#!/usr/local/bin/perl5 -w # siggie inserts for email or postings sub none { } sub formal { print q{ Cheers! xanthian. -- Kent Paul Dolan MT1(SS), US Navy and LCDR, USNOAA Corps, Retired http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub simple { print q{ Cheers! xanthian. -- Kent Paul Dolan http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub shopping { print q{ Cheers! xanthian. -- Kent Paul Dolan MT1(SS), US Navy and LCDR, USNOAA Corps, Retired [overlong URL links are shown below on multiple lines, marked by terminating hyphens; join them together by hand in the obvious way to use them] my email addresses my web sites http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ http://www.stormpages.com/user/xanthian/ If you're shopping for software talent, see: my current resume http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/SkinnyResume.txt supplemental materials to that resume http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ - resume_supplements.html I most enjoy programming, today, in Java, a very well designed tool. My two year "teach myself Java" obsession in an early, one sixth current size public version, is: http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/java/ - TravellerDoc.html See also MovieScheduler, my much more modest, latest released genetic algorithm project [offline until I find a new host site for it] Other Java code toys are also visible here: http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/java/ Other, older code in several other languages sits here: http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/public/code/ Seeking low-glitz web design help? I've made hundreds of very plain web pages for my own use, and a few dozen for the use of others, for example, this site for my hiking partner: http://www.geocities.com/mjwillert2 A recent modest web site I've designed and implemented for myself can be seen here: http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/link_pages/ - GimpStuff/GimpResources.html } } sub ascii_virus { print q{ /"\ Kent Paul Dolan - homeless constant programmer. \ / ASCII ribbon campaign against HTML mail and X postings. I'm a siggie virus! Copy me into / \ your siggie mechanism and see me spread! } } sub writing_style { print q{ [If my writing style proves indigestible, I plead acute hereditary brain damage. A copout, but one I am prepared to defend with endless reams of supporting data until the recipient falls insensitate to the floor in submission. No one would _believe_ my family background.] Or more simply, as my friend Ken Johnson in Scotland puts it, if these opinions cause irritation, discontinue use. -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub work_at_whistle { print q{ Kent Paul Dolan Whistle Communications, an IBM Company 110 Marsh Drive, Suite 100 Foster City, CA 94404 1 650 577 7025 -- work phone number for voice or voice mail 1 650 577 7005 -- work phone number for inbound facsimiles -- work computer account email; defunct -- permanent ISP account email http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ -- permanent web site } } sub star_wars { print q{ True Names -- in the desmene of mundania -- Kent Paul Dolan. in the desmene of Internet -- xanthian. in the desmene of siggie hooks -- Kent, the man from xanth. in the desmene of Star Wars -- KenDo HaOak, nalFarmallCub of BUSPAR. in the spellcheck desmene of M$-Word -- Cent Paul Dolman. in the desmene of email -- in the desmene of web vanity -- http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ in the desmene of faux art -- [offline for now] } } sub work_at_motorola { print q{ Xanthian. -- Kent Paul Dolan, (Indotronix), OSC-R 5254, +1 602 732 6251 (work: desk). Kent, the man from xanth. Badge# SC1554, +1 602 732 3617 (work: lab). (currently usually at desk). http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ Alpha paging : send brief, ascii email to 1300727@skytel.com Numeric paging: call +1 800 759 8888, enter pin 1300727 at prompt } } sub dads_books_at_motorola { print q{ Dad's Books: go to http://www.amazon.com/, do an author search for Chester Dolan. Xanthian. -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub normal_at_motorola { print q{ Xanthian. -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub dads_books { print q{ Dad's Books: go to http://www.amazon.com/, do an author search for Chester Dolan. Xanthian. -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub graverobbing { print q{ Xanthian. [Proud contract technician to X Industries Protein Recycling Division: Graverobbing done cheap!] -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub insult_netscum { print q{ Xanthian. -- Kent, the man from xanth. | Can we hurry this up? | Reputed net.scum Kent Paul Dolan. | I have places to go, | Latter Day Saint | and people to insult. | propagandist and http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ | known rabid atheist. } } sub insult_seer { print q{ Xanthian. -- Kent, the man from xanth. | Can we hurry this up? | Atheist raising a Kent Paul Dolan. | I have places to go, | future LDS seer | and people to insult. | and revelator for http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ | fun and prophet. } } sub whistle_jobad { print q{ Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ -- Whistle/IBM is paying mongo referral bonuses! If you see a job match at http://www.whistle.com/company/employment/employ-index.html mention my name as referrer with your resume cover letter, make me rich, make you employed! } } sub as_johnny { print q{ -- Xanthian, Jr. Johnny, the toddler from xanth (posting from his father's account). John Grayson Dolan, c/o } } sub job_ads_mentor { print q{ Xanthian, mentoring misc.jobs.misc and ba.jobs.misc from March 1996 to February 1997 to try to reduce the level of misposted ads in those discussion-only newsgroups. Somewhat better than 80% nuisance ad abatement accomplished during that time (most weeks, anyway). -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub y2000_contributor { print q{ Proud contributor to the year 2000 problem since 1961. -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub faster_errors { print q{ Using modern technology to commit errors at previously unachievable rates. -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub upchuck { print q{ Xanthian. [Proud founder of X Industries Keyboard Stress Test Division: making unsuspecting news article readers projectile vomit right between the G and H keys for a highly classified amount of time!] -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub xeriscape { print q{ Xanthian. [Proud staff member of X Industries Xeriscape Division; making the planet a desert for YOU!] -- Kent, the man from xanth. Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } # other inserts, not used as siggies sub federal_spam_to_cash { print q{ SPAM WARNING: Anyone who sends me unsolicited commercial e-mail will be charged a $500 fee per message. Pursuant to US Code Title 47, Sec.227(a)(2)(B), a computer/ modem/printer meets the definition of a telephone fax machine. Sec.227(b)(1)(C) prohibits the delivery of unsolicited commercial messages to such apparatus. Sec.227(b)(3)(C) states that a violation of the aforementioned Section is punishable by action to recover actual monetary loss, or $500, whichever is greater, for each violation. } } sub die_email_spammer_insert { print q{ ******************************************************************** ******************************************************************** ** ** ** Die, email spammer! ** ** ** ** What moron methodology makes you think that everyone who ** ** posts on any topic to any part of Usenet would welcome your ** ** worthless trash landing in their private email boxes, ** ** causing annoyance, inconvenience, wasted time, and added ** ** expense for the recipients? ** ** ** ** The air you are wasting by existing when you could be ** ** feeding some needy and deserving worms could be being ** ** breathed by a real, functional, thinking human being ** ** instead of by a bandwidth wasting, money-grubbing, ** ** self-centered, social-parasite, brain-dead net vandal. ** ** ** ** Please treat yourself to an early and much needed suicide. ** ** Messy, lingering, and intensely painful methods should be ** ** at the top of your list of choices of ways to accomplish ** ** this too long delayed chore. ** ** ** ******************************************************************** ******************************************************************** } } sub die_newsgroup_spammer_insert { print q{ ******************************************************************** ******************************************************************** ** ** ** Die, newsgroup spammer! ** ** ** ** What moron methodology makes you think that everyone who ** ** reads any part of Usenet would welcome your worthless trash ** ** landing in their dedicated newsgroups, causing annoyance, ** ** inconvenience, wasted time, and added connect time expense ** ** for the recipients? ** ** ** ** The air you are wasting by existing when you could be ** ** feeding some needy and deserving worms could be being ** ** breathed by a real, functional, thinking human being ** ** instead of by a bandwidth wasting, money-grubbing, ** ** self-centered, social-parasite, brain-dead net vandal. ** ** ** ** Please treat yourself to an early and much needed suicide. ** ** Messy, lingering, and intensely painful methods should be ** ** at the top of your list of choices of ways to accomplish ** ** this too long delayed chore. ** ** ** ******************************************************************** ******************************************************************** } } sub netfraud_cc_line_insert { # The format is a bit different here to avoid inserting a blank line into # a mail or news header. print q{Cc: newyork@fbi.gov Cc: bbroder@ftc.gov Cc: jccheezum@uspis.gov Cc: nfic@internetmci.com Cc: net-abuse@nocs.insp.irs.gov } } sub abusemeister_email_insert { print q{ Subject: email abuse using your facilities Abuse handlers: The appended quoted unsolicited bulk email was sent, or perhaps merely claims to be sent, from an account using your facilities. Please remove the offending account, if that is within your power. Thank you. Cheers! xanthian. -- Kent Paul Dolan http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ } } sub netfraud_warning_insert { print q{ Copies of your missive helpfully forwarded to: the US Postal Inspector, the US Federal Trade Commission's Internet Fraud office, the National Fraud Information Center, the Fraud Department at the US Internal Revenue Service, and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Don't bother to thank me, I do this for everyone who sends me email proposing or constituting illegal or suspicious activities. } } sub accrue_spam { my @spam_siggies = (); # Template: # push @spam_siggies, # q{ # put siggie text part found in spam here # }; push @spam_siggies, q{ The world is my lobster. -- filler from spam email }; push @spam_siggies, q{ Man is more ape than many of the apes. -- filler from spam email }; push @spam_siggies, q{ Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life. -- filler from spam email }; push @spam_siggies, q{ REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire. -- filler from spam email }; push @spam_siggies, q{ Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire. -- filler from spam email }; push @spam_siggies, q{ To save time is to lengthen life. -- filler from spam email }; return @spam_siggies; } sub random_spam { my @spam_siggies = ( accrue_spam ); print "\n ===== random spam quote =====\n"; print @spam_siggies[ int ( rand ($#spam_siggies + 1) ) ]; print q{ -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ }; } sub ordered_spam { my @spam_siggies = ( accrue_spam ); while ( $spam_siggie = pop @spam_siggies ) { print qq($spam_siggie), "\n"; } } sub selected_spam { my @spam_siggies = ( accrue_spam ); print "\n"; print " ===== selected spam quote =====\n"; if ( defined( $siggieArrayIndex ) && ( $siggieArrayIndex >= 0 and $siggieArrayIndex <= $#spam_siggies ) ) { print qq($spam_siggies[$siggieArrayIndex]), "\n"; } else { print qq($spam_siggies[0]), "\n"; } print q{ -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ }; } sub promote_atheism { my @atheism_siggies = (); # Template: # push @atheism_siggies, # q{ # put atheism siggie text part here # }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. -- Mark Twain }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ The Golden Rule is of no use to you whatever unless you realize it is your move. -- Frank Crane }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. -- Carl Sagan }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ The Lord God made the lot. All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat, All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot. Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings, He made their brutish venom. He made their horrid wings. All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small, All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all. Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid-- Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did! All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small, Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all. Amen. -- Monty Python }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Any fully matured science of ecology will have to grapple with the fact that from the ecological point of view, man is one of those animals which is in danger from its too successful participation in the struggle for existence." -- Joseph Wood Krutch }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ All superstition is much the same ... the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common. - Francis Bacon - }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ > Kent Paul Dolan writes: >> if you choose your religion on a >> "what's in it for me" basis, you'll >> simply end up subscribing to whatever >> religion has as its promoters the most >> effusive liars. Superb observation. -- Bobby Bryant Reno, Nevada }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Forget the question of who created the creator. God has a special Get out of Infinite Regress Free card. John Harshman }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Atheism is the world of reality, it is reason, it is freedom. Atheism is human concern, and intellectual honesty to a degree that the religious mind cannot begin to understand. And yet it is more than this. Atheism is not an old religion, it is not a new and coming religion, in fact it is not, and never has been, a religion at all. The definition of Atheism is magnificent in its simplicity: Atheism is merely the bed-rock of sanity in a world of madness. -- Emmett F. Fields }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government." -Bertrand Russell }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Given the astounding number of galaxies and potential worlds arrayed overhead, the complexities of life on earth and the advances in our ethical discourse over the last 2,000 years, the world's religions offer a view of reality that is now so utterly impoverished as to scarcely constitute a view of reality at all." - Sam Harris }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. --Stendhal }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause. David Hume }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Creationism, simply put, is the heartfelt conviction that man was created by God, using some kind of celestial putty. This is perhaps the most arrogant belief a human skull can contain without exploding. After all, God has far better things to do than creating self-important little species such as ours. He's got wars, deaths, disasters and diseases to ignore for starters. And a fair bit of not-exist-ing-at-all to be getting on with. -- Charlie Brooker, Monday December 4, 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/ }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. --Ludwig Feuerbach }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating us in a stupid way." -- J. W. Nienhuys }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. -- Albert Einstein }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledegook than the rest of the world put together. -- Sir Peter Medawar }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." -- Richard Dawkins }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them" -- Abraham Lincoln }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to his nephew, Peter Carr. }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes." -- Friedrich Nietzsche }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark than a moral. -- John Burroughs }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ I like your Christ. But I don't like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ. -- Mahatma Ghandi }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "I call Christianity the *one* great curse, the *one* great intrinsic depravity, the *one* great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, *petty* -- I call it the *one* mortal blemish of mankind." -- Friedrich Nietzsche }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow' disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." -- Richard Dawkins }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Does it ever strike you as just a teeny bit odd that after a brief period where philosophy flourished, from maybe 400 B.C.E. to ~100 C.E., we went through a follow-on period of well over one thousand five hundred years during which the Roman Catholic Church enslaved everyone's minds and killed anyone who dared think differently? What's weirder is that we tend to pretend it didn't really happen. We like to just skip right over the dominance of religion over our minds for a hundred generations, and think of religion today as a kindly old grandpa who's just looking out for us kids. No harm, no foul. Let bygones be bygones. Sure, there were massacres and crusades and genocides and torture chambers with teeth grinding and eyes bleeding and intestines torn out in the name of God. But we were all just kids then, right? Nobody does that kind of thing today, at least not in civilized countries. We try not to think about the uncivilized ones. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/software-needs-philosophers.html }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Personally it's not God I dislike, its his fan club I can't stand. -- http://bash.org/?277337 }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ It also mirrored Lenski's own research, launched in 1988, which is now the longest continuously running experiment in evolution. He began with a single bacterium "Escherichia coli" and used its offspring to found 12 separate colonies of bacteria that he nurtured on a meager diet of glucose, which creates a strong incentive for the evolution of new ways to survive. Over the past 17 years, the colonies have passed through 35,000 generations. In the process, they've become one of the clearest demonstrations that natural selection is real. All 12 colonies have evolved to the point at which the bacteria can replicate almost twice as fast as their ancestors. At the same time, the bacterial cells have gotten twice as big. Surprisingly, these changes didn't unfold in a smooth, linear process. Instead, each colony evolved in sudden jerks, followed by hundreds of generations of little change, followed by more jerks. "Testing Darwin" by Carl Zimmer _Discover_, Volume 26 Number 02, February 2005 http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/cover/ }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul..." -- Mark Twain }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "But the limit of tolerance for these human foibles is obtained when the proponent of a questionable scientific doctrine endeavors to maintain it against all possible odds by misrepresentation, misinformation and suppression of contradictory data, and by insinuating unfairness in opponents of his views." -- Franz Weidenreich, Morphology of Solo Man }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Man stands alone in the universe, a unique product of a long, unconcious, impersonal material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself, and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces, but his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny." -- George Gaylord Simpson, Life of the Past }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "I call Christianity the *one* great curse, the *one* great intrinsic depravity, the *one* great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, *petty* -- I call it the *one* mortal blemish of mankind." -- Friedrich Nietzsche }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers. -- J. D. Salinger }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." -- Woody Allen quoted in a Unix fortune() message }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ For the angels warn you that men may take salvation and beat it into the shape of a sword. They may take the humble gift of the stable and raise it to a palace it was never meant to fill. For greed's sake, and power's sake, and simply because they have the might to enforce their desires, they will build a wall around the peace that might have been and deck it with shields and bones. -- Esther M. Friesner _Yesterday We Saw Mermaids_ }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity." "Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the world and of tranquillity amongst it's peoples...The greater the decline of religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to chaos and confusion." -- Baha'u'llah, a selection from the Baha'i scripture [The question being, does this work better as a promotion, or as a condemnation, of religion?] }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Jesus died for your sins. Make it worth his time. -- Unix fortune() cookie message }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel." -Thomas Paine (1737-1809), in The Age of Reason, on the Old Testament }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." "We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication." -Thomas Jefferson }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason." -Voltaire }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "What can we say to a man who tells you that he would rather obey God than men, and that therefore he is sure to go to heaven for butchering you? Even the law is impotent against these attacks of rage; it is like reading a court decree to a raving maniac." -Voltaire, 1764 }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all price, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation..." -Nietzsche }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Only the fighters have any hope of beating the system once it's at work against them," he told me. "Most people, fighters or not, are beaten in the end, though. It's . . . you see, I ... you finish up not knowing who you can trust. You can get no help because your story sounds so paranoid that you are thought a crank, one of those nuts who think the whole world is a conspiracy against them. It is a strange phenomenon. By setting up a situation that most people will think of as fantasy, these people can poison every part of a person's life. If they give in they go under. If they don't give in It's only putting off the day because if they fight, so much unhappiness will be brought to the people around them that there will likely come a time when even their families turn against them out of desperation. When that happens and they are without friends wherever they look, they become easy meat. The newspapers will not touch them. There is no defence against an evil which only the victims and the perpetrators know exists." -Christopher X., Freemason, Whitehall high civil servant, as recorded by Stephen Knight and published in his book, The Brotherhood }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Not that he will. All the "evidence" you claim to have has no bearing on supporting "intelligent design", and the evidence against it is all too overwhelming. No I.D. proponent can give any satisfactory I.D. "explanation" for the _vestigal_ components of living creatures, like the human appendix, like mammal males' nipples, like the legbones of whales, all of which would condemn an "Intelligent Designer" as an "Unintelligent OmniBumbler", but which make perfect sense seen from the vantage point of evolution, where they are the remnant "errors" of the "trial and error" approach Darwin documents. Nor can they explain why the human eye, for example, has its blood vessels on the wrong side of the retina, while the squid's eye got it correct, or why the Panda is stuck with a "thumb" which is just a wrist bone flange, while lots of other creatures have perfectly functional thumbs. -- Kent Paul Dolan, xanthian@well.com, as quoted in famous "Dr. Who" novelist Kate Orman's LiveJournal. }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Truth" never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation. --Anton LaVey }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating us in a stupid way." -- J. W. Nienhuys, from a Unix fortune() cookie }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said: "And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible." Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. -- C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church). }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Belief in god requires a great deal of mediocrity and lack of thought. -- MS }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light." -- Carl Sagan From "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," Random House, 1994 }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Q: How do you play religious roulette? A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first. -- from a Unix fortune() cookie }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." -- John Milton }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ The universe is a figment of its own imagination. -- Jerry Coffin }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Behold the unborn fetus and Weep salt tears crocodilian; All life is sacred (save, of course, An enemy civilian). -- anonymous Unix fortune() cookie }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." -- Jonathan Swift }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Occident, n.: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, 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, "The Devil's Dictionary" }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people do evil - that takes religion. }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ There's a new religous sect called "Jehovah's Bystanders." It's for people who don't want to get involved. }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle." i-- David Barry }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Article I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God." "I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be." -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity." -- Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men. -- Thomas Merton, "New Seeds of Contemplation" }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination. -- Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book" }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ I believe Alan Moore said it best: "Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating blackness goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reasons later. Born from oblivion, bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us." -Watchmen -- quoted by Chris Schumacher }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pense'es, #894. }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Religion is all about taking personal spirituality, and turning it into a fast food chain. -- Nikolaus Maack }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ "Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true." -- Friedrich Nietzsche }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Science makes godlike -- it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the *first* sin, the *original* sin. *This alone is morality.* "Thou shalt not know" -- the rest follows. -- Friedrich Nietzsche }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ [about an award for the first proof of paranormal phenomena:] The Randi Foundation's million is 100% safe. -- John Griffin }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ Of all learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks. A large part of his professional activity, in fact, is given over to these enterprises. Doing things that would cause a lawyer to be disbarred, a medical man to lose his license to practice, even a chiropractor, a bartender or a whore-madam to be regarded as grossly unethical are part of his daily routine, and his admirers accept them as proofs of his consecratation to holy works. -- H.L. Mencken, _Minority Report_ }; push @atheism_siggies, q{ [...] allow me to give you some free advice: Remain skeptical. Especially when they ask you for your faith and wallet at the same time. -- Allen Steele, in _All-American Alien Boy_, page 159 }; return @atheism_siggies; } sub random_atheism { my @atheism_siggies = ( promote_atheism ); print "\n ===== random atheism quote =====\n"; print @atheism_siggies[ int ( rand ($#atheism_siggies + 1) ) ]; print q{ -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ }; } sub ordered_atheism { my @atheism_siggies = ( promote_atheism ); while ( $atheism_siggie = pop @atheism_siggies ) { print qq($atheism_siggie), "\n"; } } sub selected_atheism { my @atheism_siggies = ( promote_atheism ); print "\n"; print " ===== selected atheism quote =====\n"; if ( defined( $siggieArrayIndex ) && ( $siggieArrayIndex >= 0 and $siggieArrayIndex <= $#atheism_siggies ) ) { print qq($atheism_siggies[$siggieArrayIndex]), "\n"; } else { print qq($atheism_siggies[0]), "\n"; } print q{ -- Kent Paul Dolan. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ }; } sub create_cuteness { my @cute_siggies = (); # Template: # push @cute_siggies, # q{ # put cute quote here # }; push @cute_siggies, q{ They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown... -- attr. to Carl Sagan }; push @cute_siggies, q{ There is only one group which would ever call for the banning of 'The Diary of Anne Frank', and I don't care what they happen to be calling themselves these days. -- Alan Moore }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Whats he that wishes so? My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin. If we are mark'd to die, then we are enough to do our country loss. and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor. Gods will, I pray thee, wish not one man more. Rather, proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host; That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse; We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is call'd the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.' Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.' Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he'll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words- Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. -- William Shakespeare, I Henry IV }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers. -- Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man 'in power' depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he 'causes' things to happen...it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation. But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster." -- Gregory Bateson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Every country has the government it deserves. -- Joseph de Maistre }; push @cute_siggies, q{ One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. -- A. A. Milne }; push @cute_siggies, q{ 'Twas orgy, and the hip and mod Did groove and trip out at the pad: All whimsy were the slamming chicks, And the Radcliffe undergrad. "Beware the Radcliff girl, my son! The looks that melt, the claws that catch! Beware the Byrn Mawr deb, and shun The uppity Wellesleysnatch!" He took his venerable staff in hand: Long time the cool young stuff he sought -- So rested he among the spree And paused to smoke some pot. And as in raffish thought he sprawled, The Radcliffe girl, no idle flirt, Crept past the hippies getting balled And doffed her miniskirt. One, two! One, two! And through and through The venerable staff went snicker-snack! He left her bred, sans maidenhead, And went galumphing back. "And hast thou laid the Radcliffe girl? Come to my arms, my horny boy! O spaced-out day! Calooh! Callay!" He cackled in his joy. 'Twas orgy, and the hip and mod Did groove and trip out at the pad: All whimsy were the slamming chicks, And the Radcliffe undergrad. -- from a Unix ofortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. -- Vernon Balbert }; push @cute_siggies, q{ My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled -- Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world -- And I wish I'd never met him. -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place." -- IEEE Grid newsmagazine }; push @cute_siggies, q{ 1: "The moment you think it's x, it changes to not x" --- Confusius' Fundamental Meta-Law of Opposite Reversal 2: "The best way to predict reality, is to know exactly what you DON'T want" --- Moracle's Fundamental Meta-Law of Scientific Forecasting 3: "Saying that you believe in God is declaring publicly that you know your limits" --- Protectorius' First Law of Protection 4: "Saying that you don't believe in God is declaring publicly that you are an idiot" --- Protectorius' Second Law of UNprotection 5: "Not only God exists, he is also your worst fucking nightmare. On a PERSONAL level" --- Kolastirion's Law of Usefulness of Religion 6: "You have your own personal nightmares to avoid, so why bother other people? Things are hard enough for you, already" --- Kolastirion's Corollary of Correct Application of Religion 7: "Blessed are those who expect the worst, for they shall not be disappointed" --- Jesus' Sermon on the Mount First Forgotten Law 8: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they cannot fully fathom the predicament they have gotten themselves into" --- Jesus' Sermon on the Mount Second Forgotten Law 9: "If you do good, expect evil to come back to you. If you do evil, expect evil to come back to you REINFORCED" --- Jesus' Sermon on the Mount Third Forgotten Law 10: "The Universe was created just in order to ANNOY you. If you resist it, it will annoy you MORE. If you stop resisting it, it will STILL annoy you. Therefore the best path for you is either to become immune to its annoyance or get the fuck out of its way" --- Purposi's Fundamental Laws for The Purpose of Life 11: "Everything in The Universe is ALWAYS against you" --- Sisyphus' Law of Eventual Failure 12: "Not only everything in The Universe is against you, but your very best friend, your self, is ALSO against you" --- Froyd's Forgotten Law of Perverse Psychology 13: "The less The Universe knows about YOU, the happier you'll be" --- Cipher's Law of 'Happiness is Bliss' 14: "The less YOU know about The Universe, the happier you'll be" --- Einstein's Unproved Conclusion Law 15: "The more YOU know about The Universe, the more The Universe knows about YOU" --- Nerdius's Futility of Scientific Knowledge Law 16: "You can NEVER know everything about The Universe, but eventually The Universe finds out EVERYTHING about YOU" --- Dementius' Law of Evil Focus 17: "In short, there's SOMETHING out there, and the less you know about it, the happier you'll be" --- Garabam's Law of Maximum Allowed Knowledge 18: "Attempting to battle that 'something' using the most powerful means, is a bit like throwing a loud fire-cracker to an elephant: The fire-cracker is harmless to it and is likely to annoy the animal with its noise" --- Futilitus' Law of Infinite Inertia 19: "The level of scientific expertise of ANY being, culture or civilization is directly proportional to its evil intentions" --- Hish's Law of Evil Dominance 20: "When you have finally settled down and figured out the religious/metaphysical side of it, beware of The Unexpected" --- Pordus' Law of Maximum Unpredictability 21: "If you could realize the full extent of your fuck-up responsible for you being born on this planet, you'd immediately commit suicide. In which case, you'd AGAIN be kicked down here, for that very reason" --- Buddha's First Fundamental Law of Reincarnation & Karma 22: "If you cannot stand The Truth, you'll have descendants. If you CAN stand The Truth, you'll be made immortal. In either case, your torment will be UNENDING. In the latter case from knowing EVERYTHING, in the former from NEVER knowing ANYTHING" --- Buddha's Second Fundamental Law of Reincarnation & Karma 23: "The average stupidity of any human population as a function of time, always increases exponentially" --- Gauss' Law of Average Growth of Stupidity 24: "It's better to die without descendants than to leave behind offspring who will continue your legacy of stupidity" --- Ackermann's Corollary to Gauss' Law 25: "No matter what you know, there's always somebody who knows MORE than you" --- Patatrackious' First Law of Knowledge Distribution 26: "No matter who you are, there's always somebody STRONGER than you" --- Patatrackious' Second Law of World Power Distribution 27: "If you think that there's also always somebody WEAKER than you, you are WRONG" --- Patatrackious' Perverse Corollary to The Second Law 28: "There's ALWAYS a mistake, somewhere" --- Caratheodory's First Forgotten Law of Scientific Expertise 29: "The chances of you making that mistake in the presence of experts are within epsilon of certainty" --- Caratheodory's Second Forgotten Law of Scientific Expertise 30: "The key to happiness is being OK with NOT being OK" --- Anderson's Law of Eventual Complacency 31: "For every true fact x, at least one person doesn't know anything about it and doesn't WANT to know anything about it" --- Occult's First Law of Forbidden Knowledge 32: "For every false fact y, at least one person knows something about it and is willing to teach you for a fee" --- Occult's Second Law of Forbidden Knowledge 33: "Don't be afraid of death. It can't POSSIBLY be worse than the rest of your life" --- Priest's First Law About The Afterlife 34: "On the other hand, BE afraid of death. Murphy's Law says it WILL be worse than the rest of your life" --- Priest's Second Law About The Afterlife }; push @cute_siggies, q{ 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. -- R. Buckminster Fuller }; push @cute_siggies, q{ A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. -- Barry Goldwater }; push @cute_siggies, q{ When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. -- Thomas Paine }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Maturity is the capacity to withstand ego-destroying experiences, and not lose one's perspective in the ego-building experiences. -- Robert K. Greenleaf }; push @cute_siggies, q{ ... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. -- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I feel a disturbance in the Force, as if millions of killfiles suddenly went *PLONK* and StickThatInYourPipeAndSmokeIt was silenced. -- Ray Chason }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. -- Isaac Asimov }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Here in my heart, I am Helen; I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least. I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Stael; I'm Salome, moon of the East. Here in my soul I am Sappho; Lady Hamilton am I, as well. In me Recamier vies with Kitty O'Shea, With Dido, and Eve, and poor nell. I'm all of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book. -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Why marry a virgin? If she wasn't good enough for the rest of them then she isn't good enough for you. -- Usenet fortune cookie. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way." -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. --Leonardo da Vinci }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits. -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@apple.com, about Usenet }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Displacement's a response to every MC-able threat and every other threat, and if you don't have the serial ascender's 400 HP and more armour than the USS New Jersey, some of those other threats are actually serious. David Damerell writing about NetHack }; push @cute_siggies, q{ If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll }; push @cute_siggies, q{ A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place. -- IEEE Grid newsmagazine }; push @cute_siggies, q{ On a cold winter's day, a group of porcupines huddled together to stay warm and keep from freezing. But soon they felt each other's quills and moved apart. When the need for warmth brought them closer together again, their quills again forced them apart. They were driven back and forth at the mercy of their discomforts until they found the distance from each other that provided both a maximum of warmth and a minimum of pain. In human beings, the emptiness and monotony of the isolated self produces a need for society. This brings people together, but their many offensive qualities and intolerable faults drive them apart again. The optimum distance that they finally find and that permits them to coexist is embodied in politeness and good manners. The English warn anyone who comes too closely to keep his distance. Because of the distance between us, we can only partially satisfy our need for warmth, but at the same time, we are spared the stab of each other's quills. -- Arthur Schopenhauer. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." - Isaac Asimov }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "[A]s the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time. Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective." -- Statement by Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn on 2000-09-28 }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -- William Butler Yeats: }; push @cute_siggies, q{ There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. -- Albert Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus_ }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Inerrancy is the lock on the cage of ignorance. To find the truth, begin by assuming you are wrong. John.Vreeland@IEEE.org }; push @cute_siggies, q{ FIGHTING WORDS Say my love is easy had, Say I'm bitten raw with pride, Say I am too often sad -- Still behold me at your side. Say I'm neither brave nor young, Say I woo and coddle care, Say the devil touched my tongue -- Still you have my heart to wear. But say my verses do not scan, And I get me another man! -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I've only ascended once, it was about ten years ago and I did it in 24 hours of nearly straight play... that was quite a day. I don't recommend all day Nethack binges to the faint of heart or marginally sane. AbidNibBeE }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Real education must be limited to men who *insist* on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding." -- Ezra Pound }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that's not the reason we're doing it. --Richard Feynman-- }; push @cute_siggies, q{ There is now ample evidence that gene duplication is the most important mechanism for generating new genes and new biochemical processes that have facilitated the evolution of complex organisms from primitive ones. Wen Hsiung Li, _Molecular Evolution_ }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Outrage! Well met the dawn! O pleasant day of great felicity! Let us scrutinize our newsfroup and its cast of beaux esprits. Wait a minute. Something's wrong here. This door won't unlock the key! Whose that unfamiliar posting? Holy Christ! It's friggin me! O the nerve! O the audacity! The overweening gall! The contemptuous presumption and the arrogance withal! How dare I take such liberties?! My whole life is a sham! Evidently I'm mistaken as to who it is I am. I demand that I pluck out myself! I cast me out! Begone! Get me behind me, Satan, and absquatulate anon! Still so bold, my alter-ego? I have push'd me to the brink! Taste my suicidal file: Sayonara, sucker! Plink Elsibeth Ann Shannon, in her livejournal blog. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables." -- Archie Goodwin, in a Unix fortune cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ To killfile, or not to killfile: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slurs and affronts of outrageous trolls, Or to implement filters against a sea of morons, And by opposing silence them? (No apologies to Hamlet) -- Gary Olson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway or the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him. -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [Black] US Congress Representative Charles Rangel, (Democrat, New York), was asked what he thought about President George W. Bush. "Well," he said, "I think he really shatters the myth of white supremacy, once and for all." }; push @cute_siggies, q{ We're sysadmins. Sanity happens to other people. -- Chris King }; push @cute_siggies, q{ No, her snoring sounds more like a freight train plowing into a pile of old computer monitors filled with plastic explosives and light bulbs. You'll know it when you hear it. -- Comic character Snug, in Ugly Hill http://www.uglyhill.com/d/20050823.html }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I think we have just begun to scratch the surface on what you can accomplish with background speculative computing. We are still thinking in terms of trying to minimise the work a CPU does, even when it has nothing better to do. -- Roedy Green feedback@mindprod.com }; push @cute_siggies, q{ In fact, this is crucial to what fiction does. Through it, you experience empathy in its purest form because what you cannot experience is blame. Blame requires at least one beating heart. -- Julia Glass }; push @cute_siggies, q{ We need artificial intelligence as the drowned need artificial respiration: because the real thing has failed us. -- St. Jude }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Gerrold's Laws of Infernal Dynamics: 1. An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction. 2. An object at rest will always be in the wrong place. 3. The energy required to change either one of these states will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task totally impossible. -- a Unix fortune cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." --Winston Churchill Thanks to: Sean }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days, bribery and corruption are common, children no longer obey their parents and the end of the world is evidently approaching." --Assyrian clay tablet 2800 B.C. thanks to Noodles Jefferson, }; push @cute_siggies, q{ It would be nice if everybody was in a good mood and loved their fellow man all the time, but since that is not an attainable goal, I will settle for people behaving decently even if they have a "negative" attitude. -- Bibliophilia }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Probable-Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how. -- Frederick Winsor }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Ansel Adams said: "There is nothing worse than a sharp photograph of a fuzzy idea." }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. -- Lord Acton, historian (1834-1902) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Carter's Clarification of Murphy's Law. "Things only ever go right so that they may go more spectacularly wrong later." From this principle, all of life and physics may be deduced. -- John Carter }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less. -- Piet Hein }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Put up in a place where it's easy to see the cryptic admonishment T.T.T. When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb, it's well to remember that Things Take Time. -- Piet Hein }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. -- George McGovern }; push @cute_siggies, q{ That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. -- Thomas Jefferson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Katrina's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (coinage attrib. to Paul Ciszek) -- Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ To A Quick Young Fox: Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp, Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice? Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp -- Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice. -- Lazy Dog }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Excuse me. You're not entitled to your opinion. I copyrighted all of the stupidest opinions in the universe, so they can never again be uttered. -- Dogbert, courtesy of Scott Adams, in "Dilbert" 20050322 }; push @cute_siggies, q{ If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm. -- Marcus Aurelius }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct amongst us...I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so." -- Senator Adlai E. Stevenson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [advice for dealing with Usenet trolls] _No_. These creatures thrive on attention, and nothing else. The only solution is to simply let them simmer in their own milksop - eventually, their poor adolescent minds will tire of their game, with no feedback (and remember, to this species of loser, any feedback is positive), and then they will slouch off in search of new prey to slobber over, in some other newsgroup. -- Richard Bos }; push @cute_siggies, q{ he just got stupid with drugs, and had the bad fortune to have his stupidity become fatal. heroin is one of the drugs that makes it especially easy to stupid yourself to death. -- Ace Lightning, }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Bless you" and "Gesundheit" are both appropriate. English (or maybe just American English) has a tendency to, well not so much 'borrow' words, as much as chase down other languages, knock them down in dark alleys and rifle through their lexicons for words it likes. -- Justin Hiltscher }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I've been playing nethack off and on for about 15 years, so far I haven't ascended a character. I don't really mind, I'm not all that fond of finishing projects, starting them is much more fun. -- Tsingi }; push @cute_siggies, q{ It goes to show that impact is not proportional to the number of bits one spews. -- Mathematician and Physicist John Baez reacting to expressed surprise online at the smallness of Shakespeare's total output of text, roughly five small novels' worth. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ If we're going to work together, sir, then I think you need to take the Trolley back from make believe land. -- Special Ops Officer Thompson "Furmentation" 2003/04/02 http://xodin.keenspace.com/d/20030402.html }; push @cute_siggies, q{ THEORY Into love and out again, Thus I went and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen: Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head? -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Pirate Jenny You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell In this crummy Southern town In this crummy old hotel But you'll never guess to who you're talkin'. No. You couldn't ever guess to who you're talkin'. Then one night there's a scream in the night And you'll wonder who could that have been And you see me kinda grinnin' while I'm scrubbin' And you say, "What's she got to grin?" I'll tell you. There's a ship The Black Freighter with a skull on its masthead will be coming in You gentlemen can say, "Hey gal, finish them floors! Get upstairs! What's wrong with you! Earn your keep here! You toss me your tips and look out to the ships But I'm counting your heads as I'm making the beds Cuz there's nobody gonna sleep here, honey Nobody Nobody! Then one night there's a scream in the night And you say, "Who's that kicking up a row?" And ya see me kinda starin' out the winda And you say, "What's she got to stare at now?" I'll tell ya. There's a ship The Black Freighter turns around in the harbor shootin' guns from her bow Now You gentlemen can wipe off that smile off your face Cause every building in town is a flat one This whole frickin' place will be down to the ground Only this cheap hotel standing up safe and sound And you yell, "Why do they spare that one?" Yes. That's what you say. "Why do they spare that one?" All the night through, through the noise and to-do You wonder who is that person that lives up there? And you see me stepping out in the morning Looking nice with a ribbon in my hair And the ship The Black Freighter runs a flag up its masthead and a cheer rings the air By noontime the dock is a-swarmin' with men comin' out from the ghostly freighter They move in the shadows where no one can see And they're chainin' up people and they're bringin' em to me askin' me, "Kill them NOW, or LATER?" Askin' ME! "Kill them now, or later?" Noon by the clock and so still by the dock You can hear a foghorn miles away And in that quiet of death I'll say, "Right now. Right now!" Then they'll pile up the bodies And I'll say, "That'll learn ya!" And the ship The Black Freighter disappears out to sea And on it is me Bertholt Brecht, Kurt Weill }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [Said during a long running rgrn war over the complete unacceptablity to some, joy to others, of NetHack pudding farming:] Of course, this cuts both ways. If you ever had a unihorn in your inventory, you're obviously just phoning it in; it isn't as though that's a _real_ ascension. -- Douglas Henke }; push @cute_siggies, q{ This is from "Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker" Christmas, 1921 By Dorothy Parker I ask not for presents rare, Other-world trove of forgotten metals; Orchids that opened to jungle air, Tropical hate in their waiting petals; Onyx and ebony, black as pain, Carved with a patience beyond believing; Perfumes, to harry the startled brain; Laces that women have died in weaving; Cool-tinted pearls from the ocean, where Grottoes of dolorous green regret them. I do not ask for presents rare -- Dearest, I know that I would not get them. Give me your love, on this Christmas day. Give me your thoughts, when the chimes are ringing. Send me the happier along my way, Deep in my soul let your words be singing. Give me your wishes, as bells sound clear, Charming the air with their golden measure. Give me your hopes for the unborn year, Fill up my heart with a secret treasure. Give me the things that you long to say, All your tenderest dreams unfetter. Give me your love on this Christmas Day --- But come across, please, when times get better. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide. -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad }; push @cute_siggies, q{ National Lampoon - Deteriorata From the album "Radio Dinner" (Parody of the written prose "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann. This was written by Christopher Guest of "Spinal Tap" fame. The narrator is Norman Rose, and the female singer was an unknown singer at the time named Melissa Manchester.) You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. Deteriorata. Deteriorata. Go placidly amid the noise and waste, And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof. Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep. Rotate your tires. Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself, And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys. Know what to kiss, and when. Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do. Wherever possible, put people on hold. Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment, and despite the changing fortunes of time, There is always a big future in computer maintenance. You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, The universe is laughing behind your back. Remember The Pueblo. Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate. Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI. Exercise caution in your daily affairs, Especially with those persons closest to you - That lemon on your left, for instance. Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls Would scarcely get your feet wet. Fall not in love therefore. It will stick to your face. Gracefully surrender the things of youth: birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan. And let not the sands of time get in your lunch. Hire people with hooks. For a good time, call 606-4311. Ask for Ken. Take heart in the bedeepening gloom That your dog is finally getting enough cheese. And reflect that whatever fortune may be your lot, It could only be worse in Milwaukee. You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, The universe is laughing behind your back. Therefore, make peace with your god, Whatever you perceive him to be - hairy thunderer, or cosmic muffin. With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal, The world continues to deteriorate. Give up! You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, The universe is laughing behind your back. You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, The universe is laughing behind your back. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Sorry, but if your beer is getting warm, you aren't drinking it fast enough and you shouldn't be entrusted with any. -- }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Here in my heart, I am Helen; I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least. I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Stael; I'm Salome, moon of the East. Here in my soul I am Sappho; Lady Hamilton am I, as well. In me Recamier vies with Kitty O'Shea, With Dido, and Eve, and poor nell. I'm all of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book. -- Dorothy Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ ...when all government... in little as in the great thing, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson (1821) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. -- Jacques Ellul }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. -- Chief Seattle }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "An operating system is just a name you give the features you left out of your editor." -- Per Abrahamsen, alt.religion.emacs }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, who can't, and those in cemeteries. -- Everett Dirksen }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [about winning at NetHack] I did one thing different this time around, which was... absolutely positively no, playing while upset, horribly bored stiff, or like playing while frustrated or frantic or when I'm feeling crappy. All of that kept me from making lots of horribly stupid "oh that isn't so dangerous, I'll just bop it" mistakes, and let me run away very very fast and be better about things. -- Magpie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "I can't wait until the North Koreans have a missile that can reach Redmond, WA. In fact, I wish they had a PayPal account so I could donate something." - Karlo X in alt.religion.kibology }; push @cute_siggies, q{ ... self-evidence ... must not be confused with ... provability. -- Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo }; Template: push @cute_siggies, q{ Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike. Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning Christmas tree. The piano is missing. You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level 4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog. -- Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [about her Johnny Ramone haiku] it scans if you read the second line really fast. -- (St. Terri of the Net) a.k.a. "T Flynn" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mahatma Gandhi }; push @cute_siggies, q{ For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken }; push @cute_siggies, q{ G. B. Shaw to William Douglas Home: "Go on writing plays, my boy. One of these days a London producer will go into his office and say to his secretary, `Is there a play from Shaw this morning?' and when she says `No,' he will say, `Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish.' And that's your chance, my boy." -- from a Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." -- Mark Twain }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her ... the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand." -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ 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. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" (as quoted by Robert Heinlein) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. -- John Kenneth Galbraith }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I'd vote for Alfred E. Neuman, or Barney the Dinosaur, or Monica Lewinsky - *anybody* but Dubya. -- "Ace Lightning" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ No one can earn a million dollars honestly. -- William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency. -- Albert Einstein }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to sharpen. -- Eden Phillpott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Every country has the government it deserves" -- Joseph de Maistre (1753 - 1821) Written on August 15, 1811 -- Oxford Dictionary of Quotations }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Fortune's graffito of the week (or maybe even month): Don't Write On Walls! (and underneath) You want I should type? -- Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ When school ends, there is a tearing up of homework, screeching and cheering. You'd think teachers would be more dignified. -- Fred Galvin }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Transporting cargo using your own power is, of course, an especially good form of aerobic exercise. People who regularly haul cargo by bike are rarely fat. -- http://www.bikesatwork.com/ in .../hauling-cargo-by-bike/ why-transport-cargo-by-bike.html }; push @cute_siggies, q{ All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. -- Samuel Butler [This is far too exactly true, even in an evolutionary sense.] }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes." -- Maimonides }; push @cute_siggies, q{ (Be warned that nightly builds are development software, and there is no guarantee that they won't fry your processor, insult your mother, or cause you to break out in a nasty rash.) -- from the Mozilla splash screen urging updates of the user's version to the most recent release }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb --Elliot Nesterman }; push @cute_siggies, q{ My Favorite Drugs [Sung to My Favorite Things] Reefers and roach clips and papers and rollers Cocaine and procaine for twenty year molars Reds and peyote to work out your bugs These are a few of my favorite drugs. Uppers and downers and methedrine freakout Take some amphetamines, watch your brains leak out Acid and mescaline pull out your plugs These are a few of my favorite drugs. Backs that are perfect for carrying monkeys Users of heroin, often called junkies Methadone helps them to stop being thugs Takes them off one of my favorite drugs. On a bad trip When the cops come When I lose my head I simply take more of my favorite drugs And then I'm not sad -- I'm dead! -- from a Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "If I have to play bureaucratic games then by God I'll play to win!" -- Terry Knight }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. -- Helen Keller }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe." -- Frank Zappa }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Always code as if the person maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." -- John F. Woods }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity." -- Voltaire }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat." --James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way." -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Use of tools distinguishes Man from Beast. And UNIX users from WINDOZE lusers. -- David Klein }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Knowledge is the most powerful and valuable when fresh. It is like a hot rock, for if we choose to hide it by swallowing it, it will surely burn a hole through our stomach. However, if we choose to share it and pass it on, it will pass through many hands quickly, warming all those that share it. (Palauan Proverb) -- from the siggie of: The Architrave }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room. -- my all time favorite gift of a Unix fortune() cookie, ancient }; push @cute_siggies, q{ It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. -- from a Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." -- Sherlock Holms to Dr. Watson in _A Scandal in Bohemia_ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Also, crossposts are nearly always appropriate with certain groups, such as misc.misc, whose entire purpose is to collect interesting (or not) bits of cruft and clutter. -- Bruce Labbate }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win, some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins." -- Dizzy Gillespie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ May your signals all trap May your references be bounded All memory aligned Floats to ints rounded Remember ... Non-zero is true ++ adds one Arrays start with zero and, NULL is for none For octal, use zero 0x means hex = will set == means test use -> for a pointer a dot if its not ? : is confusing use them a lot a.out is your program there's no U in foobar and, char (*(*x())[])() is a function returning a pointer to an array of pointers to functions returning char -- Kingbarry2000 }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage }; push @cute_siggies, q{ As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand; The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of _Spiritus Mundi_ Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again: but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [to David Longley, festering plague of comp.ai.philosophy:] Well, you know how I am always talking about probability? I've already decided the probability of my ever reading anything suggested by you. If I were stranded in a desert with you and dying of thirst, and you had a book on how to find water, I would be crawling in the opposite direction as fast as I could crawl. And years later we'd find your skeleton with "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" clutched in both hands. -- "Larry == Acme Posting" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Lack of information has not been the bottleneck in education for decades, or even centuries. Rather, the task for the teacher is to take the infinitesimal slice of available information that can actually be used in the classroom and find some way to bring students into living connection with it. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The single thing children suffer from most in today's society is the lack of close relationships with caring adult mentors. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Given how many hours a day children pursue mediated experience through cinema screens, television screens, and video game screens, it hardly makes sense to add a computer screen to the mix while saying reassuringly, "Let's make sure the children use it in a balanced way". -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Computer labs have been displacing art, music, craft, and physical education classes. Does anyone pretend to have shown that the exchange is beneficial? -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Money going toward computers could have been used for reducing class size. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The huge amounts of time teachers are having to spend learning to adapt their curriculum to the computer and themselves to the latest software could have been devoted to a livelier understanding of the subjects they teach. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Children, whose developing bodies need vigorous and varied physical activity, already spend too much sedentary time in cars, classrooms, and in front of televisions, contributing to an epidemic of obesity, among other things. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The claim that computers can stimulate kids, if true, hardly points to the decisive need for an overstimulated and hyperactive generation. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The quality of kids' play is correlated with their later cognitive, aesthetic, and social skills. There is no demonstrated connection between these skills and early computer use. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Studies (by Louise Chawla and others) have shown that naturalists, ecologists, and environmental activists, together with teachers in these fields, have had, more than most people, childhood experiences in wild places with adult mentors. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ If it's impossible to love mankind without loving the people around you, it's also impossible for computer-wielding children to love the Amazon rain forest, African wildlife, and the environment in general without learning to love the bits of nature immediately around them in yard, street, and park. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Children are more and more subject to artificial, disconnected, and chaotic environments, making it hard for them to find a stable ground for their lives in the world -- as illustrated by the boy who was taken to the aquarium and then asked, "Is this real reality or virtual reality?" -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Internet-based multicultural programs in our schools are often more a celebration of electronic monoculture triumphant than of the invisible local cultures that technology is so efficiently marginalizing. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Literacy depends much more deeply upon the child's powers of attention, language-use skills, imagination, and questioning strategies than it does on the alphabet-sound and word drills computers are so often used for. We can reasonably ask whether the drills weaken the more fundamental capacities. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ For most people the computer, whether inside the classroom or outside, stands as an image of the human mind. But, for all its increasing presence in the lives of children, it presents an extremely one-sided, limiting, and distorted image of the mind. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Using the computer without understanding it encourages children to defer to it inappropriately, as when many say the computer never makes mistakes and is therefore more authoritative than their teacher. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Teaching the principles of computation, in any full sense, is best deferred until secondary school. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Secondary schools are widely failing in their responsibility to teach students about digital technologies. They substitute computer use and online experience for an understanding of the technology. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Parents pushing for computer use in schools are often driven by fears for their child's employability and by an undue respect for the computer as a glamorous emblem of technical expertise. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Pressure to use computers in the classroom comes from the massively funded marketing arms of high-tech corporations, who are perfectly happy for the public educational system to condition the interests and buying habits of their future customers and oversee the vocational training of their future employees. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Elementary schools should not be vocational training centers. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The task of schools is to encourage the development of children who can decide what sorts of jobs are worth having in the coming century, not to train children to fit whatever jobs the system happens to crank out. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ A great deal of computer-based learning turns out to be more about creating nifty computer effects than about learning the subject at hand. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The computer is often used as a gimmick to lend a touch of glamor or excitement to a subject. Why is this artificial glamorization more appealing than making the subject itself exciting -- something good teachers have no difficulty doing? -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ As computer exposure among the young increases, the glamor factor is progressively losing its effectiveness. Therefore we see escalating competition among web sites and software makers to deliver novel entertainment value, much as we have seen in television and cinema. Indeed, turning children over to the computer for their education is much like turning them over to television. Babysitters have long appreciated the convenience of this. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ More and more children's web sites have the same purpose as Saturday morning television: to keep children glued to the screen until they see the next commercial -- a task on which vastly more psychological expertise is brought to bear than is ever available to schools pursuing the child's inner development. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Parents who are impressed that their tube-bound kids are so focused should ask themselves whether "focused" means "mesmerized". -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The computer has been embraced as an all-purpose answer without the educational problems for which it is the needed answer ever having been articulated -- and in willful ignorance of all the problems the computer itself introduces. -- Stephen L. Talbott }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I imagine the security department at Microsoft consists of an office full of ringing telephones, with a single operator, who has his fingers stuck in his ears, and is singing the La-La song. -- Tim Tyler http://timtyler.org/ tim@tt1.org }; push @cute_siggies, q{ A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [about "Legally Blonde"] of all the ways it could have gone, proving that intellectualism can win out over weapons-grade stupidity ... but no! -- Bobby Parker }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Nothing anti-Microsoft here. I just wouldn't consider Windows for any safety-critical purpose, any more than I would use Tupperware to ladle molten steel. -- Tom Welsh }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Whether strength of body or of mind, or wisdom, or virtue, are found in proportion to the power or wealth of a man is a question fit perhaps to be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but highly unbecoming to reasonable and free men in search of the truth. -- Rousseau }; push @cute_siggies, q{ We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems --John W. Gardner }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The belief that humanity will "rise above its own faults" is as reasonable as the belief that a prime number will suddenly sprout factors. -- ptsc }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Now you've done it. As soon as you introduce the Equivalence Principle you undermine the intelligibility of special relativity, as Einstein clearly perceived around 1907. This was Einstein's best moment, having won attention and honors for his theory of special relativity, he was immediately willing to challenge and deconstruct his own theory, discarding global Lorentz invariance, to seek whatever was necessary to make a theory consistent with the Equivalence Principle. (As Wilde said, "The witty contradict other people; the wise contradict themselves".) -- Albro Smith(?) http://www.mathpages.com/home/albro/albro19.htm }; push @cute_siggies, q{ When you don't understand something, the problem is most likely with you and not the system. Don't assume everything is wrong just because you can't understand it. Go ahead and ask questions, that's what the newsgroup is here for. But ... there are no fundamental errors being taught .... When your understanding seems at odds with what is taught, ask for help in figuring out why your understanding is wrong. -- Mensanator }; push @cute_siggies, q{ So it is not wonderful that Are the priest had good information about ancient events both here in Iceland, and abroad, being a man anxious for information, intelligent and of excellent memory, and having besides learned much from old intelligent persons. But the songs seem to me most reliable if they are sung correctly, and judiciously interpreted. -- Snorri Sturluson, (c. 1179 - 1241), intro to his _Heimskringla_ }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I've seen this style before. No matter how clear the answer, OP never gets it, but goes on to elaborate endlessly his fixation. -- William Elliot }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." -- Edmund Burke }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. -- Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ There were the Scots Who kept the Sabbath And everything else they could lay their hands on. Then there were the Welsh Who prayed on their knees and their neighbors. Thirdly there were the Irish Who never knew what they wanted But were willing to fight for it anyway. Lastly there were the English Who considered themselves a self-made nation Thus relieving the Almighty of a dreadful responsibility. -- Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you." -- Rita Mae Brown }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Panic instructions: When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried. -- Mark Cockrell }; push @cute_siggies, q{ "...Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that's horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our _informed_ opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing. It's just bibble-babble...." -- Harlan Ellison }; push @cute_siggies, q{ a poem is never finished, merely abandoned -- Lawrence Schimel http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/schimel6.shtml }; push @cute_siggies, q{ College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity. -- H. L. Mencken }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The world wouldn't be In such a snarl If Marx had been Groucho Instead of Karl. -- Yves Bodson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ and in conclusion before we close: If "insanity" is being defined as: "repeating the same behavior despite consistently obtaining the same undesirable results", then "no one ever won a medal for being in the audience". Which could relate to the second law of thermodynamics, which can be summarized as "you can't get something for nothing." -- Yves Bodson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ This led us to consider that "Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common." as said Leroy "Satchel" Paige -- Yves Bodson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Then listen to Mark Twain who once advised: "blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, does not proceed to prove it." -- Yves Bodson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ As great as the Search is for the Truth, The Supply always seems to exceed the Demand. -- author unknown }; push @cute_siggies, q{ There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don't. -- Luke Tulkas (luke_tulkas@hotmail.com) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ obstupidlittledisclaimer ... none of the above words are intended to indicate that i do not love elspeth at web tv dot net with every fiber of my socks -- Anonymous (mplninetwentyfive@juno.com) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ One of my favorite quotes is from a woman on rec.boats about 10 years ago: "I don't much care for sailing... it's too much like my wedding night. 90% boredome and 10% pure terror." -- "Steven K. Roberts" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Mosher's Law of Software Engineering: Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job. -- from a Unix fortune() cookie. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure. -- Albert Einstein }; push @cute_siggies, q{ [#1 among quotes that read _far_ better taken out of context:] i prefer not to get twigs in my underwear -- Ace Lightning, }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to avoid responsibility with? -- from a Unix fortune() cookie }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I think most expert systems should be referred to as "that-guy-in-the-corner-who-everyone-hates- but-can-answer-the-weirdest-questions systems". Or more succinctly, "nerd systems". -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Every few months we hear rumors of land. Nobody believes the fish any more. They're just messing with us. -- Bill Gibson }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. -- Pooh-Bah, "The Mikado", Gilbert & Sullivan }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. -- Dick Brandon, found in a Unix fortune cookie. }; push @cute_siggies, q{ As is well known to those versed in the state-of-the-art, Murphy's Law states that "If anything can go wrong, it will." Or, to state it in more exact mathematical form: 1 + 1 = 2 (1) where "=" is the mathematical symbol for "hardly ever". -- "jaelle" }; push @cute_siggies, q{ I am no longer a potato. -- Julian Waldby, }; push @cute_siggies, q{ Libraries are not made, they grow. -- Augustine Birrell (1850-1933) }; push @cute_siggies, q{ The Kraken Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides; above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous grot and secret cell Unnumber'd and enormous polypi Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. There he hath lain for a