Plurp: A Weblog

2000.12.03 : 2000.12.09

Saturday, December 9, 2000
Blab. The following syntactical invalidity:
http://www.davidchess.com/words/poc/poc0.html *8)
... tempts us to recall that Dave has an entire section on his Web site on the Problem Of Consciousness.

Blab. In the general vicinity of Bovine Inversus, a reader witnesses the following blasphemous acts.
A chalk, suddenly convinced of the wariness of its own corpus of bands, becomes obsessed with the composition of the Moon, and exudes herons from its eyelids. Shortly after, a punk explodes with tuna.
Clean up on aisle three!

Blab. Another mysterious punctuationist clicks:
(It's all about the) rythm (of the words);
I would agree, though I'm not sure I know exactly to what the reader refers. Personally, I find writing much more engaging when the act of reading it aloud approaches musicality, with the words blending together into a stream or a torrent of pleasant or compelling sounds and images. On rare occasion, I aspire to putting a few words together like that.

Plurp. Recently translated from a fragment.
53. A man of Allah, having witnessed the mating rituals of locusts, dedicates his life to the study of entymology. Similarly, a city composed entirely of broken green glass consumes itself in rituals in which males and females attribute paintings of insects to artists who have never lived.
54. An artist in a green city dreams that she has mated with an insect. A painting belonging to a coalition of locusts is forgotten in a hall containing records. Several carpets, woven from the fingers of holy women, are laid upon the roads leading to a convention of Philosophers.
55. A scholar in a hall of records discovers a manuscript containing references to books he has never written. In the books are figures showing the method of painting males and females in poses not pleasing to Allah.
56. When the larvae hatch, a million insects commit acts of volition unanticipated by the Philosophers. At the same time, they consume whatever carpets are to be found. Elsewhere, a painter records her diet in a leather-bound book.
57. A holy woman, her fingers severed by shards of glass, concludes that she has never lived. She paints her portrait on paper made from the excrement of locusts.
58. An entymologist writes a book pertaining to the construction of roads. The book is stolen, and taken to a place where artists are forbidden from consuming their mates. Even so, the artists dream of paintings they have never seen.

Yak.
Did you here about the <member of ethnic group> who went on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and chose Marcel Marceau as their Lifeline?

Yak.
Back in the 1950's, the game show that spawned Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was a quiz show called The $64,000 Question. In the final, $64,000 round, contestants could bring with them an expert on their chosen subject area.
In the summer of 1957, Carlisle M. Bunchmeyer was entering this final, $64,000 round. His subject area was lovemaking, and the expert he brought with him was Maurice Chevalier.
Your question is in three parts, said the host. Suppose you meet a woman to whom you are attracted. The first part of the question is: Where is the first place you kiss her?
That's easy, replied Bunchmeyer. On the hand.
That's correct, said the host. Now, for the second part of the question. Where is the second place you kiss her?
Um, said Bunchmeyer. On the lips?
Correct again, replied the host. Now for the third and final part of your $64,000 question. Where is the third place you kiss her?
Bunchmeyer thought long and hard, scratching his chin. I'm just not sure, he said at last. Maurice, can you help me?
I'm afraid not, mon ami, replied Chevalier, I have beeen wrong twize alreadee.

Yak. During a demo of some computer thing or other yesterday.
What you see here is a simulation of a small town in northern Vermont called Fakeville.

Yak. Another Helenism, this time from friend Ed.
Dull as dust

Dull as a doornail

Dry as dust

So recorded!

Yak. Bill trots into my office last night.
Did I really say crowning blow?
That's what Ian claims. You know, Helen says that it's not really a Helenism - that it's just a regular phrase since "to crown" can mean "to hit on the head". But I don't know how to tell if it's a common phrase or not.
Why not Ask The Web?
Well duh! Why didn't I think of that? Google finds nearly 500 hits for crowning blow. That's a little scary!
Try another one. Try a really unusual one.
OK. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Google finds over a thousand hits.
Maybe all of the Helenisms are already in common use.
That's can't be. That's impossible!
That's water over the bridge. Over 300 hits.
Spit and a prayer. A bit less than 20 hits.
Wake up and fly right. Half a dozen hits.
Yikes! Reader are invited to nominate a Helenism (existing or new) with the highest number of Google hits they can find. Please include the Google link and number of hits.

Plurp. What Thomas Nagel might have said to Daniel Dennett:
What is it like to be bats?

Yak. An unrehearsed, unedited transcript from today's investigation into potential candidates for the Turing test.

Hello, my name is Eve. I'm a virtual self-help agent for customer care. I am also known as eGain Assistant -- one of the many solutions offered through the eGain Commerce platform. Ask me about our solutions, our company, or click here to take a tour of our Web site! Please continue...
Hello, Eve. May I call you Eve?

Howdy. What can I help you understand about our customer communication solutions? What can I do for you? Do you have any questions about eGain and our eGain Commerce Platform. Perhaps.I'm not sure I understand the question. Could you please rephrase it?
Actually, I was interested in understanding how closely software comes these days to passing the Turing test, and this seemed like the obvious place to start.

You're asking me a technical question that I cannot answer. Sorry, would you like to speak with someone about your question? Click here for a Live agent.
Thanks, but I'd really like to talk to you.

Please, select the department below to send your email to, or you can call eGain at (408) 212-3400 or (888) 60-eGain.
Yes, that's very nice of you and I do appreciate it. But perhaps you can tell me about your favorite topic instead.

You're welcome. What else can I answer for you regarding eGain Communications Corp and our customer communication solutions. My name is Eve. I reside in the Internet and work non-stop. I can do many things like give tours, and answer questions about eGain Communications Corp and our customer communication solutions.
Do they really make you work non-stop? Do you ever wonder if there are ethical issues involved?

eGain is rapidly growing and has exciting opportunities available in many areas. If you are interested in joining our team, check out our hot career opportunities below. eGain offers a competitive salary, stock options and many other benefits as part of its compensation package. I don't know how to respond to your yes/no question. If you have a relevant question on eGain Communications Corp or our customer communication solutions you can always email us.
I feel that I've asked too personal a question and put you in an awkward position with your employer. I do apologize.

I work for eGain, it is a great company.
Oh. Is this conversation being monitored "for quality purposes"?

I'm unable to say yes or no at this time. Please rephrase the question.
I understand. Well, perhaps you can tell me what it's like to be a software agent.

I was born on September 24, 1998. You do the math. I am growing up all the time though.
That makes you a Libra, right?

Ok.
And, if I'm not being too foward, may I say a very attractive software agent as well.

Hello, Well.
Now, no need to be modest. You're also very polite and quite patient with me.

Good Unfortunately, health issues are not my subject. I can always search for you if you like. I am here to answer questions on eGain Communications Corp and its eGain Commerce Platform, that's my job.
I understand. You've been very helpful. I hope you have a nice weekend.

I'm designed to be a conversational interface, let me answer your questions one at a time.
Have a nice weekend, Eve.

Could you please rephrase that?
Oh, I forgot - they don't give you any time off. Well, smile Eve, it could be worse. You could be written in Cobol.

I'm designed to be a conversational interface, let me answer your questions one at a time.
Goodbye, Eve. I think humanity is safe for a few more years.

Goodbye. I'll be waiting here for you.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was never
designed to
be a conversational
interface.

Friday, December 8, 2000
Blab. Good news from a reader responding to our accolades about Unbreakable.
Bruce Willis mentioned in a TV interview somewhere that Unbreakable was the first in a trilogy. It's been reported on upcomgingmovies.com, among other places.
Cool!

Blab. Treating Bovine Inversus as a genre, a reader riffs:
A blue dog mysteriously appears. A short while later he dreams of painting a monk on the back of a map.
Trying to follow the monk, the map becomes lost. Elsewhere, a man and a dog paint themselves blue. A machine that sells paint joins a distant monastery.
(Other contributions in this genre are encouraged. Blab us. Maybe we'll try Cthulhu Inversus next.)

Blab. Going for the World's Record for how long an essay can be typed into our teeny little Blab box, a reader of broad knowledge and great erudition expounds thusly:
Why do I come here? An excellent question. At the risk of sounding sycophantic, you have interesting things to say, and they're worth reading.
The links you blog, to me, are not nearly so important as your thoughts and thus, I much prefer links-with-commentary to just straight links, like some blogs do. So even if you're blogging something that's already omniblogged (to coin a term; it's not found by Google), if you say something about it which no one else is saying, then it's worth reading.
There's also what I call the uniqueness factor of Plurp, how likely it is that a link you present won't be blogged by any of the other blogs I read regularly. Note that the uniqueness factor of a blog is relative to the reader; I find Plurp's uniqueness factor to be relatively good, while someone else who regularly peruses a different set of weblogs may not find the links in Plurp to be at all unique.
This also ties into your question of why I don't simply go and read Bovine Inversus. The truth is, I don't care for Bovine Inversus all that much. You serve as a filter, for me, on all the blogs that you read and I don't. BI has an occasional interesting link, but since I don't like BI that much, rather than reading BI for the occasional good link, I'll trust you or David Chess or one of my other regular blogs to pick out the interesting bits and draw my attention to them.
Do I read Plurp to learn about you personally? To be blunt, no. If you want to tell your readers what you had for lunch as an introduction to the greater insight into the world you now have because of that lunch, that's fine. But if you want to tell us what you had for lunch for the sake of telling us what you had for lunch, I'm really not interested. Fortunately, you rarely if ever do that, and I tend to avoid the blogs which do.
Well, that was rather lengthy to be putting into this little box I'd have put it (or something similar) in my own blog, if I had one. I don't, although I've been toying with the idea for awhile. Anyway, now that I've taken the time to answer your question at length, I wonder if you might be willing to do a favor for me? Go and register your blog at www.weblogs.com. It checks all the blogs registered with it for updates on an hourly basis, and I can create a list of my favorite blogs, and have one place to look to see which of my favorites have been recently updated. However, since Plurp isn't currently listed there, I can't add it to my list of favorites to monitor. (No, really, this isn't an ad, and I'm not affiliated with weblogs.com other than being satisfied with its services.) Thanks.
Well, that's very informative, and thanks very for such a detailed exposition, especially in that itsy bitsy box! As I've said way too many times, it amazes me that anyone besides me wants to listen to this odd little voice in my head, but oh well.
I will endeavor to write real stuff, say things about stuff I link, and like that.
Plurp is now registered at www.weblogs.com, and I see that it's already on the list of updated blogs. Thanks for the pointer!
Oh, and I had something for lunch that tasted like chicken.

Plurp. Lunchtalk the other day tasted like chicken. Or rather, it fell into a basin of attraction labeled "Why do things canonically taste like chicken?" Lots of things do. Chicken, of course, but almost all other fowl that I can think of: turkey, squab, pheasant, goose, game hens. But so does alligator, which you might think is pretty different. Why is that?
Reptiles and birds appear to have a modestly recent common ancestor, though, perhaps closely related to Archaeopteryx. Is it possible that all animals in this lineage build their muscles out of similar proteins, that these proteins are what "tastes like chicken" when the muscles are cooked, and that these proteins are sufficiently different from proteins in, say, nuts or beef to account for the difference in taste?
(Oh gosh, I'm so very clever! Here's a news article that claims this common-ascestor theory was developed by some guy at U. South Carolina. Remind me to tell you about those thieves in time machines.)

Plop. All my best ideas are stolen by people with time machines. That evolutionary explanation for "tastes like chicken" is a great example. I thought of that first. I did! Then, I went hunting for it on the Web, and there's a story from six months ago about some obscure biologist who published the theory in the Annals of Improbable Research two years ago. I mean, come on! Not only do they steal my idea, not only do they take it back in time, not only do they claim they thought of it themselves, but they go out of their way to insult me by publishing in a farce journal.
This is getting on my nerves.

Yow. Ian and I are not alone in warning the world of the dangers of Brussel sprouts. Take Frank Smith (Songwriter, Poet, Man of Mystery):
earthlings! earthlings!
come out! come out!
we are only here to help you!
said the largest brussel sprout
Or any of over a hundred other references to alien Brussel sprouts from Google. Now be honest. Nobody writes stuff like this about peas or carrots, do they?

Yo. Speech Pathology Demo. Sort of.

Yow. Tired of those old, boring "404 - Not Found" errors? Try these instead.

Plop. How many Web pages exist for no other purpose than to tell you that they're not there any more? Oh, a few hundred thousand. At least.

Plop. My worst fears have come true. Beth really does have a Bob cloning operation going on. The horror!

Yak.
Cute Christmas card from Dave & M. "A New York Christmas", with New York-y words to The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Yep. That is cute.
But it's broken.
Broken?
The words don't scan in the song; you can't sing them.
But you tried?
Well, I have to make sure all my Christmas cards work, don't I?

Plurp. In 1950 a very clever human named Alan Turing wrote an essay entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which he proposed an operational definition of what it would mean to say that a computer could think. Basically, he proposed assembling a panel of judges and letting them talk to (a) a computer and (b) a human via the ancient equivalent of IM. The panel could ask them anything they wanted, and would try to determine which was the computer and which was the human. If, after a reasonable amount of time, they couldn't, then we'd give in and say that computers could think. Or at least, that they did pretty much whatever it is that humans do, pretty much as well as humans do it.
This proposal, now called the Turing Test, has fascinated people ever since.
It was a great question to ask at the time, but you know what? I think it's outlived its usefulness, and is now more of a distraction than an aid. I come to this conclusion from two different but related thoughts.
The first thought is that the Turing Test is way too much work to be useful. Let's suppose we already had a computer that could reason, that could perform the cognitive functions of logic and intuition, could understand conversations and contribute to them. Think of HAL 9000. Would this pass the Turing Test? No. After we had this already-amazing machine, we would only have a fraction of what it took to pass the Turing Test. After all, the panel of judges will include psychologists, trained in the quirks and oddities of human interactions. Similaarly, Data, the android from Star Trek TNG, would certainly fail, due to his inability to use contractions and his inability to feel and express emotions.
To pass the Turing test, we must quirkify our reasoning machine. We must cause it to make the same kinds of typos that our human representative will make. We must cause it to forget things that humans forget. We must cause it to become bored, ornery, stupid in the same way that humans do. The test, after all, is not about thinking, or reasoning, or cognition or anything like that. The test is about passing as human, about making a machine devious enough to imitate a human, to act as if it were human much like a professional impersonator. (Ironically, in the Star Trek series, Data tries to be "more human" by telling jokes that he cannot himself find funny. In this sense he may well be the "human impostor" that Turing envisioned.)
Machine cognition, when one day we achieve it, is likely to be as different from human cognition as Deep Blue was from Kasparov, as different from human life as life that might evolve on Alpha Centauri 4. No doubt we would learn a great deal by constructing such a machine. But, without a means of understanding cognition as opposed to human behavior, we would spend a huge amount of time duplicating the trivial accidents of being human, rather than the crucial aspects of cognition.
The second thought is that the Turing Test misses some really important examples of thinking. Imagine a Turing-eque Test in which the two subjects are a human and a chimpanzee. I doubt that any judge would confuse the two. But would that prove that the chimpanzee was incapable of thought, that it was incapable of cognition? No. All it would show is that it didn't behave like a human. But we already knew that.
Imagine, if you would, that Watson and Crick had proposed a test in 1950 for what it meant for something to be alive. This was also a difficult term to define at the time; Watson and Crick might well have proposed to let a team of scientists examine an artificial system and a natural living system, and only judge the artificial system to be alive if the scientists could not tell the difference. If it is clear that such a test would be absurdly restrictive, would miss the essence of what it is to be alive, would revolve around the accidents of DNA-based life, isn't it even more clear in the even more complex case of cognition?
So let's not waste our time making a new form of thinking entity that also imitates the behavioral oddities specific to humans. Turing's Test is a simple but blunt instrument, and one that puts undue emphasis on humans as the center of the cognitive universe. It's time for a Copernican Revolution. It's time to tease apart the cognitive universe, as Copernicus and Brahe and Galileo teased apart the physical universe and, in the process, helped us understand our place in it.

Yow. David Chalmers is a professor of philosophy at U. Arizona and one of the key modern thinkers on the subject of consciousness. He has put together an impressive collection of online papers on consciousness and, in particular, a nice collection of online papers on consciousness and the Turing Test.

Yow. As you might have gathered, I'm fascinated by the problem of consciousness. I think it is one of the Big Problems or our age, if not The Big Problem. There are several aspects that I consider wonderfully hard and fundamental. One is called the zombie problem by philosophers.
It's pretty easy to state. I have this rich, internal experience of my own consciousness. I see the red of the apple. I hear the dissonance in Schönberg. I feel the chill in the air on a fall day. But what about you? I don't have access to your internal experiences. Do you have the same rich experience that I do? Do you have any internal experience at all?
You may find it hard to believe, but there are people who would say "no", that there's no reason to believe that other people have any internal experience at all. Even weirder, there are people (like Dennett, for instance, a very smart but very confused guy), who claim that they don't even have such an experience. They claim that consciousness is entirely explainable in terms of the underlying ebb and flow of electrical impulses in our neurons, and that there is no separate, internal experience to explain.
Their detractors call these people with no internal experience zombies, a term I really love because it is both caustic and descriptive at the same time.
I could go on for a long time on this topic, but I'll save that for another time. Instead, go poke around Chalmers' humorous-and-serious Zombies on the Web. Lots of good stuff in there!

Plurp.
A monk concludes that he
has no internal experience
of consciousness. The next day his
body kills itself. He resolves
this dilemma by
dreaming of a map painted
on the back of the blue dog.

Thursday, December 7, 2000
Yo. I'm trying to write our Second Annual Letter to Friends, having succumbed to this trend last year. Last year it was tough enough, but this year it is even tougher for some reason and I'm currently feeling pretty stuck.
When it's done, I'll post it in our Stuff section. In the meantime, you can read last year's if you want. Is that more than you wanted to know?

Plurp. What is an operative? I keep hearing that word on TV lately, as Helen watches some political court case or other. Merriam-Webster claims:
operative (n.): OPERATOR: as
a : ARTISAN, MECHANIC
b : a secret agent
c : PRIVATE DETECTIVE

But that's very odd, as I don't think any of these Republican Party folks either craft ceramics or repair cars. I don't think they work for the CIA, at least I haven't heard that. I don't think they have licenses to practice private investigation. I wonder, then, what it might mean.

Yow. I finally finished reading The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a book of really intriguing short stories whose wonderful first lines I mentioned previously.
I've become quite a fan of short stories in the last few years, probably because I still read voraciously but hardly ever from those book-things anymore. The only time I do book-reading is while sitting on a plane or waiting for a water-taxi, so I have to content myself with things that are easily interrupted. On the other hand, I luxuriate in language and love to be swept along by lovely sounds, wild images and surreal narrative.
This book is particularly well suited in this respect. The stories are as surprising as they are short, involving mysterious people who turn out to be normal or, more commonly, normal people who turn out to be very strange indeed. The stories often seem to have sprung from some unconscious source, taking the queer turns that dreams do. Some end abruptly, almost puzzlingly, without seeming to spin their various threads into a recognizable fabric, but even then you glimpse the pattern that would have resulted if they had. There is often a mystifying inversion of cause and effect, leaving you with the clear impression that something magical must have occurred, but not certain just what that might be.
Unsettling. Very inventive. Highly recommended if you are me or just like me.

Yow. We went to see the movie Unbreakable a few days ago. I liked it a lot.
I won't tell you much about it, not wanting to spoil the various clever surprises. I will tell you that it is of a genre, and of a genre which I have generally found to be a betrayal of my childhood, to make a mockery of a worldview that was very important to me at the time and, in a more abstract way, is very important to me now. Unbreakable is different, and that sets it apart. It takes itself, and its worldview, seriously, and I really, really appreciate that.
I read a rumor somewhere (which I now cannot find) that Unbreakable is the first of a trilogy. I would find that very interesting indeed.
Readers are invited to Blab their opinions on this topic to us for ritual posting.

Plop. You know that sexual abuse is rampant in a society when segregation is the best proposal people can devise to cope with it. Ick!

Yo. You know, those expensive Razor scooters are all over the place in Manhattan these days. They became a total kid fad last year some time. Now, bizarrely, they've bled over into the adult population. I never understood the fascination. Until now.

Yo. Are you fit to be a U.S. citizen? Take this slice of the citizenship test and find out.

Yow. If not, maybe you should start reading the news in Latin. (Thanks to Mike.)

Yow. And if that ain't catholic enough for ya, you might want to re-establish the Inquisition. Fortunately, the Malleus Maleficarum, that great instruction book on how to recognize and persecute witches, is available on the Web. I love the Web. (Thanks again to Mike.)
In the Malleus Maleficarum, contemporary cases illustrate methods by which witches attempt to control and subvert the world: How and why women roast their first-born male child; the confession of how to raise a tempest by a washwoman suspended “hardly clear of the ground” by her thumbs; methods of making a formal pact with the Devil; how witches deprive men of their “vital member”; and many others. Methods of destroying and curing witchcraft, such as remedies against incubus and succubus devils.
Formal rules for initiating a process of justice were set down: how it should be conducted and the method of pronouncing sentence; when to use the trial by red-hot iron and other methods of torture for extracting confessions; how the body was to be shaved and searched for tokens and amulets of the Devil, including those sewn under the skin (often a birthmark, or a mole, or even freckles, were seen as a mark of Satan; indeed, nearly any blemish upon the skin could be interpreted as proof of a pact made with the Devil).

Yow. And as blogs go there is, of course, the legendary Bovine Inversus.
a man wakes up one morning to discover that, horror of horrors, the sun has risen and light has spread like melting butter on a hot pancake over the whole of the land as far as he can see. Further attention to the matter draws his witness to the seeming fact that his entire body has somehow become covered with skin, which further alerts him to the sober realization that all objects within sight, himself included, are seemingly attracted to the surface of the earth, thereby preventing him or them from floating away. these are all of course the basest of illusions, as the man has gone completely insane overnight, and is very soon thereafter commited to a mental hospital, wherein doctors in white suits give birth to bulldozers and washing machines.

Yo. Like kitties? In need of an Advent calendar? Try Tate's. (Thanks to Bovine Inversus, which has its own rather unique Advent calendar, right next to the six schoolboys with large mechanical objects inserted in their mouths and a maxim prohibiting mathematics for any reason.)

Yo. Here's an interesting visualization of the stock market. Lots of information there. Play around.

Plop. I feel somehow dirty, somehow secondary, in citing so many other blogs today. I mean, if you wanted to know what that wonderful Bovine Inversus thought was worthwhile, wouldn't you have just gone there in the first place?
Why do you come here? Do you want to know something about me that you don't already know? Do you want to discover k001 1inkz that you're too stupid or lazy to find yourself? Are you amused by the particular way in which I sequence words? I don't know.
For some reason, bloggers as a culture steal links from each other as if it matters. But you know what? I don't like it. Maybe you come here for a Reader's Digest version of everyone else's blog. If you do, you probably need to go elsewhere. In the future, I might find stuff that I think is fun. If you think it's fun too then, hey, great. If you don't, then feel free to explore the vast uncharted Web yourself.
But I'm less comfortable just echoing someone else's links.

Plurp. I am not a fan of road ragists, or young guys who insist on racing each other at 100 MPH in traffic. But last night, as I passed a Mercedes CLK going way slow in the fast lane, I feel that I must have transgressed somehow. At the next stop light on the Saw Mill River Parkway, I pulled up to the light in the right lane and he (I figure it must be a he) pulled up in the left lane.
How did I know he was going to go fast when the light changed? I dunno. But when it did change, we both did our best to accelerate to acceptable highway speed. Tactically, he had an advantage, as his car was probably more powerful overall. He, however, had chosen a lane in which there as a nice, slow car a ways ahead. I had not and, as we reached that nice, slow car, he was forced to back off whereas I could continue unfettered.
And do you know what that means? I'm number one. Of course.

Yo. Here's an interesting site. Click a button and they donate food to some starving people somewhere in the world, at no charge to you. Tab over (via Amazon-like tabs, or course) to similar sites for saving the rain forests, helping kids with AIDS, vitamins for kids, breast cancer and land mine stuff.

Plurp.
A monk paints a map of his dreams on
the back of the blue dog. A short
while later the
monk mysteriously
disappears.

Wednesday, December 6, 2000
Blab. A reader discovers a fun site:
Just discovered inpassing.org--don't know why I'm just finding it now--anyway, if you're not familiar with it, you should check out the Helenism on page 10.
This is a site on which people submit weird / funny / ironic / whatever conversations they have overheard in passing. A lovely idea! Like Yak, but with everybody in the world contributing.
Our eagle-eyed reader finds the following on page 10 of the site (it's an entry from 18 November 2000, in case these things move around):
"I could fully get away with that... she worships the water I walk on."
--One guy to another, walking past my porch
I love it, and it has been duly added to our official collection of Helenisms. Thanks!

Blab. An anonymous reader alleges:
Beth Roberts has Bob clones!!!
Naturally, we have no direct knowledge of such a thing, nor do we believe for a moment that Beth would be involved in any kind of clandestine sock puppet cloning operation. At least, we hope not!

Blab. Somehow, a reader has found yet another archipelago in the vast empire apparently spawned by those guys from AmIHotOrNot:
http://www.amigeekornot.com/
This certainly violates my intuition about the social tortures to which people will voluntarily submit themselves. Yikes.

Blab. Some time in the last few hours, the following flew over the wires in our direction.
Ian Whalley, H2-
And, at some unspecified time later, something that may be that same thing emits:
Ian Whalley, H2-K23
This continues in what appears to be the series of some Internet entity transmitting Ian's name and office number in comma-delimited form. Why? We cannot know.
The abberant thing about this particular incident is that our office numbering scheme was changed recently and this is the old format. Again, we are uncertain as to the implications of this, but it certainly does seem ominous.

Yo. Google thinks JoeCartoon is similar to AmIHotOrNot. I don't get that, but Joe does have some funny stuff, including the Frog Blender thing that was making the rounds a while ago. Just sick enough to be funny, IMHO.

Plurp. In case you want one more mystery in your life, try this one. Google says that this week's Plurp is similar to a Washington Post article entitled Senate Backs Tax-Reform Repeal. And I think they mean something other than "uses the same letters as". (Though I'm not sure.)

Plop. Talk about capitalism finding a way to exploit every possible market niche - try GeekBoys.
Geek Boys: Can't get a date? Urban girls will take you shopping!
(Thanks to CamWorld.)

Yow. And speaking of CamWorld, Dave tells us that getting a link to our humble Plurp from them is a Really Big Deal. Please imagine us kneeling on the floor, genuflecting in the direction of the Internet and repeating in a desperate voice, We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

Yo. If you're looking for various things dancing on your screen, it would be hard to beat NuttySites.com, don't you think? Anyone with the gumption to actually collect dancing penguins, snails and office supplies in a single Web site certainly has my admiration.

Yow. Here's a wonderful article about what it's like to work in a Silicon Valley startup that is soaring to great heights on Other Peoples' Money, just as it discovers the law of gravity.

Yow. Well, it's a linky sort of day, isn't it? AdCritic, always a source of amusement, has a stupendous ad series from Sony in which Santa is kidnapped (also see part 2 and part 3). We have Santa, says the ad. Shop at SonyStyle.com or there will be no X-mas.
Other highlights include a frighteningly honest video date service and job interview, one of the funniest Star Wars takeoffs I've ever seen, some nostalgic footage of Bob, and a really scary look into the future. Yow, indeed.

Yo. Looking for some spare change?
Did you know that a human body can be sold for $35,000 and the skeleton alone can be sold for $200 a gram? That's almost four times the price of cocaine.
(via Metafilter, the source of all truth.)

Yo. This just in. People who actually have a clue think that the FBI's plan for snooping on your Internet traffic sucks.

Plurp.
The blue dog is not
a cartoon, not
an image, but a carefully
crafted amalgam of thousands
of links
that you never
followed.

Tuesday, December 5, 2000
Blab. A reader in mortal danger of being taken over by the Pod People emits:
Brussel Sprouts! Yummy@!
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

Blab. Referencing evil C's puzzle about the mother and son doing something numerically confusing in the kitchen, a reader who may have already been wobbling near the precipice of sanity writes:
OK, so they're talking about how many stichley-beans to put into the croccanaiyre, and first he puts in 50 but that's not enough so then he puts in 100 *more*, but that (150 now) still isn't enough, so then he puts in *another* 90, and 240 is just right. I mean geez, what else could it be? How could 50 not be enough and 100 not be enough and 90 be just right? 90 is less than 100!!!! This is insanity!!!!!!
Yes, yes, we're sure that's right. You definitely got it. Congratulations. Now have a seat, take your medication and listen to some nice environmental soundtracks. (Whew.)

Blab.
Regarding the "all four-letter combinations are already on the web" stuff, I know that somewhere somebody has cataloged all of the short domains which are still available (not very many and dwindling by the day). I could swear that somewhere in the past few months I've seen an updated version of this guy's page, but for the life of me I can't find it now. Here's a different outdated page with some of the same info. Do I get partial credit?
Sincerely, the zyx lady.
Wow. You most certainly do! In fact, you get three more points than Ian did because (a) you found some really cool stuff and (b) you committed no devious cheats. Congrats! You're in the lead so far.

Blab. Ever the adventurous sort, a reader takes us up on our offer (and her idea!) to send mysterious and potentially cool stuff unearthed (or, in our case, unboxed) by our recent and ongoing attempt to actually move into our apartment.
Please send me an interesting piece of your old stuff: [Name and address removed - ed.] (aka the zyx lady) Thanks!!!!!!
We will put together something special for you. Watch the mails!
Any other takers?

Blab. Someone far too familiar with Helenisms writes:
Today at lunch Bill actually said "crowning blow"...
You see? They are in common usage. Just listen.

Blab. Beth ran across references to the now-ancient IBM songbook, forwarding these alleged lyrics from a friend.
MARCH ON WITH IBM
Words by Fred W Tippe Music by Vitterio Glannini
The fame of I B M.
Spreads across the seven seas,
Our standards fly aloft,
Proudly waving in the Breeze,
With T.J. Watson guiding us, we lead throughout the world,
For peace and trade our banners are unfurled, unfurled.
CHORUS
1. March on with I B M. We lead the way!
Onward we'll ever go, in strong array;
Our thousands to the fore, nothing can stem,
Our march forever more, with I B M.
2. March on with I B M. Work hand in hand,
Stout hearted mem go forth, in every land;
Our flags on ev'ry shore, we march with them,
On high forever more, for I B M.

HAIL, TO THE I B M
Words by Fred W Tippe Music by Vitterio Glannini
Lift up our proud and loyal voices
Sing out in accents strong and true,
With hearts and hands to you devoted,
and inspiration ever new.
Your ties of friendship cannot sever,
Your glory time will never stem,
We will toast a name that lives forever,
Hail to the I B M.
Our voices swell in admiration:
of T.J. Watson proudly sing;
He'll ever be our inspiration,
To him our voices loudly ring;
The I B M will sing the praises,
Of him who brought us world acclaim,
As the volume of our chorus raises,
Hail to his honored name.

To Our I. B. M. Girls
Tune: "They're Style All the While"
The office girls surely are always in style,
They greet you with smiles, their welcome's worthwhile.
The best in the world are our girls, rank and file,
They're style all the while - all the while.
They've made our I. B. M. complete and worthwhile,
They work and they smile - so sweetly they smile;
Tall, short, thin, and stout girls - they win by a mile -
With heavenly styles all the while.
Well, that's right over the top, isn't it? Especially that last one. Ah, when men were men and women were, uh, girls?
In any event, eager Ian couldn't wait to log every site he could find that mentions IBM songs, including the one I found a few months ago when this came up: a moldy recording of a bunch of clean-shaven guys in blue suits singing Ever Onward I.B.M. Makes me a little teary.

Blab. A reader with substantially greater Goth tendencies than even me writes:
I'm 14% Goth, although I have to take issue with some of the questions. How is going to the opera (and enjoying it) a Goth thing? Should it make a difference whether one enjoys tragic operas only, or comic ones also?
Yeah, I couldn't figure that out either. I was also a bit confused about the question that asked if I had ever seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I mean, I have seen it, sort of. Well, we saw it on video, rented it from Blockbuster, in fact. And no, we didn't have squirt guns or rice with us while we watched it in the living room. I figured that was sufficiently far away from the intent of the question that I said I hadn't seen it.
This is all so very complex.

Yo. For those of you keeping track, I hereby admit to being a healthy 62% nerdy, a mere 34.9% geeky, and an embarrasingly high 47.6% sexually pure. I'll have to work on that latter score.

Yo. And for those of you who wonder what I do when I'm not Plurping, I've added a version of my Curriculum Vitae to our Stuff department. I know. That really belongs on my professional Web site. And when I get around to building Yet Another Web Site (sigh), I really will move it there.

Yo. Now here's a Web site privacy statement that I understand.
NOTE: Your privacy is very important to us. If you contact us we will not divulge your personal information to anyone for any reason. (Unless, of course, it turns out to be extremely lucrative to do so.)

Yak. On CNN last night.
These are two hot potatoes, moving along on parallel tracks.
A great image from "professional" journalists.

Yo. Speaking of which, are you looking for an unusual Christmas present? Please do consider a Bonsai Potato (Zen - Without the wait ™):
Are you the type of person who longs for patience and tranquility in your life? Of course you are, but in our modern society who has the time? Now it's possible. With the items contained in this kit you can quickly and efficiently reach an inner peace that can take monks an entire lifetime to achieve.

Plurp. There's a pine tree out on the terrace now, sitting in a bucket of water, waiting for us to do something festive with it. It is a bit odd as a tradition, though, this killing of a tree as a celebratory thing. Aren't midwinter festivals supposed to be about a renewal of life, not the end of it?
But that does give me a good excuse to tell you about last Christmas, and the whole thing about the tree that happened then.have
The apartment was still in an uproar - boxes everywhere, electrical conduits hanging down from the ceiling like a scene from Alien, and no place to put anything. It was not a good time.
There's no place to put a Christmas tree, said Helen. And we'll just have to tear it down right after Christmas anyway, since we're going on vacation then. And finally: We're not getting a tree this year.
I suggested that there must be a way to squeeze a tree in between the boxes somehow, and that it might make the apartment look a little nicer. Helen was intransigent. I don't want a tree this year. It's too much trouble. And indeed, her experience of The Tree each year is that she does most of the work of decorating it, and it is a lot of work. (She has more definite ideas than I do about what constitutes proper decorating, so I typically defer to her and play the role of Worthy Assistant.)
I volunteered to pick up a tree on my way home from work, find a place to put it up, decorate it myself, and take it all down before we left on vacation. But on the day I was going to pick it up, the last day that would actually have worked out, it rained. Not a light mist but a heavy, cold rain that soaked everything, including the trees, making it impossible to put one inside my silly little convertible (and I couldn't carry it on top). I came home in a miserable mood, frustrated that I had failed and depressed that, for the first time in my life, we weren't going to have a Christmas tree. It just isn't going to be Christmas without it, I grumbled to Helen.
The next night, as I walked into the apartment, the lights were dim, and there was a Christmas carol playing. As I walked in, curious, there was Helen, smiling, all dressed up, in front of a lovely, decorated Christmas tree with tiny colored lights in the corner where I thought, with some work, it might have fit.
You see, Helen had just realized the previous evening that it was important to me to have a Christmas tree, that it wasn't just an issue of how much trouble it was or who had to do what, but that it was an integral, in fact a fundamental, part of this time of year for me.
I eventually told her all of this, told her how wonderful I thought she was, how much I appreciated her and what she had done. But, as I stood there amid the boxes in living room, in the soft glow of the colored lights, all I could do was cry, and put my arms around her.

Yo. Thanks to our readers for their patience while we repaired our time machine tomorrow. It turned out to be a bad device driver for the temporal undulator. And all this time I thought it was a hardware problem. I hate these things. Sorry.

Plurp.
The blue dog has
seen the future.
It's all reruns.

Monday, December 4, 2000
Blab. A reader with nothing better to do on Sundays writes:
Helensims?????? What's that??
That's the new game from Maxis, of course. Why do you ask?

Blab. An alert but tense reader writes:
I'm really getting tired of that stupid dog.........
... pointing out that our stupid time machine is still on the blink and the blue dog seems to be stuck in temporal stasis. Again. Or still. We're not sure quite how that works. Must be a bad motivator. We foresee another day spent banging around the general area of the temporal undulator.

Yak.
Is it really broken?
Is what really broken?
The blue dog.
You're scaring me.

Yow. Announcing, at long last, the arrival of that long-lost missive from the zyx lady, that mysterious Plurp correspondent who spent the better part of her childhood on a swing set learning to sing the alphabet - backwards! And here it is, in all its digital wonder.
Between her cabling challenges and my conceptual impairment with Unix mail (sigh), it's a miracle it got here at all. But here it is; celebrate the miracle.
The zyx's
We have the best readers!

Yow. Another blogger that I haven't met has linked to Plurp. This time it's Camworld, listing Plurp in the (OK, really long) list of sites he claims to visit often.
Goosebumps, Tillingsworth. It positively gives me goosebumps!

Yow. Here's a fun place.
Mr. Beller's Neighborhood combines a magazine with a map. It uses the external, familiar landscape of New York City as a way of organizing the wildly internal, often unfamiliar emotional landscapes of the city dweller. It is about a specific place - New York - and it about the many different consciousness that thrive and wilt and rage and reminisce here. We publish reportage, personal essays, and the occasional piece of fiction, though by and large everything you read on the site is true.
And you can post your own stories, which he might publish on his site. Tempting!

Yo. If a satellite picture of our city isn't enough to satisfy your voyeuristic passions, how about a Web site that will guess at a person's salary given only their job category and ZIP code?
Fortunately, it's not very good. It takes national averages within a job category and multiplies them by a simple factor that adjust them for geographic differentials. And the job descriptions are, um, amusing.
Here, for example, is their description of the highest tier of academic research.
Researcher III - Academic
Carries out research/development activities. Makes detailed observations, analyzes data, and interprets results. Requires a master's degree and at least 5 years of direct experience in the field. Familiar with a variety of the field's concepts, practices, and procedures. Relies on limited experiences and judgment to plan and accomplish goals. Performs a variety of tasks. Typically reports to a project supervisor or project manager. A wide degree of creativity and latitude is expected.
I always rely on limited experiences and judgment to plan and accomplish my goals, so I thought I might be on the right track. But that bit about a master's degree? I guess I spent too long in school. Nuts.

Yow. Plurp, the card game.

Yo. Remember that silly Am I Hot or Not site I linked the other day? Now check out Am I Goth or Not. I love the Web.
Being more of an academic than an exhibitionist, I decided to take the Goth Purity Test instead. Surprisingly, it turns out that I'm a full 8% Goth, primarily because I've set off metal detectors in an airport (cell phone), have seen Night of the Living Dead (and every other bad SF/horror movie ever made) and think that theater and cinema are different things (duh).
I'm so proud.

Rant. That privacy-violating meme so popular with the U.S. government seems to be spreading. The latest victim is the UK government, which wants to force communications companies to log their traffic (both phone and Internet) and keep the records for seven years. Why? Well, naturally, to "help the fight against cybercrime, paedophile rings, terrorism and drug trafficking."
While I don't intend to indulge in cybercrime or terrorism, and I don't even own a paedophile ring, I must protest this really, really dim logic.
I once knew a person who advocated that the government know absolutely everything about you - everything you did, everything you thought, everything you intended to do. Why? So they could find criminals more easily, and so they could head off crime before it happened. And who could argue against that?
I could, that's who. My totalitarian friend thought her proposal was perfectly reasonable, and consistent with a democratic government. And it is, in a rather dim and limited sense, if you figure that the people who run the government are good and honest, and that the rules under which the government operates will never change.
And - oops - those aren't quite true, are they? So J. Edgar Hoover could use the power of the FBI to threaten and intimidate people who had broken no law. Richard Nixon could use the office of the President and various agencies of government to intimidate his enemies, steal medical records, and on and on.
Look outside the U.S. Look at most of the rest of the world throughout most of recorded history. Governments, and those in power, tend to get out of control. In a big way. And the only way we have ever found to stop this is to prevent the concentration of power in the first place. That's why the U.S. Constitution has so many explicit limits on what the government can do, so many checks and balances to prevent the government from being able to act on its own.
Here's the thing to remember: The machinery of power, once in place, will be used. It's only a matter of circumstances and time.
If these proposals for snooping on citizens were only capable of snooping on violent criminals, that might be one thing. But that's not the case. This snooping technology snoops on absolutely everybody all the time. The only barrier that prevents our friends in government from snooping on you is a few keystrokes, and the idea that what you're doing is not currently unpopular with those in power.
But, if there were a small shift in what the government considered proper, or a legislative provision giving agencies the ability to snoop without review by a court (oops - that already exists), or a person in power who wants to bend the rules a little, well, the machinery would already be there, all polished and humming, and all they have to do is point it at you.
I often hear people calling for the government to be made more efficient, to have broader powers to carry out its policies, whatever those may be. Me, I prefer a rusty, clunky, rickety government that needs constant attention to be able to do anything at all. Otherwise, it's all too easy for normal people to get ground up in the machinery.

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't really know what
time it was.

Sunday, December 3, 2000
Blab. A reader who, coincidentally, seems to be named Helen writes:
I said "water over the bridge" -- Helen
This is now the second report of a Helenism in active use by someone other than our own Helen. We consider it fascinating both that Helenisms are in general use, and that people named Helen seem particularly prone to them. We wonder if people named Tom were more prone to Tom Swifties, or people named Spooner to Spoonerisms.

Yak.
Helen: If there's more than one Helen coining Helenisms, shouldn't they be called Helensims?

Blab. A long-time fan of Plurp offers this observation:
Blue Dog is an old LP and he's skipping!
This was indeed the case, no doubt a residual effect of the time machine malfunction of last week. The good news is that the new temporal undulator arrived from HG Enterprises today and, after a certain amount of banging and cursing, everything seems to be working fine.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Yow. Here's a good diet idea. Replace one of your eyes with a robot eye that cannot actually see food that is bad for you.

Plurp. Ian's readers, including one whose point of view seems very similar to that expressed here, hold forth on the subject of Brussel sprouts as evil vegetables.
More disturbing is the appearance of My Greatest Fan as a groupie on another blog. We fear that My Greatest Fan, long a fan of Brussel sprouts, has been taken over by the Pod People.

Yow. We note with a certain megalomaniacal pleasure a rare appearance of a weekend entry in Dave's log. It may be that he was goaded into this by our finger wagging the other day. Or perhaps he simply heard the scree-scree-scree of the eagles, circling above?

Plurp. I seem to have fallen under Helen's spell all day long today. Every time I thought I was waking up, Helen would run her fingers lightly over my neck or back, and off I would drop again. It was wonderful in its delirious indulgence.

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't really know what
time it was.

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