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2001.06.17 : 2001.06.23
Saturday, June 23, 2001
Yow. We got that stupid T21
working well enough to play the demo for Thief II - The Metal Age. Wow.
Way cool. So if we don't have a lot to say today, we hope you'll understand
why.
 Plurp.
The blue
dog had no
liver.
Friday, June 22, 2001
Blab. A reader suggests an activity which we can pursue
in our endless meetings at work.
meeting bingo
Does everyone know that meeting bingo is? We've never actually played
it, though we do keep threatening.
Actually, we're playing a much more perverse game during our meetings
this week: System configuration. We sit there with two laptops,
trying desperately to install all of the necessary software on the new
one and migrate the data and settings from the old one, all during the
dull bits of our meetings.
Are you bored? asks someone, seeing us come to a meeting with
two
laptops. Don't ask, we say.
Blab. Another reader, thinking outside that very same box, revisits
that very same bottom line.
For
your next meeting.
Or were you the one who linked to
this? Hard to remember where all the information comes from.
Where does all the information come from, anyhow?
Blab. A reader confesses to something we've all experienced.
The little blab box looks
like a search engine entry form, and I know its not, but I've been trained
so long that if I want to search for something that I type it into the
box and now I keep doing that on your site and instead I send you some
cryptic comment that makes no sense whatsoever because its not supposed
to and anything you actally get out of it is just a knowledge accident.
We feel your pain.
But think of it this way: It gives us such great stuff to write about,
as if you had intended to send us those cryptic remarks, as if there
was hidden meaning in them, or as if they were a cleverly crafted enigma
with which you taunt us.
We love it when you tease us with such ambiguity.
Blab. An Elven reader reminds us:
Ash nazg durbabatuluk, ash
nazg gimbul,
Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum ishi
krimpatul.
More properly:
Ash nazg durbatulûk,
ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk
agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
"I cannot read the fiery letters,"
said Frodo, and Gandalf explained that "[t]he letters are Elvish, of an
ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor."
It's got a beat. We can dance to it. We give it a seven.
Blab. A reader concerned with the source of rights writes:
Privacy policies preventing
the casting of a fundamental spell.
Actually, a world with Sorcery in it has a very
tough time with privacy. Imagine a group of people who could not just see
and hear pretty much anything they wanted, but could read your thoughts
and probe your memories, without you ever knowing.
Blab. That reader who keeps giving us tasks to do insists:
Keep the beard. Shave the
head.
It might frighten you to know that we have considered shaving our head.
But the experience of shaving our beard has put the Big Kibosh on hair
removal of any kind. Sorry, but it is for your own good.
Yow. What is the greatest single piece of music ever written?
For me, it's clearly Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which we put on
last night thinking it was the Brandenberg Concertos, which it certainly
was not. It is the most powerful, most perfectly integrated music I have
ever experienced, and it leaves me exhausted and exhilarated every time
I hear it.
And you?
Plop. Now imagine my embarrassment when it turned out to be
Beethoven's
Ninth, which I also love, and which is a close second in greatness
to his Fifth, but sheesh.
Yow. Do you remember when you were but a wee child, getting presents
on Christmas or your birthday and, instead of going for the toy inside,
doting with infinite fascination on the packaging?
I'm still that way, but these days its not toys but women. I love the
packaging of women, the boxes they come in.
Oh, the insides are equally wonderful - exuberant and joyful, thoughtful
and moody, frightened and morose - I love everything about women. But it
is still a great joy to admire the packaging in which these marvelous spirits
come wrapped.
Zoom. The young Hispanic garage attendant brought my Miata out
this morning and got out of it, smiling broadly, speaking rapidly in Spanish,
and gesticulating at the car. Excuse me? I said, so he translated,
still smiling broadly.
If I had this car, I could
get many, many women!
Plurp. And we, so wrapped up in our reverie about D&D, had
to go back and change history by adding that bit about the Acknowledgments
section in our Ph.D. thesis to yesterday's nostalgic
romp.
Plurp. This year's award for Most Oxymoronic Award goes
to ...
Sexiest
Geek Alive 2001
Congratulations.
Plurp. He Who Avoids Names has developed a new kink. I
came home yesterday, having driven around in the hot sun, with a rather
aromatic shirt, which I tossed on the bed while changing clothes.
The Beast Unnamable hopped on the bed, sniffed around, and found
the underarms of the shirt. What ensued was not for tender eyes. He didn't
just sniff in the general area. He slid his head along it, buried his snout
in it, drooled on it, all the time his eyes dilated and his tail twitching.
He must have wrestled with the shirt for a good half hour before falling
fast asleep on it, wrapped in it.
It is Gay Pride Week. Maybe he's just celebrating.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was the package
that life came
wrapped in
Thursday, June 21, 2001
Blab. A reader far too knowledgeable on a particular
subject writes:
In fact, you should not call
Mr Gerstner 'Sir Lou', even following his honorary knighthood.
The key word here is 'honorary'.
If Lou Gerstner was a British citizen, he would indeed now be addressed
as 'Sir Lou'. However, because Mr Gerstner, in spite of all his other
marvellous qualities, is not a British Citizen, he should be properly addressed
as 'Mr Lou Gerstner, KBE'. KBE stands for 'Knight of the British
Empire' -- or, more fully, 'Knight <something> of the Civil Division
of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire' [which sounds like something
from a Bill & Ted film]. There are, in fact, several (5?) grades
of Knighthood, which affect what the <something> is in the above title.
Other recipients of honorary knighthoods
include Steven Speilberg, Pele, Thabo Mbeki, Bob Hope, Javier Solana (who?),
Spike Milligan, Takuma Yamamoto (head of Fujitsu), Douglas Fairbanks Jr,
Ravi Shankar, and Henry Kissinger
Well that's more information than we thought was even out there. And here's
more. The various grades seem
to be something like:
-
Knight Commander of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the
British Empire (KBE)
-
Knight Bachelor (KB?)
-
Commander of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire (CBE)
-
Officer of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire (OBE)
-
Member of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire (CBE)
Then there's also the Queen's Police Medal, which is a sort of booby
prize, as far as we can tell. And a Knight Commander of the Order of
the Bath (KCB) for the heroically
clean. There are also corresponding titles like Dame Commander of
the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
(DBE) since, as we all know, dames can't be knights.
We're uncertain as to whether the Not-So-Excellent Order of the British
Empire has awards. Maybe they can't afford them?
Anyhow, it's all so complicated! Maybe we'll just keep calling
him Lou.
 Blab.
A reader picks up on a subtle clue.
The Plurp marquis?
I wasn't aware there was such an individual. Obviously, this nobleman needs
to join the ranks of Captain Plurp, Dr. A., and Dr. K.
La Marquise has, until now, lived a shadowy existence in the world
of Plurp. Here
is a rare image of her.
Blab. A reader caught in a web of memes says, incompletely:
Untold problems entangling
themselves in a privacy policy.
We'll never tell.
Blab. A reader mints new coinage.
Knowledge underload!
Sensory accidents!
We suffer from both. Did you see that?
Blab. A reader insists that I trod the muddy paths of Memory
Lane.
You were a D&D player?
Do tell more!
Oh, very well. I was introduced to D&D in my first year of grad school,
as good friend (now brother-in-law) Randy and I barged into a weekly evening
game at UCSD. It was pretty confusing, and we spend the night knifing random
passers-by and searching their pockets for loose change. In the game, of
course.
Somehow (I forget how), we got hooked up with Rich Spahl, a great guy
who was one of the original Midkemians
(of Ray Feist
fame and such). Rich GMed a truly wonderful game, using their marvelous
Cities
rules, that lasted until we left grad school. (That was a long, long time.)
We'd play once a week, usually on Saturday, and usually all day and
all night Saturday, living on Coke and Nacho Doritos.
During that period, Randy and I did what all completely addicted gamers
do: we wrote our own rules. We were interested in a magic system that was
not as arbitrary and ad hoc as the D&D Magic User rules. We
started out, naturally, trying to base it on fundamental physics. That
turned out to be hopeless, partly because no one else could understand
it, but also because fiddling with fundamental constants is a good way
to blow up the universe, but smaller scale effects don't work out.
So we developed a system we called Sorcery (evocative of the
source of magic), with 44 fundamental spells, and rules for how you
combine them into larger, more complex spells. The fundamental spells were,
by themselves, pretty weak. Here's an example.
Sight
Creates an invisible pointlike "eye"
centered on the caster's forehead through which the caster can see. As
long as the spell is active, the receiving mind sees only through the magical
eye. It cannot see through its mundane eyes.
Big deal, right? But combine it with a Move spell to change the
location of the eye and who sees through it, a Perceive Magic spell
to let it see magic, a Mind spell to direct it, a few utility spells,
and a cheap piece of jewelry and presto - so to speak - you have
a
Ring of Magic Detection that can be used by anyone. Sorcerers,
if they survive their spells going awry, which few did, can become incredibly
powerful.
(Really obscure footnote:
Our cat Thomas, recently departed from this world, was named after Thomas
the Terrible, the angry misfit Sorcerer character I played for years in
grad school, who could turn himself into a cat.)
Rich was kind enough to let us play test Sorcery in his world, which we
did with great delight for many years. The Acknowledgments section of my
Ph.D. thesis says this about the characters with whom we so closely bonded:
This thesis could not have
taken its present form without the kind aid of these people:
[...]
Thomas, Regnad, Morgan and Karél,
who let me share in their mysterious journeys and wondrous lives.
When I moved to New York, I started a new game with some experienced players
and a few novices which ran for a couple of years, again including Sorcerers.
In fact, the campaign was set in a great Dark Age after the previous civilization,
which relied on Sorcery as its technology, blew itself up.
(I've still got all the text of the Sorcery Manual
around, and have this vague idea of putting it into some modern format
like PDF and making it available on this Web site. One of these millennia.)
Later, friend David started a Call
of Cthulhu campaign, which was way cool but eventually petered
out as we all became too busy to wile away frequent nights and weekends
on such imaginative fun.
There's still a big cardboard box under my desk at work, labeled The
Whole Universe, with all of the rule books, campaign notes, and scribbled
additions to the Sorcery rules, just waiting to be opened and once again
become my world for little shards of time. Sigh.
Those were the days, though, and I miss them.
Yow. Speaking of cool job titles,
Geegaw
is looking for one. She's currently considering Software Development Neuron,
Circuit Breaker, Software Devolver, Cog, Cogito Ergo Sum and Fungineer.
But my favorite of hers is Popular Mechanic.
In my old physics days, we liked Quantum Mechanic.
Plurp. A friend at work suggests that we produce a movie, in
the genre of self-referential movies like Scary Movie, consisting
entirely of trailers. We'd call it Preview: The Movie, and follow
it up with a second one called Prequel: The Sequel.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was
a BDBE.
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
Blab. One of our more minimalist readers suggests:
rosch
A reference, no doubt, to the fascinating
discussion on how to approach the science of consciousness from a while
ago.
Blab. On the subject of interesting privacy policies, an anonymous
reader writes:
Another good privacy
policy
This is a good one!
How do I know you won't
sell my personal information to other companies?
We don't. Period. Not your name, your
address, your phone number or email address. Who'd want our mailing list
anyway? Eli Lilly? GET OVER YOURSELF.
I represent another company, and
I'd be interested in buying your mailing list. What's your price?
Let's talk!
Blab. Trying desperately but unsuccessfully to disentangle those
memes, a reader writes:
German proverbs applying
to an untold problem.
That's untold German proverbs, we assume?
Blab. An avid reader points us at Yet Another Silly Test. (We
love this stuff.)
D&D
Alignment Test
Neato! It turns out that I am:
Neutral
A neutral character does what seems
to be a good idea. She doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when
it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most neutrality is a lack of
conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character
thinks of good as better than evil. After all, she would rather have good
neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, she’s not personally committed
to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some neutral characters,
on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They
see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They
advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in
the long run. The common phrase for neutral is "true neutral." Neutral
is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without
prejudice or compulsion.
-- excerpted from the Player’s Handbook,
Chapter 6
Interestingly, most of the characters I played in D&D were Chaotic
Neutral. That's close, though True Neutrality is much harder to maintain.
Blab. A reader notices yet another element in an ongoing enigma.
Here's another Mia
sighting.
When she returned he was still asleep,
snoring lightly in the canopy bed. She smiled. Stepping softly into the
kitchen, she selected an oxblood lacquer tray and arranged the lemon-poppy
bread artfully on it, along with two small glasses of orange juice and
a slender black vase that held a single daffodil. Satisfied, she removed
her clothes in the kitchen so as not to wake him, and carried the tray
into the bedroom, setting it down on her side of the bed, beside him.
"My love," she whispered, her breath
close to his peaceful face and he stirred, his blue eyes opening slightly.
"Mia."
Cool! And duly noted. We do
greatly appreciate our readers informing us of Mia's activities.We can't
help but wonder if she has left footsteps elsewhere on the Net, somewhere
outside our current experience.
Blab. A reader attempts to bruise us with this probing question.
You concluded in Tuesday's
Plurp that you hated computers. What would you do WITHOUT them?
Sleep late. Read those analog book-things. Discover new ways to make love.
Write enduring poems of painful beauty.
Blab. A reader starts a scurrilous rumor!
Rumor has it you've lost
your beard. Where did it go, and when are you going to change the
Plurp marquis?
Let me take this opportunity to state categorically that I am not shaving
my beard again, and will resist with all my might any evil force or
forces that might attempt to steal it or otherwise cause me to lose it.
Anyone who saw me without it last
year can attest that, without it, my head looks like a large peach colored
balloon. Not good. Not good.
As to the Plurp marquis, we are open to reader suggestion about
how to change it. But the beard stays!
Yow. There's a sum rule active in my life. To balance out all
of the grief that my various computers are giving me (which is large and
seemingly unending), various calamities have ended up nearly happening
but not quite.
Last weekend, I got out of a cab and discovered that my key ring was
not in my pocket, which never happens because I compulsively fill my pockets
with All The Usual Stuff whenever I get dressed. It turned out it was just
shoved to the back of the drawer in the bedroom and I didn't see them while
filling my pockets. Whew.
Then, last night, I accidentally wiped out last week's Plurp,
both my local copy and the server copy. Anguish! How could I bear
the idea of my brilliant words, lost forever? Then I woke up in the middle
of the night and realized that there was probably a nearly current copy
in the Recycle Bin on my desktop. Sure enough, there was.
So life is restored to normalcy and all the bits are back where god
intended them to be.
It's funny to rejoice simply because bad things didn't happen. But sometimes
that's the way it is.
Yo. Now here's
something you don't see every day.
Lou Gerstner, the reclusive
chairman of International Business Machines, the world's biggest computer
maker, was awarded an honorary knighthood in Queen Elizabeth's annual birthday
honours list on Saturday.
I guess now we have to call him Sir Lou.
Yow. The creep
who wrote the Anna Kournikova virus is going to be prosecuted. Good.
Plurp. Would you sleep
with a stranger in order to get tickets to a Madonna concert? At least
135 people signed up to do just that.
Thema1,
a German online tabloid based in Berlin, has picked the winner of its "In
Bed For Madonna" contest.
A reader from Frankfurt, identified
as "Aaron T. - a 26-year old, well-built, black-haired guy" will get his
ticket for the sold-out Madonna concert this Friday in exchange for sex
with Thema1's sex columnist Shelley
Masters.
Oh! So I guess they didn't really mean sleep?
Yo. Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico was recently rescued
from the toilet bowl.
"He didn't even know where
the toilet bowl was," said Goodin, one of the governor's rescuers. "He
was pretty much in the dark about the whole thing."
"I think (Johnson set) a very poor
precedent for how people should be engaging in this activity."
Yow. Here's our next billion dollar marketing idea, from a very
long meeting today that was being recorded so some executive could listen
to it while driving between other appointments.
Meetings on Tape TM
Investors should feel free to contact us.
Yo. From that same meeting, a great new term:
Knowledge accidents
Readers are invited to submit definitions
and/or use this term in a sentence.
Yo. And another great new term from that same meeting:
Sensory underload
Do you love it? We experience this in most meetings!
Plop. Here's something that really
sucks.
In a case that could help
set the bar for the amount of privacy drivers of rental cars can expect,
a Connecticut man is suing a local rental company, Acme Rent-a-Car, after
it used GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to track him and then
fined him $450 for speeding three times.
Well we're certainly not going to be renting from Acme any time
in the near future!
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a bad
thing that didn't happen
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
Blab. On the deep science behind
where you sit in the movie theater, a reader writes:
I was so intrigued by your
inquisitive web-surfing research into the seating habits of movie goers,
but I must retort:
I have no seating preference other
than to sit next to the person I am with. What does this say about me?
Also, I was further intrigued about
the student who quit his "sex and violence films" class. I'm assuming
he finished the first half of the semester and decided not to attend the
latter "violence films" portion of the class. I'm just curious if
this class was for credit, and why I didn't go to that college instead....
Well, that's quite a large number of questions from a single reader, but
we'll try to do our best.
-
You don't want to know.
-
You are referring to poor Maria
Chattillon who "closed her eyes during parts of Apocalypse Now, The
Untouchables, and Bonnie And Clyde. The final straw was a scene in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein which featured a girl having her heart ripped out."
It sounded to us like she never really got to the sex part, and that's
a shame. But yes, the class was for credit.
-
Because you are not a Canadian High School student. We assume.
Blab. Yet another reader serenades us with inquiry.
Curious if the promoters
of Plurp have thought about arranging a chess match between computer-aided
Deep Blue and Chicken-aided Blue Dog....
No, but we did write a nice letter some time ago to the CEO of IBM asking
if he had any interest in a cooperative project that we call Deep
Blue Dog (details of which are omitted here for obvious reasons).
We have not yet received a response. We are greatly encouraged as we assume
this means he is studying it in some detail.
Blab. Our wanton meme mixer spits out this:
Chickens playing chess against
a German proverb.
You know what they say:
Sometimes,
even a blind chicken finds the corn.
Blab. A reader tells us this.
Dear Dr. Plurp:
I have this untold problem.
Would that it were so.
Blab. Using emoticons unfamiliar to us, a belated reader writes:
Tomb Raider opened over the
weekend.... (o)(o)
Indeed. Did you like it?
 Yo.
Preparing for a meeting with the Corporate Staff folks this morning, I
changed my Windows background
from Angelina Jolie to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.
I wonder why I did that.
(Don't worry; as soon as I returned to my office I changed it back.)
Plop. It's New Computer time here in Plurpdom. Helen's
laptop finally went into death rattles. Whenever you touch any of the keys
in the upper left part of the keyboard, the little gremlins below the Tab
key hold it down indefinitely, causing the computer to chitter about until
rebooted. It's not a pretty sight.
And of course our own laptop has developed Bit Rot, with unexpected
odd behaviors mounting and multiplying, so we're in the process of moving
to a new machine as well. Today's extra fun was trying to get a backup
of our own new machine before we do the Massive Bit Stirring required to
get it to work the way we want. In the middle of doing so, the backup tape
drive crapped out. Or the adapter. Or something.
We're currently wiling away an otherwise lovely afternoon engaged in
a game of Plug and Flay on some dopey piece of hardware that was working
perfectly fine yesterday.
We hate computers.
Yo. An enlightened, or at least enlightening, privacy policy,
from the eSnipe FAQ.
What does eSnipe do with
personal information?
Sells it indiscriminately to anyone
who asks, and for a shockingly low price.
They're just kidding, though. We think.
Yow. Strawberry
Pop-Tart blow torches. Eek.
The flames steadily grew
larger and larger until reaching a maximum height of about 18 inches above
the top of the toaster. As the flames were reaching their maximum height,
the toaster abruptly stopped making buzzing noises. [...] At this point,
the researchers also realized that the heat could inadvertently melt the
adhesive cellophane and cause the flaming SPTs to suddenly eject from the
toaster. Unfortunately, this did not occur.
Yo. Did you know that Dubya
has a weblog? Where does he find the time?
Yo. Jesus Christ
Superstore, including this frightening item. (Weird
Links)
Yo. Ouchy the Clown.
He's a professional clown dom. If you don't know what that is, please don't
click on it. If you do know what it is, please tell us how you knew.
(Weird
Links)
Now that's weird even by our standards.
Yo. At lunch the other day, someone doubted our story about the
person who was building a supercomputer out of Furbies. O ye of little
faith, click here.
[T]he Furby's [sic] need
to be "fed" regularly [and this] can be a nuisance, especially for a large
array, but sometimes you just have to put up with these things. Most of
the time, people are pretty understanding when you explain that you can't
get them the final results of your solar wind simulation until after you've
had your finger nibbled upon for a while.
We've been telling people this for years. (The
Unnatural Enquirer)
Plurp.
The blue dog
couldn't talk about
the secret project.
Monday, June 18, 2001
Blab. Responding warmly to our ever-so-clever idea of
figuring
out the true name of pets by reading every word in the OED to them
and watching their reactions, a reader has already applied this theory
to an offspring.
I wanted to try the OED-name
thing with my 1-year-old daughter, but I didn't have an OED handy.
The manual for the computer game "World War II online," however, WAS handy.
It turns out my daughter's "true name" is "Stuka."
Interesting. A child named after a dive
bomber. And we'll bet you never would have discovered that using those
cutsy lists of baby
names.
Blab. Once again mistaking
Plurp
for an advice column, if only momentarily, a reader writes:
Dr. Plurp:
I have this burning sensation in my...
er... nevermind.
Oh thank you! We definitely didn't want to go there.
Blab. Following a lunchtime discussion on what it would take
to convince us that prayer really worked, a reader finds some interesting
stuff on the effects of prayer.
From the Utne
Reader: Odd-numbered patients became the control group. In all, 466
patients received prayers while 524 didn't. Volunteer supplicants--mostly
women--were of various Christian denominations.
...in 1753, when James Lind discovered
that lemons and limes cured scurvy, the notion of a nutrient was still
200 years in the future. "I'm not interested in mechanism," says Harris.
"I want to know how this can be maximized for healing. What kind of prayer
works? With how many praying? One? Ten?"
From Salon:
...there might be a problem with what Stannard called "unwanted background
noise," unaccountable prayers whizzing through the airwaves from more distant
sources.
From the John
Templeton Foundation: Religious leaders, such as The Dalai Lama...
former Presidents of the United States Gerald R. Ford and George H. W.
Bush; members of European parliaments... Baroness Thatcher; members of
royal families, such as His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Her
Serene Highness The Princess Poon Pismai Diskul of Thailand... have all
served as Prize judges. ....
... the judges this year have selected
Dr. Freeman Dyson as the 2000 winner of the Templeton Prize.
We like James Lind, Prayer Technologist.
Blab. Our meme-mixing reader is back.
Fountains flowing over a
chess-playing chicken.
Soggy, soggy knight
Paint your chicken blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the wetness in my soul
Plurp. It's all in your point of view.
The French have vanity, levity,
independence, and caprice, with an unconquerable passion for glory. They
will as soon do without bread as without glory.
-- Napoleon I
Do you suppose that would be the point of view of those French people who
had no bread?
(P.S. Yeah, we couldn't find that quote on the Web either.
Maybe Helen made it up.)
Yo. What kind of movie-goer are you? Front row film fanatic?
Mellow middle of the roader? Detached observer? Invisible rebel? In her
scientific brilliance, a psychologist claims she can tell by where
you sit.
Isn't psychology wonderful?
Yak. From a meeting today, in which the speaker was blaming his
manager, in the presence of his manager's manager, for not being able to
hire the people he needed.
There is a German
proverb: Den Sack schlagt man, den Esel meint man (You beat
the sack, but you mean the donkey).
Yow. A surprisingly good article in Time about recent
advances in cosmology, under the rubric of how
the universe will end. Definitely worth reading.
[A] series of remarkable
discoveries announced in quick succession starting this spring has gone
a long way toward settling the question once and for all. Scientists who
were betting on a Big Crunch liked to quote the poet Robert Frost: "Some
say the world will end in fire,/ some say in ice./ From what I've tasted
of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire." Those in the other camp preferred
T.S. Eliot: "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper."
Now, using observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico,
the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, the mammoth Keck Telescope in Hawaii
and sensitive radio detectors in Antarctica, the verdict is in: T.S. Eliot
wins.
No, the article does not couch this as a fight between poets as physicists,
but this was such a great quote that we couldn't resist.
Plurp.
The blue dog didn't
have enough energy
left to contemplate
heat death
Sunday, June 17, 2001
Blab. A reader, perhaps that
Helen person who mistook us for Dear Abby, writes:
Dr Plurp,
You disappoint me. I thought you would
have some sage advice in my dilemma. But, no, you ridiculed me and recommended
I do something completely useless. I will never ask for you advice ever
again. My HUSBAND is much smarter than you anyway!
8P
H
We disappoint lots of people. Its pretty much a fixture in our lives. But
actually, we liked the idea of using the OED to determine the name
of your unspecified pet by its reaction to the various words. No accounting
for taste, we guess. 9Q.
 Plurp.
Bozo's very
last TV appearance is coming up on Saturday night, July 14 at 7:00
PM Central time. Sniff. WGN-TV's Bozo show (in Chicago) is the longest
running children's show currently on the air and second to the longest
running in the history of television.
Plurp.
Play: Follies
Demographic: Those old enough
to remember the aging and aged actors in their prime
Plot Summary: Aging and aged
actors who can still get around the stage without walkers portray aging
and aged actors who can still get around the stage without walkers as these
veterans of the old Follies return one last time to the theater of their
distant memories, which is now derelict and about to be demolished. Note
the metaphor. Nostalgia and regret mix as they realize that of all of the
possibilities that seemed open to them as dewy youths, they can only end
up having taken one of the many paths through life and that doesn't always
lead to nirvana. It's that darned linear time thing. Ghosts of their former
selves haunt the old theater, eventually reenacting the situations and
choices that got them where they are today, interacting with their present-day
selves and, weirdly, taking center stage in a modern day Follies number
in the second act which confuses then with now. This is, of course, a revival
of the Sondheim musical, replete with Blythe Danner, Polly Bergan, Marni
Nixon and a cast of similar size and repute not seen in a single production
since
Ben Hur. Note the metaphor.
Distinguishing Features: The
audience cheers for the various former luminaries, not because they are
out there at the height of their craft - they certainly are not - but because
they are out there at all. (It's not that the chicken played chess well,
but rather than she played it at all. Note the metaphor.) Still, there
are some genuinely good performances here, notably Blythe Danner who nearly
plays herself in Phyllis Rogers Stone and Gregory Harrison as her successful
and tortured husband Ben Stone.
Tony Award For: Most Self-Consciously
Self-Referential Production About That Same Production Since A Chorus
Line
Verdict: Not especially recommended.
Sorry.
Yo. I have recently been accused of being sarcastic here in Plurp.
Duh.
Plurp.
The blue dog
once took chess lessons
from a chicken
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