Plurp: If symptoms persist, see a doctor

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2001.05.20 : 2001.05.26

Saturday, May 26, 2001
Blab. Referring to our tale of mystifying somnambulism, a reader who apparently placed Webcams in our bedroom writes:
"I got up, came around to her side of the bed, sat down, had a conversation with her, and otherwise wandered around the apartment."
Well, that's not EXACTLY what happened.........
The reader refers to the utterly embarrassing part. And we're just not going to go into that here.

Blab. A prodigal correspondent returns.
Greetings from your friendly Northwest correspondent. I wanted to report that the same group of early morning trolls who seem to randomly toss those "analog newspaper things" on doorsteps are also on the rampage in the Great Northwest (otherwise known as the Great Due West to those Plurp fans in NY). We have talked about installing a recycling bin outside front doors to make our lives much easier, and thus creating more jobs for the struggling recycling industry. The problem is I fear I would soon be out of shape by not walking to the bin myself, thus shortening my life expectancy by at least 3 or 4 hours.
And by the way, that analog print described the events you were describing as
"Devils Ice Penguins"
and I pose the question - was this punishment or a blessing?
How intriguing! Further research uncovers evidence of a titanic struggle in the Netherworld.
Devils Push Penguins to the Edge
Penguins Smash Devils
Penguins Near Elimination
And this final, chilling image:
Devils Down Penguins

Plurp. Our latest Secret Project is a quite a bit less ambitious and time-intensive than the last one, but in some sense just as much fun for us. It's Generic Literature. The unveiling is this coming Monday.
We know. You can hardly wait. Deal with it.

Plop. Would you like to see a really shocking, grisly video of the recent building collapse at an Israeli wedding? Would you like to see dozens of people falling to their deaths, up close and personal? A video shot live as it happened? CNN is happy to oblige. As was NBC, according to Helen.
What does that say about CNN and NBC? What does that say about us?

Plurp.
Video: The Contender
Demographic: Those of you interested in political intrigue, sex, women's rights or really good movies. That's basically everyone, right?
Plot Summary: A woman is put forth for confirmation as Vice President of the U.S. after the former V.P. kicks the bucket. It seems, however, that she participated in a gang bang in college, which makes for salacious coverage and great debate, especially about the role of women. The plot is interesting but predictable until close to the end, when it soars to surprising and breathtaking heights.
Distinguishing Features: Most amazing plot twists. Obviously, I can't explain more. But see it. Really. See it!
Academy Award For: Best writing. I cried, not from tragedy or joy, but from the commanding beauty of the ideas.
Verdict: Highly recommended.

Plop. Dennis Miller's goatee is turning gray. Are we feeling old? Oh yeah.

Yo. The Unnamable One seems to be developing names, after a fashion. Helen's official name for him is Christopher, but she mostly only calls him that when he's being bad. That's almost all of the time, so it works out. On the rare occasions when he's being good she calls him Baby Pie and sometimes, even less explicably, Puppy.
I tend to call him Cat, or Beast, or Creep, depending upon just how bad he is at the time. When he eats flowers and throws up on the rug, as he did again yesterday, I call him Clarence. He doesn't seem to like that.

Plurp. As if cats weren't already taking over, a company called CyberPounce is producing computer games for kitties.
The software includes 11 virtual kitty treats, including helpless little birds, dangling spiders and a furry mouse, that dart around the computer screen. The victims either move on their own as part of the program's screensaver mode or are manipulated by the cat's owner.
The main goal is to get housebound cats to spend some quality recreation time batting at a PC monitor.
On the other hand, this sounds useful!
PawSense from BitBoost Systems aims to prevent cats from walking across PC keyboards. The $20 program runs in the background and, when keys are depressed in "paw-like" combinations, it emits a shrieking sound to scare the cat, shuts down keyboard input and displays the message: "Cat-like typing detected."
Not that Clarence ever z drtu0-i'][p];

Yo. Just how many stupid people are there in the world?

Plurp.
Movie: Pearl Harbor
Demographic: Summer blockbuster devotees, plus the gaggle of yentas that sat behind us and talked the whole time.
Plot Summary: Handsome people fall in love. The Empire of Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The U.S. bombs Tokyo. Writers produce three hours of sappy dialog, trying both the stomachs and the bladders of the audience.
Distinguishing Features: Far and away the most astonishing, most jaw dropping battle footage ever created. Oh, and the captivatingly beautiful Kate Beckinsale.
Academy Award For: Worst dialog in a major motion picture. We kept giggling and comparing it to Airplane.
Verdict: Recommended.

Friday, May 25, 2001
Blab. A reader informs us of a guy named Norwell Durant in the Caribbean who has spent his whole life extracting sea salt and packaging it. No, he's not a Morton Mogul. He's an old hermit, the only occupant of a tiny island, and his production facility is a little shack.
Still, there's something romantic about that.

Blab. A reader who may have just learned the wonders of cut-and-paste writes:
"Plurp. In this entry, please imagine that I am discussing some esoteric point of modern culture, analyzing it wittily yet insightfully,introducing a clever perspective on it that hadn't occurred to you. Imagine that you are impressed, not only with my command of the subject and my ability to weave it in such lovely prose, but also with the restrained way in which I bring in ideas from literature, history, philosophy and art without making you feel as if I am showing off the astonishing breadth of my knowledge. Imagine that you leave it with a feeling of quiet satisfaction, but also with the awe of having been shown a small piece of The Truth.
Thank you. "
Imagine that I really care...........
Deja vu! I had the distinct impression of writing that same thing yesterday. Strange.

Blab. A reader obsessed with the passing of time writes:
Subj: how many minutes?
Perfect for vacations!

We suppose this would be good for people who still want to count the minutes but who just don't have the time.

Blab. Before rushing off, a reader asks:
Through what throat do the golden voices talk now? Is there anything left of that culture that we counted on, that rested in the backgrounds of our various unknowing childhoods, axiomatic and unexamined? There is the blue dog, and behind the blue dog, the blown god, are the masses of the common people, standing in ranks, that army that we never suspected until today (until the fall of the Nasdaq? but that's too easy an excuse) we were in fact doing our spying for; a Fifth Column for the humanity that some of us (some of them, the choreographers of confidence) have now found ourselves (herself) hopelessly outnumbered by, hopefully absorbed among. What gory and monumental dawn are we waiting for NOW, after the cellphone has rung?
I have to see a man
about a dog.
I have to see a man
about a god.
A dandy set of questions! Let's see. On that golden voice question, that would be Stevie Wonder. (We were not previously aware of the blown god; interesting.) The gory dawn is, as you rightly suspected, that of the New World Order. As to the monumental dawn, that would be 3M's.
We are always happy to answer reader questions, and we look forward to hearing from you again after you've seen that guy.

Yak.
I'm getting old.
What do you mean?
In college, I had this mechanical clock radio. It would go click and then, a second later, the radio would come on and start playing music. But it would never get that far. It would go click and I would turn it off, wide awake, and get out of bed. It would just take a second. Now, it takes me an hour to get out of bed.
That's because you were sleeping alone in those days.
Ah.

Yo. This morning, Helen told me the most amazing and utterly embarrassing story about me sleepwalking last night. And no routine somnambulism this! It seems I got up, came around to her side of the bed, sat down, had a conversation with her, and otherwise wandered around the apartment.
Weirder still, I have absolutely no memory of this whatsoever. Human minds are very, very strange. At least, mine is.

Yak.
James Taylor is amazing.
How so?
His voice is so great. It's the same as it was when he was twenty.
My voice is as good as when I was twenty.
You can't sing to save your life.
See?

Rant. A kid was killed yesterday in Brooklyn as a result of a fight in a school bathroom. It seems that her head got bashed on a radiator, though presumably that was not the intent of the person who did it. Today, everyone is up in arms about it. Why weren't the students supervised? they ask, figuring that there should have been a teacher in the bathroom at the time to stop it.
There is a strange inversion going on in America. I call it ex post facto prevention. People see something happen that they don't like and they say Why didn't they yada yada yada?, something that might have made a difference at the time but that would be impractical to the point of absurdity if done regularly.
I first noticed this in the aftermath of the recent school shootings. Why didn't they know this kid would do it? everyone asked. Why didn't they arrest him when he made random comments about getting even? This has led, of course, to amazing incidents like children being suspended from school for playing cops and robbers, pretending that their fingers were guns.
A teacher in every bathroom all the time? Look, folks: shit happens. Life is contingent. The world is an unsafe place. Get used to it.

Yo.
Ad form offers one-stop opt-out
People seeking to protect their privacy can complete a single Web form to keep major advertising companies from collecting data about their Internet browsing and shopping habits.
Under pressure to better protect privacy, the advertising industry has set up two new Web sites that let computer users refuse to have their personal data collected and profiled when they visit popular commercial Internet sites.
The paranoid among us will wonder what else they do with the data you give them.

Plurp.
The blue dog
aspired to be a
choreographer of
confidence

Thursday, May 24, 2001
Blab. A reader returns to the practice of assigning us tasks.
Subj: Project for today
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/world/24PREX.html
Ignore the news story and tell us what is going on in the linked picture...............
To avoid the onerous process of clicking through to this link, I've attempted to reproduce the picture here. (Though I'm not sure if this will force you to log on to the New York Times site. We'll see!)

We speculate that this might be a fashion discussion, but we await our readers' more learned interpretation.

Blab. Another reader, insistent on giving us things to do, writes:
dress code
Very well. We have asked the various programmer in our group to make their programs more complicated. Anything for our readers.

Blab. Speaking of Brincess Pride, a reader writes:
Background music from an Army National Guard radio ad, heard last week: "Suicide is Painless".
We file that under What Were They Thinking?
Blab. It's always hard to tell how much our readers just make up.
EDINBURGH (Reuters) - British police said Wednesday they were treating a haggis attack on the house of a Scottish woman living in England as a "racially motivated hate crime."
A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester police said the traditional Scottish dish -- normally the size of a pineapple -- had been thrown through the front window of Christine MacKinnon, 45, in the Rochdale area of the city northwest in England.
"We can confirm the object thrown was a haggis, which has been taken away for examination," the spokeswoman said.
Scotland's Daily Record tabloid newspaper said MacKinnon grew up in Glasgow but had lived in England for 35 years and had lost all trace of her Scottish accent.
"This harassment from my neighbors has been going on for two years," the paper quoted her as saying. "I've had people screaming in my house telling me to get back to Scotland. But I won't budge."
Perhaps she's staying for the cuisine.

Plurp. Pearl Harbor, a movie about thousands of people being killed in a mass murder (oh, sorry - "act of war" - a much more acceptable term) is coming out in a couple of days. It's rated PG-13, which means that 13 year-old kids can go and see the slaughter. And yet sexual relationships are not only banned in movies for anyone under 18 but, in many cases, banned from U.S. society altogether.
Can someone explain this to us? 'Cause we're unclear on the concept. Thank you.

Yo. There was one of those funky analog newspaper things on our doorstep yesterday. This seems to happen regularly. Someone must get up really early to put them there, too. It's so odd. The recycling bin is just a few feet away. Why don't they just take them there directly? And if whoever it is insists on plopping newspapers down in front of our door, why don't they just bring them all at once? We've tried to find somebody to call and tell them to stop, but they just keep coming.
Anyway, as we were taking the newspaper to the recycling bin yet again, we saw a really weird headline:
Devils Show Penguins Who's Boss
It's weird enough that the Catholics were right about all that Heaven-Hell stuff, but we had no idea that (a) penguins were subject to moral law and hence exposed to eternal damnation and (b) there was some confusion on the part of either the devils or the penguins about the authority structure in Hell (though perhaps the penguins should be forgiven in that they probably did not receive religious training).
In that same newspaper was this headline:
Devils Beat Penguins
Now this is just plain going too far! It seems to us that the penguins, whatever their turpitude, must be suffering enough with all that fire and brimstone stuff. But beatings too? We shall have to protest to the ASPCP.

Plurp. Notation seen on a presentation at work today:
May/24/2001

Plurp. In this entry, please imagine that I am discussing some esoteric point of modern culture, analyzing it wittily yet insightfully, introducing a clever perspective on it that hadn't occurred to you. Imagine that you are impressed, not only with my command of the subject and my ability to weave it in such lovely prose, but also with the restrained way in which I bring in ideas from literature, history, philosophy and art without making you feel as if I am showing off the astonishing breadth of my knowledge. Imagine that you leave it with a feeling of quiet satisfaction, but also with the awe of having been shown a small piece of The Truth.
Thank you.

Plurp.
The blue dog
just
couldn't imagine

Wednesday, May 23, 2001
Blab. Stumbling over a quote astonishingly like the one from yesterday, a reader writes:
Life is high, painless. Anyone who sells different is saying something.
--- from "The Brincess Pride"
I thought that was from M.A.S.H.?

Blab. In the midst of some embarrassing personal stuff which we will not reveal here, a reader suggests:
If you haven't been there, this is an interesting link -- the Surrealist Compliment Generator.
That's so solipsistic. If I have been there, then ... ? But indeed, the Surrealist Compliment Generator seems to have been listening to me as I was trying to get dressed this morning.
'Lo, EUREKA,' I yelled into the cat, 'Thou art truly laborious and divergent. My nose bleeds for your impending encounter with the front fender of a Mercedes Benz.'

In the same vein, the Surrealism Server has several interesting things and is worth several nanoseconds of your whimsical attention. From their Critical Paranoia department, for instance:
Those cracks in the sidewalk, they look like an outline of the west coast of Mexico. Those cracks in the sidewalk, they are the west coast of Mexico. Those ants in the middle, they are eating the Yucutan. Someone has steped in Panama. They have left smudges in the Pacific.
I always wondered where those smudges came from.

Blab. Responding to our lament at our nearly nonexistent classical education, a reader writes:
Shakespeare's not in Old English, silly physicist! hahahahahahahah!
See what I mean? That was never in Classics Illustrated!

Blab. A reader consumed with our HTML writes:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en] (Win98; U) [Netscape]">
<meta name="Author" content="Steve R. White">
That is absolutely correct. Not only that, but:
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
So there!

Plurp. One of our "brilliant artist friends" from the other night points out that they brought ossi dei morti (bones of the dead), not ossi da mordere (bones to chew). It's so hard to keep all them ossis straight!
Of course, they also said that Plurp was "Quite literary!" so our opinion of them does go down a notch. But maybe they just typed the wrong URL and looked at www.stevewhite.com instead? Or were simply searching for an inoffensive thing to say in reaction to being forced to read this drivel?
Now I'm depressed.

Yo. We told someone today that all human knowledge was already on the Web and, with a little effort, can be found with Google.
So he challenged us to find The Control Voice intoning the opening lines from The Outer Limits. Easy. Then he said How about Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone? Just as easy.
It is kinda amazing, tho.

Yo. Not everyone writes weblog entries every day. Some people write plays. Every day. Wild!
Scene: Three men in a blimp.
Man 1: You know, I wish I had brought a jacket. Nobody told me how damn cold it is in these blimps.
Man 2: Everyone knows you have to dress in layers when you go on a blimp ride. Come on.
Man 3: Really. Didn't your dad teach you anything about blimps?
Man 2: I remember when my old man had the talk with me, when I turned 16. He came over to me as I was feeding my guppies in the fish tank, and he said, Son, do you know where babies come from? And I told him I thought so, and then he asked me if I knew how cold a blimp ride was. And I had to admit I didn't, and that began an interesting 45 minute conversation about the blimp.
Man 3: My dad and his buddies told me about blimps when we were on a camping trip.
...

Plurp.
The blue dog
hungered for more
pixel da mordere.

Tuesday, May 22, 2001
Blab. Amplifying on yesterdays life = road metaphor, a reader writes:

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
"Life is a highway."
From the upcoming book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Pop Culture.
Let's see, that would be Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Princess Bride and some dumb song or other. Yes, I am frightened that I know that. Imagine all those neurons that could otherwise be finding the secrets of the universe, wasted on such nonsense.
I probably shouldn't be surprised, though. I never did have any education in literature or history, or really much of anything non-technical. I read a Shakespeare play once, but was so thoroughly confused by the Old English that I couldn't figure out what was going on. It was embarrassing!
I used to say, quite truthfully, that everything I knew about literature and history I learned from TV and comic books. Classics Illustrated is responsible for my ability to fake familiarity with much of Western culture. These days it's probably TV and the Web. Come to think of it, comic books were probably better for me.

Blab. Continuing in the Grand Plurp Tradition of mixing the forms, a reader writes:
The blue dog had no bones.
The blue dog had no bones?!
That's right, the blue dog had no bones.
How did he smell?
With his nose.

Plop. Oh shoot. No original content again. It's that awful job thing! I hate when that happens.

Plurp.
The blue dog
...
...
...

Monday, May 21, 2001
Blab. A reader prone to circulating humor via email writes:
For those who already have children past this age, this is hilarious. For those who have children nearing this age, this is a warning. For those who have not yet had children, this is birth control. The following came from an anonymous mother in Austin, TX. Poor woman.
Things I've learned from my children (Honest and No Kidding):

A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2,000 sq. foot house 4 inches deep.

If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.

A 3-year-old's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.

If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a superman cape. It is strong enough, however, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20X20 foot room.

You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using the ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.

The glass in windows (even double pane) doesn't stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.

When you hear the toilet flush and the words "Uh-oh", it's already too late.

Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.

A six-year-old can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year-old man says they can only do it in the movies. A magnifying glass can start a fire even on an overcast day.

Certain Legos will pass through the digestive tract of a four-year-old.

Play Dough and Microwave should never be used in the same sentence.

Super glue is forever.

No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.

Pool filters do not like Jell-O.

VCR's do not eject PB&J sandwiches even though TV commercials show they do.

Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.

Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.

You probably do not want to know what that odor is.

Always look in the oven before you turn it on. Plastic toys do not like ovens.

The fire department in Austin has a 5 minute response time.

The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy. It will however make cats dizzy and cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.

That is very funny. In fact, 907 people thought it was funny enough to post it (or variants of it) to their own Web sites already.

Blab. Presumably still Sleepless In Seattle, 1-3 readers contribute new puzzles in the series:
If your tongue is like a football, you may never be...
Molybdenum smugglers are almost always...
What rhymes with...
Readers?

Blab. A reader stops to remind us that ...
Life is a highway.
Is it? Is our path from birth to eventual death paved with asphalt and given strange names like 9A? Is it common for squirrels to be smashed onto life by heedless drivers? Do people get pulled over by officious folks in quirky outfits if they go too fast in your life?
Maybe life is a metaphor ...

Blab. Yet another reader says, quite mysteriously:
codernauts
Prolly some IBM geek referring to this advertising gimmick. Around the lab, we worry that the pictures are intended to imply that whatever IBM does must require an environmental suit to get close to it. But maybe that wasn't the intent?

Plurp. Why, we hear you ask, was Plurp so brief the last couple of weeks? Well, part of the reason was this silly job thing. It seems that our employer actually expects us to work for a living. Go figure.
But it was also due to the birthing process of our latest Secret Project, which took quite some time. If you want, you can check out (and even download) our new Windows Backgrounds, all ninety of them. If this doesn't get us slashdotted, nothing will.
(Dave thinks we're doing this just to torment him. That's silly, of course. It's not just to torment him ...)
Anyhow, tell us what you think.

Plurp. There's an online discussion facility called Babble here at work. In it, there's an area for you to tell people who you are. So, for the enlightenment of my colleagues, I posted this.
I am a contradiction, an edifice of brick and mortality, a collection of penguins required to do push-ups, the kind of algebraic form you can't bring home to mother.
I am nothing if not helpful.

Yo. We wondered a while ago (as did Dave) what would happen if someone started a blog that was entirely fictional but well done. Apparently it happened - again - recently. (Dave)
This makes us wonder what our social responsibility is in how we present ourselves to others. Must we always portray ourselves as exactly ourselves? Just how fictional can we be without crossing the line of Social Badness? Can we exaggerate? Tell misleading stories? Deny the truth? Portray ourselves as people entirely different from who we are without informing our "audience" that we are being fictional?
I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.
-- Somebody famous

I am a 6'2" blonde 23 year old CEO of my own startup.
-- Chat room conversation

I'll be done with it in two weeks.
-- Every programmer in the world

Plurp. Am I too connected? Let's see, just to pick "now" as a random moment in time, I am:

Writing here, preparing to post Plurp today.

On the email server that I use to gather Blabs, so I can post them here.

On the email server at work that I use for everything else.

Looking at Dave's blog to get links.

Using Google to get that Monica Lewinsky quote right.

Monitoring my WorldJam topic at work.

Using a discussion facility named Babble to talk about problems with WorldJam with the developers.

Is that too connected? Nah.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was definitely too
connected.

Sunday, May 20, 2001
Blab. On Mispelling Day, a reader wrote:
What does "illeterate" mean?
Zackly.

Blab. A reader just a touch too excited about our Sleepless In Seattle bit writes:
bdhjklnprsweepless
Ah yes. A janitor whose broom is stolen is ...

Plurp. Welcome to anyone from IBM who happens to find their way here from WorldJam! For everyone else, WorldJam is this wild experiment at work in which we're trying to get 350,000 people to brainstorm about the Big Problems for 72 hours online, starting Monday at noon EDT. I'm "moderating" one of the ten topics. I put that in quotes because I did the math.
If a mere 1% of IBM employees try this thing out, that's 3,500 people crammed into the equivalent of ten newsgroups / chat rooms, or 350 people per topic. My worry is that there will be so much activity that no one will be able keep up. Including those foolish enough to sign up as "moderators".
We'll see!

Plurp. Our brilliant artist friends Blaise and Ginny came over for dinner last night after a day of gallery hopping. They brought Ossa Da Mordere (bones of the dead) and La Cryma Christi (the tears of Christ). A bit on the macabre side. But good!
(And for a hoot, see how Google "translates" an Italian recipe for Ossa Da Mordere into English. Boneses To Bite indeed. Who knows what you'd get if you tried to follow that?!)

Yow. Budweiser may make lousy beer (or so we're told), but they make great commercials. The next in their Whazuuuuup? series is a bunch of New York mafiosos in a howyadoin'? spoof. Utterly hilarious.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had no
bones.

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