General Wisdom

"Nuclear war would really set back cable."

— Ted Turner

[Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.

— Edwin Meese III

Nudists are people who wear one-button suits.

(null cookie; hope that's ok)

Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.

O give me a home, Where the buffalo roam, Where the deer and the antelope play, Where seldom is heard A discouraging word, 'Cause what can an antelope say?

O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law: Murphy was an optimist.

Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air.

— Thomas L. Martin

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.

— Plato

Of all the words of witch's doom There's none so bad as which and whom. The man who kills both which and whom Will be enshrined in our Who's Whom.

— Fletcher Knebel

"Of course power tools and alcohol don't mix. Everyone knows power tools aren't soluble in alcohol ..."

— Crazy Nigel

Of course there's no reason for it, it's just our policy.

Office Automation, n.: The use of computers to improve efficiency by removing anyone you would want to talk with over coffee.

Ogden's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.

Oh Dad! We're ALL Devo!

Oh don't the days seem lank and long When all goes right and none goes wrong, And isn't your life extremely flat With nothing whatever to grumble at!

Oh, I am a C programmer and I'm okay I muck with indices and structs all day And when it works, I shout hoo-ray Oh, I am a C programmer and I'm okay

Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.

— Lichty & Wagner

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up along delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, Where never lark, or even eagle flew; And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee Jr., "High Flight"

Oh, well, I guess this is just going to be one of those lifetimes.

Oh, when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave. And now the fancy passes by, And nothing will remain, And miles around they'll say that I Am quite myself again.

— A. E. Housman

Oh, wow! Look at the moon!

"OK, now let's look at four dimensions on the blackboard."

— Dr. Joy

OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't touch anything.

Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.

— Trotsky

Old programmers never die. They just branch to a new address.

Old soldiers never die. Young ones do.

Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Omnibiblious, adj.: Indifferent to type of drink. "Oh, you can get me anything. I'm omnibiblious."

OMNIVERSAL AWARENESS?? Oh, YEH!! First you need four GALLONS of JELL-O and a BIG WRENCH!! ... I think you drop th' WRENCH in the JELL-O as if it was a FLAVOR, or an INGREDIENT ... or ... I ... um ... WHERE'S the WASHING MACHINES?

On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

— Wolfgang Pauli

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

— Will Rogers

On his first day as a bus driver, Maxey Eckstein handed in receipts of $65. The next day his take was $67. The third day's income was $62. But on the fourth day, Eckstein emptied no less than $283 on the desk before the cashier. "Eckstein!" exclaimed the cashier. "This is fantastic. That route never brought in money like this! What happened?" "Well, after three days on that cockamamie route, I figured business would never improve, so I drove over to Fourteenth Street and worked there. I tell you, that street is a gold mine!"

On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks.

— Avery

On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks.

— H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow"

On the road, ZIPPY is a pinhead without a purpose, but never without a POINT ...

On the subject of C program indentation: "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."

— Blair P. Houghton

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

— Charles Babbage

On-line, adj.: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.

Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.

— W. C. Fields, "My Little Chickadee"

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"

— Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"

Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease". Disraeli replied, "That all depends upon whether I embrace your principals or your mistress".

Once Law was sitting on the bench And Mercy knelt a-weeping. "Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench! Nor come before me creeping. Upon you knees if you appear, 'Tis plain you have no standing here." Then Justice came. His Honor cried: "YOUR states? -- Devil seize you!" "Amica curiae," she replied -- "Friend of the court, so please you." "Begone!" he shouted -- "There's the door -- I never saw your face before!"

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.

— Rainer Rilke

Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom." The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the rocks, making legends of a Saviour.

... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them. Holiday shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a shopping bag. If your children object to being tied, threaten to take them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up.

— Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"

Once, adv.: Enough.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening.

— Franklin P. Jones

"One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative." Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this. The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame.

— Chuq Von Rospach

One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs -- but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette.

— Professor Charles P. Issawi

One difference between a man and a machine is that a machine is quiet when well oiled.

One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.

— Chateaubriand (1768-1848)

One learns to itch where one can scratch.

— Ernest Bramah

One man's brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one man would have produced alone. These two plus two more will produce half again as many ideas. These four plus four more begin to represent a creative meeting, and the ratio changes to one quarter as many ...

— Anthony Chevins

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out of the net! How will it live?" The other said, "When you have gotten out of the net, I'll tell you."

One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.

One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.

— John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

— Will Durant

"... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."

— Robert Firth

One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.

— Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984

One of the rules of Busmanship, New York style, is never surrender your seat to another passenger. This may seem callous, but it is the best way, really. If one passenger were to give a seat to someone who fainted in the aisle, say, the others on the bus would become disoriented and imagine they were in Topeka, Kansas.

The Seventh Commandments for Technicians Work thou not on energized equipment, for if thou dost, thy fellow workers will surely buy beers for thy widow and console her in other ways.

The First Commandment for Technicians: Beware the lightening that lurketh in the undischarged capacitor, lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most untechnician-like manner.

One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood.

— Mark Ardis

"One planet is all you get."

One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.") This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500 members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil, are already too large to fit on normal aircraft.

— Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"

One reason why George Washington Is held in such veneration: He never blamed his problems On the former Administration.

— George O. Ludcke

One seldom sees a monument to a committee.

One thing the inventors can't seem to get the bugs out of is fresh paint.

"One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions ... like a state of sheer terror."

— W. K. Hartmann

One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.

One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him.

One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.

— Thomas B. Reed

One-Shot Case Study, n.: The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is concluded all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green.

Only adults have difficulty with childproof caps.

Only God can make random selections.

Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."

Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.

Optimization hinders evolution.

Optimization hinders evolution.

Oregano, n.: The ancient Italian art of pizza folding.

Oregon, n.: Eighty billion gallons of water with no place to go on Saturday night.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

— Mike Adams

Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't.

Others will look to you for stability, so hide when you bite your nails.

Our country has plenty of good five-cent cigars, but the trouble is they charge fifteen cents for them.

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing.

— Roy L. Ash, ex-president Litton Industries

... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.

— Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!"

"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it."

— Alex Schure

"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it."

— Alex Schure

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

— General Omar N. Bradley

OUTCONERR Twas FORTRAN as the doloop goes Did logzerneg the ifthen block All kludgy were the function flows And subroutines adhoc. Beware the runtime-bug my friend squrooneg, the false goto Beware the infiniteloop And shun the inprectoo.

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend: and inside a dog, it's too dark to read."

— Groucho Marx

Over the years, I've developed my sense of deja vu so acutely that now I can remember things that *have* happened before ...

Overdrawn? But I still have checks left!

Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket.

Ozman's Laws: (1) If someone says he will do something "without fail," he won't. (2) The more people talk on the phone, the less money they make. (3) People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't. (4) Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

— Ambrose Bierce

panic: can't find /

panic: kernel trap (ignored)

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better.

— Laurie Anderson

Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.

Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life.

Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one.

Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.

— D. J. Hicks

Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Arnold's Addendum: Everything else causes cancer in rats.

Pardon this fortune. Database under reconstruction.

Parker's Law: Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.

Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.

Parsley is gharsley.

— Ogden Nash

Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.

"Pascal is not a high-level language."

— Steven Feiner

"Pascal is Pascal is Pascal is dog meat."

— M. Devine and P. Larson, Computer Science 340

Pascal Users: To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half speed.

Pascal, n.: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

— Eric Hoffer

Patageometry, n.: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants.

Paul Revere was a tattle-tale

Paul's Law: In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save.

Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.

Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Peanut Blossoms 4 cups sugar 16 tbsp. milk 4 cups brown sugar 4 tsp. vanilla 4 cups shortening 14 cups flour 8 eggs 4 tsp. soda 4 cups peanut butter 4 tsp. salt Shape dough into balls. Roll in sugar and bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 F. for 10-12 minutes. Immediately top each cookie with a Hershey's kiss or star pressing down firmly to crack cookie. Makes a hell of a lot.

Pecor's Health-Food Principle: Never eat rutabaga on any day of the week that has a "y" in it.

Pedaeration, n.: The perfect body heat achieved by having one leg under the sheet and one hanging off the edge of the bed.

— Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were.

— Chicago Reader 10/15/82

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

— Bokonon, "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.

"People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense."

— Ken Kesey

People usually get what's coming to them ... unless it's been mailed.

People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart.

— Howard Simons, "The Washington Post"

People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito.

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they don't want it.

— Ogden Nash

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.

People will buy anything that's one to a customer.

People will do tomorrow what they did today because that is what they did yesterday.

Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. "Confound those who have said our remarks before us."

— Aelius Donatus

Perfect day for scrubbing the floor and other exciting things.

Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Personifiers Unite! You have nothing to lose but Mr. Dignity!

Peter's Law of Substitution: Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after themselves.

Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

— John Keats

Pick another fortune cookie.

"Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..."

Pig, n.: An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it balks at pig.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

PISCES (Feb. 19 - Mar. 20) You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA or FBI. You have minor influence over your associates and people resent your flaunting of your power. You lack confidence and you are generally a coward. Pisces people do terrible things to small animals.

PISCES (Feb. 19 to Mar. 20) Take the high road, look for the good things, carry the American Express card and a weapon. The world is yours today, as nobody else wants it. Your mortgage will be foreclosed. You will probably get run over by a bus.

Pittsburgh Driver's Test (7) The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light but a steady left tail light. This means (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn to call the problem to the driver's attention. (b) the driver is signaling a right turn. (c) the driver is signaling a left turn. (d) the driver is from out of town. The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign countries to signal turns.

Pittsburgh Driver's Test (8) Pedestrians are (a) irrelevant. (b) communists. (c) a nuisance. (d) difficult to clean off the front grille. The correct answer is (a). Pedestrians are not in cars, so they are totally irrelevant to driving; you should ignore them completely.

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

— Don Marquis

PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

— E. W. Dijkstra

"Plaese porrf raed."

— Prof. Michael O'Longhlin, S.U.N.Y. Purchase

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

— Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) "Venus on the Half Shell"

Play Rogue, visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures and kill them.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

— Dave Barry, "The Snake"

Please ignore previous fortune.

Please take note:

Please try to limit the amount of "this room doesn't have any bazingas" until you are told that those rooms are "punched out". Once punched out, we have a right to complain about atrocities, missing bazingas, and such.

— N. Meyrowitz

Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means?

Plumbing is one of the easier of do-it-yourself activities, requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm into a clogged toilet. In fact, you can solve many home plumbing problems, such as annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the radio. But before we get into specific techniques, let's look at how plumbing works. A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system, except that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires, it has pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets and toilets. So the truth is that your plumbing systems is nothing at all like your electrical system, which is good, because electricity can kill you.

— Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

PLUNDERER'S THEME (to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius) Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation. If you do the things we say, then you'll soon rule the nation. Kill your foes and enemies and then kill your relations. Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.

Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

Police: Good evening, are you the host? Host: No. Police: We've been getting complaints about this party. Host: About the drugs? Police: No. Host: About the guns, then? Is somebody complaining about the guns? Police: No, the noise. Host: Oh, the noise. Well that makes sense because there are no guns or drugs here. (An enormous explosion is heard in the background.) Or fireworks. Who's complaining about the noise? The neighbors? Police: No, the neighbors fled inland hours ago. Most of the recent complaints have come from Pittsburgh. Do you think you could ask the host to quiet things down? Host: No Problem. (At this point, a Volkswagon bug with primitive religious symbols drawn on the doors emerges from the living room and roars down the hall, past the police and onto the lawn, where it smashes into a tree. Eight guests tumble out onto the grass, moaning.) See? Things are starting to wind down.

Political T.V. commercials prove one thing: some candidates can tell all their good points and qualifications in just 30 seconds.

Politician, n.: An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Politician, n.: From the Greek "poly" ("many") and the French "tete" ("head" or "face," as in "tete-a-tete": head to head or face to face). Hence "polytetien", a person of two or more faces.

— Martin Pitt

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

— Nikita Khrushchev

Politics is like coaching a football team. you have to be smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.

Polymer physicists are into chains.

Portable, adj.: Survives system reboot.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

— Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat"

— John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987

Power corrupts. And atomic power corrupts atomically.

Power, n: The only narcotic regulated by the SEC instead of the FDA.

Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.

— J. P. McEvoy

Predestination was doomed from the start.

President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax.

President Thieu says he'll quit if he doesn't get more than 50\% of the vote. In a democracy, that's not called quitting.

— The Washington Post

Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.

[Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man -- he loves to see him work.

— Winston Churchill

Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.

Probable-Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how.

— Frederick Winsor

Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have orgasms? The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime.

— Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"

Prof: So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data encryption standard and they came up with ... Student: EBCDIC!"

Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem. Eng. 130 midterm. Once again no student received a single point on his exam. Newell has now tossed five shutouts this quarter. Newell's earned exam average has now dropped to a phenomenal 30\%

Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: DC Divide and Conquer DMPK Destroy Memory Protect Key DO Divide and Overflow EMPC Emulate Pocket Calculator EPI Execute Programmer Immediately EROS Erase Read Only Storage EXCE Execute Customer Engineer HCF Halt and Catch Fire IBP Insert Bug and Proceed INSQSW Insert into queue somewhere (for FINO queues [First in never out]) PBC Print and Break Chain PDSK Punch Disk

Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: PI Punch Invalid POPI Punch Operator Immediately PVLC Punch Variable Length Card RASC Read And Shred Card RPM Read Programmers Mind RSSC reduce speed, step carefully (for improved accuracy) RTAB Rewind tape and break RWDSK rewind disk RWOC Read Writing On Card SCRBL scribble to disk - faster than a write SLC Search for Lost Chord SPSW Scramble Program Status Word SRSD Seek Record and Scar Disk STROM Store in Read Only Memory TDB Transfer and Drop Bit WBT Water Binary Tree

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

— H. L. Mencken

Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

— Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"

Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off of the TV screen.

Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen.

Pushing 40 is exercise enough.