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2000.11.26 : 2000.12.02
Saturday, December 2, 2000
Blab. A reader either too subtle for our meager mind
or too unclear on the concept claims:
This is a "Helenism).
Hmm. What could this mean? Was it intended as a sly joke, in which case
the following typography might have been more universally recognizable?
This is a :Helenism)
We may never know.
Blab. A clueful reader asks:
Is "water over the bridge"
a Helenism?
Not only is this a Helenism of absolutely classic form:
-
Water over the dam
-
Water under the bridge
... but it has also been so recorded!
Helen, incidentally, claims that things are only Helenisms if she said
them in the first place, and she says they don't really have to conform
to the defining rules of Helenisms to qualify. I guess we're just at ends
with each other about that.
Blab. Two apparently different readers who share at least this
part of their conscious experience ask:
The blue dog doesn't know
what time it really is for two days in a row?
Is Blue Dog into reruns already?
Dang! That time machine is still malfunctioning!
When are they ever going to make these things reliable? Has anybody noticed
anything else this week that seems to be time-stuck?
Plop. We've had no takers on our generous
offer to send free stuff to people who send us their names and
addresses. Last chance to avoid legal action - send your name & address
today. (We promise not to publish them.) Just imagine what you might get!
Rant. Ian wants us to believe
that sprouts
are evil vegetables. This, of course, is not true or, rather, not entirely
accurate. Bean sprouts, for instance, can be combined with sesame oil and
soy sauce for a crunchy and yummy treat. Alfalfa sprouts are a major addition
to spinach salads, and a real step forward for human culture.
Brussel sprouts are an entirely different matter. As a kid, I always
thought they tasted like distinctly non-human food. I mean, who could eat
those things. It was only as an adult and, in fact, only a few years ago,
that I saw Brussel sprouts on their native stalks and came to that
horrible realization.
You see, Brussel sprouts are Pod People. Yes, just like Invasion
of the Body Snatchers. They grow them in soil treated with alien
chemicals and truck them into groceries all over the world, those strange
looking green trunks dotted with green spheres the color of no known human
food. Pretending that they are food is just an excuse for getting them
into your house. Their real purpose is to create an alien duplicate of
your body, sucking yours dry in the process, and take over your place in
society to spread their kind. Fall asleep near a Brussel sprout and the
process begins. By morning, you are one of them.
Have you ever noticed the people who sell Brussel sprouts? Have you
ever noticed that there's something a little strange about them? Sure,
they look like normal people. But they're not. They have been taken over
by the Pod People, and devote their existence to spreading their population.
Never sleep near a Brussel sprout. Never let your friends sleep near
them. They are coming. They are after us.
You're next. You're next!!
Yak.
Steve! You look so tan!
Oh? Well, I did go out to lunch today
without sunblock. Maybe that's it.
Really?
Uh, no. I was just kidding.
I worry about people. I really do.
Yo. We received absolutely no valid responses to our
challenge to show that all four-letter combinations (e.g. ASDF, QWER)
are already on the Web. Tsk!
(As previously mentioned, we discount Ian's
obvious dodge of generating and then posting them. But we admire the
deviousness!)
We're pretty disappointed at all of you. No sense of digital adventure!
No yearning to solve the Hard Problems! Well, whatever. Here's a solution.
-
Use Google to find a site that has several
unlikely four-letter combinations, say ZTGQ, QXJL, UQGG and JQWW.
-
Check quickly that it seems to be an
ordered list of all four-letter combinations.
-
Grab the list into your favorite editor
and edit out everything except the list itself.
-
Use
sort | unique | lines
(or something similar) to count the
number of unique lines.
-
If that turns out to be 26**4 (= 456976),
you're done!
When we tried this a few months ago, there were three or four such sites.
At the time of this writing, and quite curiously, there don't seem to be
any at all. Click here
to see if there are any right now.
Yo. And, speaking of unmet challenged, neither our readers nor
we seem to have any clue about a solution for this
puzzle:
What are they talking
about ???
Son: Is 50 enough?
Mother: That's not nearly
enough.
Son: Well, how about 100?
Mother: No, that's still not
enough.
Son: All right, how about
90?
Mother: Yes, that should be
just about right.
Noticing this, evil friend C, who submitted this puzzle, gives us the following
hint:
The mother and son are in
the kitchen, talking about using a common appliance.
Ooh! Good hint, and we think we know the answer. If you think you do, Blab
it at us! Do give a full explanation, though; single-word
answers are unlikely to be satisfying.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't really know what
time it was.
Friday, December 1, 2000
Blab. A reader skilled in dream interpretation turns
her considerable talents to our nocturnal hallucinations.
steve, while the intimacy
of the village may provide neighbors of artistic interest the apts. are
squalid, have a house warming, i promise there will be satisfaction. all
the nostalgic ruminations..........understand, goaless, not clueless, helen
prompted site exploration,
i close in peace, lynne
In general, we seem to operate better in a mode of cluelessness rather
than goalessness. Your mileage, however, may vary. Park and lock it. Not
responsible. Close cover before striking. For external use only. Do not
use without a doctor's supervision. People with elbows should not read
this sentence.
Blab. A reader with a questionable future in stand-up comedy
writes:
everyone who believes in
telekinesis, raise my hand! hahahahahahahahaha!
Since we were unable to determine just who wrote this, we were forced to
raise everyone's hand today. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Blab. A reader with parts unknown sings:
email, la
... which, we believe, is a fragment of the eleventy-seventh verse of Deck
The Halls, right before the part where Santa disappears under an avalanche
of spam. Sing along!
Blab. A reader with an earful for us denotes:
... not the brightest ear
candle in the deck.
What a remarkable time in which we live, when Helenisms
are so prevalent that yet a new genre of phrases emerge from them, as Venus
from the head of Zeus. (I would use a Helenism here, but my mind does not
seem to work that way.) Perhaps we should call them meta-Helenisms?
 Blab.
And speaking of Helen, a very confused reader writes:
Helen misses her own puppy.
As everyone knows, Helen wants a kitty. Steve's the one who would
prefer a Golden Retriever if only there was a place to keep one. Now I
ask you, aren't they just infinitely cute and wonderful?
Blab. Meanwhile, back at Plurp, we seem to have received
a press release intended for the major wire services. We are pleased, however,
to make this important announcement right here.
"While the new menu, bar
and appetizers are winning praise from our guests and the new ambience
is getting the greatest reaction," says Dodson. "There really is a chandelier
in the ladies room, with marbleized walls and a sit down vanity.
Everything that Mr. Cannon had seen in his vision for the new Fuddruckers.
We built it -- and they came!"
Blab. Whether related to the new Fuddruckers or as a Dadaist
amalgam of Lovecraft and 1950s Americana, a reader submits the following:
The drooling piper
gnawing at the heart of time
your next-door neighbor
As always, in case it turns out to be desirable in the sightless eyes of
the Old Ones, this has been dutifully
recorded.
 Plurp.
And speaking of time, our time machine malfunctioned somehow this week
and we got a day ahead in Plurp. Weirdest thing. Are you sure it's only
Friday?
Yak. Steve enters a room stuffed with a half dozen people and
many more computers. Cables are strewn about the floor, a large fan blows
the electrically heated air out into the hall, and several people are squinting
at screens while Ian types at supersonic
speed.
Steve: How's it going?
Bill: Fine. Now all we have
to do is get it working.
The entire computing industry summarized in a single, pithy remark!
Yo. Dedicated Plurpists will remember the strange
case of Maria Tirotta Andrews, who brought a 300 pound pig aboard an
airline, claiming it was a "theraputic companion pet" like a seeing-eye
dog. In first class, no less. Well, it seems that that wisest of all bodies,
the FAA, has ruled that the airline did
the right thing by letting the pig on board.
Andrews said her heart condition
was so severe she needed the pig to relieve stress. [Passengers complained]
that the pig became unruly when the plane landed. The animal tried to enter
the cockpit and refused to leave the galley until a passenger tossed food
at her, according to the report.
I would make this stuff up, I really would, but I'm just not that creative.
I do however, predict that airline travel is about to become considerably
more interesting. I myself am pondering to what creative purposes I might
put a yak.
Yak.
Ian: Get off the Web,
Steve. It's full.
Steve: Not yet it's not. I'm
still typing.
Yo. Late breaking news. Wowed by Dave's
astute analysis, Florida has ordered six
million coins for a tie-breaker coin toss.
 Appropriately
for an election that remains a toss-up, this "double-headed" Silver Proof
features the portrait of Al Gore on one side ... and George W. Bush on
the other.
As I keep saying: I would make this stuff up, but ...
(Thanks to Rebecca for this
gem.)
Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't really know what
time it was.
Thursday, November 30, 2000
Blab. A reader, hopefully the last to remind us of the
recent and disgraceful incident in which Blabs were solicited like
a hussy in the Tenderloin, writes:
Another website that I HAD
to bookmark because Helen asked us to take I look and I got sucked in for
25 minutes. Well, it beats having to read about Forida and I did
enjoy "not the brightest candle in
the deck" and "sharp as a cucumber."
However, I take issue (as can be my want, particularly after several scotches...but
not now, because I'm at work) with "no
skin off their teeth." That's been around my family for years!
Anyway, fun stuff. I'll check
the plurps (definition, please) daily.
We are fascinated at this report of latent Helenisms elsewhere in the culture.
As to the definition of the word Plurp, we have no idea. It just
plurped into our head one day. Readers with more satisfying answers are
encouraged to Blab them at us for public exposition.
Blab. Our mysterious friend, the zyx
lady (whose curiously inverted song
we have still not posted, tsk!), suggests a way out of our Saturday
angst.
Why not avoid the Saturday
readership "issue" altogether by having your weblog show "today's
entries + last seven (or whatever other #) days' entries" ?? I mean, that
way it's all relative, eh?
Sincerely, the zyx lady, who recently
had a long and involved dream about the John Hancock Building in Chicago,
of all things (what's with these building dreams? So very odd)
A great idea, and Ian would certainly
second the emotion, having written his own custom databasey program in
Perl that does just this. Myself, I'm too lazy to figure all that out and,
anyhow, I'm still pretty scared of having my liver
eaten by eagles. (Though Dave
seems to have gotten away with slouching through weekends without blogging
recently, and even misses a few weekdays when he's feeling particularly
lazy. Did I see an eagle up there?)
As to those building dreams, my initial theory
was that it was just about me and all our apartment
renovation/unpacking madness. But if it has now spread to others, I
can only wonder if there is some contagion spread via blogs. Yikes!
Blab. A reader, demonstrating that the blue dog has more fans
than our blog itself, insists:
Poor Blue Dog! Bite!
Fortunately for all involved, the blue dog only bytes.
Plurp. I was suddenly awake in the starless night, trembling
from some fear without a name, remembering yesterday's
Cthulhu haiku, and beside me sheets of paper, mottled with sweat, written
in
a hand that was not my own.
Strange forms in the night
Murmuring in the waters
Why these sleepless dreams?
Leaves rustle oddly
Whippoorwills in the dark trees
I hear them calling
Nothing will stop them
These half-seen, nameless horrors
Nor death bring relief
The madness awaits
A scream upon the waters
Cthulhu f'tagn !
Those of you peering at your screens in the murky darkness, clicking in
hopeless terror, huddle here
in your last sane moments.
Plop. Why do I do this? Yesterday I bought a banana for lunch
that I didn't eat. I'll take it with me on the plane, I thought
today, stuffing it into my bag as I ran out the door. You never know
when you'll get fed on these trips. Now, of course, the bag's been
banged around, the way-ripe banana has bubbled out onto my book and The
Girl in the Flammable Skirt smells like bananas flambé.
Plurp. Here's my Next Big Idea: a new cable TV channel that's
sure to be a hit - The Time Channel. Obviously, it displays the
time.
Motto: All time, all
the time.
Teasers:
Yesterday, on The Time Channel
Today, on The Time Channel
Coming up, on The Time Channel
Investor inquiries are welcome.
Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't really know what
time it was.
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
Blab. A thoughtful reader advances a theory as to the
purpose of that wide, scalloped fourth
tine on salad forks:
Re: salad fork tines - perhaps
this is for spearing goodies within the salad, such as succulent cherry
tomatoes, olives, etc. I'm sure Martha Stewart would know.
Well Martha, ever the Old Schooler
that she is, doesn't quite have a general search facility on her site.
(Though we're sure she does craft each and every bit on her site by hand,
from old leaves and pieces of string.)
This seems like a perfectly good functionalist explanation, though.
On the other hand, we could probably come up with an equally compelling
explanation if it didn't have a wide, scalloped fourth tine. Hmm.
Blab. Figuring that only Scientologists would worry about the
psychic
trauma that Thanksgiving induces in turkeys (a reasonable assumption,
of course), a curious reader writes:
Does anyone who isn't a current
or former scientologist actually use the word "engrams"?? Just wondering...
As always, let's Ask The Web!
Google references to engrams:
4,850.
Google references to engrams
that do not also mention Scientology: 2,440.
So the answer to your question is: Yes; about half of us.
Blab. Referring, perhaps, to the curiously mute blue dog of yesterday,
a concerned reader writes:
Speak! Blue Dog, Speak!!
The blue dog seems flattered by the attention, and is boning up on rhetorical
technique.
Blab. Trapped in the maelstrom eye of our eldritch challenge
to write Cthulhu haiku, a reader screams:
Sanity Slips Away,
The Unseen Watcher Watches,
Blinkless, Eyeless sight.
In true Lovecraftian form, the reader nearly incants three lines that would
have surely sucked his mind into a dimension outside space, but saves himself
by incanting six syllables in the first line rather than the mystical five.
We have, however, added the more dangerous form of this verse to our Cthulhu
Haiku. Incant if you dare!
Blab. This apparently got the Old Ones stirring, and one or more
people had sleepless nights in which patterns of sounds repeated inside
their heads like the trilling of mad flutes. Here are some of the scarred
remains.
Old is the strange hiss,
Whispers on the wind sing of
things yet to return.
Blab.
Beyond the edge of
night lies the darkness to deep
to ignore -- deep fear
Blab.
Stars align -- Deepness Shakes
Things beyond the world
Waken and call
Blab.
My eyes blinded by
my won hands still see the
horrors I now fear
Blab. Finally, we must report the loss of one of our dear readers,
who was taken by the three-eyed apparition moments before finishing his
or her final testament.
Beyond the edge of
In memory of this reader, today's Cthulhu haiku has been digitally
immortalized.
Yow. Dave
found another goodie somehow: FindSame
(Find content, not keywords), a Web site that lets you find a Web
site similar to some Web site that you tell them about. (Whew. Not much
Web site in that, now, is there?)
He pointed it at his About page and it matched him with a
Web page about ear candling.
I pointed it at this week's Plurp and it matched me with a sermon
from St. Paul's Episcopal Church (in Macon, Georgia of all places),
proving once again that Plurp is good for your soul.
(Actually, what it matched was [devast]ation of which we are only
dimly aware, matching it with [cre]ation of which we are only dimly
aware. Looks like a simple string match to me!)
Yo. From the Ear
Candling FAQ:
Q: Does Ear Candling
hurt?
A: Absolutely not! It is a
painless, harmless and totally relaxing experience. If it weren't for the
intermittent crackling and hissing sounds -- due to the burning of the
wax and fungus being drawn up the chimney of the candle -- you would never
know that anything was happening in your ear.
And you thought we made this stuff up!
Yo. And speaking of Dave,
he seems to have elicited even more ways to skin
a cat. In case you need to do so.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
hit 14,600
times by
Google.
Tuesday, November 28, 2000
Plurp. Two nights ago, I had a dream in which we either
had or hadn't bought an apartment just above the East Village somewhere.
It was a two-story building, attached at the hips to the adjacent buildings,
and with a single, large, one-bedroom apartment. It was in a not-particularly-great
part of town, didn't have a great view, and its spaciousness was its single
good characteristics. If we had bought it, we had either bought it in
place of our current apartment, or in addition to it, perhaps
as some kind of weekend getaway to a different part of the City. I was
confused.
In various phases of this dream, I kept trying to get Helen to tell
me if we had bought it, and if we had bought it in place of our current
apartment. Helen kept showing up inside of a car with the windows rolled
up, or in some similar circumstance in which she couldn't hear my question,
so she kept saying What? What?
I woke up in that same state of confusion, and couldn't tell if it had
been a dream or not. I told the dream to Helen and then asked her to assure
me that we really hadn't bought another apartment somewhere.
Helen turned to me and said, What?
Yo. Remember how much fun it was in High School, with all of
those kids whose opinions you valued (for some reason you can't quite remember)?
Remember when they thought you were dorky? Or lame? Or whatever?
Now you can relive that dreadful social warfare on AmIHotOrNot,
a Web site that lets you rate how other people look, on the ubiquitous
scale of 1 to 10, then shows you how your rating compares with an average
of lots of other people. (It also shows you how long since the person submitting
the photo looked at his or her rating, which turns out to be pretty revealing!
There are apparently quite a number of people who are checking in every
hour.)
Now I know you're asking Who would submit themselves to such a social
pillory? and indeed this is a dandy question. The answer appears to
be: Lots of people! Mostly young (but not entirely). Perhaps better looking
than the national average, but I'm not sure of that. In particular, there
are some people with very well-armored egos, highly inflated self-images,
or both. But perhaps that mirrors the national demographic as well. Look
at our prospective President, for instance.
I considered submitting a photo of myself to see what would happen.
After leafing through a few dozen, though, I decided it would have to be
a photo of the Much Younger me, and I'd have to spend a few hours doctoring
it in Paint Shop Pro to remove the - ah - photographic imperfections. It
just seemed like more effort than it was worth to be called a dork in public
again.
Yow. New in our Stuff
department: Cthulhu Haiku -
As
if from the shunned memory of a foetid dream.
Readers are invited to submit their own Cthulhu haiku to us here at
Plurp.
Kindly conform to the classic but limiting 5-7-5 syllable form. Those appropriately
in the Mythos
will be added to our collection and displayed for all to fear.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
dismayed to only be rated
number one.
Monday, November 27, 2000
Blab. Extending an already over-extended reaction to
our
foolish request for people to tell us if they really do read the Saturday
Plurp,
an extensive reader writes:
Two days posterior to Turkey
Gobbling, one Day posterior to Mad shopping. One day prior to the next
Plurp Archivage Event.
Thank you. We are most appreciative. But that's enough. Really. You may
all stop now.
Blab. Riffing on the amazing literary jazz piece that is Helen,
a reader who would like us to believe his name is Marianne writes:
Hi Steve--
Last week I had a question from a
student asking my definition of 'literate'. I answered with this.
NOW I see the Helenisms!!
NOW I see the most apt example of literate! It is not enough to be able
to read and write, but rather to be able to synthesize with a unique harmonic.
Wisdom is, after all, elusive.
Marianne
Imagine - a whole generation of students raised to aspire to Helenisms.
We shall have to get more disk space.
Blab. A reader who knows us far too well and who has far too
much time on its hands writes:
http://www.brunching.com/features/simgames.html
Sim games for the successful!
Commuter: The Commute
You've got two hours on the jam-packed
freeway, and you need to fill time. Sip your coffee, read the paper, rubberneck,
argue with the on-air "personalities." Defend the three inches of space
in front of your car by any means necessary! Hunt for alternate routes.
(Hint: they're all full!) And when think you're ready, just try to get
through Commuter: The Commute II: Carpooler: The Carpool !
At the height of our D&D
mania in grad school, I once suggested a role-playing game along the following
lines:
Your character awakens in
the morning, throws on the same clothes he or she wore yesterday, and stumbles
out of a small, disheveled abode to a metal canister the size of a hippopotamus.
Your character enters the canister, causing it to move along the landscape
by manipulating various levers and buttons, until it reaches a grouping
of larger, institutional-looking buildings. Your character exits the canister
and walks into one of the buildings, up the stairs and into a small room
whose most prominent feature is a uniform pile of paper a foot thick, covering
the entire room. He or she sits at a small table and scribbles incomprehensible
symbols onto several of these pieces of paper until late at night, at which
time the reverse trek is made in the metal canister.
The game was called, of course, Graduate Student. And yes, we decided
it was far too dull for anyone to actually play.
 Yow.
At lunch last week, I was telling folks about how, as kids, we built wonderfully
complicated things we called marble machines. You'd put a marble
in a hole in a large cardboard box and watch as it rolled and clunked its
way through a menagerie of paper towel tubes and electrical conduit accidentally
purloined from the construction of a local shopping center. The marble
would hit other marbles, jarring them loose on their own paths until, finally,
one or more marbles came out the end. Pointless! Kinetic! That is, sheer
kid bliss!
Today, after lunch, friend Jim waltzes into my office and shows me what
he got for Christmas last year. Some durn fool has gone and done a really
wound up version of this in digital form, called Marble
Drop (a free downloadable demo is available at that link).
Beware! It is addicting!
Plop. Oops. I forgot to post yesterday's
Helenism to the Helenisms.
Fixed now.
Plurp.
In a previous life
the blue dog
was a
digital marble.
Sunday, November 26, 2000
Plurp. Do you suppose that there are murky stories in
the turkey community, passed down generation after generation, or perhaps
deeply-bred engrams in their collective unconscious, that heighten fear
this time of year, make them tremble, sleepless against the cold chicken
wire, wide-eyed at the sight of humans?
Plurp. Nature has a slow and insidious sense of violence.
Along the side of the road in early winter, bittersweet climbs slowly
up the bushes and trees. It is a parasitic plant, using its host as a way
of reaching the light, choking the life out of its host in the process.
It does not need its host to live, only to support its own climb.
In the Caribbean in the last few years, the coral reefs have been dying.
At first, we thought it was tourists tromping all over them, or the hurricanes
that spiral through every year, stripping the trees and the coral heads.
And those certainly do contribute to the problem. But we hear now that
the more significant effect is thought to be some kind of disease, some
microorganism spreading slowly across a thousand miles of warm, clear ocean,
decimating the tiny animals that build the reefs.
Glaciers spend thousands of years crawling across the landscape, millimeter
by millimeter, their immense weight crushing and gouging deep wounds into
the earth, lumbering hand-in-hand with climatic changes that spell doom
to hundreds of indigenous species.
Galaxies collide in an intricate and deadly dance that goes on for hundreds
of billions of years, their interstellar dust smashed together with enough
violence to ignite, creating a shock wave of new star formation, devastating
any life that might have existed on the planetary systems, and typically
even the planets themselves.
As humans, our attention span is so limited. We look at events that
happen in a few seconds, or a few days, appalled by violence that turns
a building into rubble or kills a dozen people, figuring we are witnessing
the key events of history. All the while, nature glides blithely on, wreaking
devastation of which we are only dimly aware.
Plop. Here is a lesson in how not to write a program that you
expose to lots of other people on the Web. Some bozo wrote a program in
Java that calculates
how old you are right now - in years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.
 Unfortunately,
this particular bozo seems never to have tested the default case that he
or she presents: someone born at midnight on Jan. 1, 1900 is judged to
be -1799 years old. Which seems unlikely.
Tsk!
Yow. A new Helenism,
courtesy of Amtrak's extremely crowded, extremely slow, extremely stop-happy
train from Baltimore to New York today.
Milk stop
Duly noted!
Plurp.
In a previous life
the blue dog was cold
chicken wire.
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