Ghoti

I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, laugh and through. Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead — it’s said like bed not bead — and for goodness’ sake don’t call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)

A moth is not the moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear for bear and pear. And then there’s dose and rose and lose – just look them up – and goose and choose, and cork and work and card and ward, and font and front and word and sword, and do and go and thwart and cart – come, come I’ve hardly made a start.  A dreadful language? Man alive. I’d mastered it when I was five.

— unknown

According to this, it may be attributed to T.S.Watt or Richard Krough. Some other articles attribute it to Gerard Nolst Trenite, because of it’s similarity to The Chaos, but that seems to be incorrect as well.

Fortune

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

— quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, and redacted from a US Supreme Court document by the Ashcroft Justice Department in the name of national security.

Five cents

I have ‘fortune’ run at login for all of my machines.  These are the fortunes I saw, one right after the other, while hopping from machine to another:

Our country has plenty of good five-cent cigars, but the trouble is they charge fifteen cents for them.

Then, when I connected to the next machine…

What this country needs is a good five cent ANYTHING!

My computers are getting better at coordination.  I had best keep them happy.