Plurp: Abducted by aliens

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2001.12.09 : 2001.12.15

Saturday, December 15, 2001
Blab. A reader knows why the passenger air bag was turned off mysteriously on our car.
Clearly this is a case of someone with a nearly identical car that happens to have the same key shape as your car. That is why your key opened the door and allowed you to drive away. The reason I say it was nearly identical is that the passenger side airbag was turned off in the car you stumbled upon. Please do not turn the airbag on. That will make the this car identical to the car you originally owned thereby causing a singularity in the universe. Such singularities will not have any observable effect unless there is a blue dog present. In such unusual cases there is a 10% chance that the universe will disappear (whatever that means).
Too late! Duck!!

Blab. Impressed with the ability of that inarticulate reader yesterday to evoke a brilliant piece of prose from us (if we do say so ourself), one or more readers attempt to do the same.
Akuna

Taramtschibuffinazekaluppe
We appreciate our Treasured Readers' desires for fame. We do.

Plurp. According to the CNN subtitles this morning, New York was voted one of the fifty most polite cities in the U.S. Hearing this news, New York mayor Rudy Guliani is reported to have said, What were those people drinking?

Yak.
Her criticism of you was completely off the mark.
Yeah. She was projecting her own insecurities onto me.
You don't mean ... ?
Yes, she's indulging in projectile criticism.

Yow. So they finally did something about the leaning tower. 'Bout time.

Plop. Why can't we find the architectural plans for Fallingwater on the Web? How are we supposed to make a gingerbread Fallingwater if we can't? Hmph. Readers are invited to portray their superiority to us by finding a URL to this for us.

Plop. Those clever proofreaders at the Washington Post probably thought this looked just fine in the middle of an article.
[See story, Page A18]
Problem is, it was on the Web. Snort.

Plurp.
If you blow up, you probably are going to lose some customers, going to lose some workers and going to lose some reputation

Yo. And you thought cell phones made people rude? Check this out.

Plurp. We went to a perfectly lovely holiday party at the abode of Ian and the mysterious C tonight, wherein the several accompanying tikes played a game called Shark. As best as we can tell from observation, it consists of one tike telling shark!, after which they all scream and run away, typically to or from the basement, that being the most distant part of the house. Repeat until giddy.
Wouldn't it be nice if everything were that simple?

Plurp.
The blue dog really
was
that simple

Friday, December 14, 2001
Blab. We imagine that some large fraction of our readers sit, day after day, in large, well lit rooms whose windows are too high to reach and whose sharp corners are covered with foam rubber or padded cloth, staring fixedly at obscure but meaning-laden smudges on the far wall, or with their eyes darting around, following unseen insect swarms.
dreidel
Such as this one.

Blab. Mistaking us for someone named Waitaminute, a reader asks:
Hey, waitaminute... is The Blue Dog the stunt double for Blue, in "Blue's Clues"?
Frankly, we fail to see the similarity. But whatever.

Blab. A reader with a difficult-to-pronounce name writes:
Real Tape Huh?
hmmm... -AJL
Ah. The cited audio clip talks up (in a lovely Scottish brough) the newly venerable SmokeHammer site, which seems to specialize in offensive humor related to recent events. Sort of like Plurp.
Significant glances exchanged at Pentagon meeting as official suggests that if no one was left in Afghanistan, it wouldn't need governing at all...
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Blab. A reader proves happy to step up to even our most absurd and trivial requests. And we treasure that.
More possible reasons your passenger airbag disable light was on:
5) The manufacturer inadvertantly switched the wires to the indicating lights for "passenger airbag disabled" and "severe engine troubles."
6) The airbag still works, but the Web-Host-Abducting Aliens (see reason #2) crossed the indicating light circuitry. If you thought you re-enabled the passenger airbag, you have actually disabled it. What was that about causing the untimely demise of the woman you love?
7) Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network has covertly sabotaged every passenger airbag on every Miata in the country, causing untimely demises to many loved women (and men).
8) The airbag warranty expired two days ago. Any questions?
Yes we do - is it really the case that you can make a Grand Unified Theory with only eleven dimensions?

Blab. Our dream nearly comes true.
Dear Dr. Plurp,
I strongly object to the opinions expressed by Brigadier Arthur Gormanstrop yesterday. Please bill me to renew his subscription, and make sure that he is flooded with continuous Plurp drabble, as well as regular emails offering him discounts on airline tickets, on line retailers, and of course 0% intro APR credit cards.
Thank You.
Sincerely,
Angelina Jolie
We would be delighted to do absolutely anything you ask. Really, anything. Say, did you hear the one about the exobiologist, the 'brane theorist and the forensic accountant?

Blab. A helpful reader has additional suggestions for poor Paul Ford.
I've also found books (as well as magazines) very useful in propping up wobbly table legs, and on occasion as a stool for reaching high shelves and cleaning light fixtures.
I'd be interested in borrowing The Lord of the Rings from Mr. Ford when he finishes - I've decided to add some height to my step aerobics bench as well....
And kindling. Don't forget kindling.

Yow. More cool stuff going on in our group at work, this time on economically-motivated software agents. Good stuff.

Yow. rebecca, quoting lizard, on Dubya:
He's like Nixon lite: all the BS, half the IQ points.

Yak. From a conversation today about research folks around work who focus on boring, near-term problems.
Dude, that is so next year!
We love that.

Plurp. Today's Windows background? Why, Winona, of course. Aren't we naughty?

Rant. Anybody out there hear of BlueMountain, a Web site at which you used to be able to send amateurish, stupid, but free online "cards" to other people? Well, not any more.
The optimistic among you have concluded that they are no longer amateurish, or perhaps no longer stupid. No such luck; they are no longer free.
Let's review. A dot-com era Web company offers clunky, insipid online cards for free, figuring they will make their money either on advertising or by selling your email id to paedophile spammists. The dot-com bubble bursts, splattering them with debt. So they hire brilliant save-your-stupid-company consultants who tell them ... what? Why, charge everybody in the world money for something that most of them wouldn't use for free!
Wave bye-bye.
We wonder what the consulting fee was.

Yo. And speaking of blue mountains, here's a stock by that name (not the same bozos we don't think, but hey) that sells for less than twenty cents a share and whose daily volume averages about zero. Killer!

Plurp.
The blue dog
...
...

Thursday, December 13, 2001
Blab. Having recently returned from the clutches of alien abductors, we now proceed to lose even those Treasured Readers who stuck with us through it all.
Dear Dr. Plurp:
I strongly object to your editorial of December 9 regarding the ramifications of EPR as it affects modern Ornithology. I cannot beleive anyone holds such antiquanted opinions in this day and age. Cancel my subscription forthwith.
Yours etc., Brigadier Arthur Gormanstrop
In retrospect, we are forced to agree with you, Brigadier Gormanstrop, sir. Hence we are canceling ourselves. Forthwith.

Blab. A correspondent hunts down an authoritative-sounding technical description of IT/Ginger/Slime.
See this for a accessible description of how these devices works. Not very detailed, but more grounded in reality than our speculations. In particular, they don't use spinning gyroscopes, they use "solid-state angular rate sensors" (they vibrate, follow the link), five of them (two for reduncancy), 10 onboard microprocessors, and basically try to do a balancing act the way people do when they walk.
It's still 40 pounds too heavy and $2000 too expensive, but does appear to be an interesting device.
Hoo ha! It's not only scoot-by-wire, it's also stability-by-wire. And what fun if the hardware or software goes El Blotto on you. 'Course that never happens in real life so you'll be fine. Just fine.
IT's pretty cute, from a techno-geek-toy point of view. Who would have thought you could do that at all? ("This chicken has a small opening book.") But are we going to redesign cities so people can toodle around on these lumbering, pricey beasts? Oh definitely.

Blab. A reader of rare and probing insight writes:
So... why is the Blue Dog blue? Hmm... I guess it doesn't make sense to name a blue dog The Purple Dog, right? Did I guess right? Huh? Did I? Is that it?
Yes, Treasured Reader, that is exactly correct.

Blab. A reader who seems to have been on Mars for the last several decades writes:
Steve, I am reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy for the first time in my life. I am 27 and otherwise healthy. Am I okay, or am I going to need some help?
Paul Ford
Well, Paul Ford, where do we start? Perhaps you have become interested in Tolkein because of the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie. So far, that's good. We encourage you to sit in the front row with a big bag of popcorn, 'cause that's what people do these days.
But ... reading? From, like, books? Oh dear. Paul Ford. Dear Paul Ford. Books, you see, are static, analog media. You may think of them as quaint, historical artifacts. We think of them as wrong. If you must read text, at least limit your reading to the Web, and preferably to blogs, today's literati.
Today, in this millennium, books are used only to generate scripts, which are then turned into movies, where you sit in the front row with a big bag of popcorn. Movies, you see, are the ultimate passive media (to white folks, anyhow). You don't even have to turn the page (the "page"). And that is obviously Good.
So please, Paul Ford, put the books down and make a calendar entry in your Palm to see the latest (and most epic) Lord of the Rings movie.
It's not too late.

Plurp. We're purposefully not notifying anybody that we have returned from being kidnapped by aliens. We suspect that nine of our eleven readers became bored and wandered away. But we're interested in seeing what, if anything, happens.

Plurp. Driving home last night, we noticed a warning light was on, indicating that the passenger's side air bag was disabled. Odd. The proper operation of the airbag is a "feature" that you can turn off in case you want to have an infant as a passenger. In a Miata. Yeah, makes no sense whatsoever. Anyhow, it can only be turned off with the ignition key. So what's the deal?

It was always off, and we never noticed.

It was turned off by some mysterious, key-abducting party, possibly in league with the aliens that abducted our Web site.

We turned it off ourselves in a hallucinatory binge subconsciously intended to result in the untimely demise of the woman we love, then forgot to follow through.

It is the artifact of an alternate quantum history, whose wavefunction we have failed to integrate properly.

Readers are encouraged to provide better explanations for this impossible turn of events.

Yo. We reveled in the annual ritual of suffocating gingerbread men last night.
Many people seem firmly wedged into the rut of representational gingerbread suffocation. You know - green Xmas trees. Humanoids with recognizable body parts. Stuff like that.
Not us. As prosecutorial evidence, we submit exhibits A and 2, being, as they are, Mister Primary Color Poop Man and the Jackson Pollock Tree Number B.

Exhibit A Exhibit 2

Yak.
Do you want to have <person's name> over for Christmas dinner?
We could.
Or would you rather have an intimate Christmas dinner?
We could have <person's name> over and still have an intimate dinner.
How's that?
All we need is some ice cream and handcuffs and we're all set.
So it'll just be us then?
That'd be fine too.

Plop. Transcript of the bin Laden tape, in which he appears to have known about, and indeed helped plan, the events of Sept. 11. Fun guy.

Plurp.
Hey, BD! You are back!!!!!!! I have missed you sooooo much! Let's do crunchies sometime. Your place and mine, huh?
--------Christopher the cat

Wednesday, December 12, 2001
Rant. Let us start by nominating Richard Bozobreath (we've mercifully forgotten his real name, we think), of the former OnePine web hosting service in Manhattan, as our candidate for Second Slimiest Person of 2001. (Most Slimy goes to Dean Kamen and his PR slime for the astonishing flap over IT/Ginger/etc. Obviously.)
Some time around Nov. 29, our site just stopped responding. That, in itself, wasn't unusual. Richard's one-banana operation was never the most reliable. More disturbing was the fact that Dave's and Ian's sites also went mute. A little poking around revealed that the entire OnePine subnet no longer existed, and a phone call revealed that the OnePine phones had been disconnected.
That didn't sound good.
But, bowing to sloth, we just hung out. Ian (clever Ian) had already moved to a new Web host, figuring that Richard wasn't all that reliable in the first place. Dave set up subsistence blogging over at Pitas. We did nothing.
(Well, actually, this cyber-tragedy coincided with a manic peak of activity at work, as we're now in the middle of the triple year-end rituals of denigrating the people with whom we are privileged to work - otherwise known as employee evaluation - brainwashing people into supporting new projects, and begging for money. So we really were insanely busy. Attentive Readers may claim we are using this as an excuse for not having done any real blogging for over a week. Attentive Readers can go suck eggs.)
Late last week, we concluded that Richard, OnePine, their subnet, their phones, and our very own Web site, had been kidnapped by aliens. We spent several pleasant hours imagining just what the evildoing aliens might be evildoing to Richard's body. Then we decided we needed to get our Web site back.
This was complicated by the fact that OnePine had registered our domain, so they were the contact for all administrivia about our domain. We ended up having to prove to Dotster (a domain registrar) that we really were who we said we were. The Dotster folks were pretty responsive, but it still took days.
When that was done, though, getting our site up and running took just a couple of hours of uploading and updating.
So, um, we're back.

Yo. Our covert listening devices (For Your Safety^TM) hear you muttering the obvious question: So where's Plurp's new Web host?
And you're gonna love the answer: We don't actually know. Honest.
Ian (clever Ian) had moved his Web site off of OnePine and onto a new host just before the aliens arrived. He recommended that we move to the same host - a reasonable proposition. So we did.
It turns out that this is a Web host run by Ian and some of his cronies, and they made the transition to their new host really, really easy. Rumor has it that their host is somewhere in England, oddly enough. And it is apparently run more or less as a hobby. We imagine a few machines stuck in someone's basement in Surrey. But we don't really know.
We love the Web.

Blab. Somehow, readers both fruminous and uncertain discovered that we were back.
WOOP WOOP
I am a feedback. Doo doo bee doo.
Welcome back! --G
gladyourback
still off the dns map in roadrunner land.
I hope the blue dog didn't have to hold it in during the blackout. The thought of that is painful.
Great rejoicing. BoinG said Zebedee. The blue dog, despite his unawareness, is back. We are glad -AJL
Does this work?
Welcome back!
That "roadrunner" remark notes that our new srwhite.org addressing information took (is taking?) several days to propagate into all the DNS boxes that resolve URLs into IP addresses. Dunno why it takes so long. Speed of light limitations, prolly.
Anyhow, we're glad to be back as well.

Blab. One particularly loquacious reader writes:
Glad to have you back...
'Plurpless in Seattle 2' was a very disappointing sequel - much longer than before, and not even a decent plot resolution. The only promising performance was that of the Blue Dog, who was not aware that it was even in the sequel.
Though I confess it was worth the price of admission, I'm not looking forward to any future sequels.
You mean you didn't like that alien abduction bit? That was the best!

Blab. Then the usual reader drooling begins anew.
Heck, I was so good at this I could play it one-handed...
Erm..
Bloggi
This seems to be some dubious game involving images of scantily clad young women. Our high morals prevent us from playing this game (from our work account).

Blab. And those dear Chinese spammists, confused as ever about our gender and relation to them, check in with just what we need for stocking stuffers.
Dear Sis, Madam,
Now, We have a huge stocks of approximate 530000 pairs of shoes, include tennis shoes, sport shoes, children shoes, flying shoes, etc. We wanted clear these stocks, the minimum FOB price will be only USD 0.70 a pair, and you may discuss these prices with us if your purchase quantity is big. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are interest in these stocks, we will send you photos and details. Thank you and best regards !
Sincerely
Mr. Long Tan ( Satrap )
When you live in a country with a billion people, we suppose that a million shoes just doesn't seem like all that many.
We do wonder about those flying shoes. Is Dean Kamen involved?

Yow. A date with all 0s, 1s and 2s. And that's in any common representation. Is it base 3? What could this mean?

Plurp. Fanatic readers will want to memorize the historic Plurp entry that wasn't posted until now due to having been abducted by aliens.

Plop. What a time to be without a soapbox. Slime Kamen finally unveils IT/Ginger/Whatever. And you know what? It's a scooter! Who would have guessed?
And not just a scooter. Oh, no. It's a 60-pound $6,000 scooter. While the price may come down with volume production, the weight isn't likely to come down much. That's because much of the weight is from the two big batteries that power the thing.
Now it just occurred to you that you could dump one of the batteries, didn't it? And you could, except for one tiny problem. If the last remaining battery poops out, it sounds like Kamen's scooter becomes, well, unstable. That is, it appears to dump you off at high speed. That's because, from what we hear, it's a scoot-by-wire system. You don't actually control the speed of the scooter yourself. Some onboard computer guesses what you want to do by how you shift your body around. And the whole thing is only stable while the flywheel / gyroscope is whirring around at high speed.
Those of you holding your breath for this to revolutionize society are hereby nominated for the Darwin Award.

Plop. What a time to be without a soapbox! Evildoer John Ashcroft declares that anyone who objects to his trampling the Constitution is giving aid to terrorists. Naturally, this makes no sense whatsoever. But given his unswerving support for secret military tribunals and summary executions, one might expect such pronouncements to have a certain chilling effect on people who formerly believed this was still a free country.
Not us, though. We love military tribunals. We think that anyone whom Ashcroft thinks is suspicious should be shot on the spot. We are hopeful that Ashcroft will get additional powers to shoot whomever he wants, whenever he wants. We want all Americans to know how doubleplusgood this is.

Yow. While we were busy being abducted, a new Helenism emerged from the source herself: Mobbia. A good one.

Plurp.
The blue dog never
really had
rights

Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Plop. Those of you wondering where we were can join us in that activity. Our Web site, as it turns out, seems to have been abducted by aliens.
Anyhow, we're back now. Obviously.
More later.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was not aware
of having been away

Monday, December 10, 2001

Sunday, December 9, 2001

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