Current
Earlier
Later
Archive
 

Home
Search
Mail
Stuff
 

2001.10.28 : 2001.11.03

Saturday, November 3, 2001

Blab. A reader chastises and compliments us in the same breath.

It is your fault.  None of your alleged "Disturbing Items" were even a tenth as disturbing as that Bezos head was.

You liked that, did you?

Blab. A reader familiar with nasal party favors writes:

Didn't get our essay about the Cat Tape Dispenser, eh?  Well, we'll blame our browser this time, and let you off the hook.  The turtle lamp, on the other hand, is exactly the shape of the left nostril of Gargantua.  You should look into that.ctly the shape of the left nostril of Gargantua.  You sh

Yes, we do see the resemblance. Good point.

And no, we didn't see your essay about the Cat Tape Dispenser, eh.ut the Cat Tape Dispenser.

Blab. A reader comes to its senses.

I'm sorry. It's not a TURTLE LAMP, it's a rare breed of "Nuclear Mutated Alien Poop".t a TURTLE LAMP, it's a rare breed of "Nuclear Mutate

Correct! Congratulations to our winner! Now about that stutter ...

Blab. A reader defends an ignorant and badly researched Web site other than ours.

The Jargon File is not ignorant or badly researched, the Jargon File is the Newpaper of Record, the Common Consensus, the Conventional Wisdom of the hacker community.  Any mistake left uncorrected in it for long becomes true.

Just so you know.

And you're a curmudgeon, so there!

Ya-boo.

And all.

Why, thank you! That's the nicest thing anyone has said about us all day.

We were wondering where the hacker community gets its wisdom. This explains quite a lot.

Plurp. A new Helenism, from a conference call yesterday.

Getting buy-off

• Getting buy-in
• Getting sign-off

Plurp. You can set your clock by the jackhammers in Manhattan and ours was three minutes slow as, at 9 AM sharp this morning, the pounding started on the street below our apartment. It's hard to sleep through that, even on a Saturday morning. But, over the years, it's become part of the routine. The street is always being dug up for one reason or another. So I throw a pillow over my head and drift back into a dream.

Yesterday, the new Homeland Czar announced that last week's Highest Possible Alert, formerly in effect for just a few days, was being extended "indefinitely." What are we supposed to watch for, asked one reporter. Anything out of the ordinary, he said. 

Referring to the ongoing discovery of more anthrax contaminated sites, some random expert being interviewed suggested with authority that, in the future, we would hear reports of terrorist attacks on the evening news, just like we listen to the weather. And we would take it in stride and carry on.

Could be. But I don't think it'll be as easy as the jackhammers.

Plurp. Stufflebeem. It's such a weird word. Stufflebeem. It should be out of a fairy tale, like Rumplestiltskin. Or, better yet, out of that silly movie a few years ago - Beetlejuice - in which saying that name three times brought a zany supernatural character into our world, full of both power and trickery.

Stufflebeem!
Stufflebeem!
Stufflebeem!

See?

Plurp.

The blue dog
just wanted to
sleep
through all of it

Friday, November 2, 2001

Blab. A reader falls victim to the Satanic chorus we chanted on Hallowe'en.

I repeated that 4-line phrase you plurped yesterday - all the lights in my office turned a light shade of fuchsia, and now there's an odor not unlike old tennis shoes dipped in honey.

Oh, and it's raining too, but then again, I'm in Washington, so that's probably just a coincidence.

We recommend not eating the tennis shoes.

Blab. A reader gives a sadly linear interpretation of our Disturbing Item from yesterday.

Of course it's a TURTLE LAMP. Doesn't everybody own one?

OK. It must be our fault. We have failed, with our Disturbing Item series, to inspire the mass of our reader to do anything but make dull, literal, spittle-drooling interpretations of the images we have presented.

We accept full responsibility for this intellectual necrosis and hereby terminate the current, obviously under-inspiring series.

In the meantime, we are unable to avoid expressing our disappointment at how few readers we have who ... well, at how few readers we have.

Blab. A person three steps down the road to Fudded Dudville writes:

I claim no relationship to the guy who wants to costume as a fireman. I deny any knowledge of him.  The whole concept might have become funny in ten or twenty years.  MIGHT have. 

Helen

Oh feh! This Helen person is forgetting our time-honored tradition of Hallowe'en costumes that are outrageous, offensive, in incredibly bad taste or, when we really hit our stride, all three. A sampler from years past, to refresh her memory:

• A Geisha, with kimono, black wig and long red fingernails. Greeting guests at the door was the interesting part. 
• A flasher. Sunglasses, baseball cap, tennis shoes, dirty black raincoat. Shear flesh-colored bikini underwear with a strategically placed purple ribbon that said Best In Show. Flashed people as they came in. 
• Jesus. Robe, sandals, crown of thorns. Legend has it that we passed around shots of tequila saying "Do this oft in remembrance of me". Seriously offended at least one devout Catholic. Oh well. 
• A victim of the black plague, complete with fleas. (That was in 1999; the theme was "significant person or event from the last millennium".)

And that was just us! One Hallowe'en, after that mess in Waco, a friend came as David Corresh ... post-fire. Ick.

Honestly. What good are sacred cows if you can't have a cookout once in a while?

Yow. Cheddar, this historic town of cheese, is about to become a cybercity.

Plop.

The New York Lottery

Hey - You Never Know

Plurp.

In a previous life
the blue dog was
an historic town of
cheese

Thursday, November 1, 2001

Blab. An anonymous reader writes:

I am angered and saddened that you would degrade me to being just an anonymous reader.  I'm NOT !

I'M the one who submitted the URL for the cat clock.

I'M the one who searched for hours (well, ok, more like minutes - actually 2 minutes) ALL over the deepest recesses of the internet looking for that website.

I'M the one who knows precisely what that "thing" is.

IT'S ME !  IT'S ME !  ME !  ME !  ME ! ! !

So please, I beg of you, don't ever call me just an anonymous reader.  If you must, just call me Paul Ford.

Yeah, whatever.

Blab. A reader, or rather an unclueful non-reader, insists on spamming us. Twice. With the same stupid spam.

From: Emilia Johnson<joh3072@attglobal.net>
To: PlurpMail@stevewhite.org

Hi,

I think I goofed on the format when I sent you mail last time. This is the second and last time I'll email you, recommending you check out the site and gallery at www.scaramoosh.com.  The paintings there are a little dark and a lot hilarious.  Think: "Martha Stewart meets Salvador Dali" ... and Happy Halloween!

 EJ

We encourage all of our readers, and all of their recursive friends, to write directly to Emilia Johnson<joh3072@attglobal.net>, telling her that her alleged art basically sucks, that her slimy solicitation does not change that fact, and that she should instead seek immediate employment in either the food service or housekeeping industries.

Thank you.

Blab. On that bozo derivation of the term computer virus, a reader, ever anxious to assign us more work, writes:

If you are serious about there being an error in the Jargon File, you should write to Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> and let him know. The main site is www.jargon.org.

Tell you what. That can be your job. We are currently unable to take responsibility for correcting every ignorant, badly researched Web site in the known universe. We have a tough enough time correcting our own ignorant, badly researched Web site, thank you very much.

Blab. A reader tells us more than we really wanted to know.

Halowe'en?  I was in the pub.

In a Guinness costume, no doubt.

Blab. Finally, a reader explains to us the purpose of yesterday's disturbing item.

This is to be put in the garden where it will constantly worry that the cat next door will come and evacuate on its head.  There is justification for the foreboding, but in its very presence it will act like a mezuzzah, which, to paraphrase the satiric words of Alexander King, contains the words, "may this garden be safe from catshit."

We worry about this constantly.

Blab. A reader relates a harrowing tale.

Good to be through another Halloween. Started particularly early with a longish joke on our Public Radio station:  "We bring you now to Washington DC ... blah, blah ... where John Ashcroft will comfort all of us again", that sort of thing, and then the Ashcroft imitator proceeded to mumble and fumble and then tell bad stand-up jokes about FBI and CIA marriages.  Better than television because you can imagine that ashen face, that affectless stare above sacks of worry ... or is it madness? ... below. The voice cracks and falters ... is this a voice simulator? ... and beads of sweat on the upper lip you imagine, appear.  If I didn't know about the Orson Welles radio program about the alien attack, I might have taken that offer of a one way to Sydney. 

So you're saying that John Ashcroft isn't really a space alien, he just plays one on NPR?

Good to know.

Plop. Here it is, not only a different month, but one with a different name than the last one. Too much to keep track of !

Yo. And - oh good heavens - it's another one of those dates with all ones and zeroes (in an appropriate base and notation of course). You know, if we expressed dates in binary, they'd all consist of ones and zeroes. Then where would we be? 

Yak.

So, if we had had a Hallowe'en party this year, what would you have come as?

I have no idea.

I know exactly what I would have done.

Oh lord. What?

I would have come as a dead fireman ...

That's disgusting.

... and I would have hidden my left arm in the uniform and bought one of those plastic bloody arms that I would have carried around all night.

Steve, I am serving dinner now.

Yo. A Nimda variant takes down the otherwise venerable New York Times. Maybe they need an immune system. Or some fruit.

Plurp. Having tried, and failed, to modify the behavior of the many rotten drivers on New York roads by invective and Zen, we now turn to High School Cheerleading.

Hey hey,
Ho ho!
Get off the brake
Come on let's go!

... or...

What makes the car go
faster, faster?
Gas makes the car go
faster, faster!

Readers are encouraged to send their own driver-encouraging mantras directly to us.

Yow. Dave (along with many others) is off writing a novel this month. We're tempted to be insanely jealous over this. Imagine - come December first, Dave will have written a freaking novel!

On the other hand, we recently counted the number of words we wrote in our stupid Weblog over the past year and it exceeded the number of words in a thousand-page book.

So we conclude that we have written a novel already - a thousand-page novel with no plot, only a few characters, a smattering of dialogue and hundreds and hundreds of pages of pure, mindless drivel.

And we'll use this as an excuse not to write a real novel.

Yow. A newly minted Helenism, from another one of those interminable meetings today.

Skip to the chase

• Skip to the end
• Cut to the chase

It has a nice, symmetric perambulation theme to it, don't you think?

Plop. If you're blissful in the knowledge that, since you're not Tom Brokaw, you won't get anthrax from your mail, you should definitely avoid clicking here.

It turns out that paper (i.e. the stuff from which envelopes are made) is as porous to the anthrax-laden dust that was sent to Daschle's office as a flour sifter is to flour.

It's not just that you can get anthrax by handling a sealed envelope containing that stuff. It's that you can apparently get anthrax from pretty much anything that came in contact with that envelope.

Like, oh, other envelopes.

Plurp. Finally, today's disturbing item (from, and surely you recall this, pre-Xmas catalogues) in search of reader explanation. This time, we can give you a free clue: This item is illuminated from within.

Plurp.

The blue dog
turned out to be
a thousand-page novel
with no plot

Wednesday, October 31, 2001

Blab. A reader finds an authoritative source (or, at least more authoritative than that Steve White guy that was cited yesterday) on the origin of the term computer virus.

[from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF]

Um, yeah, well, 'cept that's completely wrong. We don't recall that the term virus was ever applied to self-replicating programs prior to Fred Cohen's Ph.D. work, and certainly not in SF. And Fred told us personally that it was Len Adleman, his thesis advisor, who coined the term. So that seems pretty authoritative to us.

The analogy was so non-obvious that some early self-replicating programs whose effect was to use up all the resources in a system were called rabbits, because of the obvious analogy with biological rabbits. Similarly, an early self-mailing program in IBM was called a bacteria, because of the obvious analogy with biological bacteria.

It's the wonderful thing about obviousness, isn't it? It's so easy in retrospect.

Blab. An onomatopedantic reader writes:

Those helicopters that go "thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo" certainly are disturbing.  All the helicopters I've ever seen go "thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup."

That's what you get for watching them instead of listening to them.

Blab. A reader sends us a pointer to this.

Who was that masked man?

Blab. A reader suggests a simple model for our Miata's Check Engine light.

So the "Check Engine" light is a OR gate for the entire car. Useful.

Zackly. Programmers take note. Or pity.

Blab. A reader shows evidence of Plurp-induced brain rot.

These are probably slightly off from the correct definitions, so they're even more broken than they ought to be--which is good. Maybe.

Broken Jokes:
When is a car not a car?
When it pulls into a driveway.

Nurse: Doctor, the next patient is the Invisible Man.
Doctor: Tell him I'm busy.

Helenism:
  The funniest thing since sliced bread.
   -best thing since sliced bread
   -funny as...

Well, OK, that pseudo-Helenism is a bit of a puzzle. Will it surprise you when we tell you that other people have already said it? We hope not.

We like the Invisible Man joke! We don't understand it, but we laughed anyway, or maybe because of that.

Blab. A previously unknown correspondent writes to us (and many others) in an unknown language:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE></TITLE>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252">
<META content="MSHTML 5.50.4134.600" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I urge you to check out the online gallery at <A href="http://www.scaramoosh.com">www.scaramoosh.com</A>.&nbsp;
The paintings there are a little dark and a lot hilarious.&nbsp; Think: Martha Stewart meets Salvador Dali!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>

Embedded therein is a URL for some really, really bad art. We know that surprises you.

Blab. A reader opens the Floodgates of Helenism.

In fact, another possible Helenism:

Putting them out of their mercy
  -putting them out of their misery
  -have mercy

Good one!

Friend Bill wandered into our office yesterday with this, from a real, live conversation in which the person who uttered it didn't realize there was anything odd about the phrase even when it was pointed out.

Stirs the boat

• Stirs up trouble
• Rocks the boat

Also written on my whiteboard, source now conveniently forgotten:

At crosshairs with each other

• At odds with each other
• In the crosshairs

All these new additions in a single day. It makes our mind swim.

Blab. A reader named Sun Tzu writes:

"Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Which begs the obvious question: Has your resistance been broken yet, or do we have to keep writing this stupid Weblog?

Blab. A generous but cryptic reader offers us the ability to ...

Choose 3 Free Lipsticks Offer - While Supplies Last

But we're not really sure what we get in this process. Do we just get to make a choice? We like choices. Is it for Lipsticks or an Offer? If it's the former, we don't tend to use much Lipstick, and it qualifies as stuff that we need to put somewhere, and that's bad. If it's the latter, is there only one Offer and if so, what do we get to choose between? Or are they challenging us to discover which of the Lipsticks Offer(s) happen to be free? And what do we get if we guess right?

We enjoin our readers to be more specific while retaining their legendary generosity

Plurp. Boo.

Yow. Ian recaps Recent Events. And brilliantly. Go read. Really.

Yo. Did you know that .god and .satan were TLDs? Yeah, well, now you do.

Plurp. What are you for Hallowe'en? Hmm?

Yo. Wacky patents.

Plurp. Repeat five times.

Zumblishamalia jumblish jum
Zumblishamalia trumblish trum
Henglishamalia thrumblish thrum
Jenglishamalia jenglish jum

Yow. Friend Bill waltzes into our office with news of sewage hacking.

An Australian man was today sent to prison for two years after he was found guilty of hacking into the Maroochy Shire, Queensland computerised waste management system and caused millions of litres of raw sewage to spill out into local parks, rivers and even the grounds of a Hyatt Regency hotel. 

Imagine that. Even the grounds of the Hyatt Regency hotel. They probably don't get much raw sewage there.

Plurp. So we've decided to crank up our courage and go have dinner with Paul Ford anyway. This will be a first! We've never even met a blogger whom we didn't already know (and, for that matter, work down the hall from) before they started blogging. To add extra danger to the encounter, we've picked a restaurant neither of us have even seen. Perhaps we will eat blindfolded and try to guess what we are eating.

Plurp. Oh gosh! We almost forgot today's Disturbing Item from Pre-Xmas Catalogues. Readers should take note. This is your last chance to identify its purpose and audience or you will get one for Xmas too!

Plurp.

The blue dog
didn't get that
Sun Tzu
joke

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Blab. On the topic of disturbing catalogue items, a reader who still wonders where Superman went to get those suits so perfectly tailored writes:

Oh now come on!  That's a sellotape dispenser in the shape of a cat.  I fail to see why this is confusing in any way.

Perhaps it's that we work harder than our readers do in being confused. That would be entirely consistent.

Blab. Another reader, this one with certain visual fixations, writes:

Cat tape dispenser, similar to the other cat tape dispensers that can be found with google/images, and two stamps, one an apparent Tulip stamp, the other an apparent Karl Marx stamp. 

And some clear tape. 

Duh.

Duh, indeed.

Blab. A reader who uniquely lives up to the standards we expect of our readers writes:

I believe the Xmas gift you stumbled upon is part of the new "Things To Do With Your Dead Cat" series, which includes items like these:

http://www.krittersinthemailbox.com/animals/cats/sgc646.htm
http://www.store.yahoo.com/tailsbythebay/climcatcloc.html

Now that's the spirit! Note, readers, how this treasured reader has (a) interpreted our question creatively and (b) submitted URLs which we can cite rather than doing our own investigation. That is a Good Thing.

Yes, we realize that our previous (lazy, shiftless) readers (above) showed a certain self-referential irony by refusing to answer the question. Yeah, great. We weren't impressed. Too bleeding easy. OK?

(And see below.)

Blab. The person who spies on us through that X10 camera hidden in our wall writes:

It's good to know that another cat assumes the same position that Christopher does when laying down.  And we thought he was just weird.  Maybe he just wants to be a tape dispenser!  Let me go try!!!!  "Here kittie, kittie, kittie......."

You hold him down. We'll get the tape.

Blab. On the topic of that guy who had two left thumbs, a reader speculates:

Maybe the guy had a right thumb transplant and the Dr had been drinking the beer!

What beer?

Blab. In spite of it all, our Meme Mixer returns.

In a dream last night the blue dog was a velveteen jacket.

On the sleeve of the velveteen jacket, in thread made from the hair of long lost hopes, a forgotten tailor had stitched a simple poem of peace.

Plurp. Oh lord! Now I've gone and done it! I blogged my dream about Paul Ford earlier this week, thinking it an oddity as (a) I've never met him and (b) He surely didn't even know I existed.

Then I got an email from him. Two emails! Let's get together, he says, go to dinner.

This is a serious problem. Paul Ford actually knows stuff. He can write, with real words and everything. He thinks about nonlinear narrative. He says stuff like, Let's go to dinner.

He's not some bozo geek with no outside interests, some nerd whose Weblog readers scatter as soon as he tries to talk about anything serious. Heck, I can't even interest myself in my conversation through a whole dinner.

What can I do? What can I do?

Maybe I can meet him in a restaurant somewhere and, rather than pretend to be interesting, hand him a slip of paper that says:

Hello. I am a deaf mute. You can help me get through life
by pretending that I am not here. Thank you.

Then I could smile in that happy idiot sort of way, stare past him and hand slips of paper to other people in the restaurant before shuffling off into the dim streets of New York, alone.

Plurp. The other night, the Engine Check light came on as we drove home. This is never a good thing. Our brother once ignored such a warning light, figuring he could have someone look at it the next day. Two minutes later, the engine seized and destroyed itself rather noisily.

So, we pulled over on a pitch black country lane and squinted at the Owner's Manual to divine what it might mean.

The Engine Check light illuminates if you are completely out of gas, if the gas cap has been removed while the engine is running, if a ROOM fuse has blown, or if there is an electrical problem with your engine. You should take your car to be serviced.

And we thought it was only programmers who so badly overloaded indicators! Despite the fact that the manual didn't define a ROOM fuse (and despite several anguished minutes trying to figure out what it might mean, under the assumption that it was an acronym), and despite the ominous sound of electrical problem, the description didn't actually mention that anything would explode or turn our brain to jelly. So, we decided to drive home and take the car into the shop the next morning.

Well, the results are back. The little Engine Check light isn't illuminated any more, so homeostasis must have been restored. The grease monkey who worked on the car wrote the following:

Found and cleaned spider webs outside of gas fill tube. Recommend not removing gas cap while engine is running.

... which, of course, we never had. Perhaps we should suggest to Mazda that they append to their list the phrase, or if spider webs are found in an unrelated location.

Plurp. We didn't write this. RasterWeb did. Blame him.

Knock, knock
Who's there?
Ann
Ann who?
Ann Thrax!

How did we find this site? It showed up from Plurp on Netscape's What's related tab. So, see? Netscape endorses anthrax humor. Go complain to them.

Plop. This is not working out. I tried being flip, silly, even sarcastic. I tried going to Maine. I tried ignoring it. I tried obsessively gathering every scrap of information I could find about what's going on and why. [Today's find: the Army's Special Operations Aviation Forces Field Manual in a place that doesn't require registration.] I tried not sleeping. Well, actually, that not sleeping thing wasn't really a plan. But I tried it anyway.

Now my new best friend John Ashcroft is on the radio. (Well, OK, he's not actually my best friend either. But he is a loyal reader. Well, not him personally, but the massive computer facilities he controls. They pay particular attention when I talk about stuff like this. Heidi ho, John.) John tells me to be on Highest Alert because of some unidentified new information that Only He Knows, indicating that terrorists will commit Some Unidentified Horror this week at locations unknown. Thanks, John. You told me that same thing three weeks ago, and I don't think you ever told me to stop. What is this, Double Highest Alert, like Double Secret Probation but without the toga party?

Six military helicopters fly low and slow overhead as I drive down the edge of Manhattan - thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo - and I wonder what they are looking for. What now? I stick my head out the window and watch their dark underbellies. What the hell is going on now?, I shout, but they don't answer. thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo thyoo.

We'll talk about this when you calm down, says Helen. The funny thing is, I am calm, at least as calm as I'm likely to get. I ask her to make popcorn for me. Comfort food.

Nothing happened to you, Steve. Nothing happened to you. I know this is a fact. But it doesn't matter either.

Now it seems that a woman who works seven blocks from where we live has come down with pulmonary anthrax from an undetermined source.

I don't want to live in a place where the military hunts my neighbors. I don't want to live in a police state. I don't want to care what's on the news this very minute. I don't want to wonder what's going to happen next.

And no, I am not having a nice day.

Plurp. Today we actually have a reader-contributed item in this week's Plurp Special Series of disturbing items found in catalogues around Xmas. Our warm thanks to our anonymous reader!

We look forward with great anticipation to the learned explanations of our creative readers as to (a) what this might be, (b) who in their right mind would buy it and, especially, (c) why.

Thank you.

Plurp.

In a previous life
the blue dog
was a disturbing
item

Monday, October 29, 2001

Blab. An earnest Taiwanese missive to us (and many others, judging from the address list) enjoins us to:

SHARE YOUR TIME WITH AN AWESOME SOLE MATE [...]

We weren't sure if this was about sushi or power walking but, since we had enough of both, we passed on it.

Blab. On the topic of a certain disturbing item showing up in mail-order catalogs recently, a very literal reader writes:

That's a couple of boots with flowers growing out of them.  HTH!

D'oh! Why didn't we see that?

Blab. A loyal reader and monitor of his or her internal monologue transcribes thus:

My internal monologue came up with a Helenism this past weekend.

I was channel-surfing, and came across a program on A&E on the World Bartender Championship.  Part of the competition is "flair" bartending, with much tossing and juggling of bottles and other barware, a la Tom Cruise in Cocktail.

"I could never do that," I thought to myself, "because I have two left thumbs."

Duly recorded. Thanks!

Blab. Our mere mention of the Internet WayBack Machine tickles some ironic neurons in a reader.

The WayBack machine, Captain Plurp?  How bizarre you should mention it!  Just a few days ago the rhyme that brought Mr. Peabody & his boy Sherman back to the present time popped into my head.  Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle!  As a kid in Southern California, I loved that show!  And to think that all these years later, I live just a few hundred miles from Frostbite Falls.  Go figure. 

- Your Midwest Correspondent

Yep, that's the right meme! But, hmm, we don't remember the rhyme that brought Mr. Peabody and Sherman back home.

We do, however, remember the one that brought Tooter Turtle back home, in response to the plaintive cry, Help, Mr. Wizard!

Drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drone
Time for this one to come home

At least, that's the way we remember it. There seem to be over a hundred people out there who remember it slightly differently.

And who would have figured that there were real U.S. communities that would admit they were the inspiration for a place called Frostbite Falls?

Yow. We get quoted on the Scientific American Web site, answering the question, When did the term 'computer virus' arise? It must be a really old quote, 'cause we don't remember even saying it, but that's OK.

They probably thought of us from our now ancient article, Fighting Computer Viruses, from way back in 1997.

Yo. A Lego Mindstorms robot that solves Rubik's Cube. You have to wonder about people like this. You do. (Everything Burns)

Plurp. We had some friends over for dinner last night - born and bred New Yorkers, unlike us late arrivers. One works downtown, the Other New York as she calls it, the Tragic New York where things are still nowhere near the way they were. Conversation centered on Recent Events. Where were you when it happened? Do you know anyone who...? Are you picking up your mail with latex gloves?

Then, after a time, the conversation turned to what we were doing for our aging parents, and how this sibling or the other wasn't behaving well in the process.

It was hard for us to connect the two subjects. The latter seemed almost mundane and trivial in comparison.

Maybe it was. And maybe that's a good thing.

Yo. Nobody seems to have figured out the obvious explanation for the two different kinds of powders containing the same strain of anthrax. So we suppose we'll have to tell you. (Sigh.)

Whoever's sending this bad stuff out bought, from someone with fancy equipment, a small amount of high quality stuff - finely particulated and treated so as not to clump together - well suited for aerial dispersion. Then they used a pinch of the high quality stuff to brew a larger batch of lower-quality stuff themselves - clumpy and not well suited for aerial dispersion.

One bacterial strain, two media. One group responsible.

You're welcome.

Plurp. Here is today's item in this week's Plurp Special Series of disturbing items found in catalogues around Xmas.

Reader are invited to tell us what it might be, or to speculate about who might be the intended buyer or recipient.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was disturbed by the
blinkless stare of ...
whatever it was

Sunday, October 28, 2001

Blab. Our Greatest Fan writes:

This is a great link. Interesting site too. 

... a site on the WTC, its history and architecture.

Plurp.

In a dream last night, we went to visit Paul Ford (of Ftrain). We were planning to be in the area and Paul invited us to drop by. We arrived before he did, but he was pleased to see us when he finally got there.

We were trying to show him this cool new bit of tech - a 2D game on a Palm Pilot that you play by scrolling a large landscape around with the stylus and tapping on the various little bots that inhabit it - the whole thing having been hooked up to a gigantic wall-sized display.

As with most tech, we spent all our time trying to get it to work. The game kept initializing all the way at the bottom of the landscape, and we had to scroll and scroll and scroll to get back to the relevant, top part of the landscape before we could try anything. The game ran so hot that the plastic stylus kept melting and smearing out on the surface of the Pilot.

Paul went quietly about his business, poking around the room and shuffling books, coming by every so often to check on our minimal progress.

We never did get it working.

Curiously, though Paul also lives in New York, we've never met. He probably doesn't know we exist. And, late adopter that we are, we've never even used a Palm Pilot, much less hooked it up to a wall display.

Plurp. For those of you who don't want to think any more about Recent Events or the frightening machinations of the U.S. government, please don't read about the floodgates opening for a new generation of  U.S. government assassins. OK?

And be very careful that no one thinks you're a terrorist, or associated with someone they think might be a terrorist, or be related to someone that might be associated with someone ..., or have ever handled any money that has also been handled by someone ...

'Cause that would be bad for you. Very bad.

Yo. It's beginning to look a lot like Xmas. Do you know how we can tell? It's the appearance of certain items in certain mail-order catalogues that we are completely unable to explain.

This week, our Plurp Special Series features a number of such ... items.

Here's our first entry. We would appreciate it if one of our learned readers would explain this to us. Really we would.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was worried about that
whole velveteen jacket
thing

© 2001 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved