BSD Fortune - About this site
At a very young age I became fascinated with quotes from famous (and not so famous people). At the library I always looked for collections of quotes. Later on I also started buying books like the "Penguin Dictionary of Modern humorous Quotations", "The Forbes book of Business Quotations" and "You can say that again".
In the early 1990's I started working with Unix computer systems and was overjoyed to find out there was a program called "fortune" on these systems that generated random quotes. Very soon I had my Unix accounts (and later linux accounts) set up to generate a fortune each time I logged in. I also set up my e-mail to include a random quote in my signature. Soon some of my friends requested a daily e-mail with a quote of the day and the "Cookie Monster" was born. The "Cookie Monster" is a cronjob (Unix speak for a scheduled job) that sends out a daily e-mail with a random quote.
When twitter came along I soon set up a twitter account called
bsdfortune that got automatic tweets from another cronjob. Twitter however limits you to only 140 characters in a tweet. Because many of the fortunes generated by the fortune program are much longer this site was born.
Randomly Generated Fortune
... William Prynne's Histrio-Matrix, the Player's Scourge or Actor's
Tragedie (1632), a fat book of more than a thousand pages, which forms
an admirable compilation of all the Puritan arguments against the
theatre. The work is a classic of abuse and a monument to the
misplaced scholarship and zeal of its author. Unluckily for Prynne he
referred to women actors as 'notorious whores' meaning a group of
French actresses who had appeared at Blackfriars in 1629; the
reference was taken to apply to Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies
who were about to perform a pastoral at Whitehall. She made a Star
Chamber matter of it and Prynne was fined 35,000 pounds, set in the
pillory, shorn of his ears, branded and imprisoned for life. The SL on
his cheeks he construed as Stigmata Laudis [marks of glory] and bore
bravely; it is pleasant to know that the life sentence was revoked by
the Parliament of the Commonwealth, for although Prynne was a small-
souled and cantankerous zealot with a maggot about homosexuality, he
was a courageous fighter and a master of invective.
-- Robertson Davies, _Shakespeare's Boy Actors_
Reload for another fortune
Acknowledgements
- Henrik Aasted Sørensen - Creator of the php code used to generate the random quotes on this site. See http://www.aasted.org
- All the collectors of quotes who published their fortune files on the world wide web. Use google to find them, there are far too many to link to here.