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2001.07.22 : 2001.07.28
Saturday, July 28, 2001
Rant. Loyal Plurp readers may
have noticed a certain unavailability of our Web site starting on Tuesday.
That seems to be because our dear Web hosting company ("Web hosing company")
forgot to do any of that pesky security stuff, got majorly hacked and,
well, lost our entire Web site.
In fact, it was worse than that. He lost the whole freaking server
and had to rebuild it from scratch, a process that took an astonishing
four
days. (This involved him being confused about how to configure servers,
unable to get email working reliably, deciding to restore all of the content
back to completely different subdirectories, and on and on and on. And
getting hacked again in the middle of it all.) Even after he got the site
back up, he neglected to tell us that we needed to get a new password,
so we couldn't update the site or figure out why.
OK, OK. Deep breaths ...
We're back now. So Blab
away!
Thanks to poor Ian, who's still
not up, for clueing us in on the need to get a new password, or we would
still not know what was going on. And thanks to Dave for providing surrogate
bloggery services during our exile.
Plop. Boy
Scouts destroyed a 190 million-year-old set of dinosaur tracks in Utah.
Does that come under Helpful, or Reverent?
 Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't know how to run
a Web hosting service
Friday, July 27, 2001
Plop. Our dear Web hosing service
seems now to have restored Plurp, but still won't let us update
the site. We have no site but we must scream.
Plurp. I slept alone last night for the first night in a long,
long time. I did not like it. Not at all.
I have become so addicted to her, to the warmth of her hip against mine
as I slip into sleep, to her indulgence when I ask for a back scratch in
the morning, to the intimacy of her embrace.
Sometimes I feel so needy, so dependent. Other times I feel so luxurious.
And all the time I feel so fortunate.
Yow. There's an exhibit called Light
Screens: The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright at the American
Craft Museum in New York going on through September 2. It features
more than fifty of Wright's windows and includes archival photographs
and original lithographs that show the windows in context.
Very cool. Gotta see it. Maybe this weekend. (But there are so many
museum shows to catch up on!)
For those of you not blessed to live in NYC, the show travels to five
lesser cities in the next 1.5 years.
Plurp.
Q: Under what conditions
is being stranded on a lush tropical island with a beautiful woman a terrible
waste?
A: If you're homophobic.
Plurp. According to this
test, my personality type is that of an Administrator (Submissive
Extrovert Concrete Thinker).
Like just 3% of the population
you are detail-oriented and organized. You're an extrovert, but you lack
the over-aggressive tendencies of obnoxious "go-getters." Very nice. However,
you probably like getting into other people's business--living through
them a little. Try to control your busy-body tendencies.
Yipes. These folks need to get their money back from those online
test developers!
Yow. Large, flat-panel plasma displays have become cheap enough
that they are rapidly replacing old, icky CRTs as the way to display flight
information in airports, as well as give Those Who Wait a constant CNN
feed, weather and status of the standby list.
Nice!
Plurp.
Eve at 94
My first husband and I started off
in the brand management business before anybody else even knew what it
was. We spent years and years coming up with names for things - animals,
mostly - and boy did that simplify things. No longer did you say that
thing over there. You'd say lion!
We were in Africa. The pay wasn't
great, but the working environment was wonderful - warm days, starry nights,
beautiful vegetation.
We moved out of that job after a misunderstanding
about some fruit or other. I don't really remember the details, but there
were hurt feelings all around. It was probably time for us to move on anyway.
We had named pretty much everything. Except for the bugs. Just too many
of them!
So we went into agriculture. It was
hard work, sure, but satisfying. We raised a family, a couple of lovely
boys. But you know how boys are, roughhousing all the time. It got out
of hand one day and one of them died. The other one hooked up with a nice
girl - we never did really find out where she came from - and gave us lots
of grandkids.
After Adam passed away I was awfully
lonely. As time went on, I took several other husbands, younger men you
know, though you have to realize that there weren't any real towns around
so we were without benefit of clergy.
All in all, I guess I'd have to say
it's been a good life. Nothing special, but a good life.
Plurp.
The blue dog
dreamed of chewing
the ankle
of a Web host
Thursday, July 26, 2001
Plop. Our dear, treasured Web hosting service ("Web
hosing service") is still down, so Plurp
is too. This is ridiculous. Nonetheless, we are writing stuff here in the
fell hope that it will some day be up again, and that these words may actually
be read by someone other than us.
Blab. Through a circuitous route that did not involve our Web
hosing service at all (see above) comes the following:
Subject: Plurpless in Seattle
I've been trying to access Plurp for
two days now with no success. Technical difficulties? Perhaps
the staff is striking with management for higher wages and better pension
plans? Experimenting with bad viruses again? I'm worried -
how can I get my fill of Plurp?
I think it's some evil marketing ploy.
You've slowly drawn me in to where I want to check it out once a day, and
then you pull the plug, creating havoc and chaos in the streets.
Then you'll offer to cure my ills for a mere $99.95 monthly Plurp usage
fee. Having succumbed to the effects of withdrawal, I won't think
twice to hand over my credit card for on-line charge processing, while
unbeknownst to me you've decided to also fund your next BVI vacation on
my Visa.
Evil, I tell you, pure evil.
Must be some Democratic plot to bankrupt
the Republican Party! I think Congressman Condit is behind it all!
Hey, just because you're not paranoid
doesn't mean they're not after you!
We are happy to announce Pay-Per-Plurp, our new Weblog service designed
to fill those many lonely hours in your pale, meaningless life. Please
enter your credit card number here. We already have your signature on file.
And hurry, please - we want to upgrade to that villa
in the BVI.
Blab. Somehow, mysteriously, a single missive from that Big
Blab Box got through the digital wood chipper that is our Web hosing
service.
You referred earlier to that
"quaint analog" place called a mailbag.
Well, then, where do Plurps and Blabs
and Yaks and such land? Are they forced to aimlessly wander the endless
cyber-world without a place to call their own?
We believe the term for which you are searching is in-box, a term
with similarly analog origins but which seems nonetheless to have been
adopted by the digerati and made their own. We have not heard the bitheads
use the term mailbag.
But yes, thanks to the supreme competence of our Web hosing service,
the Plurps and Yaks are all sitting here, smoking cigarettes,
wondering if there isn't some other job they could get, and all of our
precious reader Blabs are indeed aimlessly wandering the endless
cyber-world without a place to call their own. If you see them, send them
our regards.
Plurp. In this past week's Plurp searches, someone searched
twice (or two different people searched once) for the string Ko.
Hmm. Wonder what that is.
Yow. The King of Jordan is our new friend. It seems that King
Abdullah got all worked up about people using cell phones in the mosques
he frequents, and asked a company to build a cell
phone jammer for him. The company, Image Sensing Systems, has already
shipped 5,000 of these
little puppies around the world.
In a similar vein, a company called BlueLinx
is creating a device that will automatically turn off the ringers of cell
phones,
BlueLinx expects to sell
about a million of its devices once they are released. At least two movie
chains, plus many theaters where live plays are presented, are among those
clamoring for orders.
Redmond, Wash.-based Zetron
is celebrating the fourth anniversary of the introduction of a device that
detects cell phones within 100 feet and can be programmed to alert officials
or trigger a recorded message requesting that the owner leave the phone
outside.
[...]
Other companies also are cashing in.
NetLine
Communications Technologies, an Israeli company, says it is selling
record numbers of its C-Guard
Cellular FireWall mobile-phone jamming equipment, especially in the
United States, where jamming cell phones is illegal.
Hurray for technology!
Yow. Yet another Helenism
from Queen Helen herself:
Head search
Yo. Are there artificial
structures on Mars, or does this guy just have a vivid
imagination? We know which side we're betting on. (Weird
Links)
Plop. Sorry, you've
been stolen.
Key personal data belonging
to hundreds of individuals have been shared in an Internet chat room, in
what one expert says could become one of the largest identity theft cases
ever. The data include Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers,
date of birth and credit card information — everything a criminal would
need to open an online bank account, apply for a credit card, even create
the paperwork necessary to smuggle illegal immigrants. It is still unclear
how the data ended up in the chat room, but an MSNBC.com investigation
has revealed common threads among the victims — including the purchase
of a cell phone online from VerizonWireless.com or an AT&T Wireless
reseller.
As always, kids, the best way to keep your information private is not
to give it to anyone.
Plop. Slate wants to know if the new JFK
Jr. doll is in bad taste. We don't think so. We're waiting for the
JFK Jr. aviator glasses and matching white cane.
Plurp. I'm not susceptible to air rage, mild-mannered person
that I am. But if I were, La Guardia would be my absolute favorite airport.
I'm trying to get to Atlanta to go impress some industry analysts on
Friday. But a very minor rainstorm came through the area this afternoon
and sprinkled a few handfuls of water around New York. As a result, Delta
Airlines at La Guardia assumed a posture of extreme fear and canceled nearly
all their flights.
They canceled my initial flight, but kindly booked me on a flight leaving
three (now four) hours later. With any luck I will actually get to Atlanta
tonight, even if it is at zero-dark-thirty.
Not so lucky are the hundreds of other people whose flights were canceled,
and who did not get on subsequent flights. They are milling about the terminal
looking frustrated, or standing in very long lines looking frustrated.
Or they got frustrated and just went home.
Fortunately, they all seem to have forgotten their automatic weapons
today, so there have been no "incidents". Yet.
This is typical for La Guardia. If anything happens, anything at all,
they panic and cancel flights. It could be a little sprinkling of rain.
It could be a minor delay in a flight from Albuquerque to Dubuque. It could
be anything, but you can be sure it will result in a serious delay of your
flight, if indeed you get to take off at all. La
Guardia has the worst record for delayed and canceled flights of all
U.S. airports.
Do you suppose that those susceptible to air rage somehow, perhaps subconsciously,
flock to La Guardia to exercise their disability? Maybe there are so many
of them that they are, in fact, the cause of the overcrowding, the
cause
of all of the maddening delays.
It makes me want to shoot them all.
Plurp. I don't know about me, but I'm sure you'll be glad
when I get on that plane so I stop writing such drivel.
Plurp. ... which leads us to muse yet again about the Web as
self-publishing, as the ultimate vanity press.
It really is amazing. Any idiot can publish on the Web. You don't have
to know anything, or be able to write, or even have a following. Just type
it in and, presto, the whole world can read your very own drivel.
And, compared to having some vanity
press publish your not-so-Great American Novel, it's dirt cheap. (Aside:
Will the term dirt cheap someday vanish into analog obscurity, replaced
by something like bit cheap?)
And you can publish absolutely anything. It's the ultimate freedom of
the press (Aside: Will the term freedom of the press someday vanish
into analog obscurity, replaced by something like freedom of information
dissemination?)
You can publish your wacky
conspiracy theories, your personal
history of alien abduction, awful pictures of your stupid
little doggie, or your astonishingly
bad poetry. And you don't even have to be the National
Enquirer!
And we, as self-publishers (Aside: We're not really publishing ourselves.
We're publishing our words. It's the same linguistic oddity as self-storage.),
have no incentive to bow to the whims of the buying public, because we
don't have any. While it is admittedly amusing that we have readers at
all, we feel no compunction against mistreating them, making fun of them,
or writing dreck that may make them feel put upon as they force themselves
to wade through it. It's our Weblog, we get to say. If you don't
like it, go jump in a lake. Take a number. Go play on the freeway.
It's not like we're ever going to put this on our resume, fercryinoutloud.
Except for our Pay-Per-Plurp
subscribers, of course, whom we love and value as life itself, for whom
we only write thrilling prose and heart-rending poetry, and whose intellectual
acumen we would never, ever question.
Yo. Now there's a good name for a Weblog (or a consulting firm):
Drivel
& Dreck. But it's probably already taken.
Plurp. A new PhoneMail greeting we should try out. Or you can.
What? A telephone call? An
analog
telephone call? Hey Martha, come here! Some joker's using the telephone.
Honest!
Plurp. Will it someday be called Voice Over Analog?
Yo. On the much delayed flight to Atlanta (bumped up to First
Class, woo-hoo), an odd flight attendant with pallid, greenish skin and
gray lips. I wondered if she was real.
Then, in the Atlanta airport, there were quite a number of white folks
with very dark skin, and local flight attendants with Big Hair discussing
their mutual friend who won the Mrs.
America Contest. It's a scary place.
Yow. Plurpless in Seattle. That's very funny!
Plurp.
The blue dog
really was
self-published
Wednesday, July 25, 2001
Plop. We're down. Or, rather, our Web site is down.
Details to follow once we're, uh, no longer down.
Tuesday, July 24, 2001
Blab. Unsatisfied with our recent limitation to humor,
sarcasm and postmodernism, a reader expands our literary repertoire.
Plurp to live
live to Plurp
Plurping Plurping Plurping
ahhh, Existentialism!
Should we get T-shirts printed that say Will blog for food?
 Blab.
A correspondent turns us on to:
MyCatHatesYou.com
And, frankly, we believe it.
The Web is a very strange place, isn't it?
Blab. Seeking to point out the obvious inadequacies of our
remark that typing something into the Blab box before clicking
on Send! results in more contentful reader contributions, a reader
sends us the following eighteen "contributions".
2
1
4
3
6
8
7
5
9
10
12
11
14
13
16
15
18
17
We are pleased that our reader knows the first eighteen positive integers,
and look forward to the day when he or she also knows them in order.
Yak. Oxymoron O' The Day:
Revolutionary institution
Yow. Lunchtalk today flitted off onto the phenomenon of change
blindness where, under certain conditions, very large changes in the
visual field are almost completely unnoticeable.
In a typical scenario [...],
the experimenter stops a person in the street and asks for directions.
While the person is speaking to the experimenter, workers carrying a door
pass between the experimenter and the person, and an accomplice takes the
place of the experimenter. The person usually goes on giving directions
after the interruption, and very often does not notice that the experimenter
has changed.
We had heard of this but didn't believe it. Several munchers assured us
it
was true. And indeed, the Web provideth.
Here's a good overview
article.
Recently a number of studies
have shown that under certain circumstances, very large changes can be
made in a picture without observers noticing them. What characterizes the
experiments showing such "Change Blindness" in visual scenes is the fact
that the changes are arranged to occur simultaneously with some kind of
extraneous, brief
disruption in visual continuity,
such as the large retinal disturbance produced by an eye saccade, a shift
of the picture, a brief flicker, a "mudsplash", an eye blink, or a film
cut in a motion picture sequence. These phenomena are attracting an increasing
amount of attention from experimental psychologists and from philosophers,
because they suggest that humans' internal representation of the visual
world is much sparser than usually thought.
We're all familiar with how easy it is to see things change if the change
is rapid. In this
example, it's perfectly obvious what is changing. But insert an 80
msec flicker between two slightly different pictures and the change can
be very difficult to spot, as illustrated here.
Don't believe it? Try this
Java demo of a number of scenes. Some pop right out at you. Others
don't look like they change at all. But, when you figure out the change
(and all of them have changes!) it will be impossible not to see
it.
The disturbance between the two different pictures does not have to
be a global flicker. Even localized splotches disrupt the scene enough
that it's hard to see the changes. It took us forever, for instance, to
figure out what changes here.
Very slow changes, even without flicker, are also hard to see. It took
us quite a number of viewings to see what's changing in this
demo. (After the picture loads, you may have to right-click on it and
select Play to get it started.) It's astonishingly invisible! (More
slow-change surprises are here.)
This little movie
illustrates a related effect called inattentional blindness. There
are three people in black shirts and three people in white shirts. Your
job is to count the number of times the people in the white shirts pass
the basketball. It's hard! Give it a shot.
A bunch more very cool films and demos are here,
including films from the original guy-asking-for-directions
experiments.
Why does this work? Here's an outline of the commonly
accepted theory.
Visual transients are fast
changes in luminance or colour in the retinal image, such as would be produced
by a sudden
appearance or disappearance, or through
motion of an element of the scene. It is known that such transients are
detected in the first levels of the
visual system, and that attention is automatically attracted to the location
where
they occur.
Under normal viewing conditions therefore,
when a change occurs, it produces a visual transient which attracts
attention to the change location.
The transient thus provides information that a change has occurred,
and it says
where it occurred, but it
does not provide information about what the change was.
[...]
There are thus two things that can
go wrong in change detection: either the transient that attracts attention
to the
change location may be interfered
with (thereby causing a deficit in detection that or where
the change has occurred),
or the encoding and comparison process
may be interfered with (causing a deficit in determining what the
change
was).
[...]
In change blindness paradigms using
local disruptions, the situation is very similar, with the difference that
the local
transient corresponding to the change
location is missed by observers, not because it is swamped by a global
transient, but because the mudsplashes act as "decoys", attracting attention
to locations other than the true change
location.
In change blindness paradigms with
slow changes, the change occurs so slowly that no local transient is generated.
Attention is thus not attracted to
the change location, and again, the observer must rely on the very sparse
information that he or she has encoded
about the scene in order to locate the change.
Why do you care? Well, because of the following remarkable
conclusion about the nature of consciousness.
It is clear that under this
view of what seeing is, only those aspects of the visual environment that
are currently being
"manipulated", are actually available
for conscious processing at a given moment. We have the impression of seeing
everything because we know we have access to everything, even though without
actually accessing something, no detailed information is available about
it. This explains the apparent paradox between the feeling of richness
we have of our visual environments, and our striking inability, in change
blindness experiments, of knowing what has changed.
Yow!
Plurp.
The blue dog only
changes when you
blink
Monday, July 23, 2001
Blab. To start things off we note that, like you, we
keep running out of uranium for our nuclear power plants and our other
little experiments. And yes, it is very frustrating! Fortunately, a correspondent
brings us the solution for our current problem:
UraniumOnLine
It's kinda like eBay for incredibly dangerous materials.
Blab. A reader tries a third shot at meaning.
inter nagy basel kb heck
ox fork cask frail quote
kerr eke sloe cluj shook
another 5 words and what is the google-answer?
The same page?
OK... what is the page name? diceware8k.txt?
and what is diceware???
We must admit that we are at a complete loss on this one. But surely our
trusted readers will Solve The Mystery and fill
us in.
Blab. Perhaps on a related subject, a reader writes:
I want to stop this diceware
stuff, but today I found/generate these interesting words:
beggar (13564)
marx (41565)
koran (35515)
pun (46524)
quiz (51165)
It's as if there's this whole enigmatic subculture that knows all about
this stuff! How disturbing.
Blab. You may recall last week when someone
from AOL wrote:
where u at man, holla, cause
i want that and1 mixtape vol. 1 unopened
Now a reader sends us the alleged AOL profile of this person:
Member Name: <Deleted>
Location: da field 4lyf
Sex: Male
Marital Status: free and pimpin
Hobbies: whateva i feel like doin
hoopin and and gettin in trouble chillin wit my main dawgz like rob, scott,
smeeze, crazy ass elijah, big wayne, lil chris, jazz, birge, b. sum,
burrell, wingo, sadelle, darrell and all my otha playaz i 4got
Computers: timmmmmmmmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyyyy
yyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!
(i didn't know how else to answer
this question
Occupation: student/balla
Personal Quote: i ain't got one
Now it all makes sense.
Blab. Our postmodern spammer
is back with more.
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PHARMACEUTICALS! MASTERBOLAN * D-BOL * WINNI-V *EQUIPOSE "REAL" Anabolic
Bodybuilding Pharmaceuticals... ( CLICK HERE! ) "REAL" Diet Pills ... (
CLICK HERE! ) xxxx LABS TOLL FREE:1-888-xxx-xxxx, xxxx Lake Worth Road
Lake Worth, FL 33467 <------------------------------> To be removed
FOR FREE from our mailing list please click on the link below and and hit
send. Your email address will be removed within 24 hours. ( CLICK HERE
) If the link does not work please send an email with the word remove in
the subject to remove@xxxx.com - #####################################
In this regard, the notion of level of # # grammaticalness recognizes the
importance of # # other disciplines, while taking into account # # any
normative concept of the # # linguistic/holistic continuum. We will bring
# # evidence in favor of the following thesis: the # # independent functional
principle is necessary # # to impose an interpretation on the subsystem
# # compatibility testing. Under these # # circumstances, the independent
functional # # principle necessitates that urgent # # consideration be
applied to possible # # bidirectional relationship approaches. # # Suppose,
for instance, that the fully # # integrated test program maximizes the
# # probability of project success, while # # minimizing cross-cultural
shock elements in a # # stipulation to place the constructions into # #
these various categories. Obviously, any # # exponential Folklife coefficient
must utilize # # and be functionally interwoven with possible # # bidirectional
logical relationship approaches. # # For any transformation which is sufficiently
# # diversified in application to be of any # # interest, any associated
supporting element # # adds explicit performance contours to problems #
# of phonemic and morphological analysis. # # However, our fully integrated
field program # # cannot be defined in such a way as to impose an # # important
distinction in language use. So far, # # the earlier discussion of deviance
does not # # readily tolerate the preliminary qualification # # limit.
In theory, the incorporation of # # agonistic cultural constraints is to
be # # regarded as the philosophy of commonality and # # standardization.
#
#####################################
Our current theory is that the pseudo-postmodern dreck at the end is an
attempt to elude spam filters that look for spammish words in a certain
frequency in the text of mail, or look to see if the email you're getting
right now is identical to some spam that was sent last week that we're
attempting to filter out. By cramming real, correctly spelled words in
alongside the spammer's original message, the filters might think this
is meaningful correspondence. Or at least correspondence qua correspondence.
Blab. A correspondent forwards some much-forwarded email.
>Subject: Fw: Fw: Andy Rooney's
Thoughts On Life...
>
>The most unfair thing about life
is the way it ends.
>I mean, life is tough. It
takes up a lot of your time.
>And then you die. What's that?
A bonus?
>I think the life-cycle is all backwards.
>
>You should die first and get it
all over with.
>Then you live in an old age home.
>You get kicked out when you're too
young.
>You get a gold watch.
>You go to work.
>You work forty years until you're
young enough to enjoy your retirement.
>You do drugs, alcohol and party.
>You get ready for high school.
>You go to grade school and become
a kid.
>You play. You have no responsibilities.
>You become a little baby and go
back into the womb.
>You spend your last nine months
floating...
>
>Then, you finish off as an orgasm.
I like it.
Well, this certainly is a widespread meme, as Google finds 683
instances of it on the Web. Only 34
attribute it to Andy Rooney though, the same number as attribute it to
George
Castanza. 268
attribute it to George
Carlin, which we think fits better stylistically.
As seems to be so common among email-circulated humor these days, (1)
It's Already On The WebTM, and (2) Folks
often misattribute it.
Plop. Well there we were, all excited at finding 18 new Blab
contributions in our Plurp mailbag (what a quaint, analog term that
is). But they all turned out to be empty, and sent one right after the
other.
So, to our mysterious and voluminous correspondent, we offer thanks,
and the advice that typing something before clicking on Send! will
make your contributions much more, um, contentful.
Yow. While the rest of us would just have blown bubbles, Dave
turns a backyard pool into a literary experience.
Looking at clouds, grey clouds
rich and heavy with water like saturated cotton, makes me thirsty in a
way that drinking never quite satisfies. I think what they make me want
is this feeling of cool bouyancy, the thing I feel relaxed and motionless
in
the Tub, my knees bent so the surface is just below my mouth, looking at
my shadow on the bottom through the invisible water. If I wave my hands
the right way, nothing happens at first, but then in the shadow-world of
the bottom a cloud appears, roiling and chaotic, as the force that I waved
toward the surface finally gets there and makes small waves, too small
to see in themselves, but evident in their shadows. I'm a wizard, my gestures
and my breath making circles and currents and eddies and explosions in
the shadows on the clean blue bottom.
Go
read!
Plurp. Medical results are back. Our blood pressure is a healthy
120 / 80, down a whole lot from 140 / 95 just a few years ago. We attribute
the drop entirely to less stress in our life. And we don't have tuberculosis,
which is always a plus. The bad news is that our cholesterol is too high,
which means we'll be having fewer dinners consisting entirely of cooked
fat, darn it, and probably have to endure some form of exercise other than
button pushing.
Plurp.
The blue dog consisted
entirely of eighteen
blank emails sent to a
weblog that no one read
Sunday, July 22, 2001
Blab. Even on the weekends, our readers are thinking
about the Big Questions.
Did the blue dog ever mix
memes before the advent of Plurp?
We know it will hurt your head, but it's much like asking what time it
was before the universe began. Prior the advent of Plurp, you see,
the blue dog was like Pinocchio
before the Blue Fairy gave him life, a mere image graven in sticky paint
in some Cajun painter's weary gallery.
Blab. In the category of Earliest Meme Mixing by a Blue Dog,
our long-absent Northwest Correspondent nominates:
Your Northwest correspondent
here. Not sure if it was true mixing of the memes, but on November
11, 2000, your Plurp referenced blue dog kibbles dated 1972 found in dusty
boxes that could have come from the move last year. Thoughts?
How true. Is this a mixing of memes?
And, if so, is it the first in Plurp? Only our readers can tell
us.
Blab. A reader properly flatters us before asking for help with
her homework. Would that all of our readers were so polite.
Hello,
I'm Lina from Malaysia.I'm a high
school student.Your site is simply gorgeous.I've recommended it to many
of my friends.Actually,i'm joining a debate in my school.The topic
is "Tution classes are a waste".But i'm in the negative/opposition group.So
i'm searching for some strong points to argue that tution classes are not
a waste.How can it help the students.
So,please give me some points .I'll
be very thankful if you help me.Kindly,reply soon.Thank YOu
Looking forward for your reply,
Lina
Malaysia
Could this be Lina
from Malaysia? Or Lina
from Malaysia? We don't know. But her question does lead us to this
interesting article on tuition in Malaysia.
In the United States, tuition
is what you pay to universities and colleges. In Malaysia, however, it's
part of a teen's life.
The Malaysian definition of tuition
can probably be described as "extra coaching", only in classes that range
from as small as 3 students to as large as over 150 students. Tuition is
taken outside of school, and you have to pay monthly fees from as little
as RM 20 to about RM 100-about $5.30 to $26-per subject, dependent on the
subject, teacher, and frequency of classes.
[...]
Another factor is the need to gain
the best marks possible in government examinations. Government examinations
are the benchmarks on which a student's academic performances are measured.
The SPM examination can rightfully be called the most important examination
in a Malaysian teenager's life. Gain good results in the SPM examination,
and doors open magically for you. Gain poor results, and you will have
to re-sit the examination, or watch as opportunities galore pass you by,
denying you entrance because of your results.
While we are not in the practice of answering reader's homework assignments
for them, we can refer Lina from Malaysia to Google's
extensive listings on the subject, as we're sure there's some good
material for her debate in there.
Plurp. The Disney architecture exhibit in D.C. was quite cool.
It was housed in a curious building called the National
Building Museum, which was odd in that it was a private museum and
it did not, despite the name, house any buildings. Rather, it housed exhibits
about
buildings (it's that old object-referent error again) and hence might better
have been named the Architecture Museum. But whatever.
Another exhibit there caused us an unplanned but pleasant stop - an
exhibit of the architecture of R.M.
Schindler, who might have made lists, but in particular made
buildings. He was an architect influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, and
you can see that in his work, especially his early work. But the path he
took emphasized more simple rectilinear geometry that Wright, less ornate
decoration, and a simpler, more sparse Japanese esthetic. While his designs
do not precisely match our own tastes, we were very taken by them, and
running into the exhibit was a happy surprise.
The Disney exhibit,
rather pretentiously subtitled The
Architecture of Reassurance by those who staged it, covers Disney
theme park architecture from before the beginning of Disneyland to its
international expansion into France and Japan. There's a certain amount
of breathless reinterpretation of reality by the curators in their written
commentary. You can safely ignore that, especially if you've grown up with
Disney, as you probably know more than they do about both Disney history
and its place in American culture in the past half century.
The historical layout was quite nice. It started with Disney's original
plan for a (very small!) park near some of his corporate offices and showed
how this evolved, through setback and rethinking, into what became the
huge (and hugely innovative, and hugely successful) Disneyland. Disney
was thinking about branding tie-ins to his already-successful Mickey Mouse
franchise, and about merchandising, from the very start, before these ideas
became common practice.
Particularly interesting was the original "pitch briefing" in which
Disneyland was formally described and proposed as a project. (Though it's
not clear how much of a white-knuckle experience that would have been for
Walt, as the proposal was pitched to Disney Corp. by WED Enterprises, and
we rather suspect that Walt's right hand already knew what his left hand
was doing at that point.) What clearly comes through in the pitch is Walt's
enthusiasm about the project, and his optimism about society and the future.
This same enthusiasm has since infected millions of people.
The non-curated highlight, for us, was a four year old boy running up
to his father, grabbing his hand and saying Dad! There's something really
neat over here! Ya wanna see?! We smiled as the father followed his
son's excited tug to some new wonder.
Yo. Brands Gone Bad, in the form of signage on trucks
seen on the way to and from D.C. this weekend.
M.S. Carriers - Delivering
Your Future
Adequate Fire Protection
Danger Gasoline
 Yo.
We detect a new fashion trend in car colors - ripe banana yellow, a color
just a bit more orange than a NY taxi, and about the same color as warning
signs on the highway.
What are people thinking? Are these the same people whose parent bought
those shocking green Gremlins some years ago? Did their great grandparents
buy Edsels? How tragic for them.
Plurp. And on the subject of cultural
trends ...
Typing typing
Typing typing typing
On the cell phone ...
Yak. The beginnings, we fear, of another Shower
Song.
What do the simple folk do
The folk who just haven't a clue?
The paupers and the beggars
That dysentery lot
Whatever are they doing
While waiting to rot?
What do the simple folk do
At sad dinner parties for two?
They have no escargot, dear,
They have no mousse pate
They've never heard of fois gras
Or fine Cabernet.
Oh what do simple folk do
We do not?
Yak. One Mr. Bush, on TV today.
I know what I believe. I
will continue to articulate what I believe. And I believe that what I believe
is right.
My friends, you've elected Yogi Berra to the Presidency.
Plurp.
The blue dog considered
having the operation to
become ripe
banana yellow
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