... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce
Connell, Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm.  One
thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition.  If
somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it
on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what
a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.
		-- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!"

... proper attention to Earthly needs of the poor, the depressed and the
downtrodden, would naturally evolve from dynamic, articulate, spirited
awareness of the great goals for Man and the society he conspired to erect.
		-- David Baker, paraphrasing Harold Urey, in
		   "The History of Manned Space Flight"

-- Scintillate, scintillate, asteroid minikin.
-- Members of an avian species of identical plumage congregate.
-- Surveillance should precede saltation.
-- Pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity.
-- It is fruitless to become lachrymose over precipitately departed
	lacteal fluid.
-- Freedom from incrustations of grime is contiguous to rectitude.
-- It is fruitless to attempt to indoctrinate a superannuated
	canine with innovative maneuvers.
-- Eschew the implement of correction and vitiate the scion.
-- The temperature of the aqueous content of an unremittingly
	galled saucepan does not reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those
who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent,
and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious
and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
		-- Voltarine de Cleyre

... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks.  Generally, their
procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as
to infest the waters.  I would estimate that the primary food source of
sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making
documentaries.  Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly
listless.  The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another
documentary."  So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking,
under the guise of Scientific Research.  "We know very little about the
effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply
scientific voice.  "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White
in the testicles with a cattle prod."  The divers keep this kind of
thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and
then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very
dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all along.
		-- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"

***** Special AI Seminar (abstract)

It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge
in order to perform well in complex domains.  But knowledge alone is not
sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well.  Accordingly,
we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call
"wisdom engineering".  As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a
wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought.
IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom
about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so
forth.  IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic
rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base.  IMMANUEL
succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed
in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those
underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory
of value, and Husserl's phenomenology.  In this seminar, we will describe
IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture.  We will also briefly
discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration.

-- THE BATES MOTEL --
					... convenient
					...	clean
					...	cozy

	Norman, knock loudly,
	     I'm in the shower.

		M.

... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ...
		-- Dave Barry

... the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from
other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in
charity we can only call "inhuman."
		-- R. A. Lafferty

-- The writing implement is more potent than the claymore.
-- The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the
	optimal cachinnation.

... there are about 5,000 people who are part of that committee.  These guys
have a hard time sorting out what day to meet, and whether to eat croissants
or doughnuts for breakfast -- let alone how to define how all these complex
layers that are going to be agreed upon.
		-- Craig Burton of Novell, Network World

... TheysaidDoyouseethebiggreenglowinthedarkhouseuponthehill?andIsaidYesIsee
thebiggreenglowinthedarkhouseuponthehillTheresabigdarkforestbetweenmeandthe
biggreenglowinthedarkhouseuponthehillandalittleoldladyridingonaHoovervacuum
cleanersayingIllgetyoumyprettyandyourlittledogTototoo ...

	I don't even *HAVE* a dog Toto...

... this is an awesome sight.  The entire rebel resistance buried under six
million hardbound copies of "The Naked Lunch."
		-- The Firesign Theatre

... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage
from beginning to end.
		-- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

 U       X
e dUdX, e dX, cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159...

* UNIX is a Trademark of Bell Laboratories.

 VII. Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel
      entrances; others cannot.
	This trompe l'oeil inconsistency has baffled generations, but at least
	it is known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall's surface to
	trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical
	space.  The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to
	follow into the painting.  This is ultimately a problem of art, not
	of science.
VIII. Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.
	Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives
	might comfortably afford.  They can be decimated, spliced, splayed,
	accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be
	destroyed.  After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate,
	elongate, snap back, or solidify.
  IX. For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance.
	This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to
	the physical world at large.  For that reason, we need the relief of
	watching it happen to a duck instead.
   X. Everything falls faster than an anvil.
	Examples too numerous to mention from the Roadrunner cartoons.
		-- Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion", June 1980

<< WAIT >>

... we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent
observations and inferences by the thousands.  The earth is billions of
years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary
descent.  Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but
do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither
flat nor at the center of the universe?  Science *has* taught us some
things with confidence!  Evolution on an ancient earth is as well
established as our planet's shape and position.  Our continuing struggle
to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not
cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" --
into doubt.
		-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism",
		   The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2.

... when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer
has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
		-- Frederick Brooks, Jr.