______ __
/ ____/___ _____/ /___ ______ ___
/ /_ / __ \/ ___/ __/ / / / __ \/ _ \
/ __/ / /_/ / / / /_/ /_/ / / / / __/
/_/ \____/_/ \__/\__,_/_/ /_/\___/
One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out of the net! How
will it live?" The other said, "When you have gotten out of the net,
I'll tell you."
JACK AND THE BEANSTACK
by Mark Isaak
Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL
character named Jack. Jack and his relations were poor. Often their
hash table was bare. One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices
are sparse. You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some
BASICs." She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it
to him.
So Jack set out. But as he was walking along a Hamilton path,
he met the traveling salesman.
"Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman
in high-level language.
"I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips
and Apples," commented Jack.
"I have a much better algorithm. You needn't join a queue
there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now."
Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house. But when
he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she
started thrashing.
"Don't you even have any artificial intelligence? All these
kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the
window ...
Aquadextrous, adj.:
Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off
with your toes.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Without ice cream life and fame are meaningless.
Iles's Law:
There is always an easier way to do it. When looking directly
at the easy way, especially for long periods, you will not see it.
Neither will Iles.
Moon, n.:
1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to
hackers. See PHASE OF THE MOON. 2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC).
Absentee, n.:
A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove
himself from the sphere of exaction.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
We had it tough ... I had to get up at 9 o'clock at night, half an
hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work 29 hours down
mill, and when we came home our Dad would kill us, and dance about on
our grave singing Haleleuia ...
-- Monty Python
Thursday, 12 March 2026 Michael J. Chappell Contact me at:
mcsuper5@freeshell.org
