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2001.02.25 : 2001.03.03
Saturday, March 3, 2001
Blab. A particularly astute reader writes:
Don't you think that by keeping
a Web log you might be tempting otherwise innocent and seemly folks to
walk out into the night with their hair coated with cheese, singing in
high voices (like Dionne) "We are little lost sheep who have gone astray,
baa baa baa", while at the same time knowing that, absent some amazing
stroke of luck, it would prove pointless in the end? (We are poor little
lambs who have lost our way, baa, baa, baa.)
Yes. Now who moved my cheese? ("Moved my cheese.")
Blab. On the subject of laser weapons and the Beast With No Name,
an adoring reader writes:
---
running from them in abject fear and hiding under the bed -----
Steve,
Actually, Christopher is SO clever
that he hides on TOP of the bed knowing that anyone, when searching for
a kitty, would always look UNDER the bed..........He's a smart boy!
Helen
No wonder we haven't been able to find him. Devious little cuss.
Blab. A recent blog contribution genre has sprung unbidden from
the Dark Reaches.
We love to hear from visitors
to our site, and we offer you several ways to contact us. If your browser
is properly configured, you can click on Mail in the left margin of every
page. If you're in Plurp (our weblog, and please do read it), you can type
into the little Blab box in the left margin. Or you can come here and type
into this really Big Blab Box.
This is going to be hard to follow, so hold on tight.
Traditional blog contributions take one of two forms. They are either
simple text, or links to something the contributor thinks is interesting.
Sometimes both.
Recently, however, we're noticed readers of Plurp and other blogs
sending simple text that is an inverse link. It's not a link per
se; you can't click on it. Rather, it is text copied from a page to which
the contributor wishes to draw attention. The trick is to find the page
via Google or some such.
The above case is a jewel of self-reference, taken from, referring to
and entered into our own Big Blab
Box.
Yo. Caloo! Calay! It's Mispelling Day. And this time, we have
a tale to tell.
Yesterday, friend David sauntered into our office and asked What's
a "relection"? We knew immediately that there was a problem.
You see, this week, we changed the subtitle of Plurp, though
we suspect that David is the only one who noticed. And, silly us, we misspelled
it. David, kind soul that he is, decided to tell us on the sly rather than
embarrassing us with a Blab on the topic.
Turns out that some 2,200
other folks out there also misspelled reflection in this same
way. So at least we're not alone!
(Just to compare, 5,200
used refection and 759
used relfection. Over 1.3M
used reflection, which is presumably a real word in some language.)
Yow. It's an AYBABTU-o-rama!
Some are really good. (synthetic
zero)
Plurp. Sitting in a stuffed auditorium at work yesterday, listening
to an IBM Research executive give a talk on The Future, I looked up (from
my weblog, of course) to see this bullet on the slide.
Now I know what you're thinking. But it's not about me. (I'm pretty sure.)
It seems to be about managing slack. Look here
for more information.
Rant. I bet nobody clicked on that last link. Pity. It was funny.
But now you missed it. Too late. Don't bother. The moment has passed.
Plurp. Also from that same talk:
-
Note: the high cost is not due purely
to stupidity.
... but we're sure those rogue costs will be factored out soon.
Rant. No, there are no links in that last entry. Look - ya don't
click on 'em anyway, so what's the point?
Yow. Oh dear. Lileks
is at it again. This time it's Interior
Desecrators, a magnificent visual diatribe against the really bad interior
design of the 1970's. Having just completed our own massive interior design
project, the mere thought makes us bilious, but you might enjoy it.
Warning: As usual with Lileks' stuff, do not read this in places
where you must avoid laughing, such as business meetings or church. Unless
you like it when people look at you disparagingly. (We do.)
(And, honestly, we find this stuff so mind-wrentchingly funny that we
cannot read it at all unless we're very sure we're comfortable with having
tears stream down our face, turning purple, and wheezing uncontrollably.
Your mileage may vary. But I doubt it.)
Yow. I know I shouldn't, but I can't resist.
Yow. From the universally famous Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest.
The sun oozed over the horizon,
shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers,
pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand
at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden
amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the toad's deception,
screaming madly, "You lied!"
Yep. That's bad. Great image, though.
 Yo.
Further evidence of alien infiltration.
What the heck is that?
Yow. 'Bout time! Flat panel TVs in a sensible
size: bigger than your ear (handheld LCD TVs) and smaller than a barn
door (flat-panel plasma wall TVs). Now if we only had a few thousand bucks
to spare on new tech.
Yo. If you hate Survivor II, or just want to know what's
going to happen ahead of time, check out SurvivorSucks.
 Plurp.
The blue dog was
not due
purely to stupidity.
Friday, March 2, 2001
Blab. Flogged by our suggestion that we keep lists
for God of people who should not die and people who should take their
place instead, a reader takes on the Big Issues.
I like your idea, but I fear
that it's possible that the world we see these days may be the unfortunate
result of someone attempting to make a deal with God as you suggested.
But God, being a cretinous bastard (*), decided it would be funny to kill
twice as many people from the "keepers" list (often in a manner which inflicted
extra, particularly unnecessary suffering), and let the people who deserve
to be run over by a speeding bus live so they can continue to make the
rest of us miserable.
* This is just one interpretation
of this purported "God" person's personality, often held by those who wonder
why He doesn't do more to alleviate suffering, if he supposedly cares about
us, His children, at all. That is, if He even exists in this form outside
the confines of human imagination.
-The Eternal Cynic
Our theory is that God smiles more on those who contribute to Plurp.
You may think this is a parochial theory, but it works for us.
Blab. An ambiguous reader writes:
Dogs love it!
Birds chase it!
Great for training!
Reptiles are intrigued
Drives cats wild!
Fish are attracted to it!
Makes a great gift!
-- Sputum --
Now is this a takeoff on the packaging of our recently acquired cat toy
(about which more later), suggesting that the same marketing messages could
be used for sputum? Or is it a reverential regurgitation of these messages,
sans
context, by a person named J. Fred Sputum?
We may never know.
Blab. Driven mad by our observation that landscape
features have body parts, a reader gibbers.
Potatoes have eyes.
Little pitchers have big ears. Corn has ears. Bread has noses.
My dog has fleas. Boxes of matches have tiny little spleens.
Love is blind. The man behind the curtain has a pocketful of swamp.
Somewhere, veiled by the fires, there is a parkinglot with unspoken fears.
Adultery has fingernails. Tipper Gore has mucous membranes.
And last summer we all learned that air has obsessions. Here at Camp
Marleybone.
Though we must admit abject admiration for the reader's ability to create
such psychotic verbiage at will.
Blab. Plurp's own taskmaster writes:
Assigned activity # 67: Stop
thinking dangerous thoughts.
Mai non, mon ami. We are paid a great deal of money to think dangerous
thoughts!
Blab. Having thought a lot about the medium, a reader issues
this message.
The thing about the Internet
today is, it's become so easy to call yourself an artist that it's become
extremely difficult to call yourself an artist.
We love the plasticity of this statement. Regard in wonder its invariance
under transformations of the word artist to designer, writer
or digiteratus.
Blab. A reader sends us a wonderful puzzle.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595094724/
As should be obvious, this is a link to the famous How to Good-Bye Depression:
If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?
by Hiroyuki Nishigaki.
Now the puzzle is: What does this have in common with Plurp?
And no, it's not that. Readers are encourage to ponder this and submit
their answers in that jangly little Blab box.
Blab. A reader, overcome by guilt from our random rant the other
day, submits the following rationalizations.
I'll rant when I'm good and
ready too. The only reason I didn't hit the send button was
I couldn't get my thoughts together enough to give you something worth
reading. That and the phone kept ringing.
But, don't worry. I'm picking
up new doses of my meds on the way home and will return . . . someday.
We are always relieved to hear that one of our readers is back on his meds.
We encourage other readers to do likewise.
Blab. A reader helps out the overall Plurp community by
finding the previously-missing letter d.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3218/gaymuppet.html
Our heartfelt thanks.
Blab. A reader overwhelmed by our
graphical prowess writes:
...And how'd you get the
word 'Succumb' to waver like that?
While we cannot reveal all of our technical secrets, we can say that
this was a significant scientific achievement. Complex mathematical transformations
were employed. An overnight run on an SP-2 supercomputer was necessary.
Patents have been filed.
 Blab.
A reader well trained in managerial etiquette supplicates himself thusly.
Well, Your Godlike Masterfulness,
Sir -- if I can't have an IBM T210 display, can I _at_least_ have one of
these?
Come on, help me out here!
We shall certainly consider your politely worded request. In the meantime,
we have ordered one of these lovely Wyse monochrome
monitors for you.
You're welcome.
Yo. The Pentagon has developed a "non-lethal" Star-Trek-like
pain beam.
The weapon is designed to
stop people by firing millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy in a beam
that quickly heats up the surface of the victim's skin. Within seconds
the person feels pain that officials said is similar to touching a hot
light bulb.
A prototype of the weapon will be
tested on goats and humans at Kirtland in the next few months.
The Marine Corps plans to mount the
microwave weapon on top of Humvees, the Jeep-like vehicles used by both
the Marines and the Army. Later it might be used on aircraft and ships.
Apocryphally, the Pentagon calls this "active denial technology."
Yo. You know, we would take out an insurance
policy against alien abduction. Really we would. Except that we really
do
want to be abducted by aliens. (memepool)
Yow. Ever see a sonic
boom? Cool. (memepool)
Plurp.
The blue dog
always wanted to
be monochrome.
Thursday, March 1, 2001
Blab. A correspondent corresponds:
A very nice and unusually
complete listing of
creationist arguments, and appropriate counter-arguments. (I've been
dismayed by the recent publicity for "Intelligent Design Theory", particularly
the compete lack of understanding of information theory.)
I honestly didn't know that speciation
has been observed in the wild and in the laboratory.
Wow! This is a comprehensive, well-researched and well-reasoned resource.
We are very impressed.
Blab. That same correspondent doubles his fun with:
How
to decrypt a DVD: in haiku form.
An astonishing treatise, to be sure!
Muse! When we learned
to
count, little did we know all
the things we could do
(Well, OK, it's Haiku in the limited sense that it is in a 5-7-5 syllabic
form. It doesn't embody the classic surprising synthesis of Haiku, except
perhaps in the large. Astonishing nonetheless.)
Blab. That reader fascinated with trying to dictate the details
of our daily life finally comes up with a good one.
Assigned activity # 29: Construct
a device that demonstrates Galvanic response in small mammals.
We surmise from the careful wording of this demand that we must also use
the device on small mammals. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.
Blab. In the midst of a continuing flurry of submissions, our
Massachusetts correspondent turns suddenly stubborn.
Oops - where di it go?
As I was saying, I refuse to believe the Blue Dog had no insides --- but
as a precaution, we've instructed the theaters that you may not be admitted
to see Hannibal again this week. MAVA
We are not aware of the whereabouts of your missing d.
We also regret that we have not yet seen Hannibal at all. The
spirit has been willing, but the flesh weak.
Blab. Referring to our infinitely clever idea from yesterday
of keeping two lists - people who shouldn't have to die and people who
should be reaped instead - a reader writes:
And naturally The One Who
Keeps The Lists, must not be run over by a bus
It seems a small recompense for the onerous job of keeping the lists.
Blab. A reader romances us with lyrics from Country Toad.
Almost seven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah
River
Life is old there, older than TV,
Younger than the mountains, me and
my RC.
Ah - many pleasant memories there.
Blab. Miss Otis' social engagement bots informs us ...
Miss Otis regrets she's unable
to lunch today.
We'll miss her, but now there's more crumpets for us.
Plop. Sheesh. That earthquake
in Seattle really highlighted how lousy Web sites are. All of the Seattle
newspaper and TV sites were swamped. How dopey - news sites that can't
handle the hits when there's, uh, news.
CNN on television (remember television?) was apparently quite good though,
beaming video feeds from every bloody camera in the Northwest in continuous
coverage all day long. Hmph. Maybe there's something to this broadcast
stuff after all.
Yow. Wanna see little Billy Gates narrowly miss being smote
by Almighty God? You have to wonder what went through his mind.
 Rant.
Every video of the quake showed people standing around looking stupid.
One guy went up to a plate glass window and started snapping pictures.
Others looked up, confused, at the ceiling from which stuff was falling.
One candidate for the Darwin Awards made sure he grabbed his drink from
the bar before running outside where broken glass cascaded from above.
These people are really, really lucky that it was a subduction fault,
not a slip fault, and hence not a very big deal. There's a name for people
like this who stand around stupidly in a major quake. Rubble.
Yo. The USGS checks in with this
site mapping recent earthquakes.
Rant. It has recently come to our attention that a certain member
of the Plurp readership has almost sent us long, scathing
rants about whatever was randomly firing his few working neurons on this
day or that. We do not wish to complain about this per se. After
all, we spend most of our waking hours in deep concentration, our lips
puckered and tiny squint lines threatening to permanently crease our nose,
trying to string words together in patterns that will provoke some response
from you.
Something.
Anything.
Now we hear that a certain person (and you know who you are just
as well as we do, so stop looking over your shoulder as if to deflect the
guilt, the heavy wave of guilt, that washes over you) have indeed been
provoked. Ranting, we understand, at the acoustic ceiling in your pathetic
little office! Making your cubicle buds wonder if you went off your meds
again. And You Didn't Tell Us! That Blab box
just sits there, microsecond after unending microsecond, inside a gigantic
chromium cerebellum somewhere in New York State, its only purpose in existence
to breathe luminous, pixellated life into your psychotic rage by conveying
your words here.
So, dear friend, we encourage you to take the few minutes out of your
busy life that may be required - perhaps you can polish your snails tomorrow,
maybe you can write that anonymous hate mail to your boss in tiny, compulsive
block letters another time - to put into words those seething rivers of
dark thought and click that bloody Send button.
Thank you.
Plurp. We got a lovely present from friend Bill yesterday.
-
Dogs love it!
-
Birds chase it!
-
Great for training!
-
Reptiles are intrigued
-
Drives cats wild!
-
Fish are attracted to it!
-
Makes a great gift!
 At
least, that's what it says on the package. Oh - you want to know what it
is? Why, the MiracleBeamTM Laser
Pet Toy, of course. It's just a laser pointer in a pet-specific package,
of course, but it is reportedly irresistible to cats.
We'll see. So far, Him With Name Unfathomable reacts uniformly to all
cat toys, running from them in abject fear and hiding under the bed.
The other fun part is that we're pretty sure that laser pointers are
illegal in New York City. Something about the police running from them
in abject fear and hiding under the bed.
Plop. I was quoted yesterday in a USA Today article about a new
mathematical model of computer virus epidemiology. Either I was incoherent
or the reporter really wanted to write something other than what I said,
as she got it mostly wrong. Sigh.
Apologies to whichever of you it was whose several seconds of fame I
squandered on this.
Yow. Geek-o-rama! Kyocera announced the world's smallest, lightest
digital
camera.
The new
Finecam S3 ... [is] credit-card sized ... 30 millimeters deep ... 160
grams ... and packs a 3 megapixel CCD ... [It] also has a 2x optical zoom
lens.
If we wanted more stuff (which we most emphatically do not),
we might well be fondling a few handfuls of these little darlings in a
store near us.
Plurp. Woods have necks. More than one, in fact: your neck of
the woods, my neck of the woods. There are tree ears and wood ears. Wood
has eyes as well. Rivers have mouths. Roads have shoulders. Journeys have
legs. Craters have lips. Mountains have feet.
Isn't that odd?
Yak. From a recent conversation about the goal of artificial
intelligence.
Why aspire merely to humanity?
Plurp.
The blue dog is
brought to you today by
the missing letter
Wednesday, February 28, 2001
Blab. The Web is an amazing place. Really, it is. You
can find just about everything there. Why, you can see things on the Web
that you wouldn't even want to see in person, as illustrated by this reader's
contribution.
Friday
Shakedown!
I ask you: Who really wants to see some random high school student shaking
his booty to bad music? And not just once, either!
Blab. A reader displays the symptoms of acute technophilia.
"In a related space-saving
matter, IBM also announced Tuesday a 20.8-inch flat-panel display. The
T210
display, priced at about $6,000, will offer about 40 percent higher
resolution than other screens available on the market, said Tom Martin,
program director of flat-panel displays in IBM's PC division." Please,
Your Godlike Masterfulness, Sir -- can I have a T210?
Of course not. But we do appreciate being addressed properly.
Blab. Our Massachusetts correspondent, long feared to have been
abducted by aliens, checks in.
Yikes, I haven't responded
for so long, I couldn't find the Blab Box. I do understand the difference
between lie & lay - here's an example: The Blue Dog would have
lain around quite a lot, but you never let him lie down, here in Plurp.
Is he really a Blue Watch Dog who is on the lookout for Helenisms (and
Christopher)? MAVA
Yeah, that Blab box is ridiculously tiny, isn't it? Some day, we
will redesign our site to accommodate a somewhat more reasonably sized
Blab
box, among other things.
Thanks much for the wonderfully Plurpish grammar example. And
yes, the blue dog does watch things (though we're not sure what).
Blab. A reader who we once thought was long dead writes:
Outside of a dog, a book
is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to
read.
-- Groucho Marx
Groucho, you may recall, was one of the early architects of Communism.
Having grown up in the Previous Era, he still tends to think in terms of
old analog stuff. Books, for instance. Or dogs whose insides are dark.
Plurp. We watched, with obvious professional interest, the quasi-State-of-the-Union
speech by the Dubya-Bot last night. We were particularly fascinated
by this first large-scale, public test of MIT's new SpeechReader
technology.
It was disappointing that the script for the speech was such a dull,
eleventh-grade-English-composition
text, full of meaningless pablum and self-contradiction. Nevertheless,
the Dubya-Bot was impressive, pausing properly when the (apparently human,
apparently spontaneous) audience clapped or booed. A nice touch.
Granted, it was a limited application, far less difficult even than
a short interactive Turing test. And yet, because of the public attention
to the event, the pressure was on and the Dubya-Bot did quite well.
 There
were problems, of course. The upper lip was badly rendered the whole time,
a mere black slash in the otherwise plausible face. And the animators had
gone too far with the idiosyncratically random
motions of the head. At length, the sucking and bobbing motions became
positively distracting.
Pretty close, we thought, but no cigar. Still, we wondered
if anybody watching actually believed it was a real person.
Nah.
Plop. I see that Claude
Shannon, the father of information theory, died yesterday. And even
more tragically, and ironically, he died of Alzheimer's disease. This is
the kind of thing that just shouldn't be allowed to happen.
Hey - here's an idea. We could put together two lists. The first is
a list of people who shouldn't be allowed to die. People like Shannon.
The second is a list of people who deserve to be run over by a speeding
bus. Then we go to God and cut a deal.
OK, God, here's what we need
you to do. Every time you roll the dice and they indicate that you should
take the spirit of someone on the first list (the "keepers"), you take
someone from the second list instead.
See, God gets to keep the same flux of souls going to heaven and hell,
the essential randomness of the process is preserved, and the only change
from God's point of view is that there's a statistical bias in favor of
keeping cool people around longer.
I volunteer to keep the lists.
Plurp. At first we thought that the standards of cleanliness
had plummeted overnight, but it turned out to be Ash Wednesday. And that
means we missed Fireplace Tuesday altogether. Nuts!
Plurp.
The blue dog
was made of luminous
pixels, and
had no insides.
Tuesday, February 27, 2001
Blab. A reader seeking to avoid answering
our question about the usage of lay vs. lie (or something
like that) writes:
Steve, Steve Steve.
How can it be that you're so good about Googling for some things ("All
your base are belong to us") but then when it comes to lie
vs. lay you suddenly have a mental block against Google?
We do not know the answer to this question. But could someone please answer
the original one?
Blab. Fortunately, here's a more, uh, willing reader.
And just in time.
Sigh! It's almost simple.
"Lie" is intransitive, while "lay" is transitive. So you can lie
on the table, or lie down on the floor, or lie to your Gramma, but you
can't "lie the book on the floor". You can lay the mail on the endtable,
you can lay the mail carrier, you can even lay *yourself* ("now I lay me
down to sleep, I pray the Lord it won't rain sheep"), but you can't simply
lay down; you have to lay *it* down, or lie down.
It gets ugly in the past tense, unfortunately.
The past tense of "lie" (in the sense of "lie down", not "lie to Congress")
is "lay". This is a *completely different word* from the "lay" which
is the present tense of the transitive verb "to lay". This shows
why it's a bad idea to invent a language while high on mead, or fermented
rocks, or whatever it was back then.
The past participle of "to lie" is
"lain". So "I'm going to go lie down", "He went and lay down", "He's
just lain around all day". (Note that American English speakers never actually
use the past participle because it sounds dumb; "He's just been lying around
all day" is much more likely).
The past tense of "lay" is "laid".
"He laid the mail on the endtable", "Last night he dreamed he laid the
mail carrier". The past participle is *also* laid (another good reason
never to use past participles). "He's laid that mail carrier every
night for the last two weeks."
So it's lie/lay/lain, and lay/laid/laid.
And yes it's a very silly language, thank you very much.
For corroboration, see for instance
the end of "http://www.compu-diva.com/IvoryGates/grammar_bas.htm".
We thank our kind reader for such a clear and detailed exposition. We also
caution our more delicate readers against following that last URL; it is
also a clear and detailed exposition of several worthwhile grammatical
points, illustrated, so to speak, with examples that are rather inappropriate
in a business setting.
We have such well-read and naughty readers!
Blab. A particularly bold and skillful reader uses modern recombinant
DNA to create the literary offspring of Bill Shakespeare and Toaplan.
She should have chance to
survive hereafter; make your time for such a word. Tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow set up us the bomb from day to day for great justice of every
ZIG. And all your yesterdays are belong to dusty death. What,
what you say brief candle! Life's but a way to destruction, a how
are you gentlemen that struts and frets his hour upon the main screen then
is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury--we get signal nothing.
We are deeply envious of the lab technique thus demonstrated.
Blab. That reader who lusts after the mind control lasers writes:
Assigned activity # 71: Tell
three co-workers they are being watched.
Would that be the same three co-workers with which we were asked to use
the word glabrous? Hmm. Perhaps
only their glabrous parts are being watched?
Blab. A reader with a possible interest in tautologies writes:
Mia is MIA
... referring, no doubt, to a broken link to The
Mia Chronicles on yesterday's Plurp entry. Oops! It's fixed
now. Ironically, this self-referentially generates another entry in the
The
Mia Chronicles.
Blab. A student of Latinis Illigitimis writes:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diem nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut
lacreet dolore magna aliguam erat volutpat. Ut wisis enim ad minim veniam,
quis nostrud exerci tution ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip
ex ea commodo consequat. Duis te feugifacilisi. Duis autem dolor in hendrerit
in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat
nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit
praesent luptatum zzril delenit au gue duis dolore te feugat nulla facilisi.
Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci taion ullamcorper suscipit
lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex en commodo consequat.
We couldn't agree more. Or less. (That is hell on the spell-checker, though!)
BTW, fascinating pages not containing these words at all can be found
by following Google links for, say, nonummy
nibh or zzril
delenit. How is that?
Blab. A reader who should have remained anonymous directs our
overworked attention to this.
A Japanese company that fired
an employee because he did not greet his boss in the proper manner
was ordered on Tuesday... to pay $55,000 in back wages.
In Japanese society, with its emphasis
on traditional Confucianist forms of respect, manners are considered crucial.
However, Tokyo District Court judge
Masanori Suzuki said such a reason for dismissal "cannot be considered
acceptable in society and constitutes an abuse of the power to dismiss
an employee and is invalid."
We don't know what those folks in the Japan legal system are thinking,
but we can assure you that, here in the good old Ewess of Aye, mandatory
honorific titles for managers are alive and kicking. Our employees, for
instance, address us as Your Godlike Masterfulness, Sir, or there's
hell to pay.
Yow. Acme
Heart Maker. (beth)
   
Yow. Two new Helenisms,
both from Helen her own self. Yay!
Don't count the eggs in your
basket
-
Don't count your chickens before they
hatch
-
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Older than springtime
-
Older than dirt
-
Younger than springtime
Rant. Wanna see something really scary? The Stanford
Prison Experiment, in which psychology professors at a major U.S. university
imprison and degrade students in the name of science.
We can't decide which is scarier: what otherwise innocent students do
to each other in engineered authority situations, or the easy rationalizations
made by the experimenters for the many travesties they perpetrate. (dave)
After the nightly 10:00 P.M.
lights out "lock-up," prisoners were often forced to urinate or defecate
in a bucket that was left in their cell. On occasion the guards would not
allow prisoners to empty these buckets, and soon the prison began to smell
of urine and feces -- further adding to the degrading quality of the environment.
The next day, we held a visiting hour
for parents and friends. We were worried that when the parents saw the
state of our jail, they might insist on taking their sons home. To counter
this, we manipulated both the situation and the visitors by making the
prison environment seem pleasant and benign. We washed, shaved, and groomed
the prisoners, had them clean and polish their cells, fed them a big dinner,
played music on the intercom, and even had an attractive former Stanford
cheerleader greet the visitors at our registration desk.
...
[Our] plan [to counter a rumored breakout]
was to dismantle our jail after the visitors left, call in more guards,
chain the prisoners together, put bags over their heads, and transport
them to a fifth floor storage room.
...
I ended the study prematurely for
two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were
escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they
thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their
boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of
the prisoners.
Second, Christina Maslach, a recent
Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners,
strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet
run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other's
shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, "It's terrible what you are doing
to these boys!" Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she
was the only one who ever questioned its morality.
Oh all right, we've made up our mind. The experimenter is the scary
one, rationalizing, even to this day, what he did. And he's now a tenured
professor at Stanford.
But thank you, Christina,
for being human, especially in the midst of your vile, vile colleagues.
Yo.
Are you sure you want to
send 'ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US' to the Recycle Bin?
(with apologies to geegaw)
Plop. IBM
reinvents Xerox Dorado concept. D'oh!
Plurp.
Don't put all
your chickens in
the blue dog.
Monday, February 26, 2001
Blab. Something unleashed the floodgates of Blab
today, and we seem to be thoroughly drenched with reader input. Our first
entry is a lovely bit of nostalgia that we're sure you'll all enjoy.
Bring me fruit and bring
me wine, bring me Dr. Pepper!
This brings to mind those halcyon days before
permalinks when these very words were penned.
Bring me fruit and bring
me wine,
Bring me Dr.
Pepper.
I'm in Room
239
And I'd like a little supper.
Isn't that sweet?
Blab. A reader takes a quick break from spying on others to write:
<< The
people who look askance at cell phones users do not disdain conversation
in public with those physically present. >>
Perhaps it's because we love to eaves
drop on conversations and the cell phone doesn't allow us that activity
except for making up our own idea as to what is being said on the opposite
end.
Entirely possible! Do such eavesdroppers also get itchy when they are near
people talking on public phones?
Blab. A reader, perhaps contributing suggestions for our
experiment, writes:
Come here, little boy.
Look! If you give me a penny, I will make a funny face, and you can
draw a picture of me. Then you can take the funny picture inside
and show it to the class. And then people will like you!
Variations on this idea abound. We are all going to hell. Oh yes, most
assuredly.
Blab. A reader of a certain artistic temperament, a tattered
copy of Lorenzo's Delusions of Grandeur in his pocket, taps us on
the shoulder.
Excuse me, sir, you with
the clean white shirt. I will give you a quarter if you will lie
there on the street, on the rain-washed asphalt, under the barrel of my
giant "Creamer" steam-roller. I will take a photograph of you lying
there, and call it "Sic Semper Tyrannus", and the photograph will be hung
in a quiet gallery, and people will look at it and write about it in the
newspaper. And then Mia will have to notice me.
All right. This Mia stuff has gotten entirely out of hand. We are
thereby forced to open up a brand new set of twisty passages in our Stuff
section entitled, evocatively enough, The
Mia Chronicles. Readers are encourage to submit
Mia sightings for permanent public display.
Blab. A reader with limited resources but high ideals writes:
Kind-eyed woman in the brown
dress and the sensible red sedan with rust-spots on the door and an umbrella
in the back seat, I will give you a dollar to go to Albany, or five
dollars to go to Washington D.C., if you will take over running things.
Because, kind-eyed woman in brown, the people who are currently running
things, I'm afraid that these people, these people are idiots.
We would gladly contribute five dollars of our own to this worthy cause.
Blab. A reader
Dear Plurp Central:
On the page called http://www.stevewhite.org/log/PlurpBlabResponse.htm,
there's a link whose text is "Current Entry", but it doesn't point to anything
that exists. It is a Broken Link. Broken, broken, broken.
Naughty link. ("His boy Elroy")
Well, lookee there! There were, in fact, three such naughty links
on that page. That's very, very, very naughty, and they have been disciplined,
each in its own way. ("Daughter Judy")
Blab. A reader whose mind has been taken by the latest Web meme
writes:
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG
TO US!!
Oh, it's far too complicated to explain. Read this.
Also note that there are already over
1000 Google refs. Weird.
Blab. A reader whose mind has been taken by a rogue mutant of
that latest Web meme writes:
All your input box are belong
to us! Take off every Plurp!
What you say!!
Blab. A reader with a continuing fascination towards how we spend
our time writes:
Assigned activity # 421:
Ad lib.
We interpret this as meaning Post Plurp today. Done.
Plurp. Apropos of everybody's recent fascination with CSS
and its ever-so-tidy separation of content from presentation for the Web
(at only a slightly horrendous effort, of course), lunchtalk today stumbled
into other tightly-coupled pairs that we need desperately to separate in
future Web standards.
-
Subject and object
-
Foreground and background
-
Means and ends
-
Thoughts and deeds
-
Action and reaction
-
Cause and effect
-
Needle and haystack
-
Rhythm and blues
-
Heart and soul
-
Letter and spirit
-
Scotch and soda
-
Peanut butter and jelly
-
Chewing and swallowing
-
Sex and violence
-
Coming and going
-
Fools and their money
-
Facticity and transcendence
We encourage all Web designers to start redesigning their sites now. Before
it is too late.
Plop. Lay or lie? I'm so confused! Can anyone explain when to
use one and when the other? Laid? Layed? Lain?
Plurp.
All your
blue dog
belong to us!!
Sunday, February 25, 2001
Blab. A reader who seems rather persistent in dictating
our weekend activities writes:
Assigned activity # 83: Eat
raw meat.
Does sushi count? If so, count us in! Otherwise, we admit to being less
enthusiastic.
Blab. Under the heading They Have Landed, a reader points
us to:
A
Visit from... Mr. Winkle!
This is, indeed, very odd. And it worries us. Helen, an expert on such
things, says the tongue cannot be real. What do you think?
Particularly damning evidence can be found in this
video. Frightening! Especially that tongue thing.
Blab. In the spirit of our rant about people who insist on writing
Christmas
carols with badly rhyming lines, a reader writes:
By thee may I strongly live,
Bravely bear, and nobly strive
from a hymn by Samuel Longfellow,
1864
While this has the benefit of being funny no matter which way you try to
make it rhyme, we would be forced to admit it's a stretch.
Indeed, this is from Holy
Spirit, Truth Divine, in which we also find the jarring pair divine
/ reign.
An off day for Sam, I guess.
Blab. A reader contributes a truly amazing site:
CheesyJesus.com:
Truly God Awful Stuff
Where do you people find this stuff? It's hard to know where to
begin with this one; there are so many possibilities. Oh gosh, since
it's Sunday, it just might be that a properly rounded distaste of this
site can only come from multiple examples. (Though there is much, much
more on the site itself.)
 St.
Clare, Patron Saint of TV
St. Clare had a vision of a church
service on her bedroom wall, and for this miracle, Pope Pius the XII declared
her the patron saint of television in 1958. Made of plastic with painted
features. Glows in the dark for late-night TV protection.
Price: $ 3.95
Testamints
Each tasty Testamint comes wrapped
in a verse of Scripture, so you can save your soul while freshening your
breath. Sold in a box of 144; three assorted flavors per box: wintergreen,
peppermint, and spearmint.
Price: $ 13.95
 Wash
Away Your Sins Bath Set
Easier than confession, less time-consuming
than doing penance, the Wash Away Your Sins soap leaves your bodyand soul
in a squeaky-clean state of grace. Fabulous graphics on the box make for
great bathroom decoration.
Price: $ 17.50
Yo. DisturbingAuctions.com.
Just like it says. Do look. Really. (geekish)
Especially worth the click:
Plurp. We are in our apartment elevator, on our way to go shopping.
A shortish woman in her sixties gets on. We exchange monosyllabic pleasantries.
At a lower floor, a beefy younger man gets on, taking out his cell phone
as the doors close. He dials a number and speaks into it quietly. Hi
... How's it going? ... Uh-huh ...
The elevator arrives at the ground floor and the doors open. As we get
out the woman pulls us aside and says, sotto voce, Isn't that the stupidest
thing you've ever seen?
We detect a generational divide here, one that is still forming. Younger
people think absolutely nothing of talking on cell phones in public - in
an elevator, on a bus, walking down the street. Others, usually older people,
whom we rather suspect are not fond of cell phones in the first place,
regard these people with disdain, as if they were chewing with their mouths
open or spitting on the sidewalk.
The people who look askance at cell phones users do not disdain conversation
in public with those physically present. Some of them may even be those
people who seem always to sit behind us in movie theaters, talking incessantly
through the film to their seat mates.
It seems that a new form of social interaction comes with cell phones,
and this makes some people uncomfortable. We saw the same kind of disdain
when boom boxes were the big thing. People would have serious confrontations
over the style and volume of music people played in public. There was a
similar disdain, though more subdued, towards people who swayed to the
music of their Walkman as they walked or sat in public. Knowing looks.
Rolling eyes.
Was it the same when television swept the nation? Did the older generation
look on in amazement at the young, hypnotized as we were with the glowing,
moving images? Was it similar with radio, as people sat huddled around
the large wooden cabinets, straining to listen to the grainy voices and
tinny notes? And the original telephones, as people bent, shouting at those
odd boxes on the wall?
But cell phones are just the first wave of a much larger change. Soon,
wireless devices will be capable of keeping us constantly connected, both
aurally and visually. We will walk down the streets not only talking but
gesturing at people - and things - that those around us will not be able
to see or hear. We will live partly in the world of atoms and partly in
the world of bits, partly in the community of those around us and partly
in the community of our friends and colleagues around the planet. All the
time, if we want to.
What will the short woman from the elevator think then?
Yo. Who says patents aren't useful? How else would you have figured
out how
to keep that severed head alive?
This invention involves a
device, referred to herein as a "cabinet," which provides physical and
biochemical support for an animal's head which has been "discorporated"
(i.e., severed from its body).
Chet Fleming, the inventor, assigned this important invention to Dis Corp.
which, unfortunately for them, did not pay the patent maintenance fees.
So the really good news is that this patent has expired, and all of you
budding young Frankensteins can use this technique royalty-free!
Dis Corporation. Get
it?
Yo. Today's award for Obscure Explanatory Message goes
to Lotus WordPro for the following:
Insert a new Comic Chat Room
object into your document
We dare not actually click on it to find out what it does. Readers are
invited to speculate, using that deliriously comic Blab box.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
never in
corporated.
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