My claim to net.fame is that I don't have a claim to net.fame. I don't even want net.fame. I donated my 15 minutes of fame to Goodwill, and I never went back to see what they were selling it for. I figured it was good enough for a 50-cent deduction on my taxes. Anyway, you don't get 15 minutes any more. You get one good sound-bite, one chance at a good quote that might end up in someone else's .sig file.

By my own standard, I'm on borrowed time.

These are some of the things I've said that other people have picked up, for one reason or another:

This could be the truth, and you'd never know.

Someone didn't think one of my posts was appropriate in talk.bizarre. I disagreed. This one ended up in the talk.bizarre FAQ.\

It's what's in heat that counts.

What a lovely thought to take out of context!

Pain avoidance and pain deferral both become pain amplification.

The Scorched Earth Party liked this one. I can understand that.

The good news is that art doesn't kill. Really. I've committed art and lived to tell about it. So can you.

I have a low tolerance for melodrama.

Until I encountered C++, I never realized that Bjarne was an Italian name.

Commoner's Second Law of Ecology states that nothing ever goes away. For programmers, that includes spaghetti.

Saying, "click here" is like saying, "Hi, dummy! Did you know that you are using a COMPUTER!?!?!?"

I'm collecting material for a web rant, which is coming along nicely.

Free the DSM Four!

It was a nice twist when I used this as a .sig, and about 10 days later a thread started up, asking "Who on earth are the DSM four?" (If you have to ask, DSM-IV is the current diagnostic manual for emotional and mental illness.)

The difference between an ox and a bull is a difference that lies at the heart of a fatal paradox in Lamarckian evolution.

Someone tried to tweak me. I tweaked back.

It's more fun than a barrel of existentialists.

Spoken from one depressoid to another.

The web is the world's largest vanity press, with all that entails.

I don't even remember when I said this. Damn!

There are people who think that Occam's Razor is only good for slashing their wrists.

Conspiracy theorists. Enough said.

What I find amusing is that in one way or another, all of these were throw-away lines. You won't find any of them in any of my original writings here on my web pages.

If you do find something you want to quote, that's fine with me. I do appreciate it, though, when people ask first. And when they give attribution.