It was Cucumber the First; Summer was over.
I had just spinached a long day and I was busheled.
I'm the kinda guy that works hard for his celery,
And I don't mind tellin' you I was feeling a bit wilted.
But I didn't carrot all, 'cuz otherwise things were vine.
I try never to despairagus, and I don't sweat the truffles.
I'm outstanding in my field, and I know that something good will turnip,
eventually.
A bunch of things were going grape, and soon I'd be top banana.
At least that's my peeling.
But that's enough corn; lend me your ear,
And lettuce continue.
After dressing, I stalked over to the grain station.
I got there just in lime to catch the nine-e-lemon
As it plowed towards the core of Appleton,
A lentil more than a melon-and-a-half yeast of Cloveland.
CHORUS:
Life in the Slaw Lane...
They say plants can feel no pain.
Life in the Slaw Lane...
I've got news for you,
They're just as frail as you.
No one got off at Zucchini so we continued on our route-a-baga.
Passing my usual stop, I got off a'Cado.
I hailed a passing yellow Cabbage
And told the driver to cart me off to Broccolin.
I was going to meet my brother across from the eggplant,
Where he had a job at the Saffron station, pumpkin gas.
As soon as I saw his face I knew he was in a yam.
He told me his wife had been raisin cain.
Her name was Peaches, a soiled but radishing beauty with huge gourds.
My brother'd always been a chestnut,
But I could never figure out why she picked him.
He was a skinny little stringbean
Who'd always suffered from Cerebral Parsley; it was in our roots.
Sure, we had tried to weed it out, but the problem still romained.
He was used to having a tough row to hoe,
But it irrigated me to see Artie choke.
And it bothered my brother to see his marriage go to seed.
(CHORUS)
Like most mapled couples they had a lot of growing to do.
Sure, they'd sown their wild oats - but just barley, if you peas.
Finally Peaches had given him an ul-tomato.
She said, "I'm hip to your chive, and if you don't smoking that herb,
I'm gonna leaf ya, for Basil, ya fruit!"
He said he didn't realize it had kumquat so far.
Onion other hand, even though Peaches could be the pits,
I knew she'd never call the fuzz.
(CHORUS)
So I said, "Hay... we're not farm from the Mush Room -- let's walk over."
He said, "that's a very rice place.
That's the same little bar where alfalfa my wife."
When we got thre I pulled up a cherry and tried to produce smalltalk.
I told him I hadn't seen Olive,
Not since I'd shelled off for a trip to Macadamia,
When I told her we can't-elope, the time just wasn't ripe.
She knew what I mint.
When we left the Mush Room we were pretty well juiced.
I told Artie to say hello to the boysenberry,
And that I'd orange to see him another time.
Well, it all came out in the morning peppers.
Artie caught Peaches that night with Basil,
And Artie beat Basil bad, leavin' him with two beautiful acres.
Peaches? She was found in the garden.
She'd been...
Pruned.
(CHORUS)
Well, my little story is okra now.
Maybe it's small potatoes; me, Idaho.
My name? Wheat. My friends call me Kernel.
And that's life, in the slaw lane.
Thank you, so mulch.
(It's a garden out there!)
Programmers Anthem
Threes, Rev 1.1
By Elms and L. Fish
Deep in Engineering down where mortals seldom go,
A manager and customer come looking for a show,
They pass amused among us and they sign in on the log,
They've ciome to see our pony, and they've come to see our dog.
Three things you should be wary of: a new kid in his prime, a man
with all the answers and code that runs first time
Summoned from our cubicles to conference rooms we go.
We bring our dog and pony cause we know they want a show.
Watching as we enter with a shifty routine eye,
The customer sits waiting in his pinstripe suit and tie.
Three things never trust in thats; a vendors final bill, the promises
your boss makes; and the customers good will.
The pony kicks his heels up as the doggy does his trick,
and hands are waved with vigor as we lay it on -- real thick.
The customer just watches as we do this song and dance,
Then reaches for his briefcase scarcely giving us a glance.
Three things see no end; a loop with exit code gone wrong, a semaphore
untested, and the verses of this song.
From briefcase then there comes a list of things we must revise,
All before within the room are taken by surprise.
And all but four are thinking of their last job with remorse,
the customer, the manager, the doggy and the horse.
Three things hold no secret: files that somehow hit the net; your bosses
secretary and the third thing -- I forget...
First thirty-seven changes that somehow we must add in,
Then twenty one new features show up much to our chagrin.
And this thing's just inadequate, and that one's just plain wrong,
and by the way, your schedule is about three month's too long.
Three things it is better for that only you should know, how much
you're paid, the schedule pad, and what is just for show.
The customer proceeds to go through each change line by line,
Excruciating detail that no logic can define.
When it ends there's only four not sitting there aghaw;
The customer, the manager, the pony and the dog
Three things never anger first the one who runs your DEC,
the one who does your backups, and the one who signs your check.
Now we here all are software types who spend ours days and nights,
embedded in the system down among the bits ad bytes,
and none but us can tell full well the damage done today,
it's for what they do not know for which they're gonna have to pay!
Three things are most perilous; connectors that corrode, new unproven
algorithms, and self-modifying code.
The manager and customer are quick to leave our bunch,
They take the dog and pony and they all go out for lunch,
Now how will we revenge ourselves on those who raise our ire,
writing self-destructive code that goes the day the warrenties expire
One of my favorites (taken from a book of such stunts owned by a co-worker)
occurred, I believe, at Stanford, where a modern art show was going on. An
engineering student (with the typical engineer's love of modern art) offered
his opinion of the level of creativity at the show by screwing three table
legs on a defunct banjo, and leaving it outside the building where the show
was taking place.
Of course, the next day, someone working at the show found it and assumed
that the movers had somehow forgotten it. It was brought in, entitled "The
Three Legged Banjo", and if I recall won second place.
Which only goes to reinforce the aforementioned opinion...
My physics TA (from MIT) told me this one: A student was taking a final
exam in a class, stood up, and screamed, "I can't take this any more," and
walked over to the window, and jump. Everybody in the room was astonished,
but when his fellow classmates looked out the window, his fellow Fraternaty
brothers were below and caught him with a net of some sort!
I heard this one also. There is a large tall building at MIT - the
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, which is connected to an automatic lighting
system. Well, a few electrical engineers "programed" the lighting system
and supposedly played a nice game of tetris, with the building as the
screen!
I know at Caltech, on the 20th anniversary of the HOLLYWOOD sign,
a few Caltechers arranged it so that it read CALTECH that morning!
"Do you think they offer an Engineering Pschology major to determine what
posseses people to major in Engineering?"
--Stuck Between an Interest in Science, and a Desire for Sanity
(1) Once, a barber found two MIT students wanting to buy his barber
poles. They offered a good price for it, so the barber sold it
to them. So - these two guys drove around all day in a pickup
truck carrying the barber poles. They kept getting stopped by
the police, who were sure they had stolen the poles. But each
time, the students referred back to the barber they had bought
the poles from. So finally, an APB went out all over Boston,
saying that if police saw two students driving around with
barber poles, they should leave them alone.
The next day, every single barber pole in Boston was missing.
(2) One Boston establishment had this 20-foot tall plastic cow.
One night, MIT students stole the cow and put it atop the Big
Dome at MIT. No one knows how they got it up there - it took
a crane to get it back down.
(3) In 82 during the half-time of the Harvard-Yale game, a weather
balloon came up out of the ground, disrupting the parade. It
had MIT written on it. The then president of Harvard said he
wasn't sure who was responsible for this, but that he suspected
undergrads from CalTech.
(4) Sometimes the mere threat of a hack was sufficient. One year,
the students of one dorm (I think it was New House) were get-
ting lousy phone service. They told the phone company that if
their service weren't improved they would disrupt phone lines
throughout the New England area. They got the desired service.
The Method of Inversive Geometry: We place a spherical cage in the
desert, enter it, and lock it. We perform an inversion with respect to
the cage. The lion is then in the interior of the cage, and we are outside.
The Set Theoretic Method: We observe that the desert is a separable
space. It therefore contains an enumerable dense set of points, from
which can be extracted a sequence having the lion as limit. We then
approach the lion stealthily along this sequence, bearing with us
suitable equipment.
A Topological Method: We observe that a lion has at least the
connectivity of the torus. We transport the desert into four-space. It
is then possible to carry out such a deformation that the lion can be
returned to three-space in a knotted condition. He is then helpless.
The Dirac Method: We observe that wild lions are, ipso facto, not
observable in the Sahara Desert. Consequently, if there are any lions
in the Sahara, they are tame. The capture of a tame lion may be left as
an exercise for the reader.
The Thermodynamical Method: We construct a semi-permeable membrane,
permeable to everything except lions, and sweep it across the desert.
The Schrodinger Method: At any given moment there is a positive
probability that there is a lion in the cage. Sit down and wait.
There once was a breathy baboon
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
For he said, "It appears
That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune."
