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2001.12.16 : 2001.12.22
Saturday, December 22, 2001
Blab. A festive reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to the previously blogged Surrealist
Compliment Generator.
The microfine network of eyes traversing your shoulders causes us to
shudder in anticipation of the coming of the wondrous season of jaundiced
eskimos and impotent Anglican priests.
Blab. On the subject of the great Donner-Donder controversy,
a reader writes:
Dunder and Blixem!
... these being, of course, the Dutch words for thunder and lightening.
Perhaps the reader is suggesting that this is the origin of the names Donner
and Blitzen. Sadly, this doesn't resolve the controversy of which name
is actually used in the song.
Blab. A reader who refuses to give Web references writes:
From A Visit from St. Nicholas,
by someone other than Clement Clarke Moore:
"Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer
and Vixen!
On, Comet! On Cupid! On, Donder and
Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top
of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away
all!"
L.
So you say.
Blab. On the Donner-Donder controversy, a more serious reader
writes:
The pedantic types will probably
point you (as they so often do) to snopes.
But I much prefer the answer given here.
So the Snopes reference claims that Donder and Blitzen were,
in fact, the original names, and tells a very interesting story about how
the typo occurred.
The latter reference is a more fanciful story about how both Donner
and Donder are correct, and that Donner was nickname for
Donder.
One might think that's fanciful, but they're both on the Web and hence
equally authoritative.
So there you are!
Plop. In the seasonal spirit of giving, Helen has given us her
cold. Now we're both sitting in bed, snorffling, trying to figure out how
to get the cat to fix lunch for us. Bleh.
Yow. As threatened, Dave
is back up, having recovered from the incompetence of his previous Web
host, and now in his new digs at extremis.net.
Huzzah!
Yo. Three successive dates that appear to be in base 3. We anticipate
grave mathematical aberrations. Take cover.
Yow. Good news. Solstice was yesterday. That means summer is
coming, at long last. We can hardly wait.
Yow. Yet another stupid Web test. This
one claims to discern your political somethingorother. We score +4.13
on the Economic Left / Right scale (-10 is Left, +10 is Right) and -6.46
on the Libertarian / Authoritarian scale (-10 is the former, +10 the latter).
Hmm. That's probably less radically Libertarian and more Republican
Right than we were in our peachy youth. Ah, age. (leuschke)
Yak. From the most recent Grinch movie, an answering machine
message that we'll definitely have to try ourselves.
If you utter so much as a
single
syllable, I will hunt you down and gut you like a fish!
We may finally have found the filter that we need.
Yow. We now have our own official robots.txt
file on our Web site, and our own favicon.ico
file. Aren't you thrilled? We are certain that bots worldwide are spinning
about in chromium glee and that IE victims are agog at our artistry.
Plurp. Wow - this hurts!
Plurp. What is the etymology of the term jumped
the shark? Anyone?
Plop. We had a bit of a multiple homicide yesterday as Helen
fiddled with the Solstice Tree, flinging several gingerbread men and women
into tragedy. Miss Purple Squiggle Lady, Helen's favorite gingerbread lady
this year, was catapulted onto the hard granite step below the tree, where
shattered parts of her landed up to six feet away. Several other gingerbread
men and women sustained serious injury.
Through her spokesperson, Helen denied any involvement, saying that
those involved were probably suicidal to begin with.
Yow. Our 2001 Annual Letter is done. Folks getting it by analog
mail will have to wait a while for it. The rest of you can read
it now.
Yo. A fascinating and informed analysis that suggests that the
next move in the War On Terror (we hate that term!) will be in
Pakistan.
Plurp.
I am
NY
 Plurp.
The blue dog
was often thought
to be a donnerhead
Friday, December 21, 2001
Blab. A reader walks down Nostalgia
Lane with us.
Dear Blue Dog,
Do you think he looks more like a
hamster with a perm or a hallucination? Inquiring minds want to know.
I saw him on TV recently and want to assure you he looked as strange there
as he does on the web.
Your Midwest Correspondent
This is, of course, Mr. Winkle, that
thoroughly disturbing dog-like creature so rabidly exploited by its evil
human captor.
Blab. A reader sends us another pesky ...
[link]
... and thereby attempts to denigrate our knowledge of geography and current
events by suggesting that there still is a country called Yugoslavia.
Fortunately, we know better.
Blab. In a fit of contextual contradiction, a reader types this
into the little Blab box in the margin.
Big blab
And this into the Big Blab Box.
Small blab
Note the carefully constructed irony.
Blab. A reader of rare insight writes:
Dear Captain Plurp,
Helen is right, the intent wasn't
obscene. We wanted to share with you a treat from the Minnesota State
Fair and thought you probably didn't yet have a pickle hat in your collection.
This way, you can be in a pickle in a whole new way.
Always interested in providing new
and interesting options from the Heartland, I remain ..
Your Midwest Correspondent
Indeed, we had somehow neglected to add a pickle hat to our long list of
material possessions. Until recently, of course. We do appreciate having
the option of wearing a pickle hat. In New York. We think.
Blab. A very spiritual reader writes:
Hi ho! Hi ho! It's off to
the pub we go. Merry Christmas to you and your other reader!
We wish you the same. Both of us.
Blab. A reader, mistaking us for Santa's Workshop, writes:
I need a ten-foot pole to
not touch things with.
Or a grammar primer.
Plop. Microsoft, having advertised Windows XP as their most secure
operating system ever (a notably low bar), now tells us that some serious
security bugs mean that all of you XP
users are basically hosed.
A Microsoft official acknowledged
that the risk to consumers was unprecedented because the glitches allow
hackers to seize control of all Windows XP operating system software without
requiring a computer user to do anything except connect to the Internet.
Happy holidays!
Yow. What is this,
anyhow? We don't know. In fact, we're really quite befuddled. But we like
it! (Dave's subsistence
blog)
Plop. AdCritic, one of our very favorite sites, dot-bombed.
Bummer!
Plop. Make it stop. Dear lord, just make it stop.
Plurp. OK. We admit to reading our server logs again. And we're
quite amused at all of the really strange Google searches that folks do
who eventually end up here. We wonder if we could encourage other, even
more dramatically lost souls, to come into the light. Let's see.
Nude naked Britney Spears
Supergirl Ma Kettle photo photos pic pics hot wet shower soap bed
excema skin toe hair lips ears feet foot fnord navel pierce pieced piercing
pricing girl girls boots boot beet fungus leather lather latex Richard
Feynman sect sex sexy spiders lush lust lusty naughty lesbian thespian
woman women.
We'll let you know.
Plurp. Netscrape informs us that we are among the most
popular 2,491,170 sites on the Web. That means we're practically famous,
doesn't it?
By contrast, Bovine is
in the top 4,653,385 and ftrain
is in the top
748,293. (Google is in the top
5, so we still have a ways to go.)
And yes, this will be on the test.
Yow. Helen seems to be getting over the icky cold she's had for
the past couple of days. So it's probably not pulmonary anthrax. Probably.
Plurp. Humbuggery,
as only the British can carry it off.
Yo. Ball
lightning: nonsense or fabrication? You decide.
Yo. Giant
squids? What is this, cheesy science fiction day?
Yo. Helen claims that it's Donder, not Donner,
reindeer-wise. Two Plurp points to the reader who can definitively
resolve
this crisis.
Plop. Have you seen the Norad
Tracks Santa site? Your tax dollars at work.
Yak. From CNN.
Government sources said that
sometimes they don't give full details on operations because they don't
have fully developed intelligence.
Hey - we just report this stuff.
Plurp. Seen in the soil of tree planters outside of Phillips
Chapel on E. 73rd St. The first, made from the thin wood of some child's
toy, and carefully block lettered in a woman's hand:
Frog, we love you
and we will never
forget you
The second, on laminated paper, in the same hand:
OLIVIA
DOROTHY
SWIMMY
KITTY
REST
IN PEACE
We suspect foul play.
 Plurp.
The entire interior of the Guggenheim
museum has been painted black
for an exhibit of Brazilian
art and culture, and the breathtaking atrium is filled with a dominating,
fifty foot altar screen from a church, dripping gold leaf, covered with
religious icons, and hosting the shiny porcelain figurine of a monk.
It's the weirdest, most shocking thing we've seen in quite some time.
Plurp.
A pig, a cow, a lawyer, a
bartender
and a blue dog with a tattoo of Britney
Spears
were asleep in a barn ...
Thursday, December 20, 2001
Blab. A reader, though properly worried about disappointing
us, suggests unnecessary remedial action.
I don't have any money, I
sent it all to the Satanist test site. Apparently it showed my appreciation
for the truth..or something. Anyway, you need to get mind control devices
working a bit faster in future. We are clearly susceptible.
-A...oh, you know who.
Ah. Yes. No problem, then. The Satanists are a wholly owned subsidiary.
Blab. Dan Quayle writes:
At least I'm consistant about
it.
Indeed.
Blab. A reader using wireless networking from an early screening
of Lord of the Rings, writes:
Foolish hobgoblins consistently
have little minds.
What a terrible thing to have lost a hobgoblin’s mind. Or not to have a
mind at all.
Blab. Pointing out that we may be autistic,
but we are certainly innumerate, a reader writes:
No, no, the mean score is
16.4. Ceoln Dave scored 26.
Ah. We will have to send Dave email
on this topic.
Blab. A reader spews this:
Wietse Zweitze Venema
Gesundheit!
Plurp. Can someone please explain
to us what happens when shoes are "broken in"?
The last two paris of shoes we bought were purchased under time pressure.
(Rule # 763: Never buy shoes under time pressure. You both get dirty and
pig likes it.)
One pair, a fantastically expensive pair of dress shoes, is so uncomfortable
that, to this day, our feet are nearly bloody if we wear them all day,
as we did today in a fell attempt to impress some German customers. Another,
a pair of tennis shoes (a misnomer, as virtually no one plays tennis in
them; perhaps the right term is "athletic shoes" (a misnomer, as virtually
no one does anything athletic in them)) was so uncomfortable that, for
weeks, it was hard to focus on anything else while we wore them.
The former pair of shoes is still hideous. The latter is fine. What
happened? We can't blame leather flexibility, we think, as the tennis shoes
(ibid (ibid)) were already pretty pliable and were only uncomfortable
way up by the toes. We can't blame Bosnia because, well, we just can't.
So what's the deal? Really! We
want to know.
Plop.
Dr. Harold Bloomfield, a
psychotherapist and nationally known author of self-help books, was arrested
Wednesday on charges that he drugged
and sexually battered seven female patients, police said.
Oh. That kind of self-help.
Yow.
The
future will be better tomorrow.
Yow. Late-breaking bulletin: Osama bin Laden is still
missing.
Yow.
In an important milestone
toward making powerful computers that exploit the mind-bending possibilities
of calculating with individual atoms, scientists at the I.B.M. Almaden
Research Center, in San Jose, Calif., are announcing today that they have
performed the most complex such calculation yet: factoring
the number 15.
Yow.
A Rabbi, a Hindu, and a lawyer
are in a car. They run out of gas and are forced to stop at a farmer's
house. The farmer says that there are only two extra beds, so one person
will have to sleep in the barn.
The Hindu says, "I'm humble, I will
sleep in the barn." So, he goes out to the barn. In a few minutes, the
farmer hears a knock on the door. It's the Hindu and he says, "There is
a cow in the barn. It's against my beliefs to sleep with a cow."
So, the Rabbi says, "I'm humble, I'll
sleep in the barn." A few minutes later, the farmer hears another knock
on the door and it's the Rabbi. He says, "It's against my beliefs to sleep
where there is a pig, and there is a pig in the barn."
So, the lawyer is forced to agree
to sleep in the barn. A few minutes later, there is a knock on the door.
It's the pig and the cow...
Plurp.
A pig, a cow, a lawyer, a
bartender
and a woman with a tattoo of a blue
dog
were asleep in a barn ...
Wednesday, December 19, 2001
Blab. Chiding us for chiding the spelling of a reader,
some reader writes:
A foolish consistancy is
the hobgoblin of little minds. Particularly when it comes to spelling.
But, but ... you spelled it the same way again!
Blab. A reader tells us more than we wanted to know.
I don't need electricity
to make my pickle glow. Not that I'm judging anyone who does, mind you.
We are greatly reassured. We think.
Blab. Apropos of our obsession with pickles this week, a reader
sends us the famous pickle
slicer joke, which we fail to reproduce here because it contains the
naughty word penis.
Blab. A reader decides against informing us about an urban legend
Web site.
I was going to mention snopes.com
in relation to that urban legend, but I see it's been mentioned before
on Plurp, so I won't bother.
Thanks so much.
Blab. Another reader, who should have thought better of it, doesn't.
What about ants in your pants
though? Surely not an urban(e) leg end?
-AJL
Ouch.
Blab. A reader demonstrates the astonishing efficacy of our orbital
mind control lasers.
Obviously the 'elephant in
the refrigerator' reference is an attempt to find the following sequence
of (what can loosely be described as) jokes.
- For the uninitiated a Mini is a
classic British car of very small stature, but heaps of class (not the
BMW ones though).
1.
Q. How many elephants can you fit
in a mini?
A. Four. Two in the front, two in
the back.
2.
Q. How do you know if there's an
elephant in the refrigerator?
A. There are footprints in the butter
3.
Q. How do you know if there's are
two elephants in the refrigerator?
A. There are two sets of footprints
in the butter
4.
Q. How do you know if there's are
three elephants in the refrigerator?
A. There are three sets of footprints
in the butter.
5.
Q. How do you know if there's are
four elephants in the refrigerator?
A. There's a mini parked outside
it.
simple see?
-AJL
P.S. I find it worrying that I am
so compelled to fill small boxes on your website with globs of odd text.
Perhaps you could deactivate your mind control device for a few days.
Excellent. Now please send us all your money. Thank you.
Blab. A reader demonstrates that entropy and plot line do not
mix.
If that boy with the ants
in his head had a trap door, like toasters do, that story never would have
gotten anywhere.
Except onto some stupid blog, of course.
Blab. A reader misattributes authorship of yesterday's
urban legend.
I liked your story about
the boy's ant-infested brain. At first I thought it was a childhood
story of Dubya himself, but then the kid died. So I decided it was
actually about Dan Quayle.
Did his mother have any vice presidents that lived?
Blab. In a vain attempt to shield us from life's ongoing annoyance,
a reader claiming to be Helen writes:
You know what Steve did last
night?? He stayed up until 1am fixing my computer. When all
of the rest of us were all tucked away in our feather beds he was slaving
over one download after another. So, don't bug him!
Helen
As if mere angelic service is enough to keep our many detractors from bugging
us.
Blab. A reader who, we conclude, is not a fan of paddling writes:
Curious if the "Paddling
Ontario" was either a tourist icon or a Winter Olympics banner. Or
perhaps the lines and curves of the artwork were some coded message for
Osama bin Laden - perhaps we should notify Grand Marshall Ashcroft.
(Note to self: cancel trip to Ontario)
We understand that Ontario is the next bombing target. So if you're interested
in getting bombed ...
Blab. A reader reminds us to ...
Make sure you clean yourself
if you ever Plurp on a bagel....
When Plurp's on a bagel you can have Plurp any time. You
can also do this without the bagel, of course, but there's less bagel in
that.
Blab. A reader donates the lyrics to John Cage's 4'33".
Lyrics
Thanks ever so much.
Plop. Slime Kane, scooter king, is at it again. This time, he's
telling
the big auto companies:
"Any place people walk, you
could use this," he said. "We think that most people driving their SUV
(sport utility vehicle) are going to want to put a couple of these in the
back" for when they stop.
Uh huh.
Yo. It seems that someone worked out that nerdy
folks have a higher tendency towards some types of autism than do others.
Wired,
dear children that they are, published a test.
Naturally, we took it.
The average score that people get on the test is 16.1. Higher scores
indicate more of a tendency towards autism. Dave
scored 16.4. We scored 21. We have to go now.
Yo. Are we a Satanist?
Well, the test says:
If you had a score of four
(4) or above wrong answers
you are certainly not a Bible believer.
Yeah, well. Given that we had 15 "wrong" answers, we're probably going
to have a tough time portraying ourself as a Billy Graham successor. Lucky
for us that wasn't a life goal.
But there's more! The particular answers we gave indicate:
[...] you are either a satanist
or you have a proclivity to favor satanism over Christianity and the truths
of the
Bible.
[...] you show to have satanist beliefs
and favor witchcraft and satanism whether or not you are a member of
the occult or some coven.
Funny stuff! Basically, if you're not a Christian then you must be a Satanist.
It apparently never occurred to them that there might be something outside
the Judeo-Christian paradigm.
So back off, Jack, or we'll put a curse on you. Or something. (Dave's
subsistence blog)
Plurp.
The blue dog
thought that John
Cage would have scored
high on that
test
Tuesday, December 18, 2001
Blab. A reader who really should know better says she
found this online. Apparently, she felt we needed to know too.
A little boy died because
surgeons found ants in his brain! Apparently this boy had fell asleep with
some sweets in his mouth or with some sweet stuff beside him. Ants
soon got to him and some ants in fact crawled into his ear which somehow
managed to go to his brain. When he woke up, he did not realize that ants
had gone to his head.
After that, he constantly complains
about itchiness around his face. His mother brought him to see a doctor
but the doctor could not figure out what was wrong with him. He took
an X-ray of the boy and to his horror, he found a group of live ants in
his skull. Since the ants are still live, the doctor could not operate
on him cuz the ants are constantly moving about.
The boy at ! last died. So please
be careful when leaving food stuff beside your bed or when eating in bed.
This might attract ants. Most importantly, NEVER eat a sweet before going
to bed. You might fall asleep and suffer same fate as the little boy.
A Google
search on that first line reveals what the rest of you already
knew.
These stories are both fiction,
classic urban legends. There are no documented cases of ants entering
the brain and living there.
We hope that only one of our readers is so endearingly gullible.
Blab. A reader consumed with household machinery writes:
I think the Toaster Industry
should do something about their patented trap-door feature. Countless
cartoons and a few movies have featured trap doors in an office which whisk
away annoyances from the room, sometimes to shark infested pools, sometimes
to a fiery pit, sometimes to a trash heap somewhere on Long Island.
All we need to do is have CNN seek
out another interview with bin Laden. I think the rest is obvious.
This would also work in Congress,
Microsoft, or TV game shows.
Maybe this is what Microsoft means by a "network appliance"? Click!
Blab. A reader adds to the mythos of toaster flaps.
The little flap under the
toaster is for plugging in expansion
modules. I've already added a 32MB
memory upgrade, and the consistancy of my toast has greatly improved.
If not your spelling, eh?
Blab. A reader knows our worst nightmare.
[link]
... this being a very short story about a couple in a Ford that chooses
to die while they are far, far from recognizable civilization, meaning
in small towns.
FORD: I really don’t want
to go on. I am quite depressed.
HERSELF: I hate you, you dumb car.
I shall call the Small Town Mechanic, for he is reliable and inexpensive.
Zackly. Which is why we drive a Miata. It may, at some indefinite
time in the distant future, experience indigestion in a small town (we
do too). But when it does, it will look Good doing it.
Blab. A reader has a new toy.
plurp on a pocket pc! the
mind boggles!
Plurp on a bagel.
Blab. Yet another reader is obsessed with the nocturnal
activities of the blue dog.
How does the Blue Dog have
lurid dreams? I thought dogs only saw black and white. Can't
do much with black and white. Unless you're Ansel Adams of course.
We will ask.
Blab. A reader picks an unlikely plot line.
Hello,
I need your help.
I am the wife of VLAJKO STOJILJKOVIC,
one of the people indicted at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal in Hague. The
indictment is politically motivated. It was for the package the western
worlkd has provided Yogoslavia.
Slobodan and my husband had kept some
funds ,
european currencies, in cash to enable
them take care
of rebel problems. However, now the
country they protected has turned against them. We need to transfer the
money out to safety.
The funds are in excess of 88 million
(in Euros , Swiss Francs and US dollars). They can be shipped under diplomatic
immunity. They will then have to be paid into off
shore accounts. They are not in Yugoslav.
Can you help? Are you capable of handling
funds? Are you trustworthy? I have been asked to offer you 30%. Will that
be ok?i will be also needing you expert advice on business oppurtunity,emigration
and purchasing of housing for family living. Please reply to me at private
email glostoj@excite.com for security. I am grateful.
Glorja.
Why yes, Glorja, we can most certainly help. We have handled funds in the
past, and think we still remember how. We are generally trustworthy, if
you don't count that time in Alabama.
30% does seem a bit low for helping out an indicted war criminal and
known associate of Evildoer Slobodan, though, don't you think? We were
thinking something more like 99%. Of course, we could simply report you
to the Hague. Or perhaps you'd like us to ring up Comrade Ashcroft, hmm?
Well, you get the drift. Please send a certified check for 99% of everything
you own. Then we can talk.
By the way, we know you've been busy lately, but we must inform you
that there is no place called Yugoslavia any more. You might want to make
a note of that.
Blab. At lunch yesterday, friend Ed made a number of outlandish
claims. You're so full of it, we said diplomatically. Oh yeah?
he replied and, later in the day, sent this:
Here is the full text of
the May 1999 NYT article about a guy who built
a working nuclear reactor in his dorm room for a scavenger hunt. Also
check out the /.
posting for the comments by Ted Cabeen.
Here's the story of the 15
year old kid who irradiated himself, partly using smoke detectors.
"After the moon-suited workers
dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels that
were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert."
If you don't think dangerouslaboratories.org
is a reputable news site there is an even longer story at the Britannica
site, but the extra content distracting:
"He keeps five cats and a
spotless household, and looks like a member of Sha Na Na."
Yow! That is very, very impressive, and we resolve never to doubt friend
Ed again. Never! Well, not until next week anyhow.
Yo. More idiocy from our server logs.
You'll be glad to know that the reader who searched Yahoo for water
jet orgasms photos was pointed to a hit in this week
of Plurp. As was the reader who asked for a 7
1/2 foot long spud launcher, and the one who desired information on
cat
poopology. We are always happy to be of service to our readers, though
we do worry about that last one.
And, in a fit of turtle wax, a Web site specializing in reader contributed
oddities somehow found our
home page. (Search for "this is not".) Aren't you thrilled? Or at least
puzzled?
We're pleased, though certainly not surprised, that a person Googling
for wtc tasteless found us. (In fact, our Tasteless But Not Odorless
issue is sixth on
the list!) Welcome!
Impossibly, our Windows
Backgrounds are also number six on a Google
search for such things, even though we're the only
one that links to them. That makes no sense. But it is responsible
for a lot of the random tourists that come to our site. And, omigosh, some
woman-admiring
woman saw fit to grace our very
own images of Charlize Theron and Winona Rider with image-stealing
references. We love that.
Yo. Larry
Ellison's own National ID card. (Dave's
subsistence blog)
Yo. It's not gingerbread, but here's a model
of Fallingwater constructed entirely of Legos. We wonder if the roof
leaks. Here's a book that shows you how to make one out of Graham
crackers. If that urge should strike you. Here's a guy who made a Fallingwater
model smaller than the width of a human hair. Very low ceilings, we
suppose.
We hope that's helpful. (Actually, we don't care at all. It just makes
us feel better to say that.)
 Yo.
Must be a conspiracy. Boxes are arriving at our apartment, filled full
of mysterious things and wrapped so as to obscure their contents.
Well, most of them. Sometimes, people send us things that they forgot
to wrap. Take (and would you, please) the two-foot cardboard Gedney pickle
poster that arrived today. Frankly, it looks entirely obscene, though Helen
is not positive that was the intent.
We might have been in less trouble if it had been obscured until later
in the month. Or maybe not.
Plurp. Don't do this.
Really.
Plurp. Without comment. Because, really, what would we say?
Yo. The world is once again safe. In an unexpected turn of events,
that vile and pregnant Aberration
Creature was killed while attempting itself to maul some largish herbivore.
Gotta watch out for those vicious molars!
Plurp. The three most common searches within our Web site this
past week were:
-
angelina
jolie
-
britney
-
get
an elephant in a refrigerator
Number 1 we understand. Definitely. Number 2 we can probably forgive. But
somebody has got to explain
number 3 to us. (Frighteningly, it gets
a hit.)
Plurp.
The blue dog
was
Ansel Adams
Monday, December 17, 2001
Blab. A reader takes a poll.
I wonder how many people
realize that there's a little trap door underneath their toaster that they
can open to clean out the crumbs.
Oh! That would have drastically increased the useful life of our last seventeen
toasters. Do political systems have little doors like this?
Blab. A reader helps us plan our holiday
entertainment.
How do you pull an audience
of obsessive, mostly male football viewers away from the one television
show, the Super Bowl, that they have waited all year to see?
NBC will try to do just that this
February by dangling a bevy of Playboy Playmates during the most vulnerable
part of the Super Bowl show: halftime. In a bold, and some might say brazen,
attack on what is invariably the most popular television attraction of
the year, NBC has come up with a plan to broadcast a special edition of
its much vilified reality series "Fear Factor," featuring a competition
among six recent Playboy centerfold models.
We never were much of a fan of football.
Plurp. We were defying madness today by glancing through the
access logs to our humble Web site and noticed two odd things. (1) They
were surprisingly large, over which we felt all aglow until we noticed
(2) that this was because people were image-Googling for something, found
an image on our site, and decided to suck down all of our images. Naturally,
this included all of our deservedly famous Windows
Backgrounds. And this used up more host bandwidth than we would have
expect for Our Little Backwater.
Feeling that this might somehow be linked to something that might somehow
be linked to something that might somehow be linked to terrorism, we plopped
some
index
files in those directories to discourage such poking around on the part
of tourists.
We know. You're fascinated.
Yow. Did we mention that we saw Vanilla Sky (Cruise /
Cruz / Cameron / Cameron) last weekend? Well, we did. Highly recommended!
Academy Award for the most wonderfully confusing movie ever. We're still
talking about it. It's nothing - nothing - like the trailers would
lead you to believe. Go see it!
Plurp.
The blue dog
just woke up from a
lurid dream
Sunday, December 16, 2001
Blab. A reader seeks investment
advice from us.
Man, that Blue Mountain stock
really is a dog !
Of interesting note, about a year
ago that stock traded at over A DOLLAR a share. People really lost
their shirt on THAT one !
Remember: Don't Buy Blue Stock.
Blab. A reader proves its superiority to us by send us this ...
[link]
..., the architectural plans to Fallingwater that we were unable
to find yesterday. This is going to be quite a challenging gingerbread
house project for Helen!
Blab. A reader too lazy to find the Web reference nevertheless
sends us more clarification on New York being one of the fifty
most polite cities in the U.S.
N.Y. is most polite city?
"Were they drinking?" [...]
Fortunately, our own impressive Web search abilities turn up this Reuters
article:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New
York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Friday he was quite surprised his city
-- whose citizens have been called brave and tough but rarely genteel --
would be named as America's most polite place.
"One has to wonder. I won't say, 'What
were they smoking?' I will say, 'What were they drinking?" Giuliani said
at a news conference in response to an annual survey conducted by an etiquette
expert deeming New York and Charleston, South Carolina, as the most U.S.
polite cities.
"One has to really wonder, just what
are the other cities like?" he added.
Not merely one of the fifty most polite, but the most polite.
And they say drug use is declining.
Blab. A reader express a certain sense of shock.
OUT
OF STOCK???? They ran out of electrons?
You're shopping at a place called FoolMart and you're complaining at us?
Look, there are only a finite number of electrons in the world and sometimes
there just aren't enough for everyone. Sorry.
Blab. A reader who doesn't have any problem pronouncing it writes:
I don't have any problem
pronouncing it.
It's A Jay Ell. :-/ -AJL
Now it looks to be a math problem in reverse Polish notation. This is getting
so complex!
Yak.
... the cave-and-tunnel crowd
...
Yak. From the chorus of a song we were singing in a dream last
night.
...
Doin' the Ramadan Rumble!
Yo. That vile Aberration
Creature is still alive, still mauling its more innocent brethren and
cistern and, most scandalously, still pregnant.
Plurp. What an interesting cast of characters at a party tonight.
There was the guy "from an old New York family" who told us that he was
unaware, growing up, that he had developed such a cultured sense of gentility,
then spent several minutes explaining that we shook hands the wrong way.
There was the professional clown who, when a napkin caught fire in a candle
flame, announced, We have a fire here!, perhaps expecting to be
handed a seltzer bottle. There was a man who worked for several years on
a lavishly furnished doll house, with microscopically exact details, as
a "sanity project". And there was a woman who, after explaining the lengthy
and incomprehensible rules for giving out Secret Santa presents, huffed
that we just weren't doing it right.
A man in
the park said, squirrels only find 10 percent of what they bury.
Plurp.
The blue dog
thought the squirrels probably
wouldn't find
any of them
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