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about Myself 


Well, here I should have some smart thing to say about myself, and to the left there is supposed to be my picture. But I don’t have smart things to say—nor do I have a picture. so I had to come up with some idea. And I did. I hand-drew a picture, which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike me. Then I took a huge chunk of output from the unix fortune(6) program, to fill up space easily—and it’s witty, too. Here we go:

The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking.

—William James 

Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket.

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

—Henry Adams 

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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 

I’m going to raise an issue and stick it in your ear.

—John Foreman