"We have met the enemy and he is us." – Pogo Papers, 1952

Pete's Prattle

Pete's Prattle is a mix of plagerisms – some puerile, some political – and my own muttered asides.
If a thread runs through it, it is "beginners mind."  Or chickens.

The Three Laws of Thermodynamics
One, you cannot win.
Two, you cannot break even.
Three, you cannot get out of the game.
 – attributed to C.P.Snow on physlink.com




Here, as promised, you'll find  How to Spit .

"Boffo schtick! 3 stars!" – LA Times        "Quelle horreur ! " – Maria Schneider





"We're worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he's a chicken."
"So why don't you take him to the doctor?"
"Well, we would, but we need the eggs."






This was seen posted as the Message of the Day at hobbiton.org:

     [ The programming language] C++ offers even more flexible control over the visibility of member objects and member functions. Specifically, members may be placed in the public, private, or protected parts of a class. Members declared in the public parts are visible to all clients; members declared in the private parts are fully encapsulated; and members declared in the protected parts are visible only to the class itself and its subclasses. C++ also supports the notion of friends – cooperative classes that are permitted to see each other's private parts.
– Grady Booch, Object Oriented Design with Applications



"Rationalizations are more important than sex....
"Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?"
– Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill,
    quoted in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate



For what a friend called a "warm fuzzy," here's a short dog story that starts...
Old Cap, our eighty-five pound Redbone hound, was getting gray around the muzzle. Even so, twice a year he'd still raise his head, cast his nose skyward, and heave a sigh. Then he'd march himself half a mile up the farm road to do his duty by Bonney, our nearest neighbor's cute little Norwegian elkhound. The neighbors reported that Cap kept the other dogs away, ate no food, and courted Bonney valiantly for the week.
More






"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."    – Jean-Paul Sartre



writeln
The Journal of On-line Mastication No. 12, vol. 99






The U.S. government is best viewed as a big insurance company that also happens to have an army.
– Paul Krugman in The Great Unraveling





So this grasshopper
goes into a bar,
sits down,
and the bartender
walks up and says,
"We got a drink
named after you."
The grasshopper
looks up and says,
"You got a drink
named Fred?"
There is something I don't know that I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is I don't know, and yet am supposed to know,
  and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it
    and not know what it is I don't know.
Therefore I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-wracking
  since I don't know what I must pretend to know.
Therefore I pretend to know everything.
– from R.D.Laing's Knots (quoted by Ed McBain)





This thumbnail is of the north side of Mount Index in the Cascade Range of Washington, shot in winter. If you're interested, I climbed it a while ago, although in summer. A click here takes you to about 8K of text with 27K of images.




For a Short Study of Comparative Religion ....





" They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
 deserve neither liberty nor safety."         – Benjamin Franklin, 1759


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