Quotes: f

Alberto Gonzales: Doesn’t offer own legal opinions to the president, can’t remember previous legal opinions for the senate, can’t explain current legal opinions to anybody. Baked potato: Doesn’t offer own legal opinions to the president, can’t remember previous legal opinions for the senate, can’t explain current legal opinions to anybody, and is covered with hot melted butter and sour cream! Advantage: POTATO

All of these miracles can only mean one thing: that God is the God of Christianity and the God of Islam, and he really likes drawing on food and animals.

If you are always pressing the envelope, you will suffer many paper cuts.

If you can’t take the heat, don’t tickle the dragon.

If you want a language that tries to lock up all the sharp objects and fire-making implements, use Pascal or Ada: the Nerf languages, harmless fun for children of all ages, and they won’t mar the furniture.

Yeah, those zany academics… never use a Roman character when they can stick in a Greek one. If they wrote like normal humans, everyone would figure out how easy all this stuff is, and then they’d have to work for a living.

All Galaxy Class Starships are equipped with their own dramatic lighting system.

Meg believes that “…the key to any successful relationship is compromise.” (she’s going to see The Matrix Reloaded and in exhange, she’ll have a date to see Sea Biscuit later this summer. And while I agree in principle, I’m not sure I’d invest two hours in Vin Diesel to get two hours of Tarkovsky in return. And I do go alone to the movies to see Japanese claymation documentaries on Jacques Lacan all the time, mostly because I want to *continue having a relationship*… But I digress.)

Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever.

Albert Einstein: not a game designer, but still a pretty good guy.

Driving fast on the track does not scare me. What scares me is when I drive on the highway I get passed by some idiot who thinks he is Fangio.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

donnie darko is the ayn rand of movies. everyone’s got a copy no one cracks open, it’s supposed to be hard to understand but is simply lame.

A buck in the hand is worth two on the books.

A rocky road is easier to travel than a stone wall.

A stop-gap measure is better than no gap at all.

A whole hog is better than no hole at all.

Abandon ship all you who enter here!

All the lemmings are coming home to roost.

An ounce of prevention is better than pounding the table.

As long as somebody let the cat out of the bag, we might as well spell it correctly.

At the end of every pot of gold, there’s a rainbow.

Before they made him they broke the mold.

Cheapness doesn’t come free.

Come down off your charlie horse.

Dig yourself a hole and bury it.

Don’t bite the hand that stabs you in the back.

Don’t criticize him for lack of inexperience.

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do standing up in a hammock.

Don’t eat with your mouth full.

Don’t look for a gift in the horse’s mouth.

Don’t make a molehill out of a can of beans.

Each of us sleazes by at our own pace.

Fellow alumni run thicker than water.

From here on up, it’s down hill all the way.

He doesn’t know which side his head is buttered on.

He has a dire need, actually it’s half-dire, but he thinks it’s double-dire.

He rules with an iron thumb.

He’s lying through his britches.

I hear the handwriting on the wall.

I resent the insinuendoes.

I’ll reek the benefits.

I’m not going to beat a dead horse to death.

If you find it hard to think, do skip it and save me the trouble of rants.

It is better to have tried and failed than never to have failed at all.

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody.

Photons have neither morals or visas.

Time series methods were inconvenient to the nascent Real Business Cycle Program that Ed pioneered because the models that he favored were, and still are, overwhelmingly rejected by the facts. That is inconvenient.

He who draws his sword against his Prince needs to throw away his scabbard.

If you would like to discuss this rationally, I am all about it - we can pretend the world is a game board and we all want to win. We can sit in everyone’s seat and see how the field looks. Or you can spout a bunch of hot air and emotional half-thought jingoism at me instead. In fact, don’t bother with the first: you’ve already blown it.

Hell yes, I’m bitter, but only on the outside. Inside, I’m filled with rich, creamy nougat!

Farquharson. from the ancient Thracian. it means: “to make a viscous mix of sheep bile, human blood, astroglide, and strawberry jam and pass out in said concoction after several hours of ‘Bullingtoning’ (*see also Bullingtoning)”

Found this out today: a private garden is the only socially acceptable place to go hacking into the ground with a 9" butcher knife. ..that’s right, i went gardening today.. planted african violets and lillies. i gotta do that more often; it was so relaxing and earthy that i nearly grew flowers out my ass..

Have you noticed that all the best things in life can be described as being “easily cleaned up with a damp washcloth”?

i am being treated well. my `[S]`captors have shown me nothing but kindness, in accordance `[E]` with the Geneva convention and Amnesty International’s rules of conduct. i have been `[N]` given a warm, dry place to sleep, `[D]` several novels, a watercolour set, the complete Curve discography, and a reliable ISP. i am “exercised” regularly `[H]` by a six-foot-tall shapely dominat`^H^H^H^H^H^H^H`guard by the `[E]` name of Debbi. i am quite satisfied with my arrangements. i would like to see `[L]` my friends soon, but that depends on the cooperation my `[P]` government provides with my captors.

i need ideas, people. help angsty the wonder squid find his way back to the magical “river of stoli”

I’d like a security system that fills the car with… tuna?

I’m on my deathbed. Actually, I’m at work so I guess I’m on my death-desk.

i’m on their payroll, but work usually consists of a) WAN-scale SQL db dumps that take 7.5hrs and don’t work because the damned hardware is faulty, or b) cuddling up next to a proliant 5000 for a couple hours before eating too much ice-cream and passing out in the LAN closet. OTOH, their benefits kick ass. why, interested?

Mars needs women. Venus needs a swift kick.

my attendance depends on whether or not i can hold back the momentous tide of ambivalence and bile that is rising within me.. corrupting everything close like a fuzzy black coccoon of despair and loathing.. until i feel like embracing it all and crushing it into the shape of a huge breast. ..a breast to suckle from, the better to fill the empty hole that is my frozen heart.. oops, ..heh, um, ..i mean: pencil me in for two; i’ll bring my guest from SanFran…

No shirt, no shoes, ..no cervix.

so, c'mon people. i want us to double our bile production by the end of the first quarter. with luck, we can turn this place into alt.gothic. ..does anyone still have the lyrics to ‘procmail -> null’ ??

Vince (NOW with 33% more self-importance. still caffeine-free.)

that’s my hey-look-i’m-so-cynical-and-i-use-dashes-a-lot anti-geek/art/new media page, with minimalist binary layout design and peanut cluster. exactly what the web needs.

well, Angsty the wonder squid has decided to go buy a Java book, drink some peach tea, and go home to paint ‘til he passes out.

You have pretty eyes… Can I have one?

YOU KLINGON BASTARD! YOU ATE MY LUNCH!!

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn’t want to go to war.

What does “FTP” stand for? F*(# This Place!

I wasn’t really involved in the rave scene in the early 80’s, I don’t know much about it. But what I’ve seen of the current American scene seems to have a lot of energy. But I’m not sure about those big-ass trousers.

We just sit at home and play with our computers and we can make stuff that’s funky without being funky ourselves.

Those of you playing the Ethernet home game (it’s WANtastic!) will recognize 100Mb/sec as the upper limit on Ethernet traffic, so we have spent the last couple weeks preparing to upgrade to gigabit connectivity, which mostly involves paying more money for switches that look like the other switches that didn’t cost so much money.

We’ve all heard the “herding cats” analogy with regard to managing programmers. Managing sysadmins is like leading a neighborhood gang of neurotic pumas on jet-powered hoverbikes with nasty smack habits and opposable thumbs. Oh, and as a manager you’re a neurotic junkie puma too, only they cut your thumbs off and whereas all the other pumas get to drive around on their badass hoverbikes and fire chainguns at the marketing department, YOU have to drive a maroon AMC Gremlin behind them and hand out Band-Aids and smile a lot, when all you’re REALLY thinking about is how to get one of them to let you borrow his hoverbike for a few minutes so you can show those fools how it’s DONE.

You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they’ve reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you’re just horny. It doesn’t mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.

I would have loved to have voted for it, but my view of my job is to do what I think is right, not to be cowed by the name of the bill.

As a general rule of thumb, never trust anybody who’s been in therapy for more than 15 percent of their life span. The words “I am sorry” and “I am wrong” will have totally disappeared from their vocabulary. They will stab you, shoot you, break things in your apartment, say horrible things to your friends and family, and then justify this abhorrent behavior by saying: “Sure, I put your dog in the microwave. But I feel *better* for doing it.”

It’s mine. MINE, I tell you! Me me me! Again, you’re free to repost it, pass it around, misinterpret it, rail against it, submit it as evidence as how out-of-touch we liberals are, bend it, fold it, spindle and mutilate it, add an outboard motor to it and ride it across Lake Minnetonka, whatever you want. But I ask you to please keep my name attached to it. I am a professional writer, after all. This doesn’t mean I’m a good writer, but it does mean that using the pseudonym “Anonymous” isn’t a terrific career move.

After watching the American political system in action these last few months, I think I understand why you guys always show up late to the World Wars now. Apart from that I still have no idea what’s going on.

Much of computer science involves using bulldozers to shove tough problems into someone else’s back yard.

dot com is tired, man! All the happening sites end in .org these days.

Ender’s Game can be viewed as a sort of literary bloatware; it started as a short story and has now expanded to eight novels and a collection of short stories.

I got myself a bad-ass new ACM SIGLinux shirt at the Fajita Fest today. I love America, where you can sell shirts depicting a penguin beating the richest man in the world to death.

I think evolution is over, because natural selection is over. Virtually everyone stays alive. I’m not complaining.

New Scientist: Mars laser will beam super-fast data. Outer space? Check. Frickin’ laser beams? Check.

Fight like a robot. Kill like a chicken.

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the beans of java that the thoughts aquire speed, the hands aquire shakes, the shakes become a warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

While it is true that asking regexes to parse arbitrary HTML is like asking Paris Hilton to write an operating system, it’s sometimes appropriate to parse a limited, known set of HTML.

Actually, I was just going to say that Married with Children was my example of the pinnacle of edge-losing-ness.

Diet Caffeine Free Mountain Dew - I don’t like sex, I just like wearing a condom.

I can’t believe how much I hate Cadence, and I don’t even use it!

I’m going to make emacs be my X11 window manager or die trying.

If you’re going to retcon the origin story, I’ll drop you like the Marvel comic book you are.

If you’re anywhere near as annoying as you are on other instances, we’ll give you the Rob Earhart treatment. Just a warning.

It’s not just French. It’s French who like imake. The worst of both worlds.

Remind me never to talk about how I’ll never do programming for other people any more. Using Word Perfect For Windows for other people is far worse.

The latest version of gwm will continue to be available… for as long as I continue to want to be known as a walking lisp machine, or until I give up my cs-side access, whichever comes first.

The only proper way to see The Wall is the way I saw it in Harvard Square five years ago: the smell of hashish drifting moodily through the theater, the guy in the front row on a bad trip yelling at the screen, and, after a short break allowing the purchase of more Milk Duds, immediately followed by the second part of the double feature: Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. We stood on our seats, danced in the aisles, waved lighters for the encores, went home and got smashed, were surprised to find it was midday Tuesday when next we awoke. And fun was had by all.

36 is significant because at 36 you can sleep with someone half your age and not go to jail.

Truncating my font path is the best idea I’ve had all day. Second best was deciding to log pings instead of punting, so that I could mutter to myself ‘Sam’s going to send a message to the wrong instance now’ before it happened.

Uh, since my current interest in it is maintaining my lisp-guru mystique, I’d rather continue just running the latest version out of my bin. Besides, I’m none too convinced of its stability. (I’m none too convinced of *my* stability…)

Uh, some joke involving “cd /DNE/DC/dan ; tar cf - . | (cd /DNE/NYC/dan; tar xvpf -)” is failing to generate any less geekish punchline in my head. Kill me.

You know, when you only have two feet, it’s a lot of work to keep pulling them out of your mouth so you can insert them again.

I am currently using my powers for evil.

it takes more than simple sex to crash the routers at digex. … it takes FDDI bondage, and subnetting your partner.

On a good night we call out to the heavens and thrash about like hooked bass, clamoring after those precious few seconds of blindness. As the bed comes to a quiet stop and the last picture falls off the wall, the recent commotion can be hard to explain – it all made sense a few moments ago and now we are just sticky and naked and looking for our clothes.

I would just like a really really strong spork if thats not too much to ask..

In the tradition of our ancestors I seem to have been a little bit of a slacker.

The most important thing in a relationship between a man and a woman is that one of them be good at taking orders.

“Did you grow up in the States?” somebody would be sure to ask. “No one in the States grows up. That’s the problem.”

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for all of us to read… I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it… Finally, I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna stop and read one sentence slowly’… So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully… ‘The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.’ I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? ‘People read.’

When someone demands blind obedience, you’d be a fool not to peek.

Ask five economists and you’ll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard).

Today’s example is the SocialSite REST API. That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating.

Well, I looked at my options, and I saw that my option was chocolate chip cookies.

Jigsaw will run on all platforms that support Java, with no changes! This is for real, it has been tested at least on Windows 95 and Windows NT.

I hate VMS. I can’t think in dollar signs.

It’s not bogus, it’s an IBM standard.

Hitler started by censoring the news, what people could read, etc. People did as he said because, after all, it was the law. Years later Jews, Gypsies, Gays, and anyone else who didn’t fit into his ideal of a perfect human was being shipped off to concentration camps. Many citizens of the country let it happen because, after all, it was the law. You may not see people dying now, you may not believe it can happen. Already we have political people who want to restrict what people can do based on their religious beliefs or their love life. The truly brave stand up for what they believe in and don’t hide behind rules and regulations. This is not something where people are being physically injured. Nobody is being beaten up by secret policemen. This is still just a fight for words. Stick to it, and don’t let anyone tell you that your words aren’t important. If they censor someone else’s words today, your words may be next.

Lord, deliver us from these fruitloops, for they neither snap nor crackle nor pop.

Symbolic links is the Unix way of saying: Get Lost.

The rest of you can bite my world-wide-butt.

Wow. I mean, did someone die and leave this bonehead to be god?

The difference between MS Windows and a pet rock is the cost of upgrades.

God was able to create the world in only seven days because he had no installed base to consider.

The mythology of conquest is remarkably uniform - or, less charitably, banal.

Commiting suicide would be the last thing for me to do…

Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds.

… 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.

Taunting someone for using Andrew is like laughing at a slave because he has lash marks on his back: in bad taste.

I don’t want life to resemble art. I want life to BE art.

“Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?” “Because we use vi, son. They use emacs.”

Angst: You’ve seen it (you know you have) late at night, in a mirror. It has deep, hollow eyes - too exhausted to close - and looks like someone you thought you knew.

I got a new game recently: The Oracle 9i install! [oracle.com] I’ve been playing this for MONTHS now, and I’m still not sure how it’s gonna turn out! I love the way you have to keep trying different things until you finally solve it! Please no spoilers!

People don’t fail calculus. They fail algebra or trig. But they’re taking calc at the time so that’s where the ‘f’ shows up.

Four people attack you with screwdrivers, you have a gun, they’re supposed to die. That’s not racism. That’s Darwin.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

It is always the right, and forever will be, of an American to speak out. It is always the right of an American to be wrong.

Apple’s system interconnects with AOL’s for a huge initial pool of people to send smiley faces to.

What will the future bring? A nuclear-submarine-like procedure of, “Insert Floppy A at the same instant as inserting CD-ROM B and Zip Disk C while having Colleague D press Control-Command-Delete-Option-Backspace on Computer E”? “Open the spot color palette, please, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Glenn, I can’t do that.”

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

There never has been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.

Haskell, like Ruby, is one of those things that you have to use without permission.

I should just sign up for the “hoth simulation of the month club”. oo look, now with particle snow

If I wanted to learn a technology that was going to keep pulling me into big dumb company situations with 80 hour weeks, salary with options, and multi year death marches, I couldn’t pick a better candidate than J2EE.

Management types pretend to hate this kind of shit but they’re the reason it’s necessary, and they love having a Scotty of their very own.

It’s supposed to be a dance song, it goes with the chorus. If you can’t put that together, you’re an idiot.

The secret to my success is that I stayed away from what I didn’t know

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

I’m not bitter. I’m just consumed by a gnawing hate at my gut till I can taste the bile in my mouth.

The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood: the person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person’s liberty. Are you free?

25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it’s crazy. However, 4 out of 5 US murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?

Except for the historical information contained herein, the statements in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Potential risks include anyone taking this April Fool’s Joke seriously.

Digital zoom is really just a clever marketing term for “cropping”…

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

AOL continues to send its users onto the increasingly speedy information superhighway in brightly colored, beeping golf carts.

Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates.

Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.

You might think you know exactly how this is gonna go off the rails but in fact it begins off the rails in that way

VC have the attention of a ferret on crack.

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

Realism became an outmoded literary mode when no one, from the Warren Commission to Oliver Stone, was able to provide us with a plausible account of the assasination of President Kennedy. This freed us to notice that no one had ever given us a plausible account of WWI either.

[“bisexual”] We prefer the term “best suited to appreciate the X-files” - it’s less clinical.

It was supposed to sound spontaneous, but I had been composing it on and off for days.

I recommend a vacation; spend some time listening to NPR around the clock, that ought to enlarge your repertoire of hate.

You say a lot of incredibly stupid things. You’re not on a list where ISTs are tolerated. Anyone who thinks that human psychology is composed of absolutes is a moron and by the popular definition, the textbook one being nonexistent. You are a wounded fish in an ocean of razor jaws, and it’s only a matter of time before the powerhouse wits in here get bored of shooting into the barrel.

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

I have problem with people getting their Christ on in a movie theatre.

If it is going to survive on hype, it is going to do it without us anyway.

So, is Prince currently known as “The artist formally known as the Glyph?”

Ok, wait a moment here. Hold on. There. Now you see the change was made in real time.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Even evil people sometimes get up in the middle of the night to eat chocolate chip cookies.

There’s a guy named Brad Blanton who teaches Gestalt therapists and other people about radical honesty, and he says that the key to enlightenment is the mantra, “Duuuuhhhhh.” Money-back guarantee, he assures, just recite this mantra for half an hour and you will become Buddha.

(The author wishes to acknowledge that a lot of sophomoric dirty jokes will be made about the terminology in this article. He has thought of them all, so there is no need to leave them in the comments section.)

We used to *dream* of getting two points for a bumper. When I was a wee lad, to even get to a pinball machine one had to wake up at five in the morning, trudge ten miles each way through the industrial waste from our corregated box outside the sausage factory to the pool hall, battle goons to even get to the pinball machine, and then you wouldn’t even get points for hitting a bumper, just electric shocks.

Where are we going? Western Psych! When will we get there? Real soon!

Pardon me if I sound bitter. I just spent the last week burrowing through the nastiest parts of the IRIX kernel like a caffeine-crazed gopher in a landfill.

In the never-ending saga of using internet publicists, you can always count on two opinions: those who think publicists suck and, well, the publicists.

Rush and Hannity and those guys, their value-added is lying. My value-added will be comedy.

It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been frequently forged in controversies involving not very nice people (US vs Rabinowitz, 1950)).

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it.

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

Those who give up a little freedom for a little security, deserve neither freedom, nor security.

Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.

Excuse me. AFU is a newsgroup. A fact is something completely different.

Just get a car, close your eyes and enjoy the experience. Just remember that green means proceed with caution, yellow means accelerate and red means look both ways for cops.

How did it feel to be a local kid returning to St. Louis on a fancy book tour? It felt obscurely disappointing. But I didn’t say this. I had already realized that the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren’t simply fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture.

I’m the last person to argue that color management is irrelevant, but few sites use it today. Barring sweeping near-term changes, ICM 2.0 simply means users will ignore color management on two platforms instead of one.

Get a REAL problem.

I think that the problem with God is that he has an ego problem. I mean, what do we say all day, ‘You’re so perfect,’ ‘you’re so wonderful,’ ‘you’re so great.’ Secure people don’t need that.

There’s a certain freedom in being totally screwed…

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

What you need to do is try and be the best person you can be, instead of comparing yourself to how pathetic other people are.

I have found the imitation of Christ to be largely an exercise in heartbreak. Not that I seem much like an imitator of Christ: A pious marble statue I am not. Believing in Christ has made me more aware of my faults and better at fixing them, but I am not a great model. I am not poor in spirit, I am not meek, and I don’t love my neighbor all that much. I try much harder than I used to, but I still fail. Looking at myself, I am not surprised that Christians often get blamed for hypocricy. But that’s really Christianity’s point. The central teaching of the religion is that no matter how well we humans know what we ought to do, we can’t do it, at least not all of the time. We can be pretty petty creatures, even pretty monstrous ones in the wrong circumstances. But the glorious kicker of it all is that God loves us anyway. We may prefer to wallow in our silly prides and pointless desires, but God forgives us for it and wants to drag us, kicking and screaming, into the sweet kingdom of gentleness and openness and acceptance.

The direct use of force is so poor a solution to the problems of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.

This one is only on the desktop, it’s not a console game. It’s called Disk Operating System. You actually use your keyboard to type in commands. The idea is to move files from one place to another. The great thing is that it only requires 640k of memory, which, of course, is all the memory anyone will ever need. It’s only available for the Mac.

Because every organization knows that the only way you can do anything is the way they’ve always been doing it.

Manhattan increasingly smells like a drug store. Indeed, Manhattan increasingly is a drug store.

Mr. Clinton may have lied about his sex life, but he, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers told the truth about numbers. The Bushies are all good boys who go home to their wives at 6 p.m., but that’s after a day of fudging all sorts of numbers to get their mammoth tax cut passed. Personally, if I have to choose, I prefer people who cheat on their wives to people who cheat on our kids.

The future belongs to charismatic communicators who are technically competent.

If you limit your choices to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence.

The idea that there is a “realist” faction in the debate over the size of the Smurfs ought to chill you to your very core.

Damn, damn and double damn. Damn it backwards into a narrow space, with a sideorder of hellfire, and twice on a Sunday. DAAAAAAAMN.

To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, you’re overdoing it.

To: is for your coworker. Cc: is for your boss. Bcc: is for your friend at the newspaper.

We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

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

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

This is what happens when you call the office that oversees the NSA: “You have reached the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Please be advised that your call may be monitored.” You don’t say.

It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or two things still safe to eat.

Forget, for a moment, all the wild talk about the potential dangers of computers that want to party like it’s 1900. Forget all the potential dangers of “security bugs,” which might perhaps, maybe, hypothetically enable an ingenious teenager to steal your credit card number or your password to Hustler Online. We’re ignoring a much bigger bug problem that’s hiding, well, right under our noses. Call it the Y-Does-My-Computer-Crash-Three-Times-A-Day Problem.

Our revenue and income potential is unproven, and our business model is still emerging. We have no experience in purchasing and storing components, assembling, packing and shipping our products and the testing and quality control of products and components. We currently lack the capability to carry out any of these functions. We’re “all thumbs.” As we commence commercial production, we may encounter quality-control issues in the components we purchase and in the assembly of our own products. We currently have no full-time employees. None of our executives have significant experience in the industry. The managing underwriter has never previously acted as the managing underwriter of a public offering. Sometimes he forgets to wear pants. Of the 11 employees listed in the management section of this prospectus, six have worked for us less than one year, and three of them are heavily involved in a New Age suicide cult. In addition, our location in Portsmouth, N.H., may limit our access to skilled personnel. Portsmouth is a living hell, believe you me, especially in the winter time. Even those of us who aren’t in the suicide cult are thinking of killing ourselves.

This prospectus contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties and what Dick Clark and Ed McMahon like to call “Bloopers and Practical Jokes.” You may be able to identify forward-looking statements by words such as “should,” “could,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts” or “incoming!” Also, the phrases “Look out! Here comes a forward-looking statement” and “I got your forward-looking statement right here, IPO boy” are good tip-offs. Such forward-looking statements are not historical facts. We cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or that you will not pay a lot for this muffler.

We have incurred net operating losses and negative cash flows from operating activities since our inception. We expect losses from operations and negative cash flows to continue for the foreseeable future because we plan to continue to incur significant expenses, especially with regard to our cars. If our revenues do not increase and if our spending levels are not adjusted accordingly, we may not generate sufficient revenues to achieve profitability. Even if we do achieve profitability, we may not sustain or increase profitability on a quarterly or annual basis in the future. Sometimes we take $20 bills and just flush them down the toilet. Our business manager was last seen heading for the Mexican border with a large suitcase full of cash.

Firstly, there’s no such person as Death. Second, Death’s this tall guy with a bone face, like a skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a big white horse and a penchant for playing chess with Scandanavians. Third, he doesn’t exist either.