Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 01:48:51 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com (Jordan Hubbard) Cc: bright@wintelcom.net (Alfred Perlstein), des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav), chat@FreeBSD.ORG, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: fortune candidate from #FreeBSD on EFNet Message-ID: <200011080148.SAA02034@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <73343.973641341@winston.osd.bsdi.com> from "Jordan Hubbard" at Nov 07, 2000 03:55:41 PM
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> I don't get it. > > > * Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> [001107 12:28] wrote: > > > 09:26 #freebsd mcmc> god works in mysterious ways > > > 09:26 #freebsd mcmc> freebsd on the other hand, has man pages > > > > It is quite funny can we bring it into fortune? > > > > "god works in mysterious ways. freebsd on the other hand, has man pages" > > > > thanks, > > -Alfred It's a lead-in to a quote from Cowper: "God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, He plants His feet upon the sea and rides upon the storm." It's most often quoted (and was actually incorporated into a Hymn) with a period instead of a comma at the end of the first line. The earliest non-Cowper reference I can find is 1951. It was also said in the movie "The Ten Commandments", which is probably where most people got it. The joke is supposed to be that God works in mysterious ways, but FreeBSD does not, since, unlike God, FreeBSD has man pages. There's kind of a double joke there, since there was a man page published for "god(1)" back in the early Usenet days (my memory of it is mid 1980's), a different joke. It doesn't really translate or travel very well, since the "his wonders to perform" was truncated, and assumes that the reader is either well read, Christian, or a Charleton Heston fan. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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