Plurp: Oldthink at its most ungood

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2002.03.10 : 2002.03.16

Saturday, March 16, 2002
Blab. A creative reader enters the fray of our Name That Baby contest.
"Name that Baby"
Sol Invictus
(It's really hard to say, though, without knowing the last name. Sol Invictus MacGregor has a much different ring than, say, Sol Invictus Jablonski or Sol Invictus Fong.)
L.
We like it! It's like naming a kid The Beatles in the 60s.

Blab. Educating us further about this new term - brooklyn - a reader writes:
In bowling, a brooklyn is a bowled ball that strikes the opposite pocket (1-2 if righty, 1-3 if lefty).
I assume this comes from Brooklanders' habit of punching people on the wrong side of the face (right side if righty, left side if lefty.)
Or something.
Rather like Wrong-Way Corrigan, which we never did understand in terms of clothing and fashion. But what's that about the wrong side of the face? How does a righty punch the right side of an opponent's face? (Here we admit our unfamiliarity with the details of New York martial arts. Sorry.)

Blab. Another reader seeks similarly to enlighten us.
Searched for the entomology of the term Brooklyn in bowling, and turned up nothing.
Then, looked for the etymology of the term, and got little better.
I suspect that someone knows.
But how do I get it to tell me?
Curiously, our reader finds some kind of AI database that contains the question:
What is the origin of the term "The Brooklyn Side" in bowling?
We, similarly, could not find the answer.
We do wonder, however, why there was nothing about the entomology of Brooklyn in bowling, Surely there must be something?

Blab. A reader remind us that ...
The "Thanks for Blabbing" page is full of eels, by the way.
Thought you might like to know.
Bouncy-bouncy.
Indeed. It is. We had forgotten that.
Bouncy-bouncy.

Blab. A spammist writes:
body: Viagra Without A Doctor's Appointment 
Fill Out Our Simple Online Form 
Our Doctor's Will Approve You In Minutes! 
Receive Your Prescription In 24 Hours By Fed Ex 
Other Prescriptions Are Available Also 
Cool. You're under arrest. 

Blab. A reader summarizes the truth and complexity of our Epistemology Day here at Plurp.
I don't know.
Oh? Are you sure?

Blab. A reader continues to think that we care about Slashdot.
The Great (Hopefully) Slashdot Blackout
So a bunch of folks, upset about some dull controversy on Slashdot, are going to show them a thing or two, by golly. They're going to stop posting there for a whole week! Nyah, nyah, nyah.
Kids today.

Blab. A reader continues the controversy regarding how many people have been killed in the (most recent) Afghanistan war, who reported what, who exaggerated what, and yawn and yawn and yawn.
Casualties of the Press
A good article, but did you really learn anything new in reading it?

Blab. A reader sends us a:
Challenge: Find a string of characters that is an English word both in clear text and ROT13 cipher text.
OK, kids, get your Perl script ready! Readers are invited to send us solutions to this wonderful challenge.

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought there was
a lot of Blab
today

Friday, March 15, 2002
Blab. Well, it seems to be Epistemology Day here at Plurp, in which we ask, How do you know anything? We begin this philosophical investigation with a doozy of an entry from a reader who might live Somewhere Else, in reaction to an offhand entry yesterday about casualties in Afghanistan vs. Israel.
Actually, Afghanistan has been involved in one war or another since 1979, in which time we suspect that a few more than 1500 people have lost their lives. If, as I suspect, you mean since the Good Ole Boys have been at war with Afghanistan, then, you are still incorrect. Conservative estimates are that more *civillians* have now died in the war on Afghanistan, than died on September the 11th. Then of course, there are the soldiers and "others" who have died.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that the deaths in Afghanistan outweigh or negate the ones on Sept 11th, not at all - they are all dead people. That means that they have lost the only thing worth anything on this earth. It is bitterly disappointing that the US will still not speak out in condemnation of the terrorist state of Israel, at the same time as it speaks against selected other "regimes of terror". The fact that you did not know that so many had died in Afghanistan (or indeed that it had been at war for 23 years) is testament to the way your US press has surrendered its rights to free speech to the idiots that form your government.
Goodness. Our reader seems quite eager to run us through the old wood chipper, eh? So, let's see. We are happy to believe any random report at all about how many people have died from some cause in a given region. We're especially happy to believe whatever news sources our reader plugs into, rather than the ones we typically do, despite the fact that they seem to disagree wildly with each other.
We're not sure how we got around to condemning or not condemning one government or another, but we're also happy to condemn any set of idiots that our reader would like.
We're also not sure how our Treasured Reader concludes that we do not know Afghanistani history. And we wonder if our reader is aware that the mess between the Israelis and the Palestinians has also been going on for quite some time.
It's so hard to know.

Blab. Our next contestant tries, rather blatantly, to challenge us.
dear big blab box:
please try to refute the following statement:
"nobody ever died of laughter."
The Big Blab Box declines. (cf. This.)
But the Question O' The Day is: How could you know if the statement was true or false? Aside from the usual problems of trying to prove a negative, we have the problems of causation in complex event chains, the believability of third hand reports, the documented errors in eyewitness reports, the trustworthiness of our own senses, and the difficulty in every really knowing anything at all.
It's just so complicated!

Blab. A reader tells us something we don't believe we knew previously.
USS Liberty
That is to say ...
On June 8, 1967, the Liberty, a ship of the Naval Security Group, found itself in the middle of the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. Cruising 25 miles off the Gaza coast, it was attacked by Israeli fighters and torpedo boats at 2 o'clock on a clear and sunny afternoon. There was no apparent provocation, and the reason for the attack has never been fully resolved, although Israel described it as an identification error and sent restitution for the damage and loss of life.
The U.S. government accepted the explanation of the Israeli government concerning the identification error. The loss of thirty-four men was the largest loss of life in a single event in American cryptologic history. It occurred, ironically, during a war in which the United States was not a participant.
We love the notion that the U.S., having a spy ship in a war theater, which was targeted and destroyed by the combined air and naval forces of another country, with concomitant loss of life, was not a participant.
We wonder what a country has do to be counted as a participant. Is there like a form they have to fill out somewhere? Who keeps track of these things?

Blab. A reader who has been trying to follow the confusing twists and turns of recent events tells us a story that we are supposed to believe.
I was told by a deaf-mute that the "Homeland Security Advisory System" color which corresponds to Bill of Rights is UV. It, of course, is ALWAYS on.
..or IS it ???
That does seem to be today's question, doesn't it? But rather than attempt an answer to this seemingly impossible question, we instead divert your attention to a hitherto unreported scale, developed in parallel by the Ministry of Homeland Security, to indicate the terrorist status of each U.S. resident.
Which color are you?

Blab. A reader thinks it knows what we do and what we are.
You need to stop reading into things! Alien food? WHAT A BUNCH OF F*CKING MORONS! Or are you?
(We did that * thing ourself. Naughty reader!)
We appreciate the excellent suggestion, and we would love to do just as you say. So, how do we stop interpreting things? And how would we make our way through the world if we did?
Oh. You might be asking us to interpret things as you do, or as some collection of people do. That's a perfectly reasonable request. How can we do that? Should we ask you how you interpret things before attempting to interpret them ourself? (This might put an onerous load on your previously copious free time.)
Anyhow, what makes you think that they're not alien food symbols?

Blab. A reader agrees.
I agree with Helen. Mr. Plurp edges too close to Libertarianism for my tastes. He should be grateful to have a wife with good sense and values! (I'm not sure what I'm talking about, but it's clear I agree with Helen).
Signed,
a Meddlesome Stranger
Why, you're no stranger than the rest of us around these parts. And let it be said, if it hasn't been before, that we won't tolerate any of that distasteful "Libertarianism", nosir. Even if we have neither good sense nor values. And thank you for the kind words.
Still, given the Theme O' The Day, we are forced to wonder what the reader believed. Did it believe that we had an opinion on capital punishment? (We think we do, but we don't think we expressed it.) Did it believe that Libertoonians have an opinion on capital punishment? (Many do, no doubt, but they seem to differ.) Did it believe that we were expressing an opinion about Andrea Yates? (We don't think we were, but we hate having to explain our best humor, so we'll let the reader believe that if it insists.)

Blab. A reader thinks they know someone who thinks they know something about what we think we were talking about the other day.
More on this whole reincarnation stuff...
A good friend of mine (Randy, many of you know) once described the theory that each of us lives forever in our own little world, a world which overlays (and sometimes coincides) with the little worlds of others.
We see others come into the world, live, and die, yet somehow we keep living. The cure for our disease is invented; a new nutritional supplement keeps us healthy, whatever. Meanwhile, others have the same experience - they even see us die (in their "little worlds"). But we live forever. Or so the theory goes.
The only chink in that theory is that we don't hear of anyone living longer than, say, 120 years or so. If our lives truly interlaced, you'd think that'd happen at least once in awhile, in "our little worlds."
But this is all theory - and we can do whatever we want "in theory."
Your friend sounds quite stoned. Of course, we don't know that ...

Blab. A reader gets all excited.
I liked those long-legged secret agents. Could you feature more long-legged secret agents? Not secret agents on stilts or anything; real all-natural long-legged secret agents next door.
And fewer of those terrifying clowns. Unless their heads actually explode or something, ka-boom.
Always eager to pander to the disturbing fetishes of our readers, we present an illustration from Clive Cutler's seminal 1943 work On the Concealment of Leg Length in Various Professions. Note how the man on the above right, an apothecary by trade, is clearly in possession of longs legs, whereas the man on the right, who allegedly works for the Department of Agriculture, conceals his incredibly long legs (he has, in fact, no torso at all) beneath a common raincoat.
Note also that the use of stilts does not enhance the stealthiness of the youthful applicant on the above left. For this reason, stilts are generally contraindicated in the espionage professions.

Blab. A reader of either of long standing or of a spelunktorial temperament writes:
Einstein the Genius can be found here.
Oh goodie, goodie, goodie! At long last, the Web spews forth the lyrics of Einstein the Genius! In addition (and this gets extra points), it is embedded in a document entitled The Astronomer's Songbook, which is worth your time to peruse all by itself.
Albert, dance around, Albert be profound.
Albert, let you hair stick out and your socks hang down!
Now - can any of our readers find a WAV file, or similar actual musical rendition of this magical song?

Blab. A reader tries again.
'talking out of the back of her head'
Talking out of the side of her mouth
Eyes in the back of her head
L.
Umkay. But what do the two aphorisms have to do with each other? And how do they relate to the meaning of the Helenism itself.
And how do you know?

Blab. A reader enlightens us about that confusing term yesterday.
A "Brooklyn" is the eldest child of a celebrity couple, so named because he was conceived there.
Good to know! We have already woven this term into conversation twice today here at work. How erudite we must appear!

Blab. A reader checks in with news, observation, and poetry, not necessarily in that order.
"Everyone likes an English accent."
This is a line from a TV commercial this morning. Advertising Karastan rugs. Go figure......
..............but it's true. Everyone DOES like English accents. We can listen to Ian all day speak gibberish (he does, you know) Why is that? Why is it that even the least cultured of British voices are charming to us? And why is it that we turn up our noise at unusual Asian accents or the harder German intonation or even that wonderfully odd African accent that is composed of clicks and sighs?
And then we look further and see the ones that speak and marvel at their body's wispy featheriness. And cultural physical adornments. How odd, we think. How barbaric, we declare.
How narrow, we are.
Helen
That's so reassuring. We had previously believed that we were becoming a bit plump.

Blab. A tipsy reader writes:
vote Topper Senate 2002
Now, while our Treasured Reader may well be asking us to vote for Topper, the main character from the 1950's TV sitcom of the same name who inherited a house full of ghosts, we feel it equally likely (and equally rational, BTW) that it is endorsing Tipper Gore for Senate.
This is, of course, the very same Tipper Gore who lobbied for government-mandated content ratings on music, to protect us from our baser selves. As Senator, will she work on legislation extending this enlightened idea to textual media?

Blab. A reader seeks to rescue us from the social embarrassment of our bondage doll.
Please don't dismay Captain and Mrs. Plurp. We have evaluated TigerBright's predicament and have made an appointment for him with Laura's jaw surgeon at the University of Minnesota. This guy is the cat's meow. Don't worry about the charges, we'll spring for them.
Mr. and Mrs. Midwest Correspondent
A division of the Great Lakes Save the Garbage Foundation
We feel certain that the threat of surgery will cause TigerBright to behave properly, dropping him/her/it/them from Status Orange to Status Blue.

Blab. A reader prances in to say:
TV says Rosie's gay.
I'm so happy she's happy;
Happiness is good.
You're happy, she's happy, we're all so happy, tra la.

Plurp. Everyone who wears a shower cap, raise your hand! Everyone who wears a shower cap in public, raise your hand! Everyone who wears a shower cap to work, raise your hand!

Yow. As long as the eagles are carrying off annoying little yap dogs, they're not attacking indolent bloggers. It's kind of comforting.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had always
been Status Blue

Thursday, March 14, 2002
Blab. A reader is driven to poetry. Twice.
The Blue Dog worried
Once he heard of
His pal's exploding head thing.
THIS IS A CORRECTED HAIKU... A TRUE 5/5/7
WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE THIS MAY CAUSE
The Blue Dog worried
Once he heard about
His pal's exploding head thing.
We thought canonical Haiku was 5/7/5, but what do we know? In any event, we treasure the reader's clever conjoining of the blue dog and exploding heads.

Blab. In contrast to that other reader, this reader seeks to flatter us.
I really rather enjoyed the exploding head mpg - in a sick and twisted kind of way...
Yeah, isn't that great? There's something about exploding heads that just never grows old.

Blab. A reader enters our Name That Baby contest.
Charles Rivette P*****
We like it! The Charles part strikes us as unutterably boring. We like Rivette, suggesting, as it does, some strange metalworking fetish. And P***** - very cool, and very topical. As Malcolm X did for Black anonymity in the 1960's, Charles P***** graphically protests the current trends towards censorship and similar governmental violations of human rights.
Very nice.

Blab. A reader tells us a bedtime story.
"Prisons were abolished. Crimes were divided into 3 classes:
victimless crimes (crimes against convention): there would have to be complaints by 100 neighbors of an individual. Then there would be an investigation by group of "trained neurogenetecists", who would recommend neighbors mind their business (usually), or mildly recommend relocation of the individual. Those choosing relocation were assigned by the government supercomputer to a locale where their heresy was considered "normal". This was typically an L5 city; most of them liked it when they got there. Some heretics chose to stay where they were, annoying their neighbors.
crimes against property. Felon required to make full restitution to the victim. If unable, then government made restitution, and felon had a "debt to society", repaid by working at half wages on a socially useful project.
crimes of violence: felons were sent (for life) to "Hell". Hell had been Mississippi, now sealed off; there they could do whatever they wanted. Many people moved to Hell voluntarily, as it was the only place that fit their desired social structures."
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/TheRICHEconomy
Oh look. A wiki. What fun! (Wikis, as you know, let absolutely anybody modify absolutely anything on them. Isn't that idealistic?) You should go look, and see if we have taken advantage of their quaint sense of trust.

Blab. A reader reveals intimate details of our personal life.
Steve seems to forget our heated dinner conversation last night about Andrea Yates. When he experiences post-partum depression we will talk about it again. I will, though, continue to sleep with him. I know where the best
snuggles in the world are, after all. We never did agree about religion and politics (a la 1980) and will never agree about the death penalty.
Helen
It's not that we forgot about it. It's that we, a big believer in free will and the right to free speech, prefer to let Helen speak for herself. She's not a Broken Robot.

Blab. A reader complains.
Both links to your Flashcans come up with a static Flash screen that says
Flashcan Animator
zinc Roe design
If this is your design, it's not terribly good....
- Felis Lynx
P.S. It *CAN'T* be *MY* browser!
That's correct. That's the screen where the actual Flash animation is loaded. It's 1.7M. If you're talking to the Internet with a Dixie cup and string, that can take some time.
No, that's not our design. It's Flashcan's design. Or more specifically, it's Flash. We do not suggest liking Flash.
We do suggest patience. Or some fruit.

Blab. A reader has both a lament and a shopping list.
For those who care..............TigerBright has died..............Long Live TigerBright.
(Steve, can you bring home a flash light tonight?)
TigerBright, for those of you who don't know (which is almost everyone), is/was a flashlight sort of goodie embedded inside a cartoonish orange plastic cat with an articulated mouth. When you flipped a little switch, the mouth would snap open, TigerBright would growl (rraAAAaaaaaaaw) and the flashlight would go on.
It occupied an important niche in our household ecology ever since it was given to us by our whimsical Midwest Correspondent, it being the one and only flashlight we owned.
Then, last weekend, as Helen was trying a seasonally aggressive grilling kata on the terrace, TigerBright got, well, confused. When Helen flipped the little switch, TigerBright would growl (rraAAAaaaaaaaw) and the flashlight would go on, but the mouth would snap shut.
You could fiddle with the mouth and snap it open, but that caused the flashlight to go off. Not good.
By wrapping several rubber bands around it in questionable ways, Helen managed to keep the mouth pried open while keeping the light on. That was good, and she did complete the grilling kata, but we decided that a bondage doll just wasn't a polite sculpture to keep around the house.

Blab. A reader wants to make sure we know about ...
Peep Research
Quite. Otherwise known as cruelty to peeps masquerading as science. (The cruelty, that is, not the peeps. We don't even know what it would mean for peeps to masquerade as science.)

Blab. A reader tries to get us to do work.
One of my coworkers today accused our manager of 'talking out of the back of her head', which struck me as a Helenism but thought I'd leave it up to you to prove it.
Oh, fine. You submit some random phrase and we get to do all the work. Fine!
We imagine that talking off the top of her head might be a common aphorism, as is eyes in the back of her head. But we wonder what they would mean together. Hmm ...
Perhaps our readers know?

Blab. A reader informs us of a strange coincidence in the surrealistic place it calls home.
My pal Steve (different pal Steve than YOU of course) lives in DUMBO and I go up there all the time. Typical Manhattanite, totally unaware of the glory that is Brooklyn.

You have a friend who lives in a cartoon elephant? That's unique. (And what, exactly, is it that you go up to get there?) Oh, and what's a "Brooklyn"?
So many questions!

Plop. In the last 18 months, about 1,500 people have been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian civil war. That's more people than have been killed in the Afghanistan war.
Sobering.

Yow. Did you see the coverage of the 15th Annual April Fool's Day Parade in New York?

Yo. Shocking news today: Rosie O'Donnell is gay. Who's next: RuPaul?

Plop. We're in yet another all-day meeting, this time on PC strategy. The highlight of the morning was an hour-long talk by some senior editor type from PC Magazine. He spent the first half hour reviewing the history of the PC. Very nostalgic, but we knew more about it than he did.
His big claim was that what gets widely adopted are all based on open standards. We wondered if he had ever heard of Windows. Or Gopher.
Then he tried to get all juicy about the future. His astonishing predictions include: better, cheaper, faster; ubiquitous computing; interoperability; the use of the Internet for business; and the possibility of interacting with computers via speech.
Yowie zowie. That's what we call visionary.

Plurp.
The blue dog
always figured that Rosie was
happy

Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Blab. A reader wonders.
What do you know about D.U.M.B.O.?
The Dumbo Internet Alliance? Dumbo arts center? Digital Dumbo? Or just plain old D.U.M.B.O.?
Never heard of it. Why do you ask?

Blab. A reader knocks on our door, all worried.
Hooded clowns have reset all the fuses. Darkness is banished. The best efforts of the long-legged secret agents have come to nothing, apparently, nothing permanent. Flee?
Not at all, my child! Just have a seat, yes, right there. We'll turn Judge Wopner on for you, yes, just like that. Now we'll just get a few instruments and we'll be right back, yes. With some cookies. Some nice, nice cookies, yes. You'll like that, won't you?

Blab. An unclueful reader supposes to find something about the ...
Stefan-Boltzmann
... law here. Why they would look in Plurp for the energy radiated by a black body is quite beyond us. (Gory technical details are here.)

Blab. A reader asks us to become somewhat less tasteless.
Will you kindly simply LINK the exploding THINGS. This was really not anything I wanted to be surprized by this afternoon.
Helen
Sorry about that! We will do our best to anticipate what might unreasonably surprise our Treasured Readers. Then we'll probably post it anyway, of course, but at least you'll know we're thinking of you.

Blab. A methodologist writes:
I don't have an entry for your "Name that Baby!" contest. But I do know a method by which you can find the name: ask Him Whose Name Was Forfeited in a Trademark Dispute. Clearly, He Who Has No Name must be the master of all names and of all naming.
It's a good idea, and we did try that. Him Whose Name Was Swallowed by Jimmy Hoffa was mute on the subject.

Blab. A reader listens carefully.
Phrase heard in a dream: "Adiabatic Tuesdays and Thursdays."
As a complement to Casual Fridays? We like it! How about Wiccan Wednesdays, or Mass Murderer Mondays?

Blab. Ian writes:
You spamming me with Flash again? Neato!
You bet! Yet another wastreltime conceit, this is yet another foolish Flash animation we did last night. This one is entitled We, As Living Creatures.
Do you like it?
We imagine a doohicky kinda like magnetic poetry, those silly little 'fridge magnets that you rearrange into dopey poems. This new doohicky would consist of:

A huge library of short Flash clips in a variety of themes, and

A facility for composing them in a multi-track way, much like these Flashcan folks, and

Some magical way to do the soundtracks. We have no idea how Flashcan does it.

Flashcan is currently limited to three thematic variations, only one of which is not entirely stupid. It would be cool to expand that to a bunch more.
Oh dear. Have we just exposed Flashcan's strategic plan? We hope not, 'cause there is no possible business case that corresponds to it. But if some random codemonkey out there wants to do it, that would be way cool.

Blab. A reader reminds us that ...
scanners is also a good exploding head film
Indeed. We're pretty sure that the guy whose head exploded in yesterday's entry on this topic was, in fact, from Scanners.

Blab. A reader tries to help make not playing with a full shoe into a Helenism.
Dealing from a full shoe is probably from Baccarat where the cards are held in a contraption called a shoe (just watch the casino scene from any old James Bond Movie), Cheers, Weingart
That origin sounds sensible to us.

Blab. Another reader chimes in.
Special Deals on Full Shoes!
James Bond (the one in books, not the one in films) was fond of the card game baccarat, which makes use of a "shoe" to hold cards.
This page goes into frankly tedious detail about a similar game, and includes the phrase "dealt from a full shoe" almost at the very end. Will that do?
Great minds think alike, it seems. We do like the baccarat connection, but it's not clear to us that "dealt from a full shoe" is an aphorism, rather than just a phrase found on a baccarat Web page.
We hate to be picky, but we're been accused already this week (by Helen herself) of letting in Helenisms that weren't, and we are mindful that is only our annoying pickiness that stands between Helenisms and utter chaos.
Or something.

Blab. A reader has a solution to our problem of mortality.
You could simply identify with future generations of humans; then the implementation problem more or less goes away.
Or, more generally, with rocks, or solar winds, or the universe as a whole. Yeah, that's it. We're immortal if we're something we're not.
We like that!

Blab. An enigmatic reader writes:
Emily
Emily's not here right now.

Plurp. In the (analog) mail yesterday, a large yellow card arrived inviting Richard White to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Steadfast readers may recall that Richard White is my long-dead paternal grandfather. In the past year or so, he has been solicited for a dating service, offered a pre-approved credit card and invited to the Whitney Museum.
And now this.
The card promises Star Wars As You've Never Seen It Before. In this case, that might be literally true; we don't think Richard was still around when Star Wars was first released. What would it be like to go to a retrospective of something that happened after you died?
This is getting way too weird for us.

Plurp. We appreciate the deep and profound thinking that was obviously required to come up with the fancy new Homeland Security Advisory System, with its five bright colors and unconfusing shapes. Really we do!
Well, OK, we are amused by its use of the word System. It's reminiscent of things like the Acme Carpeting System, or the Acme Floor Polishing System. But nevertheless!
And ... and ... and we just have one last, tiny question, if it's not too much trouble. Which color is it that gives us the Bill of Rights back?

Rant. Apropos of the Andrea-Yates-drowns-her-children shtick, we wish to tell you about our Broken Robot Theory and, in the process, question much of modern criminal law. Won't that be fun?
Modern U.S. criminal law seems to us (as someone who does not play a lawyer on TV) to be based fundamentally on the (seductive but unproven) idea of free will. If we, the Rude Criminal, commit a crime (let's not debate that term here, Mr. Ashcroft; please sit down) in full knowledge of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, then we're Evil and deserve Punishment. Or Rehabilitation. Which is pretty much the same thing these days, given that both are meted out by some very large guy named Bubba who was incarcerated for multiple rapes and murders.
But we digress. Based, as it is, on this free will thing, modern U.S. jurisprudence gets all confused when the defendant's lawyers claim that she had no free will when the alleged crime was committed. Oh golly, they say, we can't send her to prison for rehabilitation. That's meant for people with free will who decided to do bad stuff.
And they're right. That was the intent of prison and such. What to do? What to do?
Here's what we do. If lawyers wish to assert a defense of lack of free will, we should take them at their word. The defendant does not have free will. The defendant is not a human being, not a creature with free will. No. The defendant is a robot. And, unlike the more social robots with which society may be populated, this is a broken robot. This robot kills human beings.
We take a brief intermission here to notice that, oh look, this robot happens to have useful stuff in its body. It has a heart, and lungs, and a liver and stuff. We'll come back to this.
The concept of human rights is based on the concept of free will. Toasters do not have rights because they don't have free will. So, if there's a subclass of things that look like people but who are, in fact, robots, who don't have free will, then they can't have rights.
Have you anticipated the opportunity? If a person is claimed not to have committed a crime because they do not have free will, they are a Broken Robot, a being with no rights.
We modestly propose to take these lawyers seriously. Their clients are Broken Robots who just happen to have useful resources: hearts, lungs, livers, etc. We should harvest these useful resources in order to save the lives of actual human beings and use the rest of the Broken Robots for fertilizer.
We suspect that this would, coincidentally, result in a decrease in insanity defenses.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was
GUARDED

Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Blab. A reader walks into a bar.
A guy walks into a bar and sees George Bush and Colin Powell sitting at a table. He goes over to them and says, "Wow, this is sure a great honor. What are you guys doing here?"
"We're planning World War III," says Bush.
"Really?" the guy says. "What's going to happen?"
"We're going to kill 140 million Iraqis," says Bush, "and one bicycle repairman."
"A bicycle repairman?" the guy says. "Why are you going to kill a bicycle repairman?"
"See, smart ass!" Bush says, puching Colin Powell in the shoulder. "I told you nobody would care about 140 million Iraqis!"
L.
We're always pleased to see old Hitler/Jew jokes updated to the modern idiom.

Blab. A reader laments:
I am troubled by my failure to document the "dealing from a full shoe" phrase. My searches were as fruitless as the Plurpmeister's. Losing faith in myself.
Near the edge of despondency but buoying myself with memory of an old guy and his wife and their two twenties-thirties daughters in an Italian restaurant on a Sunday night just off Monsieur le Prince in the 6th arrondissement. Most of the restaurants on the street were closed and the restaurant was not particularly busy..or good, for that matter. But we sat and ordered and then did what anyone does: we eavesdropped. The quartet was American and he was regaling the kids with stories of the glorious past. Seems in his misspent youth he hung out in Las Vegas, maybe dealt cards or something, but specificity aside, it was clear he had a gambling knowledge. Exotic stuff to us. Daughter B was recording all of this with a video camera, a little family history project, I guess. In the process he may have dropped the "not dealing from a full shoe" phrase, but definitely did drop this one, which I have also not found on the net, either: "double breasted lucy" in a phrase that ended with "is a four letter word." The word of four letters is FOUR, for, he explained, a double breasted lucy was a dice throw of two twos. The whole phrase was what he said his book about the gambling world would be called, something he offered for my benefit when he discovered I was in publishing.
Never threw dice myself, never been to Las Vegas. Perhaps the man was a dream or a charlatan, a guy bent on throwing me a curve to torture me with, or to humiliate me in public when I could not find a corroborative source. Going to try this. If it doesn't work, I just don't know...
Be of good cheer. The next time the Googlebot comes by these parts, you will be able to find double breasted lucy in Google. We imagine you agiggle with anticipation.

Blab. No doubt mistaking the teeny Blab box for a search facility, a reader writes:
exploding head
But this gives us an opportunity to indulge in nostalgia by collecting, in one place, our favorite exploding head graphics from the Web.

And, of course, this truly wonderful video. We do so love exploding heads

Blab. On our lament about not living forever, a reader offers solace.
Just be reincarnated or something, eh?
Right! Or spend eternity in heaven, or upload our consciousness to a well-backed-up cyberbrain, or freeze ourself until folks more clever than we figure out how to make humans live forever. Or something.
We think these are all fine plans. We're just a little fuzzy on the implementation details.

Blab. Again on our lament, an extremely kind reader writes:
I thought your reflections on mortality and nature were truly beautiful. They made me sad, but at the same time rang with such truth. Just wanted to let you know.
Goodness! Thank you. It just spilled out of our fingers as we sat here at the keyboard yesterday. But it is deeply felt.

Yo. So friends C. & E. are in the process of growing a baby, in preparation for actually having one. Does that make sense? Dunno, but they are having a really hard time figuring out what the (male) baby's name should be.
And you can help! Or at least contribute to the madness. This week'sPlurp Contest is: Name That Baby!
You can, if you wish, submit some really dull name like Fred or Mike. Or you can submit a name that would clearly destroy the child socially at an early age, like Eunice or Bitsy. But that would show a distinct lack of imagination, and we would be forced to taunt you unmercifully.
So instead, try being creative. Amongst their "friends", the best suggestions so far have been names in Gaelic without apparent vowels or otherwise unpronounceable (e.g. Flyn or Maoldhomhnaigh) and names in 1337 (e.g. fr3} or mI{h@E1). We like the 1337n@m35. :-)
Have it, clever minions! The reward for your most creative name? Having a real human creature named whatever you say. Savor the power.

Yow. Using computers as god itself intended, David Leppik has automated the process of translating from English to 133t. It even shifts between various 133t character sets automagically.
See how much time this allows you to reclaim from your otherwise unoccupied day.

Plurp. There's a new feature in the New York skyline.
[T]wo shafts of bright light pierced the night sky Monday in memory of all those who lost their lives in the September 11 attacks.

Inspiring, isn't it?

Plop. Delloite Touche Tohmatsu Incompetus.

Yow. Following some blog link that we've now forgotten (sorry) we found this cute site that lets you make (simple, constrained) Flash animations without actually knowing anything. Since we met the qualifications, we made one. It's entitled Our Vision of the Future.
And to think that, just yesterday, we couldn't even spell "art"!
(And thanks to Ian for letting us use his site as a mail drop to get that link. This spam's for you!)

Plop. Without comment, 'cause ...
The hand motions to the "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" must be like riding a bicycle--you just don't forget them, even if you grow up to be president of the United States.
President Bush, surrounded this morning by nursery schoolers merrily singing and wriggling their fingers spiderily, joined in just in time to make a two-handed spider, then practically led the way on "crawled up the water spout." He executed an impressive "down came the rain," and as if by instinct made the crossways "washed the spider out."
"Up came the sun," and up came the president's hands. But "dried up all the rain" seemed to confound him, as if he had finally run dry himself, and he casually folded his hands back in his lap.

Plurp.
The blue dog
D|}N'7 Qu!T3 kN0W wh@7
70 S@y

Monday, March 11, 2002
Blab. A reader (or a bot, we're not sure which) writes:
Subject: unique verification
if interested........
The advanced lab PEAR, Princeton University, is headed by Dr. Robert G. Jahn, former Dean, School of Applied Science.
This group reviewed, and emphatically verified details that prove theories in physics, psychology, etc., regarding the nature of precognition - the mind, matter connection.
This means that an aspect of mind can transcend space and time, and accurately predict future events.
Naturally this presents enormous problems for the conscious intellect, which generally rejects any attempt to correct its philosophical views of space, time, and causality.
We have a long history of ignoring new ideas, but ignorance has never been a guarantee of security.
Some details best explained in a 'phone conversation, before review.
Ref: Pauli, Nobel Laureate, Physics:
(dimensional templates, and acausal connections)
Josephson, Nobel Laureate, Physics:
(quantum theory and psi phenomena)
Psychophysics:
Dr. Charles T. Tart
www.issc-taste.org
U.S. Army, MajGen. Albert N. Stubblebine, Intelligence Command.
(research into "remote viewing")
We saw a talk by Jahn some years ago. Pretty funny stuff! They had people try to predict (or "influence") the outcome of some truly random process - radioactive decay, we seem to recall. The answer was: people could, in fact, predict ("influence") such things.
This is either (a) the most remarkable breakthrough in physics and psychology in history, or (b) hogwash. We, of course, are agnostic on the subject.
We're interested to see dear Pauli mentioned in the same rantings as Jahn. Looks like Pauli and Jung (not Jahn) invented a quasi-magical idea they called synchronicity late in their collective dotage. Sad.
And it looks like formerly brilliant Brian Josephson done got smacked with the whacky stick. He's now writing about quantum mechanics and ESP. Woo.
Stubblebine is using his military retirement income to lecture at the prestigious International Symposium on UFO Research. So that's a plus.
(We are concerned, however, by the reader's ominous phrase, Some details best explained in a 'phone conversation. Eek)

Blab. A reader expresses certain strange preferences.
I also like toast. Toast is good.
You should get together with that reader from Saturday. You could have breakfast.

Blab. A mysterious reader writes:
Plurp!
Mustaa! Valkoista! Keltaista! Sinistä! Vihreätä! Hopeata!

Plurp. We think, every once in a while, about death - about our own mortality, and about that of those very, very close to us. We don't like the idea.
Some years ago, reading neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory and thinking about simulations of evolving populations, we came to the conclusion that death was a necessary feature in evolution. If there were a species that never died, its population would consist partly of new individuals (presumably well selected for the current environment) and old individuals (presumably not well selected for the current environment). This is not optimal, especially given limited resources to support the population.
If what you want is the continual adaptation of the species to changing conditions, you want the older (not well adapted) individuals to die off and the newer (better adapted) individuals to be the basis for succeeding generations.
And so species are selected, not only for how well they are adapted to the current environment, but also for how quickly they will die relative to the rate of change of the current environment.
That's neo-Darwinism. But that's not the same thing as our own desires.
We want to live forever. How could we not? We want always to delight in warm spring days, to rejoice in pleasures of the flesh, to revel in fabulous sushi dinners and to fall asleep in her arms.
But individual desire is not evolutionary optimality. And from this simple conflict comes such great tragedy.
Some day, some day long before we are ready, we will die. Those we love will die. And we cannot imagine a greater tragedy, a greater sadness or a greater injustice.
Oh, sure, the human genome will endure, at least for now. And terrestrial life, per se, is very likely to continue for quite some time. Or not. Nature does not care. Nature will not note our passing, will not weep for us when we fall, will not recite eulogies over our grave. Weeds will grow. Oceans will turn shells into sand. Tectonic plates will shift. Nature will just move on.
And in the perfect, eternal logic of this motion, we despair.

Plop. Investigating the claim of a product to prevent us from getting stupid telemarketing calls, we discover what happened to all of those high school dropouts.
How does the TeleZapper "zap" telemarketers?
The TeleZapper uses the technology of telemarketers' automatic dialing equipment against them. When you or your answering machine picks up a call, the TeleZapper emits a special tone that "fools" the computer into thinking your number is disconnected. Instead of connecting you to a salesperson, the computer stores your number as diconnected in it's database.
But not, we surmise, a decrease in the number of annoying grammatical and spelling errors in this advertising.
Amazing.

Yak.
A gorgeous woman slinks up to a C.E.O. at a party and through moist lips purrs, "I'll do anything — anything — you want. Just tell me what you would like." With no hesitation, he replies, "Reprice my options."
That's from Warren Buffett, of course.

Yo. Here's something you don't see every day.
A gunman upset with the quality of wide-screen television grabbed as many as 18 hostages Monday in the tallest building in the Dutch capital, then shot and killed himself after a seven-hour siege, authorities said.
While we appreciate this guy's really intense interest in improving technology, we're not sure he made the most effective choice in this regard. Of course, we don't actually know the guy. Maybe he did.

Plop. In other doubleplus good news:
Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures and legal formalities, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. The suspects have been taken to countries, including Egypt and Jordan, whose intelligence services have close ties to the CIA and where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics -- including torture and threats to families -- that are illegal in the United States, the sources said. In some cases, U.S. intelligence agents remain closely involved in the interrogation, the sources said.
"After September 11, these sorts of movements have been occurring all the time," a U.S. diplomat said. "It allows us to get information from terrorists in a way we can't do on U.S. soil."

See? All that hubbub about the U.S. Constitution frowning on kidnapping and torture? It doesn't matter. Our clever government simply asked their less savory friends to take care of it for them. Nice and clean.
We wonder if this same innovative technique can be used for traffic court.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered if Ashcroft might enjoy the
entertainment at
Egypt's more private nightclubs

Sunday, March 10, 2002
Blab. A reader thinks it's ...
St. Swivens day
It turns out that St. Swithin's Day is July 15. Not just yet. Patience.
But that brings up a good point: It's time to start planning. What should we do to celebrate St. Swithin's Day this year? Hmm?

Blab. High on drugs with nowhere to go, a reader writes:
The jazz concert was sold out, so here I am.
Oh, sorry about that. Really glad to be here...and I bear good news. (That has a scary ring to it, doesn't it? Maybe I will burst into song, truly bad song, and tell you all about Jesus and America, but don't be scared, it just popped out spontaneously and without any hidden agenda.) The good news: the Blue Dog is safe. Rumors about detention are false. He is safe, if bored, in Canada. He is also cold, he being a bayou creature.
All this talk about Ashcroft just made him so nervous he fled, with the help of friends. So I wish you would just lay off of the Ashcroft character. He is NOT the attorney general. That is a poorly rated television show in which he is a sidekick to Chevy Chase, the President. So stop it. It's scary. I know it's a television show. I do. I do.
We recommend black coffee and orange juice. And no singing.
We really can't imagine what about the Attorney General might be considered scary. After all, a government official that holds prayer meetings for his staff every morning, believes that calico cats are signs of the devil, and insists on being anointed with oil like King David - that's perfectly normal. Isn't it?

Blab. Another talented reader takes up the challenge of writing a limerick whose first line ends in fundamentalist Christian.
An annoyed fundamentalist Christian
On whose trousers the blue dog was pissin’
Let out a curse
Not Chapter and Verse
“Oh you blue liberal politician!”
We are deeply impressed with our reader's ability to weave both the blue dog and politics into this verse, a thematic feat which entirely eluded us.
BTW, friend Bill was claiming the other day that the limerick, as a poetic form, did not originate in the town of Limerick, and probably wasn't even Irish at all. Is this true?

Blab. A reader contributes ...
A possible Helenism:
The Attorney General is not playing with a full shoe.
(Playing with a full deck elides with dealing from a full shoe.)
Sounds good, except for that part about dealing from a full shoe, which we can't seem to find.

Yow. There were four English sparrows hopping around a tree on our terrace this afternoon. Him Whose Name Was Sold On E-Bay stalked them, his face pressed against the window, though there is no way he could know what they were.
This may seem trivial to you, but to us is was a wonder.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a recurring nightmare
about eagles

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