Plurp: Sign our belly

Bigger!

2002.03.24 : 2002.03.30

Saturday, March 30, 2002
Blab. A reader dissects the intricacies of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's plot to control the world.
I believe Project Freedom is some sort of giant robot, most likely general purpose and hopefully glittering (I mean, if Congress is going to spend the big bucks on robots, they damn well better glitter).
Oh, well that's OK then. We like robots.

Blab. Meanwhile, the Evil Overlord-To-Be checks in on a topic of supreme importance.
I was given the mnemonic "SLEWGAP" for the 7 deadly sins in high-school, and it was duly recorded by the part of my brain responsible for filling memory storage with random crap.
Lesseee:
Sloth
Lust
Envy
Wrath
Gluttony
Avarice
Pride
I think that's it.
-Ron Paul
What high school did our Congressman attend that insisted on knowledge of the Seven Deadly Sins? Was it Satan High?

Blab. L. reminds us of:
The Deadly Sins Web Site
L.
Humorously, their woodcarvings of the Seven Deadly Sins, which otherwise look quite nice, include both Avarice and Greed, mysteriously omitting Gluttony (one of our personal favorites, right behind Lust and Sloth, and hence our term Sluttony of course).

We feel certain that the image portrayed on the right-hand woodcarving was really intended to be labeled Gluttony. We attribute the artist's error to Sloth.

Blab. A reader decodes, definitively, those three enigmatic images.

One day in the 12th century, a mysterious and enigmatically hatted man appeared before some monks who were pitching a tent at the annual monk festival in Munich.
"Know ye of the geometery of produce?" the man asked, enigmatically. The monks replied that they did not, and would thank the man very kindly to leave the area as he seemed to be of demonic origins. The man agreed to leave, but first gave the monks an enigmatic diagram before disappearing in a puff of smoke.

"Know ye of the geometry of produce?"

The diagram cast a powerful spell on the monks, turning them into anti-monks. From that day on, the anti-monks spent all day and all night anti-illuminating black-vellumed texts with the diagram using precious white ink squeezed from rare albino squid, but still they couldn't figure out what the diagrammatical enigma meant.

Over the centuries, the anti-monks were driven insane and most ended up on the streets, wandering aimlessly, mummbling enigmatically to confused passers-by something about cabbages and oranges. Then, in a stroke of manic genius, one of these transient anti-monks finally realized the meaning of the diagram - finally knew the geometry of produce!
With as much fanfare as the anti-monastic bum could muster - a road flare he found by the side of the freeway - he revealed to the world his discovey. As he arranged the produce on the sidewalk into the proper geometrical alignment that the diagram now clearly dictated, an apparition manifested at his side - the geometry of produce had the power to summon the dead! As it turned out, the apparition was none other than 7-time Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt. After his inital excitement, the anti-monk soon realized that there was only so much that a guy who had driven around in circles for a living had to say about the mysteries of life and beyond. The anti-monk made up a poor excuse and quickly left the enigmatic ghost of Earnhardt standing on the sidewalk, alone and dejected.
And that is the story of how Dale Earnhardt came to haunt our city's streets.
And they say drug use is declining.

Blab. A reader with hair, and DNA and stuff, writes:
It is impossible to find me (no one can find me) because of the spikes in my hair (in the facticity of the world's hair-consciousness, where it coincides with my selfness, with the age of the cream-colored universe), and it is impossible for any of us (because of the spikes in our hair, real or imagined, or only in potentia) to find (to locate, and to locate is always to conceal) any of the rest of us (as if there could be a "rest" of us at this point in the development of the universal awareness of self; for we went beyond class consciousness long ago, into a consciousness grounded in and transcending DNA, information, particle suites and De Broglie's hypothesis, the unending (if never begun) sonification of the wave function, even the wave function of those tallow candles), and so we must always be alone.
Even Mia.
Even those sallow candles.

Blab. A reader reports on a scientific breakthrough. Of sorts.

French Researchers Clone Rabbits
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:29 p.m. ET
French scientists say they have successfully cloned rabbits from adult cells for the first time.
A wee bit redundant, no?
It does seem a bit like cheating. The authors are not without a sense of humor, though.
"Cloning might seem rather redundant in view of the bunny's ability to reproduce by natural methods," said a report of the research published by New York-based Nature Biotechnology magazine.

Blab. A reader comes up with a solution to the New York drought emergency.
Drought Emergency -- oh, of course. The water shortage can be solved by monetarizing water, which takes water away from poor people and gives it to rich people, and since "shortage" means "rich people can't get something that they want", that will end the shortage! I love capitalism.
Why is it MONEY that's so special? Why should it be the people with the most MONEY who can get the most water? Why not give the most water to the people with the most common sense, or the most kindness, or the best sense of beauty? But of course then some rich people might not be able to buy enough water to fill their dogs' swimming pools, and then we'd have a SHORTAGE; oh no!
We entirely agree. We note the similarly tragic shortage of Ferraris, for instance, and apartments with a view of Central Park. We think these should be allocated to the people with the most sarcastic Weblogs.

Blab. Demonstrating that someone clicks on all those links we lovingly craft, a reader writes:
"Here's another nifty visual idea from Dave Chess, with brainstorming assistance from Joseph Kesselman. It depicts DC engaged in an early (yet apparently quite advanced) form of cruising the online universe."
Wow. Who knew Dave was a Virtual Adept? After reading about his attempts to set up DSL, I would have pegged him a Son of Ether.
L.
Dave seems astonished that, having discovered a Web site displaying the great drawings that are on his office wall (and of which we have always been jealous), we blogged the site rather than telling him about it verbally.
"Verbally."
It's, like, so XX. Ya know?

Plurp. Our test mania gets the better of us again. Here are the nine god-given canonically unquestionable personality types o' the day:
Type 1: The Reformer. The rational, idealistic type.
Type 2: The Helper. The caring, nurturing type.
Type 3: The Motivator. The adaptable, success-oriented type.
Type 4: The Artist. The intuitive, reserved type.
Type 5: The Thinker. The perceptive, cerebral type.
Type 6: The Skeptic. The committed, security-oriented type.
Type 7: The Generalist. The enthusiastic, productive type.
Type 8: The Leader. The powerful, aggressive type.
Type 9: The Peacemaker. The easygoing, accommodating type.
Of these, we are most strongly Type 1: The Reformer. We might also be Type 5: The Thinker, Type 8: The Leader or Type 9: The Peacemaker. (Though Type 8 and Type 9 seems pretty darned different, don't they? Maybe we have multiple personalities. That would certainly explain the blackouts. And that strange woman in the East Village.)
Under no condition are we Type 3: The Motivator or Type 4: The Artist.
Something like that. (/usr/bin/girl)

Plurp. Here's a good one.
A Colorado company's line of dolls depicting serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and other murderers is in poor taste, an attorney for victims' families said Friday.
Poor taste. Get it?

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't have
a swimming pool

Friday, March 29, 2002
Blab. A fan of old machines and failed industrial research models writes:
I've been reading a history of the Xerox PARC lab over the last day, called Dealers in Lightning, and I find myself wondering what you think of the book and whether the specter/influence of PARC has made a difference in the way you manage.
ALSO I want to play with an Alto. That looks like fun.
pef
Alas, Dealers in Lightning sits, largely unread, on our bookshelf, keeping its many unread compatriots company. We tend to buy books and then not read them. Too much blogging, prolly.
We did glance through it, though, and it looked pretty reasonable.
In the early 1970s, Xerox had more money than they knew what to do with. So they did what every self-aggrandizing large company did when they discovered piles of unused money: They created a research division.
PARC (for Palo Alto Research Center) had a huge budget and basically no obligation to deliver anything to Xerox for ten years. So they hired the world's best computer folks (among others) and let them loose creating cool tech.
And create they did! They did fantastic, mind-blowing stuff that changed the world forever. Sadly, Xerox never figured out what to do with it. They were a copier company, fercrissake.
Their model was broken in a very bad place. They could create amazing stuff, but their parent company couldn't profit from it. This worked great while Xerox was flying high and the money continued to flow in. When Xerox fell on hard times, guess what they did? They gutted PARC, that's what. And today, it is basically dead. A National Treasure is no more.
Around IBM Research, we spend oodles of time connecting our work with the rest of IBM. We often work very closely with the product divisions from the very start of a project to make sure there's a "catcher" for our clever stuff.
It doesn't work perfectly, but it works a lot better than what was done by PARC (now an "independent" company, an hallucinogenic business model) or Bell Labs (broken up into Lucent Labs (moribund) and AT&T Labs (laying off their best people)). In the computer biz, IBM Research is pretty much the only industrial lab left.
But the Alto? Yikes. A 1974 machine that PARC built a bunch of as internal prototypes (and used extensively in the lab). It used, for pretty much the first time, stuff like a mouse, APA displays, a windowing user interface, Smalltalk, desktop computing, LANs and suchlike. (And it was the most famous of a large bagful of Xerox workstations.)
Great stuff, to be sure. But, as you might already have guessed, Xerox wasn't able to make anything out of it. In 1981, Xerox produced an office computer based on the Alto. It was called the Star. Nobody bought it.
Steven Jobs visited PARC in (we seem to recall) the late 1970s, liked what he saw, went back to Apple and built the Lisa (which no one remembers) and then the Macintosh, both based on Alto ideas. Later, little Billy Gates made a low-rez Mac knockoff called Windows. Apple (and Billy) made a ton of money off of the brilliant work at PARC. But Xerox sure didn't.

Blab. A reader who is Helen reminds us to bore you with ...
asdf............
... so we will.
Every day, as we prepare Plurp for your dining pleasure, we create a templatish sort of thing, with ten Blab entries that look like this:
Blab. asdf
asdf
asdf
That way, the fonts and indentation are all set up in our WYSI(a)WYG HTML editor, and we can paste reader commentary and type our witty replies until the cows come home. Then we have to go close the barn door, of course.
What's "asdf"? Helen would ask, looking over our shoulder. Just a placeholder, we'd say.
Yes, but what does it mean? You can see how it all got a little complicated.
When we finally managed to explain our scaffolding, "asdf" became a local joke, pronounced much like "as if".
We know. You're thrilled beyond imagining at this peek beneath the Waistskirt of Plurp. As well you should be.

Blab. About that silly little piece that we wrote when we really didn't have anything to say, a reader writes:
Do you ever have absolutely nothing to say? We don't.
What tripe! What drivel! This is akin to saying "I'm never ever depressed; when I am, I just think happy thoughts." Making with the jibber-jabber on the topic of your tendency toward persiflage is a self-fulfilling prophecy on the order of Pygmalion's.
I would have rebutted sooner, but I had other things to say.
You know it's a great rant when you have to look up the insults!

Blab. An older, innumerate, reader writes:
Sign of aging: when you think of your 5-years-younger sibling as "about the same age" as you. (Funny how it never seemed this way when I was 18 and he 13, but now, when I'm 30 and he's 25, it does.)
But that's actually true, if "about the same" means "within some fixed percentage of". No?

Blab. A reader (actually two readers, or maybe not) act out a little one-scene farce. The first character appears in the little Blab box.
Oooh, look at this, Mary! One o'dem search boxes!
The second character, possibly Mary, appears in the Big Blab Box.
Yes, dear, but this search box is much bigger. I could search for entire paragraphs here!
[Curtain.]
[Thunderous applause.]

Blab. If we had told you that there was such a thing as pet dentistry, you might look at us funny, but probably no more funny than you usually do. If we told you, on the other hand, that there was such a thing as pet orthodontia, you'd probably think us quite mad. Well, this reader wouldn't.
[link]
Yup, it's Braces For Bowser. What are these people thinking? Hello? It's a dog!

Blab. Last night, hanging around the lab, Bill claimed that there were such things as prosthetic implants for you know what for spayed pets. Oh come on, we said. So he sends us:
Neuticles, and their patent.
We love the patent. The first claim is about the process of removing one of the pet's whatchadingies and replacing it with a thingamajig. The second claim is about doing it to the other one. That's thorough lawyering!

Blab. A reader explains those three enigmatic images.

The three pictures are all evil-detectors. Upper left is the
traditional Christian method, upper-right is a diagram from the failed attempts of the techno-rationalism typical of the XX-century. Bottom is, of course, the technique familiar to us today.
The central cabbage indicates that the man is evil and will have to be put to death, which is why he waits there for the death-stroke. It's a small price to pay for security, no?
We've always said that.

Blab. Ron Paul writes:
P.S.: Check up on Ron Paul. He's actually interesting.
We invite our readers to check up on Ron Paul. Any Ron Paul will do.

Yak. From a talk by the Google founders yesterday, badly simulcast from Silicon Valley to the auditorium at work.
We don't want to give away the magic soup.

Yak.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying: 'Of every soup of the buffet thou mayest freely slurp; 17 but of the soup of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not slurp of it; for in the day that thou slurpest thereof thou shalt surely die.'

Yow. No, not Dave Chess, Egg Chess.

Plop. This page falsely claims that Dave Chess moderated the IBM internal Game Forum discussion long ago when we were all just sparkles in our own eyes. Ha! That was us! Us, we say! We started the forum and moderated it through use and abuse for many years.
That line about Giant Wombats was Dave's though, as we recall.

Yow. Surreal Estate. Just 'cause it's a good name, we suppose. (Though he's not the only person to think of this term.)

Yow. After a long and puzzling absence, Mia seems to have surfaced again, this time in the small town of Henders.

Yow. This is ultra-mysterious. Does it contain secret messages if you listen to it backwards? (Dave)

Yow. A friend sends us a link to a recent paper on Augmented Reality. Bottom line: It still pretty much sucks. But it's getting there! Geeks Gesticulating Spasmodically Into The Air - coming soon to a public place near you!

Plop. Here's an interesting plan.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today defended the Pentagon's plan to keep some prisoners from the Afghan war in captivity in Cuba indefinitely even if they are acquitted in military tribunals.
So the purpose of the military tribunals is ... ?

Yow. We were standing in the hall at work with Ian today, trying to remember the Seven Deadly Sins. (We only got up to six. Is Forgetfulness the seventh?) Janet comes up and says, You guys need to get a life!
We replied that, hard though it may be to believe, this is our life. It turns out we get highly compensated for standing in the hall trying to remember the Seven Deadly Sins.
Life takes such strange turns, doesn't it?

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the Seventh
Deadly Sin

Thursday, March 28, 2002
Blab. In reaction to one of yesterday's many groupies, a reader writes:
OK.....Who is this Lori Annaheim person? How does she know you? What happened in October 2000? And why is she asking if your married?
We think it would be best if Lori speaks for herself. Lori?

Blab. A reader, steeped in modern social protocol, knows just what to say when a groupie asks us if we're married.
Just say yes.....YES! you are married!
Well there you are: a very simple procedure. We like that.

Blab. Once again mistaking the Blab box for a search facility (and, please, dear readers, how hard is this stuff anyhow?), a reader writes:
tunak
Sadly, our links to the magnificent Indipop video Tunak Tunak Tun seem to be out of date. The Web rots so quickly these days! We wonder if our Clever Readers can provide us with a fresh link to it.

Blab. A reader gets on its knees and prays.
God save us from people who think that forcing others to give money to a cause is "compassion"
Amen. We're happy to have politicians spend their own money on their own causes.

Blab. Worrying about Rosie O'Donnell and RuPaul, a reader writes:
What about Ron Paul?
The Congressdweeb from Texas? Who knows. (Extra Plurp points for anyone who can figure out what Project Freedom is.)

Yow. Why does this silly little digital flick tickle so many 25-years-ago neurons, making us giggle and smile and tap our feet to the beeps and boops of so many unbelievably crude but unbelievably cool video games of yore? Dunno, but we do love it. How many ancient games (and movies) do you recognize? (Beth)

Yo. Reader are urged to tell us what is happening in one or more of these enigmatic images.

Extra points for explaining the subtle connection between the three.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wanted to speak for
Lori

Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Blab. A groupie writes:
You have a sweet, soft button. I know.
Shhh.

Blab. A person pretending to be the enigmatic Lori Annaheim writes:
Subj:   Wake up!
You seem to be a cool dude who has been sleeping since October 2000. Do you still exist? Where are you? And who has a copy of the stuff that AdCritcs.com was doing? And are you married? LA
Neato! Two groupies in one day!
Yes, we are a cool dude. We have, in fact, been sleeping, intermittently at least, for our entire life. As far as we can tell, we do still exist, and we seem to be located in an office with lots of pieces of paper scattered about it. We, too, were saddened by the demise of AdCritic.com, one of our absolutely favorite sites.
What is the proper answer when a groupie asks if one is married? Readers?

Blab. A fan of wondrous scientists writes:
Got the IBM Annual Report today and I was completly appalled that Lou decided that his note to the IBM stockholders needed to be THE FRONT cover of the typically beautifully designed book. It should have been an inserted letter and the cover should have been devoted to their wonderous scientists. Time to sell the stock if HE is THAT important!
Yes, the IBM annual report came out yesterday. Yeah, we know, yawn.
But it's actually interesting. Really. Lou Gerstner, CEO for the past 9 years, pulled IBM from the brink of utter destruction to a position of leadership in the industry (again). That was hard. We weren't sure, at the time, that it was even possible.
The annual report has a pithy summary of what he did and why it worked. It's not up on the Web yet; we'll link it when it is.
Gotta tell ya: If he got paid millions of dollars in the process, he was a bargain. He is one brilliant guy. And we don't say that about many suits.

Blab. A readers sends us a link with a high density of cognitive dissonance.
I suppose if you get old enough you see the light of reality........and mankind
Well, now this is a turnaround.
Senator Jesse Helms, long deemed public enemy No. 1 by AIDS advocates, said that he would ask for an extra $500 million to prevent mother-to-child transmission of AIDS overseas, contingent on matching funds from the private sector.
"Some may say that this initiative is not consistent with some of my earlier positions," wrote Mr. Helms. But he continued, "in the end our conscience is answerable to God. Perhaps, in my 81st year, I am too mindful of soon meeting Him, but I know that, like the Samaritan traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, we cannot turn away when we see our fellow man in need." There are many in Congress who have talked about adding money to President Bush's shamefully tight-fisted budget for combating AIDS overseas, but nothing can match the impact of these words from Senator Helms.
God save us from politicians who think they are about to meet God.

Blab. A psycho reader writes:
Bad Hair Night
From the vantage of style, the 74th annual Academy Awards served as a rebuke to mothers everywhere who told their daughters that life would prove more rewarding if they always remembered to comb their hair before they left the house. [...]
"I'm old, and I don't even know the names of some of these people," Mr. Battelle continued, "but there was one young woman who looked as though she'd put mud in her hair, and who knows what else and hadn't combed it in a week and then stuck a rubber band in the back. I don't think it's casual. It's messy, unkempt, unflattering."
We apologize to Mr. Battelle, whose name we do not even know, as that young woman with mud in her hair was actually, well, us. And we are, by our own admission, messy, unkempt, unflattering.
It is so very gratifying that we are back in style again. We would like to thank the Academy ...

Blab. A reader sends us another ...
[link]
This is the Free Internet Chess Server. If you register, you can play chess online against other people (boring) or against a variety of computer opponents (cool). But to get a graphical user interface, you have to, like, download and install software, stir the bits, etc. etc. Evil. Bad. Path to Perdition.

Blab. A famous reader has been sucked into the mind-numbing realm of FlashChess.
DavidChess did indeed win against FlashChess, but it was more or less by accident. And that was the second game. In the first game, he accidently left his queen _en prise_, and resigned in disgust. People can be really bad chess players, too...
We do apologize.

Blab. A reader wonders ...
Since when did stoves have bellies?
Since 1753, it turns out.

Blab. A rude reader writes:
Pot-bellied steve?
Hey!

Yow. We just might have found a politician that we wouldn't feed to the wolves. (Wouldn't that be unique?)
Cyber-policy guru and Congress' chief anti-terror cop said Tuesday he fully expects another terrorist attack on the homeland, but added he opposes knee-jerk security measures that do little real good while infringing greatly on civil liberties.
Former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, now the head of a congressionally appointed anti-terror commission [said] that a national ID card would be "too creepy for me."
We cannot, Gilmore said, "let the terrorists redefine our society for us." [...]
"It (Sept. 11) created an environment of change in American society and culture," he said. "A change for the worse."
We can only hope that his Terrorist Status will not be increased to Tribuned.

Rant. New York (and surrounding areas) are now in a Drought Emergency. What does that mean? As near as we can tell, it means that the demand for water outstrips the supply. And our benighted government has wisely restricted certain, rather random, uses of water.
In particular, we are encouraged to have dirty cars, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and no fountains (on the theory that, um, something like, evaporation is a major source of water loss, though there is nothing to inhibit evaporation from those vast reservoir systems).
Now, curiously, we are not in a Bread Emergency. Neither are we in a Butter Emergency, an Orange Juice Emergency, or even a Foie Gras Emergency.
Why is that?
Curious! We note that bread, butter, orange juice and foie gras are provided by a large collection of evil, decentralized, profit-hungry, private businesses, whereas water (in its municipal form, rather than its more plentiful and undroughtful bottled form) is provided by a monopoly run by a good, centralized, public-spirited government agency.
We wonder if there's a connection. Yeah, prolly not.

Yo. In the past week, here are the top searches that were kicked off from our Massive Search Engine.
21 for "helen naked pitures"
2 for "lutnick pictures"
1 for "angelina jolie"
1 for "big boobs"
1 for "chocolate"
We believe this demonstrates conclusively the social desirability of "helen naked pitures" over "angelina jolie", or even "big boobs". That's certainly consistent with our intuition.
Congratulations to all our winners.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was in an irony
crisis

Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Blab. A psycho killer writes:
when I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed, say something once, why say it again?
We agree. Otherwise, one would simply be a talking head, right?

Blab. A reader inquires about ...
w00t
w00t is on vacation . Sorry.

Blab. Again with the brown nosing!
As a long-time reader of the weblog which brought us The Floating Head of Jeff Bezos and The Floating Head of John Ashcroft, I would never for an instant think that The Floating Head of Ayn Rand was a joke.
How curious that The Floating X Head has become a staple of our silly blog. How ever did that happen?

Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for the complaints desk at American Airlines, a reader writes:
Can anyone explain airline pricing to me?
The other day, I was planning a one-way trip by plane. (My family is driving down to a vacation spot for a week. I will not be able to take an entire week off of work, but I can take a few days. I will fly down to meet them mid-week, then drive back with them.)
This trip is a few months hence, so it's not as if I'm making last-minute reservations. I get on Yahoo Travel, request a one-way trip from A to B. All the prices for flights that come back are in the $500-$600 range.
This is odd, I think, as I fly enough to know that a round-trip itinerary, within the continental U.S., and booked sufficiently far in advance, usually costs in the $200-$300 range.
So I try to book a round-trip ticket from A to B, with the outbound trip on the date I wanted to make a one-way trip. Sure enough, I get prices back in the low $200s. Many of the outbound flights are the VERY SAME flights which were offered for $500-$600 when I only wanted to take them one way.
It's not just one airline, either. This was true of several airlines which offered flights from A to B.
So now I have a round-trip ticket, which cost about $300 less than a one-way ticket consisting of only the first half of the journey would have. I have no intention of using the second half of the ticket, but the airline does not know this. How can this possibly help the airline? You would think that the airline would want to know if seats were going to be free, so they could sell tickets for those seats. But because they have a pricing policy which was apparently designed by some Dilbertian bureaucrat, they will not know this until minutes before the return flight is scheduled to leave, when I still haven't shown up. And because I'm not the only person who does this, airlines expect a certain percentage of people who buy tickets not to show up for flights, and so they deliberately overbook flights, which causes general hassles and ill wil towards the airline when a larger-than-expected percentage of the people booked on a flight actually show up for that flight. If they had a rational pricing policy, they might not have such a problem with people not showing up for flights in the first place.
Why, oh why, would airlines possibly do this? Are there more than a handful of people that haven't figured this out and actually do pay the higher price for a one-way ticket? On the other hand, I'm fearful that the answer to that last question might actually be "yes"--if it is, I don't think I want to know. And I have a feeling that I really don't want to know how much of my tax money was used to "bail out" these same airlines last year.
To show that I could be as perverse as the airlines, I booked a specific seat on the flight I'm not going to take.
Curiously, it turns out that we know the answer to this, due to our professional association with the people here at IBM Research who figured out the complex optimization algorithms used to do airline seat pricing. Really!
And the answer is: No, no one can explain airline pricing to you. Sorry.
We have however, independently noticed that one-way flights from A to B are absurdly expensive. You might try investigating the following:

A to Newark

Newark to Atlanta

Atlanta to Denver

Denver to Miami

Miami to Chicago (though not when it's raining)

Chicago to B

We have been known to get the airlines to pay us for this particular sequence.

Blab. Again with that stupid FlashChess game.
To say that FlashChess has no endgame strategy is a gross
understatement. It is apparently utterly incapable of winning a game.
I deliberately played very, very badly against FlashChess. At the end of the game, it had a queen, rook, bishop, knight, pawn, and king (exactly one piece of each type, through no planning of my own) against my bare king.
FlashChess managed to stalemate me.
Perhaps that DavidChess program I've been hearing about can give me a better game.
Yeah, it's quite hopeless. Further play with that dumb program (make us stop!) reveals a strategy that almost always works. It's complicated, so hold on.

Grab the center.

Throw everything you've got into an all-out, aggressive attack.

That's it. The program fiddles with its pieces while you burn it down. It can't even see a mate in one. Who programmed this piece of trash?
Pretty good graphics, though. For Flash.
This does motivate us to poke around the Web for better chess games. There are a lot of sites that will let you play against other people, but where's the fun in that? Shoot, next thing you know we'll be sittin' 'round the pot-bellied stove, suckin' on crickets and spinnin' tales about Boris Spassky.
Nope, we're looking for real, live, computer opponents. We did find tkChess, about which stuff is written here. But the Java version hangs after a few moves (in Internet Exposer, but not in Netscrape - odd) and the non-Java version has the most impossibly painful user interface we've ever seen on a chess game. In the few games we've wrestled out of it, however, it doesn't seem entirely idiotic. Plus it's infinitely faster than FlashChess. Well, nearly.
We beseech our readers to send us links to computer chess games that are (a) on the Web, (b) at least capable of non-moronic play and (c) have a user interface that at least tries to be drag-and-drop. We're counting on you. Otherwise, we'll have to do useful work. Ack!

Plurp.
Someone's in the bathroom with Louima
Someone's in the bathroom I know-oh-oh-oh
Someone's in the bathroom with Louima-a-a
[Final line censored]

Rant. On Nightline last night (remember Nightline?) a former Catholic priest, apparently "former" because he molested small boys, said that justice did not lie in prosecuting people like himself. No, he said, justice would be served by having the accused telling the victim he was sorry, in the Catholic church telling the victim they were sorry.
We agree. With perhaps one or two small amendments.
We think the perpetrators should have their genitals removed and fed to feral dogs. Then they should have to apologize to their victims. Then the Pope should have to apologize to the victims. Then the perpetrators should be sent to jail, and their cellmates should be informed that they are child molesting ex-priests.
Then, we suspect, such justice as can be done, would be done.

Rant. And on that same program, a priest claimed that less than 2% of priests abused minors, that being similar to the population as a whole, and that that meant that such abuse had nothing to do with the priesthood.
Let's think about that for a moment. What if the fraction of priests who murdered people was similar to that in the population as a whole? Or the fraction who robbed banks? Or beat people up in bars? Or committed arson? Or raped women?
Would you then say that that the priestly culture was just fine, thanks, not unusual, not a focus of severe problems?
Would you?

Yow. Words to live by:
Don't Eat Pink Pierogi.

Yo. Sign our belly.

Plurp.
The blue dog
pined for the good old days of sittin' 'round the
pot-bellied stove

Monday, March 25, 2002
Blab. Again on the topic of chess, a reader writes:
Actually, I think Dave is pretty interesting ;-) -AJL
We think Dave is pretty interesting as well. He probably plays chess better than that stupid program too.

Blab. A reader wonders ...
Which end of the elephant WOULD you crawl up, given a choice?
We find that we seldom have a choice in such things.

Blab. A reader gloats that she ...
made you look!
Yes. And now you've made everyone look. Congratulations.

Blab. A reader asks us to inspect ...
The Floating Head of Ayn Rand
You might think this is a joke. You would be wrong.

Here we also find the A=A Web site, home of the radical Objectivist group by the same name. And much, much more.
We love the Web.
Pretty much.

Blab. A reader lets us in on a debate raging within the Catholic church.
"(Diocese of Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland) believes these priests can serve and are serving the public without endangering anyone," (Archdiocese Counsel Matt) Flynn said in a phone interview Sunday night. "A reasonable person could disagree with (Weakland)."
Oh yeah???? Put THAT up your bum and smoke it!
-Your other midwest correspondent.
Actually, we fear that they are doing precisely that.

Blab. An observant reader writes:
Did you also notice on FlashChess, that it seems to take just as long to "think" about its move when it only has one legal move? Most chess programs I know, when they have only one legal move, make it instantaneously.
We did notice that it takes a preposterously long time for it to recognize that it is in checkmate. Hey - maybe it's only a 1-ply search. That would explain a lot. :-)

Blab. A blind reader writes:
Asked on top of the Eiffel Tower by a middle-aged woman: "Can you see the Eiffel Tower from here?"
And what did you reply?

Plurp. Do you ever have absolutely nothing to say? We don't. Now, mind you, sometimes we say absolutely nothing. Our many detractors would hold that we typically say absolutely nothing useful, and that may be. But many times, we have important things to say but decide not to. Sometimes, it's because we do not deem the neurons of those present worthy of our vibrating the atmosphere on their behalf. That doesn't happen very often. We are generally happy to say one thing or another, witty or not, even if no one gets it. Sometimes, their lack of understanding makes us feel smugly superior. Other times, it leads us off into silent reverie on whatever topic about which we happen to have held forth. And other times, it leads us to write about it here in Our Very Own Blog, where we smile bemusedly at the notion that other people will read it, and wonder what the heck we are talking about.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had absolutely
nothing
to say

Sunday, March 24, 2002
Blab. A reader insists that ...
Chess is boring.
Well, last week's chess program certainly was, in the sense of being a thoroughly inept player, though that didn't prevent us from playing it until 2 AM both Friday and Saturday nights. We like winning.

Blab. A reader attempts to report a new Helenism.
Submitted for recognition as a Helenism:
"Stick that up your bum and smoke it"
* "Oh, stick it up your bum!"
    [Common {well, where I grew up...}
     response to questions like "What
     shall I do with (this piece of
     paper, this random object I'm
     holding, etc)?"]
* "Put _that_ in your pipe and smoke it!"
    [Said after the speaker deploys what
     he believes to be the clinching
     argument in a discussion.]
Do I win? Do I do I do I do I? It's
all my own work! Really really! [inw]
Looks good to us. (Though it does sound painful.) Congrats!

Blab. A spammist who has somehow managed to target us appropriately writes, in part:
DAGON Magazine. Multiple award winning magazine published in the 80s devoted to Lovecraft and the the Cthulhu Mythos circle. Much sought after magazine included fiction, articles, art "Call of Cthulhu" gaming materials. I have a limited number of back issues which I have discovered after clearing out the old attic. Now fetching high prices amongst Lovecraftian collectors, I am willing to sell copies at a fraction of the current collectors market values in order to purchase fresh cadavers for the ghouls in the cellar. Buy them quick before the Rats in the Walls get to them......
There follows a very long list of various pieces of analog literature and artwork, all related to Lovecraft et al., and all of which we somehow manage to resist acquiring, they all being, you know, stuff.

Blab. On the subject of that guy who's displaying human corpses, flayed and splayed, in public exhibition, a reader writes:
I don't know where the Anglophone world has gotten the idea that the Body Worlds exhibition is meant or marketed as art. It seems that in every new country it travels to the same objections and discussions have to be raised, until enough people have seen for themselves how ultimately innocuous it is.
Of course it isn't art, it's a relatively new technique for making anatomical preparations, invented in 1977, and exhibited in public since 1996 (2.7 million visitors in Japan). Because it raised new possibilities the inventor seems to have indulged in pulling off some stunts which aren't strictly necessary for scientific purposes. He says that a reason these were attempted was to try to continue the tradition in anatomical studies of revealing the beauty of the body by using elements which show the personal peculiarity of every body in a pleasing way, which seems fair to me, and which is also a lot more helpful in studying real anatomy than the strictly average, depersonalized dummies you saw in school, just like I did.
I saw it just before it closed in Brussels, and I can tell you that sensationalism is not the reason so many people are visiting it. I was especially touched when seeing the children, some as young as four years old, sticking their noses into some dead guy's ribcage out of sheer curiosity, and without a trace of the fear I would have felt at that age.
I think this overcoming of outdated taboos is progress, and A Good Thing [tm].
SM, your continental correspondent.
Well, we haven't seen it ourselves, so it would be wise for us to withhold comment on its ultimate merit. But neither have we crawled up the wrong end of an elephant to camp out for the night, and we don't mind telling you we have about the same reaction to that idea.
But we do appreciate our Treasured Readers for taking issue with our prejudices. They are our prejudices, we love them, and we wouldn't trade them in for anyone else's, but we do enjoy having them prodded every once in a while.

Plurp. Oscar Night tonight, and we make our yearly pilgrimage to friend Debbie's apartment to eat pounds of potato chips, toss wry humor at people we only see once a year, and remind ourselves (by losing badly at the contest to pick the winners) how far outside the mainstream we really are.
We find that ritual is an important part of society.

Plurp.
The blue dog
desired only to be
skinned, sliced open,
and displayed in mocking
positions in front of all of you

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