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2000.11.12 : 2000.11.18
Saturday, November 18, 2000
Plurp. Work on the apartment has turned to The Long
March of unpacking boxes. The good news is that the cabinetry is now almost
entirely done, and done enough that we can put things away. Finally! The
bad news is that we're done with all of the easy boxes - boxes of stuff
that could be easily thrown out, or boxes of such obviously precious stuff
that we just need to store it away somewhere.
No, all of the remaining boxes are full of old photographs (some that
tug at our heartstrings, some that we don't even remember), little artifacts
that once populated desks or bookshelves (all of which are aglow with memories,
but few of which we have any room for), and things that were precious to
our parents.
It is exhausting, partly because it is tedious physical labor, but more
because our emotions are so invested in each and every handful that we
withdraw from each box.
But when it is done, there will be no more boxes. And we will have an
apartment. At last. At long last.
Yow. At that e-commerce conference this past week, Ian was sitting
beside me in the last row of the auditorium as I wrote my
sweaty rant about how technical people are often terrible at giving
talks.
Ian, bless him, wrote what would have been a
great satire about how terrible these same people are at using microphones.
Would have been, that is, except that everything he cites is true, and
pretty much everything actually happened at the conference we were at.
Ghastly.
Yak.
Wanna watch Twister?
That old party game that no one liked?
Yeah.
Sure.
Plurp. I sometimes wonder if anyone reads the Plurp entries
that are posted on Saturdays. You see, they get relegated to the dusty
archive when the Sunday entry gets posted, starting the next week in Plurpville.
Maybe everyone comes in on Monday, glances at the Sunday Plurp,
and doesn't even realize there was something Plurping about on Saturday.
So let's do this. Everyone who is reading this entry, please say something
with the word Saturday in that weekendian Blab box in the
left margin. If you want, you can be creative. Or be dull. Doesn't matter.
Just saying something.
If we receive too few Saturday Blabs, we may be forced to do
something drastic, like throw ourselves in front of a speeding bus. And
you wouldn't want that, now, would you?
 Plurp.
At the bottom of
the ninety-seventh
box, beneath the old Superman
comics and a small
porcelain box of
unknown origin, was
the blue dog.
Friday, November 17, 2000
Blab. Pondering our Biblical insight
that gnashing of teeth must be accompanied by either weeping or wailing,
but not both, a reader speculates:
Perhaps it's but a single
Greek word, which is sometimes translated as "weeping" and sometimes as
"wailing"?
You know, we have such brilliant readers! An English
- Ancient Greek dictionary (I love the Web) confirms that the word 
means weep or wail.
Thus our Biblical dictum becomes substantially simpler:
NOT gnash OR
And don't you forget it!
Blab. Is "uncoincidentally" a word? Following
our
suggestion that the collective wisdom of the Web (as reported by Google)
knows how to spell everything, a reader writes:
I guess I'll have to agree...Google
gives "about 276" matches for "uncoincidentally"
Of course, Google also gives 37 hits on "incoincidentally"
and 4 hits on "disco
incidentally". So go figure.
Blab. Joining in our brief orgy of Joyce-Carol-Oatsiana,
a reader given simultaneously to rhyme and the absurd writes:
Preening! As a flock
of strumpets or crumpets!
Plurp.
Lo, the flocking strumpets preen
While eating eggs and crumpets green.
Yak.
Hi. Is this garden.com?
...
Are you guys really going out of
business?
...
Well, I'm having trouble ordering
online and I'm hoping you can help me.
...
Well, I'm trying to order presents
for three different people on your Web site and it looks like it wants
to send all of them to me.
...
Yes, but I'm trying to send presents
to three different people.
...
But how do I do that?
...
I have to go back and delete everything
I've done and create three separate orders?
...
That's too much trouble. Can I just
place my order through you?
...
You mean I can't order on the phone
at all?
...
No wonder you guys are going out
of business.
>Click<
Yo. After an appropriate period of gestation, Beth
Roberts, whose fame stems largely from her link
to Plurp, has had an
epiphany. It's kinda long, and probably worth reading. I suspect she
will think back on it as an organizing principle for much of her thought
for the rest of her life.
We all look for organizing principles in our lives. Some of us believe
the stuff we were told as kids, about the role of adults in the world,
of institutions, of religion. Some believe that science is the One True
Answer. Others give this award to magic.
A few people try to think it all through for themselves. Right or wrong,
deep or silly, I like these people. They are the people who started
religions, and science, and magic. The world would be a much duller place
without them.
Whack the Piñata!
Rant. So my good buddy Esther
Dyson and her running dogs at ICANN
have just declared that there will be more
new domain names for the Web (that's TLDs for all you TLA fans
out there). Now that part I sorta understand. Heck, ".com"
is so crowded that stevewhite.com
is owned by some bozo real estate guy in Santa Clarita, and whalley.com
is owned by some little company that wants to sell you computers. It could
be good to dump a little landfill into the vast ocean of the Internet to
form a few more islands of Web address space.
What I don't get is the domain names they chose. The original ones made
some sense:
-
com - for commercial Web sites
-
org - for non-commercial Web sites
-
net - for network service providers
-
mil - for military sites
-
gov - for government sites ashamed
of their military connections
-
edu - for educational institutions
And, of course, all those dippy two-letter domain names for geographical
regions (uk, ca,
tv,
...), even though geographic parochialism flies right in the face of anything
called (hello?) the World Wide Web. But be that as it may.
Here are the new domain names:
-
biz
-
name
-
aero
-
coop
-
info
-
pro
-
museum
biz might make some sense. It's
sort of an extension of the com
domain. Dave points
out that any business in their right mind that already had a com
Web site will just go out and buy the corresponding address in the biz
domain so as not to confuse their customers. Yeah, probably right, so this
might not help with the crowded com
domain after all. Let's move on.
name is supposed to be for personal
Web sites. I do not, myself, feel tempted to rush out and buy stevewhite.name.
It strikes me as a low-rent neighborhood in cyberspace. Your mileage may
vary.
But aero? It looks like this
is for aerospace companies. Huh? Will we also have automobile,
riverboat
and avocadofarmer? Wacky.
coop was proposed by some "cooperative
business" organization. What the heck is it? No one seems to know. But
to be fair, I think we should have noncoop
as well. (Actually, my guess is that every New York coop apartment building
- a weird aberration in the tax laws to begin with - will register themselves
as dot-coops. Will chicken farmers
camp here as well?)
info is for sites with information,
it seems. As opposed to all the other sites that are out there, I suppose.
pro is for "professional" Web
sites. I suppose this means the rest of us now have amateurish Web sites?
How rude. And how is this different from com
or biz?
museum. Now this is my
favorite. As if there are so many museums in the world that they need a
domain of their own. Or as if anyone visiting moma.org
would get confused and think it was an arm of the Red Cross instead of
the Museum of Modern Art. How about barbershop,
or maybe fruitstand?
And, after all that effort, ICANN ends up not
approving xxx for porn sites,
which constitute something like 15% of all Web pages and (I would guess)
80% of all Web traffic in the world, making it the most obvious extension
to the TLD space ever considered.
It's like ICANN is an arm of the government in BizzaroWorld (.biz?).
What am I missing?
[Creative uses of the new TLDs are solicited. Blab - Type and Submit!]
 Yow.
I promised no more politics here on Plurp. And,
ladies and gentlemen, that is a promise I intend to keep. So please remind
yourself, as you push Mr. Gore's eyes a bit too close together, or pull
Mr. Bush's nose out just an inch longer, that this is not politics. It's
art. (Click
here!)
FYI - I find that a series of small movements works best.
Plop. Those goons at the FBI are up to no good again. This time,
they want to install their very own computers along the backbone of the
Internet to snoop through all of your email. What do they want to look
for? Well, they're not quite saying. But they do want to be able to look
at everything you do on the Internet, just in case.
The goons call their Peeping Tommery Carnivore.
It used to be called Omnivore, but I guess the Feds decided that
sounded too scary. So they cut it down to a name that might suggest they'll
only eat the meaty parts of your privacy, maybe not all of it.
I'm so comforted.
Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to
be a carnivore.
Uncoincidentally.
Thursday, November 16, 2000
Blab. Picking up the gauntlet we dropped yesterday,
into which was etched a challenge to tell a story about everyone being
absorbed by the fog, a reader with distinctly minimalist leanings writes:
Once upon a time, everyone
was absorbed by the fog.
The End.
This wins both the Min. Awd. and the Reader's Digest Sleeping Beauty Award.
Congratulations.
Blab. A reader having a certain genetic affiliation with Neil
Stephenson contributes this:
The first report of a haberdasher
absorbed by the fog was in December 2000, during the riots, but no one
took it seriously. By May, dozens per day. By September, hundreds. By December,
well, who's counting?
Who indeed! This wins the Apocalypse Soon Award and the Holographic
Ribbon for Best Speculative Fiction. Applause!
Rant. So we've been sitting in the auditorium for the past couple
of days at a conference that I helped organize. We got a bunch of clever
people to come and talk about super-cool cutting-edge digital commerce
research dealybobbers.
And here's my question. How is it that so many extremely smart, very
productive people can whip through college, get Ph.D.s, and go on to professional
success in their chosen research fields, and still have no bleeding idea
how to give a talk?
I mean, really! Slide after slide of incomprehensible gobbledygook
- acronyms that no one knows, diagrams more complex than the instructions
for assembling a Japanese pipe organ, and color schemes so jarrying and
unreadable as to make the editors of Wired weep.
One fellow gets up to give a 20 minute talk with 53 slides. Does he
think it's a movie? Another suddenly realizes that he has spent 18 of his
20 minutes pontificating philosophically instead of giving his talk and
says Oh - only two minutes left? I guess I'll hurry through the rest
of my talk. Another looks at the screen in surprise and says What's
that slide doing there? Well, I know the answer to that.
As Higgins would say: Simply ghastly.
Plurp. Somehow, there is nothing quite as satisfying as writing
a good rant. Don't you agree?
Yo. And speaking of rants, here's Rich
Robinson's rant on why weblogs are the worst thing that ever happened.
I believe that the current
weblog explosion has harmed, and is continuing to harm the web. Blame it
on laziness, vanity, or both: as the quantity goes up, the quality goes
down.
As gratuitous, incestuous linking
has gained more and more steam, "web logging" has become less about logging
the web and more about self-perpetuation.
Hey - we're doing our part.
Yo. Looking for a nice place to live? How about a Carribean
island? Nice, you say, but you don't like fixer-uppers? Me neither.
Then you, as I, might prefer a
place with a few amenities. Or someplace
really fancy. Proceed along these lines:
-
Rob bank.
-
Submit bid.
The Web makes these things so simple!
Yo. Say woo to geekish.com.
Cuz there's nothing sexier
than a woman with beautiful code.
Plop. The award for the commercial Web site with the teeniest,
tiniest, impossible-to-actually read font goes to: Urban
Decay!
Plop. Welcome to the Gallery
of Regrettable Food. Care for a delicious, frosty Bacon Milkshake?
Plurp. Wallowing, as a walrus along the beach. Heaving, as a
sailor, casting off. Billowing, as a cloud, or a warehouse fire. Bloating,
as a pie-eater. Reeling, as a mime in an earthquake, or an infant. Careening,
as a car in sudden rain. Falling, as off a high bridge, wide-eyed and screaming.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
sure the audience wanted to
see all nine
thousand slides.
Wednesday, November 15, 2000
Plop.
OK. That's it. I'm bored. Stupified, in fact! No more presidential election
stuff. Not for at least four years, and maybe not even then. In fact, no
more political stuff here for an unspecified but large amount of time!
All you bozos go figure it out yourselves. Or not. But do it quietly!
Sheesh.
Blab. Suspiciously connected with another recent submission,
about which we wondered what will happen next,
a mysterious pedant insists:
What -ever- happens next?
I mean, always. Every single time! Write about everyone being absorbed
by the fog.
It's a Plurp write-in contest! Blab your best tale on the
topic of everyone being absorbed by the fog into that moist gray
Blab
box in the left margin. The winner (and probably all of the others too)
will be immortalized here in Plurp. Jackstraws, Dickerson, jackstraws!
Plurp. Pursuant to a discussion of that last Blab item
at work, you will be interested to know that there are no Google references
to fog fetish,
but there are 120 such references to frog
fetish.
Blab. Taking advantage of our pale but desirable
Blab
box, a reader writes:
"pale but desirable"; what
a fortunate phrase!
Indeed, we are certain that many other phrases are jealous of its good
fortune. The stickleberries between your toes, for instance. Or
worrying
the fungus.
Blab. Outraged, no doubt, by my lament about throwing
away books, a reader much more clever than I writes:
I have a problem getting
rid of books too. But a few years ago, I found a solution:
donate your excess books to your local public library. (Uncoincidentally
(is that a word?) this coincided with my professional education as a librarian).
Most public libraries accept book donations. They'll decide if they want
them for their collection or not (hey, libraries have space limitations
too); if not, they'll often try to sell them at an annual/semi-annual/whatever
sale, to raise funds for the library; if they don't want them and can't
sell them, *then* they'll throw them out. I don't feel bad about
having my books thrown out after those efforts are taken. :)
Ironically, a goodly number of my books (and former books) were acquired
at library sales. I suppose I shouldn't think of it, then, as getting rid
of books, but rather as taking them back to the adoption agency. You're
right; I feel better already.
And yes, uncoincidentally is a word. At least, it is now.
Plurp. To be Biblically correct, please note that those
of you who are gnashing your teeth must be weeping or wailing, but
not both. That is: NOT gnashing OR (weeping XOR wailing). Please gnash
accordingly. Or prepare for eternal damnation.
Yo. You know you're living in the future when you have to interrupt
a meeting to take a call from your car tires. No, really! Some company
is reportedly working on tires
containing microprocessors that monitor tire pressure, traction and
road conditions. These microprocessors have wireless links back to the
computing systems in the car, so the car can monitor all this stuff in
real time. And, presumably, alert you while you're busy doing something
else.
Every day, approximately
500 million motorists worldwide put their faith in four rubber tires which
haven't got an ounce of intelligence among them.
And you can rest assured that a bunch of engineers are going to put a quick
end to that.
Yak. Ian and Bill. Of course.
I think the time of Web Challenges
is over.
What do you mean?
It's become too easy to find things
on the Web. They will now be replaced by Anti-Web Challenges, in which
you have to find out some piece information
without using
the Web.
But ... but ... how would you know
if it was correct ?
 Plop.
Christmas shopping for the man who has everything? I'll bet he doesn't
have this!
Duck
Hunter Nutcracker
Role reversal! A clever design by
Zim’s puts the duck in charge! Set for the hunt, the wooden duck wears
a plaid fabric shirt and hat and a khaki vest with make-believe shotgun
shells. He totes a wooden gun and stands in a cattail “blind.” 13"H.
From Tyrol International
- Bringing You the Heritage of Europe for 30 Years.
Hmm. Do you suppose there's a little hamlet nestled somewhere in the
bosom of Europe where everyone has one of these things? On thisplanet?
Plurp.
The blue dog isn't
here right now; he
had to take a
call from a bowl of
kibbles.
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
Blab. Friend Bill directs us to this
authoritative-sounding Web site for an answer to that age-old question,
What
is the origin of the term "red herring"? The claim is that they were
...
... used to train hounds
to follow a scent or as a drag for humane "hunting" or as a false scent
red herring is drawn across the trail of a fox by hunt-saboteurs.
Now, do you believe this explanation? It is somehow the wonder and the
horror of the Web that any idiot can put any rant they want up here, true
or not. So it could be other garbage. Or it could be God's Own Truth, like
Plurp
is. Ya never know.
Blab. Prolific Web-cruiser Bill offers yet another wonder.
These
merit a mention too. Lovely!
The cabinets were multi-function medical
devices sold to doctors who couldn't afford a lot of equipment. I don't
recognize many of the treatments
-
The Polysine machine was a single-purpose
machine that just did polysine treatments. (Locally shocking the patient
with low-frequency 10-60Hz alternating current, to exercise damaged muscles.)
-
The Wappler Excell Diathermy/Oudin currents
cabinet
-
The Fischer Model G2 Diathermy/Tesla
currents Cabinet
-
The Fischer Model H Diathermy Cabinet
-
The McIntosh Polysine model 1058
Makes you wonder what medical equipment
collectors 100 years from now will collect. :-)
 Blab.
My Greatest Fan somehow finds the greatest Web sites. This one combines
the complexities of modern electoral politics with digital music and interpretive
dance.
In the midst of the current presidential deadlock in the U.S., it is
good to see our technological elite devoting itself heart and soul to a
solution. Check it out.
Yow. I finally came up with a way to end this Election Madness.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States of America, meet Regis Philbin,
host of Who Wants to Elect the President?
State of Florida, is that
your final
answer ?
Yo. Hmm. Here's a potentially interesting new company (from the
guy who brought you XML) that has a way of mapping the Internet so you
can see what's there, zoom in and out, etc. Try
it out and tell us what you think (using, as always, that pale but
desirable Blab box in the left margin).
Plurp.
The blue dog
filled the
Wappler Excell Diathermy/Oudin currents
cabinet
with eighty-three pounds of
red herring
Monday, November 13, 2000
Blab. An anonymous correspondent asks us to consider
the following.
Jagle. Jackstraws.
Jilly-florist. My hat, her hand, the beezle and the President, all
on that ledge. In Virginia. The router. Mia. And
afterward, the police.
Poor Mia ! Everyone here at Plurp is on pins and needles, wondering what
will happen next.
Blab. My Greatest Fan bounces up and down, pointing at the fact
that The Year
of Living Dangerously, a movie set in the political strife of Indonesia
in 1965, has finally
been allowed into Indonesia. playing to a sold-out crowd at the Jakarta
International Film Festival. After 18 years!
Sugianto, an assistant to
the chief of the Censorship Board, acknowledged that he had not seen "The
Year of Living Dangerously" but suggested that the volatility of the current
political situation was reason enough to keep the ban intact. "We are afraid
with the current situation the movie will influence the people," he said.
"Indonesians like to duplicate what they see."
Oh, those childish Indonesians! How fortunate that they have the Censorship
Board to look after them.
Censorship, it seems, is somewhat like pornography except that, in the
case of censorship, you know it when you don't see it.
Blab. Commenting, no doubt, on my lament at having to
throw away precious things because we have no place to put them, a
reader with more wealth and patience that we have suggests:
So rent a storage room up
in Westchester County. Forever! Let your heirs deal with the problem...
For those of you unfamiliar with this strategy, it goes something like
this. You always have more stuff than space. If you live in Manhattan,
this happens as soon as you own anything at all like, say, underwear.
The ecology of stuff in Manhattan is very odd. No one (other
than maybe Donald Trump) has a garage for their car of the kind that normal
homeowners have. Instead, you pay a commercial garage to store your car
when you're not driving it (or else you park it on the street and endure
break-ins and having it towed on random days). You don't have a real pantry
to store food, so you buy things in tiny (and expensive) packages that
get used up quickly. We tend to think of our local deli as our pantry,
in fact. There is no such thing as Family Size in Manhattan.
But no matter what, you end up with more stuff than space to
put it.
So you, as our helpful reader suggests, pay somebody even more money
to store your stuff for you, often in an old building honeycombed
with corrugated steel compartments and vicious German Shepherds to scare
off burglars.
And you know what? You never look at that stuff again. Not ever!
I know this for a fact because, eighteen years ago, when we first moved
to Manhattan, we moved into Helen's sister's apartment and rented a storage
compartment for all of her sister's stuff. Big mistake! We've been
paying to store all of that stuff for eighteen years and no one
- no one - has any idea what's in there any more. What's worse,
her sister lives in Indonesia. Even on her infrequent visits to New York,
she has never looked inside that storage compartment. But she thinks she
absolutely must have whatever stuff is in there, so we can't get
rid of it.
Argh!
So, yeah, we could plague whomever our heirs turn out to be with all
of our stuff. But it seems like quite a price to pay for such a
distant practical joke.
Plurp. There is something peculiarly American about the need
to have a winner. In most other democratic nations, the result of a vote
that is as absurdly close as this presidential election (a four vote
difference in New Mexico??) is a coalition government - a government formed
cooperatively by the two parties.
But not the U.S. No siree! We gotta have a winner and a loser. We gotta
be number one. Even if that means recounting the votes where you know
you'll get more, or claiming that machines are better than people at determining
voter intent.
Scientific American had an article a kabillion years ago on the pathologies
of various voting systems. Strange things can happen, for instance, when
you give people five votes that they can cast any way they want, or if
they get to express a first and second choice. I don't recall that they
talked about the pathology of close votes in a simple plurality system.
But if they were writing the article today, that would be the lead example!
Plop. My worst nightmare in all this election stuff is that the
next president will be elected by a single vote in Palm Beach, Florida,
preventing me from ever saying to Helen again that my vote wouldn't matter
even if I did vote.
Plurp.
The blue dog
voted
for kibbles.
Twice.
Sunday, November 12, 2000
Plurp. We are unpacking boxes, after a year and a half
of living in an unfinished apartment, after I don't how many years of trying
to find and move into a new apartment.
Among the many problems with this is lack of space. We live in Manhattan,
which means we have no space. Those of you who live in houses have no idea.
You have closets, basements, attics, garages. We have nothing. Despite
our best attempts to engineer space into our new space, we have way more
stuff than places to put it.
Which means we have to get rid of things.
Some things are easy. An old shirt that has gone out of style. Cough
syrup that is years past its expiration date.
But most things are more difficult. Much more difficult.
A Lladro figure  of
a young man, looking up contemplatively from an opened book. It reminded
my mother of me and I bought it for her for her birthday long ago. I wanted
to get rid of it; we have no place to put it. Helen insists that we keep
it. She is undoubtedly right, and it goes into a box in the closet somewhere.
Christmas decorations from my childhood, cartoon-like skiiers from which
my parents and I made snow scenes on the coffee table. Toss.
Phonograph records, the analog kind. We don't even have a turntable
any more, but they are the dearest link we have to so many wonderful times.
Toss.
A large helmet shell that my parents gave to me to replace one that
I found while scuba diving in Hawaii but could not bring home. A treasure.
Toss.
A large, framed, oval photograph of my father and his brother. He was
maybe seven. The photograph is sepia, colored by hand. We have no place
for it, and I know we will never put it up. I want to get rid of it, though
it hurts me to say that. Helen says save. She is right.
Books. Books. Lots of books. These are the hardest. In all my life,
I had only thrown out a half dozen books, and those were books I never
wanted in the first place. Books, for me, are parts of my body, and I would
no more dispose of a book than I would snip off a finger. But we have no
room, and I must be brutal. Toss. Toss! Box after dusty box of books, parts
of my body, parts of my self, snipped off for Goodwill. Goodwill says they
will probably throw them away. Lost forever.
When it comes to the memories of my life, I am a pack rat. I want to
keep the artifacts of my life, keep them close to me. All my life I have
lived in clutter. My own clutter, my own stuff. A nest of my own gathered
things, Helen would say.
But now, I want to live in a beautiful place. I want simplicity in my
life, harmony, a lack of clutter. And that means a change. A big change.
And it is hard for me.
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