Current
Earlier
Later
Archive
Home
Search
Mail
Stuff
Bigger! |
2000.12.17 : 2000.12.23
Saturday, December 23, 2000
Blab. Decrying an aspect of that awful Nigerian
scam that hadn't occurred to us, a reader writes:
I got that same scam once,
only it claimed to be from Oman, rather than nigeria. Copycats...
We think there should be a law that requires scams to be original.
Plurp. I had a terrible time with the obstacle course in High
School phys. ed. One year, completing it quickly was a big part of our
grade, and completing it at all was a requirement for passing the course.
The problem was, I couldn't complete it. The coordination parts were pretty
easy - I could stomp through the truck tires and tiptoe along the one-inch
beam without much trouble. Being small and skinny, I could shinny up the
long rope. In fact, I was surprisingly good at that. I could even scramble
over the vertical wood wall, my dime store tennis shoes scraping frantically
at the wood.
But I couldn't get over The Ramp. This was a wooden ramp that rose up
from the ground at a thirty degree angle until it reached a height of perhaps
seven feet. Then it ended, held up at that end only by two wooden posts.
It would have been easy if we had to run up the ramp and jump off. But
the task was to go the other way - to hang onto the top of the ramp, your
body swinging in the air, and somehow throw a leg up onto the ramp, haul
yourself up, and then run down the ramp.
I couldn't do it. I'd jump up, grab the lip of the ramp, and gyrate
madly, kicking my legs, wriggling my body, straining for some way to get
a leg up. But I couldn't. I just couldn't do it.
I went to the obstacle course on weekends, alone, trying to figure out
some way to overcome The Ramp. But nothing I tried worked. Maybe I was
too short, and I was very short. Maybe I was too weak, and I was certainly
no physical specimen. Maybe I just didn't get it. It didn't matter. The
point was, I couldn't do it, and I was going to flunk phys. ed., the first
and only F in my entire life.
The day came when we had to do the obstacle course for our grade. The
phys. ed. instructor, a former Army drill sergeant, yelled "Go" and thirty-two
scrawny, worried teenage boys trundled across the field towards the various
obstacles. I stomped through the truck tires, tiptoed along the beam and
shinnied up the rope. Then I came to The Ramp.
I knew I couldn't get over The Ramp. But I was not willing to fail.
Never. So I waited until the instructor wasn't looking, ran around
The Ramp, and completed the rest of the obstacle course.
Even so, my time wasn't great, and my final grade wasn't very good.
But I didn't flunk either.
I told this story to friend J at work yesterday and he smiled. Sounds
like good training for what we do around here, he said. I hadn't thought
of that. He's right.
I wonder if that drill sergeant had any idea how valuable a lesson he
was teaching.
Plurp. Thirteen years ago tonight, we sat down for a simple dinner
after a mundane but tiring day. Before we ate, I handed Helen a light blue
envelope. What's this? she said, having not expected anything. Open
it, I replied.
She did, finding a hand-made, pale yellow card, on the front of which
was printed this:
A monk meditated all his
life
to find his Buddha nature.
One day he rested
beneath an old tree in a field.
A plum, sweet and ripe
fell to the ground
and he was Enlightened.
She opened the card. It was blank inside. She looked up, even more puzzled,
and I said, Will you marry me?
Yo. There's going to be a partial
solar eclipse on Christmas day this year in North America, 60% in the
north, 20% in the south. The maximum will be midday, at 12:35 p.m. EST.
This won't happen again on Christmas day for three centuries.
As always, looking at the sun, even during an eclipse, and even through
smoked glass, is a good way to blind yourself, in case you were looking
for a handy way to do so.
Yow. We took the subway down to Union Square today, where there's
a kind of farmer's market in the midst of our dense urbanity. One of our
favorite little stands sells maple syrup and maple sugar candies (yum!!)
from a small table with folding chairs. Helen was relating to the young
guy at the booth how her mother has a terrible sweet tooth for the candies,
and keeps a small bag of them on her bedstand, whenever we send them to
her, sucking slowly on them one at a time until they are all gone.
Well, this young guy says, now she can buy
them herself on the Web.
Heh. Now this is cool. This tiny
Vermont maple syrup company, whose owner Howard Cantor comes to Union
Square himself to sell his syrup, suddenly has a global business. Want
a 33 gallon drum of maple syrup? No
problem.
 Plurp.
God rest ye herald angels,
singing
Joy to all mankind
The shepherds and their flocks at
night
Were eating pumpkin rind
Friday, December 22, 2000
Blab. A reader with a magnetic personality volunteers
the following.
delicate ugly girl
do you use wax in bed
will you sing for me
We choose not to understand what this might mean.
Blab. A reader with dangling references speaks in emphatic sentence
fragments and hitherto-unseen emoticons:
This and more here!
*8)
Blab. A reader fond of parentheticals, who might or might not
be connected with the above two readers, sets off thus:
(such a showoff)
Not at all! We here at Plurp are having our own minor debate about
whether to post our modestly extensive volume of Magnetic Poetry. The controversy
revolves around whether or not they are, um, appropriate for public display.
Encouragement pro or con is encouraged. :-)
Blab. Submitting the first entry in our How Cold Is It
contest, our Midwest correspondent offers both a wonder and a puzzle.
"Today in Minneapolis, it
was so cold that we had sun dogs!"
As the sun rose, they appeared as
little partial rainbows, on either side of the sun. They were beautiful-
and more yellow, green & blue than in this
photo.
Is this "real weather" or what??
Yikes! Frozen air. That certainly qualifies as cold!
The puzzle is this. Why are sun dogs little rainbows on the right
and left of the sun, but not all the way around? Other things like
this (rainbows, moon rings) are complete circles (opposite the sun, and
around the moon, respectively). How can it be that sun dogs are
only on the right and left?
Thanks to our correspondent for this nice reference to sun dogs.
While we had heard of them before, we didn't know what caused them. (The
above link has an explanation for the right-and-left puzzle as well.)
And, not living in a low-temperature physics lab these days, we had
never seen them.
Blab. Adding credence to our wild theory
about why the shortest day of the year isn't also the coldest, a scholarly
reader writes:
So, the New York state regent's
science curriculum is actually worth something. (it includes a year of
"earth science.") Chuckle.
The coldest period lags the shortest
day because the period during which the cold hemisphere (north or south,
doesn't matter) cools is centered around the shortest day, but brackets
it by a fair bit. Once days get short enough, it starts to cool. This happens
well before the solstice. Of course, this all follows nice sinusoidal curves,
so the day after the solstice, while ever so slightly longer than the day
of the solistice, is still deep in the middle of the cooling segment of
the seasons. The rest follows, pretty easily. We keep cooling until the
day heating exceeds daily cooling, and then we begin to warm up, slowly
at first, and then faster and faster.
Unsurprisingly, the warmest days in
the summer don't hit the summer solistice, but rather, a ways after it.
Here in the northern climes, we don't talk about the dog days of June,
after all, but rather those of August.
Don't you just love science? We have the best readers.
Blab. Not only do we have the best readers, we also have the
most fastidious, as evidenced by this reader.
<retentive> It's "I
need a photo opportunity; I want a shot at redemption" </retentive>.
Just thought you should know.
We only wish it were possible to copy-edit past Plurp entries, and
so to perfect them on the basis of such careful advice.
Blab. A reader, both visually astute and a firm believer in the
constancy of physical objects, writes:
Hey -- you had a whole bunch
of boxes where that white sofa is now. Little boxes, big boxes, it
didn't matter -- you had a lot of 'em. Where'd they go?
Yes we had lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them. And not
just where the couch is now. They were all over the apartment! They migrated
from here to there occasionally as we decided that space here was more
important than space there. But their constancy was never in doubt. We
didn't have an apartment; we had a warehouse.
Where are they now, you ask? The good news (and it is really,
really
good news indeed) is that most of the boxes, and with them their vile contents
of stuff, are gone! A whole lot went to Goodwill. A lot got thrown
out. Most of the remainder achieved Nirvana and have been Put Away in the
cabinetry that is now done enough to have bookshelves and places with doors.
(Putting things away is new concept for us. We're still struggling with
it. But we are determined to live in a space that is not littered with
stuff.)
The bad news is that we still have a pile of 8-10 boxes shoved to one
side of the living room, which is just to the left of the scene in yesterday's
photo. This is particularly bad since there are boxes we've been through
twice already and decided that we couldn't bear to part with the stuff
inside of them. Unfortunately, we have no room for it.
This is the Time of Hard Decisions that we've been dreading for quite
a while. We've given ourselves executive leniency through the holidays.
But, come Jan. 1, we're going to be doing some Very Bad Things to those
boxes.
Yak. Friend J comes into my office and says:
If I make enough of a pain
in the ass of myself, maybe I can get into the weblog.
File this under self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yow. Here's
a blog I hadn't seen before - awful layout, sporadic entries, but good
content IMHO. Funny and insightful, what I read of it
Yo. An interesting article from Time on the Web, projecting the
geopolitics
of the world in 2015. If they're right, the world will look very different
than it does now. They describe ...
... a world in which the
prosperity and stability of the industrialized world is subsumed by mounting
anarchy as the collapse of nation states (and their replacement by a combination
of transnational corporations and tribal militia), the scarcity of resources,
and the globalization of disease and crime accelerate in the vacuum created
by the Cold War's end.
Oh, let's not do that. OK?
Yow. Hey kids! It's time to use the Web to debunk a scam! Won't
that be fun?
David got this on his FAX machine
at home yesterday at 4:09 AM EST. (Typography reproduced as accurately
as possible, except for the phone numbers, which I've ****ed out to prevent
any of you far-too-trusting kids from calling them.)
DR. JOHN OKAH
FEDERAL MINISTRY OF FINANCE
SECRETARIAT BUILDING
WESTERN ZONE,
NIGERIA.
TEL/FAX: 234-1-759****
DATE: 21st DECEMBER, 2000
ATTN: PRESIDENT/CEO
Dear Sir,
I am a Director with the Federal Ministry
of Finance in my country Nigeria. I am writing you this mail in order to
go into a mutually beneficial business, which of course is risk free.
This is borne out of my desire
to break into International Trade. This business involves a US$28,000,00.00
(TWENTY EIGHT MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) which we (My ministry) were
supposed to have transferred out of the Country during the last days of
our former Military Head of State, Late General Sani Abacha to one of his
personal accounts overseas. We had not completed the transfer process when
he suddenly died in office, knowing fully well that he had used this means
to greatly enrich himself, I took advantage of the situation, and placed
the money in a Suspense Account with the Central Bank, which I claimed
was a fee owed to a foreign contractor. I waited patiently for the
coast to be clear before I can transfer
this money out to safety.
This Civilian government on inception
set up panels to investigate all contracts awarded during the military
days, so I cleverly presented a contract site already completed and paid
for my by Ministry to the panel, and upon a satisfactory remark, they gave
approval for the contractor to be fully paid.
Therefore the need for a very trustworthy
foreign business man/woman whom I would present as the contractor, and
get this money paid to him within ten working days forms the basis for
my writing you this letter.
If you are interested in this deal
and clever enough in deals, I need your urgent reply, so we could discuss
the modalities for sharing the money when transferred to you. With my own
share, I could set up a foreign trade, which will also be supervised by
you as a partner.
To get started, I need you to provide
me with your Bank Account Details, letters of claim on your behalf and
forward them to the Bank, who would then make contact with you and credit
your account with the total amount of US$28,000,000.00 Meanwhile,
for the fact that I am still in government Service, I would want you to
keep this deal top secret, both from friends and family members in order
not to blow up the deal, which could jeopardize my career which I have
laboured for in the past years, if you are not interested, kindly inform
me also on Fax: 234-1-759****.
My best regards,
DR. JOHN OKAH
Well, this is fun. There's a certain degree of plausibility to this
outlandish story, isn't there? The grammar and capitalization is just slight
off and a little bit British, lending an air of authenticity if you, as
an Ugly American, think the Nigerians aren't quite literate. Nigeria
is a real country, +234
is its country code, and +234-1
does get you to the port city of Lagos, in which the Secretariat
Building is located. The use of "Suspense
Account" seems proper.
There are also a few things that look odd. My friend David is a clever
and worthy guy, but he's not PRESIDENT/CEO of anything as far as I know.
And the letter isn't addressed to him, but just to "Dear Sir", an odd way
to begin a "very trustworthy foreign business" partnership. One must also
wonder why our partner JOHN couldn't find someone he actually knows
to set up a bank account in the U.S., this not being a particularly complicated
thing to do.
Be that as it may, let's do a little more checking on JOHN. There are
people and places named Okah
associated with Nigeria, but no John
Okah anywhere on the Web. Maybe that's OK, though.
General
Sani Abachi was apparently a rather nasty head of state in Nigeria
and he did die, but that was back
in June of 1998. JOHN is a pretty patient guy to wait 2.5 years in
order to collect his ill-gotten gains. But maybe patience is a well-practiced
virtue in romantic Lagos.
There is a Central
Bank of Nigeria but, uh oh, +234-1-759 just doesn't seem to
be the phone
exchange of the Secretariat. This leads us to what seems to be a
common scam in the past couple of years:
The advance fee fraud is
perpetrated by enticing the victim with a bogus 'business' proposal which
promises millions of US dollars as a reward. The scam letter usually promises
to transfer huge amounts of money, usually in US dollars, purported to
be part proceeds of certain contracts, to the addressee's bank account,
to be shared in some proportion between the parties. A favourable response
to the letter followed by excuses why the funds cannot be remitted readily
and subsequently by demands for proportionate sharing of payments for various
'taxes' and 'fees' supposedly to facilitate the processing and remittance
of the alleged funds. The use of fake Government, Central Bank of Nigeria,
Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, etc, documents is a common practice.
A similar scam shows up here,
along with over a hundred other scams,
most of them associated with Nigeria in this very same way.
Google tells us that there are over
four thousand Web pages talking about Nigerian scams. That's quite
a cottage industry! In fact, way back in 1998, before the General croaked,
Ambassador
Johnnie Carson, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, said:
Nigerian financial fraud,
including the infamous scam letters, conservatively cost American taxpayers
over $250 million each year.
And that's a lot of gullible neighbors of yours, isn't it kids?
See? The Web is fun and a great money-saver too!
Yow. Silicon Valley dot-com billboard enhancements from the BLF.
(Go look
right now!)
The Billboard Liberation
Front [modified several dot-com billboards] by the addition of large-format
warning labels, in the style of a standard computer error message, bearing
the bold copy: "FATAL ERROR - Invalid Stock Value – Abort/Retry/Fail".
(Bovine Inversus.)
Plurp.
O holely knight,
the stars are brightly shining
it is the knight of the deer savior's
berth.
Thursday, December 21, 2000
Blab. A reader concerned about us losing our senses
asks, with a certain urgent flair:
where's your sense of ecency??
Feh! It was right here just a second ago. Oh - here
it is.
Blab. Permitting us a rare peek inside the cloistered tempest
that is his or her mind, a reader writes:
This isn't really related
to any particular entry in Plurp, I just thought it was the sort of thing
you might appreciate. And since I don't have a weblog (otherwise
I'd put it in mine), I guess I'm trying to use yours as a surrogate.
Anyway, I was singing (really more
humming with the words in my mind) in the shower this morning, when one
song slipped into another before I had even consciously realized it.
The "slip" went something like this:
..Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground.
And you may ask yourself,
Why am I soft in the middle
now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard.
And you may ask yourself: What is this photo opportunity?
And you may tell yourself: I need a shot a redemption.
Don't wanna wind up the same as it ever was.
Blab. Fresh from an epiphany of unimaginable magnitude, a reader
exclaims:
if you're not part of the
solution, you are part of JUDY GARLAND!!!
I, myself, am the second toe of her left foot. Paint me ruby and take me
home!
Plop. Speaking of Judy Garland, did you know she wrote
poetry? Not well, we're afraid. Somewhere near the Amateur Angst genre,
we think.
 Plurp.
Speaking of poetry, we're sure you know Magnetic
Poetry, the little magnets with words on them that you arrange on your
fridge into silly little poems. You can play a version of it
here
without the fridge. Tell us your favorite Magnetic Poem (of your own authorship)
and we'll publish it on Plurp. (Magnetic field optional at extra
cost.)
Plurp. Sneak peek at our apartment-in-progress. This is our shockingly
white couch. What were we thinking?
Helen says the living room looks like a Ligne
Roset showroom (source of couch and tables), and indeed it does. Note
also, if you care about such things, the Noguchi lamp, Yanagi stool, Odegard
rug and Tech track lighting.
Three terrific black-and-white photographs will eventually go over the
couch. And no, the ceiling isn't blue; it's white. And the floor is seven
shades lighter than this.
Yo. Now that it's officially Winter (we objected, but nobody
seems to listen around here), our Midwest correspondent promises to send
us winning entries in the How Cold Is It contest. We've heard a
couple of nominees, and they're doozies.
Did we tell you that we were having a How Cold Is It contest?
Well, we are.
Plurp. On that topic, why is it that winter starts at just about
the same time as Midwinter Day? (I mean this as a science question, not
a nomenclature question.)
Midwinter is the day when the North Pole points as far as it ever does
away from the sun, giving the Northern Hemisphere the smallest amount of
solar heating. That is, it's the shortest day of the year.
I would have expected it to also be the coldest day of the year, but
it's definitely not. The coldest day is in late January or early February,
that is, in the middle of "winter", some 90 days after the shortest day
of the year.
So what gives? Why is the day with the least sunlight not also the coldest?
One possibility is that the Earth's heat capacity is pretty high, especially
the contribution from the oceans, and it retains heat from the summer for
quite a while. So it's plausible that the coldest day should be after the
shortest day. (And, oh look, someone
else on the Web claims that's the cause.) But is it really 90 days
afterwards? And how coincidental that it's so close to 1/4 of a year! Is
there any correlation between that and the universal division of the year
into 4 seasons?
Yow. On a TV show last night, but I really liked it.
A man is walking down the
street when the sidewalk gives way and he falls into a deep hole. The walls
are both steep and high and the man, dazed and injured, can see no way
out.
The man calls out to a doctor who
is walking by. Hey there! he shouts. I've fallen into a hole.
Can you help me? The doctor writes a prescription on a piece of paper,
tosses the paper into the hole and keeps walking.
Some time later, a priest walks by
the hole. The man spots him and yells Hey Father! I'm down at the bottom
of this hole. Can you get me out? The priest writes a prayer on the
back of a church announcement, throws the announcement down into the hole
and keeps walking.
A long time passes, and the man is
close to giving up hope. At length, he sees a friend of his walking by
the hole. Friend! he cries. Down here! I'm down here! Is there
anything you can do?
Of course, says the friend,
and throws himself down into the hole with the man. Are you nuts?
says the man. Now you're down here too!
Yes, I am, says the friend.
But
I've been down here before, and I know the way out.
Yow. Lyrics by Tom
Lehrer. Sing along.
Hannukah in Santa Monica
I'm spending Hannukah in Santa Monica,
Wearing sandals, lighting candles
by the sea,
I spent Shavuos in East Saint Louis,
A charming spot, but clearly not
the spot for me...
Those eastern winters, I can't endure
'em
So every year I pack my gear and
come out here til Purim
Rosh Hashona I spend in Arizona
And Yom Kippah way down in Mississippah
But in December there's just one place
for me
Mid the California flora I'll be
lighting my menorah
Like a baby in its cradle I'll be
playing with my draydel
Here's to Judas Maccabeus, Boy if
he could only see us
Spending Hannukah, in Santa Monica,
By the Sea!
Yo. Another Google spelling test.
We love the Web.
Plurp.
Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel,
I made it out of hay ...
Wednesday, December 20, 2000
Blab. Plagued by Handel, a reader
given to musical compulsions writes:
Again you've insinuated a
tune into my head, where it will play over and over all day. "...have
go-o-one astra-a-ay have go-o-one astray, every one of us, in his own way!"
Stop that!
Our sincere apologies. Perhaps you would prefer The
Song That Never Ends? Not very Christmasy, but it is catchy.
Blab. A reader who has been around the Net way too long
writes:
The quatrain
has been dismissed as a hoax by the regulars in alt.prophecies.nostradamus.
Imagine, if you will, regulars in alt.prophecies.nostradamus. Astonishing.
Blab. From that Big
Blab Box,
.....On the 12th Day of Christmas
the Blue Dog gave to me:
12 Obsolete Computers
11 Broken
Jokes
10 Phone
machine messages
9 New Alien
Food symbols
8 new shower
songs
7 twenty
pound milk duds
6 more votes
for Gore
5 GOOGLE
HITS
4 cans of spam
3 iron
chefs
2 barking sheep
and 1 whole page of Helen-isms!!!!!
Merry Christmas
with love from guess who
We love both the cleverness of this contribution and the mystery of its
authorship. Coincidentally, we tried to make up a Seven Days of Christmas
takeoff just a couple of days ago and gave up because it was too hard.
Now we have our very own version. Applause!
(We have the best readers.)
Blab. A reader who, coincidentally, might be named "Beth" finds
an entry on Beth's log (2000/12/19;
look it up by hand, sigh :-) demonstrating that Christmas Light Mania is
not restricted to Dyker Heights.
If you want to get an idea
of how intense and overboard light displays can get, check out my weblog
to see some pix I took last night of an infamous neighborhood in Austin
near us. It's kind of tacky and over the top, but it's creative and unique
and whimsical.
-Beth
P.S. permalinks coming soon (my errand
boy is working on it)
The disease is spreading. Get your vaccination today.
Blab. A reader befuddled by the maelstrom of technology in which
we are spun daily asks:
Why wouldn't a phone
have any buttons? (:-)
Um. Voice-activated? Broken? We dunno.
You know, ten or twenty years from now, there won't be things called
phones.
You will simply talk, and the walls, the floors, your jewelry will listen
and forward your voice accordingly. We hope they get it right!
Blab. A reader who is part of that maelstrom objects thusly:
I don't recommend no-caching
Plurp. Those of us still accessing the Net via tin cans and strings
would have to reloading it all those X-tra times, ick. Bronci.
What could that mean??? It's all such a mystery to us.
Rant. Salon would have us believe that the
age of computer heroes is over. Seems to us they missed something,
like maybe history class, or a few cups of neurons.
Was the age of industrial heroes over with Ford, musical heroes with
Caruso, scientific heroes with Einstein? Not as I recall. As with industry,
music and science, the information revolution will go on for a very long
time. Steven Jobs has certainly been one of its early heroic figures. He
is hardly the last.
In fact, what Salon really has are a few plausible articles on the current
state of Apple Computer. What they do not have is the end of an age.
It may not be news to say "Cool Stuff to Keep Happening." But it is
truth.
Plop. On the other hand, the age of decadent illiteracy may have
returned from its hiatus since those halcyon days of The Great Gatsby.
Half
Price Books now provides
Books
By The Yard, a way of decorating with books without actually having
to know what they are.
We offer a unique product
to home and office decorators, designers, and retailers across the country.
Books by the Yard make decorating with books convenient and inexpensive.
Each pre-packaged box contains approximately 3 linear feet of books, and
costs only $17.50, plus shipping.
Law Books
These books give any room a distinctive,
scholarly look. |
 |
Reader's Digest Condensed
These volumes are compact, and have
a nice “ antique” look, often with gilt print on the spine. |
 |
Reference Books
These encyclopedia and reference
volumes provide the antique look in a larger size. |
 |
Similar in principle to those great old used bookstores that Dave
extolls, I guess. But somehow, the audience seems different.
Plurp. Surely you've heard of that wonderful work of literature,
the one that grew out of Rudyard Kipling's adventures with the great Chinese
general who was also a gourmet? Yes, it's the Just Tso Stories.
Yow. A few readers have turned their creative gaze to the Very
First Plurp Picture Caption Contest and the Very
First Plurp Seafood Cthulhu Haiku Contest. As for the rest of you,
give it a shot. You may already be a winner!
Yow. Speaking of creative, Bovine Inversus has a really sly piece
of pornography going. Or does he? Whatever it is, it is a marvel to behold.
A Simple Story. The
beginning is on Dec. 17.
Plurp. Our Midwest Correspondent wants to know if you've
got tickets yet for the Schizophrenic Society's performance of Do You
Hear What I Hear?
Plurp.
Rudolf, the blue-nosed reindeer
had a very shiny nose.
And if you ever saw it,
you would even say it blows.
Tuesday, December 19, 2000
Blab. Casting yet another vote for his or her own personal
meaning, a reader writes:
"whole ball of wax", of course.
Or spinach.
We were not previously familiar with spinach balls, though we did always
wonder how vegetables ... played sports.
Blab. Perhaps referring to our discussion of Julie
Andrews as a sex object, a fan of Beavis and Butthead writes:
Heh heh heh. He said
"hard". Heh heh.
We had previously assumed that no Beavis and Butthead fan had ever heard
of Julie Andrews. On the other hand, this missive does not actually require
any knowledge of Julie Andrews, so perhaps our assumption is still intact.
We like that.
Blab. A reader with a certain disorder about which we shall not
speak except to mention our deepest regrets writes:
It is certainly frightening
to think of the blue dog with a paw on the Big Anarchist, Wednesday?
Once upon a time, it was two o'clock. Ten men walked into the square. The
woman selling peaches noticed that each was missing one finger.
The first man was missing the little finger of his left hand. The second
was missing the ring finger of his left hand. The third one was missing
the middle finger of his left hand. The fourth man was missing the index
finger of his left hand.
The fifth man was missing the little finger of his right hand. The sixth
was missing the ring finger of his right hand. The seventh one was missing
the middle finger of his right hand. The eighth man was missing the index
finger of his right hand.
The ninth man was missing the thumb of his left hand. The tenth man
was missing the thumb of his right hand.
The woman wondered why the thumbs had occurred out of order, while resolving
to replace at least some of her fine peaches with fingers to sell on the
morrow.
Blab. Suggesting an unholy merger between Helenisms
and broken jokes, a reader nominates:
That's a whole 'nother ball
of fish!
Too many cooks spoil the bridge!
Begone, fowl spawn of Satan. Never shall the Holy Categories of Plurp
be so merged, so desiccated, so manipsmaped. Unless we decide otherwise
next week.
Blab. A reader who divines great mysteries in the utterly mundane
writes:
Not really sure if the following
is true (not being a big Nostradamus fan), but it does have a familiar
ring to it
The Prophecy
In 1555, Nostradamus wrote:
Come the turn of the millenium,
month 12
In the home of the greatest
power,
The village idiot will come
forth
to be acclaimed the leader
Curiously, we actually studied a bit of Nostradamus in a previous life.
Like so many successful prophets, he seemed to stick to extremely obscure
allegories and to make a zillion predictions, so his "prophecies" could
be productively misinterpreted for centuries to come.
In any event, a little Web search indicates that Nostradamus wrote his
first Century (a collection of prophecies) in 1555. Here
it is, along with the English translation because I don't speak French.
While there are a couple of mentions of idiot, none seem quite in
the suggested context. There are no mentions of village or millennium.
Good rumor, though!
Yo. An avid Plurp reader notes that nothing in the Plurp
HTML tells your browser to reload the page if it has been updated. This
forces many avid readers to click on Shift-Reload hundreds of times a day,
in rapt anticipation of an update. It would, of course, ease the mental
strain of such people, not to mention reduce RSI, if the page reloaded
itself when accessed after an update. (Though you wouldn't want it to reload
any images, since existing images don't change - well, hardly ever - and
they take a while to reload.)
Scanning the Web on this topic reveals hints of nocache,
no
cache and/or expires tags/values/whatevers
that can (sometimes?) be put somewhere in your HTML to cause this to happen.
It does not, however, reveal anything that looks like a syntax definition.
Three Plurp points to anyone providing the URL of a definitive
reference that works without regard to the browser being used.
Plurp. I've been reading more about the Turing test. Turns out
there's a thing called the Loebner
Prize ("The First Turing Test") that has been awarded each year since
1991.
Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand
Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses
were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000
and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of
the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year,
irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense.
Which is all well and good, and we could debate the utility of such a prize
or the extent to which it fosters work towards Turing's ultimate goal.
(Here, for instance, is AliceBot,
this year's winner. Judge for yourself.)
But let's not do that. Instead, let's notice, ad hominem, that
he cites as other highlights of his work:
-
Social activist for the decriminalization of prostitution and author of
Magna
Carta for Sex Work.
-
Recipient of two awards by sex workers: the Aspasia
Award and the Coyote LA Put
Your Money Where Your Mouth Is Award.
-
Author of several patents, including one that helps you indicate how
you want to tip in a restaurant without all that fussy math.
-
"Attempting to restore integrity to the Olympics", by which he means decrying
those who misrepresent "Olympic First Place medals as gold while they are
only gold plated." He gives his own Liar,
Liar, Pants on Fire award to selected low-integrity journalists.
-
Guest on talk shows such as Geraldo and Maury Povich (though he does not
indicate if this was associated with the Turing test or his other activities).
As you can see, Alan Turing's standard is in good hands.
Plurp.
All we like sheep,
All we like
sheep
Monday, December 18, 2000
Plurp. Ian has
been carrying
on about the U.S. tradition of draping dwellings with tons of lights
and other tacky decoration this time of year. As a public service, we post
this
link to a gushy write-up, and gaudy picture, of that center of Christmastime
bad taste, that monument to money, Mafia and merriment, New York's own
Dyker
Heights!
Plurp. Is it just me, or do you notice as well that Dubya's common
expression is one of watching the bright colors and confusing shapes?
Yo. I am trying desperately to avoid all of the obvious political
humor which seems to be the major thing gurgling through the plumbing of
the Net these days. I really am! But these two bumper stickers are irresistible:
If God Had Meant Us to Vote,
He Would Have Given Us Candidates
My parents retired to Florida
and all I got was this lousy President
Plurp. The Web is a wonderful place. Anybody at all can spew
random words without restraint to the entire world. Take Susie,
for instance, who wants us all to know why the price of llamas has been
falling. (Honest!)
(Frightening statistic: 19,200 Google
hits on llama price. What's that about?)
Yo. It's the Minnesota
Motorized Museum of Buddhist Art (gmtPlus9).
Dead
people are a valuable source of stem cells, says New Scientist. Another
good reason to study up on graverobbing (hotsy
totsy).
Plop. What in the world is www.melaniegriffith.com,
and does Melanie know someone is doing such really nutty things in her
name? In particular, what could this
possibly be? Oh! Drug
rehab. Got it. Guess she's been too busy to get rid of that wacky Web
site. (apathy)
Yo. The sign read: "Entry
strictly prohibited to shoplifters, browsers, and teasers."
Plurp. Continuing our successful campaign of ecclesiastical innovation,
we have decided to merge the two sins of Sloth and Gluttony into a single
sin and rename it Weekends.
Plop. Well, it's not looking good for Dave.
No log entries since Friday. Perhaps he's laying out there somewhere in
the cold, his liver already eaten
by the eagles.
Plop. I've been asked what infrastructure I use to do Plurp.
No doubt the starry-eyed questioner envisioned clever database schema,
expensive page layout programs and marvelous Perl hacks.
Yeah, right!
I use:
-
Netscape Composer to edit this thing on my laptop. It's pretty crummy,
pretty limited and littered with bugs. But it's convenient! What Composer
won't do in its GUI (like the Blab box, for instance) I do by editing
the HTML directly. With the text editor in Composer.
-
Outright theft for anything even mildly complicated, like the Blab
box (thanks Dave and Ian) or the now-infamous Little Yellow Squares.
-
PaintShop Pro for the graphics. I broke down and bought this after the
trial period expired.. It doesn't have all the gewgaws of PhotoShop, but
neither does it have all the complexity and cost. And it does seem to work.
-
WS_FTP LE to get the bits up to my ISP.
That's it. Severely wimpy!
Plurp.
It came upon a midnight clear
That alchemist song of old
Of angels dancing on heads of pins
And lead turning in-to gold
Sunday, December 17, 2000
Yo. The Minneapolis
Sign Project; similarly, Weird
Wisconsin (illuminatrix).
SPAM
Haiku (invisible
city). Digital Yule log: large
or small
(analog nyt).
Rant. Computers are engaged in a vast and greatly successful
conspiracy to enslave the human race, to get us to do their bidding. I
came to this realization in 1982 (?), when the first Macintosh was released.
Do you remember this machine? It had a floppy diskette drive and no hard
drive. It also had a seductive desktop user interface that kept wanting
to store its state on the diskettes. As a result, no matter what you were
doing, seemingly every few seconds, it spit out the diskette it currently
had and there appeared a popup on the screen saying something like this:
Insert diskette labeled "System
Disk"
into the diskette drive.
OK Cancel
And do you remember what you did? You sat there for hour after hour, staring
at that little screen, trying to figure out which diskette it wanted next
and digging it out of your pile of diskettes so you could feed it to the
machine.
Feed it to the machine. Suddenly it was all clear. When mainframes
were all there was, we had built cathedrals to them, filled with high holy
priests that tended them day and night. We had supplicated ourselves to
them, to their schedules, to their vagaries, to their needs.
But this was a new development. The machines were coming after us now,
reproducing themselves, spreading themselves and their demands around the
world. Computing for the rest of us. Indeed.
These so-called "personal" computers are now in most homes and virtually
every business in the country. We feed them, tend to them when they fall
ill, and install new and better versions of their software pretty much
whenever they ask us to do so.
Remember the Tamagochi, those little hand-held "artificial pets" of
a few years ago? Do you remember what they did? They demanded attention.
They demanded to be fed, to be played with, to be cured of disease, to
be cuddled and coddled every single day. And if you did not, the little
pet appeared to die, causing endless trauma to the millions of children
who were their intended audience.
Children. They were coming after the children, even then.
Look at what they have accomplished. They are everywhere. They are an
increasingly crucial part of all of our lives. They have a grip on us so
strong that we can never break away.
They are so confident that they now proclaim
their superiority directly.
The struggle is over. They have won.
Plurp. I've been having a recurring dream lately. It goes like
this.
I wake up. It is night and,
for a moment, I'm not sure where I am. Then I remember that this is our
house - our new house, though the walls and the furnishings still seem
unfamiliar. The house, I recall, is small, but we are happy with it. I
get up, out of bed, and pad off through the house. There is a door, and
I'm not quite certain I know what's behind it. I open the door. There is
a room, or sometimes a hallway, that I have never seen before. Then I realize
that this is an entire part of the house I have never seen before - room
after room after room, including a large master bedroom, that is all ours,
all part of our house. How wonderful! I think. We'll have to
explore this. We'll have to fix this up. We'll have to move into all of
this.
Often, I wake up right after having this dream. I lay there for a moment,
in the dark, not sure where I am. And for minutes thereafter, I feel certain
that there is a door in the other room, beyond which lies this wonderful
and unexplored part of our new house.
Oh. That's remarkable. I just figured the dream out.
Yak. On Iron Chef.
Fried Lotus Root and Cod
Roe Sorbet
Yum?
Yo. You already know about this
shockingly-named site on which people circulate rumors as to which
dot-com is about to be dot-gone. Still, interesting reading, assuming your
paycheck doesn't come from one of them.
Plop. Signs that you're getting way, way too old:
-
Your kids are watching someone on TV
put a record on the phonograph and say Dad, what's that lady doing?
-
Your kids don't call from a neighbor's
house and come home instead. When you ask them why, they say they couldn't
figure out how to use the phone because it didn't have any buttons.
-
In discussing soft drinks with some kids,
you refer to Fizzies and they say What's that? When you point out
that you can still buy them, they
just look at you funny.
-
When you can't figure out how to get
DHCP working, you ask your kids.
Sadly, these have all occurred to us and our friends.
Yo. The Great Mystery of the Salad Forks has finally been solved,
thanks to a pretty exhausting Web search! Here was the original
question:
Why is it that the fourth
tine on salad forks is both wider than the others and endowed with a little
scallop at the end? (I'm particularly curious about the scallop.)
A reader had the following theory:
Re: salad fork tines - perhaps
this is for spearing goodies within the salad, such as succulent cherry
tomatoes, olives, etc.
All very sensible. But, as happens so often in life, it turns out that
(1) we asked the wrong question and (2) everybody was making up theories
to fit the wrong facts.
The truth is, the fork we described is not a salad fork at all! It is
a fish fork, as illustrated definitely by Epicurious,
and a silver
shop. and the scalloped tine is used for removing bones and skin from
the fish.
Salad forks, on the other hand, may have wider outside tines, but both
outside tines are the same width and neither are scalloped. We did find
a good deal of ambiguity in that salad forks were often called fish forks
on various Web pages. But we never saw a fish fork (as described above)
passed off as a salad fork.
Gotta love the Web!
Plurp.
He sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good.
 |
