Plurp: A Weblog

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2001.01.14 : 2001.01.20

Saturday, January 20, 2001
Blab. It's Mispelling Day here at Plurp, that day of the week dedicated to those Plurp readers whose highest joy is to engage in discourse on what they regard as spelling or grammatical oddities in Plurp. Each week, we save up these incredibly valuable contributions for one gigantic blow-out extravaganza. Thusly:
Why don't you use a spellchecker?
I pointed out a misspelled word last week but you didn't go back and fix it. Don't you care?
LOL - "well, neither is EDITTING, if the truth be known" - too funny! How about EDDITIN ?? MAVA
editting isn't even right in English English, unlike travelling, for example

Blab. On the uplifting subject of the end of the world, a reader writes:

20. Someone wakes up and realizes it was all a dream.
Isn't this called the "1981 Dallas Syndrome" or the "Reagan Era"?
Did Ronald Reagan really shoot J.R.? That would explain a lot. Maybe he's also the one who shot Bill Gates.

Blab. Bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon!

If you've ever had a dog, you know that this is exactly, precisely, 100% what goes on inside a dog's head
Or if you have ever BEEN a dog or ACTED like a dog...........
... or been with an actor who kept dogs, or been 100% of the insides of a dog, or been the head of a secret organization that worshipped dogs, or been worshipped by someone who acted like a dog, or been a secret kept by a dog, or been had by a dog, or kept dogs from acting 100% organized, or kept a head from a dog, or kept an actor inside the head of a dog ...

Blab. Joining the burgeoning ranks of the Blue Dog Fan Club is a new face with a certain, um, curiosity.
Was the Blue Dog invited to the Inauguration? He hasn't mentioned it. Will he dance at a ball? I fear that his ticket may have been lost in the mail.
--the Red Cat
The blue dog is mum on this subject. (We have the ominous suspicion that the blue dog is keeping a secret of some kind.)

Blab. A poetic combinatoricist asks:
Would you, could you, with no pain?
Would you, could you, with no stain?
We would not bleat blue figs and yams;
We would not, could not, slamming ram.
We would not bleat them in a box;
We would not cleat them with two clocks.
We would not bleat blue figs and yams;
We would not bleat the slamming ram.

Rant. OK, I just can't stand it any longer. Those rocket scientists that run the California government, having caused the punishing electricity shortage there, are now coping with their own idiocy by paying for electricity with tax dollars.
This extent of their cluelessness surprises even me.
Let's review our Economics for Dummies course, shall we?

Shortages are not caused by having less of something than you might have liked. They are caused by prices being controlled artificially. There is no shortage of bread, even if I get really hungry for bread. There will be a shortage of bread if the California government forces the price of bread to be no more than a penny a loaf. The California government, of course, controls the retail price of electricity, so there's no incentive for anyone to decrease their electrical usage.

If you're going to control prices, it's best to make sure there's adequate supply. Otherwise, you definitely get shortages. The California government, never populated with good students it seems, has prevented the building of new power plants for quite some time.

Electricity usage peaks in the middle of the winter and the middle of the summer. (Duh.) At these times, there's not much surplus electricity available from nearby states. When supply decreases and demand increases, prices increase. That means that the wholesale spot price of electricity is high in midwinter (now) and midsummer. Since demand for electricity is pretty inelastic (i.e. people still want it if it costs a little more), the wholesale spot price gets real high about now. Businesses usually deal with large, predictable fluctuations in their costs by making long-term contracts with their suppliers, so their prices are predictable.

If you, as did the California government has done, allow California power companies to buy electricity from other states on the spot market, but prevent them from making long term contracts, then it is absolutely guaranteed that either (a) the power companies' costs go through the roof in the winter, or (b) they can't buy enough electricity in the winter, or (c) both of the above. In this case, it is both of the above. Big time.

The obvious result, and this is all in the very first chapter of Economics for Dummies, is that there will be terrible shortages. Power companies will be forced to institute blackouts because the electricity just isn't available. Power companies may well go bankrupt as their costs spiral upward while their revenue is forced to stay constant.

Now, if you were an Advanced Dummy, you would not try to fix this problem by allowing the power companies to create long-term contracts for power from other states. You would not remove the retail price controls and give people an incentive to conserve. You would not say D'oh! We forgot to build power plants! Nope. You would take money from the taxpayers and use it to buy electricity on the incredibly costly spot market, then give it to the power companies, this being, clearly, the most wrongheaded possible way to deal with the problem. And then you, too, would be qualified to run the California government.

It is my distinct impression that, like the three Fates who share but one eye, the folks running the California government are trying unsuccessfully to share but one brain cell. And while the Fates could at least sometimes see, it is not at all clear that the august members of the California government can ever quite manage to think.
(A more (ahem) reasoned discussion is here (Dave). A more knowledgeable discussion is here.)

Yak.
The January meeting of the Obsessive-Compulsive Society was called to order at 8:00:00 PM with all members in attendance.

Plop. RealSimple. There's something oxymoronic about a paper magazine whose mission is to help you simplify your life, don't you think? Seems like they could have a regular monthly feature on how to throw the magazine away and read it on the Web instead. Dunnit?
A reasonable, if undistinguished truffle recipe, though. (Note, however, the bozo URLing which will cause that last link to point to something entirely different at some time in the not-too-distant future. Real simple, yeah, but ... urk.)
We have a great, sentimental attachment to truffles. But you knew that. Would you like our incredibly fabulous recipe?

Plurp.
Let's just say that Dubya has
a backup plan when this
Ashcroft character self-
destructs.

Friday, January 19, 2001
Blab. The lone poet among our readers writes:
The frogs are all in school,
The lightning eats my brain,
I know the golden rule,
But I still writhe in...
(((No pain, no quatrain!!!!!)))
Wonderful! (This is, of course, a riff on our own much less creative attempts.)

Blab. In response to our recent realization that Bill Gates was assassinated, the Curator of BillGatesisDead.com writes:
Steve,
I just happened to stumble upon your weblog today and really enjoyed reading your thoughts. However, knowing how important accurate information is to both of us, I couldn't help but notice that you say that Bill Gates was killed last month. Actually, Steve, he was murdered over a year ago now ... in December, 1999. Sometimes it seems like just a month ago to me as well: grief can be funny that way. I'd hate for your readers to be misinformed, though -- after all, the Web is the last bastion of truth in media!
Best to you ...
Your curator,
Jack Perdue
Curator, BillGatesisDead.com
"the Liz Smith of the Gates-assassination world"
BillGatesisDead.com - The ultimate portal to the life, death and legacy of Bill Gates.
Well, our sense of time has never been ideal, but this is really humbling. We want Jack to know that we are grateful for this correction, and that we really like his chicken.

Blab. In response to our fairy tale about patents, another reader far too familiar with the patent process writes:
One saving grace is that the land mines magically disintigrate after 17 years in such a way that a villager can't plant a new one in exactly the same spot.
That is also, of course, why we all keep constructing new land mines and digging new holes. Wanna buy a map?

Blab. A reader teetering on the precipice of copy-editing writes:

There are now tens of thousands of land mines buried in the green
How big is this village green anyway? Sounds more like Central Park!
Actually, the mines are very small.

Plop. Drat! All day I've had that stupid song running through my head.
If you're goin' to Sam's Clam Disco
Be sure to wear some sort of Smoky Bear
Yeah, so I remembered it differently than the original. Sue me. The point is that this insidious tune has taken control of my mind and won't let go.
As Ian would say, make it stop!

Yo. A careful reading, and subsequent syntactic analysis, of yesterday's first (and very insightful) piece of reader feedback suggests the possibility of a surprising author. I mean, who ever heard of the word dramaturgy before? Hmmm.

Yak.
Person A: I saw a study recently that confirmed that cell phones cause cancer.
Person B: Does that mean that I can program my computer to continuously call all of my enemies on their cell phones and cause them to develop brain cancer?
Person A: Uh, yeah ...
Person B: Cool !

Plurp.
Lima bean, cabbage and brussel sprout soup
Nothing in food-dom is closer to poop.
Green sloppy slime and vegetable goop
Do I want seconds? Noop, noop and noop!

Yo. Nice to see that Jerry Pournelle, alleged SF writer and hack magazine columnist, has a really crummy Web site. It's nice when people I never particularly liked are cooperative enough to show themselves up so blatantly in public. Heh. (Beth)

Yo. Make your own Steven Jobs speech. Very silly. (geekish)
Hey! Wait a minute! I gave that speech just last week!

Plurp.
I would not eat
blue eggs and ham;
I would not eat them,
sham I am.

Thursday, January 18, 2001
Blab. An erudite reader sends us scrambling through recent issues of the Journal of Reconstructivist Analysis in this, the most marvelously insightful missive ever to arrive at Plurp.
Doesn't it seem ironic to you that, in a political climate where even the lowest climbers on the pontifical rungs of media and the government can have their opinions channeled, "Big Mac" style, into the McSenses of the ten-acre parking lot that has overtaken, with only the slightest of whimpers, any pretense at the kind of blustering "immunity from slander" that previous generations (or dreamed-of previous generations, black-and-white Beaver Cleaver and the Oakridge Boys) might have taken with them to their beds, reading "Fantastic Tales" by flashlight under covers metaphorically covered with severed ears, the tailings of toxic mrecury mines, stacks of tires burning by the side of the road on the wrong side of the conurbation?
This is a new time, or not to much new as rediscovered, taken from the edge of the trash-heap of history, where Dan Rather, the Tidy-Bowl Man of the hallucinatory American Midwest, thinks "Man, I can do this stuff in my sleep". And (without acknowledging a debt to that aristocratic apparently drunken guy on the Washington talk shows, or to Bedlam or the Graces, or anyone but Mia) provisionalism continues: the social construction of reality is dominated, as indeed it always has been, by a framework of interlinked dramaturges, scions of the patriarchy, even Camille Paglia in her leather bustier and her hair spiked with mousse, talking as though it were still the old Millennium, as though John Ashcroft were just another fond bit of chocolate nougat ice-cream, another vat-grown clone of Herbert Hoover or Harry Truman, as though, in fact, no one had ever been able to tell the difference.
Is that fair?
Come to think of it, no, it's not! Certainly not to Mia, anyhow.

Blab. A reader far too familiar with the patent process writes:
'IBM patents Smell-o-Vision. And you think we make this stuff up!' -- we _do_ make this stuff up. That's rather the point of patents, now isn't it?
The original idea of patents was to give the Heroic Inventor the opportunity to benefit from his or her clever thinking and hard work by giving the inventor a "patent monopoly" on the commercial use of the invention, allowing the inventor to charge a fee for anyone else's use of the invention. If you use one of these patented inventions without first paying the Heroic Inventor, well, the Heroic Inventor can haul you into court and sue your ... kind self.
The way this actually played out, however, is pretty different, at least in the corporate venue. Here's how I think about it.
Imagine a bunch of villagers whose village is built around a large common green, across which all of the villagers must pass daily. One day, a particularly devious villager comes up with a particularly devious idea. He buries a land mine somewhere in the green, and informs the rest of the village that there is a now a deadly land mine out there. "But don't worry," says the devious villager, "I have maps of the green here, showing just where the mine is. And I'll sell them to you for $10 each." The villagers are taken aback by this. But, not having much choice, they fork over $10 apiece to the devious villager.
The devious villager, while basking in his good and clever fortune, comes up with a second devious idea. He buries a second land mind in the green the next day, announcing to the villagers that they should be careful again. But, of course, there is a second map for sale for an additional $10.
At this point, several of the other villagers catch on. They bury their own land mines, make their own maps, and seek to tap into this fantastic new revenue stream.
It doesn't take long before many villagers figure out that they won't make a lot of money from people who already have land mines and maps - they just agree to swap maps - unless they have a lot more land mines than the other villager. (The folks with lots of land mines, you see, not only get a copy of the other maps, but they get to charge the other mine-layers as well.)
A year passes, and the village has been remarkably transformed. There are now tens of thousands of land mines buried in the green, and every villager - even the village idiot - is selling maps to their own mines or, more likely, trying to trade their maps for everyone else's, and paying additional money to people with more mines than they have. The number of mines you have - or, rather, the number of new mines you bury each month - becomes a sign of status in the village, and everyone knows who has the most.
In short, the village comes to look a lot like the modern patent system except that, in the patent system, the lawyers get rich too.

Blab. A reader concerned with our recent foray into avatarism writes:
That looks rather not much like you! I've seen a couple of these "make your own face from a toolkit" things, and they never work well. The human brain has lots and lots and lots of neurons doing face recognition, and they're pretty hard to fool. Says I.
Quite the contrary. It is an exact likeness. I am, in fact, an inch high two-dimensional cartoon that exists only on your computer screen.
A man said to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The man who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is. Picasso looked at it and said, She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?

Blab. Concerned about the dietary laws that prevail over pictures on a screen, an emphatic reader writes:
Jewish dogs eat Kosher!
We, of course, will take your word on this. Does anyone know if blue bacon, constructed entirely of pixels, is or is not Kosher?

Blab. Referencing our other-minds analysis of canines, a philosophically inclined reader writes:
Dog thought: as Dave Barry wrote years ago, a thoughts in a dog's head behave similarly to a bb rattling around the inside of an empty tuna can (when shaken).
We know a lot of people like that. In fact, we know a lot of people whose mental capabilities would be greatly enhanced by the addition of a bb.

Blab. Friend Mava checks in after a long absence with a blue dog fan letter.
The Blue Dog is so smart. Imagine, trying to create Blue Bacon for his shiny blue coat. Bark it 25 times as fast as you can: Bow Blue Bacon, Bow Blue Bacon, Bow Blue Bacon.   MAVA
Woof! Woof!
(You know it's getting bad when even the blue dog has fans.)

Blab. Our correspondent from the Bay State, once again, this time with advice on what must be an upcoming dinner party.
Here's a quote from Liz Smith's (gossip columnist) hilarious autobiography, NATURAL BLONDE, to help you plan your next dinner party or other event: "Nobody wants to go to an all-Indians, no-Chiefs event. And nobody who is a mere Indian, as most of us are, should want to go to an all-Chiefs get-together, because these often implode, and become black holes as Chief after Chief destructs with too much VIPness." Please relay this to the Blue Dog before his pack becomes a Blue Hole.   MAVA
That's good advice, and we shall relay it to the blue dog post haste.

Blab. Finally, this bit of nostalgia.
if you're goin' to Sam Clam's Disco
be sure to wear some sort of Smokey Bear
If you're goin' to Sam Clam's Disco
You're gonna heat some mental pea pods there.

Yow. Very cool Flash animations. Very funny. (geekish)

Plop. Submitted for your approval: signposts along road to the American Tort Lotto.

Shin pads cannot protect any part of the body they do not cover.

Recycled toilet water unsafe for drinking.

Warning: Riders of personal watercraft may suffer injury due to forceful injection of water into body cavities either by falling into the water or while mounting the craft.

This [electric router] not intended for use as a dental drill.

Eating rocks may lead to broken teeth.

Plurp.
Before compiling a guest list for
the power brunch, the blue dog
decided to perfect the
recipe for blue-pixel-bacon soufflé.

Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Blab. Another of our obsessive, copy-editing stalkers writes:
riviting is NOT the right spelling - not your copy-editting stalker
Yes, well, neither is editting, if the truth be known.
In the hopes of drawing focus to just about anything but copy-editing in reader responses, we're instituting a new, er, institution: Mispelling Day. Mispelling Day will be held every Saturday in Plurp, and will feature any reader responses from that week that deal, in one way or another, with misspellings and other copy-editing. Submissions of this ilk during the week will be saved up for the weekly Mispelling Day.
So all you folks who bookmarked Plurp solely to exercise your spelling and grammatical acumen, be sure to tune in on Saturdays for what will no doubt be the very most thrilling part of your week. We know we can scarcely contain our excitement.

Blab. On a more creative note, a loyal correspondent contributes another in our series of painful puns.
Ah here's another one
have you heard the one about God wringing the tears out of little angels in heaven? no pain no rain
boooooooo
Good one!
Here are some other words that folks might consider using.

Bane

Blaine

Cane

Crane

Drain

Feign

Jane

Lane

Maine

Mane

Main

Nane

Reign

Sane

Shane

Vein

Vane

Wane

Yow. Did you know that Bill Gates was killed last month? Wow. Neither did I. That story sure got hushed up in a hurry! There's a documentary film being made about the assassination and the alleged cover-up. And there's a memorial site here. Wow.

Plop. It's getting more and more fun to be a dot-commie these days. Reminiscent of the Stalinist purges in Russia, corporate meetings now include rent-a-thugs.
It's not uncommon for mass layoffs to be accompanied by beefed-up security, abrupt computer network lockouts and surveillance of laid-off employees.
What could be more fun?

Yow. More fun than that? How about 20 Ways the World Could End? We favor either Robots take over or Nanotechnology disaster, which are just variations of the same idea. But then, even so, the world doesn't end. Just us pesky humans. And we were hardly here long enough to matter. (syrup)

Plurp. Oh, all right. Everyone seems to be doing it. Slave to fadistry that I am, I too have created an all-too-cute avatar of myself from stor. Forgive me.
And, good heavens, what a lousy dresser I am!

Yow. Here's a nice article about how information technology is transforming India, helping to decrease local corruption and allow farmers who never even had telephones before to get better prices and increase their production.
We like this. We like this a lot.

Yow. Have you seen the TV commercial for Beggin' Strips, shot from the dog's point of view, the dog running around the house smelling bacon, hunting for bacon, begging for bacon? "Bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon!"
If you've ever had a dog, you know that this is exactly, precisely, 100% what goes on inside a dog's head, an incredible recreation of dog consciousness.
Uh, yeah, I do like it. Why do you ask?

Yow. Not only have we talked Beth into Chessian permalinks, we have also talked her into a Blab box (well, more correctly, a morphotrenic input field). We're so pleased! Interactive blogs are so, um, interactive.
Go tell her how cool she is.

Plurp.
The blue dog kept
trying to construct
bacon out of blue
pixels.

Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Blab. Referring to my drooling over a new store on Madison Avenue, a reader writes:
"....a nearly cubical space some sixteen feet high done entirely in white, with long, sheer blue fabric falling from the ceiling, defining the interior space in a series of semicircles. It is incredibly simple and incredibly beautiful."
NO STEVE! We will NOT rework the apartment design! I love you but.......
Well, if you INSIST!
H
Who the heck is this H person? And why does she interpret my every word as affecting her life, her apartment? Maybe she's our mysterious, obsessive, copy-editing stalker. Oh man, I am in so much trouble!

Blab. Fan mail, with a challenge:
You sure write a lot of stuff. I do like "sluttony".
Robbie Burns: some say that "gringo" comes from
the song "Green Grow the Rushes"; apparently gringos sang it a lot. Funny gringos.
Did Robbie Burns write the one that says something like "Some of 'em fell to their knees, and some of 'em fell to their
praying, but I, I fell to my bread and cheese, which is me main ferstayin'"? I can't find that one on the Web, probably
because I'm remembering the words wrong.
-- Sprontismi
On that gringo thingo, some random person on the Web claims that story is an urban legend. Another random person has collected even more suspicious stories of the origin of gringo, but also concludes that it was part of the Spanish language for a long time before any of this stuff.
The closest thing we could find to your quote is:
I LOST MY LOVE
I lost my love and I dinna ken hoo
I lost my love and I care na
The losin' o' ane's the gainin' o' twa
I'll soon get anither I fear na.
Oh some fell on their bended knees
Some ladies fell a-fainting
I fell tae my bread and cheese
I always wanted the main thing
Oh, Jock since ever I seen your face
Jock since ever I kent ye
Jock since ever I seen your face
Dae ye mind o' the shillin' I lent ye?
It is said to have been printed in Scottish Folksinger, but there's no author listed.
We like sluttony too. Oh, you had it in quotes.

Yow. Time to catch up on (and finish up) Helen's assignments for non-geek lunchtime discussion topics.
Friday
I had a meeting at lunchtime. No Helen topics today. Sorry.
Monday
The assigned topic. Discussion of New York Times Book Review offerings.
The ensuing conversation. This was rather short.
Didn't read it.
Me neither.
It didn't have a science fiction section this week, so I didn't read it.
Their Web site was down on Sunday, so I didn't read it.
So what is the biggest explosion you can make for $12.95?
It's too wet outside for explosions.

Tuesday
The assigned topic. Individual announcements, i.e. birthdays, vacations, family events, etc.
The ensuing conversation.
Oh no!
Eeeeew.
Didn't we talk about that last week?
No. We were supposed to, but we didn't.
I don't have any family events.
My family came to work with me yesterday.
Yeah, we know.
And that was pretty much it.
Thus endeth the lesson. I think it's fair to say that we've all had our conversational abilities greatly expanded, and that we all agree that it's way cool to know how to converse so authoritatively on non-geek topics. If one should ever come up.
Still no word, however, on how Helen and her friends are doing on their assigned geeky topics.

Plop. IBM patents Smell-o-Vision. And you think we make this stuff up!

Yow. Through a circuitous route arrives the latest Helenism:
Cutting shoestrings

Cutting corners

On a shoestring

Yak.
I read your weblog.
Did you?
Yes. Uh, do you really sing songs in the shower?
Yeah. Well, not all the time. But yeah, we do.
I think that's very silly.
It's hard to know how to react to that.

Yow. Dave has a just plain wonderful Zen inversion of a common joke. And you know what? I'll bet it's a genre!
A penguin walks into a bar, he goes to the counter and asks the barman "Have you seen my brother?" The barman asks "What does he look like?" And the penguin was Enlightened.
A monk asked Zen Master Wu, "Master, what is the path to Enlightenment?" Master Wu replied, "Here is a fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."
Submissions less lousy than these are solicited.

Yow. ... which leads to a pretty good broken joke.
So this policeman comes upon this guy on his hands and knees under a streetlight, fumbling around on the ground.
"What's the matter?" says the policeman.
"I'm looking for my keys," says the guy.
"Is this where you dropped them?" asks the policeman, and the guy replies, "Yes".

Plop. Ah, ya got me started.
You remember the joke they used to tell about that strange little town where they used unwary travelers as millstones? No pain, no grain.
... or the butcher who turned out to be killing people in a most brutal way in order to keep up his stock of organ meats? No pain, no brain.
... or the slave labor that was used to shore up a river in France? No pain, no Seine.
... or the mass-murdering engineer who insisted on using dismembered body parts to fuel his locomotive? ...
I'll stop now. Really I will.

Plop. Having decided that I have an overdeveloped female side of my personality, I'm taking Guy Lessons to learn more about what guys do. The best available resource appears to be the TBS marketing folks who, having exhaustively surveyed this particular demographic, know all about, uh, guy stuff. You know, home improvement, sports, power tools, plumbing, driveway sealing, wearing flannel shirts. It should be quite a cultural broadening for me! (Ron)

Plop. Late breaking news on that earth-shaking culture-overturning mysterious invention from last week. "Ginger" inventor says speculation overblown.
"The leaked proposal quoted several prominent technology leaders out of context, without their doubts, risks and maybes included," [the inventor] said in a statement issued late on Friday. "This, together with spirited speculation about the unknown, has led to expectations that are beyond the mere whimsical."
Quite. They had graduated into blatant marketing hype. And it worked, too.

Yow. Finally! Some workplace motivational posters I can really get behind. (Ron)

Yow. Bush or Chimp? (Ian)

Plurp.
The blue dog was
under the impression that marketing was mostly
the art of carefully controlled
misinterpretation

Monday, January 15, 2001
Blab. A disappointing reader writes:
Wot, no link for "Paul Simon's Graceland concert" ?
How sad that one of our readers - one of our readers - needs so elementary a map. Sigh. Very well. Here are 843 hits from Google. Here's the Amazon link for the video and DVD. And here's what Jeeves says.

Blab. A new reader who fits right in writes:
Your use of "fnord" has made me think briefly of a proposed new IML (Illuminati Markup Language) type. At present, however, the only command that I can think of is:
<fnord> .... </fnord>
Perhaps others might take up the challenge?
Uh ... what?

Yow. We went to a premature Robbie Burns supper last night, premature because Burns was born on Jan. 25, 1759. Burns was the poet laureate of Scotland and, being half-Scot myself, and what with Helen being completely addicted to Scotland, it's kind of a thing for us.
Such suppers feature Scottish songs, a certain amount of bagpipery, and the serving of haggis, a Scottish national dish of extremely dubious composition.
Ye Pow'rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o'fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
      That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer,
      Gie her a Haggis!
And here are a couple of Burns songs that I particularly like.

A Man's A Man for A' That
Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Green Grow The Rashes
Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her prentice han' she try'd on man,
An' then she made the lasses, O.
Green grow the rashes, O;
Green grow the rashes, O;
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,
Are spent amang the lasses, O.

Yak.
The Scots are a rather reserved lot. There was once a Scot who loved his wife so deeply and so passionately that he almost told her.

Plurp.
We hae tales to tell,
An' we hae sangs to sing;
We hae blae dog tae tend,
An' we hae pints to bring.

Sunday, January 14, 2001
Plurp. I love New York. I really, really do, and for lots of reasons. One of the most amazing things about New York is that it is so, well, ordinary.
Before I came here, I lived in places where we shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue. Here, it is just Saks; everyone knows where it is. Elsewhere, Tiffany's and Steuban are brands. Here, they are just adjoining stores. Elsewhere, Wall Street is an institution. Here, it's a short, narrow street. Elsewhere, the Empire State Building is an icon. Here, it was the view from our bedroom.
Let me tell you a story from the first time I went into the subway. There, on the tile wall, spelled out in blocky capital letters in black mosaic, was a simple word:

DOWNTOWN -->

You see, Manhattan runs north and south, and when you travel south - down-town - you are traveling towards the first great concentration of businesses and skyscrapers in the world.
It had never before occurred to me that downtown was originally a direction, not a place, nor that this universal term had come so clearly from New York.

Plurp. Continuing our weekend of sloth, gluttony and lust last night, we picked up sushi from Hatsuhana, one of the best places in town, and fawned over it in bed.
Sushi is one of my great loves, the Most Best Second Best Thing, and you'll have to insist that I tell you about it some time. But today, I want to tell you about going to pick up this incredible sushi.
It is night. It is January, and while the most recent snow has melted, the streets of New York are still quite cold. I walk briskly across Park Avenue and down Madison Avenue, having chosen this particular route because it shows off New York so well.
On my way to 48th Street, my eye is caught by a store that I do not recognize, an unlabelled store, a waterfall of blue and white. It turns out to be a new hair salon, a nearly cubical space some sixteen feet high done entirely in white, with long, sheer blue fabric falling from the ceiling, defining the interior space in a series of semicircles. It is incredibly simple and incredibly beautiful.
The restaurant itself is not busy. The sushi bar has eight seats and only six of them are occupied - four by suited Japanese men and the other two, surprisingly, by a gaijin couple. The sushi chef is busy explaining something that might be a preparation technique to the Japanese men, speaking in rapid staccato and gesturing with his hands - ta ta ta ta ta ta ta.
Walking back, I choose 5th Avenue. Rockerfeller Center, one of the most majestic pieces of architecture in the world, is nearly vacant. The tree is down and the hordes of tourists have all gone back to Winetka Falls, leaving the streets of New York to those who appreciate them most.
Beneath the yellow glow of an exclusive men's club, a street saxophonist plays a jazzy, lonely version of I'll Be There. The steps of a cathedral are partitioned by cardboard, harboring the homeless that have been driven out of less charitable spaces.
Returning home, setting up our celebration of indulgence and plenty, we put on Paul Simon's Graceland concert.
Bring back Nelson Mandela
Bring him back home to Soweto
I want to see him walking down the street
Of South Africa
Tomorrow
It is all very New York.

Plurp. I went poking around the Web for myself late last night, wondering how my college friend found me. Searching for "Steve White" is rather hopeless; it's a common name. Adding "IBM" as a constraint gives a pretty tight list, with only an occasional entry from the Steve White in Austin that does Unix performance stuff, and a few stray drummers and such.
My favorite is this one in Russian. I'm pretty sure it's about my friends and me, but I have no idea what it says. Or maybe this one in Finnish? Wild!

Plurp. What mortal sin do you get when you spend the weekend in bed, combining sloth, gluttony and lust? It's sluttony !

Plurp.
The blue dog's
sin was all
original

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