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From 85318-0086: The Zip code so exclusive that nobody lives there.
" At last... a 12-year, debt-free company has automated and refined everything that causes 90% of home businesses to fail!"
- Company that sells dreams or scams or something, with all the thinking done for you.
" Our working methodology gives us an edge over others to seamlessly execute projects and to provide a detect free solution."
- Headline for Acumen Soft Tech., an off-shore outsourcing company, offering to do proofreading for a dollar per page and typesetting for $2.50 per page.
" CELEBRATE YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE"
- headline on 2007 Ikea catalog (Yes, you're humdrum, and you know it, and we will help decorate your pitiful little room as a constant reminder)
" I was a librarian that spent 12 hours a day in the library. Yet somehow I met George."
- First Lady Laura Bush
" Chic-fil-a™ invented the chicken sandwich over thirty years ago."
- Radio advertisement
" It's got vitamins and minerals that Nestle's Quik don't"
- TV advertisement for Ovaltine
" If I know anything, I know scary... And giving this president and this out-of-control Congress two more years to screw up our future is downright terrifying."
- Steven King, fiction writer (What's really frightening is taking political advice from a guy who admits that all he knows is how to make up little stories about giant mutant spider-clowns that lure children into sewers, and who then wander around for several hundred pages, trying to figure out why they are there.)
" Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
- Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
" Lookit here son, I say son, did ya see that hawk after those hens? He scared 'em! That Rhode Island Red turned white. Then blue. Rhode Island. Red, white, and blue. That's a joke, son. A flag waver. You're built too low. The fast ones go over your head. Ya got a hole in your glove. I keep pitchin' 'em and you keep missin' 'em. Ya gotta keep your eye on the ball. Eye. Ball. I almost had a gag, son. Joke, that is."
- Foghorn Leghorn
" ...much of [GNU/Linux] seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?"
- Dennis Ritchie - father of Unix and the C programming language
" I know a boy with a goldfish named Dennis."
- Shown on a Disney Channel educational program (and Dennis would be which one?)
" He's Jimmy Carter, with a FOX attitude"
- Homer Simpson, talking about former President Bill Clinton
" We like to think of ourselves as the Microsoft of the energy world"
- Former Enron CEO, Ken Lay on BBC
" Method of swinging on a swing
Abstract: A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."
- United States Patent 6,368,227 (I am not making this up)
" The Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale has below-average temperature year-round."
- Radio advertisement (and, like Lake Woebegone, the children are all above average)
" Privacy laws are our biggest impediment to us obtaining our objectives."
- Michael Eisner, former chief of Disney, in a secret meeting held in Washington DC (You mean that Bill of Rights thing? With Artistic Freedom, what else do you need?)
" Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
" People are saying that computers are dead, that the Internet is gone, and the bubble's burst. People are feeling really wounded because they bought stocks at 100 times revenues, and they can't understand why their life's savings is gone. ... People, get a grip! Look at what you did! 'Hey, that truck hit me!' Well, you play in the freeway, you are going to get hit by a truck. ... We are in sustainable growth, but we just have wild and crazy abnormal swings. We used to have these gentle sine waves. Now we have this thing that looks like Clinton's lie detector test."
- Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy, Reuters news service
" My lawyers tell me all correspondence by email is subject to open record requests. Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you. ... So perhaps we will talk by phone."
- President George WWW. Bush (This is part of e-mail obtained, ostensibly legally, by a newspaper; note that Mr. Clinton never used e-mail at all, for fear of it being used against him.)
" If liberals cared about ideas or knew any facts, they would cease being liberals. ... Liberal persuasion consists of the highbrow sneer from self-satisfied snobs ladled out for people with a 40 IQ. This is not an ideology that can withstand several hours a day of [radio] caller scrutiny where their goofball notions can be shot down by any truck driver with a cell phone."
- Ann Coulter, disgruntled columnist
" He's embarrassing. He's not my president. He will never be my president. ... Republican comes in the dictionary just after reptile and just above repugnant... I looked up Democrat. It's of the people, by the people, for the people."
- Julia Roberts, Actress (I looked-up 'Actress' and... oh, never mind; forget it.)
" My logic is so sound [that] you're having trouble following it."
- Rush Limbaugh, radio personality, explaining the benefits of second-hand smoke to a caller.
" We're still living with the heat left over from the creation of our solar system... volcanoes."
- Alan Alda on Scientific American Frontiers television program (And fish flapping-around causes ocean tide. Maybe 'ol Hawkeye didn't see the gravity in the situation -- 5.972 sextillion tons-worth. I've always wanted to use that line.)
" ... However, ultimately, increases in the size of the human brain through genetic engineering will come up against the problem that the chemical messages responsible for our mental activity are relatively slow-moving - so further increases in the complexity of the brain will be at the expense of speed. We can be quick-witted or very intelligent, but not both."
- Stephen Hawking, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University (that's Sir Isaac Newton's old job)
" So you are completely doomed. But we've been doomed inside Netscape for years and it hasn't stopped us from shipping some very cool software. Don't let the fact that it is impossible stop you from doing cool stuff."
- Michael Toy, at Mozilla.
" What's really appalling is that [Bill Gates] says, 'Please let me innovate,' when what he did was destroy the most innovative company [Netscape] the Silicon Valley has ever seen, It's very upsetting."
- Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp.
" LESS MONEY LESS PEOPLE AND LESS TIME."
- Extra-bold 80pt headline in a multi-page advertisement on heavy card stock for Dell Computers. (Dell deserves better. Do you think they use the same advertising agency A-Open uses? Do they know the difference between less or fewer? Are they knotting their power ties a little too tight? For answers to these questions and more, see ASCIIcat.)
" Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."
- Edward Tufte, writer
" Developments in computer technology are making customers easier to use."
- Anonymous
" You're caught up in the Internet
You think it's such a great asset
You're wrong, wrong, wrong
All that fiber optic gear
Still can not take away the fear
Like an island song"
- Jimmy Buffett, Holiday in Banana Wind
" Them that knows
They know that they knows
Them that don't know
They don't know they don't know."
- Maria Muldaur, Louisiana Love Call
" Whistle through your teeth and spit
because it's alright
I will get by"
- Jerry Garcia, singer/songwriter
" I think that `icon' word is just another word for washed-up has-been."
- Bob Dylan, singer
All the answers you will ever need
Good news everyone! Comedy Central will be first to thirteen new episodes of Futurama after about five years out of production. Beginning in 2008, the creators of The Simpsons will try it again. And with that are my Futurama 3008 predictions:
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
For television-sweeps week, ABC remade The Music Man, starring that Ferris Bueller guy. They apparently felt that this classic motion picture, based on a successful Broadway musical, should be remade as a slapdash, low-budget, whiny, made-for-TV, lovefest. If viewers buy it, more are in the works:
Airwolf protected the sky. Night Rider made our streets safe. Riptide and Miami Vice tracked-down every bad guy in a boat. And now, the seedy underworld has moved to custom railroad trains.
Watch the Cop Train™ elite, international, undercover crime-fighting team each week as they ride the rails on their high-tech super train, solving crimes, fighting terrorists, and blowing-up things.
They're hip, they're cool, and they're afraid of flying.
This weeks episode: "Terror Takes a Holiday." Guest villain John Saxon hijacks the ATLANTIC CITY SPECIAL on its maiden run, and blows-up the Dunes hotel. Look for surprise cameo appearances by Joan Rivers and Donald Trump. Photographed in a suburb of Los Angeles that sort-of looks like Atlantic City, with second-unit exteriors shot in Toronto.
Meet your Cop Train™ team:
Don't miss a single explosive episode (we'll only repeat them three times each season, and four more times on cable, and every night in syndication).
Watch Cop Train™ every week. You'd probably waste the hour it steals from your life, anyway.
Note: I wrote this prophetic piece before 18-Wheels of Justice was announced. It's apparently about crime-solving truckers.
You have just developed a new product, the Digital Gonkulator, which is original, innovative, and practically defines a new product category.
Unless I credit somebody else in here, I wrote it.
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