Plurp: Not dead yet

Bigger!

2001.12.30 : 2002.01.05

Saturday, January 5, 2002
Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for an oracle of modern culture, a reader claiming inappropriately to diminution writes:
I want to know why on earth all of those people down south are getting so much attention for their recent snowfall. I realize that it's not that common, but you'd think that there would be more important things for the national news to cover than a few inches of snow.
-puzzled mini Midwest Correspondent
Our theory is that modern news is about the easily told, surprising story. Afghanistan unlikely to form democratic state any time soon is not news because it is too complicated. Raccoon killed by car at night is not a story because it is not surprising.
Snow in Minnesota is in the same category as that dead raccoon, we fear. Snow in Atlanta is more surprising. And, because the people there have no idea how to deal with it, their snow removal techniques are laughable and their drivers are completely incompetent. Which makes for good visuals. And that's news.
Hey - you asked.

Blab. Rather than sending us the URL, our new correspondent sends us the text.
What do you get when you cross a mountain climber with an elephant?
(It's a joke.) -mini Midwest Correspondent
punchline: Nothing; you can't cross a scalar.
See? The mountain climber ...

Blab. Anxious to show us up on that Weather Channel thing, various reader write:
[link]
Oh, and if you to page through a list of all the channels, ten at a time, go here.
-Ed

Channel 72. For the rest of the listings, go here.
Those of us who don't watch television tend to be quicker thinkers.
We bow before the radiance of your superior Web search abilities.

Blab. A reader wants to help us out and sends us this offer. Twice.
I noticed your email address on a physician list serve related to growing your practice. With your permission, we would like to send you information regarding new approaches to improving and/or growing your patient base, business tips for private practice physicians, and workshops and events for healthcare practitioners. To opt-in to our monthly e-newsletter and events calendar click here.
Sincerely,
Victor Black
Practice Growth Consultant
Tell you what, Vic. Find a job you're good at. Thank you.

Blab. A reader sends us an apocryphal quote.
"I have NO IDEA, dear! I just clicked on it!!!!"
It seems to be the plague of the modern age, doesn't it?

Blab. A problematic palindromist writes:
In base 1, everything is palindromic.
Yes, well, all one of them.

Blab. A reader worries about our eating habits.
But...did you have popcorn on a bagel?
If so, we could have had popcorn any time.

Blab. A reader explains the Mystery of Helen.
Helen is a figment of the blue dog's imagination.
We're not sure if this explanation clears up more problems than it raises, but we do appreciate the suggestion.

Blab. A reader who may have inside information about a recent question writes:
Helen is that cute girl he lives with.
-mini Midwest Correspondent
The blue dog? That would explain a lot.

Blab. A reader picks up the gauntlet of our recent puzzle and shoves it up its nose.
Speciation in asexual animals:
God made them that way. Thank you very much.
You are the weakest link. Good-bye!

Blab. A reader who was actually paying attention in biology class that day writes:
When the asexual organism undergoes mitosis one of the nucleic acids in the backbone copies wrong or gets deleted or something along those lines. Because all of the future offspring of that individual are genetically identical POOF! you have a new species.
That's my guess.
-mini MW Correspondent
Pretty good explanation! So does that mean that the number of asexual species is equal to the integral of the population of such creatures times the mutation rate, integrated from the beginning of time until now?

Blab. Riffing on our sleepless question, a reader sounds especially authoritative.
A few notes on biology:
1) Asexual reproduction still produces random mutations, just not as rapidly as sexual reproduction. That is why sexed species are far more prevalent in the macroscopic scale - they can adapt more rapidly to changing environmental
stimuli.
2) A biological entity is (generally) considered a second species within the same genus (Homo Erectus vs Homo Sapiens) when multiple specimins of the two species cannot mate and produce viable (nonsterile) young. This is not an
exact definition.
3) A link with a discussion of the topic. More questions than answers, but perhaps that is for what a scientist should be looking: the next level of understanding.
--RAO
Are there, in fact, more sexual species than asexual species? That doesn't seem obvious a priori, even if the former adapts more rapidly than the latter.

Yo. Truck hijacking in Southern California is an interesting lesson in the economics of crime.

Plop. Are you sharing music files? If so: You have no privacy; get over it.
Thousands of Internet users who installed popular software for sharing music and other computer files [LimeWire, Grokster and KaZaA] also unwittingly accepted a program that tracked their Web surfing habits.
The tracking program in question links Internet users to an online sweepstakes game, ClickTillUWin. Players pick numbers and win cash prizes based on results in the Pennsylvania Lottery. [...] The program collects information about sites visited over the past two days in order to better target ads.
But then, you'd be happy to have the sites you've visited published in the local paper, wouldn't you?

Plurp.
The blue dog
once separated into
two asexual species

Friday, January 4, 2002
Blab. Unable to shake the hypnotic meme of palindromic dates from its aching head, a reader writes:
using our English version scoring system, wouldn't 10/02/2001 (February 10th, for those on this side of the water) be palindromic? LONG after the Fun-filled Dark Ages of the 12th century....
slight oversight I'm sure (by a mere 800 years)
From this, we learn that palindromosity depends upon representation. Philately recapitulates ignominy. Stuff like that.
We wonder if there is a nonredundant representation in which all dates are palindromic. (Actually, we don't wonder that at all, but we were compelled to type it anyway.)

Blab. In those few brief moments during which they thought the mind control lasers were turned off yesterday, our readers noticed that they were busy.
Thank you, we used the brief moment to learn to spell palindrome properly. -AJL
We know.

Blab. A reader indulges in rabid speculation on an already-solved puzzle.
Was your chest X-ray looking for Anthrax spores?
Perhaps looking for evidence of Canned Beets in your system.
Then again, maybe they were looking for bin Laden?
Please score 100 points if any of these are remotely correct.
Gleefully following the directives of our Treasured Reader, we score 100 points, which puts us in the lead. By 100 points, we think.

Blab. Rising to our Web challenge to find the Weather Channel on our local cable box, a reader states the obvious:
You are ill. Go home!
The link is, of course, the reader's answer to the challenge. Curiously, the link doesn't work on my copy of Netscrape. Fortunately, this reader's does:
Is this what you're looking for?
Lamar
Both reveal that the Weather Channel is on channel 72 on our local cable box.
We are Enlightened. Or at least Informed. And oh-so-impressed with our resourceful readers!

Blab. A reader who may be new to our particular form of madness writes:
Fun stuff, and I enjoyed exploring your site -- but who is Helen, please?
JL
Why, thank you! But about that Helen thing, we have no idea. Perhaps our readers know?

Yow. Popcorn last night. We must be feeling better!

Yak. What the voices are saying today.
What a train wreck, Mr. Hardy.
What a train wreck, Mrs. Jones.
All the kids enjoyed the party,
Now we're standing here alone.

Plop. Friend Jeff at work sent us a solstice card yesterday, inside of which was a picture of their two kids. How did they get so old when we haven't aged at all? Twin Paradox, probably, but when were we abducted in the near-lightspeed ship? It's puzzling, isn't it?

Plurp. We haven't been talking about anything interesting in these parts lately. No doubt our intellect was sapped by vast expanses of rhinovirus. Or the mind control lasers. Or whatever.
So we thought we'd tell you what kept us awake for several hours one night last week: speciation. Honest. What causes the creation of new species?
The problem is this. Suppose you have a population of some species, say bandersnatch, all romping together happily in Bandersatch Valley. Newborn individuals are be genetically different from their parents, but only a little. It turns out that the population as a whole can undergo genetic drift, slowly losing that famed bandersnatch tail, or developing somewhat longer teeth, in response to environmental pressures. But you don't get two separate species. That's because any single individual genetically different enough to be unable to mate with the bulk of the population will never encounter an equally different individual with which to mate. It's too improbable.
The classic theory of speciation, as we recalled it in the middle of the night anyway, goes like this. Some subset of the bandersnatch population crosses the Mountains of Madness during a freakishly warm summer and becomes separated from the rest of the population. Millennia pass, and the two populations undergo genetic drift. The original population loses its tails. The separated population develops sharper teeth. And, in the process, the two populations become sexually incompatible.
Then, eons later, during another impossibly hot summer, the two populations get back together. Presto! Two species in the same place. (Or the formerly isolated species wipes out the original species in an equally artificial example of punctuated equilibrium.)
Yeah, great. But clearly nonsensical. It's bad enough that it depends on two events that, by definition, must be wildly improbable just to separate the populations and then get them back together. But, worse, it seems way too focused on species restricted to the ground. What about birds, or bees? Worse yet, what about pelagic fish, which have a huge and undifferentiated breeding ground? It just doesn't seem plausible. (Even if there is fun stuff like ring speciation, in which seagulls around the arctic circle can all breed with their geographical neighbors, but not with those diametrically across the pole.)
Fortunately, we either remembered it wrong or the evolutionary biologists have been doing useful work. Sure, geographical isolation is one mechanism for speciation. But there are many others. Individuals could, for instance, have an innate preference for mates that are the same size as they are, smell the same as they do, etc. That gets you lots of species in a hurry with no need to banish them beyond the Mountains of Madness. (Though there must, of course, be some evolutionary advantage to having that innate preference in the first place.) For that matter, learned traits (e.g. birdsong, etiquette) may be used as self-reinforcing mate selection mechanisms.
Imagine, a breakaway species of humans that all lift their teacups with their little fingers raised! Fun stuff.
Now an enticing exercise for our readers: Explain speciation in asexual organisms. And no fair looking it up - think it through for yourselves. Heh.

Plurp. We miss making New Year's resolutions. We don't make them for ourselves because we never keep them, and making them under those conditions just strikes us as futile. So, instead, we've decided to make up New Year's resolutions for other people.

Person Resolution

John Ashcroft Actually read the Constitution.

Dubya Try speaking from a teleprompter that does not use phonetic spelling.

Billy Gates Admit it. It's a monopoly.

Larry Ellison Repeat in front of the mirror every day: "It's not actually all about me."

Him Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned Stop shedding.

We deem each of these to be equally probable.
Readers are invited to suggest Resolutions For Others.

Yo. Headline in the NYT that we cannot conceptualize without plummeting into surrealism.
After Black Teenager Is Slain,
Norway Peers Into a Mirror
After <event>, <unrelated category error>. Ya know?

Plurp. Our undergraduate school seems to have identified someone like us, for whatever reason, as (a) a graduate and (b) astonishingly rich. Accordingly, Steven Robert White received the following solicitation yesterday.
Chancellor <omitted> and Mrs. <omitted>
cordially invite you to the
Chancellor's Year-end Reception
Saturday, the first of December
Two thousand one
The Faculty Club
University of <omitted>
Please reply by November 26

Dare we tell them that we have master keys to their campus, including both the Faculty Club and the Chancellor's office? Or that it's 2002? Prolly not.

Plurp. Here's a shocker. "Based on the continuing high level of generalized threat information," Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has extended the domestic high alert warning, formerly set to expire on January 2, to March 11, past the date of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The previous high alert warning extended the next-previous high alert warning which, in turn, extended the next-next-previous high alert warning.
We appreciate how very complex Tom's job must be.

Yow. Would you like to live in a city that travels around the world once every two years, following the sun, giving you access to lots of different countries but containing, within itself, a fully self-sustaining community? Well, come 2006, maybe you can.

Plurp.
After the blue dog,
justice soup
...

Thursday, January 3, 2002
Blab. Responding to our insanely clever puzzle, a reader writes:
>Why did the doctor order a chest x-ray?
To rule out pneumonia, would be my guess.
Whereas another reader writes:
A chest x-ray would show if you had pneumonia or not, a good thing to know if are having respiratory problems.
Oh. Yeah. And here we were all excited about a differential diagnosis for pulmonary anthrax.

Blab. Demonstrating that palindromic innumeracy is a symptom of the common cold, a reader writes:
Er...no. 29/11/1192 is palindronic, but there have been several since. Most recent 10/02/2001 (which occurred once for the English and once for the USAian date types). Strange that they are both base 3 also. Gotta mean something: like, any sequence > 1 will produce palindrones eventually? Sadly, you chaps don't get another one until 01/02/2010, which once again will work for both date styles. The next one which will actually be the same date in both places - (a truly international palindrone) will be 02/02/2020. Having written all of that, I really can't believe I just bothered to write all of that. Please, please, please turn off your mind control lasers for a while.
-A "Who scored a perhaps unsurprising 36 on the Autism
Test" JL
Oh. Yeah. In gratitude, we turned the mind control lasers off for a few minutes today. We hope you enjoyed these brief but bewildering moments of free will.

Blab. Demonstrating that we're not the only one with a cold, a reader writes:
>And the first entirely palindromic date since,
>lessee, Nov. 29, 1192? (Did we get that right?)
What about December 29, 1292 (29/12/1292)?
Um, the reverse of which would be 29/21/2192 and ... ?

Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for a meat market, a hungry doctor writes:
I need a headless goat. Stat.
This being a picture of a U.S. soldier type, astride a horse, carrying a headless goat. Your tax dollars at work.

Blab. A reader ascribes magical powers to our mundane blog.
Oh, the Power of Plurp.
During the three months of Oct, Nov, Dec 2001, the site www.octobop.com had a single by far stand out day featuring 160 hits (the Nov. graph is here -- scroll down a bit.)
This is exactly the day that Octobop got its big Plurp mention (see this and search for the phrase "oddly-shaped devices that make noises.")
If the Plurp god would mention how many hits Plurp itself typically gets, one could calculate the "click through" percentage. I (for reasons difficult to fathom) seem to be interested in knowing the chances that a random reader would bother to follow such an obscure reference.
Thanks!
--Randy
We actually dunno how many readers we get. We've been poking through some recent logs in the past few days, but our viral innumeracy (see above) makes the results somewhat suspect.
But it's (something like) 20-80 unique (or an least non-conformist) people who look at the current Plurp entry each day. (Lots of other people come to other parts of the site via search engines, but that's a very funny story for later.)
Current readership is off about 25% due either to the holidays or the recent spate of alien abductions, both of which we missed because of this stupid cold.
(If your server keeps track of the referring Web site, as ours does, you can extract the info you're looking for directly from the logs. But you knew that.)
So, instead, let's do this.
Notice To All Plurp Readers
Immediate Action Required
Please click on this here link, right now! Please. It will take you to a very obscure page on Randy's Web site - one that no one in his right mind goes to. Which means that you, dear reader, are extra qualified.
Doing this will make little binary ticky marks in Randy's logs which will, in turn, permit the poor, neglected Octobop site to revel in the manifest Power of Plurp! Or something like that.
We're sure the mysterious Randy will let us know how this turns out.

Blab. A mean, regressive reader writes:
I fear the first Pooh quiz is graded on just one axis, which (by regression to the mean) would make almost everyone Kanga. --Kanga
Are we not Pooh? We are Kanga!

Blab. Another reader teeters under the power of seductive root vegetables.
I stared at the beets for hours today...so beautiful. I almost tasted them--but no. Not yet. Soon, I will. Such beautiful beets.
We fear it is too late for this reader.

Blab. A reader awakens from a long winter nap.
hey, we have 2002
Yes. It's pronounced toot.

Yo. Web challenge! Find an authoritative Web source for the numerical channel corresponding to the Weather Channel in Time Warner's Manhattan Cable TV. We couldn't find it anywhere! Go ahead - portray your superiority.

Plop. It's time to play Who Wants to Be an Argentinean President! Problem is, nobody's been able to get past the $100 level recently.

Yo. We have registered with TVeyes so that they will tell us the number of times Plurp is mentioned on TV. We have our own estimates, but we're not telling. (Project Me)

Yo. Former alcoholic, drug addict and guitar legend Eric Clapton, 56, just married his 25 year old girlfriend. Something to do in retirement, we suppose.

Yo. The top three searches on our Web site this past week were:

jennifer lopez

lauren redniss

aaliyah

We detect no trend.

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be nothing more than
an obscure pattern of accesses in a
server log that
no one monitored

Wednesday, January 2, 2002
Blab. Stirred from sleep by our analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a reader reports:
I watched 2001 on video once. On fast forward. Waiting for it to get exciting. It didn't. Still, at least on fast forward it takes less time out of my life.
We feel the same way about reader contributions. Not yours, of course. But read on.

Blab. A reader consumed with surrealist-retro-tech-lust writes:
It'd be cool to have a stove clock with a CRT display! Ultra-retro. Like that "Brazil" movie. Open a store!
Now we know what to get you for St. Swithin's Day.

Blab. A reader makes another stab at self-defense.
>>Define "display technology". Do digital watches
>>count? The clock on the stove?
>So you're saying that your digital watch, and the
>clock on your stove, have CRT displays? That's
>pretty weird. You need to get out more
Did I say that? No, it doesn't appear so. Nice redirection attempt, though.
I was mentally counting 'display technologies' in the house, and if you count TV and computer screens, it's a tie between CRT and flat panel (four of each). However, I then got to pondering the question -- which is very poorly specified, and so the 'display technologies' count might in fact not be a tie between CRT and <other things> in my house.
For example. We have a digital watch, numerous clocks on domestic appliances, a mysterious numerical readout on the water-softener, a fridge door covered in magnetic thingies supporting bits of paper, a cork board with other bits of paper attached by pins -- which of these things are 'display technologies' in your question?
Um, we might have meant something like "dominant display technology for things that, in 1969, used CRTs as a dominant display technology." But we are so seldom sure just whose thoughts they are that amble about noisily in our head, that we're loathe to claim certainty.
We're pretty sure we weren't referring to pieces of paper stuck to your fridge, which probably weren't even there in 1969.

Blab. Our most agile reader suggests the proper method of consuming Middle Eastern fruits.
If you use dates correctly (i.e. English style) then the date
20/02/2002 will be entirely palindromic. So there. -AJL
Ooh! We like that! And the first entirely palindromic date since, lessee, Nov. 29, 1192? (Did we get that right?)

Blab. An attentive reader writes:
Overheard at the office, and submitted for consideration as a Helenism:
    tearbreaker
      [as in 'that film was a real tearbreaker']
     * tearjerker
     * heartbreaker
Absolutely, and a good one at that! Muchos thankos.

Plop. A day without being sick in bed is like ...
Well, actually, we wouldn't know.

Yo. Here's a puzzle for all you clever readers out there. When we went to the doctor this last weekend to see if there was anything they could do for this stupid cold (there wasn't), the doctor ordered chest x-rays. In our experience, this is an unusual thing to do. In fact, we're pretty sure this is the first time we've had a chest x-ray for a cold.
The question is: Why did the doctor order a chest x-ray? (Hint: There is a good reason.)

Plop. We somehow missed that Xerox PARC is being "spun off" (aka "drawn and quartered"). Wave buh-bye to a great, seminal research institution. (thinkhole)

Yow. Another link to Our Humble Blog! Now it's thribble (no doubt another compatriot of Ian's), in whose blog we make the heart-thumping short list. Time for a cold shower.

Yo. It will come as no surprise to you that, Pooh-character-wise, we are Kanga. (Though we must admit that it came as quite a surprise to us. What's that bit about being great with children, anyhow?) (Burnt Sienna, who we still think is a guy)
OTOH, according to the Pooh-Piglet Psychometric Personality Profiler, we are:
13 Tigger
20 Piglet
31 Pooh, and
36 Eeyore
...with not a trace of Kanga at all.
So, you know, go figure.

Plurp.
Pooh-character-wise
the blue dog was
J. Fred Shirley-Harold

Tuesday, January 1, 2002
Blab. A lone and lonely reader with nothing better to do on New Year's Eve attempts to pick nits in our précis of 2001, in which we said that CRTs were no longer the dominant display technology.
Define "display technology". Do digital watches count? The clock on the stove?
So you're saying that your digital watch, and the clock on your stove, have CRT displays? That's pretty weird. You need to get out more.

Plop. Different year, same stupid cold. We've gone from a husky croon to a creaky vibrato. Urk.

Yow. It's the first palindromic year since 1991. And, it's another base 3 day, as is tomorrow. Readers are invited to divine the cosmic significance thereof.

Yow. Rather contrary to our expectations, there appear to have been no Terrorist Bad Things on New Year's Eve, anywhere. Now all we need is another 365 days like that and we'll have a pretty good year.

Yo. For those of you wondering about the plane that crashed at IBM headquarters last night, you can read about it here. Other than the unfortunate pilot, who is now flying under his own power, no one was hurt. It was a small private plane that crashed in the parking lot of IBM Armonk, a few miles away from where we work.

Plurp. Happy 100th birthday to Marmite, and a Happy New Year to Baron Justus Von Liebig too.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was once fermented,
spiced and put in
little blue jars

Monday, December 31, 2001
Blab. A reader with perhaps more computational skill than we, writes:
A Rhesus+
MonkeyCam!

Blab. A reader in danger of losing its immortal soul to the evil beets writes:
Ah, the spawn of the devil! That explains much! Particularly the apparent disparity between their taste and their seductively beautiful color.
Mmmm.... the color of beets.
No! No, dear reader! Run fleeing from that vile vegetable - before it is too late.

Plop. Would someone please just shoot me now? It's clearly not a cold. It's a plot from the lowest rungs of hell, from which we would rather hang ourselves than have to endure this any longer.
We have canceled even our late-made New Year's Eve plans, and instead plan to lie around home complaining. Given our general state of exhaustion, we probably won't even make it until midnight,
This really does suck.

Plurp. In a weird, delirious dream last night, we were partitioning the universe with Voronoi diagrams, either as a scientific exercise or as part of a huge online game, which promised that our highest-level Voronoi diagram would be worth a lot of money in the context of the game. (Caterina)

Yak.
It was the Helen M. Exploding Jordan Almond Trick. You mean you haven't seen that before?

Yo.
A Florida man arrested on charges of attempting to board a flight with a loaded gun says he forgot the weapon was in his briefcase and worries the incident will affect his credibility as a transportation safety consultant.
Ya think?

Yow. Today's small treat: Iranian pistachios, larger and sweeter than the usual pistachios you get. We keep hoping that world trade will lead to global interdependence and world peace, but it doesn't always seem to work that way.

Yow. Lileks is back. Hoop-La!

Yo. OK. We've put this off as long as we possibly can. We now crack open (for the first time!) a copy of the video 2001: A Space Odyssey that Helen gave us some fifteen years ago and see how well Kubrick and Clarke did in anticipating social and technical trends from their vantage point of thirty-two long years ago.
2001 is the only SF movie in which we never found any scientific flaws, no doubt as a result of Kubrick's fanatic attention to detail. We first saw it in 1969, in the only day-long break we had from an NSF-sponsored astronomy and mathematics summer school for high school juniors. (Yes, the same summer that humans landed on the moon.) We were given the choice between 2001 and the musical Hair, one of the first popular plays to display full frontal nudity. It is a tribute to our nerdhood that the vote for 2001 was unanimous.
So here we go.

Kubrick & Clarke's 2001 Our 2001

God-like alien race that directs the course of human evolution Not that we know of

Orbital weapon systems Sadly, yes

Large, multinational space station Not quite

Routine commercial space flight Don't we wish!

CRTs as dominant display technology Not any more

No change in women's fashion since the groovy 60's No, thank god

Dramatically less bizarre men's clothing since the groovy 60's Yes, thank god

Automated security checks in airports Not really

Videophones take over No, still no

Routine if suspicious cooperation between the U.S. and Soviet Union Soviet Union?

Large, permanent moon colonies Not a chance

Handheld (notebook) computers Bingo!

Video camera the size of your hand Bingo!

Discovery of advanced alien artifacts Nope

Manned interplanetary travel Nope

Human hibernation technology Nope

True AI, and in life-critical situations Nope and nope

Computers that trounce people at chess Yes

Computers as central to the control of complex systems like spacecraft Yes

Dramatically new, extreme high density electronics Absolutely!

Dawn of a new evolutionary era for humankind Not that we know of

Not a particularly great record, all in all. But then, few futurists have done better.
Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
-- (Attributed to) Yogi Berra
A great, great movie, though.

Yow. Did you ever read all of the instructions for the zero-gravity toilet?

Yow. 2001: A Lego Odyssey.

Plurp.
The blue dog's
mind
was going

Sunday, December 30, 2001
Blab. Again in the itty bitty Blab box, a reader writes:
Big blab
And then, displaying great originality, in the Big Blab Box:
Blue blab!
What secret meaning is implied?

Blab. A reader writes:
Mmm... Penguins...
Possibly, though the URL seems to misbehave. Even clicking on the Penguins button results in a messy, unintelligible picture at best.
What secret meaning is implied?

Blab. A reader answers our question.
Alternate answer D:
Beets are the spawn of the devil and should be dealt with accordingly.
Many spastic greetings to you...And a Happy New Year, also.
(PS: Alternate answer D can only been seen during certain phases of the moon...Like Moon Runes for all you hairy-toed fans.)
Many Hippy Returns to our treasured reader, and everyone back at Riptide Campus.

Plop. We're not dead yet, but we're pretty frickin' close. Our evil rhinovirus has spawned a colony - either of it or of its bacterial lackeys - in our lungs, which we were already using for something else. Several hours in the NYU emergency ward today resulted in the following sage advice from our learned medical community: Yep, you're sick; tough it out.
To express our gratitude, we are currently working on the world's largest collection of olive green sputum, for donation in the near future to the NYU medical center trust fund.

Plop. We conclude the Web hosting really must be impossible. You see, neither our previous, clueless, Web host (which was, as you'll recall, kidnapped by aliens) or our current, allegedly clueful, Web host, seem able to keep our trivial little Web site running. Our site (as well as Dave's and Ian's - we all use the same host) has been down all day. (Though, oddly, we seem to be able to upload this.)
We are having so much fun today.

Plurp.
The blue dog decided to
colonize the
lungs of a Web hosting
company

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