Plurp: A Weblog

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2001.01.28 : 2001.02.03

Saturday, February 3, 2001
Yo. Well, here it is Mispelling Day. And it seems like it was Mispelling Day just last week. I guess it snuck up on everybody, as none of our faithful readers seems to be participating in the Grand Festival this week.
Ah, well.

Yo. The 2001 Bloggies - the first annual weblog awards. Self-aggrandizement. Inbreeding. Best Weblog About Weblogs. All the hallmarks of awards in cloistered communities.
Yep, all true. But there are some good links to blogs that might be worth checking out. These might be some of them, but I've only looked briefly.

Disturbing Search Requests (silly but fun)

Loobylu (nice design)

Wockerjabby

saturn (another dead Pyra person)

not.so.soft

Disturbingly, Plurp received no awards. Someone must die. Sorry, but that's what the voices say, so that's the way it is.

Yow. Rebecca's got permalinks. The meme spreadeth.

Yo. The Museum of e-Failure. Obsessive collection of Web pages from failed dot-coms. Does it surprise you to find Gazoontite.com there? Our rule:
If you can't spell it, you can't sell it.
Amusing, if you're not a dot-commie. (plasticbag) Bob!

Plurp. At a doctor's office this week, they wanted me to fill out a form that included my Social Security Number. Being a privacy geek, I left it blank.
You have to fill in your Social Security Number.
Why do you need that?
If we have other patients with your same name, we can look you up with your Social Security Number.
Ah. Realizing that all they really needed (modulo a much less than one-in-a-billion coincidence) was a nine-digit random number, I gave them one.
Was that wrong?

Yow. Googie architecture. (Harrumph)

It can look organic, but it must be abstract. "If it looks like a bird, it must be a geometric bird. It's better yet if the house had more than one theme: like an abstract mushroom surmounted by an abstract bird."

Ignore gravity altogether. "Whenever possible, the building must hang from the sky."

Multiple structural elements. Inclusion is the rule, rather than minimalism.

Hey! I grew up in that world!

Yo. Test-o-rama! Take the gender test. Here's what it says about me.

Amazing. It's absolutely perfect. That's me! How do they do that?

Yow. Shadow of the Vampire. Fabulous! Rush out and see it right away. Honest! If I could give you a link to the movie itself I would insist that you click on it immediately.
You already know the plot. Malkovich is the obsessed director of Nosferatu, the first vampire movie. (And don't pretend you haven't seen it, you naughty weasels.) Dafoe is the odd little actor who plays Count Orlock. Actually, Dafoe is the actor who plays the vampire who plays the actor who plays the vampire. Still with us?
The film is brilliant on several levels. Malkovich is terrific, and Dafoe is incredible - it is most certainly the part of his life. There is a wonderful little scene in which the twisted Orlock is asked what he thought of Bram Stoker's Dracula. He looks away and says simply, It made me sad and you feel sorry for the monster.
In this treatment, the overacting and broad movement of silent films is rendered as simply what happened in real life. The innocent mortal in the director's movie really is wide-eyed at Orlock. The Count himself is perfect in his intense, rat-like movements and expressions.
But the surprise is that the film keeps folding back on itself. You and I are not so different says Orlock to the director as they bargain with each other - film the scenes as the director wants and Orlock gets to feed on the leading lady - and you smile because the characters are explicating the metaphor that they represent.
Who lives in light, and who in darkness? The filmmakers always don dark, dark goggles during filming - to protect themselves from their own bright lights. In an unexpectedly touching scene, the vampire is left alone in a cave with the camera equipment after the crew leaves. He discovers the rush projector and starts it up, immediately fascinated, drawn in by scenes that he has not seen in hundreds of years - scenes set in daylight.
What is real and what is image? These peasants will not be able to act, objects the producer. They do not need to act, replies the director; they need only be. Is the vampire acting when he turns into a moody leading man? Is the leading lady being real when she pouts and complains? When the crew starts to turn up dead, when the director injects the leading lady with morphine (her addiction of choice) to keep her from fleeing Orlock's deadly embrace during the final scene, who is willing to sacrifice what for art? If it is not in frame, says the director, it does not exist.
Did I say that Dafoe is incredible? Too pale. He is mesmerizing, completely transformed into Orlock (just as the director tells us that actor Max Schreck is completely transformed into the character of the vampire). He dominates our attention whenever he is in frame - shocking, horrifying, wretched, depraved, commanding, hopeless, even sympathetic. Not for a moment do we think of him as anything but Orlock. It is rare to find this at all in film, and even rarer to find it carried off with such compelling perfection.
I won't spoil the ending for you. But you will find yourself nodding, and smiling, and appreciating a metaphor wrapping one last time around itself.
Highly recommended.

Plop. Analog media warning, Will Robinson! There seems to be an upcoming ABC TV program called Inside the Osmands. Personally, I never wanted to see the outsides.

Plurp. If you're not supposed to sniff them, why are they called inhalants?

Plurp. Seybold report on the future of the printing industry. Guess what? The Net is taking over. We know you're shocked.

Yo. You've already seen this Java marbles game, right? Rumored to be addictive. But of course, I wouldn't know.

Yow. Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass. (Dave)

Conclusion. Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash.
Very funny, except that I tried desperately to complete a similar experimental physics project as an undergrad, with similar results. Some of us are just not born to be experimentalists.

Plop. Reassuringly, ...
Former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton announced Friday they will pay more than $85,000 for gifts given to the first family during the president's last year in office "to eliminate even the slightest question" of impropriety.
Were any of our questions slight?
Is there any realization that gross ethical transgressions are not cured by injections of more money?
Guess not.

Plurp. Every clown has a silver lining.

Plurp.
Each person whose
death or dismemberment had
been perpetrated by the
blue dog was to
be given $9.37.

Friday, February 2, 2001
Blab. From the Blab box comes this thoroughly cryptic message:

That's correct. It's an utterly blank message. We give this the Grand Prize for Ultimate Minimality.

Blab. We may have read a bit too much into that mysterious Brussel sprout missive yesterday, as evidenced by the following threat.
I suggest you end this rumor that Your Greatest Fan is a Republican. Cease or I will be forced to take your reputation hostage!
YGF
Having a healthy sense of self-preservation, we withdraw our unfounded speculation.

Yow. Callooh! Callay! Up until now, I've had to get onto a (snail slow) modem line in order to upate Plurp because, well, corporate firewall mumble mumble, non-SOCKS-ified stack mumble mumble, firewall straddling mumble mumble. Whatever.
But Ian points out that the local networking folks have a new firewall in place that allows FTP from inside the firewall. And ... (drum roll) ... it works! I can now update Plurp over a T3 line.
This is so entirely cool. And Ian is now People's Hero Ian.

Plop. IMHO, the International Necronautical Society is a pretty confused bunch. (Caterina)
We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-

That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

...

Methinks the map will be rather small.

Yak. In a presentation today on the future of computing technology.
But the thing that gets me really excited is smart clothing. I'll never have to shop for clothes again.
Mega-geekery.

Plurp. And speaking of geekery, all you Linuxheads out there must run right out and download the Linux Anatomy poster. And this gigantic and confusing geneology of Unix. (CamWorld)

Yo. Petopia is out of business, following in the unprofitable footsteps of Pets.com. Did you really think that everyone was going to buy rawhide bones and pink kitty collars over the Web? Look, folks, this whole Internet thing? It's about bigger stuff than that. Sheesh.

Plurp.
The blue dog never
shopped for clothes in the first
place.

Thursday, February 1, 2001
Yow. I'm not dead yet!
Yesterday morning, as I was relating my digital woes, friend John (now People's Hero John) ran out of my office, returning with Morton's laptop, which he left behind when he transferred to Zurich. It turned out (John is so clever!) to be the same model as mine.
Six hours of backup later, and after a nerve-wracking, drum-rolling brain transplant (moving the hard disk from one machine to another) ... it works! Amazing! I have a machine that works and I can send my intermittently dead machine into the shop without undergoing digital death.
Oooh. I like this!

Blab. A student of syntactic form writes:
So... why is "oomph" correct and "oomf" wrong? It's not as if they're anything but sound effects, right?
Along these lines, I've been wondering why it's called boinking. As an onomatopoeticist, and based on my experience, I would expect it to be called squishing, or maybe schlooking, or possibly plapping.
Have I been doing it wrong? Please advise.

Blab. There has been an illicit, non-Plurp email conversation going on using the PlurpMail address recently. This is not allowed. We've been Really Unhappy about it, and have tried to discourage the participants from its continuance, threatening exposure here on Plurp.
Sadly, these miscreants continue unabated. We have no choice but to begin the exposure. Unless this illicit conversation ceases immediately, we will reveal more, making up sufficiently scandalous constructs if their explicit conversation does not provide motivation enough to stop.
> You can meet our new family addition, Danny.
> Yep, our second cat.
SEE STEVE! Another family that has seen the wisdom in multiple kitties! I tell you..........we will be in the minority with only ONE baby.
Thanks, Christine!
H

Blab. Apparently on behalf of My Greatest Fan, a bot at Bluemountain.com writes:
Hello! Your Greatest Fan has just sent you a greeting card from Bluemountain.com.
You can pick up your personal message here:
[URL deleted by Plurp legal staff - see below]
Your card will be available for the next 90 days
This service is 100% FREE! :) Have a good day and have fun!
Our legal staff recommended that we delete the actual Bluemountain URL that points to the webcard from My Greatest Fan because, in a rare slip, My Greatest Fan included in the card certain clues as to her identity. It turns out, in particular, that she is female!
In any event, the card featured the following gruesome animation involving an abnormally large Brussel sprout with questionable taste in fashion rehearsing for a Texas line dance at the White House. We are baffled as to its meaning, but we're pretty sure it indicates that My Greatest Fan is Republican.

Also, see the last line of that bot's note? This service is 100% FREE! This causes us to wonder what it would mean for something to be only 93% free. Is it like product labels that say 93% fat free, when they could just as well have said Contains 7% pure fat? Or labels that say 93% rodent hair free?
Yeah, I really do think about these things. Why do you ask?

Blab. It seems to be bot day here at Plurp. Some really blabby bot at allHealth.com apparently wanted to inform us about the reading habits of a certain p/erson named Helen. Ironically, the bot also informs us, a little more clearly than it probably intended, of its own mental capabilities, or perhaps those of the p/eople who programmed and tested it.
Hi!
Helen was reading this article at allHealth.com (http://www.allhealth.com/) and thought it might be of interest to you. H/She also wanted to let you know:
Here's the article:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IQ Test Results
You only scored 1 correct answer. A score like that would be an IQ of below 70 (mental retardation). In other words, you couldn't use a computer. Hence, we conclude you were guessing, weren't trying, being funny, or too young to take this test. Hopefully you've learned something about IQ tests. Click Here to Try Again.
   ";
} else {
     if (numRight You only scored 2 correct answers. A score like that would be an IQ of below 85-70 (some mental retardation). In other words, you probably couldn't use a computer. Hence, we conclude you were guessing, weren't trying, being funny, or too young to take this test. Hopefully you've learned something about IQ tests. Click Here to Try Again.
   ";
} else {
     if (numRight Your IQ = 85-92
   Low Normal Intelligence
   ";
} else {
     if (numRight Your IQ = 93-99
   Low Normal Intelligence
   ";
} else {
     if (numRight Your IQ = 100-105
   Average Intelligence
   ";
} else {
     if (numRight Your IQ = 106-110
   Average Intelligence
   ";
         } else {
             if (numRight Your IQ = 111-115
   High Normal Intelligence
   ";
     } else {
             if (numRight Your IQ = 116-123
   Above Average Intelligence
   ";
         } else {
             if (numRight Your IQ = 123-129
   High Above Average Intelligence
   ";
} else {
             if (numRight Your IQ = 130 PLUS
   Gifted
   Highest Score Measured by This Test
   ";
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
     }
}
}
// done hiding --
document.write(response);

Blab. A correspondent who will most certainly wish to remain anonymous after this, writes:
Expanding your broken joke concept to broken childhood riddles, I would like to submit the following:
Q: How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?
A: 0.02 cords per day.
We shall add this to our immense database of useful, commonsense facts about the world. We are not, however, entirely sure how to parse the phrase broken childhood riddles.

Plurp.
Steve R. White from this day forward you will also be known as Alan Phelps.
You may call me Mr. Phelps as in Good morning Mr. Phelps.
(Thanks to Dave for this list)

Yow. The Permanent Collection of Impermanent Art is now open. Rejoice! But first, go look!

Plurp. Sometimes I tease the five-dollar bills by putting them in my wallet upside-down. Is that wrong?

Plurp.
Being free of
error, the blue dog was
never tested.

Wednesday, January 31, 2001
Plop. My laptop screen appears to be in death rattles. It's jittery and has intermittent horizontal lines. This is an almost sure sign that (1) the connection between the display at the main unit is going flaky and (2) it's going to die real, real soon. So, time to do One Last Backup and send it into the shop. Naturally, my computer has picked the busiest few days of my recent life to do this to me.
Why do you care? Well, you probably don't, but that's neither here nor there. It does mean (for reasons too convoluted to go into now) that Plurp will not be updated for several days. You and the eagles will just have to tough it out.

Blab. A reader who is clearly too enthusiastically on the side of the viruses writes:
Ebola rules (or btter yet, will rule...)
That would be bitter indeed.
Actually, ebola has a good chance of doing lots of damage in a limited area (it is a very nasty hemorraghic virus), but not of Taking Over the World. It kills its victims too quickly and too obviously to become seriously widespread. In fact, in most recent epidemics, the majority of spread is via hospitals with poor facilities.
Smallpox, on the other hand, could easily wipe out a lot of the population. The U.S. and Russia were scheduled to destroy the last known remaining samples of the virus a few years ago. For reasons which never made any sense to me (and hence I don't believe them) they decided not to. Kids (in the U.S. at least) are no longer vaccinated against smallpox, it "not being a threat any more". If it does Get Out again, it could be bad.

Blab. On a paler note, a reader writes:
Never did understand how this became "beyond the pale" but it's definately related
With this great clue, a little more digging reveals:
Pale
... in Irish history, that district of indefinite and varying limits around Dublin, in which English law prevailed. The term was first used in the 14th cent. to designate what had previously been called English land. Outlying districts were styled the marches, or border lands. In the time of Henry VIII the Pale extended N from Dublin to Dundalk and c.20 mi (32 km) inland from the coast. It disappeared in the ensuing years as the English control of the whole of Ireland was made effective. There was another English Pale in France, comprising Calais and the surrounding area, until 1558. In Russia the Pale designated those regions in which Jews were allowed to live. The Jewish Pale was established in 1792, when it comprised the areas annexed from Poland in the first partition. The area was extended (partly as a result of further annexations), but even within the Pale the Jewish population was subjected to many restrictions. Most of these were in force until the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Columbia Encyclopedia: Sixth Edition.
In this sense, pale meant A region or district lying within an imposed boundary or constituting a separate jurisdiction. Thus beyond the pale (or, probably equivalently, outside the pale) apparently derived from the English usage, and meant outside the region of law. It has come to mean outside or beyond the bounds of social convention.
Great history lesson but, sadly, it means that the almost-Helenism from yesterday, isn't.

Plop. Gordon Liddy, that paragon of consistent evil from the Watergate days, is back on the charts. It seems that he finally figured out what (his!) Watergate burglaries were all about. Wanna know?
[Liddy claims] the burglars were seeking photos of [Nixon's White House counsel John] Dean's fiancee in a package of call-girl photos used to set up liaisons for visitors to the Democratic National Committee in nearby apartments.
He's being sued for $5.1M for claiming this. What a colorful guy.

Plop. Without comment.
"It's very expensive to be me. It's terrible the things I have to do to be me," [former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole] Smith, 33, told jurors in a Houston probate trial to determine who gets what from 90-year-old husband's estimated $1.6 billion estate.
Though adamant she truly loved her husband, Smith freely admitted she blew through the $5,000-$10,000 cash [he] sent her ... each week.

Yow. Wombat coats, only $22. And a free whoopee cap too. Can't beat that with a stick.

Plurp.
The blue dog
hated
computers.

Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Blab. Our Midwest Correspondent returns to Plurp with two rather amazing responses to our request for odd names for favorite foods. In this case, it seems that we got odd names for odd food, which is probably a bonus.
On topic of food names, two items come to mind. In the Really Offensive category: a ground beef, noodles, tomato sauce, corn & peas casserole my older brother use to call "Train Wreck". Is it a universal quality of older brothers to pull "really offesive" stunts?? Just wondered.
In the Unintentially Disturb Your Roommates category: ground beef rolled out in a rectangle shape, a layer of green beans on top, a layer of spaghetti sauce, then shredded cheese on top of that. Roll it up lengthwise (like a jelly roll) and bake. It's called "Meatloaf Surprise". This one is from my early cooking days in college and so "impressed" my roommates that they remind me of it to this day (27 years later...).
We, too, have a soft spot for faux cannibalistic food. And we, too, would have been surprised at the stringy green stuff in that latter dish.
Interestingly, and in places on the frightening side, Google reports 52 hits on meatloaf surprise.

Blab. In a creative combination entry, involving both excuses for our behavior and How Cold Is It, our Midwest Correspondent relates the following story, which she alleges to be true.
Here's a useful excuse for not recording gas mileage in those little notebooks some people keep in their glove compartments. "The ink in the pen froze". This actually happened to me one January Minnesota morning. (By the way, this is also a submission in the "It was so cold that ..." contest.)
That would, we assume, be ancient Greek ink.

Blab. Following up on our discussion of the U.S. Army's storage facilities for deadly chemical weapons, a reader using the code-name "Beth" writes:
The ninth chemical weapons site is likely to be at the Lualualei Naval Magazine in Hawaii. I drove through there numerous times, since I lived at Schofield Barracks, the Army base on the other side of the mountain from Lualualei. I took that route because it was much faster to go through Kolekole Pass to get to Waianae, the place where I liked to go bodyboarding. Only military people are allowed to drive on that road, by the way. It saved us about 40 minutes each way.
In the picture at this page, Kolekole pass is about 1/3 from the left edge of the picture, the slight notch in the line of mountains.
Anyhow, after showing one's valid military ID at the checkpoint at the top of the pass, there's a beautiful overlook of the Waianae Valley, then assorted switchbacks as you rapidly lose altitude. Then comes the interesting part...
There's tall chainlink fencing along both sides of the road (I think it was topped with barbed wire, too). There are stern signs that say "Absolutely No Stopping, So Don't Even Think About It" (I'm paraphrasing). And there are bunkers. Many, many, many bunkers. The ones I could see from the road were above-ground, with huge steel doors and a roof totally covered with a thick layer of earth, making them look like little hills. The warning signs at the gates to each of them were interesting, featuring a generic soldier-person wearing a big chemical-protective suit.
And the most interesting signs, in my estimation, were the ones which accompanied some of the ubiquitous chemical-suit-wearing-person signs and indicated "if this stuff catches on fire, DO NOT attempt to put it out with water - it'll only make the situation worse". I have no idea what kinds of chemicals those are, but they sound nasty. The picture on the sign showed a fire with a water bucket being emptied onto the fire, with a large international "NO" bar crossing the whole thing. Quite an elegant little feat of semiotics, I think.
In one of the areas, there were a handful of emaciated horses. I have no idea how they got there, how long they'd been there, or why they were emaciated, but it bothered me every time I saw them - who was supposed to take care of
them? What the hell were they doing at a military weapon storage facility? Did anyone even know they were there?
While I was still living in Hawaii, I remember someone mentioning to me that there were nukes stored at Lualualei, but I have no idea if that's true. Apparently this page was written by people who know exactly what type & how many.
All I know is that it's a beautiful valley, and even if someday by some miracle the military moved out of it, it would still be too dangerous to visit, probably.
This valley, which is on the dry (leeward) side of Oahu, is subject to raging brushfires when the rainfall has been particularly low. I found this article about a fire at Lualualei, which the National Guard helped to fight. I sure hope those bunkers are fireproof - the article mentions helicopters dropping water on the blazes. I don't want to think what would happen if a brush fire managed to ignite some of those chemicals marked by the special signs I mentioned above.
Yuck.
--Beth
Yuck indeed! Sounds like whatever is stored in those bunkers, it's pretty nasty stuff, and hence probably not good to include in meatloaf surprise.

Blab. A reader and avid follower of the cursed life of Bob the Sock Puppet writes:
Bob made an appearance in an etrade ad during the SuperBowl - check out adcritic.com (it's the one called "E-trade: dotcom graveyard".
You know, we thought we saw that, and here it is (note: 2MB)! Poor Bob. Love the chimp, though.
Our favorite Super Bowl ad, though, was What Are You Doing? (note: 2MB), a white-guy (sorry - multi-cultural) version of Whazzup? Very, very funny.

Blab. A reader who may be even less connected with popular culture that we are asks:
Super Bowl or Superb Owl?
Perhaps we shall never know.

Plop. I got one of those new gold dollar coins in change the other day. Oops. Did I say "gold dollar"? The U.S. Mint calls them "golden dollars". That's because they actually contain no gold whatsoever.
With the new Golden Dollar, the alloy layers on each side of the [copper] core are manganese brass, a golden-colored material composed of 77% copper, 12% zinc, 7% manganese, and 4% nickel.
Taking account of the copper core, the overall composition of the new Golden Dollar is 88.5% copper, 6.0% zinc, 3.5 % manganese, and 2.0% nickel.
And 0% gold.
It's much like McDonald's chocolate flavored shake, which contains no chocolate.

Yow. From some political wag on TV yesterday, a possibly new Helenism!
Outside the pale

Outside the mainstream

Beyond the pale

Curiously, Google shows 2,090 hits for outside the pale (as well as 30,800 for beyond the pale). We always thought that beyond the pale was the correct phrase. Now we're beginning to wonder! If one of our loyal and wise readers knows the answer, please enlighten us. And what is the derivation of this odd phrase anyhow?

Plurp.
In an abandoned
bunker in south-west
Colorado, in back of seventeen large
boxes labeled VX
was the blue dog.

Monday, January 29, 2001
Blab. A reader, sifting through the dusty archives of Plurp, asks what is probably the oddest questions we've ever been asked.
You have an article on the Mcintosh 1058 Polysine. Do you collect them or know who does? I have one I am trying to restore and sell.
Naturally, we here at Plurp simply record these moments of social synchronicity. If, however, any of our electrically-inclined readers has either restoration instructions for a McIntosh 1058 Polysine, or a place in their house that cries out for one, please do let us know and we will endeavor to hook the two of you together. (All puns intended. Thank you.)

Blab. A reader, perhaps reacting to the fascination of our government with ever more horrific ways of killing people, writes:
I guess they are also not anti-viral...
Indeed! I think there are a lot of people in the various governments of the world, and the one in the U.S. in particular, who like viruses a lot. Not just dumb rhinoviruses, mind you, but the really juicy ones: hemorraghic fevers, viral encephalitis - the most frightening things in nature.
Working, as I do, on technology, there's always the capacity for what you're doing being used for good, and the capacity that it will be used for evil. All my life, I've been very conscious of this, and very conscious that I can choose to work on things that seem, on balance, to be life-enhancing or seem, on balance, to be life-destroying.
As I was finishing up grad school in physics, a guy came to our department to give a seminar, trying to get us to come and work with him. His seminar was on the physics of matter at extremely high pressures (much higher than anything found on Earth) and extremely high temperatures (again).
Cool, I said. It's a really complicated system for which the usual theories and approximations don't work at all, requiring a fundamentally new way of thinking.
After the seminar, I started wondering why he was interested in that particular regime of physics. Who, after all, really cares about physics at extremely high pressures and temperatures? Then I remembered where he worked: Lawrence Livermore Labs.
You may not know them, but these are the folks who design bombs. Well, they call them devices, because it frightens them to think of what they actually do. Nuclear devices. Those nightmarish things that can kill millions of people in a fraction of a second and that, collectively, can annihilate everything that we typically think of as life on this planet.
Extremely high pressures and temperatures. Yeah. Just before the end of the world.
In case you haven't guessed, I didn't go to work for them.

Blab. A reader with uncommon knowledge writes:
In Re: Chemical Weapons Depots. Johnston Island, Of course. http://deseret.sbccom.army.mil/ leads you to this. But, it is common knowledge, isn't it? - DWL
That's a pretty scary list of chemical weapons on the cited page! And as our uncommon reader notes, Johnston Atoll, in the Pacific, is the ninth site at which these incredibly dangerous stuff was stored. The Army claims that they destroyed all of the bad stuff at Johnston Atoll last month. The last such stuff was "13,000 land mines filled with nerve agent VX". Those would sure be fun things to have left in the fields around your town after the end of some conflict or other, wouldn't they?

Blab. A reader forecasts the future.
Dave will tell you who Chuck Carroll is.
We'll see!

Blab. A reader focuses on the interesting part of that sports thing last night.
My brother and I both felt that this year's superbowl commercials, like last year's, were subpar. Will we have to remember 1999 as the last year there were truly good superbowl commercials?
We were surprised that

IBM advertised on the Super Bowl for the first time ever, and

They used an old commercial. A good one, but it wasn't new.

Plop. Did you say you were sleeping well at night?
Army detonates nerve gas bomblet found in Colorado
Army workers detonated a Cold War-era bomblet Sunday and began neutralizing the deadly sarin nerve gas it contained.
In coming weeks, the Army will detonate five more grapefruit-sized sarin bomblets found during efforts to convert the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal to a wildlife refuge.
The Army and state officials agreed detonating the bomblets in a steel chamber and neutralizing the gas with a caustic solution would safely prevent environmental contamination or health threats.
Sarin kills by attacking the nervous system, paralyzing vital organs. Each bomblet holds 1.3 pounds of gas and is capable of killing people within 900 feet. A sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995 killed 12 people.
The bomblets were manufactured at the arsenal northeast of Denver from 1953 to 1957. Nature tours at the 27-square mile prairie were suspended in October after sarin was confirmed in the first bomblet.
It's sure a good thing they knew where all of the "bomblets" were for the past four decades.
What? They didn't? Oh.
But don't worry. We're absolutely, positively sure that the U.S. Army knows the exact location of absolutely all of the other incredibly deadly chemical weapons that they made. And the even more deadly biological weapons.
Don't they?

Plurp. Helen brought home several videos last weekend for the entertainment of virus-infested Steve. I'm too tired to write real reviews of them, so you'll have to make do with one-liners.

Patriot: Braveheart all over again, but Mel gets to kill the bad guy.

Gladiator: The guy who shoulda been Caesar gets captured and taken to die in the Coliseum while Caesar looks on, ending up killing him instead; yawn.

Erin Brockovich: Buxom single parent uncovers PSG&E doing bad things, makes them pay, gets rich in the process in a folksy sort of way; Helen liked it and she hates what's-her-name.

The Art of War: Spies, gadgets, things that go boom; pretty good guy movie in spite of gratuitous references to Sun Tzu.

Rant. Why is it focusing rather than focussing? Focusing should be pronounced foh-kyoo-zing. It just ain't right.

Plurp. Last night, we watched one of those sports things in which people are (or become) Number One. There are a number of things which confused us about it, many of which were said by people called sports commentators. Perhaps our kind and wise readers can enlighten us.

"They gotta play the same game the Ravens are." Aside from the various grammatical problems, it's a little hard for us to understand this as a point that needed to be made. It seems obvious to us that, if one team played hockey while the other played hop-scotch, that wouldn't work out well. Isn't it?

"If I didn't know better, the Ravens are picking on that receiver." Uh...?

There a blimp called the Budweiser.com Blimp. Dot com? Don't they make, like, beer?

"This team knows the game's not over!" Well, OK, but again we have a hard time understanding the significance of this. After all, they have these big clocks and everything. There are noisy buzzers that go off when things are over. It's great that the participants realize that the game they're playing is still going on. But...?

"Special teams has done its work." We can chalk this up to grammatical ignorance, and that would be fine. But it seems to require at least two grammatical corrections to make sense out of it, no matter which way you go. That seems like a lot to us.

"If you didn't get a chance to win it, it takes some of the sting out of the fact that you're gonna lose." We tried for some time to make sense of this and failed. Readers?

"Thanks, Jim, and I just gotta say that if you face adversity, and if you do your best, this is what comes out the other end." You know, we often feel that way ourselves.

Yow. Probably the greatest rant ever written on the Super Bowl was just written by Lileks as his 01.29.01 edition of The Bleat. Go read it right now. It's fabulous beyond belief.

Yak. From TV last night.
Commentator: Police snipers. Every community in America wants one. Why?
Guest: There are people ... who need ... to be shot.
While we do have our own private list, we wonder who's making theirs.

Yow. Bovine Inversus has instructions for making an origami image of his cat George. Gotta love it!

Plurp.
The blue dog is
what came out the
other end.

Sunday, January 28, 2001
Blab. A reader concerned about our sudden loyalty to viruses writes:
and I thought you were anti-viral
All things change, dear reader. All things change.

Blab. Seeing our distress at our dying computer, a reader transmits an enigmatic message.
Nellie is a nice girl, but Hannah is a horrible prude!
Who, praytell, is Hannah?

Plop. Feminism: Mask for Marxism.
[U]nder the banner of Feminism, Marxism and Socialism are being imposed on the American people. And not only that, but Feminism and the culture that has replaced the American culture that we once had, is a paradigm. And because men are so socialized to protect women from things that are offensive, and to give them good things -- that no one speaks against it.
You hadn't heard that? Must be 'cause you don't listen to Radio Free America. At least, as transcribed by those colorful people at Conspiracy Nation.

Plop. Those fun folks at the U.S. Air Force are thinking ahead again. This is apparently a report about how the Air Force might operate in 2025. Extra fun parts of the report speculate on microchips implanted in humans that hook them up to military systems through neural links.
Ethical and Public Relations Issues. Implanting "things" in people raises ethical and public relations issues. While these concerns may be founded on today's thinking, in 2025 they may not be as alarming. ... The civilian populace will likely accept ... implanted microscopic chips that allow military members to defend vital national interests. Further, the US military will continue to be a volunteer force that will freely accept the chip because it is a tool to control technology and not as a tool to control the human.
Ah. That's reassuring.
In a later section on countermeasures, we learn more fun stuff.
Internal Deactivation
If captured by the enemy, users with the implanted microscopic chip may self-deactivate the chip and render it useless. Further, the chip disintegrates and cannot be extracted by the enemy for reverse engineering or for adversarial reasons.
External Deactivation
When faced with the disturbing events of espionage and defections of friendly users to the enemy side, the IIC is engineered with the capability to deactivate and disintegrate the offender's implanted chips. The highest level commanders within the US military have the authority to access the IIC and order the system to deactivate the defectors' chips the next time they try to activate the Cyber Situation.
Now let's see. This chip is connected directly to my optical and auditory pathways so I can see the Cyber Situation. It is connected to my motor pathways so I can respond. "Disintegrating" such an implanted chip would be ... well golly, that would be bad, wouldn't it? And it can be done by remote control?
Some people might view that as a "tool to control the human". Ya know?

Plop. And if all of that still has you sleeping well at night, you may be interested in this comprehensive 1996 book, courtesy of the U.S. Army.

Textbook of Military Medicine
Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare

Chapter 1: Overview: Defense Against the Effects of Chemical and Biological Warfare Agents
Chapter 2: History of Chemical and Biological Warfare: An American Perspective
Chapter 3: Historical Aspects of Medical Defense Against Chemical Warfare
Chapter 4: The Chemical Warfare Threat and the Military Healthcare Provider
Chapter 5: Nerve Agents
Chapter 6: Pretreatment for Nerve Agent Exposure
Chapter 7: Vesicants
Chapter 8: Long Term Health Effects of Nerve Agents and Mustard
Chapter 9: Toxic Inhalation Injury
Chapter 10: Cyanide Poisoning
Chapter 11: Incapacitating Agents
Chapter 12: Riot Control Agents
Chapter 13: Field Management of Chemical Casualties
Chapter 14: Triage of Chemical Casualties
Chapter 15: Decontamination
Chapter 16: Chemical Defense Equipment
Chapter 17: Healthcare and the Chemical Surety Mission
Chapter 20: Use of Biological Weapons
Chapter 21: The Biological Warfare Threat
Chapter 22: Anthrax
Chapter 23: Plague
Chapter 24: Tularemia
Chapter 25: Brucellosis
Chapter 26: Q Fever
Chapter 27: Smallpox
Chapter 28: Viral Encephalidities
Chapter 29: Viral Hemorraghic Fevers
Chapter 30: Defense Against Toxin Weapons
Chapter 31: Staphylococcal Enterotoxin B and Related Pyrogenic Toxins
Chapter 32: Ricin Toxin
Chapter 33: Botulinum Toxins
Chapter 34: Trichothecene Mycotoxins
Chapter 35: Medical Challenges in Chemical and Biological Defense for the 21st Century
If this looks like too much to read on your lunch hour, just browse Chapter 1 and Chapter 35. Or, if you're just into horror read, oh, Chapter 22. These folks sure know a lot about some very nasty stuff. I wonder how they found out so much.

Plop. You don't live near one of the U.S. Army's aging stockpiles of chemical weapons, do you? That's good, 'cause some of these extremely deadly chemical weapons are still attached to their delivery systems (e.g. missiles), which may become unstable with age and, well, go boom.
Oh, you thought they were all destroyed in the 1970's? Yeah, that was the original directive. But they keep putting it off, currently until 2004. Busy with other, more important stuff, I guess. And what's the difference between a Depot and an Activity? They don't say.

They do say they still have millions of chemical weapons at nine sites. Their little map only shows eight. Hmm. I wonder where that ninth one is?
Sleep tight.

Plop. Curiously, I can't seem to find equivalent Web information on storage or disposal of biological weapons. Now that could be because:

I'm really lousy at this Web search stuff.

There never were any biological weapons in the U.S.

The military got rid of all of their biological weapons already.

There are still stockpiles of biological weapons in the U.S., maybe really huge stockpiles, but the military is a little shy about saying so.

I'd actually like to think that (2) is the right answer, since the idea that the U.S. would develop such a horror is really awful. I'm going to have a hard time with this one, though, since the U.S. Department of State says that in 1969 the "Department of Defense was ordered to draw up a plan for the disposal of existing stocks of biological agents and weapons." Oh well.
So I'm pretty sure that (3) is the right answer. Indeed, according to USAMRIID's History of Biological Warfare, "Total destruction of antipersonnel [biological weapon] agent stocks and munitions were accomplished between 10 May 1971 and 1 May 1972." Pretty fast, too, as one of the big reasons for the over 30 year delay in destroying chemical weapons is safety of both transport and destruction, and you have to believe that biological weapons are much, much worse. And then there's that curious word antipersonnel, with no mention of anti-crop or anti-material agents, though those were clearly in development too.
Or should we Ask The Audience?

Plurp.
The blue dog
... grrhkk
... ghzzrll
...

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