Rick Moen's .signature archive
Archivist's Note: This archive is riddled with technical in-jokes, and
you're on your own for most, but one should be explained: The Usenet
group "alt.sysadmin.recovery", source of some quotations below, is also
denoted by the abbreviations "a.s.r." and "ASR", as "Scary Devil Monastery"
(an anagram variant), and by extension as simply "The Monastery".
I've also provided explanations for some of the others. (For the
remainder, you can figure them out with not much effort. Or maybe
for you they're just not funny, or You Had to Be There.)
The annotation "McQ! (4x80)" is a nod to the McQuary Limit -- named for George
McQuary -- the Internet-courtesy rule of thumb about .signature blocks whose
gist is: Kindly manage to be witty without exceeding four 80-column lines,
or prepare to be mocked mercilessly on alt.fan.warlord and elsewhere.
Another key part of the Internet .signature block standard (for .signature
blocks at the bottom of e-mails and Usenet netnews articles, which is what
these are) is the required leading delimiter: two flush-left hyphens
followed by a space character and a hard return. Each entry below starts
with that delimiter.
--
Cheers, A post is just a post
Rick Moen My admin will deny.
rick@linuxmafia.com The usual disclaimers apply
McQ! (4x80) As news spools by.
--
Cheers, DISCLAIMER: I didn't do it.
Rick Moen You can't prove it. Nobody
rick@linuxmafia.com saw me. The sheep are lying.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The X11 approach to device independence is
Rick Moen to treat everything like a MicroVAX on acid.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Don Hopkins, _The UNIX Hater's Handbook_
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The only good goth is a shoggoth...."
Rick Moen -- Alistair J.R. Young, in r.a.sf.w.r-j
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, (Regarding "In God we trust":) "Don't ask me how you set the
Rick Moen trust-level of a god." "At a PGP signing party?"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Per Leijonhufvud & Peter de Silva, in ASR
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "You have acquired a scroll entitled 'irk gleknow mizk'(n).--More--
Rick Moen This is an IBM Manual scroll.--More__
rick@linuxmafia.com You are permanently confused." -- ADOM (a roguelike game)
McQ! (4x80)
--
This message falsely claims to have been scanned for viruses with F-Secure
Anti-Virus for Microsoft Exchange and to have been found clean.
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Making fun of self-promoting .signature blocks
appended by commercial antimalware products with the effect of saying
"Please trust me because I claim to be trustworthy. What could possibly
go wrong?")
--
Cheers, "A Discordian is a Taoist with a very strange sense of humour
Rick Moen and the inability to sit still."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Rabbi Kwan Chi Sun Lieberwitz, _Jews for Buddha Cabal_
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Evolution: Life's a niche, and then you die.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Not only does the English language borrow from other languages,
Rick Moen it sometimes chases them through dark alleys, hits them over the
rick@linuxmafia.com head, and goes through their pockets." -- Eddy Peter
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "This is mad, egotistical, sick, twisted, and stretches the bounds of
Rick Moen good taste right off the tongue, past the uvula, and down around
rick@linuxmafia.com the duodenum. It has other merits, but that should
McQ! (4x80) indicate positive interest." -- The Cube, www.forum3000.org
(Archivist's Note: Sadly, the forum3000.org site vanished in 2002 and the
domain has hosted a commercial Japanese-language site since around 2011.
But it was a Dadaist masterpiece, with dialogues and monologues
involving characters from reality and fiction. The Cube was a mainframe
computer given to making philosophical utterances. See archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020413104414/http://xalton.forum2000.org:80/matrix/forum_hof_questions)
--
Cheers, "Normal? Normal is a setting on my dryer."
Rick Moen -- heard at BayCon 2001, http://www.baycon.org/
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Facta tua Restitueri ad Status Pristinus Eius.
Rick Moen (May your data be restored to
rick@linuxmafia.com its original pristine condition.)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Quantum materiae materietur marmota
Rick Moen monax si marmota possit materiari?
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Learning Java has been a slow and tortuous process for me. Every
Rick Moen few minutes, I start screaming 'No, you fools!' and have to go
rick@linuxmafia.com read something from _Structure and Interpretation of
McQ! (4x80) Computer Programs_ to de-stress." -- The Cube, www.forum3000.org
--
"Is it not the beauty of an asynchronous form of discussion that one can go and
make cups of tea, floss the cat, fluff the geraniums, open the kitchen window
and scream out it with operatic force, volume, and decorum, and then return to
the vexed glowing letters calmer of mind and soul?" -- The Cube, forum3000.org
--
Cheers, I have a mind like a steel trap.
Rick Moen Rusty, and illegal in thirty-seven states.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is someone else's doxy."
Rick Moen -- William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester (1698-1779)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "All my life, I wanted to _be_ someone. I guess I should have
Rick Moen been more specific." -- Jane Wagner
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Yes, I _am_ an agent of Satan,
Rick Moen but my duties are largely ceremonial.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "He was clearly a man of many qualities, even if most of them
Rick Moen were bad ones." -- Douglas Adams, describing Zaphod Beeblebrox
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Get the facts first. You can distort them later."
Rick Moen -- Mark Twain
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental,
Rick Moen and should not be construed."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen YOU! Out of the gene pool.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "To summarize the summary of the summary:
Rick Moen People are a problem."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Douglas Adams
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "He who hesitates is frost."
Rick Moen -- Inuit proverb
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Where I come from, there's nothing in the 'middle of the road'
Rick Moen but a yellow line and dead armadillos."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem."
Rick Moen -- William of Ockham (attr.)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: I try to be scrupulous about author
attributions, including where, as here, an author didn't exactly say the
exact phrase, but the formulation was nonetheless retroactively ettributed
to him/her. To be picky, this exact wording is properly credited to
Irish Franciscan philosopher John Punch, three centuries later, but the
indicated sentiment is genuinely that of English scholastic philosopher
William of Ockham, whose writings also included numerous extremely similar
sentences such as "Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate":
Plurality must never be posited without necessity.)
--
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants." (Isaac Newton) "If I have not seen as far as others, it
is because giants were standing on my shoulders." (Hal Abelson, quoting Jeff
Goll) "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet." (Brian K. Reed)
--
Cheers, Open-source SourceForge retakes the lead:
Rick Moen http://gforge.org/ Thank you, Tim Perdue.
rick@linuxmafia.com
(Archivist's Note: For context, Perdue had been the original architect
of the SourceForge codebase, which was then taken proprietary by his
employer in 2002. After he was laid off, he cleaned up the
pre-proprietary codebase and released it, as a clearly superior
alternative, renamed to "GForge" for trademark reasons. This .signature
of mine aimed to give Perdue's project a small mindshare boost. Since
that happened, the active open source version departed from the GForge
effort and is now FusionForge. N.B.: Timothy Dean Perdue succumbed to
colon cancer on September 16, 2011, aged 37.)
--
Cheers, I once successfully declined a departmental retreat,
Rick Moen saying that on that day I planned instead to advance.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Alan J. Rosenthal, in The Monastery
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, I have /usr/sbin/coffee mounted from /dev/mug right now,
Rick Moen and you can't have it. Oh no, I just tried to seek past
rick@linuxmafia.com end-of-beverage. *sigh* -- Graham Reed, in The Monastery
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Skud: Real Programmers don't use Python.
Rick Moen Thorfinn: Real Programmers don't use *whitespace*.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "My file system's got no nodes!"
Rick Moen "How does it shell?"
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen "vi is my shepherd; I shall not font."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Psalm 0.1 beta
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A: No.
Rick Moen Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen This .signature intentionally left blank.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, I've been suffering death by PowerPoint, recently.
Rick Moen -- Huw Davies
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Ceterum censeo, Caldera delenda est.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Context is the scurrilous and ultimately
unsuccessful lawsuit by The SCO Group, Inc., immediately after it
abandoned its longtime name Caldera Systems, Inc., against various
Linux-using companies on the outrageous pretext of claiming that the
Linux kernel was not an original work but rather violated copyrights on
historical Unix, over which SCO Group né Caldera (falsely) claimed to have
ownership rights. SCO Group later went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy,
was dismembered, and, as of this writing (2017) has substantively ceased
to exist.
The gibe in the .signature block involved parodying Cato the Elder's
repeatedly ending speeches in the Roman Senate with the phrase
"Ceterum censeo, Carthago delenda est", meaning "Furthermore, I
consider that Carthage must be destroyed." Technically, it is more
likely Cato used the pedantically-correct-Latin variant "Ceterum censeo,
Carthaginem esse delendam", for whatever that's worth, but the former
and rather more sonorous rendition is how it is widely quoted.)
--
Cheers, First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, for
Rick Moen verbing weirds language. Then, they arrival for the nouns
rick@linuxmafia.com and I speech nothing, for I no verbs. - Peter Ellis
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Wall Street has all the emotional stability of a
Rick Moen thirteen-year-old girl. -- Louis Rukeyser
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they'll
Rick moen fall all over each other trying to sell us the rope.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- V.I. Lenin
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Dogs may have kept us company on the hunt, but it was
Rick Moen the cats who insisted we invent houses and discover fire.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Khiem Tran
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Accordions don't play Lady of Spain;
Rick Moen _people_ play Lady of Spain.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Ah, September, when the sysadmins turn colors
Rick Moen and fall off the trees....
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Dave Van Domelen
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The other day, upon the stair,
Rick Moen I met a man who wasn't there.
rick@linuxmafia.com He wasn't there again today;
McQ! (4x80) I think he's from the CIA.
Archivist's Note: Nobody seems to be able to track down the exact
reference, but it's widely agreed that this jape originated in Mad magazine
in the middle 1970s at the time of the Church Commission Congressional
hearings into misconduct by US intelligence agencies. As such, it's
actually a parody of a much older & longer semi-humourous poem, "Antigonish",
that American educator and Poet William Hughes Mearns wrote in 1899(!)
as part of an amateur dramatic production called _The Psyco-ed_ that
Mearns wrote while attending Harvard. It probably entered the public
mainstream only after Mearns reprinted it in his _New York World_ column
in 1922.
The above version someone's mashup of the first two lines from Mearns's
original (rewriting the first few words) with the punchline closing
couplet from Mad magazine. Mad's version was:
There was a man upon the stair
When I looked back, he wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I think he's from the CIA.
I confess I think the unknown reviser improved on Mad's wording.)
--
Cheers, * Contributing Editor, Linux Gazette *
Rick Moen -*- See the Linux Gazette in its new home: -*-
rick@linuxmafia.com <http://linuxgazette.net/>
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: This .signature dates back to when SSC, Inc., the
Gazette's one-time Web host, decided it owned the periodical's name and
obliged the magazine's staff to move to a new domain hosted elsewhere.
However, please see also:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/kicking.html#linuxgazette)
--
Cheers, "A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line, today. The results
Rick Moen blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Steel City News
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "This is Unix. Stop acting so helpless."
Rick Moen -- D.J. Bernstein
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Since the Dan Bernstein programmer cult seemed to
regard me as their special devil figure for several decades, because of
my posted critiques stating why I personally preferred not to use his
software, it seemed fun to rile them up by quoting the gentleman in
public. Besides, Dan made a perfectly good and telling point, so I'm
delighted to quote him.)
--
Cheers, No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message.
Rick Moen We do concede, though, that a large number of electrons
rick@linuxmafia.com were terribly inconvenienced.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, My grandparents went to a planet with no bilateral
Rick Moen symmetry, and all I got was this lousy F-shirt.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Never criticize anybody until you have walked a mile
Rick Moen in their shoes, because by that time you will be a
rick@linuxmafia.com mile away and have their shoes. -- Brian Servis
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Never anger a bard, for your name sounds funny and
Rick Moen scans to many popular songs.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Stephen Savitzky
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "< > Kernel support for JAVA binaries (obsolete) (NEW)"
Rick Moen -- Linux kernel v2.2.19 configuration
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, There are only 10 types of people in this world --
Rick Moen those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who
Rick Moen know ternary, those who don't, and those who are now
rick@linuxmafia.com looking for their dictionaries. -- Ron Fabre
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, There are 10 types of people in this world, those who know quaternary,
Rick Moen those who only recently figured out Ron Fabre's "ternary" .sig, those
McQ! (4x80) who're completely confused, and those who hate self-referential jokes.
--
Cheers, "Plus ça change...."
Rick Moen http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/pictures/1861-versus-2004.jpeg"
rick@linuxmafia.com P.S.: http://www.sorryeverybody.com/gallery/1/
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: There's an art to making comments on contemporary
politics in .signature blocks. One wants to be oblique enough to avoid
the in-your-face effect, which is tacky and self-indulgent, and it helps
to make a good-faith effort to be at least a little amusing. Although
Internet convention gives commenters carte blanche to use their
.signature space for personal expression, it's considered bad form to
deliberately provoke emotional overreaction, so some restraint and
subtlety is generally advisable.)
--
Virtual Regards,
Rick Moen
Sysimperator, dominus regis deusque machinarum.
rick@linuxmafia.com
--
Cheers, Hardware: The part you kick.
Rick Moen Software: The part you boot.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Ita erat quando hic adveni.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Frater Magnus vos spectat.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Katrina's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence
Rick Moen is indistinguishable from malice.
rick@linuxmafia.com (coinage attrib. to Paul Ciszek)
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Topical to 2005's botched government response to the
catastrophic damage Hurricane Katrina left all along the Gulf Coast from
central Florida to Texas, but most strikingly and infamously in almost totally
devastated New Orleans.)
--
Cheers, "Due to circumstances beyond our control, we regret to
Rick Moen inform you that circumstances are beyond our control."
rick@linuxmafia.com --Paul Benoit
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Chip Salzenberg: "Usenet is not a right."
Rick Moen Edward Vielmetti: "Usenet is a right, a left, a jab,
rick@linuxmafia.com and a sharp uppercut to the jaw.
McQ! (4x80) The postman hits! You have new mail."
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Support your local medical examiner: Die strangely.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen "Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Elizabeth Tudor
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: How cool is it to quote, in an Internet .signature block,
one of the most legendary of ruling British monarchs, an unparalleled
practical politician, a keen mind, and the figure who helped make the
word "Elizabethan" near-synonymous with "Golden Age"? I do love living
in the future.)
--
Cheers, Now, it's time to hack the real world, and let other
Rick Moen people write Web sites about it.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Donald B. Marti
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, $n=99;sub b{"$n bottle${[s=>]}[$n==1] of beer"}
Rick Moen print$b=b, $w=' on the wall',
rick@linuxmafia.com ",$b! Take one down, pass it around, ",b($n--),"$w! "while$n
McQ! (4x80) -- Ben Okopnik
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Recedite, plebes! Gero rem Imperialem!
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Clamo, clamatis, omnes clamamus pro glace lactis.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis,
Rick Moen ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Tua mater tam antiquior ut linguam Latine loquatur.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar?
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A positive attitude will not solve all your problems, but it will
Rick Moen annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. -- Herm Albright
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "What a pity [Standard Oil exec] H. H. Rogers's money is tainted."
Rick Moen -- some commentator of the day "It's twice tainted:
rick@linuxmafia.com 'Tain't yours, and 'tain't mine." -- Mark Twain, replying.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, I have yet to see any problem, however complicated,
Rick Moen that, when you looked at it in the right way, did
rick@linuxmafia.com not become still more complicated. -- Poul Anderson
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Always remember: Clones are people two!
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The box said "Windows 95, Windows NT
Rick Moen 4.0, or better", so I installed Linux.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, For good netiquette,
Rick Moen be wise and choose a four-line
rick@linuxmafia.com .sig (haiku is good).
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, My pid is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9
Rick Moen my parent process. Prepare to vi.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, When encryption is outlawed,
Rick Moen only outlaws will xr2d3fsxd df#$%xx`
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The Viking's Reminder:
Rick Moen Pillage first, _then_ burn.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The Technical Support Credo:
Rick Moen Remember, there _are_ no stupid questions,
rick@linuxmafia.com only stupid people asking questions.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Linux: Good, fast, AND cheap.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM!
Rick Moen SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM!
rick@linuxmafia.com (_Nobody_ expects the Spammish Repetition!)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Everything is gone;
Rick Moen Your life's work has been destroyed.
rick@linuxmafia.com Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
McQ! (4x80) -- David Carlson (winner, haiku error message contest)
--
May those that love us love us; and those that don't love us, may
God turn their hearts; and if he doesn't turn their hearts, may
he turn their ankles so we'll know them by their limping.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Heedless of grammar, they all cried 'It's him!'"
Rick Moen -- R.H. Barham, _Misadventure at Margate_
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Disclaimer -- These opiini^H^H damn! ^H^H ^Q ^[ .... :w : :wq :wq!
Rick Moen ^d ^X ^? exit X Q ^C ^? :quitbye CtrlAltDel ~~q :~q logout save/quit
rick@linu :!QUIT ^[zz ^[ZZZZZZ ^vi man vi ^@ ^L ^[c ^# ^E ^X ^I ^T ? help
xmafia.com helpquit ^D ^d !! man help ^C ^c :e! help exit ?Quit ?q CtrlShftDel
--
Cheers, "Ceterum censeo Linux propaganda est."
Rick Moen -- Seth David Schoen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I am the very model of a modern Unix sysadmin,
Rick Moen I've information relevant to programs in slash usr bin,
rick@linuxmafia.com I know the tricks of emacs and the vi bugs historical,
McQ! (4x80) From a to ZZ upper case, in order categorical." H. Hahn
--
Cheers, Higgledy-Piggledy / Kibo Ubiquitous,
Rick Moen Greps for his name in the / Happynet spool.
rick@linuxmafia.com Interdimensional / Cyberspace deity:
McQ! (4x80) Didaktyliaios / Dada is cool. -- Lewis Stiller
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen ROMANI, ITE DOMVM!
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "All power is delightful, but absolute power
Rick Moen is absolutely delightful." - Kenneth Tynan
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Linux: It is now safe to turn on your computer.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The cynics among us might say: "We laugh,
Rick Moen monkeyboys -- Linux IS the mainstream UNIX now!
rick@linuxmafia.com MuaHaHaHa!" but that would be rude. -- Jim Dennis
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Founding member of the Hyphenation Society, a grassroots-based,
Rick Moen not-for-profit, locally-owned-and-operated, cooperatively-managed,
rick@linuxmafia.com modern-American-English-usage-improvement association.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen This space for rant.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "By reading this sentence, you agree to be bound by the
Rick Moen terms of the Internet Protocol, version 4, or, at your
rick@linuxmafia.com option, any later version." -- Seth David Schoen
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Ban the Bomb.
rick@linuxmafia.com Save the world for conventional warfare.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Why, yes, _of course_ I'm an elitist.
Rick Moen Isn't everyone?
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Potestatem capite!
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Emacs is a decent operating system,
rick@linuxmafia.com but it still lacks a good text editor.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A host is a host, from coast to coast.
Rick Moen And nobody talks to a host that's close,
rick@linuxmafia.com Unless the host that isn't close is busy, hung, or dead.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I'd say it's latke-esque. Sort of like
Rick Moen Kafka-esque, only less depressing."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Deirdre Saoirse Moen
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Linux for Intel: Party like it's 2037!
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Dates back to when "Intel" got assumed by default to
mean IA32. It turns out, all 32-bit Unixes will start having
software failures attributable to 32-bit signed integers rolling over
on Jan 19, 2038, at 3:14:07AM GMT, with a cascade of problems starting
to occur well before that.)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Bu^so^stopu min per kulero.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: It's an extremely colloquial phrase, rendered into
Esperanto. If you really want to know, you can look it up.)
--
Cheers, "Linux means never having to delete your love mail."
Rick Moen -- Don Marti
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Smirking at the ILOVEYOU network worm for MS-Windows.)
--
Cheers, "The front line of defense against such sophisticated
Rick Moen viruses is a continually evolving computer operating
rick@linuxmafia.com system that attracts the efforts of eager software
McQ! (4x80) developers." -- Bill Gates
--
Cheers, It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
Rick Moen It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
rick@ The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
linuxmafia.com It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
(Archivist's Note: One of many parodies of the Litany against Fear
in Frank Herbert's novel Dune.)
--
Cheers, If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ gives you enough
Rick Moen to bind and gag your neighbourhood, rig the sails on a small ship,
rick@linuxmafia.com and still have enough to hang yourself from the yardarm.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "On the face of it, Microsoft complaining about the source license
Rick Moen used by Linux is like the event horizon calling the kettle black."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Adam Barr, former Microsoft Corp. programmer
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Fac me cocleario vomere.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Never ask a sysadmin "What's up?"
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Not using Microsoft products is like being a non-smoker
Rick Moen 40 or 50 years ago: You can choose not to smoke, yourself,
rick@linuxmafia.com but it's hard to avoid second-hand smoke." -- M. Tiemann
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Java is COBOL 2.0."
Rick Moen -- Deirdre Saoirse Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Some Java fanciers assume Deirdre was just
trolling them for liking the language, but there is a functional
similarity in that both languages have a niche in business-transaction
batch-processing, in business, finance, and administrative systems
used by companies and governments. Thus, they thrive in the same
specialties.)
--
Cheers, "Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse."
Rick Moen -- D. Gale
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Right to keep and bear
Rick Moen Haiku shall not be abridged
rick@linuxmafia.com Or denied. So there.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "That scruffy beard... those suspenders... that smug ex-
Rick Moen pression.... You're one of those condescending Unix users!"
rick@linuxmafia.com "Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a real computer."
McQ! (4x80) -- Dilbert
--
Cheers, Bad Unabomber!
Rick Moen Blowing people all to hell.
rick@linuxmafia.com Do you take requests?
McQ! (4x80) -- Unabomber Haiku Contest, CyberLaw mailing list
--
Cheers, "Open your present...."
Rick Moen "No, you open your present...."
rick@linuxmafia.com Kaczinski Christmas.
McQ! (4x80) -- Unabomber Haiku Contest, CyberLaw mailing list
--
Cheers, "Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm
Rick Moen for a day. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm
rick@linuxmafia.com for the rest of his life." -- John A. Hrastar
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Long ago, there lived a creature with a
Rick Moen voice like a vacuum cleaner. We know little
rick@linuxmafia.com about it, but we do know that it ate cats.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Look at Rick: He has Whitfield Diffie's key
Rick Moen and John Gilmore's brain."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Chris di Bona
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: It might ruin the surreal effect of that quotation
to provide context, but: At the time, I was in a restaurant, handling
John Gilmore's PDA for some reason, and about to drive Whitfield
Diffie's car home for him, for which reason I had Diffie's car key.)
--
Cheers, "Besides, Debian runs Web sites, Red Hat runs
Rick Moen Quake, and Windows runs Half-Life."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Bryce Kerley (on Slashdot)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Reality is not optional."
Rick Moen -- Thomas Sowell
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us
Rick Moen in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Artemus Ward (1834-67), U.S. journalist
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a
Rick Moen little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider
rick@linuxmafia.com price only are this man's lawful prey." - J. Ruskin (attr.)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Rehab is for quitters.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Before enlightenment, caffeine.
Rick Moen After enlightenment, caffeine.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Re-elect Gore in '08.
Rick Moen http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/misc/gorespeech.html
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Originally, this was the somewhat more melodic
phrase "Re-elect Gore in '04", but passage of time and loss of euphony
should not stand in the way of a good troll. It would have been good to
find a pithy way to say "What do you mean, rigged election? The man won
by a clear 5-4 majority!", but I think I missed my window of opportunity.)
--
Cheers, We write precisely We say exactly
Rick Moen Since such is our habit in How to do a thing or how
rick@linuxmafia.com Talking to machines; Every detail works.
Excerpt from Prof. Touretzky's decss-haiku.txt @ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst
(Archivist's Note: During the Hollywood entertainment industry's
ill-starred legal effort to stamp out the open source "DeCSS" program,
written mostly by Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen to decrypt the
Content Scramble System (CSS) on movie DVDs so they could be played on
open source operating systems, Prof. Touretzky was one of many public
figures who needled the Hollywood powers with the unpalatable fact that,
in order to truly stamp out DeCSS, they'd need to convince courts to
ban it in all forms including literary variants such as his own
decss-haiku.txt, a complete description of the DeCSS algorithm written
entirely in a series of several hundred haiku poems. Touretsky accumulated,
in fact, an entire gallery of similar literary implementations, pointing
out the absurdity of the court decision decreeing that code isn't eligible
for First Amendment protection on grounds of lacking the expressive nature
of protected speech.
Touretsky and other contributors knew that Hollywood would flinch
against trying to prosecute univesity professors for writing
poetry. Their point about the court decision's absurdity was duly made,
and Hollywood abandoned the anti-DeCSS effort in the face of near-universal
mockery and clever sabotage such as Internet propagation of a "decoy" DeCSS
codebase -- an effort to draw misdirected legal threats and chew up
Hollywood attorney billing fees -- that merely strips Cascading Style Sheets
from HTML, but has nothing to do with the DVD Content Scramble System.)
--
Cheers, Microsoft Corporation Gandhi-o-meter, revision 2001-05-03 beta01.
Rick Moen "They ignore you." "They laugh at you." "They fight you." "You win."
rick@linuxmafia.com WE ARE HERE.>> ^^^^^^^^^^
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Wry comment on Microsoft Corporation's then-current
series of rather nasty comments, starting in 1998, about Linux
and open source, against which MS alternatives the firm's usual armamentarium
had proven ineffective. In other words, this .signature commented on
Microsoft's startlingly impassioned, full-on propaganda war against what at
the time was an underfunded and almost guerrilla-like software movement.
This .signature has been rendered pretty much just a historical artifact
by the fact that, by the late 2000s, Linux and open source in fact won,
in the sense that they became accepted as standard infrastructure and
have a ubiquitous presence, including at Microsoft, which long ago ended
the propaganda war. If I were to resume using this .signature, I could
certainly reasonably move the arrows to "You win", but Linux and
open source having done so is such a "done deal" that it's no longer
perceived as worth talking about.)
--
Cheers, Bah humbug. Shop late.
Rick Moen Happy unChristmas.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: The Christmas season has bad associations for me, for
family and personal historical reasons, but the details are not at all
happy to relate, and I have no desire to rain on other people's good
cheer, so this .signature is essentially a private joke for me and
people who know me well.)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen FORTH heart if honk then.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The genius of you Americans is that you never make
Rick Moen clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves
rick@linuxmafia.com that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be
McQ! (4x80) something to them that we are missing. --Gamel Abdel Nasser
(Archivist's Note: I feel entirely free to tell jokes at the expense of
Americans because I am one, likewise about Scandinavian ethnicity
for similar reasons. In a corporate context, I was once advised that I
should stop telling the joke about how my Tante Bjorg warned me to never
trust as Scandinavian -- "tante" being Norwegian for "aunt" and Bjorg
being my Norwegian-immigrant aunt's ludicrously ethnic given name -- on
grounds that someone might complain, but this is not an employment
context, nei?)
--
Cheers, "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first
Rick Moen woman she meets, and then teams up with three complete strangers
rick@linuxmafia.com to kill again." -- Rick Polito's That TV Guy column,
McQ! (4x80) describing the movie _The Wizard of Oz_
--
Cheers, "I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate
Rick Moen those who do. And, for the people who like country music,
rick@linuxmafia.com denigrate means 'put down'." -- Bob Newhart
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Ever wonder why the _same people_
Rick Moen make up _all_ the conspiracy theories?
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, You can't lick the system -- but you can certainly
Rick Moen give it a damned good fondling....
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I used to be on the border of insanity. However, due
Rick Moen to pressing political concerns, I recently had to invade."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Kurt Montandon, in r.a.sf.w.r-j
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Errors have been made. Others will be blamed.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Cthulhu loves me, this I know; because the High Priests tell me so!
Rick Moen He won't eat me, no, not yet. He's my Elder God, dank and wet!"
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Chaos, panic, & disorder - my work here is done.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Best "In coming here today, you demonstrate, together with many others
Regards, who did not come, that the people truly desire peace and oppose
Rick M. violence. Violence erodes the basis of Israeli democracy. It must
be condemned and isolated." -- Yitzhak Rabin, 4 Nov 95 (last speech)
(Archivist's Note: In case the supreme irony is lost on people, it helps
to be aware that Prime Minister Rabin was murdered a few seconds after he made
that statement.)
--
Cheers, "There's a sucker born every minute. eBay is the delivery room."
Rick Moen -- David Crowe
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "In 1993, the World-Wide Web was an infosystem based on hypertext.
Rick Moen In 1994, the World-Wide Web was an infosystem based on hype."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Lars Aronsson
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The shortest distance between two puns is a straightline.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Remember: The day after tomorrow is the third day
Rick Moen of the rest of your life.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Age, baro, fac ut gaudeam.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Don't use Outlook. Outlook is really just a security
Rick Moen hole with a small e-mail client attached to it."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Brian Trosko in r.a.sf.w.r-j
McQ! (4x80)
--
<BLINK>Resize your browser so the following line touches both margins!</BLINK>
<HR WIDTH="75%">
Best Regards, Rick Moen, rick@linuxmafia.com
--
Cheers, find / -user your -name base -print | xargs chown us:us
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, kill -9 them all.
Rick Moen Let init sort it out.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Send a policeman, and have it arrested."
Rick Moen -- Otto von Bismarck, when asked what he
rick@linuxmafia.com would do if the British Army landed.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense
Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are.
rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Emacs is a good operating system, but I prefer Linux.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me spread.
Hi!p I'm a .signature spread virus! Copy into your ~/.signature to help me
Hilp I'm .sign turepread virus! into your ~/.signature! help me! Copy
Help I'm traped in your ~/signature help me! -- Joe Slater
--
Cheers, "Azathoth need not be present to win."
Rick Moen -- Charles O. Baucum, Jr.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "We're sorry; you have reached an imaginary number.
Rick Moen Please rotate your 'phone ninety degrees and try again."
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Live Faust, die Jung.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Please return all dogmas to their orthodox positions."
Rick Moen -- Brad Johnson, in r.a.sf.w.r-j
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"
Rick Moen -- Steven Wright
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Paranoia is the delusion that your enemies are organised.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A good man has few enemies; a ruthless man has none.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "That article and its poster have been cancelled."
Rick Moen -- David B. O'Donnel, sysadmin for America Online
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by
Rick Moen Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of
rick@linux Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and
mafia.com Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that. -- Bill Hammel
(Archivist's Note: I have to say, as a Viking-descendant who grew up speaking
British English, and has a fascination with history and languages, that
Mr. Hammel's pithy summary of my native language's origins is spot-on correct.
The .signature lacked room to say so, but this is yet another entry from
John Cowan's Essentialist Explanations page.)
--
Cheers, Your eyes are weary from staring at the CRT. You feel
Rick Moen sleepy. Notice how restful it is to watch the cursor
rick@linuxmafia.com blink. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are
McQ! (4x80) yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
--
Cheers, Higgeldy Piggeldy "Phooey on Freud and his
Rick Moen Hamlet of Elsinore Psychoanalysis --
rick@linuxmafia.com Ruffled the critics by Oedipus, Schmoedipus,
McQ! (4x80) Dropping this bomb: I just loved Mom."
--
Cheers, A mosquito cried out in pain: The cause of his sorrow
Rick Moen "A chemist has poisoned my brain!" Was para-dichloro
rick@linuxmafia.com Diphenyltrichloroethane.
McQ! (4x80)
Archivist's Note: para-dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane is the insecticide
better known as "DDT".
--
Cheers, Reality and I had a fundamental difference of opinion.
Rick Moen We're currently undergoing a trial separation.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia
Rick Moen lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail
rick@linuxmafia.com Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root
McQ! (4x80) partition last week. Time to die..." -- Peter Gutmann, a.s.r.
(Archivist's Note: A Unix-culture parody of the late Rutger Hauer's
famous monologue from the film Blade Runner.)
--
Cheers, "I prefer to think of 'fax' as a shortening of 'fac simile sed
Rick Moen longe', a Latin command meaning 'make it the same, only far away.'"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ed Hopkins
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Yes, we will want simultaneous translators.... No, not when
Rick Moen the PM meets the leaders of the English-speaking nations....
rick@linuxmafia.com Yes, the English-speaking nations can be said to include the
McQ! (4x80) United States." -- Bernard Wooley, "Yes, Prime Minister"
--
Cheers, "So, how are things at the Campaign for Freedom of Information?"
Rick Moen "Sorry, I can't talk about that."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Sir Humphrey and Sir Arnold, "Yes, Prime Minister"
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Moebius strip for sale. See other side.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, .sig fault
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The seminar on Spam Canceling has been canceled again. The
Rick Moen person who supposedly canceled it says it wasn't him."
rick@linuxmafia.com Znqr Lbhybbx, Usenet Cabal J.D. Falk jdfalk@cybernothing.org
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Cron's disease: Symptoms include an obsessive-compulsive behaviour
Rick Moen at regular intervals throughout the day, week, or month."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Clinton A. Pierce, in the scary devil monastery
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me
Rick Moen that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Arnold Edinborough
McQ! (4x80)
--
"Phnglui mgwlnafth Cthulhu rlyey wghnagl fthagn." "In his flat in Bromley,
drunk Cthulhu waits knitting? I think a few subtle typos may have crept into
that one." "That explains why this shoggoth I summoned is only 3mm tall."
McQ! -- Peter da Silva and Peter Gutmann, in The Monastery
--
Cheers, "I can see an opening for the Four Lusers of the Apocalypse:
Rick Moen 'I didn't change anything', 'My e-mail doesn't work',
rick@linuxmafia.com 'I can't print', and 'Is the network broken?'"
McQ! (4x80) -- Paul McAuley <pmcauley@iol.ie> in the scary devil monastery
--
Cheers, "I'd hate to have a Peugeot 404. I can just see it now...
Rick Moen I'd park it somewhere, then never find it again."
rick@linuxmafia.com - Kirrily 'Skud' Robert <skud@infotrope.net>
McQ! (4x80)
--
Superpolylogarithmic subexponential functions! / Faster than a polylog but slow-
er than exponential. / Even though they're hard to say, they're truly quintess-
ential. / Superpolylogarithmic subexponential functions! / Um diddle diddle did-
dle, um diddle ay! / Um diddle diddle diddle, um diddle ay! -John S. Novak, III
(Archivist's Note: See, that qualifies as not merely complying with
the McQuary limit, but doing so ostentatiously, don't ch'a think?)
--
Cheers, I've been given a revelation by my e-mail spelling checker, which,
Rick Moen when I wrote "fundies," suggested that I really meant "fun dies."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Estron
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "If these walls could talk... they'd probably say 'No!
Rick Moen Not the nails again! Not the hammer! NOT THE HAMMER!!!!'"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Jennifer A. Ford
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone
Rick Moen has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- English Professor, Ohio University
McQ! (4x80)
--
"As someone here (I forget who) said, little incidents like this are expected.
If you have a group 'alt.fan.red-things', it's inevitable someone will show up
and say 'red things suck'." "THINGS TO DO: newgroup alt.fan.vacuum-pumps"
McQ! (4x80) -- Richard Boye' and Alistair J.R. Young, in rasfwrj
--
Cheers, "The American Republic will endure, until politicians
Rick Moen realize they can bribe the people with their own money."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Alexis de Tocqueville
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "You know, I've gone to a lot of psychics, and they've told me
Rick Moen a lot of different things, but not one of them has ever told me
rick@linuxmafia.com 'You are an undercover policewoman, here to arrest me.'"
McQ! (4x80) -- New York City undercover policewoman
--
Cheers, "History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just screams,
Rick Moen 'Why don't you listen to me?' and lets fly with a big stick."
rick@linuxmafia.com --John W. Campbell, Jr.
McQ! (4x80)
--
"The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted
sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there.
Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the
computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'" -- Rich Jeni
--
Cheers, "Your program just attempted an illegal instruction. No worries, mate."
Rick Moen -- Australian error messages, #14 in a series
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Here, sanity ... niiiiiice sanity, come to daddy ... okay,
Rick Moen that's a good sanity ... {*THWONK!*} _Got_ the bastard."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Anthony de Boer, in The Monastery
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, there's going
Rick Moen to be one big-ass fight over where to set the thermostat.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Jim Rosenberg, in The Monastery
McQ! (4x80)
--
Haiku are "IP"; Permission's hereby
Keen Unixes are, too. GNU Granted to deal in this poem
Is better, and free. Without restriction.
-- Seth David Schoen
--
Cheers, This .sig inspected by:
Rick Moen 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, This .sig inspected by:
Rick Moen 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Concerning the prior two entries, please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy. I was one of many
people posting that key all over the Internet, thumbing my nose at the
notion that it could be suppressed into non-existence on the Internet
through litigation and the threat of additional litigation.)
--
Cheers, "I want you to remember just one question, and this is it:
Rick Moen Graduates, what would you do with your life if you knew
rick@linuxmafia.com you could not fail?" -- Sen. Jackie Speier, in
McQ! (4x80) http://www.sfsu.edu/~news/2006/spring/comm06.htm#address
(Archivist's Note: Longtime reformist politician Jackie Speier is one
of my personal heroes, and among other challenges she's lived through
was shot five times by People's Temple staff in the same attack that
murdered her boss, my then-Congressman Leo J. Ryan.)
--
Cheers, "Of course, NIMBYism is perfectly fine for other
Rick Moen places, but we certainly shouldn't allow it in
rick@linuxmafia.com _our_ town." -- Rick M., going meta on his $SPOUSE
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, English is essentially a bizarre dialect of Chinese,
Rick Moen pronounced entirely in the first tone.
rick@linuxmafia.com --John Cowan, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with
Rick Moen all the cool bits taken out.
rick@linuxmafia.com --Thomas Leigh, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, English is essentially an imprecise dialect of Java,
Rick Moen without the object orientation.
rick@linuxmafia.com --Julian Morrison, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, English is essentially Plattdeutsch as spoken
Rick Moen by a Frisian pretending to be French.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Andreas Johansson, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, English is essentially what happens when you can't decide whether
Rick Moen the Greeks or the Romans had the better civilization, so you ask
rick@linuxmafia.com everybody they ever beat up on to sort it out.
McQ! (4x80) -- John M. Ford, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
--
Cheers, English is essentially a language in which "up" has
Rick Moen forty-seven dictionary definitions, but
rick@linuxmafia.com antidisestablishmentarianism is considered a "hard word."
McQ! (4x80) -- John M. Ford, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
--
Cheers, English is essentially a text parser's way of getting
Rick Moen faster processors built.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- John M. Ford, vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
McQ! (4x80)
--
"Zees American words are too much. Zen our culture you'll wrench;
With 'le parking' 'le weekend' & such. Wiz our children we'll be out of touch."
Eef you anglicize French, -- L'Academie Française in a nutshell
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, To you, this thought Alot
Rick Moen I gently allot: Isnot
rick@linuxmafia.com Aword.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Your font is: Proportional Monospaced
^
Matt McIrvin's amazing Font-o-Meter!
(Archivist's Note: E-mail and Usenet netnews are best composed and
read in ASCII plaintext with monospaced typefaces for a large number of
reasons, but corporate types and new-to-the-Internet kiddies who never want to
change their MUAs' defaults and think "rich text" is a good idea
famously don't agree, so the above gently plays with the perceptions of
both camps. Note that for this Web page presentation, you will be
seeing the monospaced rendition because of <pre></pre> HTML tags.)
--
Cheers, Peter G. Neumann: "Mars has been a tough target."
Rick Moen Harlan Rosenthal: "That's because the Martians keep
rick@linuxmafia.com shooting things down." RISKS Digest, v. 20, #59&60
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Mia kusenveturilo estas plena da angiloj.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Harahefet sh'eli mele'ah betzlofahim.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascanna.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Luftputebåten min er full av ål.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: All four are translations of a rather famous phrase
from a Monty Python skit about translation -- in, respectively, Esperanto,
Hebrew (עִבְרִית), Gaelic (Gaeilge), and Norwegian (Norsk).)
--
Cheers, Ceci n'est pas une pipe: |
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: It's a Unix joke, and also a René Magritte joke.)
--
Cheers, EMACS May Alienate Clients and Supporters
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, But then voting season comes, and reminds you that all
Rick Moen those Americans that are individually sane and normal tend
rick@linuxmafia.com to be collectively crazy and very odd. -- Linus Torvalds
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/stranger-in-strange-land.html
--
Cheers, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
Rick Moen --- John Maynard Keynes (attr.)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "My generals are always right about other people's
Rick Moen wars and wrong about our own." -- LBJ
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "You do not examine legislation in light of the benefits
Rick Moen it will convey if properly administered, but in light of
rick@linuxmafia.com the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if
McQ! (4x80) improperly administered." -- LBJ
--
Cheers, "I'm sorry Dan, what's right isn't always popular,
Rick Moen and what's popular isn't always right."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- George R. Moscone, Nov. 27, 1978
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: These were the last words of San Francisco Mayor
George Moscone, just before he was murdered by Supervisor Dan White.
I had been a volunteer campaign worker in Mayor Moscone's campaign
-- and also for my congressman, Leo J. Ryan, likewise assassinated near
Jonestown, Guyana by People's Temple staff, shortly before Moscone's murder.
For whatever it's worth, the context of Mayor Moscone's remark is that
Dan White had, four days earlier, in a rage over establishment of a rehab
centre that White opposed and Supervisor Harvey Milk supported, impulsively
resigned his office as Supervisor, and was now pleading with Mayor Moscone
to reinstate him. Moscone, considering White a problematic person and
quietly satisifed to see him go, was trying to let White down gently and
say "no" politely. So, White murdered Moscone, and then murdered Supervisor
Milk as well.)
--
Cheers, "There once was a man from Nantucket,
Rick Moen who lost his .sig in a bucket.
rick@linuxmafia.com Five lines was too long, / columns 80 just strong,
McQ! (4x80) so he didn't know where to tuck it." -- alt.fan.warlord
--
Cheers, Crypto lets someone say "Hi! I absolutely definitely have
Rick Moen a name somewhat like the name of a large familiar
rick@linuxmafia.com organization, and I'd like to steal your data!" and lots
McQ! (4x80) of users will say "OK, fine, whatever." -- John Levine
--
Cheers, Híggledy-pìggledy / XML programmers
Rick Moen Try to escape those / I-eighteen-N woes;
rick@linuxmafia.com Incontrovertibly / What we need more of is
McQ! (4x80) Unicode weenies and / François Yergeaus.
(Archivist's Note: This was one of John Cowan's contributions
to a 2002 limerick contest on the xml-dev mailing list, John having decided
to go on beyond limericks. Notice that it includes a number of
characters properly renderable only with UTF-8. This .signature is one
reason I gave up on trying to serve up a non-HTML-wrapped version of
this .signatures archive, as I had no luck at all getting my Web server
to correctly serve up an ASCII text file that includes UTF-8
characters.)
--
Cheers, Notice: The value of your Hofstadter's Constant
Rick Moen (the average amount of time you spend each month
rick@linuxmafia.com thinking about Hofstadter's Constant) has just
McQ! (4x80) been adjusted upwards.
--
Cheers, They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
Rick Moen They pursued it with forks and hope;
rick@linuxmafia.com They threatened its life with a railway-share;
McQ! (4x80) They charmed it with smiles and soap.
(Archivist's Note: It's from Lewis Carroll's narrative nonsense poem "The
Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)" -- the famous couplets announcing
the beginning of the hunt.)
--
Rick Moen There was an old man Said with a laugh, "I
rick@linuxmafia From Peru, whose lim'ricks all Cut them in half, the pay is
.com Looked like haiku. He Much better for two."
--Emmet O'Brien
--
Rick Moen "The Internet sees your competence and wisdom as damage,
rick@linuxmafia.com and will route around it." -- Anil Dash
McQ! (4x80) http://twitter.com/anildash/status/2897466042
(Archivist's Note: Dash deftly parodies, here, a famous saying by
the late and much lamented John Perry Barlow, one of the founders and
guiding spirits of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The Internet treats
censorship as a malfunction [RM: commonly misquoted as "damage"] and routes
around it.")
--
Rick Moen Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean
rick@linuxmafia.com to stand by the president or any other public official.
McQ! (4x80) -- Theodore Roosevelt
--
Rick Moen "The plural of 'Pokemon' is 'vermin.'"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Names of fictional places are capitalized:
rick@linuxmafia.com Narnia, Oz, San Francisco, etc."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use 'login' for the noun, 'log in' for the action,
rick@linuxmafia.com and 'Loggins' when you're footloose in the danger zone."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use 'verbal' to compare words with some other form of
rick@linuxmafia.com communication ('poor verbal skills'), use 'oral' to be
McQ! (4x80) more popular." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use the inverted pyramid structure for your story,
rick@linuxmafia.com as this pleases Apophis, the Egyptian god of darkness
McQ! (4x80) and chaos." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Robots should be referred to only by gender-neutral
rick@linuxmafia.com pronouns, no matter how sexy they may be."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "'Lego' is the plural. There is no singular, because
rick@linuxmafia.com what the hell can you do with only one of them?"
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The seemingly odd usage of 'ironic' in Ms. Morissette's
rick@linuxmafia.com song is due to errors during translation from the
McQ! (4x80) original Canadian." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use 'quirky' to describe potentially dangerous crazy
rick@linuxmafia.com people that you don't want to upset."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Always remember to close all parentheses. We're
rick@linuxmafia.com not paying to air-condition the entire paragraph."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "If accuracy / Is what you crave /
rick@linuxmafia.com Then you should call it / Myanmar Shave."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Always capitalize 'Satan'. You don't want to get dead
rick@linuxmafia.com goats from those people." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "The correct spelling is 'Mr. T.' People who type out
rick@linuxmafia.com 'Mister' are fools to be pitied."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "While it's tempting to call them 'baristi' because of
rick@linuxmafia.com the Italian roots, the plural of 'barista' is
McQ! (4x80) 'journalism majors.'" -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "'Among' if you're in normal society; 'amongst' if you're
rick@linuxmafia.com in a period drama made by the BBC." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "If you start a sentence with an action, place the actor
rick@linuxmafia.com immediately after, or you will anger Christian Bale."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The plural of Blackberry is 'Blackberries.' The plural
rick@linuxmafia.com of Blackberry users is 'Dingleberries.'"
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The numbers one through ten should be spelled out,
rick@linuxmafia.com while numbers greater than ten are products of the
McQ! (4x80) Illuminati and should be avoided."
-- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Take note; the semicolon is never to be used correctly."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "The rules for numbers below ten do not apply to 6.
rick@linuxmafia.com He is not a number, he is a free man."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
(Archivist's Note: Fans of Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" will get
this joke.)
--
Rick Moen "Commas are probably the most misunderstood of all
rick@linuxmafia.com punctuation. They frequently dress in black, listen
McQ! (4x80) to sad music, and cut themselves." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Avoid using 'decimate', as someone will pipe up about it
rick@linuxmafia.com meaning 'remove 1/10th of', and those people are dicks."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not abbreviate 'Maine'. They will call the newsroom
rick@linuxmafia.com and whine in that ridiculous fake accent of theirs."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "To make 'pants' singular, use a pair of scissors."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "People who spell 'voila' as 'viola' should be
rick@linuxmafia.com responded to with voilence." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "For the titles of most compositions, use quotation marks.
rick@linuxmafia.com If Bob Fosse is involved, use jazz hands."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "A 'homonym' is a nym attracted to nyms of the same sex."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "The phrase 'sources high in the administration' can give
rick@linuxmafia.com unintended connotations, depending on your readership."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Infinitives may be split only after extensive counseling,
rick@linuxmafia.com and a trial separation." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "We believe you mean 'dundant', ma'am."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Due to circumstances beyond your control,
rick@linuxmafia.com you are captain of your fate, and master of your soul."
McQ! (4x80) -- Ashleigh Brilliant
--
Rick Moen "The word 'totally' is redundant except when
rick@linuxmafia.com describing how rad something is."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not bracket nonrestrictive phrases with commas.
rick@linuxmafia.com Nonrestrictive phrases yearn to be free and feel the
McQ! (4x80) wind in their hair." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not confuse 'lyme disease' with 'lime disease',
rick@linuxmafia.com an affliction caused by over-consumption of mojitos."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Having the right word is much more satisfying than just
rick@linuxmafia.com sleeping around with any old word that comes along."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Answer rhetorical questions. They act like they don't
rick@linuxmafia.com need one, but, deep down, they do."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "And you say, 'Just a moment, I've almost finished
rick@linuxmafia.com _If on a Winter's Night a Traveler_ by Italo Calvino.'"
McQ! (4x80) -- Italo Calvino, _If on a Winter's Night a Traveler_
--
Rick Moen "Columbus, too, thought he was a flop, probably, when they
rick@linuxmafia.com sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no
McQ! (4x80) America." -- Saul Bellow, _The Adventures of Augie March_
--
Rick Moen "This is the difference between this and that."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Gertrude Stein, _A Novel of Thank You_
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen this way this way this way this way this way this way this
rick@linuxmafia.com way out this
McQ! (4x80) way out
O -- Ronald Sukenick, _Out_
(Archivist's Note: Above four .signature blocks quote the closing lines
of the respective famous novels cited.)
--
Rick Moen "Fine. The use of the passive-aggressive voice
rick@linuxmafia.com is to be discouraged. Whatever, MAN."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Passive voice is used when the receiver of an
rick@linuxmafia.com action is more important than the performer. Ex:
McQ! (4x80) Your mom was banged." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use standard abbreviations for foreign money: EUR for
rick@linuxmafia.com euros, AUD for Australian dollars, CBP for Canadian
McQ! (4x80) beaver pelts, etc." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Only three living individuals are addressed as 'the':
rick@linuxmafia.com the Batman, the Doctor, and the Erik Estrada."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "For 1-5 pizza boxes, use the suffix -heap. For 6-10,
rick@linuxmafia.com use -henge. 10+ pizza boxes is a pizziggurat."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "References to online retailer Amazon.com should always
rick@linuxmafia.com include '.com' even though they actually make money."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The suffix '-bate' means 'to lessen.'
rick@linuxmafia.com Yeah, we were surprised, too."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in
rick@linuxmafia.com rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Avoid using foreign-language phrases in your articles,
rick@linuxmafia.com unless they have a certain je ne sais quoi."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "When attributing a quotation to Paris Hilton,
rick@linuxmafia.com the preferred term is 'blame'."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The word 'axiomatic' is George Will's thing, and
rick@linuxmafia.com he will straight up cut you, if you try to use it."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Remind testy sources they shouldn't pick fights
rick@linuxmafia.com with someone who buys ink by the barrel, by throwing
McQ! (4x80) barrels of ink at them." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use 'Holy Grail' for the cup of Christ and
rick@linuxmafia.com 'holey Grail' for the strainer of Christ."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "A superscript is a script that was rocketed to
rick@linuxmafia.com Earth as an infant from its doomed homeworld."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "It is important to close all parentheses. We've
rick@linuxmafia.com all been trapped in a Mike Royko aside since 1978."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Cheers, I don't have a solution, but I
Rick Moen certainly admire the problem.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, To whom it may concern: you
Rick Moen are a very special person.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
The sight of his guests filled Lord Cray / At breakfast with horrid dismay,
So he launched off the spoons / The pits from his prunes
At their heads as they neared the buffet. -- Edward Gorey
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, If God had approved of the metric system,
Rick Moen he'd have given us ten fingers.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Living on earth may be expensive, but it
Rick Moen includes an annual free trip around the sun.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, My sources are unreliable, but their
Rick Moen information is fascinating.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, All I want is a warm bed and a
Rick Moen kind word, and unlimited power.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, <SomeLamer> what's the difference between chattr and chmod?
Rick Moen <SomeGuru> SomeLamer: man chattr > 1; man chmod > 2;
rick@linuxmafia.com diff -u 1 2 | less
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Debian - even Hell freezes faster
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Welcome to our special issue on violence in the
Rick Moen workplace..., I mean system administration.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Don Marti, Linux Journal, Dec. 2000
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, #ifdef NOT_A_GODDAMN_YANK
Rick Moen { 0x10, "Minimise Delay" }, #else
rick@linuxmafia.com { 0x10, "Minimize Delay" }, #endif /* ipchains.c */
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Never substitute a slash for a solidus.
rick@linuxmafia.com You don't want to get letters from Victorian bankers."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen Well, my terminal's locked up, and I ain't got any mail,
rick@linuxmafia.com And I can't recall the last time my program didn't fail;
McQ! (4x80) I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues,
I've got the: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
--
Rick Moen "Do not use the phrase 'Jungian archetype' outside of
rick@linuxmafia.com restaurant reviews." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Subjects and verbs should always agree, even if
rick@linuxmafia.com they just agree to disagree." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Starting every sentence in your health story about
rick@linuxmafia.com conjunctivitis with a conjunction is what they call
McQ! (4x80) poeticism." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "When referring to Spider-Man, 'Web head' can now
rick@linuxmafia.com be written as 'webhead'."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not be afraid to use exclamation points
rick@linuxmafia.com in your writing. They can sense fear."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "It is no longer necessary to write new stories
rick@linuxmafia.com about Facebook privacy issues; just change the dates."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use quotation marks for all direct quotes, unless you
rick@linuxmafia.com are some kind of fancy pants, Mr. Cormac McCarthy."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "'Pop Tarts' is a trademark, and should not
rick@linuxmafia.com be used to describe generic products such as
McQ! (4x80) Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "In stories about pirates, remember the
rick@linuxmafia.com adjectival form is 'piradical'."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Omt ndlss vwls."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "ATM machine (n): Machine that makes ATMs."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Imperial units should be used only when measuring
rick@linuxmafia.com general levels of rebel scum." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "The four seasons are Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall.
rick@linuxmafia.com For California publications, change to Mudslide,
McQ! (4x80) Hillfire, Flood, and Earthquake." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "An easy way that you can save space is to edit out the
rick@linuxmafia.com overused word 'that.' That's just not a word that needs
McQ! (4x80) that much use." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "In stories about anti-war protests, distinguish
rick@linuxmafia.com participants who love peace from those who are
McQ! (4x80) just big Mercedes fans." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Use 'bologna' for the meat, 'baloney' for
rick@linuxmafia.com anything creationists say." -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "'Horrible tragedy': Use this phrasing to differentiate
rick@linuxmafia.com the described event from hilarious tragedies."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Avoid dangling participles unless referring to James Bond,
rick@linuxmafia.com in which case dangle them over shark tanks or fire pits."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Throw small projectiles at your copy editor now and
rick@linuxmafia.com then. A jumpy copy editor is an accurate copy editor."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Cheers, "One of the reasons it takes such a long time to make a picture
Rick Moen like 'Jaws' is because it's not the time it takes to take the
rick@linux take that takes the time; it's the time it takes between takes
mafia.com that takes the time that takes the takes." -- Roy Scheider
--
Rick Moen "'Rape' is a green, leafy vegetable, similar to
rick@linuxmafia.com lettuce. 'Child molestation', however, is not."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not refer to inhabitants of Lesbos as 'Lesbians',
rick@linuxmafia.com even if they did experiment that one time in college."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "When asking paranormal experts for verifiable evidence,
rick@linuxmafia.com also wish for a flying pony, because hey, you never know."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "A co-dependent clause will stay with a main clause long
rick@linuxmafia.com beyond the point that it's healthy for either of them."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "pay wall - Method used by newspapers and other publications
rick@linuxmafia.com to keep online readership down to low, manageable levels."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "It is perfectly acceptable to split an infinitive,
rick@linuxmafia.com especially if you haven't brought enough for everybody."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The correct plural forms are as follows:
rick@linuxmafia.com surgeons general, brothers-in-law, Spiders-Man."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "You can never go home again, Oatman,
rick@linuxmafia.com but I guess you can shop there."
McQ! (4x80) -- Martin Blank, "Grosse Pointe Blank"
(Archivist's Note: In this black-comedy movie, the protagonist has returned
to his hometown after many years, to attend his first-ever high school
reunion. He says the quoted lines to his psychiatrist's answering machine,
upon discovering that his childhood home is now a mini-market.)
--
Rick Moen "peasant - Seen as derogatory. Don't use in relation to
rick@linuxmafia.com farm laborers. OK for third-shift copy editors, though."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Never diagram a sentence when under the influence of
rick@linuxmafia.com alcohol or strong narcotics, even if it IS hilarious."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not simply write that an official is laying 'in state.'
rick@linuxmafia.com Be specific: What kind of state? Death? Arousal? Kentucky?"
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Do not use square brackets unless
rick@linuxmafia.com you're writing about Pat Boone or Al Gore."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "It's too bad that everyone who has a solution for
rick@linuxmafia.com everything is at home commenting on the Internet."
McQ! (4x80) -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "Shakira molests air and calls it dancing."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @kellyoxford
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "A photograph is worth more than a thousand words.
rick@linuxmafia.com Especially a photograph of at least 1001 words."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "The Tea Party is to politics what
rick@linuxmafia.com 'Jersey Shore' is to television."
McQ! (4x80) -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "I'm pretty sure the Mayans just got
rick@linuxmafia.com tired of writing that calendar."
McQ! (4x80) -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "Told my friend she shouldn't smoke weed while she's
rick@linuxmafia.com pregnant because her baby's never going to want to
McQ! (4x80) come out." -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "No hay mayor desprecio que no hacer aprecio."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Spanish proverb
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: "The worst sin is to pay no attention." In other
words, the most effective way to repond to someone's display of anger is to
display little reaction, or outright indifference. Freely interpreting:
"Don't feed the troll.")
--
Rick Moen We Await Silent Tristero's Empire.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: If you don't get that one, your life needs more
Thomas Pynchon in it.)
--
Rick Moen "I've been to Alaska, it was like a long
rick@linuxmafia.com 'Home Improvement' episode with taxidermy."
McQ! (4x80) -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "I'm not a cynic: I'm a hypocrite.
rick@linuxmafia.com Hypocrites believe in something."
McQ! (4x80) -- Roy Zimmerman, "Creation Science 101"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIwiPsgRrOs
--
Rick Moen "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle
rick@linuxmafia.com to the strong..., but that's the way to bet."
McQ! (4x80) -- Damon Runyon, riffing off Ecclesiastes 9:11
--
Rick Moen "Top tip: Pay for your homeopathic medicine with a
rick@linuxmafia.com glass of water that's had a $100 note dipped into it."
McQ! (4x80) -- Josh Price
--
Rick Moen "If a guy says, 'I feel like I've known you forever'
rick@linuxmafia.com on a first date, it means he's never talked to a
McQ! (4x80) woman for that long before." -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "'Lego'" is the plural. The singular is 'Legum'."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "You can stop running that response to Virginia's
rick@linuxmafia.com letter about Santa. She's probably dead by now."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "So, this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill,
rick@linuxmafia.com pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks,
McQ! (4x80) beer, wine, liquor." -- Michael Karlsson
--
Rick Moen "Celebrities promoting alt-med therapies should
rick@linuxmafia.com be listed in descending order of deaths caused."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "Has Google looked at the appropriateness of indexing
rick@linuxmafia.com #WikiLeaks? The answer is yes, and we decided to
McQ! (4x80) continue. Because it's legal." -- Eric Schmidt
--
Rick Moen "'Decimate' when referring to killing one
rick@linuxmafia.com in ten. 'Octomate' when referring to the
McQ! (4x80) cephalopod dating site." -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Rick Moen "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ambrose Bierce (attr.)
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Although this quip has the sound of an Ambrose
"bitter" Bierce saying, nothing quite like it's been found in his
writings, nor Twain's. It seems to have originated in 1979 as a serious
comment about warfare, then been passed around and morphed into a jibe.)
--
Rick Moen Remember Thor Five!
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: This was a rallying cry in James Blish's award-winning
science-fiction series of novels _Cities in Flight_.)
--
Rick Moen "I once requested an urgent admission for a homeopath,
rick@linuxmafia.com who had become depressed and taken a massive underdose."
McQ! (4x80) -- Dr. Phil Peverley
--
Rick Moen "It may be necessary to explain to your younger readers
rick@linuxmafia.com that Mubarak is not a Pokemon."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
(Archivist's Note to posterity: Above was topical in the year 2011.)
--
Rick Moen "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Max Weinreich, linguist
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note to the Yiddish-challenged: "A language is a dialect
with an army and a navy." (אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט)
Weinreich was raised in Russian-ruled Latvia, where he founded YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, one of the bastions of the Yiddish language,
in 1925. He fled the outbreak of WWII and re-founded YIVO in New York City
during the war.)
--
Rick Moen "If you watch Black Swan backwards, it's a movie about
rick@linuxmafia.com a psychotic girl who benefits from ballet therapy."
McQ! (4x80) -- @knnth_dh
--
Rick Moen ("Personal to sci-fi fans: If '2001' is _Analog_,
rick@linuxmafia.com 'Tron: Legacy' is _Thrilling Wonder Stories_.)
McQ! (4x80) -- Roger Ebert's review of Tron: Legacy
--
Rick Moen "Julianne Moore probably took the role of Sarah Palin
rick@linuxmafia.com because actors win awards for playing handicapped people."
McQ! (4x80) -- @kellyoxford
--
Rick Moen "What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- The Doctor
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor said this in the
serial The "Two Doctors" (1985). As one of many fannish in-jokes, Baker
says this same line once again, but substituting "quote" [sic] for
"quotation", in 2013's 50th anniversary special "The Five(ish) Doctors
Reboot".)
--
Rick Moen The Doctor: "I feel disorientated."
rick@linuxmafia.com Sarah Jane Smith: "This is the disorientation centre."
McQ! (4x80) The Doctor: "That makes sense."
--
Rick Moen "No. 'Eureka' is Greek for 'This bath is too hot.'"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- The Doctor
McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward?
rick@linuxmafia.com That's the trouble with time travel - you never can tell."
McQ! (4x80) -- The Doctor
--
Rick Moen Vila: "Why don't you go?" Avon: "_You_ are expendable."
rick@linuxmafia.com Vila: "And you're not?" Avon: "No, I am not.
McQ! (4x80) I am not expendable, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going."
-- Blake's 7
--
Rick Moen "There are three states of legality in Irish law. There is all this
rick@linux stuff that comes under 'That's grand', then it moves into 'Ah, now
mafia.com don't push it', and finally it comes under 'Right, now you're takin
McQ! (4x80) the piss', and that's when the police come in." -- Dara O'Briain
--
Rick Moen "They say men can never experience the pain of
rick@linuxmafia.com childbirth. But they can, if you hit them in the
McQ! (4x80) goolies with a cricket bat for 14 hours." -- Jo Brand
--
Rick Moen "Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Stephen Fry
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "This is the first time in my lifetime that Irish people are
Rick Moen able to go 'What? You're going to England? It's full of
rick@linuxmafia.com terrorists. Come to Ireland. We've no terrorists at all.
McQ! (4x80) They're all playwrights, now.'" -- Dara O'Briain
--
Cheers, "I installed a skylight in my apartment.
Rick Moen The people who live above me are furious."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Steven Wright
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "On American pronunciation: You say erbs and we
Rick Moen say herbs. Because, you know, there's an H in it."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Eddie Izzard
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.
Rick Moen Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Peter Kay
McQ! (4x80)
-
Cheers, "People say 'Bill, are you an optimist?'
Rick Moen And I say, 'I hope so.'"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Bill Bailey
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The first thing I do in the morning
Rick Moen is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Dorothy Parker
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Please proofread your feature titles. We don't need more letters
Rick Moen from people reminding us that Mothra's Day isn't until August."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Conjoined sentences have two or more clauses. Once popular
Rick Moen sideshow attractions, modern surgery has made them rare."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "You're not cleared for that information, Friend Citizen.
Rick Moen (Remember: Rumors are treason, and make the Computer UnHappy.")
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Paranoia
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Recurring saying from the role-playing game Paranoia,
set in a future distopian underground city ruled by an insane
all-powerful computer, in which much surreal humour occurs because the
players are charged with hunting down and killing mutants and
participants in conspiracies, though everyone is a mutant and
conspirator.)
--
Cheers, "If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan.
Rick Moen Even worse, if you play it forwards, you hear Ke$ha."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Lord_Voldemort7
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Typographers will tell you to eliminate widows
Rick Moen and orphans. Typographers are MONSTERS."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Misplaced modifiers are always in the last place you look."
Rick Moen -- @FakeAPStylebook
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, ["Exit, pursued by a bear."]
Rick Moen -- The Winter's Tale, Act III, Scene III
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Yes, really. That's Shakespeare's actual stage direction,
surely one of the most famously odd ones in any play, ever.)
--
Cheers, Q: Why did Douglas Hofstadter cross the road?
Rick Moen A: To make this joke possible.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: If you don't know why Douglas Hofstadter has a close
personal relationship with the subjects of recursion and self-reference, you
need to read more Douglas Hofstadter, starting with _Godel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid_ and continuing with _Metamagical Themas_, _The Mind's I_,
and other groundbreaking and stimulating works. Remember also
Hofstadter's Constant, which is the amount of time you spend each month
thinking about Hofstadter's Constant. I've just adjusted yours upwards
-- for the second time, if you're reading this file consecutively.)
--
Cheers, "Now, at this point, I should have remembered that profound
Rick Moen truism: 'Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem,
rick@linuxmafia. think, "I know, I'll use sed." Now, they have two problems.'"
com McQ! (4x80) -- Jamie Zawinski, Unix-Haters mailing list, 1992-12-12
--
Cheers, "When closing parentheses, it's polite to post
Rick Moen a sign saying when they will reopen."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Junk science, n.: genital studies."
Rick Moen -- @FakeAPStyleBook
rick@linuxmafia.
com McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Never bury the lede. Cremation is the
Rick Moen only way to make sure it's really dead."
rick@linuxmafia. -- @FakeAPStyleBook
com McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Any claim that includes a requirement that you
Rick Moen have to really, really believe for it to work is
rick@linuxmafia. essentially unfalsifiable." -- Rebecca Wolfe
com McQ! (4x80)
--
Rick Moen "So as not to offend readers, use
rick@linuxmafia.com 'the N-word' instead of 'Nebraska'."
McQ! (4x80) -- @FakeAPStylebook
--
Cheers, "I am not now, nor have I ever been,
Rick Moen a member of the demigodic party."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Dennis Ritchie
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets,
Rick Moen you are not a gonzo journalist."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Science editors: There are no such things as
Rick Moen 'indigo children.' The correct term is 'Jedi'."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Every time you make a typo, the errorists win.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen "So, every time a new iPhone's about to come out,
rick@linuxmafia.com one will get left in a bar? Apple's like a clumsy,
McQ! (4x80) alcoholic Easter Bunny." -- Rex Huppke
(Archivist's Note: Topical to 2010-2011, when this happened twice.)
--
Cheers, "Do not forget the extra 'r' in Febuarry."
Rick Moen -- @FakeAPStylebook
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Valentine's Day (Feb. 14) should not be
Rick Moen confused with Vanhalentine's Day (every day)."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Remember: "its" means "it is", and "it's"
Rick Moen is the possessive form of "it".
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Hungry: wanting food. Hungary: European country.
Rick Moen Hung Gary: Works in classifieds, gentlemen."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @FakeAPStylebook
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Debian ist ein Textadventure."
Rick Moen -- Klaus Knopper
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "money, n., life-giving elixir of politics. syn, speech.
Rick Moen Ex: When the Supreme Court equated campaign spending with
rick@linuxmafia.com free speech, I asked my boss to lend me a million verbs."
McQ! (4x80) http://campaignenglish.com/
--
Cheers, Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio
Rick Moen Is like being nowhere at all.
rick@linuxmafia.com All through the day as the hours rush by
youtube.com/watch?v=XZUGSSYlPYI You sit in the park and you watch the grass die.
--
Cheers, "Overheard a hipster say 'Quinoa is kind of 2011',
Rick Moen so I lit his beard on fire." -- @kellyoxford
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The society that tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an
Rick Moen exalted profession, and scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a
rick@linuxmafia.com lowly profession, will have neither good philosophy nor
McQ! (4x80) good plumbing. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
(Archivist's Note: From Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent
Too? (1961), by the late educator John W. Gardner. Regrettably, that
4x80 .signature lacked sufficient space for the attribution. Yes, I
really do stay under the McQuary Limit, each time, every time.)
--
Cheers, Nothing's hotter than having a copyeditor correct your sex scenes.
Rick Moen -- Max Barry
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A programmer had a problem. He thought to himself, "I know,
Rick Moen I'll solve it with threads!". has Now problems. two he
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Davidlohr Bueso
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, WebMD is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book
Rick Moen where the ending is always cancer.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @kellyoxford
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once,
Rick Moen everybody lives!"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- The Doctor, "The Doctor Dances"
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A: Yes.
Rick Moen > Q: Are you sure?
rick@linuxmafia >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
.com McQ! (4x80) >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
--
Cheers, Actually, time flies hate a banana.
Rick Moen -- Micah Joel
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Foursquare is for people who wish they were Sims.
Rick Moen -- @kellyoxford
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Some people, when confronted with a problem, think,
Rick Moen "I know, I'll use Dvorak!" Now they have k,s rosnpdm;e
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Colter Reed
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, My daughter is invited to a samba party. I was
Rick Moen excited, thought it was a sysadmin party.
rick@linuxmafia.com Turns out it's something to do with dancing :-/
McQ! (4x80) -- Martin Bateman
--
Cheers, "Two women walk into a bar and discuss the Bechdel Test."
Rick Moen -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: The Bechdel Test is my very favourite example of
non-rhetoric rhetoric, the art of articulating a telling argument in such a
way that it is winningly and drastically undersold, hence all the more
effective for ostentatiously NOT beating people over the head with one's point
-- though I've been known to produce the occasional modest example.)
--
Cheers, "Girl, are you a model? Because you could totally be an
Rick Moen idealized sample representation of a real-world object."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I love stateless systems."
Rick Moen "Don't they have drawbacks?"
rick@linuxmafia.com "Don't what have drawbacks?"
McQ! (4x80) -- Sam Hughes
--
Cheers, Snowden is accused of giving information to "the enemy".
Rick Moen He gave information to the American people. Well, now
rick@linuxmafia.com we know who the enemy is. --- Steven Brust
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Being die-hard loyal to a company is like being in an intimate rela-
Rick Moen tionship with a brick. The brick cares nothing for you. The brick
rick@linux will only cause you pain when it forgets about you. The brick serves
mafia.com only its interests, and nothing else is of consequence. --Adrian Eves
--
Cheers, If you're going to play the game properly,
Rick Moen you'd better know every rule.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas)
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Barbara Charline Jordan was another of my personal heroes.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Jordan for her story.)
--
Cheers, HULK LIKE OXFORD COMMA VERY MUCH. HULK WANT TO DATE,
Rick Moen BUT OXFORD COMMA GO OUT ONLY IN GROUPS OF THREE OR MORE.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @EditorHulk
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, HULK LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT "FEWER" MEAN YOU CAN COUNT IT,
Rick Moen "LESS" MEAN MUST BE MEASURED. FEWER MISTAKES MEAN LESS SMASH!
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @EditorHulk
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, And we all know the saying, which is true as well as witty,
Rick Moen that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Allan Sherman, "Peter and the Commissar"
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Controversy is dreaded only by the advocates of error.
Rick Moen -- Benjamin Rush
rick@linuxmafia.com
(Archivist's Note: Dr. Rush of Philadelphia, a physician, polymath
reformer in many areas of science and politics, creator of the entire
field of humane treatment of the mentally ill, one of the USA's Founding
Fathers, Pennsylvania representative to the Continental Congress, and
signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a distant (maternal)
ancestor of mine. In one famous incident -- somewhat poignantly -- he
jumped heroically into attempting to halt Philadelphia's Yellow Fever
Epidemic of 1793, working multiple days on-end without sleep to apply
the best treatments then known to science, treating as many as 100
patients per day: bloodletting, purging, mercury rubs, cold baths, etc.
-- probably thereby killing more patients than the virus did. Because,
sadly, it was 1793, and to be a physician was to be a relentlessly
optimistic agent of good health for others, who in truth mostly killed
his patients.
Until the late 1800s, even a brilliant and energetic physician like Dr.
Rush was sadly much, much more likely to kill you than help you --
speaking of error -- for lack of any understanding of the "germ" basis
of most disease, or even of disease vectors. The 1793 epidemic, for
example, was halted only when autumn frost killed the local Aedes
aegypti mosquito population. Both the exhausted Dr. Rush and everyone
else of that era had no more idea why the epidemic stopped than why it
started.)
--
Cheers, When _Guns of the South_ came out, it was sometimes shelved
Rick Moen with the history books, but only south of the Mason-Dixon
rick@linuxmafia.com Line. I couldn't make that up. Fiction has to be
plausible. History just has to happen. -- Harry Turtledove
(Archivist's Note: "Guns of the South" was one of Turtledove's alternate
history science fiction novels, published in 1992, in which a group of
time-travelling white supremacist members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement
arrive from 21st Century post-Apartheid South Africa, and supply Robert E.
Lee's army with AK-47s and other advanced technology, leading to Sourthern
Confederacy independence. As Turtledove is a meticulous historian as well
as a compelling novelist, it is famous for being a compelling picture of
an alternate American Civil War world, and also for the cover illustration
showing General Lee standing holding an AK-47.)
--
Cheers, Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
Rick Moen -- Terry Pratchett, _Small Gods_
rick@linuxmafia.com
--
Cheers, Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Rick Moen Regret, by definition, comes too late;
rick@linuxmafia.com Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
McQ! (4x80) Sonnet: Against Entropy, John M. Ford
--
Cheers, "Don't worry, your password has forgotten you,
Rick Moen too. It's moved on. It's stronger, now."
rick@linuxmafia.com @daniel_barker
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "So, a Degas painting walks into a barre...."
Rick Moen @behindyourback
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Every developer's hunt for the best editor ends up
Rick Moen with vim, emacs, or a management position.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Rolf Bjaanes
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Day 4278 of my caffeine LD50 field test experiment. Eyeballs
Rick Moen are vibrating. Can hear colors. Caught a hummingbird.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Where my codependents at?
Rick Moen (seriously, I've been texting you for 3 hours wtf)
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, A Spanish todo list has everything.
Rick Moen -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I know you believe you understood what you think I said,
Rick Moen but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not
rick@linuxmafia.com what I meant." -- S.I. Hayakawa
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Atque memento, nulli adsunt Romanorum
Rick Moen qui locutionem tuam corrigant.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Sane, paululum linguae Latinae dico. Id legi
Rick Moen modo hic modo illic. Vero, Latine loqui non
rick@linuxmafia.com est difficilissimum. Lingua speciem involutam
McQ! (4x80) praebet, sed sat cito eam comprehendes.
--
Cheers, "You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season
Rick Moen in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your
rick@linuxmafia.com body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance."
McQ! (4x80) -- Edward Flaherty
--
Cheers, "Two things programmers tend to underestimate:
Rick Moen 1. How long things take.
rick@linuxmafia.com 2. How long our code will be around.
McQ! (4x80) 3. How many things we underestimate." @jasongorman
--
Cheers, « D'où vient qu'un boiteux ne nous irrite pas, et qu'un
Rick Moen esprit boiteux nous irrite? A cause qu'un boiteux
rick@linuxmafia.com reconnaît que nous allons droit, et qu'un esprit boiteux
McQ! (4x80) dit que c'est nous qui boitons. » -- Pascal, Penées
--
Cheers, « Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen
Rick Moen des loi toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit
rick@linuxmafia.com pendable dix fois en sa vie. »
McQ! (4x80) -- Michel de Montaigne, Essais
--
Cheers, I'm ashamed at how often I use a thesaurus. I mean bashful.
Rick Moen Embarrassed! Wait--humiliated. Repentant. Chagrined! Sh*t!
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @cinemasins
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never
Rick Moen without a wave."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Jefferson to Lafayette, 1820
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "When the facts change, I change my mind.
Rick Moen What do you do, sir?"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- John Maynard Keynes (attr.),
McQ! (4x80) responding to a critic
(Archivist's Note: It's a colourful story, but not credible, as Keynes was
known for being even-tempered with even the most annoying and obtuse
interlocutor. A similar story is told of Mohandas Gandhi replying to a
critic who accused him of inconsistency with a position he'd articulated
previously: "But I have learned since then!")
--
Cheers, C.S. Lewis fan: "I'd like to visit Narnia."
Rick Moen Tolkien fan: "I'd like to live in Middle-Earth."
rick@linuxmafia.com George R.R. Martin fan: "Nope, I'm good."
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Also heard with Lovecraft fandom as the punchline.)
--
Cheers, "The trouble ain't that there is too many fools,
Rick Moen but that the lightning ain't distributed right."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Mark Twain
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Confirmed with very slightly different wording in a
1927 privately printed volume by rare-book collector Merle Johnson of
Twain quotations called "More Maxims of Mark". Johnson also published
the first areful bibliography of Twain’s works in 1910 shortly after the
writer’s death, and his work is accepted by Twain scholars.)
--
Cheers, "I don't need to test my programs.
Rick Moen I have an error-correcting modem."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Om I. Baud
McQ! (4x80) https://thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html
--
Cheers, A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi.
Rick Moen (a precipice in front, wolves behind)
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Roman saying
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, If life keeps giving you melons,
Rick Moen you just might be dyslexic.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Play on the cloyingly optimistic American saying
"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.")
--
Cheers, You can't make anyone see reason. All you can do is
Rick Moen throw a big party around reason and see who shows up.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @alexandraerin
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "NOLI TIMERE MESSOREM"
Rick Moen -- motto on Sir Terry Pratchett's coat of arms
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Beloved fantasy author Terry Pratchett was knighted, to
his special pleasure, during the initial phases of his decline from an unusual
form of Alzheimer's Disease. Possibly because one of his most famous
characters is an anthropomorphic personification of Death, his heraldic motto
is the Latin for "Don't Fear the Reaper."
He was knighted at the beginning of 2009, almost a year to the day after
being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease following a minor
stroke, which is perhaps why death -- and Death -- were then particularly
on his mind.
Sir Terry died of his disease on 2 March 2015, aged 66, having just
finished his 41st Discworld novel, leaving behind a staggeringly
successful record of over 85 million books sold worldwide in 37
languages, many scores of novels in multiple genres, short stories,
plays, non-fiction articles, essays, poetry, television feature films,
role-playing games, video games, and board games -- and also leaving
behind unfinished major chunks of 10 other novel-length works and
"fragments from many other bits and pieces". Such a full life, such
grace under adversity, and such a gift to the world. Ave, Sir Terry.)
--
Cheers, Arrq uryc qrpelcgvat EBG13? Nfx zr ubj!
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: This is ROT13 for "Need help decoding ROT13?
Ask me how!")
--
Cheers, NOT ALL ELECTRONS ARE NEGATIVE; some have just been hurt
Rick Moen in the past and are looking for a reason to trust again.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @SarcasticRover
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog --
Rick Moen unless you type 'woof, woof, woof'."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- pyellman
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "If you see a snake, just kill it.
Rick Moen Don't appoint a committee on snakes."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- H. Ross Perot
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, (morganj): 0 is false and 1 is true, correct?
Rick Moen (alec_eso): 1, morganj
rick@linuxmafia.com (morganj): bastard.
McQ! (4x80) -- seen on IRC
--
Cheers, <BombScare> i beat the internet
Rick Moen <BombScare> the end guy is hard
rick@linuxmafia.com -- seen on IRC
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, WallJam7: Roses are red,
Rick Moen WallJam7: violets are blue.
rick@linuxmafia.com WallJam7: All of my base
McQ! (4x80) WallJam7: are belong to you.
(Archivist's Note: Reference to the early 2000s Internet meme craze.)
--
Cheers, <blazemore> omg i love this song
Rick Moen <blazemore> Now playing: Unknown Artist - Track 2
rick@linuxmafia.com @ 128 Kbps. (0:47/3:24)
McQ! (4x80) <Javi> blazemore: Yeah, that's a bad-ass song.
--
Cheers, He's making a database;
Rick Moen He's sorting it twice.
rick@linuxmafia.com SELECT * from contacts WHERE behavior = 'nice';
McQ! (4x80) SQL Clause is coming to town. -- @KarenMN
--
Cheers, QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer.
Rick Moen Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders
rick@linuxmafia.com a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.
McQ! (4x80) -- @sempf, https://www.sempf.net/post/On-Testing1.aspx
--
Cheers, "My opinions may have changed,
Rick Moen but not the fact that I'm right."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "My life has a superb cast,
Rick Moen but I cannot figure out the plot."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Ashleigh Brilliant
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Why struggle to open a door between us,
Rick Moen when the whole wall is an illusion?"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Rumi
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes
Rick Moen to be true he generally believes to be true."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac, sct. 19 (349 BCE)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, « On donne des conseils, mais on ne
Rick Moen donne point la sagesse d'en profiter. »
rick@linuxmafia.com -- La Rochefoucauld
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, « Dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard
Rick Moen ne favorise que les esprits préparé. »
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Louis Pasteur
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Grossman's Law: "In time of crisis, people do not rise to
Rick Moen the occasion. They fall to the level of their training."
rick@linuxmafia.com http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#grossman
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
Rick Moen We believe in: rough consensus and running code."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Dave Clark, IETF (unofficial motto)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, You have a problem, so you decide to use Java.
Rick Moen Now, you have a ProblemFactory() .
rick@linuxmafia.com @j_c_fitz
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose
Rick Moen smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it
rick@linuxmafia.com makes a better soup."
McQ! (4x80) -- H.L. Mencken, _A Book of Burlesque_
--
Cheers, "I know there is a joke to be made with the word
Rick Moen asymptote, but I just can't seem to reach it."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @j_c_fitz
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "You can't do anything about the length of your life,
Rick Moen but you can do something about its width and depth."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- H.L. Mencken
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "No man shall have the right to fix the boundary
Rick Moen to the march of a nation."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Charles Stewart Parnell
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: The great Anglo-Irish politician Charles Parnell came
hauntingly close to pulling off the successful and peaceful separation of a
united Ireland from Great Britain in the 1880s, the high Victorian Era,
under Gladstone. If he'd succeeded, there might have been no need for
an Easter Rising, no Anglo-Irish War, no controversial Anglo-Irish Treaty,
no partition of Ireland, and no Irish Civil War -- thus, untold death and
suffering averted. He was sunk by, of all things, the scandal caused by
an extramarital affair.)
--
Cheers, A woman's place is in the House,
Rick Moen the Senate, and the White House.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Coined before the 2016 USA general election to tease
some of my far-right friends. The electorate did not succeed at the
above aspiration very well, and then Дональд Дж. Трамп occupied the Presidency
with substantial foreign help.)
--
Cheers, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but
Rick Moen you are not entitled to your own facts."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, « Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est
Rick Moen endroit de vous rendre injuste. » ("Certainly, any one
rick@linuxmafia.com who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the
McQ! (4x80) power to make you commit injustices.") -- Voltaire
--
Cheers, "It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking
Rick Moen than think your way into a new way of acting."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Jerry Sternin
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "If God dwells inside us, as some people say, I sure hope
Rick Moen He likes enchiladas, because that's what He's getting!"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "To me, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of
Rick Moen something, when you walk around. That way, if anybody
rick@linuxmafia.com says 'Hey, can you give me a hand?', you can say 'Sorry,
McQ! (4x80) got these sacks.'" -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
--
Cheers, "I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world
Rick Moen without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world,
rick@linuxmafia.com because they'd never expect it."
McQ! (4x80) -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
--
Cheers, "If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava,
Rick Moen let 'em go, because, man, they're gone."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "It's funny that pirates were always going around searching
Rick Moen for treasure, and they never realized that the real
rick@linuxmafia.com treasure was the fond memories they were creating."
McQ! (4x80) -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
--
Cheers, "The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Rick Moen -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Conservatism is the idea that healthcare imposes
Rick Moen a cost on society, but sick people don't."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Matthew Garrett
McQ! (4x80 https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/818707979130191872
--
Cheers, 299792458 meters per second. Not
Rick Moen just a good idea. It's the law.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80
--
Cheers, Homo in Domu Alba, qui est iratus et habet in
Rick Moen artificialibus capillum: Quod homo non sit
rick@linuxmafia.com honesta, et est perniciosa in rei publicae.
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: The Latin is slightly incorrect for tactical reasons:
to make it parseable without too much trouble by English-speakers who've never
studied the language formally, but recognise the word roots, as a small word
puzzle. The sentiment in question is commentary on the now-infamous moral and
functional failings of a certain deplorable, one who had a ghastly effect on
USA national politics starting in 2016, and IMO is far more amusing and less
ranty in Latin.)
--
Cheers, Simple systems are not feasible because
Rick Moen they require infinite testing.
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Augustine's Law Number XLII
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The optimum committee has no members.
Rick Moen -- Augustine's Law Number XXXI
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Like running into a burning building and trying to put the
Rick Moen fire out by means of interpretive dance." -- Iain M. Banks
rick@linuxmafia.com on alternative cancer treatments, after his own diagnosis
McQ! (4x80) www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the-final-interview
(Archivist's Note: This great, highly creative Scottish author, one of my
cherished favourites, was blessed not only by great poise in the face of a
sudden terminal, metastatic gall-bladder cancer diagnosis -- he asked his
long-time girlfriend if she'd do him the honour of being his widow -- but
also a mordant sense of humour I can only hope to one day match. Having heard
his terminal diagnosis in March 2013, after some minor treatments for an
aching back, he lived just long enough to enjoy his honeymoon and be amazed
by a worldwide outpouring of thanks and affection, and then died three months
later.)
--
Cheers, "I am not responsible for the structural integrity
Rick Moen of the bubble you've chosen to live in."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Mike Norton
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, « Le doute n'est pas une état bien agréable, mais
Rick Moen l'assurance est un état ridicule. » ("Doubt is not
rick@linuxmafia.com a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.')
McQ! (4x80) -- Voltaire
--
Cheers, "A recursive .sig
Rick Moen Can impart wisdom and truth.
rick@linuxmafia.com Call proc signature()"
McQ! (4x80) -- WalkingTheWalk on Slashdot
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Stephen Dedalus, _Ulysses_
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Romana: "I don't think we should interfere."
Rick Moen The Doctor: "Interfere?" Of course we should interfere.
rick@linuxmafia.com Always do what you're best at, that's what I say."
McQ! (4x80) -- Doctor Who, "Nightmare of Eden"
--
Cheers, "I am a member of a civilization (IAAMOAC). Step back
Rick Moen from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet
rick@linuxmafia.com they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating
McQ! (4x80) the civilization you inherited." -- David Brin
--
Cheers, "There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels."
Rick Moen -- Napoleon Bonaparte (attr.)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, My favorite Web site is probably
Rick Moen "session timed out due to inactivity"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "When do you see yourself in five years?"
Rick Moen - time traveler interview
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, I could maybe do one pilate.
Rick Moen -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel."
Rick Moen -- Rep. Charles B. Brownson (R-Indiana), ca. 1960
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: Said aphorism is one of many lazily assumed to
be one of Mark Twain's (proof that the Midwest sense of humour will
never die). A variant rephrased as advice is sometimes misattributed to
William Greener, press aide to President Gerald Ford, as "Greener's
Law", but the attribution to Brownson is substantially older, recorded
in Irving Liebowitz's 1964 biographical volume _My Indiana_. One source
claims Brownson aimed his remark particularly at Eugene C. Pulliam,
publisher of the _Indianapolis News_ and _Indianpolis Star_, among
other newspaper properties, and perennial critic of Rep. Brownson.
And, hey, that there is .signature #500! My, how this has grown.)
--
Cheers, "He who laughs last, lasts."
Rick Moen -- Leo Rosten
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, You must rise or sink / You must conquer or win,
Rick Moen Or serve and lose. / Suffer or triumph, / Be anvil or hammer.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80) -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gesellige Lieder, Ein Anderes
(Archivist's Note: This is an English translation of the concluding
lines from one of two poetic songs Goethe wrote in 1787 for a now-lost
opera, Die Mystificierten (The Mystified), both of which he fancifully
pretended to have translated from the Coptic language, thus their names
Kophtisches Lied (Coptic Song) and Ein Anderes (Another, as in another
Coptic song). Long after the opera was abandoned, Goethe saved the two
songs and published them in his collection Gesellige Lieder (Convivial
Songs), in 1814.
My best guess, along with that of an actual contemporary Coptic
scholar, is that the narrator's view, that one must be either ruthless
oppressor or ruthlessly oppressed, is being voiced by Goethe ironically,
as the songs were part of a commentary on contemporaneous European
politics that had turned ruthlessly transformative (particularly the
French Revolution), an approach to life Goethe very much did not share.
The line "You must be hammer or anvil" is well known to fans of
Patrick McGoohan's unique 1960s television programme The Prisoner, as
the thematic quotation cited by the new and particularly ruthless Number
2 in the episode Hammer into Anvil.
--
Cheers, There's no theorem like Bayes's Theorem, like no theorem we know.
Rick Moen Everything about it is appealing, everything about it is a wow.
rick@linux Let out all that a-priori feeling, you've been concealing,
mafia.com right up to now. -- G.E.P. Box (w/apologies to Irving Berlin)
--
Cheers, "I am not a vegetarian because I love animals;
Rick Moen I am a vegetarian because I hate plants."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- A. Whitney Brown
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Maybe the law ain’t perfect, but it’s the only
Rick Moen one we got, and without it we got nuthin'."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves, circa 1875
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Date: "What do you do?"
Rick Moen Me: *holds up menu* "You just choose a meal
rick@linuxmafia.com from this book of food."
McQ! (4x80) -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
--
Cheers, If I were an unethical mad scientist who
Rick Moen perfected human cloning using my own DNA,
rick@linuxmafia.com I don't think I could live with myself.
McQ! (4x80) -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
--
Cheers, Lost my car phone.
Rick Moen -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Given where we started from, which was crawling up some
Rick Moen beach, somewhere, and no one even knows where that was, we
rick@linuxmafia.com haven't really done that badly. And I would much rather be
McQ! (4x80) a rising ape than a falling angel." -- Terry Pratchett
--
Cheers, "It's not worth doing something unless someone,
Rick Moen somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Terry Pratchett
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "It's still magic even if you know how it's done."
Rick Moen -- Terry Pratchett, _A Hat Full of Sky_
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Why doesn't anyone invite copyeditors to parties,
Rick Moen when we're such cool people out with whom to hang?"
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @laureneoneal (Lauren O'Neal)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Rand Paul being patient zero for a Senate
Rick Moen viral outbreak is a sign of a writers' room
rick@linuxmafia.com dropping too much acid, late in the season."
McQ! (4x80) -- @owillis (Oliver Willis)
--
Cheers, "I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual
Rick Moen four stages: (i) This is worthless nonsense; (ii) This is an
rick@linux interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) This is true,
mafia.com but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so." -- JBS Haldane
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen "I shot a man in German just to watch him the."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- @drankturpentine
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen "The first rule of Dunning-Kruger club is
rick@linuxmafia.com you don't know you're in Dunning-Kruger club."
McQ! (4x80) -- @drankturpentine (Dennis Detwiller)
--
Cheers, @kareem_carr: "I discovered a new statistical law, that says that
Rick Moen all jokes on Twitter are based on other jokes on Twitter."
rick@linux friend: "That's really cool! What do you call it?"
mafia.com @kareem_carr: *slowly doffs sunglasses" "Regression to the meme."
--
Cheers,
Rick Moen Diaeresis: Keeping the cow out of co-worker since 700 AD.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "My hot flight attendant asked how I like my coffee.
Rick Moen And that's when she told me: 'That's cute, honey, but
rick@linuxmafia.com the coffee's free. You don't have to pay for it, here."
McQ! (4x80) (seen on Twitter)
--
Cheers, "2020 is pulling out more plot devices than
Rick Moen a TV series on the brink of being canceled."
rick@linuxmafia.com (Seen on Reddit, Oct. 2, 2020.)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The plural of regex is regrets."
Rick Moen -- old coder gag, seen on Reddit
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Like looking both ways before crossing the street, and
Rick Moen then getting hit by a submarine." -- Clarke Smith, age 9,
rick@linuxmafia.com winner of Washington Post's contest for best description
McQ! (4x80) of the year 2020 in a single word or phrase.
--
Cheers, "2021 showed up, and told 2020 'hold my beer.'"
Rick Moen -- @justinaireland
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I have neither the time nor the
Rick Moen crayons to explain this to you."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Seen on StackOverflow
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, This limerick goes in reverse. If you start from the bottom-most verse
Rick Moen Unless I'm remiss, This limerick's not any worse.
rick@linu The neat thing is this: -- Zach Weiner
xmafia.com McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Grammarian's bar joke #16: A run-on sentence walks into a
Rick Moen bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Grammarian's bar joke #20: The subjunctive
Rick Moen would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Grammarian's bar joke #22: The past, present,
Rick Moen and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Grammarian's bar joke #24: A verb walks into a bar,
Rick Moen sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate.
rick@linuxmafia.com The noun declines.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, Grammarian's bar joke #26: A gerund and an
Rick Moen infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, The Astley Paradox: If you ask Rick Astley for his copy
Rick Moen of the movie "Up", he cannot give it to you, as he will
rick@linuxmafia.com never give you up. However, in doing so, he lets you down.
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, There are really only two hard problems in computer science:
Rick Moen o Cache invalidation policy.
rick@linuxmafia.com o Name-space management.
McQ! (4x80) o Off-by-one errors.
--
Cheers, "To make error is human. To propagate error
Rick Moen to all server in automatic way is #devops."
rick@linuxmafia.com @DEVOPS_BORAT
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Facebook: Removing the dot from .com since 2021."
Rick Moen -- Deirdre Saoirse Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: The joke here is that now-defunct Sun Microsystems was
famous for the slogan "We put the dot in dot com", 1999-2000, a nod to its
Menlo Park campus housing some of the world's DNS root nameservers, and many of
that set of vital infrastructure hosts running SunOS. Facebook, which lately,
post-2009, occupies Sun's Menlo Park campus as its own headquarters, in 2021
became notorious for taking down all of its worldwide network infrastructure
with a single bonehead BGP error, that IT staff pushed out to border routers.
The preceding .signature by @DEVOPS_BORAT, could have served as another comment
on Facebook's 2021 self-immolation, and was much-retweeted at that time, but
was posted in 2013.)
--
Cheers, "Public health is not private health. Epidemics are not personal
Rick Moen diseases, and pandemics are not even national: They take place
rick@linuxmafia.com across the shared immune system of human society."
McQ! (4x80) -- Indi Samarajiva, https://t.co/bW2w059PYp
(Archivist's Note: Not at all amusing, but rather deadly serious: The
author, an author very familiar with both Sri Lanka and the USA, explains in
the linked article why the USA expensively fails at actually bothering to
take known-effective anti-epidemic measures: It has no public health
response, never has had one, and behaves as if the whole problem can be
shrugge off and resolved through uncoordinated sale of goods and services
in the market. Which doesn't work.)
--
Cheers, "I don't know who you think you are, but this is America; leave our
Rick Moen corporations alone. They're just a small mom and pop business trying
rick@linuxmafia.com to put their kids through school off your tracking cookies
McQ! (4x80) and personally identifying information." -- Cyber Stalker
--
Cheers, "Rule 53: If you can think of it,
Rick Moen someone's done it in the DNS."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Peter Lowe
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Meaningless platitudes are the true currency of open source."
Rick Moen -- @vbhvsgr (a veteran Haskell/Javascript coder
rick@linuxmafia.com who clearly understands self-referential humour)
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Measure twice. Cut as many times as it takes. Dremel."
Rick Moen -- Gardevoir
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "First rule of Linux admin: If you're not awake enough
Rick Moen to spell sudo, you're not allowed to use sudo."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Foone
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The Linux kernel has X.509 processing inside it.
Rick Moen We're all going to die."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Peter Gutmann
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "The Cloud is just smoke from outage fires."
Rick Moen -- c0debabe
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Every bit of complexity you add is a failure point."
Rick Moen -- Adam Savage
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Kindness is my go-to, but f*ck off is my wingman."
Rick Moen -- Jonny Ox
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "I would unite with anybody to do right,
Rick Moen and with nobody to do wrong."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Frederick Douglass
McQ! (4x80)
(Archivist's Note: I have often been chided by ideologues for seeking
and achieving common ground with others with whom I have profound differences
of opinion. The great Mr. Douglass expressed better than I ever could
what is wrong with that self-defeating attitude.)
--
Cheers, "Stun settings are for people who can't commit."
Rick Moen -- J. Michael Straczynski
rick@linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "Mastodon: owned by nobody and/or everybody!
Rick Moen Seize the memes of production!" -- jwz
rick@linuxmafia.com https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/11/mastoversary/
McQ! (4x80)
--
Cheers, "When you search the Web for answers,
Rick Moen may they always be on YouTube."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Edwin Brady's Curse
McQ! (4x80) https://jtsteam.bandcamp.com/track/raisins-2
--
Cheers, "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then
Rick Moen they abuse their users to make things better for their business cus-
rick@linuxmafia.com tomers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw
McQ! (4x80) back the value for themselves. Then, they die." -- Cory Doctorow
(Archivist's Note: This profound explanation for how and why Internet
business platforms become worse can be read at Cory Doctorow's
blog.)
--
Cheers, "Are you sure it’s that simple? After all my time here,
Rick Moen I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which,
rick@linuxmafia.com when you looked at it the right way, didn’t become still
McQ! (4x80) more complicated." -- Poul Anderson, in "Call Me Joe"
--
Cheers, "If I had only one hour to solve a problem,
Rick Moen I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour
rick@linuxmafia.com attempting to define what the problem is."
McQ! (4x80) -- a 1960s Yale U. engineering professor
(Archivist's Note: Widely misattributed to Albert Einstein.
--
Cheers, "Diplomacy is to do and say
Rick Moen The nastiest things in the nicest way."
rick@linuxmafia.com -- Isaac Goldberg, US journalist
McQ! (4x80) in The Reflex, Oct. 1927 issue