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2000.09.24 : 2000.09.30
Saturday, September 30, 2000
Yo. At the so-called Gala Dinner at the
conference on Thursday, there were a couple of magicians meandering
around during dinner. One did card tricks, and I think I've figured all
of them out. (They weren't very difficult.) The other one did silk tricks
- slight-of-hand with very
thin silk things like silk handkerchiefs, but substantially longer.
Those have me puzzled.
In the canonical trick, he stuffs the silk into the fist of his right
hand with his left hand, patting it down inside at the end with two fingers
of his left hand, then shows you (quickly) that his left hand is empty.
Then, omygosh, the silk has vanished from his right hand and ends up in
his left hand, your ear, Milwaukee, wherever. How does he do that?
Plop. Hey what happened? Was I hallucinating? I thought there
were only two Google hits on "plurp"
before I started my blog. Now there are hundreds! (And, by the time you
read this, I'm sure there will be even
more.) Perhaps I was having a drug
flashback (back
to a time when there were drugs and there was no Internet)?
Friday, September 29, 2000
Yak. Overheard last night.
Amanda is having her first
birthday party at the gym that she goes to. It's by invitation only.
Plurp. I added an ironic
counterpoint to This Is Not A Web Page.
Broadband access recommended. :-)
 Plop.
Here's the one and only picture I'll show you of me
without a beard.
I hope this settles any doubt you might have had that this naked face
simply must go, and with all due haste.
(This started out as a digital photo, which was uploaded to AOL, sent
from there to an IBM Lotus Notes email server, then cut-and-pasted into
Paint Shop Pro to try to clean up the resulting mess. But - trust me -
the real thing doesn't look any better.)
Argh!
Plurp. Sun Microsystems has
a long-running ad campaign in which they say "We're
the 'dot' in dot-com". Call me stupid, but it took me forever to get
it. Now that I do get it, I have this recurring daydream in which IBM
puts out ads that say "Fine. We're the 'com' in dot-com."
That's probably why I'm not the Senior VP of Marketing at IBM.
Yak. Lunchtalk today flitted around alternatives to the term
homemaker,
which connotes (to me, anyway) carpentry and masonry more than its presumed
intent. A popular alternative is domestic engineer. In this vein,
we got to wondering what a domestic physicist would be. The assembled
elders (Ian, Bill,
John,
Morton and me) concluded:
Domestic physicist (theorist): Determines that children
will be perfectly behaved, under the assumption of spherical children.
Domestic physicist (experimentalist): Crashes children into walls
at high speeds, complains that theorists' models are incorrect, and suggests
that the color of shoes that bounce back from such collisions are an important
clue.
Thursday, September 28, 2000
Yo. I shaved my beard off this morning for the first
time in twenty-five years, partly as a stunt for my Virus
Bulletin presentation. (I was dressed as Steve White of 2010.) I've
been threatening to shave it off for years, often just to see Helen's horrified
reaction. Now that I've actually done it, it's really weird! I don't actually
recognize the guy in the mirror. I can feel my breath on my lip. (How will
I sleep?) I go to pull on my beard and there's just this fleshy knob where
my chin should be. Helen oscillates between worried disbelief and giggling.
The worst thing about it is that now I look like some old guy.
I'm definitely growing it back, starting now. Grow, damn you, grow!
Plop. I just saw the pictures Dave
took of me at my talk this morning. Now I remember why I grew a beard 25
years ago! My shoulders are surmounted by a bulbous, fleshy blob. Gah.
Wednesday, September 27, 2000
Plurp.
[A] young healthy child well
nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food,
whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it
will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.
At last we've escaped the child hive of DisneyWorld. I'm busily finishing
my
talk for Virus Bulletin.
And, of course, we have to make time for dinner; I'm thinking the ragoust
tonight. I hope you'll forgive me if today's plurp is rather foreshortened.
Yow. The future of e-commerce is once again bright. As we arrived
at the conference hotel, there was a package waiting for me. You guessed
it. It's that black, band-collar shirt
I ordered from uniform.org.
Althought they couldn't figure out if they
had shipped it, it turns out they had. Helen thinks it's unfair that
I keep lucking out at the last moment like this, but even she agrees it
looks great with the white lab coat.
Tuesday, September 26, 2000
Plurp. Watching a family of gorillas today, it amazed
me that anyone could ever have thought that humans are the only sentient
species, or the only thoughtful species, or the only species that experiences
emotion. A very young sister rode on her brother's back until he tossed
her off and they ran down the hill, pushing at each other and skipping
gleefully.
Yo. In central Florida, May and September are the mating seasons
for "love bugs" - Plecia
nearctica. There a millions of them here, probably billions. They are
everywhere. They coat the sidewalks, smear the windshields, swarm around
you wherever you go, locked in pairs, mating tail to tail.  All
of them. All the time. The pushmi-pullyus
of the insect population. Flying, crawling, careening out of your way,
tapping carelessly up your leg, they are easily the most prevalent life
form around.
(Thanks to Page-By-Page Books
for online access to lots of great classical books!)
Yow. When you get tired of taking pictures of the little tykes
pulling on each others pigtails, don't despair. You can now play Doom
on
your digital camera. That's reassuring, isn't it?
Yo. If you were a fellow named Doolittle, would you change your
name before running for state Congress? If so, you're outside
the maintstream.
Yow. As a small child in the late 1950's in the southern California
desert, my father took me out at night to our front yard, mown grass in
a lower-middle-class tract, and we huddled in sleeping bags in the night
air. At last, he would point to a spot on the dark horizon (the sky was
so much clearer then) and a tiny star would crawl slowly up above the mountains
and, at length, across the sky. It was one of the early Echo
satellites - not much more than a slightly-inflated plastic bag - off of
which the military reflected radio signals just to show it could be done.
I was transfixed. And I never stopped being transfixed by the larger view
of the universe I saw that night.
Now a Java applet shows a real-time swarm
of gnats around a virtual Earth, and I can only shake my head in astonishment.
(You'll have to grant NASA the authority to load a Java applet to see this
link. I did.)
Monday, September 25, 2000
Yow. I brought one of those book
things along with me this week. As Bill
would say, "What's the point? You can't click on it." True, but it turns
out you can read things from it, though each book is pretty much only about
one thing. Wild, eh?
This one is a collection of short stories by Aimee
Bender. She has Really Great first lines, some of which I would like
to grace you with today.
Steven returned from the
war without lips.
There was an imp that went to high
school with stilts on so that no one would know he was an imp.
There were two mutant girls in town:
one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.
The hunchback took in the pregnant
girl to hide her from high school until the baby popped out.
I love stuff like that! So jarring. So full of possibilities. And
if you're very, very good, I may tell you a few more another day.
Rant. There's a guy named McSorely in the National Hockey League
who apparently beats
people up during games. The Canadian government (or somebody) is reportedly
worked up about it today. I'm sure there's something I'm missing here.
People beat each other up all the time in hockey. As far as I
can tell, that's at least half of its popular appeal. But it happens in
baseball too, when both team pile onto the field and onto each other, slugging
away ineffectively (they are, after all, baseball players). And in football.
Let's not even mention soccer, where I believe the beating is done primarily
by the fans.
Here's what I don't get. If any of this happened on the corner of the
town where you lived, the people involved would be arrested, tried and
convicted of assault and battery and a variety of other felonies. There
would be great popular outcry. Those involved would be thrown in jail,
shunned by good-thinking people, and whatever professional lives they might
have had would be over. Imagine elementary school teachers slugging it
out on the recess field. Or accountants by the filing cabinets. Or doctors
in the operating room.
But let some sports figures hammer on each other and people cheer, or
at least look the other way. Hello? It's battery! It's a felony! I don't
care if one brute insulted the other brute's heritage. Let them go consult
geneology references the next day. But if they take it upon themselves
to bash each other over it, throw the bums in jail.
So there.
Plurp. Kids have too much energy. We came back from DisneyWorld
tonight around 9 PM, completely exhausted. The pool was full - and I do
mean full - of splashing, running, screaming kids. And they got up before
we did this morning.
Seems to me we should be able to put all that extra energy to use. Put
them on treadmills, for instance, and generate electricity. Or at least
harness the wave energy in the pool. Heck, the sonic energy alone could
light most of Orlando.
Attention entrepreneurs!
Yo. Idea for a patent. Determine the correct spelling of words
by Web voting. Just count the number of pages that spell it one way, and
the number that spell it the other. The winner is the one with the most
pages.
Let's try it. Believe
(13,000,000 votes) or beleive
(a mere 121,000 votes)? Acolyte
(31,400 votes) or acolite
(only 133 votes) or even ackolyte
(a pitiful 6 votes)? Dictionary
(4,020,000 votes) or dictionery
(874 votes) or even dictionairy
(583 votes)?
The humorous thing is that all spellings, even perfectly impossible
ones, are out there on the Web. I love the Web.
Sunday, September 24, 2000
Yow. Yeah, I'm really happy finally to have gotten a
weblog together. Hence the glowing image in the title bar this week. Perhaps
you can find it in your heart to forgive me. You see, my only other foray
into webpagism was, um, this.
My excuse is that it was a really long time ago, but you would be right
in pointing out that it's a pretty weak excuse, especially since I never
improved that primitive page at all. Perhaps sloth is a better explanation.
Ironically, I no longer subscribe to Prodigy
(duh), so I can't even delete the evidence. Karma, I guess.
Yow. Yesterday, Helen and I went on the "Backstage Magic Tour"
at DisneyWorld.
Before I tell you that it was the Way Most Coolest Thing In The World (oops
- that slipped out), I have to tell you a story.
In many ways, my life has been defined by my desire to understand how
things work. My incessant questions as a child motivated my parents to
buy me The Answer Book one Christmas when I was eight or nine. It
had answers to questions like "Where does rain come from?" and "Why do
birds sing?" They probably didn't figure that I'd digest the contents in
a few days and be back with more questions for them.
In high school, I rummaged through boxes of circuit boards, designing
a computer to figure out how they worked. I ran sound for theatrical productions
at the high school and local junior college - I wanted to know how all
that cool equipment worked.
That same desire propelled me through a Ph.D. in physics - I wanted
to know how the universe worked - and then through a great career at IBM
Research.
But that's not the story. The story is before all that. The story is
when I was six years old, and I went to Disneyland
for the first time, just three years after it opened. I was hooked before
my little hand held my first E
ticket. But I also noticed that there were places that I was intended
to go, places I was not intended to go, and places that were forbidden.
Would it surprise you very much if I told you that I was fascinated
by that? I've never been very good at going where I was told, as my many
advisors and managers will attest. I think it turns out to be one of my
best character traits.
I wanted to know how it all worked, what was beyond the established
path, what was Behind It All.
When we began, Susan, our terrific and wryly sharp tour guide, asked
everyone why they had come on the backstage tour. I told her I had dreamed
of doing it since I was six years old.
 When
we had finished, she asked each of us what we liked the most. "No one else
will ever answer this way," I told her. "It was the first place we went
- the first place behind the scenes - when we first walked up to a nondescript
door, and Went Inside." And I started to cry.
I won't tell you what all we saw. That's not the point. Like the image
on the badges we wore on the tour, I was Mickey going through
the looking glass. It's not something I can convey in words.
Yo. Of course, you already know about hidden
Mickeys.
Plurp.
These creatures are the only
sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat.
Terry Bisson, They're
Made of Meat
DisneyWorld was pretty vacant today, for DisneyWorld. But, compared to
just about anyplace else in the world, the average number of people per
square centimeter was pretty big. Adding to this effect are the kids, who
are so engrossed in the wonder of the place (or the ice cream they are
smearing into their faces) that they don't actually notice other people
who are trying to walk. The effect is very much that of a meat tide.
 Yo.
Or rather, Yo ho. Actually, "Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me." But
what are the rest of the words? Does anybody know? It's so hard to hear
in that ride! My suspicion is that those robot types just don't enunciate
very well. (Oh dear. Is that remark organicist? Sorry.) Fortunately, I
don't have to know. The
Web knoweth. (Note that Toad, author of the referenced link, goes for
extra credit with a multimedia transcript of the entire ride. A+++, Toadster!)
Rant. What is it with tattooing recently? It used to be reserved
for military folks, mostly done when drunk and far away, and for Hell's
Angels, who didn't used to have jobs on Wall Street. These days, it's become
common for young women to get tattoos. A rose on their ankle. A star on
their shoulder blade. An intricate neo-Celtic pattern at the base of their
spine.
I'll admit to being mystified. Perhaps I'm just getting old, about to
start carping about that younger generation and such. Or maybe it's just
that I can't handle the idea of having it done to myself. Heck, I freaked
when Helen wanted to get a second set of holes in her ears one day. (She
came pre-punched with the first set, so that didn't seem weird.)
OK. Let me see if I can talk myself into the idea that this is just
fine.
Ahem.
Tattooing is a simple extension of everything else we do to
create a look that is unique to us, and to improve our appearance in our
own eyes and in the eyes of others. It is like styling our hair, using
makeup, or wearing a nice hat. It is simply body
art.
Sure, some people get carried
away with it (note: not for the faint of heart). They call it
"body modification" (note:
also not for the faint of heart; seriously adult content). Personally,
I prefer the term "romantic disfigurement". But you don't have to go to
extremes. Just think of it as permanent lipstick, applied artfully to some
part of your body that is probably not your lips, in colors and patterns
that you would probably not attempt with lipstick.
You're right. I probably need more work on that.
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