I have stared for too long into an abyss, and now the abyss stares back into me.
Eric Oppen
The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do.
McCloctnik the Lucid
What's magic, eh? Just wavin' a stick an' sayin' a few wee magical words. An' what's so clever aboot that, eh? But lookin' at things, really lookin' at 'em, and then workin' 'em oout, now, that's a real skill.
Terry Pratchett
If you replaced all of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies with Magic 8 Balls (tm), and came back in five years, you would discover that some of those companies had compiled excellent track records by pure chance. The CEO's job in a huge company is essentially the same as the Magic 8 Ball: saying yes, no, or maybe, without the benefit of understanding the questions. A Magic 8 Ball is highly qualified for that sort of work.
Scott Adams
[A] study done in 1971 involving high school students in Europe [. . .] compared intelligence with interest in various professions. The lowest correlation (-0.23) was between intelligence and interest in management. In other words, the dumber you are, the more you want to be a manager.
Anonymous
When in doubt, mumble. When in trouble, delegate.
Anonymous
Management: A class of semi-skilled corporate hirelings whose rise within the organization correlates directly with the amount of work they delegate to their more talented underlings.
Rick Bayan
The supreme irony of business management is that it is far easier for an inadequate CEO to keep his job than it is for an inadequate subordinate. . . At too many companies, the boss shoots the arrow of managerial performance and then hastily paints the bullseye around the spot where it lands.
Warren Buffett
The good thing about having a work partner was that I could leave him to fret all night over any new evidence. As senior executive I could forget it then stroll in tomorrow, refreshed and full of unworkable ideas, to ask in an annoying tone what solutions my minion had come up with.
Some of us are born to be managers.
Lindsey Davis
To get action out of management, it is necessary to create the illusion of a crisis in the hope it will be acted on.
Gene Franklin
Brian's rule of status reports — the amount of real work done by an individual is inversely related to the length of their status reports
Brian Hurt
[Lois McMaster Bujold wrote] "never file interim reports, only final reports. Interim reports only generate more orders, which you either have to obey, or waste precious energy circumventing which could instead be used to solve the problem." I once told my boss that I thought it easier to seek forgiveness than permission, but that if he never figured it out I didn't need either. He thought I was joking.
Brian Hurt
[T]hat manager sounds like he couldn't get a clue even if he doused himself in clue musk and did the clue mating dance in a field of horny clues.
Ken Prescott
Managers who anticipate a short tenure with their firm unsurprisingly have little interest in long-term solutions to its basic problems. Their goal is to look as good as possible in the immediate future.
Robert Reich
The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.
Casey Stengel
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you when the excrement and cooling device meet. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. That's the Boss's job.
Simon Travaglia
More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen
There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don't.
Anonymous
The man who invented the eraser had the human race pretty well sized up.
Anonymous
Man is the only asynchronous, heuristically-programmed computer which can be mass-produced by unskilled labour.
Anonymous
Ocean (n): A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man who has no gills.
Ambrose Bierce
Man (n): An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
Ambrose Bierce
Occident (n): The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful sub-tribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient.
Ambrose Bierce
People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
Winston S. Churchill
Most of us are no better than we believe others to be.
Arnold Glasgow
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck."
Robert A. Heinlein
Never appeal to a man's "better nature". He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
Robert A. Heinlein
Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking.
Robert A. Heinlein
The universe that birthed us is amoral. The universe has no system of values; morality is a human construct. It does not care whether we live or die. . .does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we must try to outwit it at every poor turn to save our skins. Perhaps, in time, we can develop the capacity to rework ourselves to thrive in any environment.
Romana Machado
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
H.L. Mencken
Man is one of the toughest of animated creatures. Only the anthrax bacillus can stand so unfavourable an environment for so long a time. All other mammals would succumb quickly to what man endures almost without damage. Consider, for example, the life of a soldier in the front line--or the life of anyone in Mississippi.
H.L. Mencken
By an inferior man I mean one who knows nothing that is not known to every adult, who can do nothing that could not be learned by anyone in a few weeks, and who meanly admires mean things.
H.L. Mencken
Man is something to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?
Friedrich Nietzsche
In every real man is a child hidden that wants to play.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The deeper you look into the abyss, the deeper the abyss looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Three-Type Theory: The world is made up of three types of people: Type Number Ones, who understand and openly acknowledge that they always act in their own self-interest; Type Number Twos, who understand that they always act in their own self-interest, but try to make you believe otherwise; and Type Threes, who either don't understand or don't want to understand that they always act in their own self-interest. Beware of Type Twos and Type Threes.
Robert J. Ringer
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
William Shakespeare
A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.
Alexander Smith
The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Mankind as a whole is becoming a mighty geological force. There arises the problem of the reconstruction of the biosphere in the interests of a freely thinking humanity as a single totality. This new state of the biosphere, which we approach without noticing is the noosphere . . . The noosphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it for the first time man becomes a large-scale geological force. He can and must rebuild the province of his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radically in comparison with the past. Wider and wider creative possibilities open before him.
Vladimir Vernadsky
Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.
Anonymous
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, and the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty", "meaningless", or "dishonest", and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery which does not work too well at best.
Robert A. Heinlein
It is not enough to take due care for the rights of the other fellow, for many of them are dubious and all of them are shifting; it is also necessary to take care for his dignity. This is the essence of good conduct. It is one of the foundation stones of life in human society.
H.L. Mencken
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Anonymous
Marketing: Where the rubber meets the sky.
Anonymous
Repurposing: When the troops in the trenches have to start shoveling after marketing finds out they should have used more focus groups.
Earl Cooley III
marketroid: /mar'k*-troyd/ /n./ alt. "marketing slime", "marketeer", "marketing droid", "marketdroid". A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory.
Eric S. Raymond
Don't marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.
Anonymous
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen
If you've ever wondered why you see so many weddings where the bridesmaids are unrecognizable, the answer is that these poor women were following the fashion orders of a crazed bride who wants all her bridesmaids, regardless of their physical nature, to have exactly the same "look," because otherwise her Special Day would be RUINED RUINED RUINED.
Dave Barry
Alimony (n): Bounty on the mutiny.
Ambrose Bierce
Polygamy (n): A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one.
Ambrose Bierce
Marriage (n): The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce
I am glad I am not a man, for if I were I should be obliged to marry a woman.
Madame de Stael
I am a marvellous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Always remember that the most important thing in marriage is not happiness, but stability.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
Marriage, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the most wonderful, heart warming, satisfying experiences a human being can have. I've been married 17 years, so I haven't seen that side of it yet.
George Gobel
By the way, restaurant supply stores are fantastic. The biggest one I went to had movie theater popcorn machines, those hot-dog-roller things they use at 7-11, huge commercial gas stoves, beer pitchers, 24" skillets, and even a giant wooden pirate. If I'm not married the next time I move, I plan to furnish my entire home with stuff from that place. Even the bedrooms. If I AM married, I'll do whatever I'm told, just like the rest of you. Shut up, you know it's true.
Steve H.
It's funny; the older you get, the more you see these things happen, and afer a while, it's like seeing the same bad romance repeat itself. They start to seem the same. You know a marriage or relationship isn't going to work, and you could tell both parties why, but you also know you need to keep your mouth shut, because no one is going to listen to you. That's true even in relationships where the man is beating the woman. Interfere, and YOU'RE the villain, nine times out of ten.
Steve H.
It's no wonder people have such bad marriages. We sell ourselves for trinkets. Women want love, but they sell themselves to high-status males who ignore them and treat them like servants. Men sell themselves for a nice body and a pretty face, and then the gym membership is cancelled, the diet goes out the window, the first baby arrives, and the husband becomes an ATM machine that also donates sperm.
Steve H.
[P]remarital sex is a stupid idea. It makes men think they're in love when they're not. It makes women think they're loved when they're not. It also spreads a number of loathsome, incurable diseases and causes unwanted pregnancies, but that's not what I'm getting at here. Having sex will help you convince yourself you have a relationship when what you really have is an arrangement.
Steve H.
All marriages are happy. It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.
Raymond Hull
Let the woman get what she wants all the time it's not important, and when something is important just go ahead and do what needs doing and she'll be so surprised you didn't ask permission it'll be done before she can get in the way.
Robert Jordan
Marriage: Like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.
Jean Kerr
[T]here is truth to the argument that marriage generally benefits women more, at least in terms of directing sexual relations more towards women's preferences. Yet what a lot of pro-marriage conservatives won't acknowledge is that it is largely women who have undermined marriage. After all, it is women who initiate most divorces and usually women who get the bulk of marital property, custody of children, and maintenance and child support payments. Relatively few women have been prepared to oppose measures gutting men's rights. Therefore, if women today find that men have abandoned them they may only have themselves to blame.
Nick Kinsey
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Stephen Leacock
[A] society needs marriage to survive — it's the best way to raise kids. It's the best route to happiness, period. Get together, be together, stay together. Marriage itself, however, doesn't guarantee a healthy society; if the society is clan-based, rigidly patriarchal, polygamous and gynophobic to boot, well, we know what hell on earth for women that creates. But wearing Victoria's Secret lingerie before one is married will not destroy America. Being 20 years old and watching the [Victoria's Secret] TV special will not shatter the institution of marriage like a cold toffee bar struck with the spike of a high-heeled shoe.
As for the malleable minds that will be warped by these lanky inhumans and reject real women, well, good. Real women will be spared the difficulties of living with an idiot.
When the lid's on tight, the stuff that bubbles out is altogether ookey, if I may quote the Addams Family theme song. (Now there was a couple who loved each other. Say what you will about their hobbies, but do you think Morticia and Gomez had separate beds like Rob and Laura Petrie? Good Lord, no; if Gomez hadn't had that big cigar to clench all day he would have been dragging Cara Mia up the stairs nine times before lunch. He was crazy about her.)
James Lileks
The secret to matrimonial harmony is easy; you have to pay attention, plan ahead, and book one night a month where the two of you can get away, rent a room, and go at each other with ice picks. Gets out all the aggression, and if you use a stolen ID they can't bill you for damage to walls and upholstery.
James Lileks
I belong to Bridegrooms Anonymous. Whenever I feel like getting married, they send over a lady in a housecoat and hair curlers to burn my toast for me.
Dick Martin
A man may be a fool and not know it--but not if he is married.
H.L. Mencken
One of the reasons women crave marriage more than men is the fact that many more of them, even in these loose days, are without sexual experience. They expect something cataclysmic, and find only a banality that, at best, is charming, and at worst a bore. In taking to connubial bliss the ruined girl is usually a good deal more prudent than the virgin.
H.L. Mencken
The really astounding thing about marriage is not that it so often goes to smash, but that it so often endures. All the chances run against it, and yet people manage to survive it, and even to like it. The capacity of the human mind for illusion is one of the causes here. Under duress it can very easily convert black into white. It can even convert children into blessings.
H.L. Mencken
Alimony--the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H.L. Mencken
I'd never be unfaithful to my wife for the reason that I love my house very much.
Bob Monkhouse
Real happiness is when you marry a girl for love and find out later she has money.
Bob Monkhouse
You don't marry one person; you marry three: the person you think they are, the person they are, and the person they are going to become as the result of being married to you.
Richard J. Needham
Love makes passion, but money makes marriage.
French Proverb
Well, just give it time. Once mom gets her needle-marked ass out of detox, she'll be right up there in front of the judge crying about how he abuses her so. Never mind the fact that mom turns tricks for the neighbors, runs a crack house out of her minivan, scores E in exchange for oral sex with the kids' soccer coach, and is up on charges for leaving the kids in the car for 14 hours in 102-degree weather while she "worked" the mall during the July 4th weekend with a 13-year-old named Angel and a middle-aged transvestite named Sapphire.
She'll get the kids, the house, the retirement savings, and probably even that flaky layout. And dad will be left with life-long support payments and a criminal record — something like "being male, with intent to be white".
Remember — a woman can only be a victim, and nothing else.
Jonathan Piasecki
Crummy-Relationship Theory: A crummy relationship is one in which you consistently give more than you receive, and only masochists and losers allow such a relationship to continue.
Robert J. Ringer
Marriage: 1. A gift a man gives to a woman for which she never forgives him. 2. A legally binding contract which (at least for the first time) the contracting parties are expected to enter without legal assistance, but cannot exit without it. 3. Tenured togetherness.
Thomas Szasz
Monotheism and monogamy are based on the same principle--exclusiveness. As a person can have only one God, so can he have only one mate. Hence the violent opposition, in Christian cultures, against both polytheism and polygamy; and the intense possessiveness, both religious and sexual, which people living in such cultures exhibit toward their God and their mate.
Thomas Szasz
A metaphor for many a modern marriage: Two competent swimmers in the water, safe but solitary, decide to play: One pretends to drown, the other to rescue; they grapple, sink, panic, and drown together.
Thomas Szasz
"Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in his agony. "I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children."
Evelyn Waugh
If we accept the old feminist argument that marriage is slavery for women, then it is undeniable that — given the current state of the nation's family courts — divorce is slavery for men.
Matthew Weeks
I got married because I had grown weary of finishing my own sentences
Craig Zeni
Sadist: Someone who wouldn't beat a masochist.
Anonymous
If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
Bulgarian Proverb
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
Henry Adams
Q. What do you get when you cross an elephant and a grape? A. (Elephant)(Grape) sin (theta)
Q. What do you get when you cross an elephant with a mountain climber? A. Nothing; a mountain climber is a scalar.
Anonymous
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
Saint Augustine
There's nothing less than zero except black.
Tommy Eliot (age 4)
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
P. Erdos
And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.
Khalil Gibran
Any mathematical trick that's been used at least twice becomes a method.
Robert A. Heinlein
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Robert A. Heinlein
One of the chiefest triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.
Bertrand Russell
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
St. Augustine
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't know what the filmmakers thought our reaction would be [to Zion], but to me it was sheer hell: a rusted hole full of hippies in robes. One look at the place and I'd lasso a squiddie, head to the surface, and bang on the door of Evil Machine HQ: Hello, one Coppertop wants in, sign here, THANK you.
[. . .] Everyone's commented on the infamous rave scene, in which the population of Zion crams into the Temple Of No Particular Faith and confronts their imminent death by dancing ecstatically. Big huge slo-mo close-up of feet squishing in the mud. All of a sudden I was channeling my inner Agent Smith. I can't stand the smell, he said of the Matrix. Buddy, if you thought an average air-conditioned office was bad, try 3 AM in a huge nightclub packed with a quarter-million sweaty people who live on beans.
James Lileks
I knew I was disengaged from the movie when the Oracle told Neo to find "the keymaker", and I thought of Harold Ramis joining Sigourney Weaver to bring about the rule of Zuul. Come to think of it, the movie needed a big dose of Ghostbusting. Not in the gentle wisecracking Bill Murray sense. It needed plagues, ghosts, apparitions, giant Sta-Puft Marshmallow Men stalking down the streets in Matrixland.
James Lileks
If Neo and his crew wanted to defeat the machines, why not play with the heads of everyone in the Matrix? Get inside the program. HACK IT. Use your m@d h@X0r skilz and give everyone a reason to disbelieve reality. But from what we see Neo et al have spent the last four years doing nothing but assembling a top-notch team of Scowling Operatives whose day jobs consist of crafting really cool sunglasses. Because, you know, you really need sunglasses on a planet with no sunlight.
James Lileks
If you recall last spring's review of [Matrix Reloaded]: I thought it was a ponderous, boring mess. Sure, it had a certain buzz, but so does a beached flyblown whale carcass.
James Lileks
I took away something else from the Matrix trilogy: it is a product of deeply confused people. They want it all. They want individualism and community; they want secularism and transcendence; they want the purity of committed love and the licentious fun of an S&M club; they want peace and the thrill of violence; they want God, but they want to design him on their own screens with their own programs by their own terms for their own needs, and having defined the divine on their own terms, they bristle when anyone suggests they have simply built a room with a mirror and flattering lighting. All three Matrix movies, seen in total, ache for a God. But they can't quite go all the way. They're like three movies about circular flat meat patties that can never quite bring themselves to say the word "hamburger."
Philosophically, the Matrix movies are banal, but they're no worse than the empty animism of George Lucas' Force-centric cosmology. As dramas, they lag — but Wagner wasn't thrill-a-minute, either. The moments of emotional connection are few, but they're there, almost like Burma-Shave signs spaced out every hundred miles. Overall, they're overrated, but overall they're worth it — there are times when they have the same strange thrill you got as a kid when you chewed tinfoil and it hit a filling. New, strange, electric, disturbing. The first movie is still the best; the second is still the worst. Amazing sights await in the third, and little else, but we live in a world of amazing sights. To top what you've seen so far in your life is no small feat. And certainly worth five dollars.
James Lileks
That's why we love Agent Smith. [. . .] The director wants us to fear him — but who wouldn't want to knock back some cold ones with Agent Smith? Missster Liiilechs, I've missed you. Have a beeeeer. Don't tell me the Merovingian would be fun to kick around with, because his entire persona is based on the sort of Frenchman who'd only put down his copy of Existentialisme Pour Les Idiots because it was his turn to load the little kids into the SS train cars.
James Lileks
But, having fallen for the series' self-importance, the Matricians or Matricists or Matrons or whatever the anoraks are called were reluctant to admit they'd bought a dud. In the original film, Neo discovered that the meaning of our lives is an illusion; in the sequel, the meaning of the film is an illusion. It doesn't make much sense as it's flying by, and it makes less if you buy the DVD, slow it down and write out all the dialogue. The rabbit hole doesn't go deep at all; the buck stops about four inches down. But it has the illusion of meaning. Halfway through, at the moment when a severely cropped Monica Bellucci (in dystopian movies, there is, alas, no Charlie's Angels hair) asks Keanu to kiss her, I became convinced that my watching the film was only an illusory reality; somewhere, there was another me watching Monica Bellucci seducing Italian schoolboys in Malena and having a much better time.
Mark Steyn
By the sequel, the Wachowskis's "innovative visual style" was looking a lot less innovative: they did all same things they did in the first film all over again, just more expensively and even more arbitrarily — the scene in which Keanu Reeves (Neo) is fighting a hundred guys in black and doesn't win, doesn't lose, but just gets bored and flies off after 15 minutes pretty much sums it up. By the second movie, Keanu had perfected his morose blank look; fine actors like Laurence Fishburne were turning in performances so clunkily solemn you'd think they were auditioning for George Lucas; the subterranean city of Zion proved to be just the usual generic dystopian underground parking garage, and the orgiastic dance party looked like a provincial rave.
Mark Steyn
The romance between Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is barely less comatose than the mass of humanity they're supposedly trying to save. Unlike the first sequel, the dialogue isn't pretentiously obscure, just perfunctory: "I'm afraid hope is an indulgence I don't have time for." Or maybe "indulgence is a hope I don't have time for". Or "time is a hope I don't have indulgence for". Makes no difference. It's modular furniture. Say it portentously enough and it fills in the time until the giant steel bores tunnel into Zion and the explosions start.
Mark Steyn
If you want to understand the Matrix trilogy, think of it as a capsule history of baby-boom rock. The original Matrix is a three-chord riff of a movie: a simple, familiar idea — "What if reality is a great big fake?" — amplified and transformed into an irresistible hook. The Matrix Reloaded is a 1970s prog-rock concept album: sprawling, pretentious, and ultimately incoherent, but brimming with ideas and virtuoso displays. And The Matrix: Revolutions is an over-the-hill pop star recycling someone else's material — the sort of music you'd hear on a Michelob commercial, circa 1987.
Jesse Walker
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
Muhammed Ali
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Anonymous
If only life's biggest problems came at age twenty, when we know all the answers!
Anonymous
The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.
Anonymous
Knowledge might not be power, but ignorance was definitely weakness, and so was poverty. Time and past time to stop assuming she was the child, and everyone else the grownups.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Adulthood isn't a reward they give you for being a good child.
Lois McMaster Bujold
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
Robert A. Heinlein
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the United States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the 9 millimeter bullet.
Dave Barry
On the plus side, by my reckoning, Elian's dilemma has saved the lives of at least two celebrities, maybe more. As you know, during slow news periods the major networks kill celebrities and make it look accidental. Personally, I won't board an airplane unless the newspaper is packed with good stories.
Scott Adams
The media will always interview the worst-dressed person at the event. If they can't find the worst-dressed person, they will interview the least-dressed person.
Anonymous
Giving confidential information to the press is unthinkable, but giving them confidential disinformation is normal.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The ideal false statement to give the press is one which cannot be disproved, and which will be believed even when it is denied.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
It would be disastrous if the cultural programmes were taken off television. Not that anyone ever watches them, but it's vital to know that they're there.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
To a politician, every occasion where the media are present is a political occasion. Even a state funeral is treated like a party political broadcast.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Leak enquiries seldom meet, and only report on the rare occasions when it is completely unavoidable. If you really want to trace a leak you call in the Special Branch.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Ministry of Defence officials who talk too much risk Lossiemouth--not a disease but worse: a three-year posting to a remote Scottish naval base.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Newspapers always criticize governments for not spending enough money on the arts. It's the standard way for sycophantic journalists to get back on speaking terms with actors and directors after they've given them bad reviews.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Leak enquiries are for setting up, not for conducting. The sole purpose of setting up a leak enquiry is to enable the Prime Minister to say he has set up a leak enquiry.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
I don't read no papers and I don't listen to the radio either. I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber and I don't need to read about it.
Walter Brennan
This phenomenon, whereby crowd estimates increase relative to distance and time from an event, is known as The Pilger Curve and is named after its inventor, who within a year or so managed to inflate a reconciliation protest on Sydney Harbour Bridge from 200,000 to one million.
Tim Blair
These well-meaning gentlemen of the British Broadcasting Corporation have absolutely no qualifications and no claim to represent British public opinion. They have no right to say that they voice the opinions of English or British people whatever. If anyone can do that it is His Majesty's government; and there may be two opinions about that. It would be far better to have sharply contrasted views in succession, in alteration, than to have this copious stream of pontifical, anonymous mugwumpery with which we have been dosed for so long.
Winston S. Churchill
[Political Columns are] thrown together in a couple of hours out of a handful of clippings and a few congealed opinions.
Andrew Coyne
When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory.
Roger Ebert
During the whole fighting portion of the [2003 Iraq] war, (the press was) oppressively pessimistic. Not the reporters in the field, the embedded reporters did a pretty good job. But the experts who were embedded in air conditioned studios in Manhattan and Washington — it was like, "what war are you talking about?" The one I'm watching is going to set a world's record for successful wars — in terms of the fighting, I want to make that clear. Because securing the peace is lot harder than the war was. But they covered the war the way they cover every story in America. If they do a story about race, you get the impression that American is this racist country. If they do a story about feminism, you get the feeling that half the country is made up of women haters. They're always doing that, that's why so many people don't like them.
Bernard Goldberg
I know it's fun to torment vicious, lying lunatics, but suing Al Franken is like responding to an Internet troll or giving a quarter to a crackhead. It creates the illusion of legitimate success and stimulates them to continue their annoying practices.
Steve H.
Television interview technique
Go in with something to say and say it--irrespective of the question. You can always say "That's not the real question" and then ask the one you want to answer.
If the interviewer says "A lot of people are worried . . . " say "What do you mean, a lot of people? Name six!" They can never think of more than two.
If a question is tricky, attack one word in it "Frequently? What do you mean Frequently?"
Attack the interviewer: "You obviously haven't read the White Paper."
Ask a question back. "That's a very good question. Now let me ask you one. . ."
Say "There are ten points I'd like to make in reply." There is never time for ten points, so when they ask you to give just three, say that would be trivializing the issue. Anything that really interests the viewer can be dismissed as trivializing.
James Hacker
We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time was junk — competent junk. Now they get it from television. The casual entertainment people get in the evening from the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another.
Hugh Kenner
As I've said before, I don't believe that most papers have an explicit agenda; the morning huddle does not begin with a rousing rendition of "The East is Red." No. Obviously, no. The "liberal" bias usually manifests itself as a certain comfy sort of groupthink. Most people in the newsroom are Democrats. They vary wildly from issue to issue, perhaps, but there are some tenets that bind the tribe, and a good number of them are based in certain attitudes about conservatives that were quite possibly formed at birth. Certainly in college.
James Lileks
[Some talk radio hosts are] Ranting shouters. Disagree with the host, and you're a Commie pinko lesbo-vegetarian Volvo-driving hairy-legged pagan with bark burns on your body from hugging trees. You don't believe what you believe because you think it's right — you believe it because you're morally corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, and the incarnation of everything wrong with humanity in general and America in specific. And the host himself risks both a stroke and a heart attack telling you so.
James Lileks
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H.L. Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
Let's face it, we're turning into a nation of nadless, spineless, frightened little bunny rabbits with the attention span of a mosquito on acid, and the press, FOX included, are doing their damndest to see that we get there as quickly as possible.
Emperor Misha I
I [. . .] covered the war as an embed with the 854th Public Relations Battalion. I was right at the front—in the first row at the coalition military briefings in Doha, Qatar. Maybe you saw me on TV. I'm writing a book about my wartime adventures, Macintosh Down.
P.J. O'Rourke
Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.
P.J. O'Rourke
A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Camille Paglia
The media are not detached from all responsibility for the events they cover. A journalist will tell you — sometimes sincerely — that he or she only reports the facts. That's never quite the truth. And it's often an outright lie.
Even the best journalists must choose among the facts to form their reports. Ethical reporters do strive for accuracy. But phony efforts to provide "balanced coverage" — to report the mass-murderer's side of the story with evenhanded sympathy — skew reality. Struggling to be fair to the viciously unfair is a sign of moral weakness, not objectivity.
Ralph Peters
To an extent few journalists will admit, terror as we know it depends on the media as its accomplice, amplifying the terrorist's deeds and shaping successes out of terrorist failures — the opposite of the media's approach to American efforts.
From the terrorists' perspective, 9/11 was, above all, a media event — a global demonstration of their power.
Ralph Peters
Let me make the newspapers and I care not what is enacted in Congress.
Wendell Phillips
Could be worse. They could be doing what [mainstream magazine website] does — link to tiny video featuring a jerky pan across the scene.
Ooooo . . . Jerky Pan. That could be almost anything — from Peter on the DT's to the Greek goat god meeting a sticky end and ending up on the counter at a 7-11.
Jonathan Piasecki
The journalistic establishment is like one big, pretentious snot-nosed French waiter, and it's time for America to hurl a glass of ice water in its face and give it the boot.
William Powers
[It's] interesting that Democrats can — and Clinton did — get away with far worse civil liberties assaults, while Republicans can (and Bush does) get away with spending far more money, because the pigeonholes used by the press include "Republicans who hate civil liberties" and "Democrats who are wasteful spenders," but not the reverse.
Glenn Reynolds
Sometimes I get interviewed by people who genuinely want to understand something. Just as often, I get interviewed by people who have their story already planned, and just want me to utter the appropriate sound bite for the slot they've selected. They become quite disappointed if I don't do that. And I think my experience is pretty typical — and that in this media-fied age, it's shared by a lot of other people.
Glenn Reynolds
To the extent that science-fiction films provide a competitive source of morality, they have some advantages and some drawbacks. One advantage is that they're inevitably anti-theocracy: Theocrats (like dictators generally) don't want people to even imagine alternative sources of morality or authority. Another is that they tend, for fairly obvious plot reasons, to focus on individuals, and an increased focus on the needs and desires of individuals is almost inevitably pro-freedom and anti-tyranny.
Glenn Reynolds
We now live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow morning's newspaper.
Philip Roth
I decided to tot up the tally. Since 1940, the media have predicted seven out of the last one quagmires.
Rand Simberg
The media are used to dealing with denials and backpeddling by their spiritual brothers in politics. They can't handle honesty and integrity. It derails what little brainpower they have, and shuts them up.
L. Neil Smith
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Thomas Sowell
The scariest thing about politics today is not any particular policy or leaders, but the utter gullibility with which the public accepts notions for which there is not a speck of evidence, such as the benefits of "diversity," the dangers of "overpopulation," and innumerable other fashionable dogmas.
Thomas Sowell
He knew that some of CNN's cameramen had been tortured and murdered. He was told by Iraqi officials that "Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed." Uday Hussein boasted of his plan to assassinate his two brothers-in-law, along with Jordan's King Hussein. He saw men whose front teeth had been ripped out with pliers; he heard of a Kuwaiti woman who in 1990 had been "beaten daily for two months," then torn apart, limb by limb, her butchered body left in a bag on the steps of her home. Her crime: speaking with CNN on the phone.
Did you see any of this reported on CNN? Of course not. Because that would have endangered something the media prizes above everything else, including truth: access. In two decades the mainstream media has degenerated from impartial collectors and arbiters of what was news — in other words, reporters — to skulking curs, haunting the tables of potentates and movie stars and begging for scraps. No wonder they get kicked all the time.
Michael Walsh
Irregular verb: I give confidential press briefings. You leak. He has been charged under Section 2(a) of the Official Secrets Act.
Bernard Woolley
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
Anonymous
Perseverance (n): A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
Ambrose Bierce
Meetings make me despair. For the paper. For humanity. Meetings make me understand the appeal of dictatorships. After ten minutes in a meeting I want Mussolini to come through the door. After half an hour I turn into Mussolini. How anyone can take a steady daily diet of meetings is beyond my ken. This one was short, civil and productive, and I still wanted to disembowel myself before the door had clicked shut. You can just feel your life ebbing away in meeting rooms; every word is a clammy worm that gnaws on the corpse of your youthful dreams. No idealistic 20 year old ever sought to live if a life of meetings. They take to the streets! Man the barricades! Direct action!
Of course, meetings are where the things that shape and change the world happen.
How, I have no idea. People talk, nothing is decided, then somehow something changes. This is how we'll get a one-world government. One day in a hundred years, we'll all wake up and find that there's just one country now, and the capitol is Geneva. Half the people on earth will wonder what happened; the other half will say "didn't you get the memo?"
James Lileks
All your base are belong to us.
CATS
A good memory does not equal pale ink.
Anonymous
Perverse-Memory Theory: The only time you can absolutely count on forgetting something is when it's so important and so fresh in your mind that you're certain you won't. Discipline yourself to take notes regardless of how sure you are that you won't forget.
Robert J. Ringer
Male (n): A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
Ambrose Bierce
[I]n their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that's all they are.
Marilyn French
Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or lordliness. It consists in daring to do the right and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other. It consists in deeds, not in words.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
[T]estosterone does worse things to a person's mind than does LSD.
John Kula
Yes, yes, men are wimps. We can't take discomfort. Blah, blah. Listen, ladies, childbirth may be painful, but it happens once or thrice a lifetime. Whereas every day men deal with the fact that a fast-moving object may strike them right there, right in the region of Groinistan. Could be a car door, a briefcase in the elevator, a midget with a sneezing fit. You never know. And yet we venture forth each day.
James Lileks
Men living alone don't live like human beings. They live like bears with furniture.
Marna Nightingale
Anti-Neurotic Theory: To the degree that you ignore all neurotic remarks and actions of normal people, and all remarks and actions of neurotic people, the path between you and your objectives will be less complicated.
Robert J. Ringer
What people nowadays call mental illness, especially in a legal context, is not a fact, but a strategy; not a condition, but a policy; in short it is not a disease that the alleged patient has, but a decision which those who call him mentally ill make about how to act toward him.
Thomas Szasz
Crimes are acts we commit. Diseases are biological processes that happen to our bodies. Mixing these two concepts by defining behaviours we disapprove of as diseases is a bottomless source of confusion and corruption
Thomas Szasz
Today virtually any unwanted behaviour, from shopaholism and kleptomania to sexaholism and pedophilia, may be defined as a disease whose diagnosis and treatment belong in the province of the medical system. Disease-making thus has become similar to lawmaking. Politicians, responsive to tradition and popular opinion, can define any act, from teaching slaves to read to the cold-blooded murder of a bank guard, as a crime whose control belongs in the province of the criminal justice system.
Thomas Szasz
A soldier doesn't fight to save suffering humanity or any other nonsense. He fights to prove that his unit is the best in the Army and that he has as much guts as anybody else in the unit.
Terry Allen
I spent the first two years in the military learning how to do my job, and the next 18 learning how to get out of doing it
Anonymous
The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting the old one out.
Basil H. Liddell Hart
The typical staff officer is the man past middle life, spare, unwrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, non-committal; with eyes like a cod-fish, polite in contact but at the same time unresponsive, cool, calm, and as damnably composed as a concrete post or a plaster-of-Paris cast; a human petrifaction with a heart of feldspar and without charm or the friendly germ; minus bowels, passion or a sense of humour. Happily they never reproduce and all of them finally go to hell.
General George S. Patton
It is customary in the democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.
Air Chief Marshal Sir John Slessor
Mind (n): A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.
Ambrose Bierce
This is my nightmare, right here. In Minnesota we have snow, and then we have mosquitoes. To know that there is a place on earth that has both at the same time is too horrifying to consider.
James Lileks
Miracle (n): An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king.
Ambrose Bierce
Adversity introduces a man to himself.
Anonymous
Misfortune (n): The kind of fortune that never misses.
Ambrose Bierce
Pain (n): An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.
Ambrose Bierce
Calamity (n): A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Ambrose Bierce
Firestone's Law: Chicken Little only has to be right once.
Dr. Roger M. Firestone
Fortitude: That quality of mind which does not care what happens so long as it does not happen to us.
Elbert Hubbard
Difficulties do not crush men, they make them.
Arthur Meighan
To get maximum attention, it's hard to beat a good, big mistake.
Anonymous
Mistakes are oft the stepping stones to failure.
Anonymous
Nothing ventured, nothing goofed.
Lawrence J. Peter
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake
The middle of the road is where the white line is and that's the worst place to drive.
Robert Frost
The decent moderation of today will be the least human of things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Immodest (adj): Having a strong sense of one's own merit, coupled with a feeble conception of worth in others.
Ambrose Bierce
False modesty is better than none.
Vilhjalmur Steffansson
Put not your trust in money, but your money in trust.
Anonymous
Lend money to a bad debtor and he will hate you.
Anonymous
Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which one you need more.
Anonymous
Budget: an orderly system of living beyond your means.
Anonymous
Creditors have much better memories than debtors.
Anonymous
Money lent to a friend must be recovered from an enemy.
Anonymous
Money can say more in a moment than the most eloquent lover can in years.
Anonymous
Forgetfulness (n): A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
Ambrose Bierce
Owe (v): To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; meant "own," and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.
Ambrose Bierce
A penny saved is a penny to squander.
Ambrose Bierce
True, you can't take it with you, but then, that's not the place where it comes in handy.
Brendan Francis
A great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
Benjamin Franklin
Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.
Benjamin Franklin
The most popular labour-saving device is still money.
Phyllis George
Money: What you'd get along beautifully without if only other people weren't so crazy about it.
Margaret Harriman
Money is a powerful aphrodisiac. But flowers work almost as well.
Robert A. Heinlein
People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.
Robert A. Heinlein
$100 placed at 7 per cent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000--by which time it will be worth nothing.
Robert A. Heinlein
Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.
Robert A. Heinlein
Money may not make you happy, but happy will never make you money--That may be a wisecrack, but I doubt it.
Groucho Marx
When the budget is tight, spending money to save money is a science. Spending money to make money is an art. Not spending money is easy. Just say no.
Bruce McIsaac
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overvalued.
H.L. Mencken
Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.
Ayn Rand
Financial-Success/Artistic-Acclaim Theory (aka Film Festival Theory): The person who aspires to financial success may ultimately get rich; the person who aspires to artistic acclaim may ultimately get stroked; the person who aspires to both may ultimately get neither.
Robert J. Ringer
Money-Value Theory (aka Financial Geometric-Growth Theory): To an entrepreneur, the value of money is not measured by the amount of interest it can draw in a savings account. The "interest" accrued on it is the creative use to which the entrepreneur puts it.
Robert J. Ringer
There is no such thing as government money.
Margaret Thatcher
Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation, these bear lightly on the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and the robberies committed by depreciated paper.
Daniel Webster
Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis (When you moralize, keep it short)
Anonymous
Politicians make their decisions in terms of expediency and explain them in terms of morality.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Mind your own business is the only moral law.
Frederic Bastiat
Moral (adj): Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.
Ambrose Bierce
Immoral (adj): Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man's notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from and nowise dependent on, their consequences then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.
Ambrose Bierce
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe--the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
Really great moral teachers never introduce new moralities; it is quacks and cranks who do that.
C.S. Lewis
The difference between a moral man and a man of honour is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H.L. Mencken
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 90% of them are wrong.
H.L. Mencken
We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Paglia
Line-Drawing-Game Theory: Every person subjectively draws his own lines concerning what is and is not "proper" action, based either on his own moral standards, the moral standards of others, or what is convenient for him at the time of the action. Unless you have an affinity for courtrooms, don't assume, when doing business with someone, that his moral standards coincide with yours.
Robert J. Ringer
When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; but when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals.
George Bernard Shaw
Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.
Lincoln Stevens
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
There is but one morality, as there is but one geometry.
Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire
Murder is always a mistake. . . One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
Oscar Wilde
Glockenspiel's Commentary on Temporary Property Transfer: It's easier to borrow something the second time if you return it the first time.
Anonymous
Lawyer's Paradox: If it were not for lawyers, we would not need them.
Anonymous
The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it.
Anonymous
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
Anonymous
Don't ever stand up to be counted or someone will take your seat.
Anonymous
Murphy's Law Addendum: Don't mess with Mrs. Murphy!
Anonymous
If everything seems to be going well, you've probably overlooked something.
Anonymous
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Anonymous
If it is worth fighting for, it is worth fighting dirty for.
Anonymous
No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.
Anonymous
No matter which way you spit, it's always up wind.
Anonymous
An unbreakable toy is excellent for breaking other toys.
Anonymous
Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
Anonymous
If credit can possibly go to someone else, it will.
Anonymous
Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.
Anonymous
Zeek's Discovery: The key to flexibility is indecision.
Anonymous
Carlisle's Rule: To find the IQ of any committee, determine the IQ of the most stupid member, then divide by the number of members.
Anonymous
Churchill's Axiom of Operation: A second-rate plan successfully executed is better than a perfect plan that dies in the Board Room.
Anonymous
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced!
Anonymous
Ugol's Law: When anyone asks, "Am I the only one who. . .", the answer is always no.
Mark Atwood
Commentary on Linear Estimates: Never ask a Sierra Clubber if it's within walking distance.
David Borwer
Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode.
John Gall
In complex systems, malfunction and even total nonfunction may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.
John Gall
When a fail-safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe.
John Gall
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
C. Northcote Parkinson
Whenever anyone says "theoretically", they really mean "not really".
David Parnas
The Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Lawrence J. Peter
Stivison's Hypothesis of Quality Control: Acceptability varies with the square of the frantic.
M.V. Stivison
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety-five percent of anything is crap.
Theodore Sturgeon
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
Vonada's Engineering Maxims:
There is no such thing as ground.
Digital circuits are made from analog parts.
Prototype designs always work.
Asserted timing conditions are designed first; unasserted timing conditions are found later.
When all but one wire in a group of wires switch, that one will switch also.
When all but one gate in a module switches, that one will switch also.
Every little pico farad has a nano henry all its own.
Capacitors convert voltage glitches to current glitches (conservation of energy).
Interconnecting wires are probably transmission lines.
Synchronizing circuits may take forever to make a decision.
Worst-case tolerances never add - but when they do, they are found in the best customer's machine.
Diagnostics are highly efficient in finding solved problems.
Processing systems are only partially tested since it is impractical to simulate all possible machine states.
Murphy's Laws apply 95 percent of the time. The other 5 percent of the time is a coffee break.
Don Vonada
The Second Law of Thermodynamics: If you think things are in a mess now, just wait!
Jim Warner
Weiler's Law: Nothing is impossible for the man who does not have to do it.
A.H. Weiler
Woodward's Law: A theory is better than an explanation.
Woodward
Accordionist: A musician who plays both ends against the middle.
Gustav Berle
Piano (n): A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.
Ambrose Bierce
Phonograph (n): An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.
Ambrose Bierce
Accord (n): Harmony. Accordion (n): An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
Ambrose Bierce
The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer
Victor Borge
"I thought I'd write a Country & Western ending to this song. Something about motherhood this time, 'cause the song already had a truck."
Harry Chapin
According to the Muzak Web site, the company was founded in the '20s by Gen. George Squier, who had a vision: "One day," he said, "I see people hurling themselves repeatedly at plexiglass windows, desperately attempting to escape our orchestra version of 'Horse With No Name.' " Well, no. He didn't say that. He had patented a system for moving music over telephone wires, and found that the skyscraper age fit his new business. Muzak's page says: "As tall buildings continued to sprout in North American cities, nervous riders of a new gadget called the elevator were calmed by the subtle tones of music by Muzak." So it was there to keep people from going nuts, in other words. Those old elevators didn't shoot to the 70th floor in a minute, you know. Took the better part of the day.
I'm sure it was removed as a cost-cutting measure, Mark: Elevator Muzak put so many employees to sleep that companies had to hire someone to stand in each floor's elevator lobby and pull the people out with a grappling hook.
James Lileks
[W]e tend to judge the music by extramusical standards. Sixties music is revered mostly because it took place in the sixties. Seventies music is mostly despised because it annoyed the boomers. Punk and New Wave infuriated the boomers, because it was the first hint they were old.
James Lileks
Country music is basically like Greek mythology: Love, sex, dysfunctional relationships and big birds picking at your liver.
Roger Miller
Without music life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This could be due to the rise of grunge -- or more accurately, the rise of teeny-bopper-angst targetted grunge. Everything on the "alternative" station started sounding alike -- pre-teens singing through their noses with slack-jawed indignance, all sour and bitter and hateful because daddy won't buy them an SUV or because they can't get laid.
Jonathan Piasecki
I am terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on records forever.
Sir Arthur Sullivan
Orcs aren't all bad--if you use lots of ketchup.
Anonymous
Hydra (n): A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.
Ambrose Bierce
Centaur (n): One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labour had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse." The best of the lot was Chiron, who to the wisdom and virtues of the horse added the fleetness of man.
Ambrose Bierce
Mythology (n): The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
Ambrose Bierce
Hippogriff (n): An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one-quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises.
Ambrose Bierce
Deluge (n): A notable first experiment in baptism which washed away the sins (and sinners) of the world.
Ambrose Bierce
Cerberus (n): The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the poets credited him with as many as a hundred. Professor Graybill, whose clerky erudition and profound knowledge of Greek give his opinion great weight, has averaged all the estimates, and makes the number twenty-seven a judgement that would be entirely conclusive if Professor Graybill had known (A) something about dogs, and (B) something about arithmetic.
