When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.
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The boy was as useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker.
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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
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If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
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[The day should come when] all of the forms of life...will stand before the court -- the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams.
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