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2001.11.11 : 2001.11.17
Saturday, November 17, 2001
Blab. A reader swears to the veracity of this statement.
JE
NE SUIS PAS UN CANARD!!!
Sadly, the pointed-to page is in some furrin language, so we have no idea
what the strange man in the fuzzy yellow costume is doing.
Blab. A reader blinds us with its ...
[link]
Ah. This is that Microsoft sign from the other day,
along with a little story about how it's become one of the Web's most popular
images. We believe it.
Blab. A reader who should be doing something productive instead
writes:
This
link doesn't comply with the license agreement at this site. Is a no-links
legal statement unusual? (This is also the first page full of fine print
I've seen on a web site, and certainly the first page full of fine print
full of pokemon cartoons I've ever seen. You should see it at 1600*1200.)
Ah. We see that the Pokémon lawyers have been swarming.
Pokémoncenter.com
does not allow or condone links to its web site or pages or materials or
information without prior inspection, evaluation, and consent performced
or given by Pokémon.
Ooh. We tremble in fear that an air assault will be launched against anyone
who links to their incredibly stupid site.  In
the meantime, we can only hope that Pokémoncenter.com
(which is, BTW, not an allowed URL) will "consent performced" to us some
time real soon now, as they are existentially unable to disallow links.
Or is it the Pokémon themselves who have to "consent performced"?
It's just not clear.
We had no idea the Pokémon had lawyers, though we are relieved
to learn that they are as completely clueless as the non-Pokémon
lawyers.
In any event, we recommend that you avoid all Pokémon sites,
stores, artifacts and clutterabilia until this whole legal swamp is drained.
This may take some time.
Plop. Philip Morris Companies Inc. is about to rename itself
Altria
Group Inc. Why? Easy! It's because you think of cigarettes when you
think of Philip Morris and cigarettes kill you.
What's that? No, they're not getting out of the cigarette business,
nor are cigarettes any less deadly than they were. But they figure you
won't notice their badness as much if they change their name.
Doubleplusgood, Winston.
Yo. Why didn't we find this earlier? It's the DoD
news site, which has transcripts of daily press briefings (and maps
and video footage) so you can see what's shoveled out directly, before
it is digested for you by the news media.
Yo.
Drivers
Brace for 'Pork The Other White Meat 400' Race
We do not make this stuff up.
Yow.
Plop. The claim is that bin Laden's groupies had instructions
for making ricin, a poison that can be extracted from castor beans. Ricin
is Bad
Stuff, one of the deadliest known poisons. Naturally, it was developed
for offensive use by the U.S. and its allies in WWII, which is why
we know all about it. Such fun.
Plurp. Yeehaw. That extremely interesting U.S. Army document
- Medical
Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare - is no longer available
on its original Web site, perhaps because of security concerns.
Fortunately, it's still available elsewhere.
We love the Web.
 Plurp.
The blue dog was
consent performced or
given
by Pokémon.
Friday, November 16, 2001
Blab. A reader steals bits from a famous blog which
honors our meager blog with a permanent link in its Sites I Visit Often
column.
@ camworld.com
::
Some famous quotes that make me think
of people I know:
-
"Don't be so humble - you are not that
great."
-
"His ignorance is encyclopedic."
-
"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."
-
"Egotist: a person more interested in
himself than in me."
-
"The nice thing about egotists is that
they don't talk about other people."
Curiously, that third quotation is on our door at work.
Blab. A reader emits instructions in a language none may speak.
http://www.scripting.com/
-->
http://www.scripting.com/images/2001/11/14/suddenly.gif
We love that sign, though! Where can we get one?
Blab. Friend David claims to have expelled massive quantities
of iced tea through orifices not meant for this purpose as a result of:
http://bettybowers.com/index.html
--- DWL
We haven't examine the site ourself, not having the apparently requisite
iced tea handy.
Blab. A reader insists:
The satellite picture's aren't
pieced together, but are REAL! The cover has been blown off the conspiracy!
Behold the truth they've been hiding from us!!!
Um ...
Blab. A demanding reader writes:
I wanna see Muller's
proofs! Heh...
That's the same assertion vs. evidence discussion
we were having the other day, isn't it?
Blab. A reader asks that age-old question ...
How old
does pr0n
have to be
to become art?
Naturally, we have no idea, but we can certify that these images portray
activities that are illegal in many states.
Blab. A reader employs the twin devices of premeditated misparsing
and temporal absurdity.
Well it's not much of a secret
*anymore*, now that you've gone and told everyone, is it? Heh!
I doubt many Victorians wore enormous
white bird wings anyway.
I know I didn't.
Very often.
See below.
Yak.
Oh. My. God.
 What?
These women on the Victoria's
Secret fashion show. It's as if they're genetically engineered to be
maximally erotic.
Are they interesting?
You bet!
No, I mean, are they interesting as
people?
... uh ... what?
Yak.
Sweetheart, I married you,
and I've always been overjoyed with that decision. Why, if all of those
gorgeous women were here right now, dressed in their tiny lingerie
and trying to seduce me I'd ...
... be in big trouble, right?
Yeah.
Yo. Top Plurp search string in the past week? "amelia
warner". Why the sudden interest, hmmm?
Yow. A really
good article on how the U.S. bombing strategy wasn't so dumb after
all.
What looked like floundering
from the outside was a systematic hollowing out of the Taliban's ability
to sustain its far-flung forces.
Yep.
Plop. Why is Hewlett Packard in such Big, Serious Trouble, with
its stock price down
from 75 to 22 and its customers revolting against its abandonment
of product lines? Why, obviously, it's lazy
reporting and Wall Street analysts. At least, that's whom its CEO blames.
Whom would you blame?
Plop. Could someone please squirt the garden hose in the general
direction of the fantastically overheated U.S. media? Yesterday, all those
turgid dogs had dripping articles on bin Laden's "detailed
plans for nuclear devices".
Oh, please!
 What
he had was apparently some diagrams of how conventional explosives can
push nuclear material together to make a big boom. You can find
this yourself on the Web, fercrissake! The gulf between that trivial
idea and an actual Nasty Thing is, well, that's what the Manhattan
Project was all about.
Do they think these bozos are Feynman?
Plop. We got our first flu shot in as long as we can remember
today. Friend David called it today's Paranoia Reduction Activity. We hate
to admit it but he's right.
Yo. A store devoted exclusively
to Pokémon clutterabilia opened today in New York's Rockefeller
Center, one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world. The
store consists of two floors with a glass elevator in the middle. There
are large stuffed Pokémon, brightly painted fiberglass Pokémon
flying around on a track suspended from the ceiling, Pokémon T-shirts,
Pokémon mugs, Pokémon Battle Stadia, mini-Pokémon
and, of course, Pokémon.
Could someone explain this to
us?
This is why we could never be in marketing.
Plurp.
The blue dog
seemed always to
be in big trouble
Thursday, November 15, 2001
Blab. A reader contributes:
Muller's
Theorems
For example:
Life is more interesting
and rewarding than physics or mathematics.
As we all know, this is patently false.
Blab. A reader displays its sense of humor.
How about an even funnier
line for the poster along the lines of:
"I kept saying the President was stupid.
Because I mistake eloquence for intelligence. And micromanagement for leadership.
I wonder how he's doing so well."
We would have to agree that that is utterly hilarious.
Blab. A reader serenades us with an anagram.
Canned beets: scented bane.
That's for sure!
Blab. Saving us from Escheresque New York,
a reader with a very short first name writes:
Here's a better
sattelite image site (unfortunately run by Microsoft).
One nice thing is that as far as I
can tell the images aren't pieced together, and the results page tells
you all of the images you can pick from (e.g. 1/1/1984 vs. 12/3/2000).
--J Gordon
We were fascinated by the idea that somebody could take a satellite image
of the entire New York metropolitan area at one time and get 1m/pixel resolution.
Fortunately for our fading sanity, it turns out not to be the case, as
this
here picture shows.
 
That's the East River, pretty clearly with the sun in two different
places, which doesn't happen much, even around here. The satellite positions
looks pretty similar, though, based on the angles of the buildings, so
that's a good thing.
Blab. A reader, who we thought at first to be color-blind, writes:
Green
Screen of Death
But, indeed, we see that Microsoft has extended their legendary reputation
into the world of gaming, and that their much-balyhooed X-Box seems to
have that same level of reliability for which they have become famous.
It's good to know that some things never change. We wonder what gigantic
privacy-invading security holes will be found.
Yak. From work.
We need a plan.
A simple plan.
A dishearteningly simple plan.
Yeah.
Plurp. Does the dramatic and sudden collapse of the Taliban in
Afghanistan remind anyone else of the dramatic and sudden collapse of American-aided
South Vietnam?
Yeah, OK, we didn't think so.
Yo. Special
report.
The Supreme Court, which
has the final word on ethics breaches, on Aug. 17, 2000, unnerved many
lawyers by strictly interpreting Bar rules against attorneys engaging in
"dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation."
Imagine. Lawyers have to be, in this very limited sense, moderately honest.
No wonder they were so unnerved.
Plurp. We loving having comedians
in the federal government.
Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld said in an interview with The New York Times that Mr. bin Laden
might even have access to a helicopter and might try to sneak out of Afghanistan
to rendezvous with a waiting jet in a nearby country. "My guess is what
he'd probably do is take a helicopter down one of those valleys that we
couldn't pick up and pop over to some part of the country where there is
an airfield and have a plane waiting for him," he said.
Uh huh. Everyone who believes that Scary Rumsfeld accidentally revealed
to bin Laden a way that he could escape U.S. retribution - please raise
your hands.
Anyone? Anyone?
 Yow.Victoria's
Secret fashion show on ABC at 9 PM EST tonight.
Not that you're interested.
We're certainly not.
Plurp.
The blue dog
believed that Scary Rumsfeld
accidentally revealed to
bin Laden a way that he could escape
U.S. retribution
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
Blab. A reader wonders ...
Do you have canned beets?
Even canned beets would help.
Do you have canned beets?
Even canned beets would help.
Do you have canned beets?
Even canned beets would help.
 Do
you have canned beets?
Even canned beets would help.
Do you have canned beets?
Even canned beets would help.
Do you have canned beets?
Even canned beets would help.
Actually, we don't. We used to have them, with terrifying regularity in
fact, as a kidlet. Mom would cook up a hearty can of beets and serve them
- plop - beside otherwise edible foodstuffs. Canned beets were among
the foods that most strenuously exercised our gag reflex. We would stuff
our tiny mouth full of the wretched purple balls and say, as innocently
as could be managed,
May I please be excused? Mom would always say
yes,
not because our full-cheeked question fooled her, but because she saw how
desperate we were. And we would run into the bathroom, where we would expel
the despised mouthful of vegetable into the toilet.
Blech.
Blab. A reader concludes that ...
Finally it
all makes sense.
Cheers
Bloggi
Why, we're sure you have always wondered, do squirrels insist
on running across busy highways, getting all squishy in the process?
Bloggi provides the answer: it's Squirrel
Hazing.
If you see a squirrel attempting
to race your car, slow down. Since there is no challenge in racing a slow
car, the squirrel judge will nullify the ritual and have the victim perform
a less hazardous ritual.
Now you know.
Blab. A reader sends us an entirely sightless ...
[link].
Now this is funny! A fellow blogger plays with movie posters. (Even if
he doesn't have Plurp on his blog list, sniff.)
 George
is 55 Years Old
He is President of the U.S.A.
He Weighs 192 Pounds.
He is 6 Feet Tall.
He Has Brown Hair.
His Friends Are Smart.
But He Is Not.
Blab. An expert reader points out the advantages of hallucinations.
I suppose the whole sleep-deprived
(or drug-induced) hallucinations wouldn't be all that bad in the grand
scheme of things.
Option 1: bombs exploding all around
you, 24 hours a day, your tent, cave, or hideout blown to tiny little bits,
tanks exploding before your eyes, people to your left and right cut in
half by shrapnel, your world turned upside down.
Option 2: wandering naked through
the Garden of Eden, sipping on a hollowed pineapple filled with tropical
juices, picking flowers and putting them in your hair, while tiny little
elves dance around you playing the mandolin.
ummm, any more dried figs over there?
Gee, Reg, we're not sure. Can we phone a friend?
Yow. Secret message to a certain reader: That was fun. (Wink.)
Plop. Oh dear. Yesterday's most excellent
Plurp
reference to the Scary Baby's site had an image problem. It seems that
the image of the Scary Baby's zapping the blue dog, under the maniacal
gaze of the Bezos head, couldn't be seen by most Plurp readers.
Some referrer limitation thingie on the Geocities page or mumblety-mumblety.
Anyhow, you can click
here to enjoy it in its full bizarrity.
Plurp.
Wanted: Terrorist
mastermind to frighten major superpower. Must have small band of mindless
followers willing to die for no discernible cause. Clinical megalomania
is a must. Understanding of modern warfare not required. Benefits include
global isolation and deprecation, and responsibility for massive and needless
suffering, followed by eventual and meaningless death.
Wild appearance a plus.
Yow.
Burka burning
Burka burning
Burka burning
Say it five times fast. And rejoice.
Plop. OK. Look. We
were kidding, OK? It was fiction ! It was imaginarysatire!
Please stop imitating us. Please.
But, naturally, readers are encouraged to send
us more real-world examples of vacuous magazines taking shallow advantage
of Recent Events. If we get enough, we might even start a new section in
Stuff.
Yow. Well, winter cometh, and all you terrace fetishists are
wringing your frail hands, wondering how you'll get through the next few
months without the obligation of fiddling around with your plants. Don't
deny it!
 As
always, it's Plurp to the rescue, this time in the guise of Desktop
Plants. Yes, it's graphical avatars of real plants that you have to
water and feed, just like real plants, or they shrivel up and die on you.
Think of it as herbaceous Tamagochi. (Dave)
Rant. Fun guy Tony Blair released today what various
folks are claiming is evidence
of the guilt of bin Laden, et al. Unfortunately, these folks seem not
to know the definition of the word.
Blair's document contains stuff like:
Since 11 September we have
learned that one of Bin Laden's closest and most senior associates was
responsible for the detailed planning of the attacks.
This isn't evidence. Heck, it isn't even a documented fact. This is an
assertion without any supporting evidence. Only slightly better
is:
Usama Bin Laden has claimed
credit for the attack on US soldiers in Somalia in October 1993.
This is at least stated factually, and there is supporting evidence for
this assertion. As bold as Tony manages to get is the following.
There is evidence of a very
specific nature relating to the guilt of Bin Laden and his associates that
is too sensitive to release.
Again, assertions that Tony-baby has evidence are not evidence.
We have this vague recollection that Dubya released a similar document
a few weeks back, but we can't seem to find it on the Web just now. Our
recollection is that Dubya's document bears a great resemblance to Tony's,
both in the assertions put forth and in the utter lack of evidence. It
is so similar, in fact, that we have to wonder if someone looked at someone
else's paper during the test. Tsk.
Plurp.
Romanian politicians are
fighting tooth and nail over who has the right to build a Dracula
theme park.
You just know some frustrated, failed comedian is now working for CNN.
Plurp.
Burka burning
Burka burning
Burka burning
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
Blab. A reader exclaims, and quite rightly:
Eep!
Eep indeed! It seems that our humble Weblog has become a Cultural
Icon.
To complete the ignominy, there is even a link to Plurp on the
referenced page. We are truly frightened by this.
Blab. A reader who knows far too much about the quaint analog
publication known as Private Eye writes:
I have some links that will
*send* you blind - but I don't send them out anymore now that I've found
Jeeesus.
FYI, Private Eye is more than just
satire. Without it, current affairs coverage in this country would be entirely
controlled by scumbags like Rupert Murdoch and Richard 'I don't do Dutch'
Desmond.
Here's
a link to its website. I urge you to take out a subscription so you
may enjoy the enormous satisfaction of threatening to cancel it (a running
gag on their letters page that goes back many, many years).
Cheers from the UK
Bloggi
Our inclination is to threaten to cancel our subscription even though we
don't have one. Would that work, too?
Blab. A reader reminisces.
marble drop
You bet
!
Rant. Perhaps we should not be, but we have been consistently
amazed at the depth of ignorance of military strategy and tactics revealed
by commentators and wags in the major media, and by the Northern Alliance
itself.
Have you been following this? The U.S. bombings have been largely
ineffective, they all said last week. They haven't helped the Northern
Alliance take any new territory. The theory, as far as we could tell,
was that war is linear, and that every bomb dropped was expected to result
in the turnover of a certain number of feet of land from one side to the
other.
This isn't, of course, the way war works. Ever. And it certainly wasn't
the expectation of the folks who planned the bombing campaign. They methodically
destroyed the entire Taliban air defense and offense, as well as every
tank, armored vehicle, truck, ammo dump and fuel supply they could find.
They destroyed barracks and troop shelters. They targeted military leaders
wherever they could. They wiped out virtually every bit of military communications
in the country so that Taliban military coordination became all but impossible.
Then they started bombing the Taliban troops. Most of those who weren't
blown to bloody mush had their ear drums split open, and everyone else
was scared to death and didn't sleep for at least a week, inducing sleep-deprived
hallucinations.
Then they resupplied the Northern Alliance with new uniforms (so everyone
could tell one side from the other), new guns and new tanks.
And then, oddly enough, when the Northern Alliance mounted an assault,
it worked, and they took over province after province and city after city
of decimated, deaf, terrified, hallucinating Taliban who, when they dropped
their weapons and ran screaming, were ripped to shreds by straffing and
bombing of then-easy targets.
But we're sure there was no connection.
Yo. A datum from Time
magazine helps explain why there had been so little movement in the Afghan
war until recently.
In the north, the Alliance's
loose-knit guerrilla bands are plagued by ethnic infighting, inexperience
and customary drug use. The preferred narcotic is a potent, pungent hashish
that is smoked by Alliance and Taliban soldiers alike from dinner until
midnight.
Imagine ...
So, you wanna go attack the
... the ... you know ... those guys?
Whuuut?
You know ...
Right. You got any more of those dried
figs, man?
Yeah - those are great !
Yow. Who would ever have thought of this as a joyous celebration
of freedom?
Plurp.
The blue dog
has been hanging around the
Alliance in the evenings
Monday, November 12, 2001
Plop. Yet another plane
crash today. Helen and I (and, as far as we know, all of our friends)
were not in the path of the wreckage, so we are OK in that respect.
However, we find ourselves saying things like I don't think it's
anything really bad this time, or It's probably just a plane crash,
or Thank God it only destroyed a few homes.
Isn't that awful?
Blab. About its relief at never having to see another one, a
reader all worked up about that Dates With 1s and
0s thing writes:
(provided I only live for
9 more years)
Yes, we can only hope.
Blab. Another reader memorializes the above reader.
I am saddened to hear that
one of your readers has already realized that it won't be around on 01/01/2010.
Think of it as Nature's way of reclaiming the innumerate.
Blab. A reader sends us an extremely blind ....
[link]
Now this is interesting! Yahoo's MapQuest uses something called GlobeXplorer
to provide satellite imagery. Really bad satellite imagery, it seems. Here's
s pic of Manhattan, for instance. The big building at top-center in the
Pan Am building (neophytes will call it the Met Life building) at 44th
St. & Park Ave. It rises from the upper right to the lower left. Now
notice how, just below it and to the left, the buildings rise from a different
angle - from the upper left to the lower right. And they are darker.
This is not because Manhattan architecture is Escheresque. Some of it
is, but not on this scale.
Rather, it's because the folks that run GlobeXplorer took a whole bunch
of separate pics of Manhattan and pieced them together. By itself, that
would be fine. But they seem to have done it rather badly. They took the
pics from different angles, you see. In most places, like the wheatfields
of Kansas or some dippy
little hamlet in central California, this probably doesn't matter.
But in Manhattan, entire streets disappear when you do this, as did both
42nd St. and Park Ave. in the above photo.
And we like 42 St. and Park Ave.
We await a satellite photo service that gets it right for Manhattan.
Readers are invited to point us to
one.
Blab. Hmm. It just seems to be one of those days when readers
send us blind link after blind ....
[link].
And this points to:
The "Cerebrex," a futuristic
chair which passes an electric current through the head of users to boost
brain power, is on display at the "World Genius Convention" in Tokyo November
8, 2001. Geniuses of the world converged on a train station in central
Tokyo for the convention, organized by Japan's Dr. Yoshiro NakaMats, who
claims to have invented the floppy disk.
We conclude that they didn't limit exhibitors to just geniuses.
Blab. This reader sends us a blind ....
[link]
... to the hated New York Times site, which continues its distasteful policy
of charging you to look at that link after a week or so. So look now or
forever ... yada yada yada.
Anyhow, it's about some British publication called Private
Eye. Curiously, it's not about detective work per se. Rather,
it's a tribute to satire and bad taste.
"I'm all for bad taste if
you can justify its making a point," said [the editor] cheerfully.
Here at Plurp, we don't have such lofty requirements.
Plurp.
"America
can't get me alive," bin Laden was quoted as saying.
We're not aware of anyone for whom this detail is a concern.
Plop. Imagine the following scenario. You are in a country that
has been occupied and bombed for decades. You are poor beyond belief. You
are starving. The following two yellow packages dropped from the sky into
the outskirts of your village last night. One of them contains food that
will save your life. The other contains a bomb that will shred your flesh
into sinewy ribbons.
What would you do?
(And BTW, this scenario is not
imaginary for thousands of people in Afghanistan.) (rebecca)
Yow. Randy seems to have accreted several other people
with oddly-shaped devices that make noises. And they have a CD.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
waiting for a really, really
boring week
Sunday, November 11, 2001
Blab. OK. Another date with all ones and zeroes.
Enough.
Enough! We just can't stand this any more and we
demand
that a stop be put to it. Right now!
Fortunately, a reader writes:
Re: dates with only 1s and
0s. That's it, I'm putting a stop to it! No more dates with only
1s and 0s for the rest of my life!!
Thank you, kind reader.
Plop. There are no commercial flights over Manhattan today -
Bush and Arafat at the U.N. and such - but there are quite a large number
of very noisy jets constantly overhead.
Plurp. Allura changed her blog site
without telling anyone again. She does that just to keep us guessing.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
blissfully unaware
that anything
had changed
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