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2000.10.08 : 2000.10.14
Saturday, October 14, 2000
Rant. Quite a commotion outside the apartment this morning!
A long line of people in some kind of protest, carrying South American
flags and hand-lettered signs too far away to read, chanting something
loudly in Spanish.
I want to wake up
in a city that never sleeps ...
And I still do! But sometimes, on Saturday mornings, I do wish it would
at least sit quietly for a while.
Plurp. When I was a kid, I had one of those old analog record-things,
the ones that used to spin around at an astonishing 45 RPM while a needle
scraped along a groove in its vinyl surface. The groove wiggled the needle,
which ultimately produced sound. The needle scraped at the sides of the
groove, which ultimately wore out the record-thing.
But I digress. The song on this thing was called (something like) Tom
Thumb's Song. There are two interesting things about this song. (1)
It was explicitly designed to be sung forever, never ending; and (2) I
simply cannot find it anywhere on the Web! This latter fact is quite astonishing,
as I remember the whole song:
Tom Thumb's Song
This is my song
my very own song
I can sing it short
or I can sing it long
Doot-dee-doot-dee-dooooo
Deeee-doot-dee-doot-dee
Doot-dee-doot-dee-dooooo
Deeee-doot-dee-doot-dee
La-te-da-te-dum-dum
La-te-da-te-dum-dum
La-te-da-te-dum, dum, dum
(Repeat, of course)
This was running through my head yesterday at lunch, so I inflicted it
upon my lunchtime companions and the conversation turned to never-ending
song.
The most insidious never-ending song is It's a Small World, which
plays continuously as you float through the Disney ride by the same name.
We all know how it goes.
It's a small world after
all,
It's a small world after all,
It's a small world after all,
It's a small small world.
Except this is not, in fact, how it goes. There are a
number of verses to the song which are nothing like that. The chorus,
which most resembles what we all remember, is as follows:
It's a small world after
all,
It's a small world after all,
There's so much that we share,
It is time we're aware.
It's a small small world.
The more repetitive version, though, is simpler and more beguiling - a
better meme - and it's the one everybody remembers. See? Now you're singing
it to yourself too!
Dave remembered
part of another never-ending song that started, self-referentially, This
is the song that never ends. That also turned out to be hard to find
on the Web. The problem was that the words this, is, the
and that are too common, so the search engines ignore them. That
left song, never and ends, which show up in way too
many other contexts.
Finally, our Midwest correspondent came to our rescue by remembering
the second line - it just goes on and on my friends. - and the clue
that it was from the old Shari Lewis show. That was a winner.
 This
is the song that never ends
it just goes on and on my friends
some people started singing it
not knowing what it was
and they continued
singing it forever
just because
it is the song that never ends
it just goes on and on my friends
...
Now that these awful memes have taken ahold of your mind, and you find
yourself unable to stop singing them, you can try an experiment for us.
Dave
claims that he can get the songs to stop by changing the cadence where
the verse should end into one of the standard "ending measures"
in music. Da-da-da-dump. See if it works for you.
Yow. And, found literally all over the Web, is this technique
for annoying the person sitting next to you on a plane.
Start singing the Shari Lewis
theme, This is the song that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends,
some people started singing it not knowing what it was, and they'll continue
singing it forever just because, this is the song that never ends....
Suddenly realize that you can never
stop singing. Become very panicky. Scrawl "Help me" on a piece of paper
and hand it to the person sitting next to you. Claw at your throat and
thrash around in the seat. Never stop singing.
Plurp.
This is my dog
my very own dog
I can make him blue
and put him
in my blog ...
Friday, October 13, 2000
Plurp. It's Friday the 13th. A decade ago, we would
have gotten all worked up about it here at the
lab. That's because we developed IBM AntiVirus at the time, and there
was this dopey computer virus called the
Jerusalem virus that did Bad Stuff on every Friday the 13th. Customers
would call us in a panic. What can I do? What can I do?
One time, a person called
us up, very worried. It seems that her kid's computer had gotten infected.
She wanted to know if her kid would get sick from the virus if he touched
the computer.
And you know what's weird? I miss that.
Yo. Reacting to this question in our Alien
Food Symbol section:
 ...
Turn it sideways, however, and it portrays a huge alien ship hovering over
a planet - perhaps our own? Is the symbol of a magnet inside the planet
somehow important to these aliens?
... an astute reader suggests:
Obviously it's a warning
that Earth's magnetic field is strong enough to affect navigation.
Indeed! I shall start carrying more magnets for self-protection immediately.
Yo. Our publication of Alien
Food Symbol information appears to have come to the attention of an
ominously secret society. A correspondent, at great personal risk, relates
some conversation amongst the members of this secret society.
Shortly after our publication of Alien Food Symbols, one member of this
mysterious society posted this on their secret Internet mailing list:
Although I have to question
Steve's wisdom in breaking this
story so comparatively early, now that the news is out I feel that
the Awaiters should be among the first to know.
Another member responds quickly:
I think it's only fair to
mention that some of these aren't actually alien communications so much
as markings. Much like the heksher of the Jewish practices of Kashrut,
alien Rabbis frequently stamp the lids of jars and bottles with their personal
heksher
of approval, certifying that the product contains no meat from Gamma-Denebis
One,
neither from Theta-Cygni Three or
Alpha-Draconi Nine, and if there happens to be any meat from Gamma-Microscopii
Five, you can darned well bet that there's no milk from Epsilon-Saggitarii
Three mingled in.
It is true that many aliens settled
here on Earth because of the availability of Kosher foods.
And another responds shortly thereafter:
I was looking at some weather
forecast pages today and ran across this
one.
This link is to the AccuWeather 5-Day forecast for Area
51.
Plop. A friend of mine from California just called, complaining
that he's been having a terrible time phoning people today. My phone
service crashed, he said. Thinking this to be a colorful metaphor for
something else, I asked him what he meant.
Who would have guessed that he was being perfectly literal! His phone
service was provided by a small company in California, and their systems
crashed, went down, floated to the top of the tank, blew a fuse. He's had
to dial a bunch of numbers to access some other phone service until his
normal one comes alive again.
My phone service crashed. Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Must be a virus.
Yow. I would have missed it if Bill
hadn't trotted down the hall, laptop in hand, chuckling uncontrollably.
Missed what? Why, the Random
Tabloid Generator, of course.
First of three parts.
Swedish brain surgeon says checking pager remedies
a cold!
And you know what? It's frighteningly close to the
real thing.
(Thanks to Dave
for the ever-so-terse reference.)
Rant. Is it my imagination, or is The
Onion going downhill? I remember that it used to be consistently
hilarious. Now it just seems in bad taste. Could there be any relation
to the fact that they now have corporate sponsors? Or is my fud simply
becoming dudded?
Plurp. There was a beautiful sunset the other day as David
and I were walking out to the car. Why is it that anything is beautiful?
he asked. That is, what is the evolutionary advantage of having a reaction
that something is beautiful?
Good question! I can understand why blueberries taste good, or loud
sounds startle. But salmon colored sunsets don't seem more survival-related
than pallid pink ones, yet they are more beautiful.
There are learned reactions, like feeling fear when you hear brakes
squeal. But a lot of what we perceive as beautiful transcends culture,
and so is probably not learned.
A puzzle.
Yo. Do be careful what you name your kids if
you're in Honduras.
[The] Honduras' National
Electoral Tribunal [wants to] forbid ... "extravagant or offensive" names,
and allow children to sue parents who gave them "gross or insulting" names.
[In] a province of eastern Honduras,
"It is common ... for people to employ names usually used for automobile
parts," the tribunal said.
A young man there named Motor Martinez
could meet a young girl -- not a relative -- named Bujia ["Spark
Plug"] Martinez.
Also banned would be names of well-known
personalities. According to electoral rolls, at least one Honduran bears
the first name Bill Clinton, and another Ronald Reagan.
Repeat after me. Governments have too much time on their hands.
Plurp.
No
matter the
effort put
forth, the blue dog never
managed to sing the
alphabet backwards.
Thursday, October 12, 2000
Plop.
 Omigosh!
Bob the Sock Puppet is missing!
Bob, recently
famous at the Virus Bulletin
conference, was apparently kidnapped at the conference itself. His whereabouts
are currently unknown. If you have any information about Bob, please
contact The Authorities. (And no, we're not sure who that would be in this
case. Make something up.)
Yow. The cafeteria at work has gone all Yuppie on us. They have
theme
meals these days centering around, for instance, braised stuff (under the
dubious title Braised Expectations). Here are two typical entries
from the glossy tent cards they put on the tables.
-
October 4th. Slow-Cooked Braise
of Chicken with White Beans and Thyme offered with Caramelized Endives
-
October 18th. Garlic Studded Beef
Brisket Braised with Red Wine and Rosemary offered with Creamy Fontina
Polenta
Now, the people in my group are pretty silly around work. Our lunchtalk
is always bizarre. We leave strange alien drawings on the notepads that
the cafeteria provides during lunch. Stuff like that.
So, it was with great joy that we discovered yesterday that someone
else (i.e. not one of the silly people in my group) inscribed a couple
of creative additions to the tent cards:
-
Glovember 5th. Taffy-Braised Moles
with Psychological Intimidation and Prunes offered with Twice-Grilled Harmonicas
-
October 35th. Absinthe Braised
Halibut Tail with White Jelly Beans and Anticoagulant-Roasted Kielbasa,
foisted with Free Medical Care
Yum !
Yow. Lunchtalk yesterday meandered into the Seven Deadly Sins.
Curiously, we had a terribly hard time listing all seven. In fact, we managed
to write down the names of all Seven Dwarves in between getting the fifth
and sixth Deadly Sins. Then
somebody said:
Wasn't there an ad campaign
some years ago where somebody hired seven ad agencies to each produce an
ad for one Deadly Sin?
Web search! It turns out the ad campaign was organized by Harper's
Magazine. And all seven ads, all seven really wonderful and funny
ads, are
on the Web.
Of course! Isn't the Web fab?
(Dave posted
this before I did. He types faster. But I got the picture!)
Yow. In later lunchtalk, Ian
said:
I seem to remember a book
about a puzzle that you had to solve in the real world in order to find
a treasure. There was a rabbit in the book, I think. It was a big thing
in England a few years back. It might be on the Web somewhere, but it'd
be hard to find from such a vague description.
Web search. Hard for normal mortals, but not for us! Here's Masquerade
- the aforementioned puzzle book, with answers - available on Amazon.
Do I get bonus points for finding an edition with answers?
Then Dave
goes and trumps me by finding all
of the (unofficial) answers displayed directly on the Web. Wow.
Rant. In yet later lunchtalk, someone suggested merging the "presidential"
debates and reality TV into ... wait for it ... Presidential Survivor.
I kinda like that. It's not much of stretch, after all. Who will get
voted off tonight?
(Not that we're the only ones to think
of this.)
Yak. During a TV ad for the Apple PowerMac
G4 Cube last night ...
Steve: You know, if
I were an industrial designer today, I'd be working for Apple. They do
such great stuff.
Helen: They don't design industries,
though.
Steve: ...
Plop. Sony, it seems, is coming out with a new
robot pet.
The souped-up successor to
its original "Aibo" dog, unveiled at a news conference here, has an array
of new features that enable it to experience "intimate interaction with
people," Sony said.
Ouch !
Plurp.
Wagging,
as a finger, or a tail.
Clacking, as nail or bone on linoleum.
Dripping, as on a sweating day,
or after drinking water.
Jumping, as a small girl on her
second birthday, or
a bird.
Barking, as a tree growing.
Wednesday, October 11, 2000
Yo. So, about these bouncy yellow
squares on Plurp this week. Have you spent hours playing with
them, seeing how long you can stretch the chain, making them go in circles,
bouncing them off the left hand side of your screen, watching them undulate
languidly beneath your cursor when you stop moving it?
Yeah, me neither.
Yo. In a reverie of poetic contradiction, a reader writes:
I like the annoying little
yellow squares.
Perhaps it is the larger mission of Plurp to bring a little poetic
annoyance to everyone's life.
Yo. Our Midwest correspondent writes:
Here's a puzzle. Why aren't
there Muffler
Men in
Manhattan?
 And
indeed, it is a mystery to us! Most of the nation is inhabited by Muffler
Men. You probably have one (or more!) in your town. In fact, there's
one in
Elmsford, just south of the
Hawthorne lab, which we pass whenever we go out for Indian food at
lunch. But Manhattan, which is consistently inhabited by the weirdest stuff
on Earth (like, oh, the
cows, for instance) has so far resisted the onslaught.
Muffler
Men. Stoic sentinels of another era? Or smouldering chimneys of unrest?
Know the signs. 18 to 25 feet tall. Silent. Right hand up. Left hand down.
Yo. Frighteningly, you can now (until Oct. 21 - better hurry!)
bid
for your favorite cow on Amazon. If this is the future of the
digital economy, we're all doomed.
Yo. There's a sudden chill in the air, and the leaves have started
to turn. Fall is upon us. The Canadian
geese, who are much smarter than we are, have booked their flights
to more balmy southern climes for the winter. And so, a Web tribute to
our more clever friends.
 Goose
sounds on the Web (but - trust me - the best one is here).
The GNU Object-Oriented
Statistics Environment. The ancient Packard
Goose. The Galloping
Goose. A lovely Origami
Goose. The unbelievable Goth Goose.
The Suzuki Goose
(it loses something in the translation). Goose
Girl. The International Goose
Research Group. The famous Spruce
Goose. Goose Vodka??
A solution to all of your goose
problems. The nostalgic Silly
Goose.
And, my favorite homonymic rhyming pun, Toulouse
Goose.
Yo. Lots of Yo today, for some reason.
Plurp.
No
matter how Melissa
arranged the
doughnuts, nothing could
remind her of the
blue dog.
Tuesday, October 10, 2000
Yo. How do you turn off these awful,
frantic yellow squares? I don't know!!!
Yow. As predicted, today's Plurp is mercifully short, as I burrow
through piles of accumulated email. Instead, I must inflict upon you the
latest addition to Stuff: Alien
Food Symbols! They're here. And they have the munchies.
Yow. Oh all right. I can't resist sharing with you the nametags
we wore on the DisneyWorld Backstage Magic
tour. The image is from Mickey's 1936 film Thru
the Mirror. Note the authentic glare from the scanner.
After dinner that night, I needed popcorn. Not that I was hungry - in
fact I was already stuffed. But I needed popcorn. Helen and I were having
just that discussion as we walked up to the popcorn cart, and the following
conversation ensued with the woman who ran it.
Woman: You must be
pretty special to get popcorn.
Me: I'm six years old today,
and I can have whatever I want.
Woman: That's great! What's
your secret?
I'd like to be six years old too.
Me (in my most sincere six-year-old
voice): You can be six years old if you want to.
Plurp. Special bulletin. Our Midwest correspondent suggests
an addition to the other day's discussion
about domestic physicists:
Theorem. Consider
a baby B at time T after birth. Let the Night function N(t)
= 1 if time t is during the night, and 0 otherwise. Let the Sleepyby
function SB(t) = 1 if baby B is asleep at time
t
,
and 0 otherwise. Then for all babies B and all times
T ,
SB(T)
= N(T).
Note that this theorem has been proposed recently by theoretical domestic
physicists. The experimental domestic physicists are busy right now, but
promise to get back to us about this just as soon as they get a chance.
Monday, October 9, 2000
Yow. Oh look. Some JavaScript
stuff with which to decorate one's Web site. Don't you just hate
stuff like this? 
 Yow.
When you get tired of Microsoft's boring desktops on your computer, you'll
run around the Web trying to find something a little more distinctive.
And, if you're into cute
kitties or sunlit
dolphins then, hey, you're in great shape.
For the rest of us, distinctive desktops are tough to find. That's why
I loved it when Dave
found Chickenhead's
Desktops. Where did he get those?
This isn't, of course, the only thing that Chickenhead
does. Lots of very funny stuff there!
Yow. And speaking of cetaceans, if somehow you missed the exploding
whale, you really must go look right
now. And while you're there, read
the story by Dave Berry, from which we learn that no one in the Oregon
State Highway Division ever played with explosives as a child. Or they
would have known what was going to happen.
[H]uge chunks of whale blubber
fell everywhere.
Curiously, the Web site for the Oregon
State Highway Division doesn't seem to have any information at all
on exploding whales. I would have at least expected a How To guide.
Go figure.
Plop. Oh no! Some durn fool went and posted a whole
mess of photos from the recent Virus
Bulletin Conference including - argh! - pictures of my
naked face. The horror!
Here, at least, are equally goofy pics of Dave,
Morton
& Ian,
John,
Bill,
Sarah,
Buddha
and Helen. And,
of course, Bob the Flying
Sock Puppet. (You had to be there.)
Yo.
Yo. Do you want to be depressed by how few people view your Web
site? Then sign up for a site
meter. Not me!
Plurp. Back in the office after two weeks away on conference
and vacation. The email stats since I left:
| Received |
293 |
| Read |
29 |
| Answered |
11 |
I suspect that Plurp entries in the near future may be rather, um, abbreviated.
Please bear with me.
Plurp.
They entered the vast, dimly-lit
cavern in astonishment. It turned out that the whole world was run by a
single, large machine made entirely of cow tails or mackerels, and had
nothing at all to do with a blue dog.
Sunday, October 8, 2000
| Yo. Our Midwest correspondent points out Wonders
By The Wayside, a fascinating piece of Americana.
As David ("he
should still be in jail") Nystuen, field services coordinator for the
Minnesota
Historical Society says:
It gives people something
to look at as you're driving down the road. [sic]
Nystuen, it seems, has "compiled a Web
site listing well-known and not-so-famous attractions": carved figures
in a cornfield, a metal dragon at Coates, and metalwork between Aitken
and Crosby that looks like a T-rex "if you use a little imagination." Imagine
that. |
In Viking, Minnesota, retired construction worker Ken
Nyberg welds oversized sculptures from metal scrap. The artist poses with
Pliers
and Cockroach on Highway 210. |
Interested? Then do check out Minnesota's
Roadside Architecture and, god save us, roadsideamerica.com.
Yow. Did you vote in the Very
First Plurp Vote? It's not too late!
Yo. Our
Southeast correspondent notes a very clever women's
side-pack for your Palm Pilot. (It's called a cigarette purse
but it fits a Palm Pilot perfectly!) My clever friend Wendy
Kellogg observes that techno-gadgets are typically built for men, who
have pockets and belts and such with which to carry then. Women don't (today)
have any obvious way to carry such things. Perhaps our clever
friends in other countries have a solution for this. Please do patronize
them!
(As an aside, I am so enthused at the idea that the Net may allow
various local cultures to sell their wares worldwide, and at the same time
enable people around the world to appreciate these wonderful artifacts.)
Yow. Here's today's Billion Dollar Idea: YourIdealWoman.com.
It's a Web site on which guys can design their ideal woman. Here's
how it works.
The client completes an initial interview (on the Web, of course) to
describe his ideal woman. Black or white? Blonde or brunette? Brown eyes
or blue? Short hair or long? Straight or curly? Full lips or thin?
(We assume, of course, that "ideal women" are all young, aesthetically
perfect, common cultural ideals. Hey - we don't write the rules, we just
profit from them.)
The site then presents them with pictures of faces of women that satisfy
the criteria the client has expressed, culled from a library of supermodels,
movie stars and other cultural icons.
But that's just the start. The client then selects from the displayed
images those that most match his mysterious internal criteria. And - you'll
love this - here's where the techno-magic comes into play.
First, we use morphing technology to create a new set of facial images
based upon the client's expressed taste. The nose from this one. The eyes
from that one. The tresses from the other.
Then, we use neural network and collaborative filtering to find new
images from our library that may also excite interest
the client. And we iterate. Sorry - that's a technical term. We do this
again and again. The client selects images, we create new images, and so
forth, again and again.
Using these techniques, we allow the client to navigate through a space
of facial images that, as the client makes more choices, more and more
closely approximates the client's ideal. Even if the client doesn't know
what he's looking for!
What's in it for the client? Don't be silly. Guys already spend most
of their waking lives obsessing on this topic. Hence the already-billion-dollar
businesses of men's magazine, etc. etc. This is simply a way to bring mass
customization to an existing market. The result, for the client, is an
image over which he will obsess more strongly than any image currently
available in popular culture - more so than any supermodel, more so than
any actress, more so than anyone the client has ever seen.
And the best part is that it's free. (For the client, that is.) As with
any good dot-com company, this one is entirely financed by ad revenue.
OK, OK, I hear you. You want to know what company would place ads on
such a wacky site. I have just one word for you: stickiness. Guys will
spend hours, days, on our site. And, the whole time, they will be looking
at, obsessing over, your glorious ads.
See? The ad revenue is already pouring in.
Why, you ask, is this just for guys? What about women? Simple. Our market
research suggests that there are far more superficial guys, who think that
an ideal woman is entirely specified by facial appearance, especially as
selected from an amalgam of existing cultural icons. Women know better.
They select on more amorphous and difficult-to-quantify criteria such as
personality and compatibility. So, clearly, they are not the target market.
At least, not initially.
What's more, we (YourIdealWoman.com) capture the ideally desirable
images of thousands - millions - of dedicated consumers. How much do you
suppose that database is worth to more traditional advertisers?
I know. You want to invest. Your friends want to invest. Your VC wants
to invest. By all means. Shares are available at reasonable rates. Do contact
us.
Yo. Web search. Helen asks for the last lines in the movie The
Wizard of Oz.
 Too
easy, I say, how about if I go for the entire script?
OK, she says, if you think you can.
Heh. Elapsed time: 3.7
seconds.
Plurp.
She clicked and
clicked, the GPF staring
unmoved, her mail
lost and she
cursed Bill for being the
blue dog.
 |
