From owner-freebsd-chat  Tue Nov  7 17:49:18 2000
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From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
Message-Id: <200011080148.SAA02034@usr08.primenet.com>
Subject: Re: fortune candidate from #FreeBSD on EFNet
To: jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com (Jordan Hubbard)
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 01:48:51 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: bright@wintelcom.net (Alfred Perlstein),
	des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav), chat@FreeBSD.ORG, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <73343.973641341@winston.osd.bsdi.com> from "Jordan Hubbard" at Nov 07, 2000 03:55:41 PM
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> I don't get it.
> 
> > * Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> [001107 12:28] wrote:
> > > 09:26 #freebsd         mcmc> god works in mysterious ways
> > > 09:26 #freebsd         mcmc> freebsd on the other hand, has man pages
> > 
> > It is quite funny can we bring it into fortune?
> > 
> > "god works in mysterious ways.  freebsd on the other hand, has man pages"
> > 
> > thanks,
> > -Alfred

It's a lead-in to a quote from Cowper:

	"God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform,
	 He plants His feet upon the sea and rides upon the storm."

It's most often quoted (and was actually incorporated into a Hymn)
with a period instead of a comma at the end of the first line.  The
earliest non-Cowper reference I can find is 1951.  It was also said
in the movie "The Ten Commandments", which is probably where most
people got it.

The joke is supposed to be that God works in mysterious ways,
but FreeBSD does not, since, unlike God, FreeBSD has man pages.

There's kind of a double joke there, since there was a man page
published for "god(1)" back in the early Usenet days (my memory
of it is mid 1980's), a different joke.

It doesn't really translate or travel very well, since the
"his wonders to perform" was truncated, and assumes that the
reader is either well read, Christian, or a Charleton Heston
fan.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.


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