Plurp: Read it and weep

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2002.03.17 : 2002.03.23

Saturday, March 23, 2002
Blab. A reader seems to have played that silly chess program from yesterday.
Reader-FlashChess, March 22 2002

d4   a6

e4   g6

Nf3 Bg7

c4   Kf8

Nc3 c6

Qb3 Qa5

Bd2 Nf6

Bd3 Ra7

O-O h6

Na4 Qh5

Nb6 Nxe4

Bxe4 Qg4

Rfe1 Bxd4

Nxc8 Bxf2+

Kxf2 Ra8

c5   Rh7

Bf5 Qxf5

Rxe7 Qxc5+

Qe3 Qd5

Re8+ Kg7

Bc3+ f6

Qe7+ Qf7

Bxf6#

Yeah, pretty sad, eh? Looks to us like the program is a simple positional lookahead with maybe 4 plies. There's no opening book - probably not even center weighting - not even the simplest midgame strategy (e.g. don't trade when you're down in material), no provision for passed pawns and certainly no endgame strategy (though we've never gotten into a pawn-king ending with the silly thing).
If you want to be amused at how easily it is trounced, here's a game we just played. (We are White, of course. Or, in the board shown below, Blue, which seems equally appropriate.)

d2-d4 b7-b5

e2-e4 d7-d5

b1-c3 b5-b4

c3-d5 a7-a5

c1-f4 g7-g5

d5-c7 e8-d7

f1-b5 b8-c6

d1-g4 f7-f5

g4-f5 e7-e6

f5-e6

Silly us, our queen's knight gets flushed out by Black's move 5. Seeking to regain the initiative, we execute a Berserker attack, throwing everything we have into the fray. Here is the final position.

Note that, of our six attacking pieces, only four are covered, four are under attack, and most of our pieces are undeveloped. The last half of the game was played entirely on initiative, but the computer's position and tactical play were so awful that the Berserker attack decimated it.

Blab. A circus performer who bites the heads off of chickens writes:
When my geek friends and I (also a geek, and unrepentent) used to play Ultima Online, we would have our characters chant, "Chicken bone! Chicken bone! Lucky, lucky chicken bone!" and then move them around in a way that made them look like they were dancing a jig on the screen. It greatly amused us and confused the other players.
This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the wishbone story.
L.
We should hope not.
For some reason, we never got into Ultima, online or not. We did have a person in the group at work who did, though. He had spent thousands of hours at it. He had accumulated so much Stuff that his Massive Castle did not have one of everything in the game - it has 53. Piles of Cloaks of Godlike Foot Disease. Rooms full of Swords of Kitty Meowing. Shelves full of Tomes of Glue Sniffing.
Realizing his addiction, he went cold turkey. Canceled his account. Destroyed his gigantic collection of notes.
Two weeks later, he had a new account, and was talking about writing a bot that would accumulate Stuff for him.

Blab. A reader complains that we edit its Blabs.
No, look agai at the date - it was indeed 20002!! -AJL
Yes, the article to which your Blab about Jesus H. Ashcroft referred did claim to get it from a document published in 20002. Clearly, we not only missed the clever humor of your Blab, but we erred in changing the year in your Blab from 20002 to 2002. We swear off correcting our readers. Agai.

Blab. On that exhibit of torn-up corpses as art, a sicko with a death fetish writes:
Of course it's art - and science, and *really* clever. After all, would you rather be stuck in a hole in the ground to be slowly forgotten while your bones leak from your joints and turn to dust, or have your body (or bits of it) preserved for the rest of the world to gawp at in wonder and awe? It's just a shell, nothing more, I couldn't care less what is done with my body once I've finished it. Slice it up and make boots and bookmarks for all I'm going to worry about it! Socially innapropriate it may be, but have you considered that it might be society at fault there? I think it's fantastic, and I'm going to do my best to go see it. Maybe I'm just a sicko with a death fetish, but actually, I think this sort of thing is extraordinary, and definitely worth seeing. Not for any "cool" or shock factor, but because it lets us see inside our selves (literally and metaphorically) by bringing us into the hollow stare of death, a place where we can learn to face our own mortality. These things make life more vital. One self plastination kit please.
-AJL
We'll look for your body in future articles on this "art" exhibit, having sexual relations with the corpses of snakes and chickens.

Blab. A reader reminds us ...
Never pick up hitchhikers, especially if they're Jesus.
If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him!

Blab. A reader wonders just how knowledgeable we are.
DR PLURP, did you know that one of the 11 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) is in the NYC Morgan Library?
Your Mid-Atlantic correspondent
We did not know that! Imagine, God's own words, pressed into the flesh of young cows, just a few blocks from where we live. It's too gruesome for words.

Blab. A reader instructs us to ...
Pronounce DoD as "Do Wah Day".....
Do Wah Ditty, Pretty Dumb, Pretty Dumb.

Plop. Speaking of which, here's some good thinking.
[T]he United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum.
We reckon that the architects of this brilliant plan are regular attendees at the St. Stupid's Day parade.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a small
opening book

Friday, March 22, 2002
Blab. A reader introduces a completely new topic.
(from Bruce Sterling's commentary on the Larsen B disintegration)
"Whenever you search on 'billion tons' as a phrase in
Google, most of the hits you get back are related to
global warming and fossil fuels. There's nothing else for
which 'a billion tons' is a normal unit of measurement."
There's actually nothing for which a billion anything is a normal unit of measurement. Except computer storage, of course.
Curiously, the very first Google hit on billion tons is this:
An estimated 80 billion tons of Jar Jar Binks-related merchandise—manufactured in bulk this spring in anticipation of the summer's blockbuster Star Wars prequel—is now available at as much as 70 percent off the regular retail price and could plummet even lower by week's end, according to a report issued Monday by the National Association of Toy & Novelty Retailers.
Which is, we suppose, related to global warming and fossil fuels. Right?

Blab. A reader finds for us an ...
Interesting rant on Jesus H. Ascroft apparently published in 2002, but don't let that stop you. -AJL
Indeed, that is a dandy rant, of which the tag line is ...
If You Were God, Would You Want People Like Ashcroft Speaking For You?
We prophesize a smiting in the near future.

Blab. A reader insists that we ...
try this
Omigosh! That's absolutely astounding. And frightening! Do go click on it. Really.

Blab. A reader claims ...
I was looking for the Big Blob Box. Sorry to bother you.
Ah. That would be here.

Blab. A reader massages yesterday's preconceptions. (Are those now postconceptions?)
"Our reader seeks to confuse us by introducing questions before context."
My questions provide the context. You wouldn't want to read an article without some preconceived notion of what you're supposed to get from the article, now, would you?
Uh, no, of course not. Thanks very much. Please provide further metadata. Bzzt.

Blab. In an unexpected turnaround of the usual protocol to which we are subjected around here, a reader actually does our work for us. We love that!
562 pages of logorrhea. That's what that "study" paper is. They formed a committee, had meetings, had some focus groups with people from "minority" groups, and did a text search on certain buzzwords.
The study is devoid of any actual analysis, and just takes the conclusions of certain hand-picked studies as gospel, then rolls on from there.
Even they admit, however: "These disparities are associated with socioeconomic differences and tend to diminish significantly, and in few cases, disappear altogether when socioeconomic factors are controlled. The majority of studies, however, find that racial and ethnic disparities remain even after adjustment for socioeconomic differences..."
From which we learn that not all studies agree that race is an independant factor in healthcare access. What the relative merits are of the conflicting study findings one cannot tell from this paper, presumably because that kind of analysis is difficult, and missed the point in any event. The point is to plump for a desired set of public policy.
Statistics are not a form of lie so much as they are an excellent tool for liars, given that it is largely counter-intuitive how to properly use statistics, and that they can be used improperly to show whatever the liar desires.
This was, of course, in reference to the study that was all over the press this week (and cited here yesterday) claiming that Minority Folks get worse health care in the U.S. than do White Folks. We might infer from the above that our reader does not necessarily endorse their methodology or conclusions. Maybe.

Blab. A reader fabricates a thoroughly preposterous story.
The most remarkable thing happened last night. Last weekend I cooked a wonderful garlic chicken for company and on Sunday when I carved up the rest of the carcass, I very neatly removed the wishbone. I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth (never did understand the meaning behind that saying!). I put the bone out to dry and last night I pulled it down for us to use at dinner.
The bone was very small for a 4 pound chicken. But we got our little fingers tucked around the stems of the bone and then we puuuuulled.
CRACK! POP! Blink! The bone had broken so that neither of us got the winning side and the top part of the bone hopped into Steve's glass (not filled yet). I couldn't believe it! We both laughed and then admitted that neither of us had made a wish anyway!
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hey, wait! That happened to us last night too!

Plop. Now this is interesting. (Squeamish folks should click here to skip this. Honest!)
Let's suppose your father had checked that little box indicating that his body should be donated to science in the event of untimely mumblety mumblety. Would you subsequently expect to see his partially-dissected body at an art exhibit? Or that of your pregnant sister? Or your daughter? Of course you would.
The corpses are skinned and their insides exposed. One sits astride a horse, holding a brain in its hand.
The procedure is legal, but raises the possibility that people who donated their bodies in the cause of medical science could have ended up having their organs displayed in an art gallery.
...
But most distressingly of all, at the denouement to the exhibition, there will be the bisected cadaver of an eight-months pregnant woman with her womb opened to reveal the foetus.
...
The anatomist preserves the bodies using a technique he has invented where fluids are drained and exchanged with plastics to make the bodies rigid, odourless and permanently preserved.
...
The alarm was raised when 'Cyrillic characters' were identified on the skin of one body at the show (which claims to use only donated specimens) in Vienna in 1999, pointing, the magazine claimed, towards 'a former prison camp inmate'.
While we know it will shock and amaze you, we must admit that this is beyond even our sense of the socially inappropriate. And that's saying a lot.
As we used to say in our college days: Of course it's crap. But is it art? (Caterina)

Plop. From yesterday's DoD briefing.
Military Commissions: Fair, Balanced, Just
Hey - we're convinced. What could be more jurisprudencial than young men with huge guns and no legal training?
The Pentagon has decided to call the panels "commissions" rather than "tribunals" as originally envisioned, believing the new designation will be less contentious, military officials said.
Isn't spin wonderful? And speaking of spin ...

Rant. We are confused by what seems to be a commonly held set of social beliefs in the world. Not that this would be the first time. But this time, it's pretty serious.
Let's take what seems to be the Afghan Way Of War^TM. Groups A and B battle with each other, with equally bad weaponry and equally inept tactics, for years. By some random fluctuation, A gains a significant advantage over B.
Now here's the confusing part. A says to B: "Yo, B. What say you give up?" B says to A: "OK, but you have to give us a bunch of money, we get to leave the battlefield with our many lousy weapons which we will use against you next time, and we get to go home until we decide to attack you in return." A says to B (and this is the particularly confusing part): "Sure thing. You are our brothers."
As a second example, take the current interesting interaction between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis send troops into Palestinian settlements and blow up a bunch of folks. The Palestinians send suicide bombers into Israeli cities to blow up a bunch of folks. Rinse. Repeat.
So here's our question. What do these various parties think is going to happen? They can't possible think that their actions will lead to peace, or anything like it. They can't possibly think that they will "win", at least not in the sense that their groups / ideologies / whatever will dominate the situation or marginalize their foes.
So what's the deal? What do they think will happen? What's the endgame?
Our guess is that, implicitly or explicitly, these various parties don't care about peace, or winning, or stability, or the continued existence of their loved ones, or any of the other common goals of civilized people. Rather, they care about face, spin, PR. They care about the huffy stories they can tell, about how they didn't back down when the bullies hocked loogies on their shiny shoes. You shoulda seen the other guy. Stuff like that.
And, in the process, their countries are torn apart, their economies are destroyed, their loved ones die. But that's not important. What's important is that they can puff up their bloody chests in pride.
And we renew our suggestion that we should build a wall around these fascinating people and let them turn themselves into mulch of their own fascinating volition.

Plurp. Should we pronounce DoD as D00d or D'Ohd?

Yow. The Gutenberg Bible, printed in the 1450s on calfskin, is being digitized. That strikes us as weird.

Plop. Speaking of weird, the Pope says it's not a good idea for Catholic priests to sexually abuse young boys.
What's weird is that this is news.

Yo. FlashChess. Probably very hard to program, but really easy to beat. Imagine - no opening book. Feh! (/usr/bin/girl)

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought that A and B were
perfectly normal names
for chicken bones

Thursday, March 21, 2002
Blab. On that article yesterday claiming that minorities get worse health care in the U.S., a skeptical reader writes:
"The report said the differences exist even when insurance, income, age and the severity of the disease are the same for both groups."
And yet every reported detail was in raw percentages. Sorry, been lied to too often to accept this report on its face.
Lies, damn lies and statistics, eh? Could be! Readers are requested to read the original report (we love the Web!) and report back to us on their methodology and results.
We will wait with bated fingers.

Blab. Speaking of statistics, a reader contributes this:
Priests in US: Over 45,000
Exposed abusers: 55 ( 0.12% )
Tenured Professors at Yale: 836
Recently convicted child molestors: 1 ( 0.12% )
Being able to mock them all: Priceless.

Blab. Better late than never, a reader sends this gem.
Although I'm a little late for your "come up with a name" contest ... here's a great list of names to use for inspiration.
Cool! 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900. From this list, we will forward the following excellent suggestions to C. & E. to name their upcoming little boy:

Holly Golightly

The Invisible Man

Toad

We're betting that they pick Toad. But you never know!

Blab. And speaking of toads, kindly examine this ...
garden from Mars
It makes us want to make a special mulch pile of broken glass. More here.

Blab. And speaking of gardens, a reader bounces in from the terrace to wish us a ...
Happy first day of Spring. The big black building on East 56th Street no longer blocks the sun from our terrace. Summer can only be minutes away.........
Helen
We practiced the kata Drive Car Top-Down Style briefly in midday today, though it was pushing it, to celebrate the First Day of Spring. The mythical Helen observed the ritual more Stonehenge-like. She always was a traditionalist.

Blab. From left field, a reader asks a question that borders on the surrealistic.
Did you write the clock from the week of Feb. 17, or just borrow it from somewhere?
Look. You do not want us writing code these days. Really. The last code we wrote was a 40 line usage example for the documentation of the now venerable IBM AntiVirus, in Rexx of all things, and it contained at least six bugs that had to be fixed in subsequent revs of the docs. We were the laughingstock of the department.
We also didn't write those little yellow squares.

Blab. Mistaking us for CNN, a reader writes:
I have two questions about this article.

I thought we were conducting a war on terrorism. Is this man not a terrorist?

"about 500,000 acres?" Why measure such a large area in acres? This isn't meaningful to me until I do a not-so-quick mental calculation and come up with "about 800 square miles."

Our reader seeks to confuse us by introducing questions before context. But we are not befuddled, no not us, well, not any more than usual, anyhow. Well, we don't think we are. Or ... ?
Anyway! The article is about this.
After a nearly four-year, more than $30 million manhunt, the FBI is scaling back its search for suspected 1996 Olympic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph [...].
The first bombing Rudolph is accused of was the Centennial Olympic Park blast, which killed one person and wounded more than 100 others. He also is charged with carrying out 1997 bombings at an abortion clinic and a gay-oriented nightclub in Atlanta. [...]
Investigators believe Rudolph is still alive and he is hiding somewhere nearby, possibly in one of the hundreds of caves and abandoned mines in the region or in the Nantahala National Forest, which covers about 500,000 acres.
So many terrorists, so little time, eh? Maybe the U.S. should bomb the hundreds of caves and abandoned mines, sending in Special Forces to obliterate any trace of life from them before searching for random clues to other stuff that they might want to blow up. Oh, North Carolina is in the U.S.. Does that matter? This terrorism stuff is so complicated!
On that units question, we agree. We have always had a terribly hard time thinking in terms of acres. It took us a few seconds of hard blinking to realize that 500,000 acres is only 8.29·10⁴³barns.
We appreciate our reader's sense of the equivalent importance of these two questions.

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be
0.12% child
molester

Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Blab. Our little diatribe about the Catholic church's apparent and puzzling policy of staffing its leadership ranks with pedophiles seems to have struck resonances in our prolific readership.
Some of us are a little disturbed (as if we needed to point it out) over the inability of the Pope of Rome to speak or even acknowledge the fact that priesty boys have been buggering since they looked inside their cassocks and smiled. Now you think that a guy with a Popemobile and a large and male staff (NOT a double entendre) could find just a moment to see that the priesty boys have been running loose for centuries, doing whom they could when in a position of authority, charged up as they are with unused semen. (Is this rant unsemenly?) But then he is too busy, really, what with telling us all to love one another, an unintended double entendre.
Scandal of scandals, the head priesty boy in Boston allowed an editorial in the Diocesan paper, suggesting that celibacy might not be a really good idea for grown men with large flocks of mere human beings who can, these super men able, at the ring of a bell, to turn this into that. White magic, of course! (Imagine suppressing a bowel movement for a lifetime.) But then, probably scolded by a quite pious member of the ecclesia for upsetting the papal cart, he decided that this was just a nice little debate about what might be right or wrong, not a criticism of the Church and its drive to populate the world with copulating poor, many of whom die in desperate places because they do not have food to feed their children or contraceptives to avoid the spread of AIDS. God will provide. While the hunchback of St. Peter's flies first class.
Is that a member of the Catholic church, or are you just glad to see me?

Blab. A reader has a compelling theory.
The reason the Catholic Church gets away with things that Toys R Us wouldn't is because the Church's mascot ISN'T Geoffrey the Giraffe....
So your suggestion is that Toys R Us should adopt St. Peter as a mascot?

Blab. A reader encourages us to look at something else entirely.
The New York Times is reporting on the wonderful health care you're receiving! This makes us happy - we want you to live a long and healthful life.
The statisticians among you may suspect that there is a correlation between minority status and low income, and low income and poor medical care. You would be wrong.
The report said the differences exist even when insurance, income, age and the severity of the disease are the same for both groups.
That's not a good thing.

Plop. A PC belonging to reader M&M Maystadt (must be a German rapper) sends us email with a virus attached. Hello, M? Your PC is infected. That is all.

Plop. Here's an interesting thought.
I would be more proud if we set the standard for the treatment of prisoners of war, rather than going through practices that are questionable
But, of course, they won't. This has nothing to do with the hunger strike in which 2/3 of the Guantanamo detainees are now participating. No, nothing at all.

Yow. We find unexpectedly that we are Carl Sandburg, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Maya Angelou. All at once. Must be a mixup in the birth records.
You see the world in a different way than your peers and are able to find beauty in the most unusual places!
We once found beauty at the bottom of the frozen treats section of a 7-11 in Bakersfield. It was pretty surprising. (Dave)

Yow. Looks like Homo Erectus was pan-Asian/European to a much greater extent that previously believed. Cool.

Yow. We are sure we are the author of this blog, as we recognize our writing style and various psychoses in it. Yes, we're quite certain. Why do you ask, Doctor?

Yo. Insight O' The Day (Or Not):
The years get shorter, but the days get longer.

Plurp.
The blue dog
refused to eat
any more M&Ms

Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Blab. A reader sends us this initially confusing missive.
no magents
The reader sites an article about ...
A German crew providing translation services for a United Nations conference [...] showed up in Monterey, Calif., rather than the meeting site more than 1,500 miles away in Monterrey, Mexico
We applaud the reader's subtle typographic humor in misspelling magnets to refer to this story.

Blab. A reader may be searching for ...
helen naked pitures
And, if so, we surmise that our reader was properly gratified.

Yo. Once again, France narrowly misses being obliterated.
"It came right out of the sun," said astrophysicist Michel Foucault. "We were both running towards it. Claude said 'I've got it', and then started flailing about. It wasn't my fault."

Rant. So, help us understand the recent stuff about Catholic priests molesting young boys. More specifically, explain to us how this can still be a controversy.
It sounds like the Catholic church has, for years, heard complaints like this, wagged a no-no finger at the offending priest, transferred him to new, virgin territory, and forgotten about the whole thing.
Imagine if this happened at, oh, say, Toys R Us. Imagine if highly-placed managers at Toys R Us routinely, over decades, molested young children. Imagine if the executives of Toys R Us heard reports of this, called shame-shame to the nasty managers, transferred them to a new store, and forgot all about it.
Would there still be a company called Toys R Us? Or would it have collapsed under dozens - no hundreds - no thousands - of civil actions and criminal indictments. Wouldn't the offending managers, wouldn't the condoning executives, have been carted off to prison by now? Wouldn't Congress, in their infinite wisdom, have passed laws resulting in the bankruptcy of institutions which routinely condoned such conduct? Wouldn't there be protest marches around the world, indeed, near riots, at the continued existence of Toys R Us branches in various countries?
We suspect that Toys R Us would, by now, be but a memory of an earlier, less enlightened, more exploitative time in human history when disgusting people still thought it was a fine idea to molest children.
So, help us understand why the Catholic church still exists, why their molesting priests are still free, why their managing hierarchy is still unindicted. Could you please? 'Cause we are so confused.

Plurp. In the interests of political balance, let's now try to understand why child pornography is illegal. We can think of several theories.

People who view images of children doing sexual things are inherently evil and deserve to be punished just 'cause. (OK. That's fine. But what principle leads us to this? Is it that kids are innocent and defenseless? Then we should also ban nun pornography. Is it that they cannot reasonably be said to have given their consent? Then we should also ban pornography involving the mentally limited. But we do not.)

People who view images of children doing sexual things encourage people to make such images, whether through monetary or other social means. The making of such images always involves harming the children involved. Hence ... (But we tolerate lots of things that encourage people to do bad things - see the First Amendment - and hold the people who do such things responsible rather than blaming their encouragers. And there are circumstances in which the then-children involved did, in fact, consent at the time and later, when they became adults, still consented to their past activities, and still the original images were illegal. In this light, are snuff films illegal? Leave aside whether such things exist or are urban legends - if there were a video showing the murder of another, would it be illegal to possess it? To sell it? To display it on the Internet?)

There was a recent story in which the creation of fake child pornography - created via CGI with no children involved - was said to be illegal. (The idea was that it was hard for the police to tell whether it was real or not. If it was real, it was illegal. So they should be able to arrest the creators of the unreal too. How odd. Murder is illegal but Schwarzenegger movies are not. Do we really have laws that make people into criminals because the police are stupid?)

Kindly note that we are not endorsing child pornography. We are simply trying to understand its widespread illegality so that we can equally smite those who violate the legal principle of which it is merely an instance.
Readers?

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't wish to be
associated with
any of that stuff,
Mr. Ashcroft.

Monday, March 18, 2002
Blab. A reader with a severe typographic disorder writes:
H:elp! I: ha:ve :a spa:stic: co:lon!
And then, later, apparently filled with remorse:
I'm very sorry about the spastic colon. It was an error in judgement.
pef
We caution our reader about that error in judgement stuff, and raise his Terrorist Status Level to Detained.

Blab. A reader sends us scurrying back to the Plurp archives with this confusing missive.
Oh, so the Blue Dog wasn't impressed by Saturday's Blabs? Perhaps he needs a talking-to by Him Who Was Named on the Thirteenth of Octember.
Actually, the blue dog merely observed (and quite correctly, we think) that there was a lot of Blab last Saturday. That hardly seems reason for elevating his Terrorist Status Level to Questioned. Or so some might say.

Blab. A reader donates all of previously unnominated names to our Name That Baby contest, thus bringing closure both to the contest and to us.
Erin Warfsanger Bellevista Smythe
Mortimer "the Tiger Cage" Hannibal Smythe, Jr.
Fred Ethel Smythe
Ethel Fred Smythe
Petunia "my hat" O'Casey Smythe
Hannibal Lechter Smythe
Spam Spam Spam Fred Spam and Spam Smythe
Matthew Mark Luke John Satan Smythe
Dino Smythe
Faithful Q. ("just Q") Smythe
Helen Burnham Smythe
Name Smythe
First Name Smythe
First Name Middle Initial Smythe
That Guy on That TV Show Smythe
Sirhan Sirhan Smythe
Raymond Luxury-Yacht (pronounced "Smythe")
Bad Hair Day Smythe (ref "Major Bedhead")
We are torn between the many good candidates there, especially Petunia "my hat" O'Casey Smythe, for its sly reference, and Raymond Luxury-Yacht (pronounced "Smythe"), which is only comprehensible in context, which it never would be.
We will certainly recommend these (and the several others over which our creative readers wracked their brains) to the Pregnant Couple in Question. And, naturally, we'll tell you with which of your clever suggestions they decide to curse their nascent drooler.

Blab. A slovenly reader, content with tossing the challenge back in our face rather than solving it, writes:
Challenge: Find a string of characters that is an English word neither in clear text nor ROT13 cipher text.
Too easy! How about "r"?

Plop. Text-based pong. Wrong. So very wrong. (memepool)

Plurp.
The blue dog
was too busy to
do much about those
Blab things

Sunday, March 17, 2002
Blab. A reader with a particularly combative marriage writes:
I always get confused about "marital" and "martial". And about the "arts" thing -- so what do you mean? HUH? Compare and contrast, please?
Make love, not war.

Blab. A reader uses the gentle art of plagiarism to solve our ROT13 challenge, in which you were asked to show English word pairs in which each letter of the second word was 13 characters in the alphabet after the corresponding letter in the first word.
The longest one I know of (re: the ROT13 challenge) is abjurer/nowhere. Got that from a Martin Gardner book of years back.
That's a good one, all right.

Blab. A reader with more time on his hands provides a more complete solution to the problem.
Well, the Perl script was duly written, and proved informative. Unfortunately, /usr/share/dict/words
on my Unix systems contains prefixes, suffixes, and other word fragments in addition to real 'words', and quite a lot of those fragments ROT13 to other fragments.
Some of my favourites from the real words were:
'terral' -> 'greeny'
'pyrex'   -> 'clerk'
'nowhere' -> 'abjurer'
[inw]
Entirely dandy!

Blab. A reader points us to a cute little Air Force document entitled ...
Weather as a force multiplier
... with the more ominous subtitle:
Owning the weather in 2025
Yep, those nice folks at the Air Force propose controlling weather for military purposes, both offensive and defensive.
But that's just the start. This is part of a larger set of conceptual studies on what the Air Force might need to look like by 2025. Among the many interesting tidbits are scenarios in which the military performs economic espionage and sabotage against private companies. (It's called commercial warfare.) We particularly liked what the Special Forces folks might be up to in a few years.
We have some reason to doubt the technical credentials of those involved, however, as this proposed 2025 technology suggests.
Quantum Polarization Shift Communications (AF 2025 Concept #900291)
Since quantum polarization has the potential for faster than light communications at any distance and is jam proof, it would revolutionize communication as we know it today. Quantum physics has demonstrated that when two photons are emitted by a particular light source and given a unique and identical polarization, they always share the same orientation. If polarity of one photon is changed, the other photon changes its polarity instantaneously. This concept invokes the notion of subspace communication capability postulated in the Star Trek television series and would offer SOF precision operations teams tremendous capability.
They never studied.

Blab. A clueless reader pastes the following into the Big Blab Box.
[Extremely long text deleted - Plurp]
Foolish reader. That's what links are for! Your text can be found here, and details plans for the upcoming April Fool's Day Parade in NYC. Be there or be somewhere else.

Plop. Do not play this game. It will destroy your ability to interact with normal humans. Those of you who don't know what that means, go ahead and play.

Yo. If you thought that Frog Blender thing from a while back was in bad taste, wait until you see Osama Sissyfight. (Note: Folks who like bin Laden or dislike violence probably won't appreciate this much.)

Yow.Ian donates one of the great Google translations of our time.
CeBIT: Ballmer wakes "urine-stank" to the industry
Priceless.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was, unbeknownst to the
Scion of Mesopotamia,
a direct result of
quantum polarization shift

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