This entry (I won’t dignify it with the term “essay”) contains entirely pure unadulterated silliness.
What happened was, I woke up with this idiotic refrain running through my
head: “...like you need little teeny hands for milking mice.”
I couldn’t figure out where it came from or what it was connected to.
Ever resourceful, I typed “milking mice” into Google, and got to
http://mammary.nih.gov/tools/mousework/milking-mice/index.html
(dig that URL), check it out (really).
Anyhow, I dredged up a few more words associated with mouse-milking from the
dusty cupboards of memory, and eventually found the poem
Little Teeny Eyes,
by scifi author Tom Digby, representing a 1966 attempt at computer humor.
It is at least fairly unique.
I was thinking of silly phrases that get stuck in the cranium, and remembered “Data Potato.” In about 1988, Google claims that (somewhere on Usenet) I claimed:
Well, this is just a story, picked up from the early days of Usenet...
Story goes that that some little text-edit subsystem of something or other which had very few things that could go wrong had only one error message, used for both user and internal errors:
Data potato doo-wop doo-wopWhen pressed for an explanation, the programmer said: "well, I figured it had to print *something* when there was an error."
So I claim not to have invented it, but can’t prove it.
