Plurp: Don't forget the fungus

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2001.11.25 : 2001.12.01

Saturday, December 1, 2001

Friday, November 30, 2001

Thursday, November 29, 2001
Blab. A reader points us to something it feels sure we will appreciate.
Complete Fitness
We can, in fact, imagine how we could employ Anna Kournikova in our eternally delayed quest for complete fitness. But we're pretty sure Helen would rather we stick with more traditional methods.
Thanks anyway.

Blab. A meme-mixing reader advances a theory.
I think I know that that dog is blue. He needs to go pee. Show him the bed.
Tell ya what: we'll show the blue dog your bed.

Blab. A reader uses Plurp to calibrate its internal mental state against society's, always a useful activity.
Is it just me or does it look like this picture was the product of Photoshop? There's just something wrong with it... Hmmm...

As far as we can tell, it's just you.

Blab. A reader who might well be Helen writes (rather defensively, in our opinion):
I do NOT vote Republican! Plurp is getting nastier and nastier in its abuse!
Hey, if the Army boot fits ...

Blab. A reader on a bit of a rant writes:
I am so tired of hearing the Attorney General and the President throwing around the term "War." We are NOT at "War" with anyone. The Congress has NOT declared "War" on anyone. And now they want to justify the detention of anyone they wish because we are at "War." I am continually surprised that so few people in the press have point this out. I am further surprised that educated people haven't been shouting about this and where is the ACLU????? We are threatening our Constitution and Bill of Rights (I mistakenly typed "Bull" of Rights. Freudian slip?)
I suppose that the only kind of trial that will be possible will be a military tribunal because we are denying so many people their rights (under law) we will have no evidence that will be admissible in court. I guess it all makes sense now?
Why not declare War? Hell, then Bush and Ashcroft can do anything they want -- LEGALLY!
Our deep expertise in constitutional law allows us to concur with your assertion. On the other hand, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ...

Plop. We continue to receive virus-infected email from bozo readers whose PCs are infected with the BadTrans.B virus. Today's lucky winners include:

The Scheirer family (which is, in fact, a two-time winner)

Cybershop (apparently a reader in India)

Andre Uchoa (from the United Arab Emirates)

Info (an email account in Denmark)

Steve Soper (a UK resident)

We considered instituting a basic computing competency test as a prerequisite for reading Plurp, but then we figured we'd lose all of our readers.

Yow. We didn't realize we had such an international readership. Wild!

Rant. Oh good lord. IT/Ginger/Slime-Flapping-Marketing-Hype is still with us!
Slimeball Dean Kamen's PR marketdroids seem to have suckered air time out of ABC this coming Monday to further flap their slime.
And we must highlight the undying brilliance of the U.S. Patent Orifice for helping them flap their slime. Slime-Kane's most recently issued patent has this as its first, broadest claim:
A device for carrying a user with a desired unassisted motion over a surface, the user being a standing person, the device comprising:
a. a platform which supports a payload including the user;
b. a ground-contacting module coupled to the platform, the ground-contacting module including only two laterally disposed and separately rotatable primary ground-contacting members, the platform and the ground-contacting module being components of an assembly; and
c. a motorized drive arrangement, mounted to the assembly, the motorized drive arrangement causing, when powered, motion of the assembly.
Kids: It's a fricking scooter, OK? Criminy.

Yo. A Helenism from a really long meeting today.
Let's flesh that in

Let's flesh that out

Let's fill that in

Plurp.
The blue dog wondered
what complete fitness
had to do with
someone's bed

Wednesday, November 28, 2001
Blab. Another reader with sharpened ears writes:
Heard on the radio from an alleged Starbucks commercial:
      Kick your feet back
I'd guess this would be made from:
      Kick back.
      Put your feet up.
Now that I'm reading Plurp, I'm starting to hear these everywhere. It's REALLY bad when it comes out of my own mouth....
Felis Lynx
Reader Lynx has identified a modestly popular Helenism! Kick your feet back gets 114 Googles, while Kick back gets 129,000 and Put your feet up gets 14,400.
Congratulations!

Blab. A reader indulges our procrastination, and we really like that.
"But we've been having some trouble with the email server where we collect our Plurp mail so we ... uh ... got lazy and didn't respond yet."
Hehehe. No worries, just checking. My inbox often has that same problem.
If you were our inbox, you could sue us for neglect.
It used to be (way back when) that we really did respond to absolutely every email we ever received, rather like the Monkees before anybody knew who they were. We would spend hours every workday going through our email, filing those that needed no response, delegating what we could, and replying in detail to those that required our careful ministrations. We would typically spend one entire weekend day finishing up the remaining email from the week.
At length, we discovered the following Important Principle.
Important Principle # 492:
The vast majority of email is crap.
This principle applies not only to all of the viruses sent to us by PCs belonging to total bozos (about which more later), not only to the various tediously dull spammists that have somehow found us, not only to the blathering mailing lists to which we subscribe, but also to what we (and, sadly, you) think of as legitimate correspondence.
We had a friend who programmed his email reader to automatically trash any mail for which he was only on the copy list, figuring that anything important would be addressed to him directly. Another ignores all mail from his manager figuring that, well ... Another ignores anything except from a small group of co-workers.
Our own observation is that the vast majority of the email we get can productively be ignored altogether. We pay attention to email from certain people, and we do read the subject line of all our email. If these combine into something that actually seems useful, we read it. Otherwise, it languishes in our inbox until (a) we get so much free time that we look at it in detail, or (more likely) (b) we forget about it entirely. Option (b) takes about one day.
In the last couple of years, we have been cynically amused by all of our friends who are new to email. (We, haughtily, have been doing the email thing for 20 years or so.) I'm flooded by email, they say. I get four, maybe five a day.
Yeah. Huh. And if we don't get back to you about that, it's because ...
Of course, none of this applies to our treasured Plurp readers, as the following attests.

Blab. A fan writes:
Subj: be kind -- don't embarrass - please
<< Additional content deleted -- Plurp >>
We do our best.

Blab. A twin brother of a different mother writes:
Does "Plurp," when pronounced in Japanese, come out its reverse, "prulP," and visa versa?
Idle thought du jour sent from a coffee shop in Palo Alto (wirelessness is cool-O-rama!)
--Randy
While we cannot pretend to any expertise in Japanese language or culture, or even in offensive American stereotypes of them, we can easily portray our own ignorance by suggesting that an appropriate translation of Plurp into Japanese is, well, Plurp. According to Babelfish, anyhow.
Of course, we don't even know what it means in English, so it's hard for us to verify its translation into any language in which we are not fluent. As if there was a language in which we were fluent.

Blab. Angling for a cheap entry into immortality, a reader writes:
Mama mia!
You and nearly 19,000 other Web sites.

Blab. A reader advances an odd theory.
Why is it that I get queasy when I see Ashencroft's face on the tube? Could it have something to do with the odd sect he belongs to, with Second Comings, Great Tribulations. and Raptures and smitings all over the place? And now he has his own version of the disappeared, but he tells you how many!! Oh, my goodness, Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas. Unless this is just another sticky joke.
If you really want to scare yourself, read below and tap the Rapture.
"The weight of Scripture supports a pre-Tribulation Rapture. Wherever teaching about the Second Coming occurs in the New Testament, imminence is underscored. To interpose other events before the Rapture does violence to such teaching."
So the idea here is that the Rapture already happened, the souls of the Faithful have already been whisked away to Heaven, leaving behind only their mindless bodies, which are now running the U.S. government?
That would explain a lot, wouldn't it?

Blab. Another reader, fascinated with sticky jokes, writes:
But then what else could you expect from people in Kalamazoo.
We had not previously had any well-defined expectations about people in Kalamazoo. Should we? Are they, for instance, expected to be sticky?

Blab. A fetishist writes:
I like the blue dog. Why does he look so alarmed?
We don't know. We'll ask him.

Blab. A reader mixes the memes, resulting in a useful suggestion.
Umbrellas are good to smacking bed peeing cats. Not that I've ever had to do that, since my cats don't pee on the bed.
We shall try that.

Blab. Conversely, a reader writes:
I only see 7483 dozen umbrellas here. Have you already sold the other17 dozen?
No, the cat peed on those.

Blab. Mistaking our humble Weblog for the humor section of Reader's Digest, a reader sends us this adorable story.
Yesterday afternoon, a street vendor selling fake brand-name watches near Grand Central had one or more of his watches snatched by a thief. He shouted for the police, and, in that location, about 15 cops appeared in a minute. One cop tried to explain to the vendor that what he was doing was highly illegal, while the others tried to avoid laughing out loud before returning to their more important duties. I left without discovering the outcome of the conversation.
Isn't America wonderful these days? If you're doing anything vaguely illegal, you have no rights whatsoever. Did it always work this way?

Blab. Confused at the outlandish notion that language is meaningful, a reader writes:
I had to chuckle at your comment that we had two separate prepositional phrases for two separate thought conveyances.
RIGHT ! As if the English language is at all logical.
QUICK ! Take all the languages in the world, throw them in a blender, run on "puree" for 45 seconds, and Voi-la ! The English Language.
I've always thought that as long as you get your point across, who cares if you have poor grammar.
Just don't eat your close relatives OR your close friends, ok?
Kindly don't presume to tell us what to do or not do with our relatives and close friends. Thank you.

Plurp. So, lots of Blab today, eh? We have no idea why. It's a bit of a mystery, isn't it? Dozens of people with nothing better to do with their lost little lives than to send us email in the hopes of being ritually abused in public.
Who knew there were so many closet masochists? And who knew they were our problem?

Plop. It's bozo reader day here at Plurp. The good news is that we seem to have a few more readers than we thought. The bad news is that they're all bozos
How do we know either of these things? Simple. The PCs belonging to these bozo readers have sent us email containing the BadTrans.B virus, a virus that sends itself to people whose email address it finds in your Internet Explorer cache (or elsewhere), which is where the virus got the address of Plurp.
On today's List Of Bozonic Shame are:

Ronald E. Duke

Lou & Dave Braim

Raul Boisset

The Scheirer family

Here's a free clue just for you, bozo readers:
Update your anti-virus software. Your PCs are infected!
Are other Webloggers burdened with this? Sheesh.

Plop.
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech [...]
... except, of course, if it involves sex. Because, as we all know, sex is bad. Very bad. Evil almost beyond belief. In a Good and Just Society, sex would be banned altogether and those practicing it, or probably even thinking about it, would be imprisoned or, better yet, shot on sight. But this not being a Good and Just Society, we'll just have to content ourselves with making sure that people can't see simple photographs that makes someone think about sex.
Maybe next year we'll be able to ban thinking about it.

Plurp. This just in.
Testing is under way to determine if eight-year-old Billy Tipton of Omack, WA had plans to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, the head of U.S. area operations said Tuesday.
Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, said experts have identified 40 places in Billy's house that "represent the potential for WMD [weapons of mass destruction] research."
"We're very systematically going about our way of visiting each one of those ... [to] perform the analyses ... to assure ourselves that we do not have evidence of WMD," Franks said at a news conference at U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
If biological warfare devices were found, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, they would not be left in the hands of an eight-year-old.
"In the event weapons of mass destruction are located, the United States would be very interested in getting their hands on them and would be very interested in seeing that it did not remain in Billy's house," Rumsfeld said.
Franks said a variety of chemical compositions were found in Billy's bedroom.
But, he said, it would take some time to determine if the findings indicate the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
"We have acquired a great deal of samples and now what we need to be very thorough in their analysis."
He said officials have not found evidence that points to a "specific" kind of chemical warfare.

Yak.
As long as you're up, why don't you come back to bed?

Yo. And here we thought we'd never have anything nice to say about Portland.
Portland police have refused to cooperate with the U.S. Justice Department's request for help interviewing 200 foreign visitors. City officials said to do so would violate state law and amount to racial or ethnic profiling. Portland was the first city to refuse to cooperate with the anti-terrorism effort.
Yeah, we've been confused about this whole thing too. It would amount to racial or ethnic profiling, they say. But that's not the way we see it. It is racial and ethnic profiling, of the basest, most blatant kind. Plain and simple. And utterly disgusting.
Of course, not everyone agrees with us, especially not our new best friend.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has sought assistance from local law enforcement officers across the country in conducting voluntary interviews of 5,000 people. Most are Middle Eastern men in the United States [...].
When all this is over, we want to sit down and have a nice, calm talk with Herr Ashcroft. Just before revoking his visa to the civilized world.

Plurp. Helen derides our consistent policy of sarcasm and derision here in Plurp. We accuse her of wearing Army boots. Or voting Republican.
So there.

Yo. Are you a procrastinator? Seems to us that if you run off and take the test, that pretty much answers the question. We haven't yet, but we will. (Ian)

Yo. You don't wanna be Enron. No siree.

Plop. Well, Dave's finished his novel in under a month and, despite our vow not to be, we are insanely jealous. We are forced to content ourselves with muttering under our breath that it must all be a truckful of tripe, and we're glad our name isn't associated with any such thing.

Plurp.
The blue dog was
alarmed
at the question

Tuesday, November 27, 2001
Blab. Indulging in one of the multitudinous forms of wastrelage for which we have become so justly famous, a reader attempts the following.
Broken Joke - What's brown and sticky? ..... A stick.   -AJL
Who would have known, but this is actually the Poster Child for an entire genre of jokes known as sticky jokes. We love the Web.

Blab. A reader recommends reading for our next vacation while greatly reassuring us.
Re: Operation Whitecoat
I heartily recommend the catchily-named 'Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War' (Miller, Engleberg, Broad).
I'm 3/4 of the way through my copy (which you are welcome to borrow once I've finished it). It's grippingly written.
I mention it because it mentions Operation Whitecoat. I don't believe any of the 'volunteers' (whether or not they were really volunteers) died.
We do so like it when the military performs potentially deadly biological experiments on people and ... (wait for it) ... the people live.

Blab. Another devoted fan writes:
Your Seattle Fan Club would like to point out that we did in fact have a "proper cold, dank, spitting rain or sleet turkey day." Complete with just enough wind to chill to the bone.
Perfect weather for playing football.
How nice to live in a place where one can play football all year 'round.

Blab. Another one of our Seattle fans writes:
Is this where I can get umbrellas?
No. That would be China. This is not China.

Blab. A reader with whom we would be forced to agree writes:
Now that's a tip...
We would be forced to agree. Any time the tip at a beer party is $1256, you just have to know there were a lot of suds.

Blab. Putting the lie to the notion the drug use is decreasing, a nonetheless talented reader writes:
Entertain us with muffins, entertain us with wit (entertain us with pipes and with hope (threaten our life with a railway share) and count on the ear of a dope), for that matter. Entertain us by recounting your past. Entertain us with stories about that slut Yolanda (Mia?). Juggle your most prized possessions (you know you want to).
Take the train, here comes the train, throttle the censorious impulse. (Don't count your earwigs before they're... you know.) Here comes the train, it's the train, the train, the train, train, train
rain
in
n
Mia! Woo, woo.

Blab. A reader decides to check up on us, but in that subtle and self-effacing way that we particularly enjoy.
Dr. Plurp:
Did you get my prior email (11/21)? We've been having some trouble with the server at worker, so I've been having to re-send some of my emails from that period.
-Mark
Yes, we did. But we've been having some trouble with the email server where we collect our Plurp mail so we ... uh ... got lazy and didn't respond yet.

Blab. A reader in search of tutoring writes:
"Which do you prefer, Thanksgiving dinner with extended family, with just intimate family, or with friends?"
No cannibalism for me, thank you. I prefer Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and potatoes.
Ah yes, the subtle difference in meaning between with and consisting of. But then, that's why we have two different prepositional phrases for them, don't you think?

Blab. A reader offers us Satori.
The sleek compact size allows the Nokia 8260 to go anywhere you go. The soft curves feel so good in your hand, as the ergonomically designed keys seem to reach up to your fingers. Customizable profiles prepare you for any situation.
We have always wanted to be prepared for any situation, especially one in which soft curves feel so good in our hand. Earlier in life, such a product would have infinitely enhanced our social life. (Honest. We did the math.)
We are, however, guaranteed to have nightmares about that bit where the keys reach up to our fingers.

Blab. A reader has a riddle for us that we can't find anywhere.
What about the baby that was born on the computer last night?
We give up.

Blab. Our Greatest Fan serves up this digital delicacy.
great info!
Did you know that a lobster can be right or left-handed? Heck, we didn't even know they had hands.

Plop. Dubya learns all about recursion. Or not.
If they fund a terrorist, they're a terrorist. If they house terrorists, they're terrorists.
If you house anyone who has housed anyone who ...
Recurse six times and place yourself in indefinite detention. Thank you.

Plop. Said Beast Without Name saw fit yesterday to, well, urinate smack dab in the middle of the bed, where Helen had laid my freshly ironed yukata. Said Beast did such a good job that it soaked through, all the way into the mattress.

But of course, you say with that knowing smile, he's a cat after all. Yeah, but he's never done this before, and it was clearly a premeditated (and therefore semantically weighty) act. Now we're off trying to figure out what it means.
But of course, you say.

Plurp. If you and a friend speak in nothing but Pig Latin for two whole days, is it hard thereafter not to speak in Pig Latin?

Plurp.
The blue dog
once told a semantically weighty
story about that
slut Yolanda

Monday, November 26, 2001
Blab. A reader writes:
YAW
... while another writes:
resume
Always eager to respond to directional input, we turn slightly and then turn back.

Blab. A reader from Seattle writes:
I heard you have umberellas for sale -- is that true?
No.

Blab. On the topic of our local award, a reader writes:
77. In a 55 zone. On a holiday. Oddly enough, I was also briefly detained for doing 77 in a 55 on a holiday, this past July 4. I was eastbound on I-70 in West Virginia, and I found it particularly galling since this crosses the northern tip of WV, and out of the 700-or-so mile trip I was taking, less than 20 miles was spent in WV. The good news is that the trooper was impressed with my GPS system, and only gave me the prize for doing 64 in a 55.
Sadly, we had insufficient technological wizardry to impress the local hick cops, so we got pumped big time. Meanwhile, a similarly helpful reader writes:
In re your local prize, just blame it on global warming. If we'd been having a proper cold, dank, spitting rain or sleet turkey day, you'd almost certainly not have been tempted...
Most excellent. Now if our reader can let us know how we can get global warming to absorb the extra points on its driver's license, we'll be all set!

Blab. A reader who isn't actually too worried writes:
I'm actually not too worried about taking on the eight turkeys assigned to me and my family. I mean, eight turkeys? Shortlived rebellion...
If only it worked like that! Rather, we expect the turkeys will discover modern military doctrine, emphasizing massing of forces and surprise, to mount successful attack after successful attack on isolated individuals and small towns, whittling away at our defenses, until the Final Battle.
Remember Hitchcock, after all. Or Afghanistan.
Gobble, gobble.

Blab. A reader explains our great religious mystery.
Ah, but *everyone* matches Unitarian Universalism 100%, no matter what they believe.
We are so greatly relieved! It sounds like a pretty good property for a religious meme that it can already claim everyone as belonging to it.

Blab. A reader (or, more likely, some ISP software) writes:
------------------ Virus Warning Message (on mail)
Found virus WORM_BADTRANS.B in file New_Napster_Site.MP3.pif
The file is deleted.
---------------------------------------------------------
Outstanding! Two other readers were not so lucky, and this same new worm sent us an intact copy of itself from their PCs. Keep your anti-virus software up to date, kiddies! Especially these days - three copies of the same new worm in one day is a local record, so this one must be all over the place.

Blab. An eager reader writes:
Two possible Helenisms from the same radio news report this morning:
"Everything is well under hand" (from "under control" and "well in hand", I imagine),
and slightly less compellingly
"She's a little eerie about it" (from "a little leery of it" and something about it being eerie)
Sharp thongs, indeed!
Our readers have such sharp ears! The former one is duly recorded. We're still trying to figure the latter one out, but maybe our other clever readers can tell us the constituent phrases from which it is built.

Yow. Today even the Washington Post graces us with a Helenism.
Under lock, stock and key

Under lock and key

Lock, stock and barrel

We do so appreciate it when the major media add to our lock and stockpile.

Plop. Now this is extra fun. It seems that, between 1954 and 1973, our good friends at the U.S. Army conducted Operation Whitecoat, in which they exposed a thousand or so healthy young men, who just all happened to be Seventh Day Adventists, to deadly biological warfare agents, including Q fever, tularemia and sandfly fever. Interestingly, the claim is that these nice young men all volunteered. Or, rather, that they volunteered as an alternative to going into combat in extra, extra fun places like Vietnam.
Elsewhere, that's called extortion. But not here, Winston.

Plurp.
The blue dog wondered
what the U.S. Army did
with Unitarian Universalists

Sunday, November 25, 2001
Blab. A Chinese spammist writes:
Dear Sir, Madam,
We have approximately overstock of 7500 dozens of umbrellas, now we would like to undersell these goods.
[...]
This is absolutely pure-hearted business, please do not hesitate to visit / contact us for purchasing.
[...]
Hope to get your response soon.
Thank you !
Sincerely
Mr. Long Tan
You must admire the delicate kindness.

Blab. A reader with severe sleep apnea exclaims:
Snork.
We advise immediate medical attention to that condition, bucko.

Yow. The first cloned human embryo. How long before Xerox announces a new business model?

Yo. What religion are we? Well, seeing as how we're too dumb to know already, we asked the Web. And, according to the Web, here are the most probable candidates.

Unitarian Universalism (100%)

Atheism and Agnosticism (96%)

Secular Humanism (96%)

Liberal Protestant (78%)

Liberal Quaker (73%)

Theravada Buddhism (65%)

Bahá'í (56%)

This comes as quite a surprise as we were pretty sure we weren't a Unitarian Universalist. Shows you how dumb we are. (Though we are pleased to see the drop-off in probability once you hit any real religions.)

Yak.
I've got more brains in my little finger than you do.

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't exactly have
a little finger

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