I’ve been meaning to post something about the interesting interactions between the unix commands fortune and cowsay. This is not that post. Long story short, fortune prints a random tidbit to the terminal and cowsay takes an input string and draws an ASCII art cow with a speech bubble containing the text you sent to the command. In addition, there are a number of different “cows” that can be drawn and so when pairing up random fortunes and random cows can be a parataxis gold mine. Here’s the command I have in my bash login script that does just that:

fortune -s | cowsay -f $( find /usr/share/cows -name '*.cow' | shuf | head -n 1 )

More on that in the “real” post, but for now, I couldn’t pass this up which popped up when I opened a new terminal window just now:

s _________________________________ 
/ "The medium is the message." -- \
\ Marshall McLuhan                /
 --------------------------------- 
       \   \_______
 v__v   \  \   O   )
 (oo)      ||----w |
 (__)      ||     ||  \/\

ponder that for a bit.