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2001.03.18 : 2001.03.24

Saturday, March 24, 2001

Blab. A reader decodes the Secret of Match Rockets.

The matches..........sounds like MIR.  That's all the Russians could afford!

That would explain the fiery explosion on Mir in 1997. It was the spare matches.

Blab. A reader tries to cheer up our disease tromping world traveler.

--When the Internet is ravaged with viruses and all the computers come up blank -- make sure you're not on British Airways!--

Hey, you were lucky!  Most airlines in the US would just cancel everything and blame the weather so they wouldn't have to foot the bill for your hotel or meals!  You also wouldn't have to sit next to your SCREAMING two year old on your flight unless you spoke up. SHHHHHHHHH!

There. Now don't you feel better?

Blab. On the topic of those nudniks at Taco Bell putting a target out in the Pacific for Mir, a reader writes:

-- We wonder who from Taco Bell was out there watching it to see if Mir hit it. -- 

I was! I was!  I got hit on my head!  Now I want my TACO!

The frightening thing is that this fits the profiles of almost all of our readers.

Blab. A reader somewhat confused on the concept writes:

Mir didn't land on a Taco Bell? And here I was hoping for a free Krispy Kreme...

See? If it had landed on your head, you could have had a free Krispy Kreme. At least a virtual one. Bits for hits.

Blab. In regards to our Tupperware explosion and resulting moo shu jacket, moo shu lunch bag and moo shu briefcase, the God of Tupperware writes:

You poor puppy!  I am soooooooo sorry I screwed up your lunch.  And your coat.  And your....day!  I will have to pay......and pay....and pay.......

Who ever heard of a contritious god? It's such an odd idea.

Blab. A reader consumed with what other people are typing writes:

Found at goolo.com Search-Log:

2001-03-23 10:05:10 ***.dialup.optusnet.com.au
how to wrient English

2001-03-23 10:08:14 ***.dialup.optusnet.com.au
how to writeEnglish letter

2001-03-23 10:26:13 ***.dialup.optusnet.com.au
how to write different style English letter

2001-03-23 10:35:45 ***.dialup.optusnet.com.au
writing style

2001-03-23 10:44:13 ***.dialup.optusnet.com.au
russian hot baby
 

So why he (or she) didn't searched for "how to write russian"?

Well, we don't know. And what an odd site! It appears to be a Google rip-off (or franchisee, or something) run by people for whom English is not their native language. As it says on the Goolo site:

Many people are saying good by to the internet, at ZDnet you can read something about it, "". With goolo: we're trying to help you not to be bored. The first thing to 'fight' against it could be our RandomSearch, where you can see what other people are searching for and maybe you find something interesting.

We love the Web.

Plurp. And speaking of loving the Web, who would have guessed that there would be a page detailing Mass Killings Ordered, Committed or Approved by God, listing over a million folks who were Smote Big Time?

Plurp. Well lookee here. It's Mispelling Day and we have utterly no reader contributions on the topic. (Unless you count Goolo.) That's OK. Hakuna Matata, we say.

Hakuna Matata. Is that right? And what does it mean, anyhow? Let's ask Google, shall we?
 

Spelling	Google Hits
Hakuna Matata	14,500
Akuna Matata	310
Hacuna Matata	78
Ahkuna Matata	1
Hakuna Matada	160
Hakuna Matatah	5
Hakunah Matata	6

From this, we learn that all possible spellings of every possible word are already out there on the Web. 

HakunaMatata, by the way, is Swahili for (approximately) no problems. Or there is not perplexity. Depending upon context.

Yow. Geekish has a new layout. Very cool!

Plurp.

Whenever hearts are broken
You're the reason why.
I'll hold your hand in escrow, dear
'Cause your my boolah guy.

And with that stirring second verse, we think it qualifies for engraving in our Shower Songs section, even if we haven't gotten around to singing it in the shower just yet.

Plurp. Helen has an eating disorder, one that seems modestly common, but about which few people talk.

It's an obsessive-compulsive disorder. For example, when she eats french fries, she can only eat them in pairs, and then only when the two french fries are the same length. She'll hunt around for two french fries that are the same length, pick them up together between her thumb and index finger, and chew them into her mouth.

If there's only one french fry left, it languishes uneaten, unable to be paired. If someone reaches over and cruelly break one of her french fries in half, it too remains uneaten due to having been damaged.

Then there's eating things in threes. She won't eat one Tic-Tac, nor two. Only three. That stems from three being a lucky number in China, where she grew up, and maybe one being an unlucky number in Japan, where she also grew up. Something like that.

With small bags of M&Ms, she'll dump them out onto the table and group the colors together in piles with the same number in them. So if red is the least represented color in that particular package, with only seven red M&Ms, she'll make little piles of seven of each of the other colors as well. Then she eats the "leftovers", the ones not in the piles. Only at that point will she eat out of the sorted piles.

And there's outsides and insides. With chocolate covered caramels, for instance, she'll chip the chocolate off of the outside until the caramel is entirely naked, only then devouring the caramel sans chocolate.

It turns out that Helen's nephew also does the M&M thing. It's probably genetic.

Readers are requested to submit their own obsessive-compulsive eating disorders (OED), the more interesting the better.

Readers are also invited to submit their best brain teasers based on these eating constraints. We suspect that the M&M constraints alone give rise to dozens of interesting number theory problems.

Plop. What's the deal with tennis shoes these days? (Oh dear. These days. It's a sign of age, isn't it?) I went out to get a pair of plain, simple, black tennies today but that turned out to be impossible.

Every pair of shoes in The Athlete's Foot (and would you give a shoe store that name?) looked like it came from NASA. They have 87 different parts - spherical protuberances in purple, jagged lightning bolts in yellow and red, things that light up when you walk, pneumatic compartments, springs. Springs!

And these stupid shoes are the size of football helmets. You could be blown to bits by a land mine in these things and your feet would still be intact, protected by three dozen layers of hypermodern plastic, microfibers and high tensile steel.

I'm willing to part with the original concept of tennis shoes from my childhood - those marginally comfortable assemblages of canvas and cardboard - but is it really necessary to eliminate anything other than Buck Rogers space boots?

Or maybe it's just that I'm getting old, and need to shop instead for orthopedic golf shoes. In pink.

Yo. It's always exciting in New York, as confirmed by this photo caption today in the New York Times of the aftermath of an underground electrical explosion..

Workers examining the site of the manhole explosion at Eighth Avenue near 48th Street. A 30-year-old man, lifted off his feet by the blast, was seriously injured as a pillar of flame and smoke blew the cover in the air.

Plurp.

Cartoona mirada.
Harkonan sonata.
Laguna regatta.
Lacuna frittata.

Friday, March 23, 2001

Blab. A reader asks the question of the day.

Is "undue the damage" a Helenism?

It's certainly a wonderful homonym! I'm not sure I see the two required, constituent aphorisms from which it is built, though perhaps readers more insightful than I can point them out?

Blab. Plurp's very own GANTT chart writes:

Assigned activity # 97: Go out in a blaze of glory.

Perhaps this self-same reader will take this very advice to heart.

Blab. Another anonymous URList emits:

http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=xx-bork

... an extraordinarily useful search service for Swedish chefs. (And funny! Go look. Go. Scat!) Where do you people find this stuff?

Blab. Encouraging us to relive our childhood (through which we only barely lived anyhow), a reader with far too little concern for our fingers writes:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/mechtoys/matchrocket.html

(And a URL too long for this line.)

We actually skipped right over match rockets to potassium nitrate. Ah, but those were the days, weren't they?

Remind me to tell you some time about nearly blowing my face off when a cap-firecracker went off in my mouth, nearly electrocuting myself after touching the two ends of a 112 VAC zip cord together, nearly asphyxiating me and my lab partner when the chem lab filled with phosphorous smoke, or nearly having my skin eaten away after splattering reagent strength sulfuric and hydrochloric acid.  And it's a good thing the nitroglycerine we made wasn't of very good quality.

Blab. Our world traveler, freshly back from jaunting about disease-ridden third world countries, writes:

Hey -- I'm back too.   Barely.

Maybe your cable company could take a cue from British Airways when their computer system went down (worldwide!) on Sunday night.

Several hundred people standing in line in a terminal that's under reconstruction.  We're told  that London found a "bug" in the system and that it would be going down for about 20 minutes.  This was relayed two hours before.  So British Airways management in their infinite wisdom sent almost all of their employees into the back while management READ THE BOOK TO LEARN HOW TO MANUALLY CHECK PEOPLE IN.  Then they would come out and tell an ever increasingly agitated crowd one thing, but tell the staff who had to check people in another.  Things like, "We're going to take the flights in order.  Those of you with tickets on the 8 p.m. flight will be checked in first.  The 9 p.m. flight will be later.  We won't leave anyone behind." Then when you get to the counter the staff attendant would tell you he wasn't taking you because you were on the 8 p.m. flight. He was only checking in people for the 9 p.m. flight.

When they finally took your ticket and went into the back to get a seating assignment (it took them 30 minutes to draw a diagram of the seats in a 747), they brought out your boarding pass and made sure that you weren't sitting next to your partner. So, once on the plane you had to change seats at least 3 times to try and get everyone next to someone they knew if you could. Then they tried to count the number of passengers, but they kept losing count.  So you had to sit on the plane for another hour and a half before it could move! 

As a result of this interminable affair, I've only got one thing to say. When the Internet is ravaged with viruses and all the computers come up blank -- make sure you're not on British Airways!

Illustrating, quite clearly, that the Automated World Of The Future is doomed. Doomed, I tell you!

But welcome back anyway.

Blab. Not to be outdone, Skippy writes:

Now where do you think Mir _really_ landed? And, this final chip having been knocked by time and capitalist rhetoric from the notional shoulder of Mother Russia, having in its fiery meeting / not-meeting with the Bell-on-a-raft symbol of the very complex that it faced for all those years across the interstices, undergone a last and almost-timely transubstantiation from the grimy "troubled" metal and stuffing of centrally-planned industry (Nyet, nyet, Boris, it is not the time!) into hot and speedy electrons, light, the stuff of information and the (teetering, teetering, Dow at 7.2) New Economy on the shoulders of Newton, will the Breadbasket of the East turn its face from global domination, rebirthing perhaps the culture (the cultures) that gave us "Two Boatmen", "The Tsar of Georgia", "The Elephant and the Victor", "My Aunt Popov", "Tears and Spice", "The Crime of Viktor Lentz", stained glass in Siberia, Vodka, Mishkin, Pushkin and Blair, all now adopted by the cultureless culture of the overarching West ("If you have comments about the Russian Library at Oregon State University, please send an email to Kyle Banerjee"), and somewhere outside St. Petersberg we might see (somewhere beside Leningrad, Petrograd, what are the street names now?) an old church, in its window a sheet of Irish Crystal, reflecting now nothing but the dark and nearly invisible image (should we have waited until sunset?) of Britney Spears finally taking the Oath of Office.

Lest readers think this is mere drivel ("drivel"), we feel constrained to link to Bell-on-a-raft, the shoulders of Newton, the Breadbasket of the East, Kyle Banerjee and Britney Spears. Other curious links are left as exercises for the reader.

Yo. As referenced so slyly by Skippy just now, those marketdroids at Taco Bell are on some very dangerous drugs.

Taco Bell is offering a free taco to everyone in the U.S. if the core of the Mir space station hits a floating Taco Bell target placed in the South Pacific. ... Taco Bell has created a 40 by 40-foot target, painted with a Bell bull's-eye and bold purple letters stating: "Free Taco Here." The floating target will be placed in the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia in advance of Mir's descent.

We wonder who from Taco Bell was out there watching it to see if Mir hit it.

Plurp.

Video: Chocolat
Demographic: Chick flick / date movie
Plot Summary: A clever north wind blows a woman of ambiguous origin, her daughter and an invisible kangaroo into a small French town. The woman, a mysterious chocolatier, opens up a sinful chocolate shop at the beginning of Lent, much to the dismay of the inbred town's retentive mayor. It is a fable of people who know their place and people who make their place. The question is: Can mere chocolate turn dour, cowed and ultimately villainous villagers into joyful, loving, welcoming people? The answer, it would appear, is yes.
Distinguishing Features: Binoche is luminous, sensuous, inviting, and at the same time sympathetic and troubled - a very impressive performance. Depp, as usual, disappears into his character so completely that you have to pinch yourself to remember that it's him.
Academy Award For: Best Fable About Chocolate
Verdict: No alien spacecraft and only one puny explosion, but a pretty good time nonetheless. Recommended.

Yow. Geek lust. IBM Thinkpad T20s are sprouting up all over the place at work. I had been avoiding the whole thing, not wanting to stir the bits. But my current Thinkpad 570 has a serious case of bit rot. Its power management is so screwed up that I have to reboot it almost every time I close the cover, insert my Aironet card, or use Netscape for too long. 

Now I'm not one to stir the bits, and moving to an entirely new machine is the most radical kind of bit stirrage around. So the mere fact that these new machines are much faster, much more capacious, and have a longer battery life is not enough to motivate me to switch. The kicker is that, unlike my current machine, the T20s have serious hardware graphics accelerators so I could play all the new games.

Now that's a motivation for stirring the bits! Heck, I might even get a T21.

Plop. A quality control problem with the Tupperware seal on lunch today resulted in a minor explosion in my trunk. I now have moo shu jacket, moo shu lunch bag and moo shu briefcase. Yum?

Yow. New from Electronic Arts: Majestic - the game that plays you. Sounds very much like the movie The Game, except that you're in it. And it sounds very cool. Especially for all of you conspiracy theorists out there. And we know who you are. (Rebecca)

Plurp.

The blue dog is
offering a free weblog to
everyone in America if ...

Thursday, March 22, 2001

Blab. A reader of very esoteric literature writes:

Cohen-Macaulay := free over a regular base

Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity! Phantom homologies! Oh my.

Blab. Proving that our readers have much more exciting lives than we do, a reader writes:

I, one of your devoted readers, am also back. My excuse was that I had a drug-and-exhaustion-induced delusional psychotic episode and spent about a week in the hospital in the Behavioral Health Unit (aka the loony bin). I am now out, but find myself a thousand miles away from home at my mom's house, so I can't read your log much. That's okay, because I'll have lots of older Plurp-age to dig into once I get home on Sunday.

I find it strangely amusing that I can now legitimately utter the excuse: "Well, I was psychotic at the time, you know" in regard to certain extremely bizarre things that I did.

I'm taking my medication, doing much better than normal, and will be back as a regular reader and Blab correspondent soon...

- Beth

Blab. Helping us decipher yesterday's worrisome assigned activity, a reader suggests:

Perhaps "Drive car into lake" should be interpreted as "Drive a car into a lake," rather than "Drive your car into a lake."

Ah. That's not quite so bad. I don't have to drive my own, lovely car into some skanky lake. I get to drive someone else's. Now, how to choose...?

Blab. Not content with driving cars into lakes, our demanding reader goes right off the deep end.

Assigned activity # 59: Shave head.

Um. Perhaps you didn't see the horror that resulted when I shaved my beard last year? You might want to check that out before suggesting anything even more mind-wrenching.

Yo. Zero to eighty in under two seconds? Ah yes. That would be the HyperSonic XLC, a new roller coaster in Paramount's Kings Dominion theme park in Virginia.

Before my mind could register that we'd begun moving, we were already halfway to the base of the tower and gaining speed at an appalling rate. I'll probably never get to ride in a fighter jet as it's gettin' hurled off the deck of an aircraft carrier, but it doesn't matter; this is close enough. Like I said before: insane.

As I hollered my bicuspids loose, we blasted into the curve and, smooth as can be, made the first 90-degree change of direction. Pulling away from Mother Earth, the train made an effortless climb to that 170-foot peak, like it was headed all the way to Jupiter.

But we lost just enough speed to make a gentle trip over the top. With such a small radius, this upended U-turn is a freaky treat; one moment, we're looking at nothing but sky and the next, we're facing right back down.

And down we dove, with all the fury of an unimpeded freefall. Magnificent.

And that was a ride on the prototype by S&S Power, the developers. They say that a larger version could be made that would be be fully 350 feet high and hit maximum speeds of 240 mph. Kinda like a Big Freaking Potato Gun, but for people.

Plop. Meanwhile, British Columbia is busy making sure your mind is not warped by those evil and immoral video games. Imagine the anarchy that would be loosed if they weren't saving us from ourselves.

Yo. It seems that, of everyone trying to get a peek at Mir's fiery descent tomorrow, some tuna fishers are likely to have the best view. Maybe even a little too good.

Among the vessels are as many as 27 Albacore tuna fishing trawlers who learned Thursday that Mir's final path would place the central debris area just 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of their position. 

Bad weather and slow boat speeds means the fishing fleet cannot escape the area. 

Yee ha.

Plop. You might well trust Microsoft to not post malicious code as updates to their various products, or send you evil stuff in the mail. But would you equally trust some random hacker? Well, now you have to, since VeriSign handed out a couple of Microsoft digital certificates to some random bozo who had nothing to do with Microsoft.

The upshot of this is that your browser (or other software) will think that stuff coming from some J. Fred Shirley-Harold is in fact coming from Microsoft. And, if you told your computer to trust Microsoft, you are now also trusting J. Fred Shirley-Harold.

A Microsoft security bulletin says:

The certificates could be used to sign programs, ActiveX controls, Office macros, and other executable content. Of these, signed ActiveX controls and Office macros would pose the greatest risk, because the attack scenarios involving them would be the most straightforward. Both ActiveX controls and Word documents can be delivered via either web pages or HTML mails. ActiveX controls can be automatically invoked via script, and Word documents can be automatically opened via script.

Isn't that fun?

Yo. What's that moron in the weaving car ahead of you doing on his cell phone? Why, he's gambling, of course.

Plurp. We knew there had to be a word for it. It's nyotaimori. Yum.

Plurp.

The blue dog
once shaved his
head.

Wednesday, March 21, 2001

Blab. A wayward reader writes:

I'm baaaaack............

Naturally, the cockles of our hearts are increased in temperature.

Blab. Our Reader of Perpetual Assignment writes:

Assigned activity # 41: Drive car into lake.

Now this is a bit of a puzzle. Clearly, our demanding reader cannot possibly intend for us to drive our wonderful little blue Miata into some skanky lake. No. So to what is he or she referring?

Reader speculation, rabid or otherwise, is encouraged.

Blab. A reader interested in rap music, white kids, and furries writes:

http://www.sardonia.org/fs/fs_23.avi

(Note: 4.7 MB thingie. Get your own T3 line, says our reader.)

Yeah. Well. What do we learn from this? Readers?

Blab. A flagrant punctuationist writes:

' "

Oh yeah? Well - ~! @! *:) 

Blab. A reader seeking pity for a depressive Web server writes:

http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/asdfhjkl  - DWL

... which certainly gets the award for Most Time-Consuming 404 Not Found Message Ever.

Blab. A random reader writes:

rod, man!

Referring, we assume, to Mad Ron. Or rom.

Yow. A brand new Helenism, from Helen her own self.

It's like pulling hair

• It's like pulling teeth
• She was pulling her hair out

Yay!

Rant. This technology stuff will just plain never work.

A few days ago, something about our cable TV went blinko. One second, it was fine; the next, no cable signal at all (at least not through the decoder - the raw cable feed is fine). Kindly, our TV puts up a blue screen in this condition, so it became obvious pretty quickly.

I don't want to mess with this stupid stuff, I say in my most testasterone-laden Mister Fixit voice. Call the cable bozos.

Enter the cable bozo, some pimply-faced kid who couldn't get a better job. It's your VCR, he says. Your VCR doesn't work.

This must have worked on other folks, or he would have tried something less random. But this is the third time in a month we've been through this drill with the cable bozos. They always send a Level 1 bozo out first, and he proclaims it to be a problem with the VCR. The signal's not supposed to go through the VCR, he'll say. That's your problem. Uh, yes it is. It's worked that way for years. Until yesterday. D'oh.

So then they send in the Level 2 bozo. He used to be a Level 1 bozo, but he got promoted. Presumably for not claiming it's the VCR. Who wired this thing up, he'll say. This is all wrong. That's your problem. Uh, you guys did. The last time you were out here. D'oh.

So tonight, rather than spending a quiet evening with my sweetheart, or begging That Which Shall Not Be Named to avoid trashing some vulnerable new part of the the apartment that he's discovered, I'm likely to be up to my elbows in dusty cables, trying to (a) undue the damage done by Les Bozos and (b) trying to diagnose and fix the problem that I wanted to avoid in the first place. 

This is all a roundabout way of saying that this technology stuff is never going to work. Ever. This is just cable TV fercryinoutloud! Just imagine what the world looks like when every device in your life is magically linked together - on the Internet - with software from some highly reliable source like Microsoft. And when things stop working, this same pimply-faced high school dropout will come in and say It's your blender. You're not supposed to keep it in the kitchen. That's your problem.

Hell, you'll be lucky if the light switches work.

Plurp.

Unbeknownst to most people
the blue dog was
a level 7 bozo.

Tuesday, March 20, 2001

Blab. An astronomy buff writes:

I thought I will share this with others, given my success last evening in observing the narrow crescent shape of Venus with ordinary binoculars. In a week or so, Venus will change from "the evening star" to "the morning star" and given this narrow angular separation from the sun, Venus currently looks like a thin crescent shaped moon. If you do look at
Venus (the bright "star" 5-20 degrees above the the point on the horizon where the sun has set), brace your binoculars against a table/wall/pillar to minimize jitters. When properly focused, and with some patience, even those little compact binoculars will reveal the crescent shape of our sister planet. This is probably the only example when ordinary binoculars can resolve the "surface" of another planet.

That's very cool!

Blab. Perhaps signaling an eventual end to the madness, a reader writes:

All your base are return to you. 

What a relief. And about time too!

Blab. In an equally mysterious missive, a reader writes:

and rom 

Really? Rom too? Golly.

Blab. Our fervent assignator assignates:

Assigned activity # 43: Tell boss he is being watched.

He already knows.

Blab. Apropos of which, and following up on yesterday's assigned task, a clever reader writes:

I think Dr. Aberration ought to be Captain Plurp's archnemisis.

So be it!

We predict many future appearances of Doctor Aberration here in Plurp.

Yo. New in our Stuff section: Magnetic Poetry. Yep, lousy poetry composed with dopey fridge magnets by us and our friends. Please try to contain your excitement.

(For those of you who wondered, the link to this from the Stuff page was broken. We updated the index but forgot to actually put the file up there. D'oh!)

Plurp. Never bite the tooth fairy.

Rant. The newsheads on TV claimed it was the first day of spring today, hence the vernal equinox, and they were busy trying to balance chicken eggs on their ends. (No, the eggs' ends. Sheesh.) 

Can someone explain to me the naive physics that leads people to think that the vernal equinox is somehow connected to the ability to balance eggs? Is it something like The day and night are in balance so the eggs must be too? But that's just so whacky! It makes as much sense as The day and night are in balance so my checking account must be too.

Eh?

Plurp.

Video: Memento
Demographic: People who really like puzzles.
Plot Summary: A man's wife is raped and killed; he's out for vengeance. Sound simple? Read on.
Distinguishing Features: Injured in the incident, the man is unable to remember new things. He forgets where he is, what he's doing and who he knows after a few minutes. So, he writes things down as he hunts for the killer - in notebooks, on scraps of paper, even on his body - in an attempt to piece together what he can't remember. Best of all, the entire story is told backwards, from the man's point of view. He can't remember what happened just before, and neither can you! This is absolutely brilliant! You will be trying to piece it together, trying to remember what little you think you know, trying to get the facts to fit. You'll know something is amiss, but I confidently predict that you will not see it coming until it hits you in the face.
Academy Award For: Most Clever Narrative Flow, and Most Unpredictable Plot Twist.
Verdict: Highly recommended. But pay attention! If you let your mind wander, you'll be as lost as the protagonist.

Plurp.

As a two-dimensional
creature the
blue dog looked the
same backwards and
forward.

Monday, March 19, 2001

Blab. Either seeking enlightenment in all the wrong Blab boxes, or minimalistically commenting on the state of the universe, a reader writes: 

random

What could it mean?

Blab. A cryptic string flows across the wireless wires to us.

http://www.ftrain.com/url_poetry.html

Now that is amazing, for several reasons. First, Paul Ford attempts to create narrative solely out of Web site names, an altogether daunting task. Second, our lowly Plurp gets a link as one of his vocabulary words. And third, the image of feeding bifurcated rivets to David Chess is, well, disturbing.

Blab. Having given us the entire weekend off, our most demanding reader returns with this.

Assigned activity # 47: Change name to Aberration.

Ooh! We have always wanted to be one of those people with just a single name, like Cher, or Yanni. And, all things considered, Aberration is not a bad suggestion. So that would be Dr. Aberration? Hmm. Kinda catchy.

What do our readers think?

Blab. A shy, retiring reader nonetheless sends greetings.

hi

And a big Howdy Do back at ya!

Blab. Will this madness never end? Frankly, we hope not.

milk.com: somebody set up us the cow!

Or, as the subtitle says: All Your Milk Are Belong To Us.

Plurp.

Video: Lost Souls
Demographic: End Times fans, Winona Ryder fans.
Plot Summary: Ryder, having survived her own exorcism earlier in life, helps priests with them now. Evidence mounts that Satan is about to do something Bad, and plot fingers point at the could-be love interest, but you hope it's not true. You spend a good deal of the film wondering if it's all just the obsessed Ryder being psychotic or if it's All Too Real. Echoes of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist. The ending is quite, quite lame, but the rest of the movie makes up for it.
Distinguishing Features: Excellent atmospheric cinematography and artistic design, some good effects. Everything is stark and foreboding without being oppressive. So much black and white is used, and so much solarization, that some scenes almost seem filmed in black and white; elsewhere sepia tones are used to add psychological distance. Ryder is sepulchral, disturbing, excellent.
Academy Award For: Best Film Shot From Within Winona Ryder's Head.
Verdict: Very cool. Recommended.

Plurp.

Video: Hollow Man
Demographic: Voyeurs, latex fetishists.
Plot Summary: Brilliant young (but combatively egocentric) researchers develop invisibility serum for the military, from whom they take lots of money but don't like. Invisibility is explained by "quantum phase shift" mumblety mumblety - that is, not explained - but I would have at least liked to hear how invisible folks can see if their retinas do not absorb light. (I know. I expect too much.) Hey dude - turns out that invisibility drug makes subjects unstable and violent (heavily presaged) and Kevin Bacon becomes a voyeur, a molester and a sadistic murderer. Naturally, he comes after his geeky colleagues who are forced to become incompetent hunters. Echoes of Alien, as the unseen killer stalks the redshirts, and I'm sure their military sponsors are just drooling.
Distinguishing Features: Bacon's butt, for those of you who wondered. Really fabulous, well-integrated effects. But still, Bacon's agent must have loved his line: It's amazing what you can do when you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror any more.
Academy Award For: Best Use of Duct Tape in Surgery.
Verdict: Pretty sappy, but mildly recommended as an Invisible Man yarn. Would have been better if they had used real writers, real cinematographers or dealt with real privacy issues. Would have been much less offensive without the recurring theme of male violence against women.

Yak. From Hollow Man.

What's he like?

He's everything you're not.

Hmm. Must be dull.

Yo. The Whitney Museum of American Art sent an invitation to their latest show to our long-dead grandfather Richard White yesterday. That old guy sure gets around! This one was puzzling at first, as he never expressed much interest in art, even when he was alive, and we can only think that his interest must have decreased in the intervening years.

Curiouser and curiouser, the exhibit turned out to be BitStreams and Data Dynamics - Harnessing Digital Media to Achieve New Dimensions of Artistic Expression. Since virtually all of this technology was developed after he died, we were at a loss to explain his apparent fascination.

But the connection became obvious once we opened the brochure to see that the main graphic illustration was a digitally-distorted human skull.

Now we wonder if that's actually Richard himself. We'll  have to check it out.

Yo. Also very strange is that this page from the Whitney has a reference to a film called Suburban Legend, in apparent answer to the question we asked yesterday. Spooky!

Plop. Or not. We missed Mispelling Day last Saturday. Forgot all about it. But maybe that's good?

Yo. From our News That Is Not News folder.

Members of Congress are inundated with so many e-mail messages from constituents and special interest groups that lawmakers routinely ignore most of them

And that would be different ... how?

Plop. Does anyone else think that Scott Adams has gone downhill with Dilbert since he stopped working in the environment that he describes?

Yak. At work.

Did you have a big weekend?

I haven't had a big weekend in twenty years.

Plurp.

All your blue
dog are
belong to us.

Sunday, March 18, 2001

Blab. Continuing the madness (but cleverly!), a reader writes:

A Barely Treasonous Globule

You lost arrangeable blouse?

Onto our agreeable syllabus...

You'll sneer, sabotage labour.

Soluble Gene Laboratory, USA

Eulogy to R.A.: unbearable loss.

Ogle a brontosaurus eyeball.

O, Tubular Bells go easy on ear!

U.S., Seoul, try Boolean Algebra

Baby roosters age alone, Lulu.

Leo, Euler, go buy an albatross.

Go on, sell us arboreal beauty.

Use large balloons, or buy tea.

Uranus globes are taboo, Lyle.

Nebulae laboratory logs use.

Rule about glossary: be alone.

Away thus, yo!!

Blab. At some gawd-awful hour in the middle of the night, a reader writes:

Steve,

I find it fascinating, though a bit distant, reading about your life without me. I don't think I like it. I would rather be there.  Why can't we have those funny transporter machines like they had on "StarTrek"?  I want them now.  I mean this VERY minute.  Now get to work!  I'm still awake.........and waiting..........

H

Well let's see. Since this will take a while, we'll also have to invent time machines to meet the deadline. We should be finished, oh, some time last year. But that's just an estimate.

Blab. Even later, a reader writes:

I'm on your base

All of them are ours.

Blab. Yet later, a reader informs us:

Do they still have little rockets on threads with smoky sparklers out their posteriors?

Nope, you have it right.  It is coming out of their asses. 

NEXT.......?

Actually, we were suggesting that ... oh, never mind. Let's move on.

Blab. On the subject of the confusion of certain cats as to the efficacious operation of cat boxes, a well-known shoe company writes:

Did I say thinker?

It doesn't take a thinker to know that someone else will do it for him.  So JUST DO IT!!!! 

NIKE

It is clear that we are moving up in the world. Soon, we can aspire to being a Feline Feces Facilitator, First Class. We'll throw a party. (But you should avoid the canapés.)

Blab. Of our theatrical experience yesterday, a reader writes:

Yes, but I can't sing.

So, you saw a musical, huh?  Hum the theme.

If we had been humming the theme, all three of those ladies would have gladly given us the aisle seat as a result of the clear demonstration that we had the biggest problem.

Blab. A reader who seems to know far too much about bookstores writes:

I happened by one of those bookstore places today and, curious for not having been done so in quite some time, I went in.

So who said you could go there?????  These are pickup spots and you are a HAPPILY, MARRIED MAN!

We are watching...........

The voices said we should go in there. We always obey the voices.

Blab. Seeking to de-confuse us about that odd e*trade building we saw yesterday, a reader writes:

I don't get it. Will Google buildings be next?

No, the e*trade buildings will be bombed just like the .com stocks were.  Go and suffer, you and your children.....

This seems to suggest that we should (a) obtain children, (b) go with them to the e*trade building and (c) await the positioning and detonation of explosive devices there by our reader.

Well, OK. But this will take some time. You may need to prop up e*trade with your own finances while we work on this.

Plop. The jackhammer symphony to which I awoke this morning was interrupted briefly by the sound of Untitled barfing on the bed. Cats are so cute.

Plurp. In honor of St. Paddy's Day yesterday, I ordered my fluke fin sushi with oba leaf.

Plurp.

Exhibit: Workspheres at MoMA.
Demographic: Tech environmental design and tech artifact design fashionista.
Summary: An attempt to project the workplace of the future by cutting designers free from the bonds of function, thus making them artists instead.
Distinguishing Features: Some really goofy stuff, including an ergonomic split keyboard made of bright red plastic, in between the two halves of which is a bowl-like indentation which holds about a cup of popcorn. I could only imagine it at breakfast time instead, filled with pancakes and syrup, being used by a person who usually uses a TrackPoint. Some really pretentious stuff, including a workspace intended to explore how personalization can be brought to those big impersonal corporations we've all heard so much about. In it, "Personal Skies" lets you pick what picture you want projected on the ceiling of your office (big woop) and "Chairs That Change Color" really don't; they just have an LCD screen on the back of the upright that shows a shot of the back of your shirt (uh - wouldn't it have been cheaper just to cut a hole in the chair?). And, amazingly, several current products from IBM that actually show really good design sense.
Lifetime Bereavement Award For: Absolute Worst Information Design
Verdict: Interesting if taken with a grain of salt, noting that most of the actual products are useful and everything else is silly; worrisome if not.

Plurp.

Video: The Sixth Day
Demographic: Uneducated people who like action movies.
Plot Summary: After human cloning is banned, idiotic plot devices cause Schwarzenegger to be cloned. Doesn't matter; Arnold is somehow, implausibly, an expert in weapons and tactics despite no foundation in his character's life. Plus lots of future tech. Organs can be cloned without cloning the organism. DNA can be implanted into "blank clones" to turn them into identical copies of the adult. All of human psychological development can be recorded from a human, and reproduced into a clone by some magical process "through the optic nerve" in a fraction of a second. Excuses, excuses. Geez - do the math!
Distinguishing Features: Schwarzenegger line: I might be back. After this dog, he might very well not be.
Academy Award For: Most Amazing Misunderstanding of Both Biology and Psychology. And/or: Most Recycled Really Stupid Plot Lines in a Single Movie.
Verdict:Astonishingly bad. Avoid if at all possible. If encountered as an airline movie, read air sickness bag instead.

Plurp.

Video: Bless the Child
Demographic: Rubes thrilled with the Apocrypha, but who haven't actually read them.
Plot Summary: Canonical Second Coming of Christ, this time as a little American white girl who ends up cared for by angelic Basset, and whose first miracle is psychokinesis with toys. The Anti-Christ, leader of a for-profit self-realization organization, kidnaps said Christ-kid to seduce her to The Dark Side. Bad stuff happens, inevitably signaled by large bat-winged creatures. (God forgive the producers the similarities to the flying monkeys.) Guess what? God wins in the end.
Distinguishing Features: Basset pleading, Dear God, if you really are there, please help me. Too late, dear. It's already out on video.
Academy Award For: Most Predictable Plot.
Verdict: Not particularly recommended. Go rent Devil's Advocate again instead, even if Keanu Reeves is in it.

Yow. Dave writes a biblically inspired account of work. Dave is so great. How can you not love this stuff?

Plurp. Are there suburban legends?

Yo. Why is everyone so, er, excited about wireless access to the Internet? Silly rabbit, it's porn!

Though images can appear so grainy a reposing nude looks like a duck's webbed foot, the popularity of porn on wireless devices is surprising analysts.

Hmm! Maybe there will be big demand from duck fetishists.

Plurp.

Budget hole,
but he'd ogle.

Oh gut, be led,
old bug, thee.
Be huge, dolt!
Be glued hot!
Gold tube, he,
the loud beg:
"Do the bulge;
both deluge!"

Goblet hued,
the blue god:
"Got Bud? Heel!"

© 2001 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved