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2000.10.01 : 2000.10.07
Saturday, October 7, 2000
Yo. Can you recite the alphabet? Sure you can. You've
been doing it since you were a small child. Can you recite it backwards?
If you're like me, you can, but only with difficulty, and only by repeating
snippets of the forward alphabet to yourself silently and then reversing
them.
Now try singing it backwards.
Interesting how the human mind is wired, isn't it?
Plop. I've given up on Baldur's Gate II,
only in part because I'm going home and don't have a copy. We just can't
figure out how to get around those five Umber Hulks. Thank you for understanding.
Yak.
Passenger: Can you tell me where we are?
Flight Attendant: You mean right now?
Yo. I heard on the news today that the Israelis have agreed to
cede all of the disputed lands to the Palestinians, in return for McSorely
and a first round draft pick.
No, not really. But it does sound way too plausible, doesn't it?
Plop. Yipes! Yesterday's Plurp surely
got the award for the most misspellings in a single log entry. If you were
more puzzled than usual about the meanings of yesterday's Plurp, you might
want to go read it again, as it's now somewhat closer to what I intended.
Yow. Announcing the Very First Plurp Vote! Express
your opinion! Stand up and be counted! Influence world events!
In this Very First Plurp Vote, we want to know what you think
of Plurp. Make your selection, then click on the Vote! button.
Plurp.
 Buttered
or with cream
cheese nothing
was better before
Sunday mass than
a blue dog.
Friday, October 6, 2000
Plurp. We went swimming in the Intercoastal
today, off of Steve and Pat's
boat. Then we went to dinner.
Once, when I was six years
old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book called "True Stories", about
the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing a
wild beast. Here is a copy of the drawing.
Yak. And at dinner, conversation.
There are really very few
shark attacks here in the Intercoastal. No, really. Hardly any. And most
of those are people splashing around in the water, not like us this afternoon.
We did very little splashing. And most of those are in murky water. It
wasn't very murky today. Well, it has been clearer, but it wasn't really
very murky at all. Not at all.
Personally, I am greatly reassured. And we are going home.
Yow. I see that this McSorley character was, in fact convicted
of assault as a result of bashing another hockey player in the head.
This was, as you surely recall,
what I
recommended, and I am pleased to see that my modest weblog has so much
power. (Though it is frightening that he will apparently serve no jail
time, nor will the conviction appear on his record if he completes his
probation.)
I now recommend that the U.S. government exempt me from taxes for the
rest of my life, and refund all of the taxes they have taken from me in
the past.
I'll let you know if that works.
Yow. I know. I've been too much writing about politics
here recently. I promise to cut back. But I cannot let pass the fact that
Slobodan Milosevic has
conceded defeat in Yugoslavia's presidential elections today, after
a couple of days of somewhat scary but ultimately non-combative popular
protests of his attempts to derail the results of the elections.
This reminds me so much of the fall
of the Berlin Wall. At the time, I thought it could never happen. When
it did, it was simple, and compelling, and celebratory.
I am so greatly encouraged to see people take freedom in their own hands,
so joyfully, and often for the first time.
Plurp. I had a poppy seed bagel this morning for breakfast, fresh
and delicious. A few hours later, in the midst of a random conversation,
I worked a left-over poppy seed loose in my mouth and crunched it between
my teeth. For an instant, the toasty, woody flavor burst forth, recalling
that wonderful taste.
Do you suppose that's like the experience that god has when she recalls
the period when the galaxies condensed from the primordial cosmos?
Thursday, October 5, 2000
Plurp.
He will sleep till noon but
before it's dark,
He'll have every picnic basket that's
in Jellystone Park.
Yogi has it better than a millionaire
That's because he's smarter than
the average bear.
I woke up around 11:00 this morning with this song running through my head.
Dunno why.
My only connections with Yogi seem to be my furry appearance (Helen
says my stubble has stopped growing - a frightening thought) and my ability
to sleep almost arbitrarily long (a skill I honed to a fine edge as an
adolescent). That stuff about a millionaire is more applicable to my many
friends and colleagues who went
to startups, or at least to faster-growing
companies than I did. I took an
IQ test on the Web recently which said I was just a smidgen shy of
the average bear. Oh well.
Plop. Was I the only one who thought that Al
Gore looked like Ronald
Reagan on the "presidential"
debates last night? It was scary! I half expected to see Nancy
Reagan with her hand up his
back.
In other news, a campaign sign read Ohio - Going For Gore. Perhaps
we need to give the campaigns an R rating and forbid
people under 17 from watching them without a parent present.
Rant. Ian and the lunchtime
crew seem to have made up a drinking
game based on what Bush and Gore say during the debates. As if the
fact that one of them will become the president isn't already enough to
drive one to drink!
It is somehow a tribute to the uniquely American form of democracy that
the country survives having so many dunderheads
running the government. Somehow.
Yow. Dunderhead. I like that word. From the Dutch dunder,
meaning thunder. Perhaps it is the sound made when a politician's
head is struck by a gavel? Hmm. Some experimentation may be required.
Plurp. Confession time. After many years, I conclude that I am
... a serial obsessionist. Yes, it's true. I become maniacally focussed
on one thing for a period of time. It might be a project at work. It might
be a computer game. It might be lots of things.
(Oh lord, now I have to defend to my bosses at
work that I don't think of them as interchangeable with computers games.
Have mercy, dear bosses, and read on.)
But whatever it is, I'll do almost nothing else. For the past two days,
for instance, Steve and I have
been playing Baldur's Gate II.
Let's see. You control a half dozen little fantasy characters that run
around bashing monsters, talking to computer-controlled people and stealing
stuff. If you think this sounds like something your twelve-year-old son
would be doing, you're right. He probably is, in fact. But we're hooked
too.
Sometimes it has been work, and I'll drag a pile of vaguely work-related
books along on every vacation, to Helen's unending amusement.
In any case, I eventually saturate that particular obsession. The computer
game becomes too easy (or, alternatively, too hard) and I stop playing
it. The project at work gets completed. Then I find some new obsession.
At the moment, one of my obsessions is this silly web log, to the point
where I'm up after midnight working on it tonight instead of going to bed.
Since I started it, I've been good about posting something every day. Will
this keep up indefinitely? Nah. Will I eventually grow bored of it and
go play some dumb computer game instead? Possibly. We'll see.
Yow. In the meantime, and in furtherance of my current obsession,
I've added a whole new section to our Web site. It's called Stuff.
Mostly really silly stuff, and how embarrassing to have it exposed for
everyone in the world to see. But there's also a new search
facility for our Web site. (That part is cool, and thanks to Dave
for a pointer to Atomz, who provides
free search facilities for destitute web authors like me.)
Rant. Is it a requirement these days for all politicians to jog
in front of TV news cameras? I think it is.
Plurp. Part of Priceline.com
is going
out of business. I guess William
Shatner will have to find another
part-time job. I'm guessing it won't be in the music business.
Yow.
Would anyone like to start
our book club discussion?
Yes, I would. I loved the author's
use of color, but I was confused by the introduction of a pork product.
What did you read?
Green
Eggs and Ham.
Severely paraphrased dialog from
Sherman
Yo. And, from the UCLA
physics department, this mysterious code snippet:
if (fine_dining_destination
== on_a_boat
|| fine_dining_destination
== on_a_train)
suess (i, will, not, eat, them,
sam, i, am,
i, will, not, eat
green, eggs, and, ham);
endif
Plurp.
When
she was a child, her
snail would coast
lazily around the
marigolds leaving
a shiny
trail that dreamed of
being the blue dog.
Wednesday, October 4, 2000
Yow. Those cards and letters are pouring in exclaiming
how much everyone loves Plurp. Well, pouring may be just a slight
exaggeration. It's maybe more like flowing. Or trickling. OK, I got one.
But it was a nice one!
Yow. Since you've all been very good (or, at least, one
of you has been good), here are some more Really Great first lines from
one
of those book things by Aimee
Bender:
I fell in love with a robber
and he took me on his rounds.
When I came home from school for lunch
my father was wearing a backpack made of stone.
There was an old man and and old woman
and they dreamed the same dreams.
That last one is my favorite.
Yo. Well, it's all over the Web, so it might as well be here
too. What are those people at Gerber
thinking?
Plop. Hey! Not all the good names are taken, you know. Someone
should tell this to Yasmine
Bleeth.
Plurp.
Once,
several years ago, her
graham crackers glided
swiftly over the mottled
plains, talking
softly of the blue dog.
Tuesday, October 3, 2000
Plurp. What a lazy day! I haven't even showered, much
less dressed. The combination of stubbly
chin and wild slept-in-it hair makes me look a bit psychotic. I could
use the incessant rain as an excuse, but would anyone believe me?
My friend Steve and I have
been playing Baldur's Gate II
all day (and I do mean all day). Pretty good gods-eye-view AD&D
game, with the slavish devotion to each and every one of Gygax's
tables that only a computer could really accomplish. This, after spending
the better part of a day and a half finally getting two machines configured
that (a) worked, (b) had enough disk space for this huge game and (c) could
talk to each other. Machine configuration, as we all know, is the real
game we all play most of the time.
Yak.
Let's pretend we're fish
sticks!
Does anybody really understand how kids think?
Plurp.
The
blue dog
could make the moon
rise just by
sleeping.
Monday, October 2, 2000
Plurp. There are things in the bushes behind
the fence - in the bushes and trees that might be part of the neighbor's
yard, if that is a neighbor's yard. Mostly they are quiet, or rustle softly,
but sometimes they thrash and crash through the palm fronds. From the sound
of them, they are the size of dogs, large dogs, and there is a dog back
there, or at least there is sporadic barking. But these are not on the
ground, as the barking is. These are in the trees, high up, sometimes.
I find myself staring off into those trees, wondering if those things
are gibbons, or jaguars, then jumping, for some reason surprised to find
others still here with me on the terrace, suspecting madly for a moment
that they are aware of my thoughts and that they think me foolish.
The rain that has been falling all day leaks from the corner of a gutter
onto a potted plant that has large, leathery leaves in dark green and purple.
In my imaginings, it is a rubber plant (wasn't there once a song about
a rubber tree plant?), but it probably is not. It probably has some Latin
name that Steve and Pat would know, but I do not ask them. That would spoil
it.
Yak.
Danielle Steele is so prolific.
She must write a half-dozen books each year!
And she's probably richer than God,
too.
Yeah, well God only has the one book.
Yo. It's not my imagination. It's not! I detected a distinct
anti-technology bias at DisneyWorld
last week. Examples:
-
XTRO the Extra-Terrestrial. It's all about teleportation technology
from XS Corp., a successful technology company from Some Other Planet.
But, it both the demo (with the cute stuffed-animal-like alien) and in
your actual experience, things go wrong. The cute alien comes out a bit
fried or, later, suspended indefinitely between the teleportation pods.
And inside, your experience is much, much worse.
-
Star Tours. Besides being my favorite ride, look what goes wrong!
First, the dumb robot pilot takes a wrong turn and almost gets you killed.
("I'm still getting used to my programming," it whines.) Then it overshoots
its destination, runs you through a comet's tail, and ends up in a battle
with the Empire.
-
Spaceship Earth. The only tech problem here is that two cars crash
into each other. Look - it's sponsored by AT&T. You didn't really expect
any problems with the communications technology, did you?
-
Carousel of Progress. Here, however, it's pervasive. In every scenario,
something goes wrong. The neighborhood fuses blow because The Protagonist
has too many electrical devices strewn about. The voice-controlled oven
sets itself to 530 degrees when The Protagonist says it's 5:30 in the afternoon.
-
Buzz Lightyear. Zorg and his evil minion are all machines. The good
guys are all organic.
-
Muppet 3d. Surely not in this bastion of kidhood? Sadly, yes. The
3D film centers around a synthetic character that gets loose and creates
havoc.
-
Tower of Terror. Hey - the elevator drops. Any questions?
So what's Disney's problem, anyhow?
Plurp. At the conference
last week, Dave
drew Davesque
doodles on the notepads they furnished for the attendees. I decided
to write surrealist poems whose only connection was the inclusion of the
words blue dog. John
saw a couple and figured that Dave had written them, which I found flattering.
Ian
knew immediately that I had written them and just rolled his eyes.
When I'm feeling even sillier than normal, I may plurp some here. You'll
just have to put up with it.
Plurp.
While
the blue dog
slept, the parrot filled
itself with brightly
colored machine parts.
Sunday, October 1, 2000
Plurp. It's one of those soft Sundays - sitting out
by the pool, just enough humidity in the air to tempt you to jump in (maybe
later), reading a couple of Sunday papers, pleasantly surprised at finding
comics, talking occasionally, in no hurry to do anything more energetic
than turn the pages.
Ahhhh.
Plurp. Back in college,
my nerdy roommates and I discovered an effect we called Midnight Miracles.
These were astonishing insights into physics or brilliant proofs of mathematical
theorems that occurred to us, usually after long hours of work, and always
after midnight.
In the clear light of the next morning, these would almost always dissolve
as we discovered a missing minus sign somewhere, or a step in the proof
that was a little too glib, and not actually right. We learned to mistrust
any breakthrough intuition that sprang forth late at night. We'd always
write them down, and always look at them the next morning, but they would
seldom turn out to be as brilliant as they had first seemed.
Yo. I woke up at 4:30 this morning with two thoughts. (1) My
use of "slight of hand" yesterday was
a punny Freudian slip due, no doubt, to my inability to find a Web reference
to how the magic trick worked last night. (Note to self: Must try harder.)
(2) What seemed like a Very Clever Idea for a hierarchical compression
algorithm for graphics.
The Very Clever Idea turns out, of course, to be a Midnight Miracle.
It works great on 1D data. So great, in fact, that it turns out to be equivalent
to run-length
encoding. :-) On higher-dimensional data (and in particular on 2D data),
building the hierarchy is hard - my guess is that it's NP-complete
- and no obvious approximate method suggests itself. Oh well.
Odd how the mind works, isn't it?
Yo.
We're helping obese people
live again.
Medical center ad in
the local paper
Zombies - living
large.
Rant. I've stopped giving Web citations to articles in the New
York Times. It's a pity, really, because they have lots of good stuff.
But they persist in their noxious habit of requiring a paid subscription
to their Web site in order to access anything that isn't in the current
edition. That makes it useless to cite them on the Web unless, of course,
you happen to be reading my Web page on the same day as whatever Times
articles I'm citing. And it makes them useless as an archival source on
the Web. Hmph!
Yo. You never know what you're going to find in your Windows
clipboard, do you? I, for instance, just found this:
Fear Alien Food Symbols
Obsess Stuff about us personally
I
wonder what that means?
Yow.
One of the great advantages
of self-loathing is that you can do it anywhere.
Jeff Giles, somewhere
in the New York Times
Plop. Do you share a passion
for collecting? If so, please seek psychiatric help now, before you
really hurt someone. Or before an angry crowd gathers.
Yow. I'm working on Stuff. Stay tuned.
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