Empire State building. Aim down, and be proud. Manly men are acutely aware that their ability to piss while remaining on their hind legs distinguishes them not only from the rest of the animal kingdom, but also from women. Let's face it, and be proud: the only thing that we can do and they can't, is write our names in the snow.

The toilet was invented approximately 6,000 years ago in Egypt, and ever since then women have been asking men in various languages to PLEASE try to remember to put the seat down. But guys still have a lot of trouble with the concept. Why is this such a problem? Unfortunately, many women believe it's because guys are insensitive scum. But the truth is that guys don't see what the big deal is. A guy figures, hey, I can see when the lid is DOWN; why can't women see when it's UP, and put it down themselves? The answer, guys, is that sometimes, late at night, when a woman staggers into the bathroom half asleep, she might not realize that the lid is up, and, plop, she winds up sitting in the toilet. Think about it, men! Pretty funny, right? Hey, we really are insensitive scum. This is why we should be grateful to Lady Savers Products for coming out with these decals that say "PLEASE LOWER SEAT." These decals would make an ideal gift from a woman to that Very Special Total Moron in her life. The only drawback we can see is that, if the guy is busy reading the toilet seat, he might not be as good with his aim.

I was with paul [Paul Rubens, aka Pee Wee Herman] when this whole thing happened. Actually, it was me who said "take it out and spank it". He was kinda reserved. So I called him a 'fraidy cat and triple-dog dared him.

The only flaw in the Hinckley trial is that it left a lot of people with the impression that psychiatrists are just a bunch of bearded voodoo doctors who espouse confusing and wildly contradictory theories that have nothing to do with common sense. This is totally unfair. Many psychiatrists are clean-shaven.

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

cox@cmp-rt.music.uiuc.edu (Benjamin Cox) writes:
> PROOF that there's a little "ELVIS" in all of us.
I really hate to be the one to tell you this, Ben, but 'little Elvis' was The King's nickname for his er, uh ... UNIT. So let me be the first to proclaim that there was NEVER a 'little ELVIS' in ME! You may be suffering from a little JHVH-1 mind control, or not. It is like unto the story of the SubGenius who was made invisible, and did dwell in the Girl's locker room for forty days and forty nights - whereupon reappearing, found a twenty in his old cardigan, only to discover that the Utilities had lost his account number and were unable to bill him forevermore, who did shout, "Glory be to Bob, and all who sail in him!", finally to awaken and discover that not only had it all been an Xist- induced dream, but that he had missed his bus stop and had to walk several miles to his home.

Whether I was that man or not is unimportant, but there IS a GREAT DEAL of PUZZLING EVIDENCE and ANSWERS TO ALL YOUR QUESTIONS herein contained. DO NOT MISTAKE 'PIPE-DREAMS' for TRUE SLACK, Ben. You could be in GRAVE DANGER. You could find yourself 'happy' and 'contented' WORKING AT A REGULAR JOB, or MARRIED, ALL UNDER XIST MIND CONTROL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think you KNOW what to do, Ben. RENOUNCE THE PINK MEN and begin your SOMNOLENT QUEST for SLACK, or DOOMOLA.

Uncle Bob used to say, 'GET OUT OF MY FACE, YOU LITTLE CREEP, OR KILL ME!', and it made me feel VERY SPECIAL, let me tell you. My hope for YOU, Ben, is that YOU will HURT LIKE I DO.

That thing that hovers and bobbles around in the air above [Johnny] Carson and his guests isn't a microphone... it's the very bottom of a flying saucer.

> I saw a rather good documentary on PBS's Nova last night titled "The
> Return of the Blimp". ... is there any evidence that an agent of the
> US government or a US airship company might have instigated the disaster?
It was a long term investment by the then-fledgling Atlantic Records to shoot a really cool album cover. Knowing the value of this once-in-a- lifetime photo opportunity, they waited until 1969 - the release of Led Zeppelin I - to exploit it. Furthermore, to get extra mileage they even re-used the design on the cover of Led Zeppelin II. File this one under: Rock & Roll Blimp Death Conspiracy.

Is this in "F" or "E"?

Top Ten Body Parts or Van Pattens:
10. Heart
9. Kidney
8. Vincent
7. Trachea
6. Joyce
5. James
4. Bladder
3. Timothy
2. Spleen
1. Dick

It combines the two worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Rats greet you, they interact, they try to please. They are as close to a dog as you're going to get in a rodent.

Repeat after me: "The netnews is not real life. It's just 1's and 0's. It isn't that big a deal." Then go take a walk outside and try to gain some perspective.

If everything is coming your way you're probably in the wrong lane.

If nothing is going right, try going left.

Your eyes are weary from staring at the CRT for so long. You feel sleepy. Notice how restful it is to watch the cursor blink. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.

Penises are an industry. They are a market for condoms, lube products, underwear with holes in the front, leather pouches with studs on them, and the journalistic trade. Many pricks run for office as well. Penises are everywhere, just like Elvis.

The Procrastinator's Credo:
Why put off today what can be put off tomorrow?

It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?

All excuses are answers:
Q: Where is that computer program you are supposed to be done with today?
A: Was I supposed to be done today?
And your response, the A: above, is all three: a question, answer, and excuse.

The original Star Trek crew is getting a little old. Capt. Kirk just flew the Enterprise 2 million light years with the left turn signal on.

Getting naked before a bath is a handy way to prevent your clothes getting wet on washing day. Spice up your sex life with varied foreplay - I like to get naked before making love. Going to school naked is a handy way to stop your friends asking about the status of your current project.

The majority of men are indeed inferior to women. Unfortunately, we few who are not won't bother with the likes of you. Sorry, them's the breaks. "Dating" is the process of finding someone exactly as screwed up as you are. It's not easy. Best wishes.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So What." "My Mother didn't love me." So what... "My husband won't ball me." So what... "I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what... I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.

R.W.Davies@newcastle.ac.uk (R.W.DAVIES) writes:
>Well, yesterday I got the line "I've been really screwed up recently.
>It's nothing to do with you, it's me... I don't want to go out with you
>anymore."

Excellent. She's a real pro. I'll give her a 9.2 if there weren't any tears. 9.6 otherwise.
>So being the nice person I am, I say "fine" and see if she wants to
>talk about it, which she doesn't and I leave.

Well, that's about all you can do. Though I usually start twitching and talking to my imaginary friend.

>My response to the original post, though, is to experience both vehicles,
>one, then the other, then back to the first one again. This has kept me
>from making bizarre decisions in my life.
>roy@profrets.com

This philosophy works with women as well.

Wine comes in at the mouth
And Love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Every man's death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind, so ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

In article <13327@blue.cis.pitt.edu> djkst15@vms.cis.pitt.edu writes:
>i not that good i a drinker but even i can drink two forties with out that
>much of a problem. ive drank three before. either youre not that good of
>a drinker or youve got some kind of complex.

Well, judging by your punctuation, syntax, typing ability (and inability to use the "shift" key), I think you should reassess what you mean by being able to drink without "that much of a problem."

In article <90115.211837JCS129@psuvm.psu.edu> JCS129@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
> There is this Girl named Stacey, she only enjoys being tied
> up. That is the only way she likes it, she won't do it unless her
> wrists and ankles are tied! What should be done?

Fer gossake, you incredible PSU moron, TIE HER UP! Geez.

Dear Sir,
We have received your attempt at flamebait. While we appreciate your taking the time to write us, I'm afraid we must return your work to you. In the future, you might want to consider placing the part more people might agree with (e.g., your opinions on Paul Thomas -- which I disagree with) first, thus lulling the reader into a false sense of security. Then your bait portion (eg. point 1) is more likely to be taken seriously and draw the desired effect. Good luck in the future. Thank you,

While he was in New York on location for Bronco Billy (1980), Clint Eastwood agreed to a television interview. His host, somewhat hostile, began by defining a Clint Eastwood picture as a violent, ruthless, lawless, and bloody piece of mayhem, and then asked Eastwood himself to define a Clint Eastwood picture. "To me," said Eastwood calmly, "what a Clint Eastwood picture is, is one that I'm in".

Baldrick, you wouldn't see a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing "Subtle Plans Are Here Again".

A man may fight for many things; his country, his principles, his friends, the glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child. But personally, I'd mudwrestle my own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock, and a stack of French porn.

Half of our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.

Some people always feel that there is something missing. Unless they discover that the feeling is internal and doesn't have a lot to do with what kind of life situation they're in at the moment, they will constantly rearrange their lives in search of the ideal situation, and always find it easier to notice what they don't have than to notice what they do have.

Contacting the police in an anonymous way is real useful. Call his mom and talk to her about it. My roomate had this to say about Moms: "No matter how tough you are, even the president (Bush at the time) or Arnold, your mom always knows how to push your buttons, because she installed them...." Call a local Feminists society and tell them his name.

One day it was announced by master Joshu that the young monk Kyogen had reached an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers went to speak with him.

"We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?" his fellow students inquired.

"It is," Kyogen answered.

"Tell us," said a friend, "how do you feel?"

"As miserable as ever," replied the enlightened Kyogen.

We're treating it as a bit of a lark. There's nothing we can officially do.

The bag was made of clear plastic, so we've got a pretty good description of the robber.

You know, they didn't have any tail-lights.

We've got an entrant who's 6'7", and the worst part is he's skinny.

You know, once in a while it is my pleasure, and my privilege to welcome here at the Refreshment Room some of the truly great international artists of our time. And tonight we have one such artist. Ladies and gentlemen, someone who I've always personally admired, perhaps more deeply, more strongly, more ... abjectly than any other performer. A man, well, more than a man, a god! A great god, whose personality is so totally and utterly wonderful, that my feeble words of welcome sound wretchedly and pathetically inadequate. Someone whose boots I would gladly lick clean, until holes wore through my tongue! A man who is so totally and utterly wonderful, that I would rather be sealed in a pit of my own filth than dare tread on the same stage with him! Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparably superior human being, Harry Fink!

I think you enjoy a guy who is sweet, smart, sincere, interesting and has a great personality but you really go for guys who are cute with great asses. For me, a girl should have all the qualities you enjoy. Looks are certainly important, but they are also relative. I remember the first time I met several girls that I didn't find extremely attractive; once I got to know them and found that I was attracted to their personalities, they seemed to be more attractive physically as well. I think it's because when I look at her I see a person that I like, rather than an ass that I like. You'll be "friends" with the sweetest, most sincere gentlemen, then go out with some loser with no education or personality, just because he's got an ass. Perhaps now he has two.

And it does matter. An honest man or woman is an honest man or woman more because he or she is honest in the small, everyday things that "don't matter" individually, but which make up a well-lived life, than because of some single great temptation that was passed. A person who is concerned about individual rights or about individual dignity makes his or her difference not because of any sweeping great statement or action, but because of the accretion of small, individually seemingly insignificant acts that spread that dignity and confirm those rights through every action they take. It matters because every action you take, and every action I take is an expression of the human spirit.

The toilet seat was the least contaminated of 15 household locales studied. "If an alien came from space and studied the bacterial counts," the professor says, "he probably would conclude he should wash his hands in your toilet and crap in your sink."

If I was a fan, I don't think I'd forgive me.

Animals are there to be made into furs.

... [the product would] let a paralyzed person tweet faster than a person using their thumbs on a smartphone

...an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension.

When a man wants some company, he calls other men. When a man wants to have fun, he calls other men. When a man wants to have sex, he calls other men to reminisce.

The Buick buyer never wants to have to open his hood for anything - he would rather have it permanently sealed.

Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun. Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

"And you, Jimmie, how old would you be?"
Oddly, uncertainly, he hesitated a moment, as if engaged in calculation.
"Why, I guess I'm nineteen, Doc. I'll be twenty next birthday."
Looking at the gray-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself -- it was, or would have been, the height of cruelty had there been any possibility of Jimmie's remembering it.
"Here," I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. "Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?"

He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of the chair. "Jesus Christ," he whispered. "Christ, what's going on? What's happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?" -- and he became frantic, panicked. [...] I stole away, taking the hateful mirror with me. Two minutes later I re-entered the room. He wheeled around as I opened the door, and his face assumed a cheery expression.

"Hiya, Doc!" he said. There was no sign of recognition on his frank, open face.
"Haven't we met before, Jimmie?" I asked casually.
"No, I can't say we have."

Shut up! Shut up, you Americans. You always talk, you Americans. You talk and you talk, and you say "Let me tell you something" and "I just want to say this". Well, you're dead now so shut up!

I woulda shot her right in the fetus

I've got no option but to sell you all for scientific experiments. Blame the Catholic Church for not letting me wear one of those little rubber things. Oh, they've done some wonderful things in their time. They've preserved the might and majesty, even mystery, of the Church of Rome and the sanctity of the sacraments, the indivisible oneness of the Trinity.

Top Ten Ways To Cheer Up Abu Nidal:
10. Have his hijackings count towards frequent flyer mileage
9. "Keep your chin up" letter from Charles Manson
8. Blooper reel from the Ayatolloah's funeral
7. Novelty Uzi with flag that pops out & says "BANG!"
6. Tell him "Chicken Soup" was cancelled
5. Give him Snoopy -- everybody's favorite cartoon beagle -- molded from plastic explosives
4. Have Yassir Arafat let Nidal win at Crazy Eights
3. Shorter fuses
2. Let him make crank phone call to B'nai Brith telethon
1. Tell him Hell just got cable

Top Ten Amish Pick-Up Lines:
10. Thee at barn-raisings often?
9. If our religion didn't forbid the use of telephones, I would ask thee for thy number
8. Can I buy thee a Buttermilk Colada?
7. You've really got the build for that black bonnet & shapeless black dress
6. Say, my favorite movie is WITNESS, too!
5. Are thee a model?
4. There are so many phonies at these quilting bees, let's go someplace quiet
3. Thy buggy has a bitchin' lacquer job
2. I got Sinatra tickets
1. Are thee up for some plowing?

Sarge's Guide to Getting Out of Viet Nam in One Piece:
1. Try to look unimportant. They might be low on ammo.
2. All 5 second grenade fuses are 3 seconds.
3. Never share a foxhole with anyone who is braver than you.
4. Friendly fire isn't.
5. Remember: All your equipment was made by the lowest bidder.
6. When you have secured an area, don't forget to tell the enemy. They might have other plans.
7. Anything you do can get you shot, including doing nothing. Hence the importance of rule 8.
8. Teamwork is essential. It gives them other people to shoot at.
9. Expect the unexpected, but remember you can't rely on it.
10. You are not Superman, but sometimes imagining you are is the only thing that saves you. On the other hand, it can also kill you.

"Shit Happens" in various religions:
Taoism: Shit happens.
Confucianism: Confucius says: "Shit happens".
Buddhism: If shit happens, it isn't really shit.
Hinduism: This shit has happened before.
Protestantism: If shit happens, it happens to someone else.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Judaism: Why does shit always happen to us?
Agnosticism: What is this shit?
Atheism: I don't believe this shit.
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit.

Every person thinks his mind more clever and more learned than it is. I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person. They express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other sciences about which they know nothing. If met with applause so does the disease itself become aggravated.

For a given skill, incompetent people will:

• fail to recognize their own lack of skill
• fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy
• fail to recognize genuine skill in others

You know... you can just lie about your IQ. It's not like it's printed on your driver's licence or something.
Source: My IQ is 167

When you realise that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you're on the wrong side.

House: I think he's got the yips.
[Cuddy has no idea what that is.]
House: Steve Blass, Scott Norwood, David Duval. All got the yips. Great athletes. Lost their confidence, and immediately started sucking.
Cuddy: And you're... giving him [Foreman] time to work through it?
House: Mm-hmm! Four days, then he's fired. You don't get better from the yips.

The Holocaust is the most tragic and deadly outburst of the once-useful, now-dangerous human trait of tribalism, in which we are right and you are wrong because we are we, and you are not. [...] Any belief that does not allow others the right to believe something else is based more on fear than on faith. If that is not the lesson of the Holocaust, then what has been learned?

As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

I feel that if you live life in pursuit of "certification", "appreciation", or "compensation" in any form from your parents, you're making a big mistake. The sooner you can say, "Okay, they're them and I'm me, and let's make the best of it," the better off you're going to be. We could improve worldwide mental health if we acknowledged that parents can make you crazy.

I believe that, to a certain extent, kids get weird because their parents made them weird. Parents have more to do with making their children weird than TV or rock and roll records. The only other thing that makes them weirder than TV and parents is religion and drugs.

Bumper sticker seen on the stealth bomber:
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THEN WE WASTED 50 BILLION BUCKS.

An old Jewish man was walking on the beach with his only grandson, when a giant wave crashes ashore, sweeping the boy out to sea. The man looks up to the heavens and says "Oh Lord, this is my only grandson, how can you take him away from me like this? My son will not understand. My daughter-in-law will die from grief." Another wave comes by, and deposits the boy at the old man's feet. The grandfather looks to the heavens again and says, "He had a hat!"

Hello, this is God. Whenever I'm in Pittsburgh -- which is all the time, since I'm omnipresent -- I listen to all the radio stations at once, including WRCT.

It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.

All that children want to hear from their parents is "I'm sorry". All that parents want to hear from their children is "Thank you".

Oh yeah, laugh now! But when the millions start pouring in, I'll be the one at Burger King, sucking down Whoppers at my own private table!

King Kong cold-cocked Kato Kaelin.

HUMAN FEET ORIGINALLY USED FOR WALKING, ANTHROPOLOGISTS REPORT OXFORD, ENGLAND -- A new report in the Journal Of The Anthropological Society Of Oxford reveals that human feet were likely once used as a means of extravehicular locomotion. "Apparently, as recently as 20 years ago, the foot was used in a process called 'walking,' by which the human body actually propelled itself," the report read. "Starting sometime in the late 1970s, these crude early feet gradually evolved into their present function of operating the gas and brake pedals on automobiles." The same team of researchers discovered in 1994 that the human brain was once used for various problem-solving applications before evolving into an absorption/storage unit for lyrics to TV-show theme songs.

I'm Pink, therefore I'm Spam

After a time, you may find that "having" is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as "wanting". It is not logical, but it is often true.

Commodore Wesley: Our compliments to the M-5 unit, and regards to Captain Dunsel. Wesley out.
Dr. McCoy: Dunsel? Who the blazes is Captain Dunsel? What does it mean, Jim?
[Kirk leaves, stung by the insult]
Dr. McCoy: Spock? What does it mean?
Spock: Dunsel, Doctor, is a term used by midshipmen at Starfleet Academy. It refers to a part which serves no useful purpose.

You should be careful what you wish for in case you get it.

Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape

Do not wear a bow tie to business unless you are a clown, college professor or a social commentator. If you insist on wearing a bow tie to business - and bow tie wearers are a stubborn lot - I suggest you wear it with the proper accessories: a red nose and a beanie cap with a propeller.

But some people are thrown off by the "in" and think "inflammable" means "not combustible". For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked "flammable". Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use "inflammable".

Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you knob.

Shamus, n. [Yiddish]:
A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the temple, and makes sure everything is in working order. A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagogue functionaries, and there's a joke about that: A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The cantor, not to be bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he's nobody!"

... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks. Generally, their procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as to infest the waters. I would estimate that the primary food source of sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making documentaries. Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly listless. The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another documentary." So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking, under the guise of Scientific Research. "We know very little about the effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply scientific voice. "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White in the testicles with a cattle prod." The divers keep this kind of thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all along.

Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.

The Heineken Uncertainty Principle: You can never be sure how many beers you had last night.

To be is to do. -- I. Kant
To do is to be. -- A. Sartre
Doo bee doo bee doo. -- F. Sinatra
Yabba-Dabba-Doo! -- F. Flintstone

Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.

I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it.

The real test of an artist, of course, is not whether you can see each blade of grass, but whether the eyes follow you across the room.

Leonardo did not give the painting to the Giocondo family, but kept it himself, and took it with him to Milan, Rome, and France, and used it as a "calling card," says Feinberg--sort of an advertisement: "Hey, look what I painted! I can paint for you, too!" So in addition to being a mystery, the painting was also something of a publicity gimmick, from its earliest days.

I don't have to take this abuse from you -- I've got hundreds of people dying to abuse me.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.

People do not give parties so their friends will have fun. If that were what they wanted, they'd just send some women and champagne over to your house in a taxi and be done with it.

Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers.

All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.

It is a precarious undertaking to say anything reliable about aims and intentions.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

A cross-country study released last year by the University of Calgary found that most Canadians don't know that electrons are smaller than atoms. Almost half the population had no idea the earth revolves around the sun once a year. The study also found that large numbers of Canadians believe in pseudo-sciences -- 45% said they think astrology is "sort of scientific" and close to a third believe in lucky numbers.

36% of the American public believes that boiling radioactive milk makes it safe to drink.

There is no sin except stupidity.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.

People disagree with me on this, and the reason they disagree is because they're wrong.

You can't fix stupid.

You can't polish a turd.

Still, the company's growth isn't likely to exceed 25 percent, McNealy said. When a company grows that fast, it opens itself to the "bozo invasion," the addition of inferior employees, he said.

The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.

Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

It takes a smart man to know when he's stupid.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

You can hardly do anything that won't seem stupid later.

I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking the responsibility for what they know.

Ignorance simplifies ANY problem.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

I make progress by having people around who are smarter than I am -- and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Uhlmann's Razor:
When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there is no need to have recourse to any other.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

We all get heavier as we get older because there's a lot more information in our heads.

It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.

No one ever listened himself out of a job.

"Remember when" is the lowest form of conversation.

If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation.

Never rise to speak till you have something to say; and when you have said it, cease.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

It's weasels all the way down.

It's important to learn how to weasel out of things. It's what separates us from the animals. Except the weasel.

• Never ask a question when you know the answer is going to be a lie.
• Silence is always bad news.
• It's safe to talk openly and honestly with people because they're not really listening.

If A equals success, then the formula is: A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.

The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.

Don't be too hard on me. Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.

Remember: Silly is a state of Mind, Stupid is a way of Life.

When your enemy is [making a mistake], never interrupt him.

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Sherry [Thomas Sheridan] is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

Witnesses said the 28-year-old volunteer reached her hand into the tiger's cage to pet it and the animal responded by nibbling at her hand. The woman then panicked and jerked her hand back and the tiger tore her arm off near the shoulder. "That's nothing more than a tiger being a tiger," said Michael Knight, a spokesman for the Elbert County district attorney.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I'm schizophrenic
And so am I.

Two peanuts were walking down the street... One of them was a salted.

The only problem
with haiku is that you just
get started and then

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator

Alright, who pissed in the gene pool?

Q: Which is worse: ignorance or apathy?
A: Who knows? Who cares?

undeliverable-mail-recipient-deceased: the subject-message was undeliverable because the recipient specified in the recipient postal-OR-address is deceased.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you.

Don't lose
Your head
To gain a minute
You need your head
Your brains are in it.

Tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he'll believe you.... Tell him that a bench has wet paint upon it and he'll have to touch it to be sure.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

It's a small world - but I'd hate to have to paint it.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific.

I'm a self-made man, but I think if I had to do it over again, I'd call in someone else.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored power tools.

Wilma Flintstone smiles at trees.

All's well that smells well.

Two sausages are in a frying pan. One turns to the other and says: "God it's hot in here!"
The other says: "Oh my God it's a talking sausage!"

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Randomly, randomly, randomly, randomly
Strawberry ice cream

The best index to a person's character is
a) how he treats people who can't do him any good and
b) how he treats people who can't fight back.

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.

An opportunity is not like a boomerang. If you throw it away it is unlikely to come back.

Given what I believed, anyway, the right thing for me to have done would have been to follow your conscience, and I couldn't do it. Why? To this day, I'm not sure. I can speculate it. Some of it had to do with raw embarrassment. A terror of blushing. A fear of some old farmer in my home town saying to some other farmer, "Did you hear what the O'Brien kid did? The sissy went to Canada." And imagining my mom and dad sitting in the next booth over, overhearing this, and imagining their eyes colliding and bouncing away. I was afraid of embarrassment.

Men died in Vietnam, by the way, out of the same fear - you know, not out of nobility and patriotism. They charged bunkers and machine gun nests, just because they would be embarrassed not to, later on, in front of their buddies.

Not a noble motive for human behavior, but I'll tell you one thing, one you'd better think about in your lives. Sometimes doing the hard thing is also doing the embarrassing thing, and when that moment strikes, it hits you hard.

The foregoing contains no untrue statement of a material fact and does not omit to state a material fact that is required to be stated or that is necessary to make a statement not misleading in light of the circumstances in which it was made.

Why are many scientists using lawyers for medical experiments instead of rats?
a) There are more lawyers than rats.
b) The scientists don't become as emotionally attached to them.
c) There are some things that even rats won't do for money.

If a corporate lawyer and a trial lawyer were drowning and you could only save one of them, would you go for lunch or read the paper?

Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk.

An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.

According to the California Independent System Operator, the organization charged with regulating the state's power grid, California as a whole normally requires 46,250 megawatts of power at peak summertime periods. But even with the help of some imported electricity from neighbouring states, California's utility companies are only able to supply 46,400 megawatts, leaving a slim safety margin of just 150 megawatts. Companies such as Oracle foresaw this summer's problems. The company has spent US$6.6-million to build its own backup power plant.

The [US] Postal Service is the second largest civilian employer in the country, after Wal-Mart, employing 900,000 federal workers to deliver 3.4 billion letters and parcels each week. [...] Mark Gorkin, who was a stress and violence prevention consultant for the Postal Service and nicknames himself "The Stress Doc," said the "robotic nature" of handling mail was one problem. "There's a lot of routine and the work never stops. There's the sense that you're never really finished with the task," he added.

Block also was recognized by the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council with a certificate of bravery.

Someone with an undersize or underactive amygdala may not be able to feel empathy or refrain from violence. For example, many psychopathic adults and callous children do not recognize fear or distress in other people's faces. Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London recalls showing one psychopathic prisoner a series of faces with different expressions. When the prisoner came to a fearful face, he said, "I don't know what you call this emotion, but it's what people look like just before you stab them."

RS asks whether it's any wonder that over half of all US suicides take place in chain hotels. [...] RS references the chain hotel's central paradox: the form of hospitality with none of the feeling - cleanliness becomes sterility, the politeness of the staff a vague rebuke. The terrible oxymoron of "hotel guest." Hell could easily be a chain hotel. Is it any coincidence that McCain's POW prison was known as the Hanoi Hilton?

morom.

Nerdrons.

Cowpound.

Déjà new: the phenomenon of being completely unaware of something, such as a name or phrase, then after being told about it or discovering it for the first time, suddenly finding it everywhere.

[The] Mafia [provides] better service than Comcast. Sure they shoot you, but it's over with and they don't charge you for the bullet.

We are disrespectful to cable of girth. Can you see that we are serious? Join me or die. Can you do any less? For special lucky data, use Elecom LD-VAPF/SV05 network cabling.

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A Note from [...]:

Check out my Wish List. Wish Lists are great for keeping track of a lot of stuff you don't really need but might interest you for a few hours or days if someone gives them to you. People never know what to give. You might as well tell them, or ask for cash. Remember: no one likes to be disappointed! Who are you to wreck a loved one's birthday or holiday? Screw you! You can keep your lousy gift. Wait 'til your birthday, sweetheart!

Explore [...]'s Wish List!

Items from [...]'s Wish List:

Q: Who treats pigs for cancer?
A: An oinkologist
Q: What is the standard treatment?
A: Oikment
Q: How does a pig go to the hospital?
A: In a hambulance Q: Where do pigs like to vacation? A: Hamsterdam

Q: What's a duck's favourite food?
A: Quackers

Q: Why don't cannibals eat comedians?
A: Because they taste funny.

Vegetarians eat vegetables.
Humanitarians frighten me.