From the Henry Cate Life Humor collection:
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On Saturday last, I had dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. My fortune read:
"You will gain admiration from your pears."
Comice? Bartlett? Canned? I don't grow or eat them, anyway.
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And this was being passed around at Xerox:
I received a flyer yesterday advertising a workshop on INNOVATIVE management, qualifying itself with the following quote from someone who clearly knows something about technology I don't:
"It is a tragedy in our society that we have so few innovators, and so many copiers."
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"If marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have in-laws."
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When an elderly and distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is very probably right. When he says that something is impossible, he is quite possibly wrong.
Clarke's Law
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There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
--- John von Neumann
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Don't go away mad...Just go away!
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If you can't convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S Truman
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Why is it that we park in driveways and drive on parkways?
or
Why does a ship carry cargo and a truck caries shipments?
Ah me...
ACHE (Atlanta Center for Humorous Expression)
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Vini, Vici, Hacki
I came, I saw, I hacked
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DAILY NEWS, September 7, 1987:
One in two Californians believes that people are less honest today than they were 10 years ago, according to a statewide poll released today. What's more, many of those surveyed for the latest California poll admitted to committing dishonest acts, according to pollster Mervin Field, but Field thinks that some of those people may have been lying.
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[Advertisement in /Hollywood Daily Variety/, reprinted as a filler in /The New Yorker/]
If your housekeeper is deported who will clean up after the kids?
- Ron Burns, Immigration Attorney
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"Friends come & go, but enemies accumulate."
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Sue and Bob, a pair of tight wads, lived in the mid west, and had been married years. Bob had always wanted to go flying. The desire deepened each time a barn stormer flew into town to offer rides. Bob would ask, and Sue would say, "No way, ten dollars is ten dollars."
The years went pay, and Bob figured he didn't have much longer, so he got Sue out to the show, explaining, it's free to watch, let's at least watch. And once he got there the feeling become real strong. Sue and Bob started an argument. The Pilot, between flights, overheard, listened to they problem, and said, "I'll tell you what, I'll take you up flying, and if you don't say a word the ride is on me, but if you back one sound, you pay ten dollars.
So off they flew. The Pilot doing as many rolls, and dives as he could. Heading to the ground as fast as the plane could go, and pulling out of the dive at just the very last second. Not a word. Finally he admitted defeat and went back the air port.
"I'm surprised, why didn't you say anything?"
"Well I almost said something when Sue fell out, but ten dollars is ten dollars."
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Out in the old west, in a dingy, two bit town, there was a bar, built of a few pieces of wood, and a couple sheets. A dog came in one hot dusty afternoon and asked for a beer. After the bartender got over his surprise, he yelled "Get out of here, we don't serve your kind."
"Not till I get some rye."
"Get out of here now!"
"No way, I want my drink."
The bartender pulled out a rifle and shot the dog in the leg. The dog limbed out, bleeding all over the place. A couple days later the door swings open, there's the dog, dress in a black vest, a big ten gallon hat, and two pearl handled pistols.
"I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."
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Excerpts from the front page of the San Jose Mercury News today:
"Sculley, Jobs plotted to take over Xerox"
John Sculley and Steven Jobs, giddy with enthusiasm and flush with confidence, plotted in mid-1984 for Apple Computer Inc. to take over Xerox Corp., according to a manuscript of a forthcoming book by Sculley. In scheming to acquire a company six times Apple's size, Sculley and Jobs were doing what they knew best: to think big, to defy the odds, to go for broke . . .
Rather than just make marketing alliances with large companies, as they had done with GE, Sculley thought, Apple ought to actually buy other companies outright. Not small companies, as Jobs suggested. Big companies.
"We're not thinking big enough," he told Jobs. "Maybe we should expand our band width (sic) and think if there's a company out there that could really help us take advantage of this technology. The obvious one to me is Xerox."
The idea itself was intoxicating. Jobs and Sculley bounced the prospect off former Xerox computer scientist Bob Belleville and then took it to Al Eisenstat, Apple's in-house general counsel.
The Xerox gamble fizzled, though, not because of Eisenstat but - in part - because of Jobs. Just as Jobs' impetuous behavior eventually cost him is place at Apple, it got the better of him during earlier talks with Xerox executives.
[Sculley] recalls saying to Jobs: "I know you don't admire Xerox as a company because it hasn't been able to commercialize its computer products very well. But let's just go in [to a meeting with Xerox executives] and listen and keep our minds as open as possible. Let's demonstrate to them that we're really mature people."
Although Sculley remembers Jobs promising to "behave," he claims the chairman [Jobs] began to attack Xerox almost immediately, proclaiming, "I really shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it. You guys don't have any idea of what you're doing." That sour moment alone may have been enough to make any Apple-Xerox marriage tricky . . .
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I got acquainted with a young widow, observes a writer, who lived with her step-daughter in the same house. I married that widow. Shortly afterward, my father fell in love with the step-daughter and married her. My wife became the mother-in-law and also the daughter-in-law of my own father, and my wife's step-daughter is my step-mother. My father's wife has a boy, who is naturally my step-brother because he is the son of my father and of my step-mother, but because he is the son of my wife's step-daughter, my wife is the grandmother of the little boy, and I am the grandfather of my step-brother. My wife also has a boy. My step-mother is consequently the step-sister of my boy, and also his grandmother because he is the child of her step-son; and my father is the brother-in-law of my son because he has his own step-sister for a wife. I am the brother-in-law of my mother; my wife is the aunt of her own son; my son is the grandson of my father; and I am my own grandfather!!!
ACHE (Atlanta Center for Humorous Expression)
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