By Andrew G. Smallacombe (Guru).

Although Australia is the largest island on earth and contributes a continental land mass in its entity, it remained undiscovered for a considerable length of time. This paper deals with those who did not discover Australia, why, and the implications of their non-discoveries.

The Australian Aborigines were the first people to not discover Australia. There are a number of theories put forward by a number of leading experts as to why this is so. It is generally accepted that the Aborigines failed to discover Australia because they had:

• no guns
• no Bibles
• no diseases such as the plague, small pox, etc.
• no flags
• no title deeds
• no monarch

Furthermore, current theory is that they may have crossed over from Southeast Asia by a number of land bridges caused by the Ice Age, which would have been cheating, since all discovery had to be done by boat. In addition, the Aborigines are not of European descent, and it is universally accepted that discovery can only be an act of white races.¹ At any rate, this all took place long before the Age of Discovery and therefore can and should be discounted. Therefore Australia remains undiscovered.

The next group of people not to discover Australia were the Dutch, which is somewhat surprising considering the number of times they ran into it on their way to subjugating Java and laying the foundations of apartheid in South Africa. In hindsight, however, this may be rather fortunate² since otherwise we would all be Reformed and speaking Dutch. This is why Australia is known as “the Lucky Country”.

The third people not to discover Australia were the Spanish (or Spaniards, as they are sometimes called). The Spanish (or Spaniards) sailed throughout the Pacific Ocean³, naming almost everywhere they discovered after their saints and conquering South America and the Philippines. Incredibly, by the time they discovered Vanu Atu⁴ they had run out of saints. Naming the largest island Espiritus Santo, they returned home to obtain the latest list. Again, this proved fortunate since Australia would have been the next destination, and we might all be Roman Catholic, had the Inquisition, and speak Spanish (or Portuguese, as the Brazilians call it.)

The French (ba^tards!) also did not discover Australia. They sailed around the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, carving up an empire in and enslaving the people of Africa, the Middle East, India and Indochina into colonies, thus promoting liberty and equality. This was done to prove French superiority to the nations of the world, despite the fact they couldn’t even win a war against England. That they failed to discover Australia meant that we have been (largely) free of quiche, atom bombs and /Chiraq/.⁵

The English were the last people to not discover Australia, in spite of the huge number of fleets sent out to discover it. That so many commissioned explorers somehow managed to miss a land mass of such magnitude may help explain England’s demise in the arena of international cricket. England then colonized Australia, sending out fleets of settlers. Traditionally, it was thought that most of the early settlers were undesirable elements of English society, but recent research suggests otherwise.⁶

Finally, Australia was not discovered by Indonesian fishermen, seafaring Chinese of the Ming Dynasty, or Japanese tourists. These people are known to history as Et Cetera.

Footnotes:

1. Other examples include China (discovered by Marco Polo, not the Chinese) and the Americas (discovered by Colombus, not the Indians)
2. Those who doubt the validity of this statement usually change their opinions when their attention is directed to Anita Keating.
3. This was named by the Spanish (or Spaniard) explorer Magellan, who originally intended to name it The Ocean. He was allegedly requested by his first officer to name it more specifically, upon which he renamed it The Specific Ocean.
4. Vanu Atu was not discovered by the Melanesians. See above for reasons.
5. Chirac (pron. Shi-rack) Fr.= military disaster.
6. This would explain the presence of whinging poms, soccer hooligans, cockneys, and Take That in England, and their absence in Australia.

This document was typed in verbatim from the original by Bruce Alcorn, with permission from the author. Comments, etc can be sent to alcorn@cs.flinders.edu.au to be passed on to the author.

Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
From: dcohen@paul.rutgers.edu (Dawn Myfanwy Cohen)
Subject: Cat owners will agree...
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 95 4:30:01 EST

I’ve known a number of people who told me that they were really eager to have babies. Having a spouse or good job would be ok, too, but what they were really after was the babies. I never understood the attraction for a long time, but then it hit me. They must want babies like I wanted a cat. (Until recently I lived in a dormitory, where people of the furry persuasion are the subject of intense discrimination.) Though I now understand the feelings of those who have the unfulfilled cravings of the existence of another living creature in the house, I feel it my duty to point out the flaws in their reasoning.

Top 10 reasons why kittens are better than babies:

10. Veterinarians have evening hours.

9. Your kitten won’t be able to disturb the whole movie theater with its crying. Hell, you don’t even have to take the kitten with you, and if you don’t, you don’t even’t have to worry about whether or not the sitter is available tonight.

8. Your kitten won’t grow out of those cute but expensive clothes within three months.

7. Kittens look cute if they haven’t had a bath this month.

6. You probably don’t have to lie awake nights wondering how you are going to finance your kitten’s college (or high school) education.

5. No one will accuse you of being an unfit mother if you don’t want to breast feed your kitten.

4. No one will accuse you of perversion or sexual abuse if you fondle your kitten.

3. Dan Quayle can’t accuse you of destroying the moral fabric of the country if you aren’t married to the father of your kitten. In fact, nobody will ever ask you if you know who the father is.

2. No one will question your abilities to function normally at your job when they hear you just got a kitten.

And the Number 1 reason:

1. You only have to change a litter box once a day.

Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Subject: Re: Cat owners will agree...
From: ianb@netcom.com (Ian Barkley-Yeung)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 95 4:30:03 EST

Kittens, better than babies? Hah! Here now are the top eleven reasons why babies are better than kittens (and, as any five-year-old will tell you, more reasons makes my list better. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!)

11) Babies are rarely known to shed on furniture.

10) No one’s allergic to a baby.

9) Having a kitten in the car doesn’t let you drive in the carpool lane.

An exercise program you can really stick with… that you have to stick with, whether you like it or not…

7) With a kitten, you don’t get to watch otherwise normal adults making silly faces, jumping up and down, talking nonsense in a high pitched voice, and generally making fools of themselves. Hours of fun!

6) For an initial investment of a camera and few pieces of film, you can convince baby’s grandparents to buy the kid all the cute but expensive clothes, toys, furniture, and major appliances s/he will ever need — a good photographer can buy nothing but diapers for a year. Cats never buy their grandkittens anything.

5) Babies don’t have fleas. Babies don’t give you fleas.

4) Free pregnancy/labor horror story with each baby. Commensurate with other mothers! Scare newly-pregnant friends! Get your husband to do twice the housework for months!

3) Two words: Tax deduction

2) Childbirth — the greatest crash diet ever! Lose 20 pounds in one day — and keep it off, too!

And the number one reason babies are better than kittens:

1) Kittens never grow up to look at you and say “I love you, Daddy”.

[original to me]

-Ian Barkley-Yeung
Proud Parent of Stephen Skyler Barkley-Yeung — cutest baby in history!

Repost from isu.talk
Tue, 25 Apr 1995 15:08:34
jmbug@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu James M Buggar at Illinois State University
Sung to Beatles “Let it Be”:

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
Write in C.

As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
Write in C.

Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, oh, write in C.
LISP is dead and buried,
Write in C.

I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.

If you’ve just spent nearly 30 hours
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.

Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
Only wimps use BASIC.
Write in C.

{ Guitar Solo }

Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
Don’t even mention COBOL.
Write in C.

And when the screen is fuzzy,
And the editor is bugging me.
I’m sick of ones and zeros,
Write in C.

A thousand people swore that T.P.
Seven is the one for me.
I hate the word PROCEDURE,
Write in C.

Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
PL1 is 80s,
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,

Write in C, yeah, write in C.
The government loves ADA,
Write in C.

From: spirkov@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov (Lilly Spirkovska)

Made this one up during my morning commute:

A license plate for a VW Bug:

     FEATURE

From: tjc@castle.edinburgh.ac.uk (A J Cunningham)

These are some of the error messages produced by Apple’s MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I’m not sure where I stand on the copyright issue.

Tony Cunningham

“String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that’s 3 more than ANSI said I should)”

“…And the lord said, ‘lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement’”

“a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program”

“‘Volatile’ and ‘Register’ are not miscible”

“You can’t modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler”

“This struct already has a perfectly good definition”

“type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don’t care, I’m just trying to annoy you)”

“Can’t cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that’s why)”

“Huh ?”

“can’t go mucking with a ‘void *’”

“we already did this function”

“This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn’t wide enough to read this whole error message”

“Call me paranoid but finding ‘/*’ inside this comment makes me suspicious”

“Too many errors on one line (make fewer)”

“Symbol table full – fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer”

/* Written 10:10 pm Dec 12, 1994 by tadpole@coke.imsa.EDU in pepsi:unix.tips */
[sing]

better !pout !cry
better watchout
telnet why
santa claus <north pole >town

cat/etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty > no_gift_list
cat list | grep nice > gift_list
santa claus <north pole >town

who | grep sleeping
who | awake
who | egrep ‘bad|good’
for ( goodness sake) {
be good
/* End of text from pepsi:unix.tips */

From: dar@grettir.lanl.gov (David Rabson)

Professor Kard has been at the university for as long as anyone can remember, going back indeed to when everyone in the department spoke Latin on a daily basis. It is Kard’s unshakable belief that things have gone down-hill ever since. “1H ,30HSMALL LETTERS ARE A NEOLOGISM,” he always Hollers in faculty meetings, pointing out that classical writers couldn’t possibly have used them. In our department, you can’t say that the rules aren’t carved in stone, as it is in stone that Kard did his best work thirty-five years ago, continues to do his work, and intends to go on doing his work.

The academic journals have grown in the last thirty-five years. While it is hard to believe, Kard used to carve out his fluid- dynamics calculations on tiny 4-kilobyte stone tablets. Now he thinks nothing of allocating half a gigabyte (statically, since that’s the only way he knows how), but he still does everything in Latin. Latin, in case you think I’m prejudiced, is a fine language for talking about gladiators and chariots and even for discussing Spinoza, but it stretches the vocabulary to solve differential equations in it, let alone write operating systems or look at chaotic trajectories. Kard’s papers are unreadable by anyone else.

Things got a little better around 1977, when a few (then) junior professors bullied him into structuring his DO loops and adding a few modern words. His code, however, still looked like Latin.

Just the other day, Kard met me in the hallway (ave!) and started talking excitedly (forgive the free translation). “I’m finally going to get the rest of you to go back to talking Latin,” he said. “How’s that, Kard?” “I’ve thought about your objections, about the missing vocabulary and syntax” — a few of us had recently been pestering him over structures and classes, although at the time none of it seemed to be sinking in, except to elicit the occasional comment about how anything worth doing could be done in the ablative — “and I think I can meet your objections, on your own terms.

“While strictly speaking it has no classical precedent, I’ve spent the last ten months building on the language, adding four new cases, five tenses, six conjugations, three-hundred-sixty new verbs, and 1144 new nouns. The grammar book, alas, no longer fits in the pocket, but at least you and the rest can stop complaining about the lack of flexibility. I call the modified language ‘Latin-90′.”

He was true to his word. Latin-90 had all the structure and object orientation a writer could ask for. It accepted lower case letters (translating them internally to upper case), allowed for recursive argumentation, and discarded any special meaning column 72 might once have had. Julius Caesar wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from Gallic.

To the rest of us, unfortunately, it still looks like Latin. It doesn’t help that Kard has yet to produce a working set of chisels for it, and that the only papers written in Latin-90 still sit in Kard’s brain. At least he put Holleramus constants to rest and no longer requires six spaces before each genitive. He’ll probably be able to get some better work done in Latin-90, if he ever implements it. In the meantime, I shall continue to write in the vernacular.

Warning: This list may be offensive to ardent feminists.

[Ed: This is similar to another item Dan co-wrote, comparing programming languages to cars. The one with the cars is superior. It appears in Volume I of the TeleJokeBook series.]

by: Daniel J. Salomon Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

There are so many programming languages available that it can be very difficult to get to know them all well enough to pick the right one for you. On the other hand most men know what kind of woman appeals to them. So here is a handy guide for many of the popular programming languages that describes what kind of women they would be if programming languages were women.

Assembler

A female track star who holds all the world speed records. She is hard and bumpy, and so is not that pleasant to embrace. She can cook up any meal, but needs a complete and detailed recipe. She is not beautiful or educated, and speaks in monosyllables like “MOV, JUMP, INC”. She has a fierce and violent temper that make her the choice of last resort.

FORTRAN

Your grey-haired grandmother. People make fun of her just because she is old, but if you take the time to listen, you can learn from her experiences and her mistakes. During her lifetime she has acquired many useful skills in sewing and cooking (subroutine libraries). That no younger women can match, so be thankful she is still around. She has a notoriously bad temper and when angered will start yelling and throwing dishes. It was mostly her bad temper that made grandad search for another wife.

COBOL

A plump secretary. She talks far too much, and most of what she says can be ignored. She works hard and long hours, but can’t handle really complicated jobs. She has a short and unpredictable temper, so no one really likes working with her. She can cook meals for a huge family, but only knows bland recipes.

BASIC

The horny divorcee that lives next door. Her specialty is seducing young boys and it seems she is always readily available for them. She teaches them many amazing things, or at least they seem amazing because it is their first experience. She is not that young herself, but because she was their first lover the boys always remember her fondly. Her cooking and sewing skills are mediocre, but largely irrelevant, it’s the frolicking that the boys like. The opinion that adults have of Mrs. BASIC is varied. Shockingly, some fathers actually introduce their own sons to this immoral woman! But generally the more righteous adults try to correct the badly influenced young men by introducing them to well behaved women like Miss Pascal.

PL/I

A bordello madam. She wears silk dresses, diamonds, furs and red high heels. At one time she seemed very attractive, but now she just seems overweight and tacky. Tastes change.

C

A lady executive. An avid jogger, very healthy, and not too talkative. Is an good cook if you like spicy food. Unless you double check everything you say (through LINT) you can unleash her fierce temper. Her daughter C++ is still quite young and prone to tantrums, but it seems that she will grow up into a fine young woman of milder temper and more sophisticated character.

ALGOL 60

Your father’s wartime sweetheart, petite, well proportioned, and sweet tempered. She disappeared mysteriously during the war, but your dad still talks about her shapely form and their steamy romance. He never actually tasted much of her cooking.

Pascal

A grammar school teacher, and Algol 60′s younger sister. Like her sister she is petite and attractive, but very bossy. She is a good cook but only if the recipe requires no more than one pot (module).

Modula II

A high-school teacher and Pascal’s daughter. Very much like her mother, but she has learned to cook with more than one pot.

ALGOL 68

Algol 60′s niece. A high-society woman, well educated and terse. Few men can fully understand her when she talks, and her former lovers still discuss her mysterious personality. She is very choosy about her romances and won’t take just any man as her lover. She hasn’t been seen lately, and rumor has it that she died in a fall from an ivory tower.

LISP

She is an aging beatnik, who lives in a rural commune with her hippie cousins SMALLTALK and FORTH. Many men (mostly college students) who have visited the farmhouse enthusiastically praise the natural food, and perpetual love-ins that take place there. Others criticize the long cooking times, and the abnormal sexual postures (prefix and postfix). Although these women seldom have full-time jobs, when they do work, their employers praise them for their imagination, but usually not for their efficiency.

APL

A fancy caterer specializing in Greek food. She can cook delicious meals for rows and rows of tables with dozens of people at each table. She doesn’t talk much, as that would just slow her work down. Few people can understand her recipes, since they are in a foreign language, and are all recorded in mirror writing.

LOGO

A grade-school art teacher. She is just the kind of teacher that you wish you had when you were young. She is shapely and patient, but not an interesting conversationalist. She can cook up delicious kiddie snacks, but not full-course meals.

LUCID & PROLOG

These clever teenagers show a new kind of cooking skill. They can cook-up fine meals without the use of recipes, working solely from a description of the desired meal (declarative cooking). Many men are fascinated by this and have already proposed marriage. Others complain that the girls work very slowly, and that often the description of the meal must be just as long as a recipe would be. It is hard to predict what these girls will be like when they are fully mature.

Ada

A WAC colonel built like an amazon. She is always setting strict rules, but if you follow them, she keeps her temper. She is quite talkative, always spouting army regulations, and using obscure military talk. You gotta love her though, because the army says so.

Twas the Night Before Implementation, and all through the house
not a program was working, not even a browse.
The programmers hung by their tubes in despair,
with hopes that a miracle soon would be there.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of enhancements danced in their heads.
When out of the elevator arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.
And what to my wandering eyes should appear
but a super programmer (with a six pack of beer).
His resume glowed with experience so rare,
he turned out great code with a bit pushers flair.
More rapid than engines, his programs they came,
and he whistled and shouted and called them by name:
“On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete!
On Batch Job! On Closing! On Functions Complete!”
His eyes were glazed over, fingers nimble and lean,
from weekends and nights spent in front of a screen.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
soon gave me to know that I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
turning specs into code, then turned with a jerk,
and laying his finger upon the “enter” key,
the system came up and worked perfectly.
The updates updated, the deletes they deleted,
the inquires inquired and the closings completed.
He tested each program and tested each call,
with nary an UAE, all had gone well.
The system was finished, the tests were concluded,
the users last changes were even included.
And the user exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt,
“Its just what I asked for, but its not what I want”