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2001.05.06 : 2001.05.12

Saturday, May 12, 2001

Plurp. Submitted for your approval.

Ingredients: Soy beans, soya paste, ground processed lentils, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: corn oil, cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil), yellow corn meal, processed organs of convicted felons (subject to due process), wheat starch, salt, green dye no. 26.

Plurp. A postcard I sent while on vacation.

Mourning dove morning
Gliding, we two angelfish
Sun light on sea fans

Friday, May 11, 2001

Blab. It seems that the fourth in our continuing series of vacation puzzlers stimulated a few more neurons than usual in the Plurp readership, with no fewer than three readers responding, each with a different strategy and linguistic tradition.

You may recall that you were asked to find the word that corresponds to each of five clues, and then to rearrange designated letters in those words to solve the final puzzle.

The reader responses are summarized here.
 

Clue	Reader 1	Reader 2	Reader 3
Blasphemous garments made from the skin and hair of virgins	SUITS	COMFY	TRPAS
A ritual in which the bones of small children are replaced by kitchen utensils	XMAS	ICKY	PCKI
The desire of women to swim with fish	PISCIA	LONELY	LITURA
A trio for two scalpels and an ice pick	LLA ("ya")	RAD	AER
A box made of twelve pieces of stone, six springs and four blades, into which various body parts of holy men are inserted	TRUTH	JAZZY	MLASL
A woman who suckles a large insect is a ...	CRIXIA	MIA, ED!	RUPPL

Even more astonishing, all three readers submitted correct answers within their own chosen genre: 

• Reader 1 in the category of using disturbingly mundane words when possible (with a bonus for piscia and crixia, which not many people know)
• Reader 3 in the category of Latinate and Northern Indian linguistic traditions
• Reader 2 specializing in colloquialisms leading to a surprising Mia reference.

Congratulations to all of our winners!

Plurp. For you puzzle fans, the final bit of puzzlement from those vacation voices in my head.

Crosswordus Inversus

Across

1. An alphabet from which only blasphemous words can be formed
2. A procedure by which the carapaces of insects are embedded in the eye
3. A book of forbidden drawings stolen from a lost library
4. A child that has consumed both of its arms
5. A prophet who is said to write pornographic novels
6. A physician who sews immoral messages into the skin of his patients

Down

1. Prophecy inscribed on the head of a bald man who is no longer sane
2. A riddle that, when solved, causes blindness
3. A device, powered by forty-three strong men, which is made entirely of the wings of small birds
4. The ears of a man who had died of a rare fever
5. The use of acid to remove the fur of cats
6. A woman whose body has been dyed a very dark shade of blue

 

Plurp.

Lord won't you find me a Berlin flight crew
It seems he's a doughnut and I am a schmoo
Big plate of spaghetti all shiny and new
And whiskers for toothpicks when you are all through
Oh Lord won't you find me a Berlin flight crew

Yak.

There's always room for J. Lo.

Yo. A spontaneous invention today.

Q: Why did the fish cross the road?
A: To get away from the chicken.

Plurp.

The blue dog
thought the whole thing was
a puzzle.

Thursday, May 10, 2001

Blab. A reader schooled in the history and lore of blue paper coffee cups writes:

Back in the mid 1980s, there was a recursive version of the blue pleasure cup, which included a small but legible picture of itself.

Finally, I have a scintillating pick-up line to use in the singles bars!

Blab. A reader, illustrating the creative aspects of the Orange Theory of Ideas, suggests:

Concept: a Survivorblog type contest, except that instead of being based on Survivor, it will be based on The Weakest Link.  When one of the blogger-contestants is voted off, they will be dismissed with the catchphrase, "You have the weakest links. Goodbye."

That's hilarious!

Blab. We have the best readers! Once again, and for the third day in a row, a reader comes up with exactly the correct answer to our vacation puzzler!

Canned beets;
Canned beets;
A monk who inscribes a holy text into his own flesh, then sets himself on fire;
Canned beets.

Amazing. Since you're having such fun and such great success, try your hand at the next one.

Plurp. More fun from those voices we heard on vacation.

Jumblus Inversus

Write down the word for each clue, then rearrange the circled letters to solve the riddle.
 

Blasphemous garments made from the skin and hair of virgins
A ritual in which the bones of small children are replaced by kitchen utensils
The desire of women to swim with fish
A trio for two scalpels and an ice pick
A box made of twelve pieces of stone, six springs and four blades, into which various body parts of holy men are inserted

Now solve the riddle !

A woman who suckles a large insect is a:

Plurp. 

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a great big tattoo?
My friends all have roses and that just won't do.
I's thinkin' of sumthin' with Mary and you.
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a great big tatoo?

Yak. Overheard before a seminar today.

Person 1: I guess I'm dating myself.
Person 2: Oh? How is that working out?

Plurp. There was a seminar by famous computer visionary Ted Nelson today at work. He's the guy that wrote Computer Lib / Dream Machines way back in the 1970s, describing really usable computers, hypertext, and lots of other cool things.

It seems to be a common disease of luminaries, at least computer luminaries, that they are very enthusiastic about their own ideas, talk in the most fuzzy possible abstractions, don't get around to implementing much, and hold onto their ideas with great fervor for their entire lives, in spite of any progress in the world and in spite of any evidence that their ideas aren't really All That.

They also tend to be shameless name droppers.

Nelson is quite infected. We expected this. Wired had a great and scathing article about him a few years back, the central organizing principle of which was that Nelson's Attention Deficit Disorder is behind every technology idea that interests him, that his technology ideas are an attempt to gather his fleeting and chaotic thoughts together into a unified whole. Not surprisingly, Nelson characterized the article as a "foul and scurrilous attack" and wrote a long, rambling response. (Curiously, it's no longer available "on advice of council.")

This is not to say that all of his ideas are bad. Far from it. Many are quite good. But he's too in love with the beauty of his ideas to see that there are horrible problems with them in the real world. He has, for instance, an idea for how to copyright fundamental bits of content and let them be used and repackaged in all sorts of ways, ensuring that the original author gets paid. Unfortunately, it only works if you prevent these fundamental works from going off-line (e.g. onto CDs), which you can't. And it has no provision for repackagers (e.g. editors, newspapers, magazines) from making any money off of a collection of fundamental content. Doesn't that seem important?

He has a general structure for discrete items, something like an n-dimensional spreadsheet, which he thinks is the One True Structure. He showed his family genealogy in this structure, and it was astonishingly confusing! You have to visualize (in your head) which dimensions exist and how they relate. Items are labeled by unique numbers, which you actually have to use in navigating through the structure. (And he railed about how awful it is that you have to use URLs in Web browsers!)

But it was entertaining. It's always good to inject wacky ideas into your mind every so often and let them rattle around.

Plurp.

The blue dog
aspired to be
the weakest link.

Wednesday, May 9, 2001

Blab. For the second day in a row, a reader comes up with exactly the right answers to our daily vacation puzzler. You guys are amazing!

1. None. This scenario is the last sign of the apocolypse, so there were no children of any kind born thereafter.

2. Arthur Daniels Midland has a standing contract to pay the village a flat rate of $2000 for all their extra finger bones.

3. One year before it is declared illegal and he is jailed for the rest of his life.

4. The obvious answer is 8, but I know the man with no thumbs is smarter than that, so I can clearly not choose 8.  That leaves only 42.

 -pTang

An altogether impressive display.

Blab. A correspondent tries to wheedle information via flattery.

Hey that was a great plupr thingy. The eye part was scary. 

Now: What do you two have to tell me about blue paper coffee cups available only in Manhatten? Steve, Helen is dropping the ball on this. I am widening my appeal. What *are* those mysterious blue paper coffee cups available ONLY in Manhatten? What is the prose written on them? I am flummoxed, disconbobulated, and possibly buffaloed.

Thanks *in advance* for helping me on my blue paper coffee cup quest...

Hmm. Well, there's a story that mentions them here, complete with a bad picture. And another pic here that rotates with a paper bag and a pear for some unknown reason. An alleged history, complete with manufacturer and sales figures, is here. A poem about them, read by the author, is here.

But perhaps the most authoritative reference, with history, inscriptions and pics of a variety of different blue paper coffee cups is here.

We understand that a physical embodiment will be sent to you some time before the heat death of the universe. We hope this slakes your thirst for knowledge in the meantime.

Plurp. Another in a continuing series of things the voices told us while we were on vacation.

Differentus Inversus

Pick the one in each group that does not belong.

1. A line of pelvic bones that stretches between two distant cities.
2. A religious sect that believes it unholy to eat anything but one's own body.
3. Canned beets.

1. A bald woman who makes it a practice to crush herself under large rocks.
2. Seventeen teeth kept in a cut crystal obelisk.
3. Canned beets.

1. A short man who replaces his brain with a squid.
2. A monk who inscribes a holy text into his own flesh, then sets himself on fire.
3. Canned beets.

1. A monk who memorizes every holy text in the world, then wakes up with amnesia.
2. Three farm animals who are convicted of copyright violation.
3. Canned beets.

Plurp.

Oh Lord, won't you find me a yellow kazoo?
The concert's tomorrow; don't know what I'll do.
The stores only have them in orange and blue.
Oh Lord, won't you find me a yellow kazoo?

Plurp.

A man walks into a bar
with a farm animal, a
large rock and a can of
beets.

Tuesday, May 8, 2001

Blab. A very helpful reader not only notices that we're back, but offers useful advice:

If you want Opera users to be able to read the Blue Dog's utterances, you'll need to put them in TITLE (not (just) in ALT).

Indeed! It turns out that we use Netscape Composer as our editor, crass people that we are, and it has its own idiosyncratic view of what should be where. We are also reminded of that famous question-answer pair from our FAQ:

Q: One of your Web pages doesn't look right in my browser. When are you going to fix it? 
A: Oh sure. And then you'll want us to fix your toaster, and figure out why your front door doesn't close properly when it rains. 

The good news is that we're updating computers soonish, which means that we're also updating absolutely all of our software in the process, including Composer. No doubt the new version will do, um, different things.

And you'll let us know if that works for you, right?

Blab. An eager reader responds to yesterday's vacation puzzle.

1E 2G 3D 4C 5A 6B 7F 8H.
I'll take what's behind curtain #2.

Incredibly, that's absolutely correct! And what's behind Curtain # 2 is our next vacation puzzle.

Plurp. Speaking of which, here's today's vacation puzzle. With a flair.

Wordus Problemus Inversus
 
1. A woman severs the thumbs of all of the men she loves in order to make a gift for a man she does not. At another time, three eggs yolks are found by the side of a road that has fallen into disuse. How many children were born with extra limbs that year?

 
2. A village consists of 800 people. Each family has three children. Every seventh year, all children are born with an extra arm. What is the maximum annual revenue that the village can make from the sale of finger bones?

 
3. A man makes his living traveling between villages, trading pieces of his fingers for eggs and leaving the egg yolks along roads. How many years will he be able to continue in this profession?

 
4. A man with no thumbs is thinking of a number. What number is it?

Plurp.

Oh Lord, won't you give me a hint or a clue?
Can't open the clamshell without one or two.
Got lost in the maze and got et by a Grue.
Oh Lord, won't you give me a hint or a clue?

Plurp. Dave wrote yesterday that it's hard to figure out when you're awake (rather than dreaming). This is, in fact, a puzzle that has occupied me since childhood. And it is very, very hard!

Curiously, you can sometimes tell when you are dreaming - the so-called lucid dream. The converse, however, is fraught with difficulties, and I've had innumerable dreams in which I "woke up" only to discover later that I was still dreaming.

A friend once suggested that there are some things that you can't do in dreams: reading, for instance, or arithmetic. The theory was (something like) these were higher brain functions that were disabled during dreaming. That might even be right, but I'm unconvinced. I have certainly had dreams in which I thought I was reading things. They sometimes seem like random words or words in a language I only partially understand, but that always seems reasonable within the context of the dream. 

That's a good deal of the problem. Even odd things seem reasonable within a dream.

A few years ago, I thought I had a definitive test. I had dreams in which I had an itch but, no matter how vigorously I scratched it, it did no good. It still itched as much as before.

There's even a good explanation of this. Strong sensations (like bad itches) can leak through into dreams, and get incorporated into them. Often, an itch in a dream is a real itch leaking through. But "scratching" it in the dream doesn't result in scratching it in reality, so the itch continues.

Great stuff, eh?

Then we started vacationing in the Caribbean, and the mosquitos starting biting me, and they left behind maddening itches that, even when scratched, continued itching unabated. And I'm pretty sure I was awake at the time.

So now I have no way to tell for sure that I'm awake! Readers are encouraged to suggest how I can.

Plurp. It's definitely springtime. Know how I can tell? Simple.

The more successful trees, having burst forth in their mad evolutionary rush to beat each other out with sun-grabbing leaves, are now engaged in a veritable orgy, spraying yellow pollen like ash from Mt. St. Helens all over the landscape around work. This has two effects.

First, it utterly eliminates any visible effect of the hours I spent washing my car this week. Unh! So Helen bought me the kind of big brush that no-neck limo drivers use to keep their long black cars dustless and mirror-like 24x7. So today, we learned: (a) It works great, and the car really does turn heads when it's clean!, and (b) Steve really is that vain about his stupid car. Unh!

Second, all that pollen still flies unerringly into my allergic eyes when I drive home with the top down for the first time this year, which I did, and which it did. But it sure was fun!

Plurp. Charles Darwin to the fossilized remains of an extinct ape-like creature:

You are the missing link. Goodbye!

Plurp. Lots of Plurp today. Why is that?

Plurp.

A man with no clue
dreamed that the blue dog
had no thumbs.

Monday, May 7, 2001

Blab. Despite our insistence that our mail server would throw away mail during our three-week absence it somehow didn't, so we have a smattering of Blabbery with which to start the week.

The first is from a reader who, not taking to heart our admonition not to Blab at us while we away, found an old Blab box and tried it anyway.

asdf

And we're so glad they did.

Blab. Under the subject line:

Bad Flash, Bad Flash, Sit Flash, Quit Barking, Flash...

... and referring to our rant against a frighteningly awful use of Flash, a reader writes:

 Glad you enjoyed Florence Foster Jenkins!

 --That Flashmaker

We note only that there is an alternate, more colloquial, definition of flash (as an intransitive verb) that seems particularly apt here, and we rejoice that that, um, interesting example of Flash is no longer available.

Blab. Another of our many secret admirers writes:

hey you thisis imani    under an old sn   got bothered to much under the other one   miss you and want to hear from you   call me  286-8242  bye darling

All of our secret admirers are illiterate. In fact, we insist on it.

Plurp. This week, we bring you more of the things the voices told us during our vacation. This time, the voices had a familiar ring to them.

Matchus Inversus

Match items in the left column with those in the right.

Seven men with no tongues	Undergarments made entirely of beetles
An intricate machine with no apparent purpose	Dogs feeding on things which will not be discussed
A woman's arm, in repose	A book of rituals that have never been practiced
A musician whose instrument has been embedded in his body	A beggar who professes to tell lies in a public square
Three goats born without eyes	A mystical symbol embroidered on human skin
A flute, an oboe and a severed ear	A series of tubes and valves kept in a lacquered box
A song which can only be sung backwards	The feces of a small bird
Three teeth of unknown value	A holy man found in a butcher shop

Plurp. Also while we were away, our dear employer finally posted our "professional" Web page. Complete with a link to Plurp. Heh.

Now don't go blaming us for the really atrocious graphic design or the rank HTML. Both were foisted upon us. Hence the quotes on "professional". And they make it so hard to post stuff that we've decided to put things here, to the extent possible, and just put links to it on our "professional" page.

Yo. Dr. K suggests that we investigate the TrueAir air filter from Hamilton Beach as a partial solution to the ongoing issues arising from Him Who Must Not Be Named.

Hmm.

Could work.

Yo. Some terms you were searching for on Plurp while we were away:

• bhask
• edouard francois
• gene ray
• invisible kangaroo

Somewhat frighteningly, they all do occur somewhere on Plurp. Weird.

Plurp.

The blue dog
once had a flute,
an oboe and a
severed ear.

Sunday, May 6, 2001

Plurp. For those of you who hadn't noticed, we're back following a three week absence. And I'd like you to know that I have made a compromise with the eagles.

I worried for weeks in anticipation of going away, in anticipation of being unable to post. What would I do with my weblog - my weblog that, having started as a lark, has become at least an obsession though not, I like to think, an addiction? How could I avoid having my liver eaten by eagles?

I could write a program to post random junk to my log, but to what end? I could ask someone else to write entries, but how clueless is that?

I settled on a dangerous plan. I would write an entry every day while I was gone, promising to post them all when I returned, and in the meantime hide, and keep a furtive eye to the sky for ominously circling wings.

It seems to have worked. Go here for the beginning of the saga, and read forward. Or go here and read it backwards. It's pretty much the same.

Plurp.

The blue dog was
glad they got
back.

© 2001 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved