Plurp: Less than 3% rat meat

Bigger!

2001.06.10 : 2001.06.16

Saturday, June 16, 2001
Blab. Bursting with interesting news, a reader named Helen writes:
Subj: monster cat
Dear Dr. Plurp,
I have discovered what the cat was chasing in the middle of the night...........as I was plugging the iron into the wall socket this morning I met face to buggy little face with a very large dead roach-like insect! Flat on his back..............I'm sure scared to death by a grey monster cat.
Helen
We love it when our readers share with us the intimate details of their insect ridden night lives.

Blab. A reader amplifies on our reasons for being unable to sleep in the country.
(a) it's so impossibly dark, and (b) the crickets are way too loud! And (c) the silence is much too QUIET!!!!!!!!!
Yes, that is weird. Where does all the sound go?

Blab. Seeking a legitimate use for the word untold, a reader writes:
That reminds me of an untold...
I once heard an untold ...
It's like that old, untold story that says ...

Blab. Thinking that Plurp is a modern day Dear Abby, a particularly confused reader writes:
Dr. PLurp,
Yesterday I was going through my book and found the examination form from Christpher's first doctor's visit to the Humane Society. They had had him registered under the name of Pumpkin, if you remember. I said, "Pumpkin." out loud and he looked around at me. After a few minutes I repeated it and again he stopped what he was doing and looked at me..................I'm afraid his name really IS Pumpkin! Now I feel bad calling him Christopher...........what should I do? Should I go back to Pumpkin (even though I don't like the name) or try to convince him that GOD really wanted him named Christopher? I don't want him to get some kind of warped dual personality. Help me Obi Wan Kenobi..............you are my only help.............
Helen
It's our considered opinion that whatever creature to which you are referring thinks that pumpkin means tuna fish. However, just to be sure, we recommend you go through the OED, one word at a time, and record the creature's reaction to each and every one before taking any action.
And that's only hope, by the way, which we clearly are not.

Blab. A reader more in touch with recent pontifical events than we are writes:
What's all this about dead saints, then??
What dead saints are those? Aren't they all dead?

Yow. Square watermelons. We are not making this stuff up!

Plurp. It's Father's Day Weekend and even though we only have a cat, the rules say I get to do anything I want. So we're off to the movies!
Movie: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Demographic: I would have thought it would be 13 year old boys, but no. It turns out to be older guys (30-60) who come alone and 13 year old girls who come in gaggles with mothers as chaperones. So I guess that's letches and computer game fans. Fortunately, I'm both.
Plot Summary: Fabulously wealthy, heroic archaeologist Lady Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) is set off on a quest by her long dead father to find the two halves of an ancient artifact of earth shattering but unspecified power. As she does, she must defeat a horde of heavily armed mercenaries, various large animated stone creatures and the Illuminati themselves (how's that for a Bad Guy?), all on an immovable cosmic deadline. Reviewers who criticize Tomb Raider as an action movie that's not believable just don't get it. This is Gygaxian Heroic Fantasy, and Lara Croft makes all her saving throws. You never doubt for a moment that the right clues will come her way, that the bad guys will miss, or that she will triumph in the end. You just crunch your popcorn and hold on for the ride. And, if you're a 13 year old girl, you cheer at the end.
Distinguishing Features: Jolie is the perfect Lara Croft. She is supremely confident and supremely able, Lancelot without the tragic flaw. And Jolie's edgy personality gives Croft a dark side that works especially well. Jolie even gets to play with knives.
Academy Award For: Best Sex in a PG-13 Movie Since Barbarella. No matter what Jolie is doing, whether fighting a huge whirring robot, taking a shower, swinging on a vine in a steamy Cambodian temple or doing acrobatics on bungee cords, she looks like she's having sex. Jolie's upper torso, which gets ample screen time, might well be billed as a co-star.
Verdict: Recommended, maybe even highly

Yo. Angelina Jolie would love to drink her husband's blood. Hey hey.

You lay in bed and you just want to bite holes into each other.

Plurp. Word o' the Day.
runimerous adj. (of very old things) dusty, broken or mysterious

Plurp.
The blue dog
just crunched his kibbles
and stared

Friday, June 15, 2001
Blab. A reader who lives in the body of a dead saint writes:
Regarding sun, birds and summer, I was struck by your use of the phrase "driven a resonance." It just seemed slightly off. We really wanted to read "struck a chord." Then we thought, oh, a Helenism, but that's not it either. Is it something, or do you just like to use slightly different idioms?
And I did live in Manhattan for two years, which reminds me of another reason to hate summer. When it's warm enough to sleep with the windows open but not hot enough to run the AC (or you don't have it), street noise can be pretty loud and starts way too early in the morning. This happens both in Manhattan and in small rural towns if you live near enough to the main road.
BiSP (blogless (and sleepless) in St. Peter)
There we go being obscure again! Driving resonances is something one does in physics. It's the way a soprano breaks a crystal wine glass from across the room. Striking a chord (literally) is another example.
But never mind that. Now that we have written down what you wanted to read, we hope we have satisfied your literary desires.
My experience is that living in Manhattan without an air conditioner indicates a move to Minnesota in the near future.
Street noise is an interesting issue. We live in a place where the outdoors would probably sounds like a steel factory to most people. We have friends that consistently bring ear plugs in order to be able to sleep here. Apart from the jackhammers that pound all day, cars honk their horns almost continuously, huge air conditioning units on the roofs of buildings thrum loudly, and police cars, fire trucks and ambulances weave their way through traffic several times a day, their sirens screaming.
Mostly, we don't notice it any more. Sometimes, we'll be surprised at a collection of six fire trucks and miscellaneous police vehicles blocking off half of the street a few blocks away. We'll know that they must have gotten there recently, and surely had their sirens piping at full blast as they drove past, but we have no recollection of that happening at all.
It's the weirdest thing. People adapt. They filter out the stuff that isn't important in their environment so they can focus on the stuff that is. Even in high-intensity environments.
When we go visit friends in the country, it's really, really hard for us to sleep because (a) it's so impossibly dark, and (b) the crickets are way too loud!

Blab. A reader who points fingers at the body of a dead saint writes:
"and spend untold days getting it configured properly" Oops! You told!
Hmm! That calls into question whether or not there is ever any proper use for the word untold.

Blab. A reader who may very well not live in the body of a dead saint writes:
An unreported Mia (and the policeman) sighting from chesslog?
re: irony
Science Friday came and went, the rains and the impotent buildings hammering his consciousness like terrapins. Her tooth was loose, the aftermath of a turbulent night mostly forgotten and thankfully so. Again, again, the rains and the cold. Again, and again, the dreams came in the night, shaking her awake. And, as she sat upright, sweat streaming down her face, her chest, the policeman stirred. "Mia?" he asked.
Good heavens, yes! And with the policeman too. How did we miss that?
Love the terrapin bit.

Blab. A reader who once was a cracker eaten by a dead saint writes:
Mr. Plurp -
There has been another Mia sighting. In accordance with your request, I'm telling you about it. I've put it up at http://www.leuschke.org/log/archives/00000015.htm. Feel free to add it to the archive.
Graham
Two in one day, and one in an entirely new place? That's unheard of (or at least unremembered). They have both been duly committed to the Mia Chronicles, and our thanks to our observant readers.
This is all so exciting. Who knows what might happen next?

Blab. A reader who squirts oil in the mechanical body of a dead saint writes:
What happened to the robots?
Well, they seem to have gone back to their own galaxy. Sorry.

Blab. A reader who doesn't know what to believe about dead saints writes:
So where's the link for the "pouring mice on poor people" show in Peru? How can we believe you without a URL?
The reader is, as are we all, impatient for the long-promised Convergence Of Media, the one uniform access to All Information, the real world wide web. Alas, it ain't here yet, so the best we can do is to refer you to the TV show Nightline, Wed. June 14, 2001.
But wait! Friend John provides the clue: the program is hosted by some lady named Laura. And with that, a few Google iterations result in Laura en America, the highest rated TV show in Peru.
For $20, two women stripped to their underwear in front of television cameras, then had buckets of slime-covered toads poured over their bodies to the hoots and whistles of the studio audience.
For $20, three men raced to gobble down bowls of large, twitching, maggot-like tree grubs from the Amazon jungle.
For $30, a woman licked the armpits and toes of a sweaty body builder who had not bathed for two days.…
Finding a Web reference specifically to that mouse stuff is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ted Koppel is a waffle.

Blab. A reader who carries around the body of a dead saint writes:
"Do you say, I carry bricks around or, I am building a great cathedral?"
I say, I fall on my nose. I say, I cram the products of Western civilization into small metal cans. I say, I am zooming through space at half the speed of light, persued by the memory of a woman, a summer afternoon, the thickness of blood on glass, the loom of the tower. I say, yes, you say no. You say goodbye, but I say hello.
Hello.
Hello.
Hey - we just had dinner out of those cans! Hela heba helloa cha cha, hela ...

Blab. A reader who bathes with the body of a dead saint writes:
Lovers embracing by a fountain.
Tx!

Plurp. Is Plurp degenerating into a mere conversation between readers and editor, with no interesting original content at all? Dumb, dumber or Nobel Prize in Literature? You decide.

Yow. In a dream last night, we were staying at the house of Bovine Inversus, as we were attending some event in the area. We surmised that Ian had kindly arranged this for us. Bovine turned out to look like a British actor whose name I can't remember, soft-spoken and gracious, though his house was filled with the oddities you might expect.
We exchanged pleasantries and then he had to go.

Yo.

Children slide along a giant spoon slide at the General Mills Cereal Adventure attraction at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota

It's those strange people in Minnesota again, this time adding a cereal-themed playground to the already sufficiently bizarre Mall of America. Wasn't Jesse Ventura enough? (rebecca)

Yow. Way cool optical illusion, and one we had never seen before. (Dave)

Plop. The faux food masters at McDonalds have a new product: Eggs Benedict McMuffin®.
The Eggs Benedict McMuffin breakfast sandwich is made up of Canadian style bacon, egg, special breakfast sauce, and American cheese on a toasted English muffin.
Cheese. Hmm. "Special breakfast sauce". Could that possibly have any connection with Hollandaise sauce? Yeah, prolly not.
In other news, there's a new Happy Meal featuring Hello Kitty and Action Man. And evil Flash stuff. Beware.

Yak. And speaking of food, friend J came into our office this morning with an interesting offer.
I can bring a human brain in for you on Monday if you'd like.
It turns out the offer was legitimate, well, in the sense that she really could and really would. A number of images bobbled through our head, the best being going to lunch in the cafeteria with this thing in a tupperware container, sitting down, and opening it up.
Brains again? Ah jeez, and she forgot to cook it. I'll be right back.
Then getting up and going over to the microwave ovens, cooking something else, and returning to the table to eat it.
As good as this sounded, we decided against taking the offer, though we are certain this stunt would have been legendary around the lab for years and years after we were fired.

Yo. I can't remember to take my ginko biloba.

Yak. Jay Leno and some person on the street.
Leno: What holiday is June 14th?
Person: The Fourth of July.

Yow. From Ftrain: Personals of an unusual nature. Oh do go look! Very clever.

Yo. What is the difference between hair and fur? Please provide an authoritative reference for your otherwise random opinion.

Plurp. Word o' the Day.
corvant adj. at rest or engaged in an activity; n. something chewed, or used as a tie at a formal function; (arch.) n. traveler who leaves egg whites by the sides of roads

Plurp. Words to live by # 5:
I have no need for a protocol droid.

Plurp.
The blue dog
just carried
pixels around

Thursday, June 14, 2001
Blab. Always eager to give us more to do, a reader seconds the motion that we should litter Plurp with micro-links rather than write more content.
I agree, you need links to individual posts. It's not that hard to do. Get on that.
Tell ya what. That can be your job.

Plop. Helen's computer seems to be approaching clinical stability after a serious brain hemorrhage - its hard disk developed loads and loads of surface errors. Fortunately, few of the errors landed in the middle of files that she really needed. This time. But this kind of hardware error is a certain sign that death is imminent
After two days of nursing and diagnostics, it seems to run well enough to get critical files backed up, which is today's job. Next, we get a new computer and spend untold days getting it configured properly. And in the midst of all of that, I have to do the same thing for myself, moving from my current laptop to a new one.
I hate computers.

Yak. Helen asks to borrow my computer to read Plurp.
If feels so good to have a computer on my lap again!
Not addicted, though. No, not her.

Plurp.
Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Bibbit
Billy Bibbit,
Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Bibbit.
Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Bibbit
Billy Bibbit,
Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Bibbit.
Saying this rapidly ten times is said to cause a soothing reaction in some.

Yak. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. on whether recent reality TV shows - showing contestants tied down under buckets of rats, and other extremities - represent the end of civilization.
What makes you think we have a civilization? I feel the same way about American culture as I do about Limburger cheese. Why put it in the refrigerator; what could happen to it that hasn't already happened?

Plop. There's a new reality TV show called Fear Factor in which attractive young adults have to do things that most people would shy away from, like being dragged by galloping horses or tied down and covered with rats in an abandoned building. The prize if they're the most successful in enduring these tortures? $50k. It just doesn't seem like much of an incentive, now, does it?
I told Helen that what they really needed to do was to find people for whom the $50k was a serious incentive, like poor people whose kids needed liver transplants. Then we'd see some real horse-dragging, rat-swimming fun!
She said I was sick.
Now it turns out that there's already a reality TV show like this in Peru. They get poor people and pay them some measly amount to have, for instance, mice and mice feces poured all over them. At least, that's what they showed on TV last night.
All our best ideas are stolen by people with time machines.

Yow. So there's this guy named Brian Walker who, having made a bunch of money inventing toys, is in the process of satisfying his childhood dream of traveling into space by building his own rocket. With (hydrogen peroxide) + (silver) = (steam) for propellant and a 3:1 glide angle parachute for re-entry.
The plan is to launch a suborbital flight straight up from Nowhere, Oregon, go straight up 30 miles and glide back to pretty much the takeoff point. He's currently planning to launch in May 2002.
Hey. We just report this stuff.
(We know. Everybody else saw this on slashdot. So shoot us.)

Yow. Bovine's at it again. Sly.

Plurp. Word o' the Day.
prentate adj. (of a cat, or a small object swallowed by mistake) having a shape similar to that of a handful of aphids

Plurp. Words to live by # 4:
Have a yabba-dabba-doo time.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the product of decades
of reality TV shows

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Blab. Taking us up on our offer of a cool job title, a reader writes:
Yes, I would like one.
Very well! You are hereby elevated to the lofty position of Great Grand Poo-Bah of All That is Buttered Toast, Lord or Lady of the Seven Hesitant Crouches, Exalted Surveyor of Misunderstanding.
Now that's a cool job title.

Blab. Living by our words to live by, our Midwest corespondent sings:
Go right to the source and ask the horse,
He'll give you an answer that you'll endorse.
He's always on a steady course,
Talk to Mr. Ed!
One of my favorite childhood TV shows. Oh boy! Guess what I'll be humming to myself all day?
- Your Midwest Correspondent
W-i-i-i-i-ilbur!

Blab. Our blathering about why we hate summer seems to have driven a resonance in our readership.
Another reason to hate summer, or perhaps just an expansion of your reason, is that the sun up means that the birds are singing. Even if you could block out the blinding sun, those blasted birds won't stop chirping and singing.
Well, you could move to Manhattan, where you can't possibly hear the birds over the jackhammers.

Plurp. Today's vocabulary lesson.
trecular adj. (of a member of the clergy) found in a ditch
chittilatious adj. made, or thought to be made, entirely of the wings of insects
drelnate n. the activity of virgins while housepainting; v.t. (pertaining to spoiled cheese) haunting
unculan adv. of the consistency of blood on glass; adj. unwilling to combine geometric shapes
Yes, there will be a test.

Plop. Ian is off again, ranting that Plurp does not index every single entry separately. Or maybe every other word? In not doing so, we force people who follow links to Plurp to read all of the entries in a single day to find the particular topic referred to by the link. Ian, of course, spent a bunch of time programming his site so every entry on his site can be linked separately. (Though he does make several points in this entry, most of which are not about links to Plurp. You may have to read his whole entry, in fact his only entry that day, to see what we mean.)
We could certainly spend our time doing this kind of programming. Or we could spend our time writing stuff, some of it hopefully interesting, in sufficient volume every single day so that there are multiple entries about which Ian can complain.
Hmm. We think we'll stick with writing stuff. Nice rant, though!

Plurp. Words to live by # 3:
Don't get cocky, kid!

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be
far more unculan
than previously thought

Tuesday, June 12, 2001
Blab. A reader asks ...
a/s/l?
This is chat code for "Age/Sex/Location?" That is, some reader wonders about our age, our sex and our location. We are always happy to answer our readers' questions.

Holocene, of course

Most enthusiastically, thank you

On our shockingly white couch

Blab. Another reader, consumed with our larger-than-life image, asks:
What do you do for a living? Do you have a cool job title?
It's very strange. We type a lot. We talk to people. We say things that are sometimes funny. We are often caught staring out into space, or drawing cryptic diagrams laced with circles and arrows on our board. Somehow, our employer deems this worthy of compensation. Or maybe it's just an accounting error. We haven't been able to figure it out.
And yes, we do have a cool job title. Would you like one?

Blab. Compelled to respond to our discussion about the compulsive fixations of That Which Cannot Be Named, a reader writes:
All cats have that psychological fixation, don't they?
Our cats will wander in after we've finished the latest unwise, but ultimately successful, home improvement project, and walk snootily around, checking out the changes. They are surveying the unauthorised modifications to _their_ house.
So far, the unauthorised modifications have met with approval. At least, the behaviour of the cats has never changed recognisably after they have checked out the changes...
On rare occasions, as we perform the alleged 'home improvements', the cats will sit and watch us, their faces betraying their faint bemusement. 'Why _on_earth_ are you doing all this hard work?', their faces say. 'We didn't tell you to.'
And that's why all right thinking people like cats, see?
Fascinating, isn't it, how two seemingly rational people, when faced with the same data, can come to such diametrically opposite conclusions?

Blab. A reader reveals the intimate details of his or her desires.
Do you know what I hate about summer?
1. No snow.
Helen has that same problem. So, two winters ago, we put a really nice snowball in the freezer, figuring it would be a fun thing come summer. (No, we didn't have an actual plan, but ... whatever.) Come July or so we remembered that it was in there, stuck back in a corner somewhere and went hunting for it. All that remained of it was a tiny marble-sized lump of ice.
It was, you see, a sublime snowball.

Blab. One of the many people who has compiled a dossier on our life writes:
I thought your babe correspondent was confused about the color of your Mustang, until I realized she had written "Steve White's Mustang," and not "Steve's White Mustang."
If they know even the color of a car we owned over a decade ago, can there be any minuscule detail of our life that remains our own?

Blab. Another of those who watch us writes:
Witchblade tonight at 9PM on TNT.
They even know what we do in the evenings. Is there to be no privacy at all for us?

Blab. Speaking of lakes, a readers says the following.
(Actually, the reader said this twice, though we've only posted it here once. You can simulate the experience of our posting it here twice by reading it twice.)
Speaking of lakes...
Suppose you're in a canoe in a lake. Further, you've got a rock. It's quite a large rock (though not so large that the canoe sinks). You (being tired of holding the rock) pitch it overboard, where it sinks to the bottom of the lake.
Does the level of the lake rise or fall?
leuschke.org
Well lookee there! A new blog that has the bad taste to link to Plurp. Where will it all end?
It seems to us that this lake fixation is inherently unhealthy. First we had the various moral dilemmas relating to starving goblins, wherein we pondered making various unsavory deals involving our own body parts or those of small children. Now we find ourselves rowing around with rocks and throwing them into lakes.
What is the significance of these disturbing aquatic thoughts?

Yo. Speaking of disturbing aquatic thoughts, what do you think was the most popular search term on Plurp this last month? It turns out to have been Cthulhu. A big Howdy to all you Old Ones out there!

Plurp. The way we think about what we do with our lives is interesting. Dave touched on this briefly in a short essay on something completely different:
The guys who took care of the horses that were used to pull the wagons that were used in maintaining the roads that led from the quarries to the construction site where they were building the Tower of Babel probably didn't spend too much time thinking about how far removed their work was from the building of the Tower. They just got up in the morning, had pizza, and got out the mucking tools and the currycombs. But still the Tower was there down the road, climbing slowly up, and without it all the currying and shoeing would have been without an ultimate point.
Do you say, I carry bricks around or, I am building a great cathedral? Are folks who say the latter happier in life because they have a feeling of belonging, of fitting in to a larger goal? Or are folks who say the former happier because they don't worry about the ultimate purposes and responsibilities of their daily work?
Me? I'm definitely in the latter camp. I just couldn't get out of bed in the morning if I really thought of what I did as writing email or having meetings or making phone calls. I need to feel as if I'm building the great cathedral, as if I'm saving the world or revolutionizing some field of endeavor. I need to be inspired by the tales I tell myself (and others!) about what I do.
How about you? Bricks or cathedral?

Plurp. Words to live by #2:
A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
and no one can talk to a horse, of course,
that is, of course, unless the horse
is the famous Mr. Ed.

Plurp.
The blue dog
just carried
pixels around

Monday, June 11, 2001
Blab. On the topic of my Miata, a babe writes:
<<I have never previously owned anything that could have even remotely been called a babe magnet. >>
What about that Red Mustang?? It worked, didn't it? I remember seeing it from my dentist's office in La Jolla and thinking, "Oh, hey, that's Steve White's Mustang!" So??
Uh, yeah. Except for that '66 Mustang that I owned in college and grad school. It was hard to drive, what with having to plow through all the babes.

Blab. Reacting to our musings on this month's cover of The New Yorker, portraying a real estate agent showing a Manhattan apartment with a postage-stamp-sized view of the river, a person named Helen writes:
<<We have one of those >>
Well, NOT QUITE! Come outside and look! It's just a little bit better..........
Helen (looking at the view RIGHT now!)
We remind our readers that, while the Web makes it appear that we are all in the same place at the same time, that is not necessarily so in the non-Web part of the world, if indeed there is a non-Web part of the world.

Blab. By remarkable coincidence, and referring to our review of Cuckoo's Nest, another reader named Helen writes:
Steve, you didn't mention that Tim Sampson is the son of the WONDERFUL Will Sampson who played Bromden in the movie. While he doesn't perform to his father's level, he was remarkably capable. What an act to follow.
It is only on for another two months so those in the NYC area SHOULDN'T miss it! My neck was stiff for hours afterwards!
Helen
This might be the Helen who somehow knows everyone who has ever been involved in films and who has memorized the entire matrix of who is married to whom, dating whom, the offspring of whom, the fourth cousin twice removed of whom.
If so, don't doubt her!

Blab. Our masked URList writes:
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
This is, of course, the World's Largest List of Quines, quines being programs that, when run, print themselves. If you've never tried to write one, go look; it's much harder than it sounds. Some seriously twisted brain paths are necessary to see how to do these things. (Oh go look anyway - lots of fun stuff there!)

Blab. Under the subject line See it and weep, a reader emits:
http://www.bvibeacon.com/
This is a picture of the gleaming steel skeleton of an ancient beast to which we referred in our first vacation entry earlier this year - the soon-to-be enlarged airport through which one travels to get to our island hideaway. Which won't be nearly as hidden after this is finished.
Sigh.

Blab. A reader suggests a clever solution to our upcoming problem of trillions of clover mites in our office.
How to deal with a countless number of mites:
1) Devise a scheme to assign a unique real number to each mite.
2) Have each mite stand beside a unit ruler, at the spot associated with its assigned real number.
3) Lift unit ruler, firmly bring it down atop line of mites.
Hope this helps!
This is a very helpful idea, and we thank our generous reader. As a first step in its implementation, we are taking bids on a method for reducing clover mites to point objects, while increasing their mathematical acumen. A lot.

Blab. A reader tortures us with a brain teaser.
PART A:
We are in a rowing boat on a circular lake, starting at the center. At the edge of the lake is a mean goblin who wants to eat us; and if he catches us, he will do so. The goblin can't swim and won't go into the lake (and doesn't have a boat!) but he can run k times as fast as we can row. (We'll discuss the parameter k later.)
We, however, can run significantly faster than the goblin can, so if we are able to reach a point at the edge of the lake without the goblin being there, then we will be able to escape.
Will we be able to escape or are our only options to be marooned forever on the lake or to be eaten by the goblin?
The answer depends on the parameter k. There is a threshold T, such that if k<T then we can escape, and if k>T the goblin will eat us. Find the threshold T to six digits.
PART B:
Why is the goblin called Jimmy?
This brain teaser was posed on the IBM Research site back in May. You will be disturbed to learn that over three dozen people submitted the correct solution. And some of them even figured out Part B.
We, however, view this as more of an ethical dilemma than a mathematical one. Why is the goblin characterized as mean? Maybe he's just hungry. And if he's hungry, is it really proper for us to withhold from him what may very well be his only available source of sustenance?
If so, perhaps we can can just wait him out. We can sit in the middle of the lake making obscene gestures at the goblin to anger him. He will exhaust himself, running around the lake, stomping angrily on the muddy shore until, at length, he collapses from hunger, there to become fodder for meercats as we row lazily to shore and skip off down the path.
Or perhaps we should strike a deal, giving the goblin our left hand, or maybe just an ear, in return for letting us go for the moment. We'll probably have to return later with more food for him in order to make the deal go through, but we're sure there are nearby villages with an excess of children.
Choices, choices.

Blab. An impatient reader, disturbed by our small probe of his or her linguistic associations, writes:
'Not a day goes by' _what_ ?
We thought the phrase was so delightfully different all by itself that we just left it alone there, naked and meaningful. Didn't you like it?
Can you imagine?
Who would have thought?
Readers are invited to submit other phrases, their second halves having been lopped off, whose meanings thereby change in interesting ways.

Plurp. Helen is planning a trip to Scotland.
That Which Has No Name has a simple psychological fixation: He has to know where absolutely everything in his local environment is, absolutely all the time. Leaving the apartment? That's an unsanctioned activity. Vacations? Out of the question!
So ...

Plurp. Words to live by # 1:
Let the Wookie win.

Plop. Do you know what I hate about summer?

The sun rises too freaking early! By 5:30 - AM - in the morning - the sun is already up and our bedroom is already bright enough to grow copious amounts of illegal flora. Needless to say, this is not a pleasant experience for those of us who are night people, and for whom a plausible hour at which to stir sleepily to consciousness has at least two freaking digits. I mean, really.

Well, OK, the list is pretty short.

Rant. In the process of executing this McVeigh character for blowing up children and such, people seem to have gotten themselves all lathered up about the idea of the government killing someone.
Hello? Government, and the U.S. government in particular, does this all the time. That's what war is, after all. Police kill people. The National Guard kills people. The C.I.A. kills people.
I'm not arguing that this makes it right. But it certainly makes it common. McVeigh's death is hardly exceptional in this regard.
Another contingent of folks have gotten all spittly about why it's OK for the government to kill people. It's not vengeance, says Dubya; it's justice. Or it's closure. Or it's cheaper to execute people than to keep them imprisoned for life.
Please! Of course it's vengeance. Those of you who think capital punishment is the cat's meow should just fess up about that.
You are not seriously suggesting that the government should murder certain people in order to give others "a sense of closure". If so, I'm not attending any of those touchy-feely fests any more. Get your closure somewhere else, like the rest of us.
And the economic argument? Hey - it's cheaper just to shoot people in the street than it is to get all bogged down in that pricey arrest-and-trial stuff, so let's get those perpetrators off the dole before they get on it. Uh huh.
If you, as a deliberative member of society, wish to promote the government's killing of certain people because it gives you a satisfying feeling of vengeance, be my guest. But let's stop wrapping blood lust in what is intended to be more socially acceptable clothing. Let's leave that to the hockey fans.

Plop. In 1939, a graduate student conditioned children to stutter, confirming her mentor's theory that stuttering is induced in perfectly normal kids by seizing on minor speech imperfections. These kids became stutterers for life, which ruined their lives.
"I remember your face, how kind you were and you looked like my mother," [wrote one of the victims.] "But you were ther to destroy my life. ... I have nothing left. You stolen my life away from me."
Nice people, eh?

Yo. After more than 40 years of delightful if socially meaningless entertainment, Bozo the Clown is going bye-bye. It seem that times have changed.
"With Bozo there wasn't any pretense of education," [said one fan].
"Nobody was tuning in to Bozo to see clowns tour a museum or read a book, any more than they were watching Mr. Rogers to see him get a pie in the face," [said another].
As for us, we will miss him, and we wish him and his size 184½ shoes great and good fortune in the political arena.

Plurp.
The blue dog
couldn't imagine and
wouldn't have thought.

Sunday, June 10, 2001
Yak. It was a top-down kind of day - soft, warm and sunny - so we decided to have lobster for lunch, the connection being that our favorite lobster place is a dockside seafood restaurant at the other end of Connecticut, some 150 miles away, at the end of a three or four hour drive.
Waiter: You folks from around here?
Helen: Nah. We're from Manhattan.
Waiter: Well you're a long way from home! What did you come all the way out here for?
Helen: Lobster.
Waiter: You came all the way out here for our lobster?
Helen: You have good lobster.
Waiter: Well, thanks. Uh ... what are you going to do after lunch?
Helen: Go home.
The waiter turns away, shaking his head.

Plurp.
Play: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Demographic: Those old enough to remember its previous incarnations, probably.
Plot Summary: Oh good heavens! You already know this.
Distinguishing Features: Gary Sinise as McMurphy. It's a tough act, following Jack Nicholson in the movie and Kirk Douglas in the original stageplay, but Sinise is easily up to the task. He is provocative, wily, gregariously obnoxious in all the right ways, pacing around the stage as he whips up the thinking of the mental institution's more placid citizenry. Amy Morton is a quietly frightening Nurse Ratched, with all of the evil control of Louise Fletcher's Ratched. Eric Johner's stuttering Billy Bibbit is also quite wonderful. Segues are often carried by the inner torment of the psychotic Chief Bromden, made visible (and audible) in all their jarring terror, to great and lasting effect.
Tony Award For: Best Actor. Sinise clearly dominates the production.
Verdict: Highly recommended.

Yo. The first blind climber has returned from the summit of Everest. At least, that's what they told him.

Yow. Sunglow. At this time of year, the evening sun first becomes visible between the skyscrapers, marking an unofficial beginning to summer. Tonight, at 7:55 PM, it appeared, sliding out from the most distant building and flooding the entire street (and our apartment) with hot orange light. Think of it as Stonehenge in Manhattan. We call it sunglow.

Plurp. Not a day goes by.

Plurp.
The machinery whirred, not
listening. The sun set noisily and the darkness
filled the terrified nostrils of
the blue dog.

Top

Earlier entries Later entries