I'm going through some of my saved up e-mail from the last few months, and found these two gems.

Noah Gift on grokking threads, from the testing-in-python list:

Trying to understand what massive pools of threads that spawn other
massive spools of threads, that spawn other massive pools of threads,
are doing, is like pushing a cart full of toys down a steep hill and
then running after the cart, and trying to dig for a specific toy
you want before the cart crashes or you fall, or both, all while
running as fast as you can.

DV Henkel-Wallace from the Interesting People mailing list, on Brian Reid's claim of age discrimination against google:

I like the "too old to matter" part.  In non-academic computing a
great way to be brilliant is merely to mine "old" (i.e. 20 years or
so) journals for algorithms and advice.  The best part is you don't
have to falsely take credit for it -- show someone the journal and
they _still_ will consider it novel.

--titus