A couple of days ago I came across this wonderful collection of Windows error messages in haiku including quite a few I’d not seen before. I think my favourites are:
First snow, then silence. This thousand dollar screen dies so beautifully.
Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.
Most people fail to realize that the dictates of any belief system are not the truth, and that memorizing beliefs often replaces authentic investigation.
Wat Tyler Country Park, Essex, originally uploaded by Whipper_snapper.
Weird. Very Monty Python. It suggests a whole new set of meanings for that lovely piece from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony … You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! … I mean, if I went around sayin’ I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they’d put me away!
At the end of last year, we voiced the fear that we are being exploited by viral notices for the purposes of propagating themselves (16 December 2006). Lindsay Brash observes that the notice we mentioned then — “Please do not remove this notice until 23rd July” — “demonstrates the rapid evolution of viruses and the sophisticated tricks they can employ on their hosts. By stating a date, the notice fools humans into thinking it must be legitimate, and they let it be.”
In fact, Brash goes on, it’s even cleverer than that: people “are so gullible that they are not likely to remove it until some time after the stated date. But by then they will forget when they first saw it and, to be safe, leave it until the next 23 July. Fantastic!”
And in James Penketh’s school there is a notice with an even more subtle survival strategy: inducing complete cognitive breakdown. It reads “Take no notice of this notice. By Order.” If he took no notice of this notice, he asks, “would I know to take no notice of it?”
Justin Needham, meanwhile, has found an example of the suicide notice: “Please leave these facilities as you would wish to find them”. Every time he spots one, he writes, “I am tempted (and sometimes succumb) to tear it down. That’s better, just how I wish to find the facilities — with no patronising notices.”
Eccentric looks at life through the thoughts of a retired working thinker
