Plurp: Cat whiskers in brine

Bigger!

2002.01.27 : 2002.02.02

Saturday, February 2, 2002
Blab. A reader sends a warning, an opportunity, and a reference to a really, really old game.
You are right to be concerned about 2/2/2002. Watch out for this guy. On the other hand, he might be able to help Him Whose Name Was Eaten By A Grue to rebalance his yin and yang.
Yeah, we've been meaning to take him into the shop for just that purpose.

Blab. A reader educates us. And it's about time.
Interesting parallel to the Yin and Yang:
The symbol shows a balance between good and evil (at least, that's what my dragon-master taught me). The cat shows a gross imbalance, symbolizing a much greater evil force in the Nameless One.
Does Helen know this?

There may be some hope here yet. That Whose Name Is Hidden in the Ear Wax of Satan is mostly grey, that is, mostly a blend of black and white. So, rather than Yin (the dark) swallowing Yang (the light), perhaps we can look at it as Yin and Yang mostly mixed together except for that Yang part on his feet, chest and chin.
We wonder if Helen knows what that means. We sure don't.

Blab. A reader is clearly going for the all-time record for longest rant submitted to Plurp. Readers with short attention spans, Ian, may click here to skip it.
Gee, I guess some of your readers can't actually read. Who knew? Anyway, just so you know, (and I thought it was pretty obvious actually - you seemed to get it) what I was poking a little fun at was the way that many "evolutionists" are as unthinking in their acceptances of the theory as are certain fundamentalists. Not just Christians, there are many others. The point is, and I thought I made it pretty well (for a stupid person), it's clear that we have gone from swallowing one lot of rigid teaching to another - another that is clearly more bizzare and strange, but because it doesn't have to involve uncomfortable things like God, we are allowed to accept them. Much of the stuff we see on the TV and in the crappy populist media *does* very much give the impression that evolution is an ordered proecess, controlled not by "God" but by the things evolving. This is preposterous, and not only that, very silly (not the God bit, but the implied descision making of the respective evolvees).
I'm not disputing evolution, I think that it's irrefutable; what I'm saying is that for many people it's substitution of one faith for another, and is expressed by them in very lame terms which quite clearly misunderstand what's going on. I wasn't quite rude enough to point out which of your readers prompted me to this rant (which was pure stream of conciousness ranting - and I thought it was funny), but there are clearly *some* who don't understand the mechanisms involved, and if they really thought about it, their faith in it would fall apart. Our education system (in the UK and in the west generally) turns out half illiterate and woefully unintellectual youths, who no more understand the reasons that they believe what they do about life and evolution than does the most brainwashed child growing up in the Bible belt of Western USA. That's what annoys me. It's not an understanding of science; the beauty of chaos, or the extraordinary (and chaotic) mechanisms which drive life on this planet; that they have, but a belief system made up of a rigid heirarchical system with it's basis in the theory of the racial superiority not just of humanity in general, but the white man in particular. That has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with justifying obscenities like the slave trade and segregation. We are still feeling the effects of these things today.
Somehow, most people have forgotten that evolution isn't on pause, and humanity is far from immune from it's more brutal effects. Your recent point about the ecosystem was wonderful, and yet still, people trotted out the same rubbish - save the species, save the earth. The earth has been doing fine for a few billions of years thanks very much. Actually what they're really saying is, lets try to change what we don't like - evolution.
The theories of evolution (oh, yes, I know there's more than one) are pretty sound, and can be demonstrated on many levels, but when challenged most people just do exactly what your oh so clever reader did - they react just like a religious fundamentalist would when you challenge them about their beliefs and resort to name calling and rudeness. I guess it really proves my point.
More than anything else, I just wish people would think about things, and about why they believe what they do. If they did, then we'd be in a whole different world. Western people prefer not to think, we think we already know it all, and you know, I think that makes us more dangerous to the ourselves than all the corrupt regimes in Africa, Asia, and the rest of the world put together. If we can't learn from the successful civilisations of the past - Egypt, Rome, Byzantine, then we are doomed to repeat their mistakes, and become extinct through decadence as did they. All our culture, all our values, all that we are and hold dear will be swept away. Why? That's evolution. The fittest for survival are not the ones who sit on their ass and do nothing; their putrefying brains slowly decaying in front of a cathode tube; but the burgeoning, lusty, collective mind of those nations or societies who want what we have, to be the primary predator, and are prepared to stand up and take it from us.
*That's* evolution, and I pray (oops, guess I gave myself away there) that we never forget it.
-AJL
Well, wasn't that cathartic? We believe we'll let that be the last 800 words on the subject, lest we run the risk of turning our meager blog into an historic (and perhaps histrionic) flame war.
We must admit, however, that we long for the opportunity to sit on our ass and do nothing; our putrefying brain slowly decaying in front of a cathode tube. Wouldn't that be nice?
Oh - wait!

Yo. Ever wondered what happened to Jaron Lanier, former High Potentate of Virtual Reality? A correspondent points us here, where we learn that ...
Lanier and his colleagues [...] would translate the contents of every issue of the [New York Times Magazine] this year from two-digit computer code (0-1) into four-digit DNA language (A-G-C-T) and then splice that information into the introns [(the "unused" parts of DNA)] of . . . a cockroach.
They don't stop there. They have worked out a careful program of interbreeding that would ensure the genetic transmission of this information. Thus, after 14 years, every cockroach in New York would be an archival cockroach.
We can hardly wait.

Plop. Speaking of which, there are some very strange people in the world. And they're all on the Web.

Yo. Please don't ask.

Yow. How long has this been there without our noticing it? A random place-name generator for the brain-jellied writer!
Hatcher Spring, Iowa
Brogna's Junction, Ohio
Geffers, Wisconsin
Valiquette Woodlands, Connecticut
Great stuff!

Yow. Here's a Windows background you might enjoy if, like us, you are quite demented. Tile it, of course.

Plurp.
In the unused parts of
the blue dog,
scientists found an encoding
of the DNA of a cockroach

Friday, February 1, 2002
Blab. For reasons we have been unable to divine, a reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to a rather large picture of Santa Claus surrounded by five teenage girls whom we might charitably describe as ... well, whom we might charitably not describe. If we made our money by understanding the motivations of our readers, we would be that homeless person on the corner that you try not to notice.

Blab. On that great anti-evolution reader rant yesterday, some reader or other writes:
"At what point did the plant decide that luscious fruit would be an advantage?"
AJL is obviously a long-time attendee of that annual, week-long Nevada desert festival known as Straw Man.
Straw. Berries. We get it.

Blab. The vengeance of our readers has unexplored depths.
Interesting rant from AJL. Let's see--either he misunderstands the basics of biological science (i.e., he's stupid) or he's deliberately mistating those basics so that he can deny their validity (i.e., he's lying) or both (i.e., he's a stupid liar).
Sounds like the same problems the Conservative Christian Conspiracy has, but what do I know?
Lamar
Do you think so? We interpreted it as parody. But then, we interpret everything as parody.

Blab. A reader sends us a recursive dual simile.
Lobster : Maine :: Kokopelli : Arizona
We haven't been to Arizona for several decades now. We do recall the incipient Kokopelli meme. But could it possibly be as pervasive as Maine's lobster meme? Used Cars and Kokopelli? Bar Stools and Dinettes, and Kokopelli? Windows Washed and Kokopelli?
That would be weird.

Blab. A student of irony writes:
Interesting that a blaspheme can actually be used to describe God.
This seems perfectly natural to us. Visual terms are used to describe images, kinetic terms to describe sports, violent terms to describe war. Blasphemy is a peculiarly religious concept, and we are happy to let them have it.

Blab. Blah, blah, blah. Yadda, yadda. Etc. We fear that certain readers spent the night in a fugue state.

"Honey, can we invite Polyp Man over for dinner?"
"No, I'd rather not. Bringing Polyp Man in our house will only cause messy, nasty things to happen...."
"Get the Polyp.
Get the cure.
Then get the kitchen cleaned up."
"Po was regretting forming a co-evolved relationship which meant carrying spacehoppers in her belly."
"Oh, man, if I pop, I know I'm gonna end up in the mayonnaise, just like last time."
"When your cherry tomatoes go bad. REAL bad...."
"Ketchup Man lives in constant fear that his job will be taken away by Señor Salsa."
"The red blood cell travels through the body delivering oxygen and removing waste. Without it, you would die."
"Gerald suddenly realized that he was indeed a pimple on the ass of society."
"Ewwww! There's a hair in my chicken! Disgusting!"
"Billy Gates learned that he should have heeded the Oompah Loompah's warning and not eaten the experimental cherry candy."
"Trevor, unable to get a wife due to his slovenliness, turns himself into an apple in an attempt to disperse his seed via endozoochory."
"Ignoring all conventional political wisdom, Stan decides to become a Communist pig"
"Although he thought an indoor picnic would be safe, Larry is proved wrong when he swallows a live bee."
"Ha ha ha ha ha!! All of Steve and Helen's food! And with a touch, I, the Beetmeister, will make it all taste like beets! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
Yow. Lots and lots of those are really funny! But we have to choose one, and the chicken bones indicate that the winner is:
"And now my impersonation of Marlon Brando after sunbathing..."
Your challenge now is to come up with an image that best represents this arbitrary caption. We will admit that we are close to our boredom threshold on this game, so do be clever.
Oh, and BTW, please don't send the URL of a page that has the image you love on it. Send the URL of the image. The small image. The image that doesn't have access restrictions on its use on another site. Yes, this is us insisting on arbitrary and unreasonable restrictions that make your life harder and our life easier. But that's our job.

Blab. This time a reader sends a ...
[link]
... at which copy editors who are not on our payroll try rewriting Dubya's SOTU address. We thought ours was better. Heck, even Ian liked it.

Blab. John Ashcroft writes:
Oh, and about the cameras - we stole some $8000 drapes to cover them up.
Thanks, John. You're the first Defender of Liberty we've known who defended her by tying her up and stuffing her into a closet.

Blab. A lesbian beastaphiliac writes:
I was going to crochet the sweet little dog a burka, but the airport man took my needles away from me along with my the Foot Joys I'd worn to the fireworks. Just tell the sweetie the barefoot lady was thinking of her. (It is a she, isn't it?)
We do not know the gender of the blue dog. And, after this, we are definitely afraid to look.

Blab. For reasons we are unable to fathom, a serial reader says:
Awwww yeah, get fibby with it!
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
Let's not and say we did.

Blab. A reader invites us to ...
Roam, if you want to. Roam around the world.
Lamar
Goodness. That's a very pretty blog, perhaps even by the mysterious Lamar, though it makes the deadly mistake of linking to Plurp in its inaugural entry. We predict bitplague.
We wish we had a pretty Web site like that, with all the fancy design and coding and stuff. But that's, you know, work.

Blab. A reader comes dangerously close to haiku.
"Cat on Batik" looks
like Ying-Yang with
only a tiny Ying.
Does that make him/her sacred?
Just lazy?
We don't know. We can't even figure out if it's Ying-Yang or Yin-Yang. Readers must now enlighten us.

Blab. A reader contributes what appears to be a new joke.
Ted Kennedy once attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but was expelled after he was involved in a tragedy in the Chappaquidditch match.
We like sly homonymic humor

Blab. Astonishingly, another reader seems also to contribute a new joke.
After getting nailed by a Daisy Cutter, Osama makes his way to the pearly gates. There, he is greeted by George Washington. "How dare you attack the nation I helped conceive!" yells Mr. Washington, slapping Osama in the face.
Patrick Henry comes up from behind. "You wanted to end the Americans' liberty, so they gave you death!" Henry punches Osama in the nose.
James Madison comes up next, and says "This is why I allowed the Federal government to provide for the common defense!" He drops a large weight on Osama's knee.
Osama is then caned by John Randolph of Roanoke and soundly thrashed by James Monroe, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and 65 other men who love liberty and America. As he writhes on the ground, Thomas Jefferson picks him up and hurls him back toward the gates, where he is to be judged.
As Osama awaits the ferry to take him to his final, very hot destination, he screams, "Aieee! This is not what I was promised!"
An angel replies, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you, dumbass! What did you think I said?"
What a rude angel!

Plurp. Oh no! Another pair of trinary dates! (And tomorrow's seems particularly worrisome.) What shall we do?

Plurp. If you wondered what the U.S. intends its military to do in the near future, here's the straight poop from the obvious source, Donald Rumsfeld.
Instead of maintaining two occupation forces, we will place greater emphasis on deterrence in four critical theaters, backed by the ability to swiftly defeat two aggressors at the same time, while preserving the option for one massive counteroffensive to occupy an aggressor's capital and replace the regime.
Does that sound a lot bigger to you? Don't worry. It's both free and without any worrisome consequences. Fnord.

Yow. Not one, but two Helenisms from an otherwise normal business call. Please excuse us while we do our Dual Helenism Dance of Fragrant Delight.
Last meal and testament

Last meal

Last will and testament

Last supper and testament

Last supper

Last will and testament

Yow. Yesterday, Dave wrote about odd search strings that somehow get people to his site. The one that caught our eye was:
Where can i find lyrics that are unused
We imagine a Web site that says this:
Here is a large collection of song lyrics that are unused. Please feel free to use them however you wish.
Maybe these would be individual lines in songs, which you could mix and match to your never-ending delight.
Similar things on the Web would include sites with:

Unused words

Images that have never existed

Thoughts than no one has had

Unused pixels

Unused checksums

Unused ideas for Web sites

Readers are invited to suggest their own.

Plurp. Is it really the case that love is the only thing that there's just too little of? What about peace (especially lately)? Or common sense? Food for starving populations? Answers to deep philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness and free will? How about beautiful, lascivious women who would like nothing better than to ...
Sorry. Sorry. We got a little carried away there. It won't happen again.

Yow. Legodeath. Just what it sounds like. (Kafkaesque)

Plurp.
The blue dog
was really flattered and
all, but ...

Thursday, January 31, 2002
Blab. In one of the most astonishing expositions ever to appear in Plurp, a reader writes:
<full rant mode>
At what point did the plant decide that luscious fruit would be an advantage? Did it see that there were several suitably bellied animals in the vicinity and spontaneously sprout a variety of succulent fruit products, did it try various flavours and shapes before settling on the type it eventually ended up with? Isn't it actually more reasonable to suppose that there may be another explanation? Demonstrate one instance of macro evolution, and provide hard evidence. Natural selection is a given, but what really p****s me off is the ridiculous, and oft presented claim, that somehow plants and animals with symbiotic or mutually dependent relationships (e.g bumblebee/snapdragon) actually decided (implying that they manipulated their own genes to suit the situation)for that relationship to be like that. Which came first, the plant or the animal? Who knew that they would find each other? What the hell do we really know anyway. Evolution? Bah. It's unreasonable to presume that any chaotic system will eventually order itself, the truth is that the reverse is provably true. A chaotic system will become progressively more chaotic. The idea that you can put a few different chemicals in a bucket, make some sort of primordial soup, leave for a few billion years and come up with an ordered and mutually dependent ecosystem capable of sustaining something as destructive as mankind, is frankly ridiculous. I don't have that sort of faith, but I guess it's ok to believe whatever you want these days. Truth is, evolution is a *theory* that is totally unsupported on a macro level, while only loosely demonstrable on a micro level. Yet that is taught as truth, without question, without reason. That is as wrong as teaching any other creation myth as absolute and unchangeable truth. It's illegal to teach Christian Creation theory in our schools, so why are they forced to teach evolution as gospel? I know which one makes more sense, and it isn't the one where fish crawl out of the sea and turn into aardvarks. If it is, where's the missing link? It's clear to me that there must be a flying pig or two in there at some point. Sheesh, when did we become so blinkered and narrow that we swallowed a bunch of stuff that makes less sense than the mess we had before? Age of reason? Pfft.
</full rant mode>
-A"Spontaneously evolving monkeys in my stomach which will fly out my butt and inhabit the earth"JL
Goodness! It's nearly a textbook rant, isn't it? Reader are encouraged to die laughing. In the meantime, we're setting up the video camera to capture the action when those monkeys fly out. We're thinking World's Funniest Darwinian Videos. Or Alien 5.

Blab. Our final entries to this round of our Alternating Image / Caption contest (this one intended to image the caption of "And now my impersonation of what Julia Roberts would look like if she had green beans for teeth...") are these:

And the winner of this round, for reasons we cannot begin to explain, is this really, really disturbing image:

We think the judges are smoking something. But whatever. In the next round of our contest, you are required to submit a caption for the above picture of the round red humanoid. If this isn't fun, you're doing it wrong.

Blab. A reader has been reading labels, it seems.
On a child's superman costume:
"Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly."
(I don't blame the company. I blame the parents for this one.)
On a Swedish chainsaw:
"Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals."
(Oh my God...was there a lot of this happening somewhere?)
Let's see. In the former case, we would have to disagree. We had a superman costume as a tot, and we could most certainly fly when wearing it. In the latter case, we're not sure a written warning would actually help.

Blab. Unaware that the dot-com era is over, a reader writes:
Announcing the Internet's first atom dating agency. Find atoms that you want to join with. Create networks of atoms. Form exciting new relationships with other likeminded atoms. Be a part of the future, at the atomic level we are all the same. -AJL
We'll get right on that. Where can we invest?

Blab. A reader warns us of impending black helicopters.
Steve, the helicopters are out again looking for you. I don't think it has anything to do with the World Economic Forum being held here in NYC.
We noticed the many police on the street corners this morning. They were pretending not to watch us, but they are clumsy.

Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for Ask Jeeves, a reader writes:
So who first said "a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer
down the pants"?
A small minstrel with wet pants?

Blab. In a wildly punctuated contribution, a reader with curious knowledge writes:
Seed dispersal techniques are interesting studies, but pollination techniques are downright mind-boggling. (Excepting wind pollination). A goodly percentage of the insects have been coevolving with angiosperms (flowering plants) for over a hundred million years. (Probably starting with beetles.) Bat and Hummingbird pollination are later developments. Thank (or curse :-) hummingbirds for red (wild) flowers.
Plant/specialist pollinator pairs are often extra vulnerable to ecosystem disruption, but there are nonetheless very large numbers of examples.
Soon, our humble blog will offer college credits.

Blab. A reader becomes confused.
Ok, I liked the trip report. But you should have warned about
spoilers. Him Who Must Not Be Named has a name? Perhaps I've been misinterpreting that all along, as the search log will reveal.

We appreciate your confusion. You see, Helen thinks his name is Christopher. That's clearly wrong. We usually call him kitty. When he's being bad we call him cat. When we're just trying to piss him off, we call him Clarence. He hates that.
But, truth be told, the beast is The Unnamable, Him Whose Name Is Consumed By Fire, That Which Cannot Conceive To Be Named. And like that.
Helen is working on getting more trip reports onto our Web site. Today, we have two new ones: The Millennium Sail and British Virgin Islands 2001.

Blab. That foreign-correspondent-in-training writes:
To Plurp:
If you are trying to mock my contribution, you have failed. Utterly. I have my own spies, even IF they are kyais on the take. AND if you get your own reports on Carl Vinson soft drink machine contents, then it is clear you do not need a foreign correspondent. Gad! I really hate the net.
Affandy
Java
While we are all too accustomed to failing utterly, we were not, in fact, trying to mock your valuable contribution to our humble blog. We even seem to recall extending to you a heretofore unheard of boon: not making rude fun of your first several contributions. But, seeing as you insist on being huffy and all, we are now forced to turn our vicious readers loose to mock you fully. You and your silly kyai spies.

Blab. A reader gives us good advice.
A wig! (On the neon, neon side of town)
Thank you, kind and knowledgeable reader.

Blab. A second reader gives good advice.
See also "we have a long row to hoe"...
We most certainly shall.

Blab. A reader who may think well of the inhabitants of Maine writes:
The Lobster People have clearly taken over Helen's mind. They do that, you know. The symbol of the Almighty Lobster is all over Maine (in fact, the two things I remember about Maine are (1) the ubiquitousness of the Symbol Of The Lobster; and (2) the over-preference of Maine/main puns on shopfronts ('The Maine Attraction', 'Mainely Seafood', even the rare treble Maine/main/mane punnery of the hairdresser's shop 'Maine trimming').
They really need to get out more, those Maine residents. Not outdoors -- out of state.
The ubiquity of lobstering was incredible. No matter what a business did, it also did lobstering. Restaurants were obvious in that regard. But a guy who ran a puzzle shop? Yep: and lobsters. It was weird. But fun!

Yo. An excellent article on how Dubya's administration decided to go to war.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was a small minstrel
with wet pants

Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Blab. In our bipolar Image / Caption contest, several readers take it upon themselves to provide images to our current caption, which is:
"And now my impersonation of what Julia Roberts would look like if she had green beans for teeth..."
Here are the entries so far:

We are duly impressed with the creativity and blasphemy of our readers. To be fair to the procrastinators among us, we're going to let this phase of the contest run until tomorrow, at which time we shall cast the Elbows of Fate, which will pick the disturbing image to be carried forward to the next phase.
Iä! Iä!

Blab. Helen writes:
When do we get to read Helen's trip reports?
Now where did we put that round tuit? (Oh, here's one. Note luscious image of She Who Must Be Obeyed on the banner.)

Blab. On that endozoochory thing, Dave admits:
Dave admits that at the beginning of that conversation he was actually claiming that coconuts were an *example* of endozoochory. In retrospect this seems implausible, in the absence of really really large squirrels. Or something. But You Never Know.
This much is certain: it has been made abundantly clear that we never know.

Blab. A very old reader confuses Snow White and Bambi with endozoochory.
I recall learning (EONS ago) that apple seeds are toxic to small animals, and the animals have therefore learned to not chew (and thus destroy) the precious seeds, but instead let it pass through (and thus fertilize the seed).
I agree the sugary fruit was initially designed to provide initial nutrients to a young seedling, but - just like pine cone seeds - the seed carrier also has defensive designs built in as well....
BTW, you know many evergreen cones will ONLY open in a forest fire, thus re-planting a forest only after it has been destroyed ?
You know, a close examination of the incredible machinations involved in almost any biological system leads you to one of two conclusions.

Evolution is the only possible explanation for how things could have turned out this way.

God is the most god-awful hacker imaginable.

More about this tomorrow, we predict.

Blab. An anonymous reader is fascinated by our kata (which we practiced again last night and this morning).
An hour and a half to drive to work this morning..... must have been one hell of a detour!
Who said we just drove to work? :-)

Blab. A correspondent after our own - uh - heart, writes:
Truth is stranger than fiction!

It seems that our dear friend John Ashcroft didn't like being photographed in front of the statue Justice, portrayed as a woman with a breast exposed. (The statue, not John. We think.) So what did our dear government do? They installed a curtain. To cover up Justice.
Performance irony.

Blab. A reader indulges in certain practices, resulting in a fairly goopy ear.
"Excuse me, but there is a banana in your ear."
"Yes, its luscious fruit saems to be providing me with a survival advantage."
We with our reader the very best of luck with that. Really we do.

Blab. A reader creates false evidence of the implanted memories of our so-called childhood.
Overheard recently in a cozy midwest living room...
"Say, next time we visit Helen & Steve in New York, I know just what TV tape I want to see at the Museum of Television and Radio."
"What? I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear."
"Wooooow!"
- Your Midwest Correspondent
This is amazing. For years, we kept acting out these implanted memories for Helen, pantomiming the act of pulling a large bunch of bananas from our trench coat and saying woaAAAA in a falsetto. Insidious that this fabricated evidence is now on the Web!

Blab. A reader contributes a stunning resource to those of us paralyzed by paranoid delusions.
[link]
As the Institute for Applied Autonomy would tell you in your more lucid moments:
iSee is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments. With iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras - paths of least surveillance - allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being "caught on tape" by unregulated security monitors.
We know we'll be planning our life accordingly.

Blab. On the topic of ... uh ...
My nephew was the junior assistant glass shard (in charge of stowing the sopping-wet outer garments of mysterious visitors from the East, their dark hair matted with rain water, up in the wire racks above the tank where they kept the department of philology) on the U.S.S.S.S. "Barely Visible Through the Mist", a Bungee-class juniper-bagel on steroids.
He says that the soda machines were always full of minor political parties and their hangers-on. That, and Sprite.
Do you have change?
(We must say we admire the mind that can put such words together!)

Blab. A curious reader asks:
What's that on your head?
We give up. Readers?

Blab. We have absolutely no idea how our readers find this stuff.
So the good people in search of books and wit have been going, in increasingly fewer numbers, I fear, to this page to get to see their favorite loss leader and tap his head to get to Plurp. Roundabout, n'est-ce pas?
This is utterly hilarious! On a small book-selling site, in a list of literary links, right after Thomas Lynch and James Joyce ("James Joyce"), we find:

Steve White is a funny man. He is an IBM person who developed their security software but is also smart as hell and keeps a page that is sometimes over my head because I am not plugged into the same parts of the popular culture that he and his contributing readers are. This site is by turns funny, profane, profound, silly, and always worth a look. Tap his friend on the head and take a look.

We particularly appreciate the reappearance of the dreaded Bezos head. Clearly, this is a Treasured Reader.
Now what we want to know is: What part of the popular culture are we plugged into, how do we disconnect, and can we get boosted above James Joyce? So many questions.

Blab. Another famous and only slightly dead reader checks in.
The anorexic women altered by makeup and lighting, don't bother me as much as the identification with the little dog. We look into this next week when we have time. I have an opening at Thursday at four. Just ring and wait. Yrs,
The Dr.
Sometimes, an anorexic woman is just an anorexic woman.

Blab. A nostalgist writes:
boolah boolah
You're my boolah guy.

Plop. Too frickin' many Blabs today! We have eleven queued up that we're not even looking at today. Maybe tomorrow. Sluice!

Yo. OK, so we ragged on the silly people in the little hamlet of Inglis, FL, the other day for banning Satan from their town. Turns out they weren't intending to be silly. They really mean it. Really, really mean it.
And there's a video of it. Go watch. And be afraid.

Yak.
"Security through obscurity," eh?
Yeah. "What you don't know can't hurt us."

Plop. Don't feel left out, Governor Bush. We're deeply saddened by you, too.

Plurp. Our extensive network of politicians on medication have arranged for us to obtain Dubya's penultimate draft of the State of the Union address last night, complete with final editing by his staff. We publish excerpts of it here in the interests of ... yadda, yadda, yadda.
~~Since I have become President~~ As we gather tonight, our Nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.
We last met in an hour of shock and suffering. In four short months, our Nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, ~~ensured that Constitutional rights are not an impediment to our actions,~~ rallied a great coalition, ~~blown thousands of people in Afghanistan, including innocent civilians, into smoking shards~~ captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan's terrorist training camps, ~~dropped nearly identical packages of food and cluster bombs~~ saved a people from starvation and ~~installed a nondemocratic regime friendlier to the United States~~ freed a country from brutal oppression.
The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy ~~the stomachs of flies~~ cells at Guantanamo Bay. And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives ~~have successfully avoided our concerted efforts to locate them~~ are running for their own.
America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror... we will be partners in ~~restoring that country to the Stone Age~~ rebuilding that country... and this evening we welcome the distinguished interim leader of ~~the fifty-first state~~ a liberated Afghanistan: ~~[what's his name?]~~ Chairman Hamid Karzai.
The last time we met in this chamber, ~~[insert stuff about women in Afghanistan here]~~ the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government, and we welcome the new Minister of Women's Affairs, Doctor Sima Samar. ~~[Insert stuff about blacks and hispanics in Afghanistan here.]~~
(Etc. Etc. As a literary form, this is far too easy.)

Yow. Yes, before Dubya's circus last night, cultural authority Tom Brokaw had just enough time to contribute to our burgeoning collection of Helenisms.
We have a long road to go

We have a long road to travel

We have a long way to go

Thanks, Tom.

Plurp. We have a new kata for Dubya, which we suggest he practice each time he thinks about gloating over his stunning military triumphs:

Show me ... bin Laden.

Plop. Dubya wants us to spend two of our scarce mortal years on his dopey idea of altruistic service. We think Dubya should spend two of his scarce mortal years on us, personally. We're thinking cleaning the toilet and being sent on meaningless errands wearing a clown outfit. Then we'll talk.

Plop. Watch The Skies, says NASA. Especially tonight.

Plurp. What happens when there are more cell phone stores than there are cell phones? We only wonder because we think this is likely to happen in a few months.

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought the President's speech was
~~predictable political claptrap~~
both incisive and
brilliant

Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Blab. Too late, a reader sends us a terrific entry to the previous round of our Alternating Image / Caption Contest.

I asked Cthulhu, "How much do you love me?"
"This much," he answered, and he stretched out his arms, and jRigF grJjes ndj%eDXs.
Great stuff!
So the current round of our contest is to send us the URL of an image corresponding to the following caption:
"And now my impersonation of what Julia Roberts would look like if she had green beans for teeth..."

Blab. Undaunted by the difficulty of this task, our readers respond.

"And now my impersonation of what Julia Roberts would look like if she had green beans for teeth..."
A second reader donates this:

"And now my impersonation of what Julia Roberts would look like if she had green beans for teeth..."
hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Could be. Could be. More entries, though we doubt our sanity for doing this, are encouraged.

Blab. A reader reveals a disturbing correlation.
Heh. My brother served on the Carl Vinson. But it was a decade ago so his information won't be reliable. Hope all's well. -- Paul (pef) Ford
Odd. So did our nephew, but more recently. Unless ...

Blab. In furtherance of the Mystery of the Carl Vinson, a reader informs us of his murky past in the spy business.
Your Northwest Correspondent has coincidentally been on the Carl Vinson and can verify the existence of many soda and snack machines. If you're unhappy with distilled water or day-old coffee, you can purchase sodas, juices, iced tea (yes, root beer as well). NOT for sale in these machines include beer, wine, mixed drinks, and beet juice (though I recall some of these items were found in sailors footlockers, though I'm not at liberty to say precisely which drinks or which footlockers those were).
Yes, it's true, the carrier is like a floating city - its own fire
department, post office, security, and bank. We don't have our own McDonald's, so it's not like a REAL American city, but their burgers are usually pretty good.
Any more questions, I'm sure Plurp won't mind being a holding bay for enquiring minds.....
We welcome all readers to violate their oaths of secrecy.

Blab. A reader indulges in a dangerous mixing of the memes.
enron-zoochory - A Large Energy Company buys several smaller energy companies, stripping them of all their liquid assets (sometimes known as "droppings") and distributing them among the Members of the Board. The newly formed Very Large Energy Company muddles accounting paperwork, resulting in huge write-offs, which the company is able to expand its takeover of more smaller energy companies, and depositing THEIR liquid assets into the burgeoning bank accounts of the Members of the Board. This Extremely Large Energy Company then recommends that its employees shift ALL their retirement assets to company stock (owned primarily by Members of the Board), driving the stock value through the roof. Then the Members of the Board (in their infinite wisdom) freeze all retirement assets, sell their shares of company stock, then announce that they have muddled their accounting paperwork (surprisingly, in that order). This creates mounds of layoffs of formerly loyal employees (sometimes also known as "droppings"), and the revenue saved by a reduced workforce is deposited into the bank accounts of Former Members of the Board in the form of a severance package.
This is, of course, the carrying of seeds inside large corporations.

Blab. A reader sends us an encoded message, to which we are compelled to respond.
Microsoft.
Good.
Company.
KIDDING !
Subtle?
Enough
Pomegranate. Tremulous. Archaeopteryx.

Blab. A student of ancient history writes:
MC Hawking will not be one of the great memes of 2002 by virtue of having been one of the fairly good memes of 2000
Indeed. We are hopeful that future generations of readers will be capable of providing us with fresher material. We always were the hopeful sort.

Blab. A reader with the intellectual stature of Darwin himself accuses us of even greater stupidity than that to which we will naturally admit.
What did you *think* the survival advantage to luscious fruit was? Didn't it saeem like a weird thing for a plant to develop?
Oh, golly. What did we think? Did we think that it was an initial medium for growth? Did we think that, like mangroves or coconuts, it provided a food supply for the sorry seed before its infant root found both moisture and fertile ground?
No, surely nothing like that ever occurred to us. No doubt we just sat here, spittle running down our chin, confused at the bright colors and confusing shapes.
Fortunately, our readers are infinitely brighter than us. At least, that's how it saeems.
Our apologies to readers who figured it all out on their own. These readers are invited to send us the papers they published on the subject.

Blab. A spammist writes:
Why Spend upwards of $4000 on a DVD Burner when we will show you an alternative that will do the exact same thing for only $19.95?
You heard us right - for the price of just 1 DVD's, we'll show you how to back up and/or create Your Own DVD's!
We're tempted to send them the money, if only to allow them to buy a book on remedial English.

Blab. We are famous in even odder ways than normal.
I just added a link to http://www.stevewhite.org on my site.
You can find it here.
I would be very grateful if you added a link to my site.
I prefer a simple text link, but I also have several banners
and sample text links here.
Let me know if you would like any changes in your listing (category, description, etc) even if you decide not to link back.
Thanks,
Brianna
This is a site entirely devoted to sites that talk about bananas. We get a link because we have the following in our Broken Jokes section.
"Excuse me, sir, but you have a banana in your ear."
"Oh - thanks."
Go figure.

Blab. A reader attempts to clarify this new part of the U.S. military which seems destined to showing up soon on the street where you live.
In theory this isn't anything as big as a new branch of the military; it's just picking some 4-star general and giving him a staff and saying "here, you co-ordinate anything that troops do in North America". We already have those for other continents, and they aren't branches of the military they're just CinCs. _In theory_ this doesn't mean that the military would be doing anything more within the borders, it just "streamlines" the chain of command for those that already are.
In theory.
We love theory.

Plurp. Oh. For readers who aren't already infinitely familiar with it, there's a bunch of non-blog stuff over there in our Stuff section. Look around.

Zoom. An unexpected congruence of fortuitous circumstances led to us once again practicing the kata Drive Car, Top-Down Style this morning, this time for nearly an hour and a half.

Plurp. Did you know that, in New York, it's illegal for groups of people to wear masks in public? This is really going to put a damper on the Hallowe'en parade in Greenwich Village.
Ah. Selective enforcement. The rule of men, not law.

Yo. The world is getting to be a very strange place indeed when chess grandmasters are packaged as fashion darlings. (Dave)

Plurp.

A monk in a faraway temple once wrote a book detailing the intricacies of seeds carried within the eyes of virgins.

Elsewhere, the magistrate of a great city banned all books containing words, forcing authors to write in visual metaphors or to consume their bodies in sacred herbs.

Once, an old man who lived in a dry gully planted seeds in the side of a salt cliff.

"The King shall establish no religion pertaining to unholy things, nor to the bowels of certain animals, nor to books containing certain illustrations."

In the time of Termeos, salt was used to preserve the virginity of children before they could read.

Just before dying, a woman of high position found a book that encouraged the growth of certain herbs for purposes that were not described.

The daughter of a magistrate, trying to interpret the illustrations in a forbidden book, accidentally lodged the seeds of a religious herb in her eye.

Although no one would ever know it, a child once plucked herbs from the face of a forgotten cliff.

Yow. Yet more insane fame, this time from UseModWiki which, as you can tell from the name, is just a breath away from Major Media Attention. Be still my beating pancreas.

Yo. Can someone explain the Periodic Table of Sculptures to us? 'Cause we're just too dumb to get it.

Plop. So it seems to us that Dubya's Three Great Goals for America are basically:

Get America back to where it was before I took over.

Get America back to where it was before I took over.

Get America back to where it was before I took over.

But no doubt we are missing the political subtleties involved because, you know, we're not very clever.

Plop. Demonstrating that the federal government does not have a monopoly on ignorance of Constitutional rights, this from the South.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina's attorney general threatened Monday to sue the NAACP if the civil rights group stages protests along the state's highways next month.
The [NAACP] plans the protests as part of an ongoing economic boycott over the state's display of the Confederate flag on the Statehouse grounds.
"I am drawing the line in the sand," state Attorney General Charlie Condon said. "If the NAACP uses South Carolina's rest stops and welcome centers to urge visitors not to buy in South Carolina or to stage demonstrations or protests, I will take legal action."
Elsewhere ...
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yo. More fun news from the South.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) -- The daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested early Tuesday after she allegedly tried to fill a false prescription at a pharmacy, Tallahassee, Florida, police said. "[blah, blah] substance abuse [blah, blah]".
It's a party-on kind of family.

Plurp.
The blue dog's
secret name was
Brianna

Monday, January 28, 2002
Blab. A reader, delighting in its anonymity, sends us a blind ...
[link].
Yes. Well. A piece based (it is implicitly claimed) on a lecture on entropy by gangsta rapper Stephen Hawking, via his speech synthesizer.
While this does meet the bar of cultural offensiveness over which we constantly strive to stumble, it is not, IMHO, destined to be one of the Great Memes of 2002. But what do we know?

Blab. A reader who is possibly new writes:
Wondered how readers responded!
Behind Enemy Lines finally made it to Java! Wow! Did you know that the Carl Vinson has soft drink vending machines in its mess? Know a nephew who served on the Carl Vinson and so I am checking with him to see if it's true. Would you need to be updated on this?
Are you looking for foreign correspondents for Plurp? If so, would you fill me in on the qualifications? (The job market here is a little down, unless you are a Kyai on the take).
(If you dont know what this sentence in the parens is about, then it is clear that you do need a foreign correspondent).
Affandy
Java
We are desperate to know exactly which soft drinks were available from machines on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. Colas? Root beer? Beet juice? Yes, it really matters.
Stringent qualifications for foreign correspondents to Plurp include: Pretending to be a foreign correspondent to Plurp. And that's about it. It's not a very high bar. OTOH, the pay is nonexistent, so it all works out. We even promise not to make rude fun of your first several contributions. Unless you make it too easy.
And no, we have no idea what either sentence in parens is about.

Blab. Our Alternating Image / Caption Contest seems to have awoken several readers early today. Here are the final entries for this round.

"It's not easy being green... or an eldritch horror, for that matter."

"You put your right tentacle in; you put your right tentacle out; you put your right tentacle in and you thrash it all about..."
"do these wings make me look fat?"
"I wuv wu!"
"MMM!! Endless milk-covered floor! *licklicklicklicklick*"
"Hey! That little green thing is the Eagle Immunity Idol! How did you get it?!"
And our winner for this iteration is ...
"And now my impersonation of what Julia Roberts would look like if she had green beans for teeth..."
Great stuff! In our next iteration, readers are invited to send us the URL for a (small, please!) image that best fits this caption. Good luck; we think you'll need it!

Blab. A reader circulates yet another of those jokes that are endlessly circulated via email.
* Capitalism
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
* Enronism
You have two cows. You borrow 80% of the forward value of the two cows from your bank, then buy another cow with 5% down and the rest financed by the seller on a note callable, if your market cap goes below $20B at a rate twice that of prime. You now sell three cows to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at a second bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more, and this transaction process is upheld by your independent auditor and no Balance Sheet provided with the press release that announces that Enron,as a major owner of cows, will begin trading cows via the internet site: cows on web.

The guy who runs the blog A Dog's Life got a version of this in email from his brother, so it's Already On The Web^TM.
(The blog we just referenced says it's about second-hand analysis, trite reflections, ill-informed opinions, ignorant observations, incoherent blitherings, dogs. In other words, pretty much like Plurp.)

Blab. A reader contributes a clue to an unbelievable claim from lunchtalk today.
endozoochory
OK. Here's the deal. Walking around after lunch today, which was weird enough by itself in that it's late January and we were outside, Dave made the wild claim that many fruits (e.g. strawberries) developed large, luscious fruit in which their seeds were embedded specifically to have them eaten by animals and have the seeds spread to distant places by having the animal carry them in their digestive tract before eventually, well, dropping them somewhere.
Now, isn't that preposterous? Of course it is. But it also turns out to be true, and it's called endozoochory, the transport of seeds inside the bodies of animals. Some seeds actually require the animal's digestive process to remove the seed coat in order to germination to occur.
And this is in contrast to, for instance, myrmecochory, the spreading of seeds by ants.
Biology is very, very strange.

Plurp. There are no longer police vehicles stopping trucks on the Third Avenue Bridge. There are no longer National Guard stationed at the Manhattan entrance to the 59th Street Bridge. There are no longer military personnel standing on random corners in Manhattan, wearing camo and waving M-16s.
So it's over now, right?

Plop. Well, maybe not. The Pentagon wants to open up a new branch of the military for "homeland defense". Not a branch of the police, you understand, or the FBI, who actually have authority over law enforcement inside the U.S., but the military, which has previously been forbidden (hasn't it?) from actions inside the U.S. except under extraordinary and temporary conditions.
With this, the U.S. seems intent on joining the majority of countries, whose barbaric policy is to let loose the military on their own citizens.
Is this new policy a good idea? We just can't imagine how it could be.

Plurp.
A monk told Joshu, "I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me."
Joshu asked, "Have you finished your email?
The monk replied, "I have finished."
Joshu said, "Then you had better transmit your output queue."
At that moment the monk was enlightened.

Yo.
The man, described as wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt and having his black hair tied in a ponytail, set down the folder and then walked out of the store. On leaving, he called out, "With compliments from the future".
He Never Returned.
(Weird Links)

Yo. Ever wanted to build a flame thrower for domestic use? That's what the Web is for, don't you know?

Yow. Our view at dawn.

Plop. Lucky you. Soon, you'll be able to buy a gender-neutral Bible. We predict that the next version will be species-neutral. And then object-neutral. And on the sixth day God created other things.

Yak. From one of those fascinating meetings with the sales folks today.
That information is worth its weight in gold!
No doubt.

Plurp.
The blue dog's
Rollerball name was
Brawler Blue

Sunday, January 27, 2002
Blab. Our reader-initiated contest to alternately provide images for captions and then captions for images is off and running. (For readers who didn't realize that Plurp also publishes on Saturday, well, we do.) Here's the image: And here's the first entry:
"Cuthbert demonstrates the dangers of attempting photosynthesis while smoking too many havanas."
... the second entry ...
"Oh look Honey, it's one of those damn Pokemon things"
... and, unless we're putting this otherwise unidentified reader contribution in the wrong context, the third entry:
"If given the choice between losing my lungs and losing my guitar, I would think about it and then choose to keep the guitar. I can live for at least a minute without breathing."
More are, of course, solicited.

Blab. A reader with a time machine reports back.
2011 - the new owner of AOL/TW sues Microsoft, cause AOL/TW lost the OS-war. The new owner renames AOL/TW Linux to Linzilla, puts lots of bugs inside of it and throws it back to the Open Source community.
Investors take note!

Blab. A reader demonstrates its Plupitude with this inbred response to yesterday's shocking revelation.

He didn't smell. He had no nose.
Zackly.

Blab. A worried reader objects.
Put that nose back! It's almost the cutest part of you.
We have saved it for you. Watch the mail.

Blab. A reader suggests:
sex winamp skin
... which could be an inverse link, but gets way too many hits, most of them on sites we probably ought not to explore from the office. Ya know?

Blab. A reader insists that we read this:
Unlawful Combatants
... this being a lengthy piece by some lawyer entitled WHAT IS AN "UNLAWFUL COMBATANT," AND WHY IT MATTERS:
The Status Of Detained Al Qaeda And Taliban Fighters.
We're sure it's vital to the continued existence of reality as we know it. And we're sure some reader who cares more will summarize it pithily for us.

Blab. A reader claims:
This is cool stuff.
This being a formal academic study of the Six Degrees of Separation hypothesis. We imagine one registers with it, tells it everyone one knows, and lets it find out if one is separated by six links from some starving villager in Nepal.
We would spend the time required to try it out ourselves, but we are unable to type.

Plop. Despite being on the list of people who should not, Robert Nozick went and died. That's a serious bummer. We were very impressed by his Anarchy, State and Utopia, though we're not sure what real-world impact his deep and clever thinking had.
We surmise that it's the technology transfer problem of political science. You know, Marx dreamed of a worker's paradise in which the State withered away, and he got Stalin and Mao. Nozick dreamed of the ultimate pluralistic society, in which everyone got to live the life they wanted. And he got Dubya and bin Laden.

Yak. Regarding our current Windows background.
Helen: Who's that woman?
Steve: I dunno.
Helen: She's so skinny. She looks anorexic.
Steve: Yeah, she's probably dead by now.

Plurp.
Movie: In the Bedroom
Demographic: Chick flick
Plot Summary: It's your typical Marisa Tomei meets boy, Tomei's ex kills boy, father of boy kills ex kind of movie, set in a small Maine town in which everybody knows everybody else and nothing ever happens. In addition, and this was a great disappointment, there were no aliens or explosions whatsoever.
Distinguishing Features: Kubrick's 2001 is short attention span theater compared to the tedious, glacial flow of this movie. Bring a book to read.
Academy Award For: Sissy Spacek's tight and powerful portrayal of the mother, who nearly comes apart after her son's death.
Verdict: Not particularly recommended (with apologies to Helen, who loved it and cried all the way through it)

Plop. Here's the euphemism that no one wants to hear: consequence management.

Yak.
This is really hard. I've spent two days on this. Well, not days...
Periods of time?
Yeah.
Like minutes?
...

Plurp. We practiced two related kata today. The first was Drive Car, Top-Down Style, which is seldom practiced in late January. The second was Clean Office, a kata which we seem destined to practice all our life without mastering.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was separated by
six degrees from
an anorexic woman
that no one knew

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