1.  I'm Not Rudolph; That's Not My Nose
 2.  The Nutcracker Swede
 3.  Santa Goes Round-The-World
 4.  Not-So-Tiny Tim
 5.  Ninja Reindeer Killfest '88
 6.  Yes, Yes, Oh God Yes, Virginia
 7.  Crisco Kringle
 8.  Babes in Boyland
 9.  Santa's Magic Lap
10.  Hot Buttered Elves
		-- David Letterman, "Top Ten Christmas Movies in Times
		   Square"

... A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you
have turned into a pile of dust.

... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
		-- Mark Twain

... a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you
were a High-Class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker and
a fly-by-night.  These virtues awakened Confidence and enabled you to handle
Bigger Propositions.  But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical
and refuse to take twice the value for a house if a buyer was such an idiot
that he didn't force you down on the asking price.
		-- Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt"

-- All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.
-- When there are visible vapors having the prevenience in ignited
	carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.
-- Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
-- A plethora of individuals wither expertise in culinary techniques vitiated
	the potable concoction produced by steeping certain coupestibles.
-- Eleemosynary deeds have their initial incidence intramurally.

=============== ALL FRESHMEN PLEASE NOTE ===============

To minimize scheduling confusion, please realize that if you are taking one
course which is offered at only one time on a given day, and another which is
offered at all times on that day, the second class will be arranged as to
afford maximum inconvenience to the student.  For example, if you happen
to work on campus, you will have 1-2 hours between classes.  If you commute,
there will be a minimum of 6 hours between the two classes.

... all the good computer designs are bootlegged; the formally planned
products, if they are built at all, are dogs!
		-- David E. Lundstrom, "A Few Good Men From Univac",
		   MIT Press, 1987

... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center.  When a
programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting
down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up.  That
behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and
never when standing.

Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal
know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing?  Good debuggers, though,
know that there has to be a reason.  Electrical theories are the easiest to
hypothesize: was there a loose wire under the carpet, or problems with static
electricity?  But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible.
An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard:
the tops of two keys were switched.  When the programmer was seated he was a
touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led
astray by hunting and pecking.
		-- from the Programming Pearls column,
		   by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985

... and furthermore ... I don't like your trousers.

... and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a
courtesy detail.
		-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

... Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an
inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth.  Most notably I have
ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old.  Well, I
haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and *then* rejected
it.  There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between
prejudice and postjudice.  Prejudice is making a judgment before you have
looked at the facts.  Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards.  Prejudice
is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious
mistakes.  Postjudice is not terrible.  You can't be perfect of course; you
may make mistakes also.  But it is permissible to make a judgment after you
have examined the evidence.  In some circles it is even encouraged.
		-- Carl Sagan, "The Burden of Skepticism"

... But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can
easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed
and were a scourge to mankind.  The evidence (including confession)
upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was
without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable.  The judges' decisions based
on it were sound in logic and in law.  Nothing in any existing court
was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and
sorcery for which so many suffered death.  If there were no witches,
human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand.  Human
intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we
can tell.  If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now
seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their
world, not in their distorted perceptions.  Even the standard example of
ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once
you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen
would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
		-- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"

... But we've only fondled the surface of that subject.
		-- Virginia Masters

... C++ offers even more flexible control over the visibility of member
objects and member functions.  Specifically, members may be placed in the
public, private, or protected parts of a class.  Members declared in the
public parts are visible to all clients; members declared in the private
parts are fully encapsulated; and members declared in the protected parts
are visible only to the class itself and its subclasses.  C++ also supports
the notion of *friends*: cooperative classes that are permitted to see each
other's private parts.
		-- Grady Booch, "Object Oriented Design with Applications"

... computer hardware progress is so fast.  No other technology since
civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price
gain in 30 years.
		-- Frederick Brooks, Jr.

... [concerning quotation marks] even if we *_d_i_d* quote anybody in this
business, it probably would be gibberish.
		-- Thom McLeod

... difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.  The several sects
perform the office of a common censor morum over each other.  Is uniformity
attainable?  Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned;
yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
		-- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia"

<<<<< EVACUATION ROUTE <<<<<

... "fire" does not matter, "earth" and "air" and "water" do not matter.
"I" do not matter.  No word matters.  But man forgets reality and remembers
words.  The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him.
He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see
them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time.
Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he
knows them in the naming.
		-- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light"