These are funny things other people said that I thought were worth archiving for some reason or other. Most of them were funnier in context, but, hey, so are most car-train collisions.

  • If I was the sort of guy who drooled at OS descriptions, UNIX with a Mac-like GUI on top would come out pretty high on the drool-o-meter. --Matt McLeod

  • I've said it before and I'll say it again, Canada has a surplus of seals and they are not going to go extinct any time soon. I had to club three of the fuckers just to get to my desk this morning!! -- Shayne Dark

  • What's a net Nazi? That's what's left after you deduct the wholesale price and overhead from a gross Nazi. -- Rich Tietjens

  • Let them rot on the RBL and let's see which grows on their lifeless carcass first... a clue or mold. -- Ray Everett-Church

  • Unable to buy a clue, unwilling to rent to own. -- David DeLaney

  • It's about damn time that all of us who actually give a damn about Usenet stand up and tell the people who don't to fuck off and die. -- Russ Allbery

  • This seems to be an increasingly common problem - as total number of users grows, the chances of there being one sufficiently obsessed loon per topic rise as well. -- Bruce Baugh

  • Their favorite folklore consists of finding small people, catching them, tying them up, and then forcing them to cough up some gold. It's not about leprechauns, it's about armed robbery! When Irish eyes are smiling it means they have wired your car with explosives. -- Shayne Dark

  • Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't. -- Yiftach Levy

  • Yes, eat the willfully ignorant. Just use good table manners. -- Ron Echeverri

  • Besides, I've always wanted to be a tyrannical fascist, and this is as good a time to start as any, I say. Bring on the grotty peasants... -- Barry Bouwmsa

  • This is all enlightened self-interest. I want to RULE THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF MEN AND WOMEN EVERYWHERE! Selfishness demands that I make it as easy as possible for them to swallow my views and adopt them as their own. -- Bruce Baugh

  • Stir frequently. Add "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and commentary on the "tragedy of the commons" to taste. Serves 50 million. -- Dan Birchall

  • I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that without MS PodBay 2.1. -- Jonathan D. Colan

  • There's an entire large post from Russ Allbery that needs to be read by anybody who cares about Usenet. My favorite line from it is "I don't know what makes me more sick, the fact that people don't have any clue what actually goes into keeping this thing that they're using running, or that when they find out they don't care." The full post, which appeared both in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet and net.subculture.usenet, is archived here.

  • And so your ignorant newbie status shows through like a carbuncle under a silk blouse. -- Jon Parry-McCulloch

  • These caffeine culprits are worthy of a great deal of spite and although I do not rank them up with the three great evils (winter, fascism and clowns), they are still worthy of any and all contempt that can be rained upon them. -- Shayne Dark

  • If somebody starts shooting a gun at me, don't expect me to defend myself with a condiment. -- Steve Daniels on "pepper spray."

  • I wore [a tie] once and got married. That didn't work. I wore another one and got married again. That didn't work either. Ties scare me. -- Dennis McLain-Furmanski

  • My aunt Hazel, now deceased, raised Chihuahuas. Her back yard was filled with dozens of these yapping little pests. When they are Very Small, they are actually rather cute and playful. When they are old enough to figure out they are chihuahuas, they get mean. -- Henry Warwick

  • Of course we don't know what the fuck we're doing. If we did, it wouldn't be research! -- Charlie Lear

  • Sigh. Lusers. WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM... -- Dan Ritter

  • Getting trolled in news.admin.net-abuse.email should not be a requirement for being considered alive. -- J.D. Falk

  • Let's pedantically bicker on this trivial detail for a month. *time flash* Well, that was fun. -- Jeff Mercer

  • Recently, Erol's was lucky enough to acquire a pair of Orbital Ion Cannons. The spammer you're reporting gave us an excellent opportunity to test out these new pieces of equipment. I'm pleased to say that the test was a smashing success. The spammer has been reduced to component atoms and shouldn't be troubling you again (at least, not from an Erol's account). -- Afterburner

  • ...maybe there's some quantum level of suckitude about the world that I'm missing. -- YoYo

  • Didja ever notice that a dead high school jock is a "tragedy," but a dead high school geek is just dead? -- David Rosenfeld

  • If god is the father, and we are all his children, and we marry each other... THAT'S DISGUSTING! I guess we can't laugh at Arkansas again. -- Shayne Dark

  • New newsgroup creation would probably be well served by going back to September of 93 and implementing a means of keeping newbies from hitting USENET sans sufficient clue. Once time travel has been fully perfected, I plan to go back in time and personally solve that problem. -- Abby Franquemont

  • I bet General Motors is pissed off about the release of [Viagra]. Now that old men can get erections again, what will happen to the market for red Corvettes? -- Carlos Alvarez

  • Settle down, boys. There's pain enough for everyone in net.*. -- Kate Wrightson

  • My point is that it would take an absolute moron to lose money, if his/her/its spam hits millions. But since many spammers are absolute illiterate morons, maybe I should reconsider my position. -- Sanford Wallace

  • Of course, he soon passed out on the floor and by the time he got to hospital he'd had acute renal failure (I've yet to see an ugly one) and shortly thereafter was dead as a herring. -- John WIlson

  • I tell you, it's enough to make a guy stop believing in Karmic Vengeance. You'd think that by now enough Ugly would have accumulated so that [company name] would be getting hit by meteors at the rate of 20 per minute. Actually, knowing Karma's general vacillatory tendencies, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some poor Bushman out in the Kalahari wondering where all the rocks came from. -- Illuminatus Primus

  • I leave you to draw your own conclusions. With crayons, no doubt. -- Marc Wolfe

  • Nobody needs to upgrade to Windows 98. Of course, if we only bought what we needed, we'd still be using Word 2.0. -- C|Net

  • You have achieved the rarified state where, from my consideration, your very existence acts as a net subtraction on the sum total of human knowledge. -- Henry Warwick

  • I don't think Doom has desensitised me to killing people any more than Master Of Orion makes me feel that planetary bombardment is a Good Thing. -- David Damerell

  • Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. If I was I'd have asked one of you to kill me for being a lawyer. -- Richard Sexton

  • I really thought that my decades-old reputation as an out-of-control flamer would have headed off some of this paranoia. I must be slowing down. -- Paul Vixie

  • Sanity is like money; you should just have enough to get by. Any more and you turn into a freak. -- Ron Echeverri

  • I don't comment on covert operations; that's why they're called covert operations. -- Mike McCurry

  • Paranoia is a valuable resource; let's not waste it internally. -- Christina Schulman

  • I head a race of super beings, poised to take over this puny world. When my work is done, you will be but a minion on Planet Dust. Come early, all the really good minion jobs fill up fast. -- Dustbunny

  • Besides, once you give storms rednecky names like Charley and Earl, they're bound to make landfall *somewhere* in the south. -- Rick MacKinnon

  • I don't anticipate anything. I just show up for work and see what happens. -- Mike McCurry

  • The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. -- George Santayana

  • What followed was, I believe in retrospect, something much like a flamenco dance, except involving fewer feathers, more chitin and neurotoxins, and significantly more cursing. -- Nathan J. Mehl

  • Lee, you are a BLITHERING DISCOMBOBULATED PINHEAD. You deserve nothing short of a scalding Olestra enema and digital amputation. -- Ron Echeverri

  • UFO enthusiasts, as a class, can seem rather humourless; on the other hand, if I believed I were being cornholed nightly by mushroom-coloured dwarves, I too might find it hard to keep my face wreathed in smiles. -- Bruce Wright

  • It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity. I bet this kind of thing does not happen to heroin addicts. I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles. -- Dave Barry

  • Ah, what an unexpected treat it is to laugh at the pain and suffering of a vain imbecile! -- Chris White

  • I'm sure Hell has an e-mail system. So I'll have to learn Outlook Express, big deal. -- Scott Hazen Mueller

  • Bah. He's getting too old. Time to shoot him off in a space shuttle. -- Phoenix

  • Fsckheads just come with sheer numbers of people. Good people come with sheer numbers too. One just needs a more ... final ... filtering process. -- David Gerard

  • There is nothing in need of fixing (except of course his opinions when they differ from mine). -- Steve Boursy

  • I think I have the first entry for my executive list of local companies that we will never, ever even consider buying so much as a single molecule of hardware or a single electron of service from, until nothing remains of the sun but a charred, smoldering core. -- Dan Birchall

  • Everett-Church Axiom of Online Law #1: The validity of legal threats made by email is inversely proportional to number of times the author references his/her lawyers. -- Ray Everett-Church, Esq.

  • Don't piss off he who is god over your e-mail. -- Jeffrey "elezar" Haas

  • A bazillion interlocking cheeseballs. -- Brian Mailman characterizes the Internet

  • I've got a very nice list of 198 carefully targetted addresses. Largely male, technologists many of them, nearly all in the computer or Internet industry, and they *all* read and respond to advertising e-mail. Well, except the one guy who programmed his computer to read and respond for him. -- Scott Hazen Mueller

  • It's better to be pragmatic and safe, than RFC-anal and blowed up. -- Chris Lewis

  • Some people are clueless. Being anti-spam does not make them less clueless, it just makes them anti-spam. Being clueless doesn't make them pro-spam, though that's certainly a prerequisite. -- Peter da Silva

  • Based on the number of Tards who "find" him, I suspect Jesus really sucks at hide'n'seek. -- Marc Wolfe

  • The Internet is the end of civilizations, cultures, interests and ethics. -- Official Iraqi government statement

  • During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. -- Al Gore

  • West Virginia leads the nation in toothlessness. -- CNN Headline News

  • What do I need to do to get a TLD of 'lance'? I'll let my parrot administer it. I'll bet the quality will be superior [to Network Solutions]. -- Jay Denebeim

  • Remember, the problem is not that people are stupid; the problem is that modems are cheap. -- Vince Sabio

  • Subjectively, the human animal is just as dorky, twisted, and knobby as any other primate species would be if it wore polyester and tight shoes. -- Henry Warwick

  • "Great" Britain. "United" States of America. Pah! -- Andy Kirk

  • But what *IS* the internet? It's the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP packet from." -- Seth Breidbart

  • Hey, that was fun! Anyone else wanna say something stupid? -- Iris Gonzalez

  • Round these parts we save the vitriol for the guy from UUNET. -- Neil Schwartzman

  • I'm surviving on a diet of caffeine and painkillers in addition to my natural disability of blondness. -- Nick Davies

  • Talent and sensibility clearly don't travel on the same chromosomes. -- Ray Everett-Church

  • When Pricilla Presley married Michael Jackson, Elvis fans took it in stride, as it was no sillier than anything else associated with Elvis. -- Shayne Dark

  • I wish someone could take out a patent on e-commerce and then sue anyone else who uses the word. It would significantly reduce the amount of cutesy in the universe, thus staving off universal heat death via marketing for a few more years. -- Russ Allbery

  • Not that we ever have to do much smiting. Dammit. Nothing perks me up like a good smite. -- Victoria Swann

  • Every city has its undesirables. In terms of interesting and disgusting locations, Los Angeles has East LA, New York has Harlem, and Europe has France. These are the places that nobody wants to go if they can help it, a place where things are abandoned, and forgotten about, a place where the scum of society thrive. -- Chris Robock

  • IMHO, there are some people we should just refuse to allow sales to on the grounds that they are dangerously stupid. -- Peter Evans

  • Keep in mind, this is WebTV, the world's most self-replenishing source of poor English. -- Peter Seebach

  • I imagine that long after IPV6 has been superseded there will still be former Cyber Promotions IPV4 addresses still firmly embedded in deny lists throughout the solar system. -- Michael Rathbun

  • For the benefit of companies that have got it backwards, here's the instruction manual. You do business, in a thoughtful, professional manner, first. For a long time. If you succeed, and if there is integrity and a guiding philosophy behind your operation, then you build brand. -- Steve Ulfelder

  • In the years to come, there will be only 1 TLD ".bleah" and everyone in the world will have a machine name that is a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 11. One name per party worker. -- Peter Evans

  • Sometimes a big jagged fact gets caught up in the Colon of Consciousness, requiring you to use the Enema Kit of Enlightenment. -- Travis Ruetenik

  • I mean, seriously, we are a culture that can stand in front of a microwave with a burrito in it and scream "FASTER!" -- Ross Brown

  • And who says our criminal justice system is supposed to provide catharsis? Buy Ex-Lax if you want catharsis. -- Marsha Clodfelter

  • I bet in heaven they don't even need tires. They probably have wicked cool hoverbikes or something. -- R.M. Weiner on life after Firestone

  • Our guns don't kill people. Bullets do. Our guns just make the bullets go really fast. -- George Nemeyer

  • I mean, being mentally incompetent shouldn't be an argument for the defense, it should be one for the prosecution. -- Chad Larson

  • Bill sez, "Dance, little librarians!" and we reply, "To what tune, master?" -- Sioux Prifogle Otte

  • It's not because I mind hurting people - frankly, I excel at it. -- Mitch Berg

  • Besides, government workers can't seem to run a railroad, count the votes or deliver my monthly copy of Swank, so what makes everybody think they're so skilled at this whole determine-who-should-live-and-die thing? -- Bob Van Voris

  • Your misdirection is as subtle and skillful as a German funk band. -- Mitch Berg

  • I don't think I have a long enough attention span to be clinically depressed. -- Fran Fruit

  • The online business that killed off the net you knew and loved is, if not already bankrupt, serving web pages from half a dozen redundant sites at Akamai with support outsourced to an industrial park outside Delhi. -- Peter da Silva

  • The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. -- Frederic Bastiat

  • She's just a single crooked incisor away from possessing strange powers in a Stephen King novel. -- Chris White

  • I have all the subtlety of one of those World's Strongest Man Competitions. In fact, imagine one of those guys on a six day whiskey, cocaine and steroid binge swinging a snow shovel around an antique doll shop. -- Dave James

  • I doubt I'd ever be in favor of aborting an unwanted pregnancy I'd helped create, but I know damn sure I don't want Tom DeLay involved in the decision. -- Jonathan Colan

  • Terror has a name, and its name is Bubba in his rusty pickup truck without blinkers or brakelights, spinning out on a slightly damp road in a construction zone lane merge at 85 MPH. -- David Goudsward on Dallas drivers

  • So, did *every* Asian general who ever lived have his own chicken recipe? -- Peg Warner

  • They couldn't get a clue in clue season in a field full of horny clues if they were smeared with clue-musk and did the flipping clue mating dance. -- Martin Bredeck

  • TV is art like velvet Elvis is art. -- Joseph Moore

  • Usenet: A community with an astoundingly high density of anarchists and libertarians who democratically elect a small number of absolute dictators in the hopes of preserving their property rights. -- Peter Seebach

  • Tiny, hard-to-see, especially hands-free cell phones make it very difficult to distinguish well-connected people from psychotic people talking to themselves you'll want to cross the street to avoid. Especially when they start emitting beeping noises. -- Jonathan Colan

  • Now's where the sniveling solipsists/philosophic idealist infants start whining about "How can you KNOW objective reality? Isn't everything appearance?" At which point, I grab a beefy, hardbound copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and whomp 'em upside the head but good! -- Joseph Moore

  • I just saw 4 state employees standing around watching 1 guy dig for the better part of an hour. All had shovels. How do I apply for the "onlooker" position? -- Jay Wyatt

  • Between coffee in the mornings and beer in the evenings, I haven't seen a proper turd in eight years. -- Travis Ruetenik

  • Dude, if we don't hate the Yankees, the terrorists have won. -- Bob Van Voris

  • I am in England and the food here is not to be tasted as much as just swallowed without grimacing. -- Kristin Gilbert

  • These "garlic mashed potatoes" taste vaguely like someone might have been considering the possibility that garlic exists while they were mashing some potatoes. -- Jeffrey Anbinder

  • I thought I would look into the possibility of landing a dream BOFH position as an air marshal - in that it seems to require long hours seated interspersed with occasionally shooting someone. -- Scott Hazen Mueller

  • It's nice that we've been married for a year now, but I do kind of miss that "new wife" smell. -- Bob Van Voris

  • To these dolts, the rest of the world does not exist, just the tinny, offkey music playing in their otherwise echoingly vacant noodles. Death is too good for them. -- Martin Bredeck

  • I go into Wal-Mart and wonder if decapitation would actually slow any of these idiots down. I think they'd just continue running around in circles, just like chickens do. -- Chris Urich

  • Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good. -- Carl Sagan

  • In my opinion, the amount of time that's been invested in chasing Barlowesque fantasies of "net.government" is one of the primary reasons that we've been beaten like red-headed stepchildren on most of the major real-world engagements on political and economic policy as applied to the net. -- Nathan J. Mehl

  • Is there anything better in sports than the sound of Eric Lindros getting another concussion? I think they should make a new sport focused entirely around that: World Champion Hitting Eric Lindros on the Head Competition. -- Jonathan Colan

  • Christ, we start making it easier for the boneheads to participate and Congress will be spending all their time passing the North American Free Nachos Act. -- Bob Van Voris

  • Mariah Carey was a waitress? I cannot imagine a colder bowl of soup. -- Travis Ruetenik

  • My whole thing with the "but I fall in" complaint is this: how do you NOT know that the lid is up? Do you always approach the toilet in the dark with your eyes closed, walking backwards? -- Allen Lindsay

  • I think every woman under the age of 28 should be sat down and told that despite the socialization effects of television and Barbie, they are not princesses to be worshiped, they are people to be loved. -- Ross Brown

  • Passive voice makes the baby Jesus cry. -- Andrea Crain

  • If I was on my uppers, it's possible that we might have a reunion tour. But I'm not, thank God. -- Roger Waters on Pink Floyd

  • I like strong opinions, especially when they're mine. -- Marsha Clodfelter

  • Of course, removal of the soul is more a spontaneous event for marketers. One day, you are just trying to get some product sold and the next day, it hits you - the perfectly evil marketing plan. As soon as the Powerpoint file is saved, your soul spontaneously ejects from your body to protect itself. -- Ross Brown

  • Those who forget history are doomed to testify before congressional committees. -- Andy Kessler

  • Submerging your forearm in pudding is something most people never do. Poor bastards. -- R.M. Weiner

  • I've always wondered if there was a Hezbollah version of minesweeper where you get points for blowing up on your first move. -- James Lileks

  • You are so wrong on this - morally, tactically and every other way BUT perhaps the letter of legal procedure - that light leaving "correct" right now will not reach you until your great-grandchildren are long dead. -- Mitch Berg

  • Really, when is it *not* appropriate to despise a telco? -- Tim Pierce

  • My true enemy? Creed. That band makes me want to wave my fist angrily around and utter curses like a supervillain. -- Dave James

  • If I ever ran a marathon, I would never run anywhere ever again, ever. Not even if someone was coming after me with a weapon and intent to do great bodily harm. "Well, you got me, I guess." -- Geoff Brown

  • I like "capers." Doesn't it sound fun? It's like little cavorting food items. -- Allen Lindsay

  • Y'know, the creators of soccer might not have realized what a uniquely American game they were making. After all, since you can't use your hands on the ball or the other players, why *not* issue each player a gun carry permit? -- Brian Jones

  • Bah. Elf needs caffeine badly. -- David Romerstein

  • If there's anything Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo has taught me, it's that breakdancing is the key to financial solvency. -- R.M. Weiner

  • I don't believe in the very concept of "first thing in the morning." I'm a "third thing in the afternoon" fellow. -- James Lileks

  • How the fsck do you people tolerate PacBell? I have this vision that the NOC for San Diego is a room full of the chimps from 2001: A Space Odyssey and they just discovered the jawbone of a WorldCom rep and are beating on the phone switches with it. -- Ross Brown

  • In any battle to determine who is more open-minded and classically small-l liberal, I crush all before me. I am a rampaging M-1 Tank of open-mindedness. The Attilla of mental liberation, I'm called. I drive my enemies before me, and listen with joy to the lamentation of his women and children, when it comes to my receptiveness to dissent and discussion. -- Mitch Berg

  • You gotta figure that all those killers who did James Bond villain things like move across the ceiling with suction cups not to leave foot prints, or poison someone over a span of years to get away with it, look at that big angry dope and say, "How is he our spokesmodel?" -- Dave James on O.J. Simpson.

  • There are Great Whites with fewer teeth and a smaller grin than Julia Roberts. Her skull must look like a coconut attached to a 50's Buick grill. -- Joseph Moore

  • Basically, the Taliban government blew up some ancient Buddhist statues because they're Buddhist, not Muslim. I think it was some kind of faith-based federal construction program. -- Fran Fruit

  • What do women do in those awkward years when they're too old for "Cathy" and her humorous self-esteem problems but too young for Erma Bombeck's wry take on "the young people nowadays"? -- Bob Van Voris

  • I hereby claim that all anti-spam technologies are bad ideas. There are no good ways to stop the delivery of email. There are only bad, worse, worser, and worsest ideas. -- Russ Nelson

  • Yasser Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and it appears he has finally done something to promote peace: He stopped breathing. -- James Taranto

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