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2001.08.26 : 2001.09.01

Saturday, September 1, 2001

Blab. Apparently overhearing a lunchtime discussion yesterday implying that it was illegal to advertise a house as having a "great view" because it discriminated against blind people, a reader writes:

This copy of a 1995 official HUD memorandum explicitly states that it *is* legal to describe a property as having a great view.

I couldn't find anything claiming that it isn't legal.  Probably the 1995 memorandum got out before the web took off.  The fact that HUD officially denied it shows that people at one time believed it.

This says "The undersigned has actually heard real estate professionals say that you cannot describe your unit as having a great view, because that would imply discrimination against blind persons.  This is part of the nonsense.  What is not part of the nonsense is that HUD and local agencies fund investigators who scour ads and act as agents provocateurs to visit landlords that they suspect of trying to discriminate illegally.  For this reason, the careful landlord will give some thought to how he will draft his advertisements and conduct his showings so as to give no hint of invidious discrimination."

The Lousiana Press Association maintains a list of acceptable and unaccepted words, which bans phrases like "near synagogue", "no play area", and "privacy."

Astonishing. This is to avoid discriminating against the privacy challenged, we suppose. Also on the list of unacceptable words in housing ads are:

• board approval required
• must be employed
• mature persons
• quiet tenants
• responsible
• stable

Given that all co-op sales in Manhattan are subject to board approval, this is going to come as somewhat of a surprise in the local market. As to the rest of these terms, we can only conclude that we cannot say no to potential real estate customers who are unemployed, immature, raucous, irresponsible and unstable. We're certainly glad we're not selling property at the moment!

On the Caution list, which presumably indicates that these terms are sometimes OK, are:

• no gays
• no lesbians
• straight only

... from which we conclude that it's sometimes just fine to discriminate against our gay friends on the basis of their private lives. Sheesh.

Blab. Bemoaning a perceived lack in the infinitely perfect Internet, a reader writes: 

As enormously capable as our internet is, there should be some method of translating emails or websites written in a foreign language to the end-users language whenever they access that site.  Doesn't this seem like the next logical step in our bridging of foreign borders via the internet?

Perhaps you enjoy reading spam written in a code that not even your computer can undertsand, but what good do meaningless symbols mean?

If it's going to be spam, it might as well be good spam....

Silly reader! Translation is just a click away. The great god Babelfish assures us that yesterday's Chinese spam is easily translated into English as:

yuntguo@sohu.com é............... / *...... é25. ò..! é. ¨... ú............ °..... °.. ò........... é.
                           ó................ §.............. *.... é........... é..... / (ssreader)... ¨....200199996
                           666....695460.... *.. á..................... ò.............. *.. á..............2001. ê9..30.... ¨... 

All hail Babelfish.

Blab. One of our managers submits a question.

Q1. Do you ever worry that your time spent doing Plurp is time you should be spending distributing massive systems, or massively distributing systems, or systematically distributing missives (which, I suppose, you are), or whatever the heck it is you do?

Actually, we have no idea what the heck we do. Next question, please.

Blab. The next question is a doozie. 

What will they think of next?

Apparently, they'll think of this.

A disabled Mississippi man said on Wednesday he was planning to amputate his feet with a homemade guillotine and broadcast the procedure live on the Internet to raise money for new prosthetic legs.

[...]

Morgan needs about $150,000 to cover the cost of the prosthetics, follow-up surgery and rehabilitation. Only 20 people so far have agreed to pay $19.99 to watch the Oct. 31 broadcast on Morgan's web site, http://www.cutoffmyfeet.com.

"People are still a little bit skeptical, but that should change once I have the guillotine built," said Morgan.

No kidding. 

There is a long tradition of beggars who disfigure themselves, and even cut off body parts, so as to make themselves more pitiable figures, and hence more lucrative recipients of charity. As any fan of Monty Python will tell you.

Now no doubt some of our readers will point out, cynically, that this guy is from Mississippi. To which we can only reply: D'oh!

Blab. Our third question today is on a more pedestrian subject. 

blue dog???

No. Chihuahuas are not dogs. They are ROUS.

Now drop the chalupa.

Blab. Perhaps knowing something that we don't, that capitalized spammer once again insists: 

 **** VORTEX  SUPPLIES ****

We just checked again and our vortices seem to be quite well stocked. What are we missing?

Blab. A reader points us to an email address in a low-rent neighborhood. 

ANSAN14@YAHOO.COM

Probably not a Korean dentist? We give up.

Plurp. Here it is a completely different month again. Who can keep track?

Yo. For those of us who have somehow not run off to Burning Man, here's what we're missing.

The psychedelic festival combines wilderness camping and an eclectic mix of art and music in a surreal 5-square-mile encampment known as Black Rock City, 120 miles north of Reno. 

The weeklong gathering on the ancient lake bed climaxes Saturday night with the ceremonial torching of a 70-foot-high wooden effigy of a man for whom the event is named. 

It's a place where men can be seen walking in diapers or skirts and nude women can be seen bouncing on pogo sticks -- and no one thinks anything of it. 

Organizers and participants criticized the media for focusing on the festival's nudity and drugs, insisting the artwork, such as fire-belching sculptures and fish-shaped vehicles, is what makes Burning Man unique. 

Other activities include bicycle soccer, egg volleyball, body painting, a "weird" underwear fashion show and dominatrix training. 

There we go missing out on the dominatrix training again. Darn!

Plurp.

Movie: The Others
Demographic: Twenty-somethings our for a laugh, judging  by the Friday night audience. Otherwise, we would have said Tolerant spook movie fans.
Plot Summary: Nicole Kidman is the religiously obsessed mother of two tikes with such photosensitive skin that they must live forever in darkness in an already spooky mansion on the Isle of Jersey that seems even more enshrouded in fog than one might expect. The arrival of equally spooky servants and the apparent presence of ghosts in the house add to the mystery until, ham-handedly, the Big Surprise is just plain given away halfway through. (Not that the rest of the audience noticed; they were too busy talking to the screen.) Nonetheless, some good twists are saved for the end and there are several moments of real, nerve jangling fright.
Distinguishing Features: Kidman has matured into an elegant, beautiful woman with real depth as an actor, rather a powerful version of Grace Kelley, and you get caught up in her abject fear (or is it madness?) and rising anxiety. James Bentley is the perpetually terrified kid and has a fabulous face for it. The direction is quite good, and is largely responsible for the building sense of fear and the times when you literally jump in your seat.
Academy Award For: Best surprise ending given away halfway through. Or best dialog between kids:

Don't talk to them!
Why not?
Because they're dead!
They're what!?

Verdict: Recommended (but could have been better).

Plurp.

Movie: Jeepers Creepers
Demographic: We have no idea.
Plot Summary: Sexually desirable co-ed and her moronic younger brother drive home from college in a broken-down car on canonical back roads through canonical small towns, encountering a canonical car-smashing truck driven by a canonical mysterious figure that dumps canonical dead bodies down a canonical dark hole. Through a series of badly considered actions warned against by everyone in the audience, they become involved in the feeding frenzy of a canonically demonic entity in a bad rubber suit. Astonishingly, the cops aren't effective. It turns out that the thing in the rubber suit comes out every 23 years to carve out various body parts from the hundreds of unsolved missing person cases in this unpopulated county to restore his/her/its body. The canonical stout, black, late-middle-aged psychic says I see you screaming in the dark while a phonograph plays "Jeepers, creepers, where'd you get those peepers; Jeepers, creepers, where'd you get those eyes?"  Hmm. Can you guess what the final scene is?
Distinguishing Features: There is an amazingly out of context quote by Clive Barker, who arguably does some really great horror writing, in the large display ads for this movie. The quote says:

This is the most scary, stylish horror movie I've seen in years.

We can think of two possibilities. Either the original quote was:

This is the most scary, stylish horror movie I've seen in years. Not!

Or Clive hasn't seen a movie of any kind in twenty or thirty years. He should get out more.
Academy Award For: Absolutely nothing. Even the popcorn was bad.
Verdict: Avoid at all costs.

Yow. Elaborate martial art sequences set in 17th century France? This is likely to be good. 

Plurp.

A Psychic / Astrologer sat in front of her streetside store today, offering advertising leaflets to people who, it turned out, did not take them.

Yow. And for those of you who doubted, we scored an amazing 27 out of 30 on the Princess Bride test, making us a "Total Princess Bride Junkie". It's so true.

Yow. Bumper sticker we'd love to see.

I Pierced Your
Honor Student
(guess where)

Plurp.

The blue dog
was an elaborate
martial art sequence
set in 17th century France.

Friday, August 31, 2001

Blab. On our rant against bozo teenage hackers, an otherwise kind reader baits us.

It's a simple curiosity of youth.

Young boys and girls watch pro ball players and aspire to be pro ball players.  They read about doctors saving lives, and they aspire to be doctors.

Now the word is out: hi-tech companies hiring professional hackers to figure out bugs and other weaknesses in network security systems - and paying top dollar.  These young Einsteins spend all their free time at the computer - what a great career aspiration!  So, while their peers are working on their jumpshot or holding a stethoscope to their dog, some kids are practicing their future as computer hackers.

Heck, if we are recruiting athletes out of high school and sending 12-year-olds to medical school, why can't we ENCOURAGE these young kids to explore their talents, pull them straight from their high school classroom to place them in a controlled training environment?

What's so wrong with that?  Perhaps the makers of Plurp should be on the phone to Montreal tomorrow!   Hmmmmm?

Simple curiosity of youth leads us to learn how to do all sorts of things. A sense of ethics prevents us from engaging in destructive, criminal actions. Both are important.

We have had the opportunity to hire such people. In fact, we've had quite a few such opportunities. And we've turned them down. Every one of them. We just don't hire people who can't tell the difference between curiosity and crime.

Do you?

Blab. On that same dear kid, a reader writes:

"...she noted that it was her son's first offense..."

I would point out to her that, technically, it was her son's first fifty-eight offenses.

Your Honor, my son has never previously shut down major companies around the globe. Surely you can't punish him for fifty-eight instances of youthful exuberances.

Blab. A reader sends us another ...

Re: Crimestoppers tip

Ah. A tale for our age.

Norway's unluckiest – or most stupid – criminal broke into an Oslo apartment and grabbed cash and some perfume.

What he didn’t know was that the apartment was part a reality television programme and every move inside – including his – was being tracked by 17 small video cameras and simultaneously broadcast on the internet.

It's an interesting perspective on what we fear will be the ubiquitous use of surveillance technology in the future.

Blab. A reader who has clearly thought a great deal about restrooms writes:

I have no reservations about using "public restrooms" at private businesses.  How is this different than using the restroom at the mall on a day you don't buy anything?

Plus, in my case, I own stock in McDonald's.  I justify my use of their restrooms as one of the unwritten benefits of being a partial owner of the company!

Plus I find McDonald's bathrooms are generally cleaner than other public facilities....

Yeah, we've gone out and bought one share of a number of major corporations, just in case we can't find a public restroom some day.

Blab. A spammist who is convinced that all caps is the way to go writes:

**** VORTEX  SUPPLIES ****

... and of course much, much more. But our vortices are pretty much stocked up, so we skipped the rest.

Blab. Our Chinese spammists are back. Rather than granite, this time they offer us this (in part):

ÈôҪȡÏû£¬Çë»Ø¸´:  yuntguo@sohu.com 

ÔĶÁ³¬ÐÇͼÊéÇëʹÓó¬ÐÇä¯ÀÀÆ÷,×øӵͼÊé25ÍòÖÖ! 

³¬ÐǶÁÊ鿨ÇëÄúÃâ·ÑÊÔÓã¡ 
Ó­°ÂÔË£¬°ÙÍò¶ÁÕßÃâ·Ñ¶ÁÊé´ó»î¶¯ÏÖÔÚ¿ªÊ¼ÁË£¡
 

Óû§Ö»ÒªµÇ¼³¬ÐÇÊý×ÖͼÊé¹Ý£¬ÏÂÔØÒ»¸
ö³¬ÐÇͼÊéÔÄÀÀÆ÷(ssreader),
Óÿ¨ºÅ£º200199996
666 ÃÜÂë 695460
ÔÚÏß×¢²á¼´¿ÉÓµÓÐÔĶÁºÍÏÂÔØ¡¢´òÓ¡¹¦ÄÜ¡£´ËºÅÂë×¢²
áÈÕÆÚ½ØÖ¹ÈÕÆÚΪ2001Äê9ÔÂ30ÈÕ¡£

ÈçÓÐÒÉÎÊ£¬ÇëÁªÏµ£ºsuperstar@ssreader.com ÊÔÓÿ¨ºÅ£º

That Number of the Beast bit has us slightly worried, but all the sites to which they refer are apparently in Chinese, so we'll just add this to the vortex and move on.

Plop. Speaking of memes that take over your mind, we just can't get this out of our head.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

We are so doomed.

Plurp. Sad news. The only remaining Plurp creature has joined the choir ethereal. Dear Plurp creature spent its whole life running from vicious gangs of sharp-toothed nasties, and never even had the pleasure of connubial companionship. It's tragic, really. It's a brutish world, if a virtual one.

Services will be held when we get around to it.

Yo. Meanwhile, that vile Aberration creature is alive and well, and far too involved in sex to even contemplate dinner.

Figures.

Plop. Helen received some odd mail with an odd file attachment from a friend this morning. So she ran the attachment. No, we don't know what she was thinking, but her computer is now infected with the Sircam virus, a particularly nasty little creature.

Poor Helen.

Rant. We got caught in the rain during our lunchtime walk today. Can't these things be scheduled more conveniently?

Plurp.

The blue dog
was too involved
in the vortex to even
contemplate
curiosity.

Thursday, August 30, 2001

Blab. Possibly in reference to the odd discussion of hibernating mammals and Weblogs yesterday, a reader writes:

Bear plurp?  I'm getting 365 results from google right now.

We definitely can't bear it.

Blab. An extremely verbose spammist from Israel who really could use a copy editor writes:

I bet that I make more money in the Web design business than you do.

Actually, he, she or it goes on much, much, much longer than this, but you've been nice lately so we figured we'd spare you the bandwidth.

Anyhow, since we make zero dollars from Web design, we were willing to concede the point and move on.

Blab. A reader challenges us to actually think about things for a change.

Since you brought up the concept of spoken language as a societal meme, thought I'd ask a follow-up.

How would a person born deaf respond to this?  Having never heard a word uttered, they are still able to communicate with a language that (I am told) is far more complex - and certainly unique - than our own spoken language. And they can read and write the same language we do without uttering the words on the page.

Now, modern advancements in therapy have allowed deaf persons to develop some semblance of speech based on a learned method through vibrations.  But does this at all qualify as a meme ?

An excellent bunch of questions!

Are there any deaf readers who can respond to this? Any readers that would like to pretend to be deaf for us? (It's the Internet; we can't tell.)

Blab. Our precious readers are looking out for us. And as they do, they find Ballmer Vids for us.

Title: Ballmerfunk Music Video
 Location: ??? 
 Director: James Carusone 
 Date: ??? 
 Description: Freaky…really freaky!
 -Music by Digital Droo- 

Utterly hilarious, and an excellent use of broadband technology, being 6MB and all. Go click on it right now, kids. You'll be singing this catchy tune all day long. Look for it on the MTV Music Awards.

(What must it be like to live inside that head?)

Yo. Another, even less flattering, remix of Steve Ballmer. Hey - we only linked to it.

Yow. And speaking of Mr. Ballmer, this picture explains a lot.

Rant. There's something that we just don't understand, and we're hoping our readers can help us through this muddle. Consider the following.

A 17-year-old student who paralyzed several major businesses, including NBC and WalMart, needs structure, but should be spared further detention, his parents said at a sentencing hearing. 

The Montreal teen--known only as Jones because of his age--pleaded guilty in January to 58 charges related to the February 2000 attacks on businesses in Canada, the United States, Denmark and South Korea. 

Jones' mother told Judge Gilles Ouellet on Tuesday that her son "is not a bad boy;" she noted that it was her son's first offense and it was not violent. "I don't think being sentenced to closed custody will help him in any way."

The boy's father said he hopes his son will complete his education and have a career in executive management. 

Jones admitted involvement in attacks against five companies. Entrances to major locations of the companies were covered with millions of tacks and tire spikes, preventing workers and customers from entering the businesses for up to five hours.

Previously, a social worker testified the youth showed no remorse and should spend at least five months in detention.

Outrageous! Flog the little terrorist! How dare he? How are we to have a civilized world if miscreants like this can walk away from such criminal activities? How could there possibly be a controversy about his culpability or punishment?

Well, OK, that didn't really happen. But this did (excerpted from here).

A 17-year-old computer hacker who paralyzed several major Web sites, including CNN and Yahoo, needs structure, but should be spared further detention, his parents said at a sentencing hearing. 

The Montreal teen--known only by his computer nickname, Mafiaboy, because of his age--pleaded guilty in January to 58 charges related to the February 2000 hacking attacks and security breaches of sites in Canada, the United States, Denmark and South Korea. 

Mafiaboy's mother told Judge Gilles Ouellet on Tuesday that her son "is not a bad boy;" she noted that it was her son's first offense and it was not violent. "I don't think being sentenced to closed custody will help him in any way."

The boy's father said he hopes his son will complete his education and have a career in a computer-related field. 

Mafiaboy admitted involvement in denial-of-service attacks against Web sites belonging to five companies. The sites were bombarded with thousands of simultaneous messages, which prevented legitimate users from accessing them for up to five hours. 

Previously, a social worker testified the youth showed no remorse and should spend at least five months in detention.

So my confusion is: What's the difference? If it would be outrageous for some little jerk to knock out major businesses around the world with tacks and tire spikes, why is it forgivable for the same little darling to knock them out with a computer, especially when the economic damage might very well have been more severe in the latter case?

Readers are invited to compose their replies in invective form.

Plop. Here's an interesting variation on the above.

Uncovering a relatively benign vulnerability in the Internet, researchers [at the University of Notre Dame] have tricked Web servers around the world into solving math problems without permission in a practice known as "parasitic computing."

In parasitic computing, [...] the work is performed without the server owner's knowledge or permission. 

The parasitic computing probably did not break any laws. 

Here's the abstract of the article.

Parasitic computing

Reliable communication on the Internet is guaranteed by a standard set of protocols, used by all computers. Here we show that these protocols can be exploited to compute with the communication infrastructure, transforming the Internet into a distributed computer in which servers unwittingly perform computation on behalf of a remote node. In this model, which we call 'parasitic computing', one machine forces target computers to solve a piece of a complex computational problem merely by engaging them in standard communication. Consequently, the target computers are unaware that they have performed computation for the benefit of a commanding node. As experimental evidence of the principle of parasitic computing, we harness the power of several web servers across the globe, which—unknown to them—work together to solve an NP complete problem.

One of the researchers compares this to using the rest room at McDonald's without buying a burger. This demonstrates the limits of analogy. We might better compare it to a person who makes a collect call home for "Al B. Homatseven". It may conform to the protocol for collect calls, but it is a clear misuse of the system. 

While we do not pretend to the exalted status of Lawyer, we would suggest that such surreptitious use of computing resources not owned by these august academics is, at the very least, antisocial and obnoxious.

It would be reassuring if the tenure committee at Notre Dame were not in the practice of rewarding antisocial, obnoxious behavior. But we are not hopeful.

What do you think?

(Another article about the article is here, but it's written by people who didn't understand it and for people who don't really want to understand it, so you may find it less than perfectly enlightening.)

Yo. When we suggested that SUV drivers play with nail guns, we never thought you'd take us this seriously.

Man Survives 5-inch Nail in Head

"The nail missed hitting any of his eye, his mouth, his nose, his ear or his spine," said Dr. Kristine Reeser. "Or his brain." 

We suspect that missing his brain was more than luck.

Yow. Larry Kramer on Nightline. Is that great or what? Whatever you think of him, you must love his ability to garner attention to the plague of AIDS.

A couple of months ago Time Magazine printed an article listing some of the most influential people of the last century or so. The list, a very short list, really, included Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Larry Kramer. 

Plurp. Why are we linking to an invisible fence site? Because people at lunch were wondering if it could be used on sheep and whether that information was on the Web. Silly people.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was once a parasitic
computer hacker
with a nine inch nail
in his head

Wednesday, August 29, 2001

Blab. Python fans arise!

Where?!? Behind the rabbit?

That's the most vicious plush rodent you'll ever see!

Blab. Offering an explanation for why it's so quiet around here lately, a reader writes:

no one's running naked down the hall at your office because all those who are so inclined are at burning man

Truer words were never spoken. And we can't wait for the pics!

Blab. A reader predicts doom.

Tragically, the downward spiral has continued:

Today "Plurp" has registered with 333 hits.  This is down from the 343 and 340 that were recorded in recent archives.

Either Plurp is going through a cycle "correction" following a long period of a "Bull Plurp" or, more likely, that Plurp will continue to fade into obilvion.  At this rate, Plurp will cease to exist (at least in the profitable mind of Google) by Friday (which is about when the government surplus will also fade into oblivion).

Well, loyal fans, it was nice sharing a lovely blog with you.  It appears that Plurp may be the next victim of the dot-com bust - no profit, no weblog....

Of course, loyal fans, by doubling your contribution to your Pay-Per-Plurp subscription, perhaps we can turn this around and become the next Google mysterious success story.

Then again....

We are confident that Plurp will forever be in a period of bull.

Blab. A reader from cow country writes:

(out of my rear view mirror)

mooz, mooz

Farms? In Berkeley?

Blab. A reader seeking to darken his or her nose writes:

Plurp is America's greatest resource.

That's very flattering, but we feel duty-bound to inform you that there is some disagreement about that.

Blab. Demonstrating the awesome destructive power of associative memory, a reader writes:

Subj: illness and the raw mongoose

"... slowly starve to death for lack of nourishing material."

Plurp-

I've been surfing bizarre (but true) diet web sites lately and found this gem:

"Further, Zephyr became very ill recently, reputedly from ingesting raw parasite-infested mongoose, and finally resorted to medication to stem his deterioration from what was diagnosed as trichinosis."

-A Reader

Ah yes, the instinctos. These are folks who ...

[...] choose their food by smelling a bunch of different [raw, unmixed] foods and eating the most attractive by itself until they don't want any more, at which point they can go sniff out another food to eat if they want.

[I]nstinctos eat fruits and veggies and honeys and nuts and seeds and seafood and meat and organs and bone marrow and sometimes even insects. And they eat it all raw and one food at a time. No mixing of foods, no spices, no juicing or grinding. [M]ost of them prefer their animal foods "ripe"--as in well-aged and strong-smelling.

We think we should open up a whole new culinary category of the Darwin Awards for these folks. 

It has been one of the driving forces of culture and religion for thousands of years of plague and pestilence to figure out how to eat food without dying. It's even enshrined in religious cannons like kashruth law. Now these yutzes figure they can just smell their way through life.

Even further, I know personally, firsthand, of a long-time instincto in Hawaii who had been laid out with a humongous staph infection which had oozed probably a gallon or more of pus over a five-month period (during which he also suffered from nematodes).

Nematodes.

Blab. Where do our readers come up with this stuff?

Thought I'd upgrade your exploding head video from last week to a more animated version:

www.theviralfactory.com

It also appears that they're hiring programmers and animators, so this could be a great site for all the recent victims of the dot-com bust.

Either there, or Google, I suspect.

The actual video is here. It is quite, erm, impressive. And not for the faint of heart.

Let's see. That makes three images of people's heads exploding. And just in the past week, too!

Yow. Make that four.

Yo. Remember Burma Shave signs? That means you're very old, but never mind that. Their odd, four-line gooey rhyming pattern seems to be an important memetic pattern in ad slogans. Witness this really strange collection of winning UK ad slogans. (It's a strange Web site. The links are mostly broken but you can fiddle with them to find their intended targets.) (geegaw)

Yow. Have we pointed you at Cyber-Geographies already? Many, many, many very cool maps of the Internet and related stuff. Spend some time there.

Yo. A guy named Earl Vickers stamped a bunch of one dollar bills with the following message:

Lost: Dollar Bill, Serial # [space where the bill's actual serial number appears]. If found, please return to: Earl Vickers, P.O. Box xxx... 

Curiously, a number of people replied. Here's what they said.

People are so odd.

Yo. The Bible, translated into Pig Latin? Naturally, it's on the Web.

Yo. Want to know where your dollar bill has been? Yeah, that's on the Web too.

Plurp. What if there were a meme (a mental process or mode) so powerful that (a) it took over your mind, making it almost impossible to get out of the mental state in which it puts you and (b) was amazingly contagious, in that it causes you to transmit the meme to others almost without exception.

It would be the stuff of science fiction, or Monty Python. It would be the joke you couldn't stop telling, the song you couldn't stop singing, the religion you couldn't stop evangelizing.

Or would it? What if we told you that there already was such a meme, that your mind had already been taken over, indeed that almost every human mind for thousands of years has already been taken over?

Well, there is such a meme. It is spoken language. Speech runs through our minds almost constantly. We talk to ourselves in our heads. We talk to others. We make lists. We comment on external events. So much of our conscious thought is in the form of (silently) spoken language that philosophers and AI theorists have often mistaken language for consciousness.

It is almost impossible to stop thinking in the form of language. Cults and religions have evolved methods to help dampen out this mode of thought: mantras, chanting, focused visual images such as mandalas. Yet they are only successful with much effort. And your mind naturally falls back into speech.

There are some modes of consciousness that do not involve speech, at least not necessarily. Parts of composing music do not, exactly, though we still find ourselves vocalizing the notes. Painting need not, but we still find the internal dialog going through our mind as we do.

Songs (or, more intentionally, jingles) that you can't get out of your head play on the fact that we are always talking to ourselves. Ask yourself this: Of all the times when you've had a song going through your head repeatedly, and often annoyingly, how many times did that song have no words?

And talk about contagious! (Pun intended.) Language is so clearly useful, and so clearly necessary to life in society, that we start teaching it to our children shortly after they pop out. It is such a major part of our social life that it feels awkward, often amazingly so, to be with another person in a social setting and not talk. We make up things to talk about - the weather, how have you been, how 'bout them Yankees - things about which we don't actually care in any deep sense. The important thing is that we are talking.

There was a time in all of our lives when we did not have language. And there was a very long period of time in human evolution when our forefathers did not have language. Some philosophers would deny that we (as infants or pre-linguistic species) were conscious at all. That's poppycock, but it does raise an interesting question. What is it like to experience the world as a raw sensorium, without language, without the constant babbling of voices in our heads?

Readers?

Plurp. Intel wants to put their chips in your socks. Why? Well ...

In the future, [chips] will be attached to people [...] or inserted in clothing to track people [...]

"Not only are we the input/output devices for (computers and handhelds), we are the chauffeurs," [said the VP of Intel Research], adding that machines "either work for us or we work for them."

Humans won't be needed [...]

In this way we feel loved.

Yo. The Google preference page with preferences set to hacker. A bit over the top, but mildly funny. (beth)

Yow. Crimestoppers tip: Webcam catches burglar. (beth)

Plurp.

We are sailing
To Philadelphia
To toe the line,
The Marnie Nixon line.

Plurp.

The blue dog's
head once
exploded

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Blab. Mistaking our meager blog for a political campaign, a reader writes:

Plurp is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.

It is upon such lofty thoughts that all our hopes are dashed.

Blab. A singing reader writes:

We don't need another hero.
We don't need to know the way home.
All we want is life beyond
TechnoSphere.

There's gotta be something better out there.

Blab. A reader, consumed with the artificial imitation reality substitute known as TechoSphere, writes:

I too have found myself exploring the world of Technosphere, and I too found my first creature's life short-lived.  I have since created another vegitarian, who was unsuccessful in its first attempt at mating (hey, weren't we all?) and is already being pursued by drooling beef-itarians. 

Fortunately, like your newest creation, my creature has an enemy who suffers from a lack of spelling or grammar ability.

Unfortunatly, spelling or grammar ability have little to do with survival of the fittest in the Technosphere.

Or in the Blab box, we surmise.

We're beginning to wonder if the lack of crudités in the area of our rather hungry Plurp creature, and the low population density, are related to it being (we think) a low-lying area of the world. It's hard to tell from the map (and of course there's no actual write-up; who wants to document when you could be munging the code after all?), but we wonder if our dear Plurp creature (and the equally unsatisfied Aberration monster) weren't somehow tossed into the Great Ocean where, oddly, there is no food for vegetarians. If you look at the map location of random creatures, it appears to us that the brown areas of the map (the land?) are extremely densely populated, much more so than the area around our two creatures.

If so, it would be art imitating life, as we also expect our blog to slowly starve to death for lack of nourishing material.

Blab. A reader explains the mystery of Google being profitable.

What with all the games we're constantly playing on Google, of *course* it's making money. Just like First Citiwide Change Bank: it's all about VOLUME.

Oh! Then we feel so very proud to be responsible for the only dot-com to have made it to profitability. Where do we cash in?

Plop. Maybe it's something about August. Or maybe it's the impending Labor Day weekend. Whatever the cause, it's real quiet around work this week. Almost no one's here. Doors are closed. No one's running naked down the hall.

It's spooky.

Yo. The Internet really is running out of space, and somebody-or-other calculates that it'll be completely out of space in just five years. The problem is that there can only be 4.3 billion IP addresses in IPv4, the current addressing system, and the flood of new Internet-connected devices (PDAs, games, bunions, etc.) will soon exhaust these.  IPv6 can handle zillions more, but everybody will have to change their software to take advantage of it. And what a mess that will be!

Backers say v6 will ultimately be needed because the Internet is simply running out of numeric IP addresses, particularly abroad. 

"We basically hogged all the IP addresses in the United States. So as the rest of the world comes online, there's a shortage," said [some Sun guy].

Lawrence Orans, a Gartner analyst, points out that Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology each got a block of 16 million IP addresses -- more than what's available to latecomers, including the entire country of China. 

Ah. Now the conspiracy is revealed. Having intentionally created a scarce resource, Stanford and MIT plan to plunder the Third World by selling increasingly rare IP addresses to starving peasants who must address the air conditioning systems in their bamboo huts from afar.

The dastards!

Yow. Our employer of record has a nifty new branding campaign to show off IBM technology in other peoples' products. The first to use the new logo (reminiscent of the Intel Inside sticker that we all know and love) is Nintendo's new GameCube, which uses an IBM microprocessor.

Kind cool, IMHO.

Yow. Psychedelic Republicans. Of all things.

Plurp.

The blue dog
needed to have at least
a bajillion IP addresses

Monday, August 27, 2001

Blab. A reader, probably mocking that nice reader from yesterday, writes:

You are the wings beneath my wind.

Somebody's got to be.

Blab. Encouraging all of our worst tendencies, a reader writes:

I can't make it to Plurp to read it, because it's a weekend.  But I just wanted you to know that your sarcasm is exactly biting enough to be amusing, but not insulting.

And don't go thinking I must have read Plurp because I mentioned sarcasm, because that's just a co-incidence.

Keep on Plurpin', good buddy.

Here we are, so wrapped up in our own angst that we didn't even realize we had trucker fans. 

Blab. A regular reader offers this link to an irregular reader.

Mr. Plurp Man?

OK. Everyone except sp1nk can skip the rest of this entry, as its tedious regurgitation of he-said-she-said cannot possibly be of interest.

The link references an entry by a person named Burnt Sienna:

heh. i just found this bizarre comment in reference to this even more bizarre comment. first of all, mr. plurp man, i'm female. that should be fairly obvious from the girl taking a picture of herself in the large and prominently displayed graphic on this site. and regarding the permalinks, "d00d," maybe if they were a bit easier to find and not only located at a date but after every entry, i would have used it. forgive my err, mr. plurp man. i still don't understand why you searched my screen name in the first place. what was the "puzzling process"? 

Here's what happened. A while ago, somebody send the following via a Blab box.

sp1nk

... prompting this puzzled reply. The owner of that Web site posted a reply there (how obscure!) and a reader sent it to us, prompting this entry. Now the above. 

While we are flattered that our commentary should be characterized as bizarre, we fail to understand the obvious offense taken by Ms. Sienna. Take a stress tab, bucko. It's just humor.

Sheesh. Can we help it if she looks like a guy?

Blab. Inspired, we flatter ourselves, by our single lyrical line yesterday, a reader creates the entire song.

(sung to the tune of "Counting Flowers on the Wall")

Take the cookies from my hair,
There is plenty enough to share.
Help yourself to the chocolate chips,
Just don't take them from my lips.

Take the cookies from my hair,
You can eat them, if you dare.
Count the pieces one-by-one,
Help yourself, but save me some.

Wonderful! We were actually thinking of Take the Ribbon From My Hair, but we like this better! It's catchy; it's got a beat; we can't dance to it, but then we can't dance to much of anything. We give it an 8.

Yo. Remember Wil Wheaton, the guy who played Ensign Wesley Crusher in ST:TNG? We predict that his acting career is over, done, kaput, sorry Charlie. Why? Blogging, that's why.

It seems that Mr. Wheaton has a Weblog, which is all fine and dandy and such. It also seems that Mr. Wheaton hasn't been getting many "projects" (what the rest of us refer to as "jobs") recently, which can certainly happen in an acting career.

But now Mr. Wheaton has decided to vent his invective about his career doldrums in his blog. For everyone in the world to see. (Pardon the edited language; Mr. Wheaton is nothing if not colorful.)

Since yesterday, when I got the "it's you or another guy" phone call, I've been sliding deeper and deeper into depression, because if I can't get hired by MY [COPULATING] FRIEND, who practically promised me the part, I don't know what to do. I'm sorry, but I am getting so sick and tired of having a project dangled in front of me for weeks, and then having it yanked out from under me at the last second.

[...]

And this comes on the heels of some producers, for whom I suffered with the biggest [rectum] "director" (I put that in quotes because this guy couldn't direct traffic on a one was street) for NO MONEY on a movie that should have been great, because the script was brilliant. But it will suck now because the [rectum] will ruin it in post, these producers have jerked me around for 4 months with the promise of a project which will most likely never happen now.

[...]

But you wanted to know how I was feeling, and was was going on in my mind...well, there it is.

Being in the research biz, we work with a lot of colorful people. Heck, we like that. Some of them are moody, some of them have anger management issues, and some of them are prima donnas, but none of them put that in their résumés.

It's understandable that Mr. Wheaton is unhappy. It sounds like a very stressful experience, and a lifestyle that we probably couldn't handle ourselves. But it's one thing to vent in private, and rather another to do it where the people against whom you are railing will doubtlessly see it, as will all of the other potential employers that you might have had. And they'll think, Hmm - Do I want my name appearing there next? And then, we predict, they'll pick the other guy.

Another blogging related career death. (Ian)

Yow. Our currently favorite T-shirt, in New York Black. (Ian)

Yo. Bad news from TechnoSphere. One of our gentle Plurp creatures has met with a violent end at the hands (or similar appendages) of a carnivore. Ah well, 'tis better to have loved and gotten eaten than to never have loved at all. Donations should be sent directly to us.

The other gentle Plurp creature seems to be getting along just fine, but is getting pretty desperate for a juice bar or a power smoothie.

In yet further bad news, a new carnivore seems to have appeared on the horizon. Its name is Aberration, and it is not pretty.

Zoom. Items found in the extremely small center console.

• EZ-Pass, for paying bridge and tunnel tolls quickly. (Note: Not mounted on windshield; not aesthetic.)
• A silk scarf, to prevent the long hair of a beautiful woman from tangling in the breeze.
• Sunblock. SPF 45.

Zoom, zoom.

Yo. While we can't vouch for the source, if this story about Compaq Research is true, it certainly indicates that it's an awfully exciting place to work these days.

Apparently, on the 2nd of August, Compaq's global research units were treated to a confidential strategic roadmap presentation by Dr. Alex Stepanov, VP & Chief Scientist. 

"Stepanov lost his cool and in front of the entire worldwide organisation watching by teleconference, started bellowing in his Russian accent: 'you can all quit! I have authority! Shane appointed me! You have never produced any good proposals! Research is not important!' and so on. 

[...]

"Things got so bad that people walked out of the talk, including the director of the Systems Research Center (who incidentally has resigned and will now head up the new Microsoft Research division in Silicon Valley).

"In short, the research component at Compaq is coming unglued, and the new CTO office is creating a hullaballoo. Morale has gotten very bad during the past year, since the new CTO arrived, but now it has gone beyond rock bottom. Expect a significant number of departures of talented research staff in the near future." 

Does that sound like too much fun or what?

Yow. A correspondent informs us of an amazing fact: Google is actually profitable. How the heck did that happen?

Plurp.

The blue dog
said good-bye to
everyone from the
TechnoSphere

Sunday, August 26, 2001

Blab. A reader with special knowledge (and an Arkansas ISP) tells us something that we just plain didn't know this lovely Sunday afternoon.

Subj: some people dont know their hybrds 

did you know besides all the different nationallities of people on the earth that there are two main root races?yes there are.remember in the beginning of the christian bible it said:"the sons of god came down and saw the daughters of men and took them for wives because they were compatible.i doesnt matter if we are white,brown,red.black or yellow there are ownly one differance between the two root races and that is our ears.one race has ears that connect to their jaws without a lobe,the race i belong to has ear lobes,then over hundreds of thousands of years our race grew in numbers.that is untill now.those people whithout earlobes are dominating the planet.And from our race mixing with theirs for thousands of years unknowing.we have produced the people that have rounded ears.the gods told man not to mix whith creatures but to keep the blood line pure.in the beginning the gods said:let us create man in our own image,in our likeness.Those are creatures,attached ears like a beast.later the gods formed man from the dust of the earth,hu-man,us.

(Yes, those are the original colors.)

God is such a sneaky guy! What with all the many, interesting differences between various of us humanoids around here, He chose to hide the Real Difference in how our ears are attached. No wonder it took so long to figure out!

Now about that biblical quote, the one in red with the missing close quote. We don't quite find exactly that, at least not in the King James version of the bible. There are a couple of things that are close, and translate to something like the quote in other versions of the bible.

Genesis 6:1-2 (King James): And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

Genesis 6:4 (King James): There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

They both miss that crucial compatibility idea, though, which seems somehow central to the thesis that there were two different root races of the same species. But oh well, why quibble about little stuff?

Curiously, and this is no doubt that sneaky God guy again, the King James Bible doesn't mention lobe anywhere. Prolly just translated differently from the Aramaic.

Hey - we're convinced!

Blab. On a rather different topic, a reader writes:

You are my hero.

Goodness! Thank you.

Plurp. Continuing our adolescent angst about our stupid blog, today we worry nearly to the point of contrition about the way we mistreat our dear readers, subjecting them to the most caustic stream of sarcasm merely for taking the time to write to us.

It's wrong, we say to ourselves, striking our head against the bathroom tiles again and again. It's so wrong!

Then, suddenly, we feel better and go into the kitchen to look for some cookies.

Yow. Our Plurp creatures are, indeed, alive in TechnoSphere. We're so proud. It took so long for the TechnoSphere to acknowledge the creation of our first creature that we created a second, identical one in the interim. Kinda like having a dalliance with another woman while you wait impatiently for the results of the pregnancy test from the first.

Shame on us.

Plurp.

Note: Do NOT wash your furniture by placing it into the swimming pool.

Yo. Microsoft tells us that we are a:

Youngest child

Far from being the runt of the litter, the youngest child is usually the most outgoing. They are also very low-maintenance lovers. Once in a relationship, it doesn't take much to keep a youngest child interested. But while they may be competent lovers and affectionate spouses, don't ever try to dominate them. 

Last-born children live to question authority. Far from parroting the ideas of others, look for them to be innovators in technology and fashion. The youngest child also has the best sense of humor in the family. 

And Microsoft is always right.

Yak. To be sung.

Take the cookies from my hair ...

Yo. Looking for jewelry made from human bones? It's on the Web. Isn't everything? (Weird Links)

Yo. With the certain knowledge that we are now deeply offending anyone whom we had not already deeply offended, we point you to Jesus Dress Up. But please don't go there. Really. We warned you. (Weird Links)

Yak.

I'd like the Happy Meal with a McChokey toy, please.

Plop. We're pretty sure we don't like this. Amazon has a new service called the Amazon Honor System. Web sites that sign up for it display a little box that says Pay Me Money, Fred (or something like that). It recognizes who you are using Amazon's cookies, and greets you by name on the subscribing Web site. Click on it, and it uses Amazon's famous One-Click Payment scheme to charge you money and send (some of) it to whomever's Web site it was on.

Current exploiters of this fine technology include AdCritic, Bartleby and the Internet Movie Database.

Amazon absolutely positively assures us that our privacy is not violated in the process. Uh huh.

Plurp. Highlights of our trip to Maryland this weekend.

• Road signs in Pennsylvania, in German.
• Signs warning about buggy crossings.
• A place of business claiming to have made the first pretzels in America.
• Following a local egg truck for an hour along country roads, at 70 mph.
• Two large, white tents near Helen's sister's house, under which toxic waste from a former chemical weapons site is being frozen, dug up, encased in something inert, and only then removed from the site, as it would be way too dangerous to remove it any other way.

Plurp.

Plurp.

Far from being the runt of the litter,
the blue dog was
jewelry
made from human
bones

© 2001 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved