No such care in sourcing was needed for the time-tested jokes: “Those congressmen who worry about being bugged by the FBI—you’d think they’d be glad someone was listening to them.”

"There's little danger of our government being overthrown – there's too much of it."

"It's a great kindness to entrust some one with a secret. They feel so important while telling it."

"Easier to forgive someone if you get even with them first."

"Used to talk our problems over cigarettes and coffee. Now cigarettes and coffee ARE our problems."

"The art of politics is making people like you, no matter what it costs them."

"Room bugged? Every time I sneezed the chandelier said, 'Gesundheit!'"

"Never start an argument with a woman when she's tired -- or when she's rested."

"Don't say he's old, but every time there's a knock on the door he yells 'Everybody hide, it's Indians!'"

"Nothing like a vote in the U.N. to tell you who your friends used to be."

Ronald Reagan notecard

netstat -tn 2>/dev/null | grep :80 | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

instance_eval { reduce(:+) / size.to_f }

0</dev/null script --quiet --flush --return --command "$(printf "%q " "$@")" /dev/null

A one-liner alternative for hash-only cases can be implemented using Enumerable#reduce: root = {} [:a, :b, :c].reduce(root){@1[@2]||={}}[:d] = 'E' # root => {:a=>{:b=>{:c=>{:d=>"E"}}}}

yell() { echo "$0: $*" >&2; } die() { yell "$*"; exit 111; } try() { "$@" || die "cannot $*"; }

I'm certainly not claiming that we should use clever tricks to scrunch our code into the most compact form possible at the expense of readability. Nor am I claiming that reducing lines of code is necessarily a worthwhile goal, since it encourages turning readable code like this...