Plurp: Wrong. So very wrong.

Bigger!

2002.04.14 : 2002.04.20

Saturday, April 20, 2002
Blab. A reader lets us in on its frightening internal mental dialog.
I am happily part of a non-dysfunctional family. That makes my family what--functional? Doesn't quite sound right, does it? "Functional families are all alike; every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
We have the same problem with flammable and inflammable.

Blab. A reader somehow familiar with our bold and balmy friends Jerry and Nina, who set out to sail around the world despite their utter lack of initial sailing experience, writes:
There have been times that I thought that Jerry and Nina are BOTH bold and balmy! There are times I wish was with them.
There are also times I am glad I live in the BIG, BAD CITY.
----Bold and Balmy in NYC
While we find Jerry and Nina's adventures very romantic from a distance, and we have loved visiting them (except that time with the mosquito horde), we prefer our own lifestyle. Running out of water hundreds of miles from land, skirting deadly hurricanes and having to bribe local chieftains with narcotic plants is somehow just not for us.

Blab. A Canuk symp writes:
A story about the Canadian friendly-fire casualties. See the picture marked "Joe Clark, Progressive Conservative Leader?"
Am I supposed to believe this isn't just a stock photo of Jesse Helms?
Let's check it out, shall we?

Joe Clark Jesse Helms

Wull, yup, they seem pretty much Separated At Birth to us!
Though, frankly, we find the picture of Pte. Richard Green, one of the soldiers killed in the bombing, much more disturbing.

Is something rather badly out of alignment here, or are we experiencing lateral vertigo again?

Blab. A reader send us yet another ...
[link]
... that's pretty much the same as those previous links.
OK, OK. We get it already. Wacky Palestinian fathers are dressing their kids up as suicide bombers and it's not even Hallowe'en. Go figure.
We recommend the creation of Martyrdom Booths in tense areas of the world, where those who believe that killing themselves violently is god's will can do so without causing mayhem to the general public. We can equip them with Webcams so the entire world can feel terrified in real time.
We'll even supply the dynamite.

Blab. In a shameless ploy to attract attention, a plurality of readers writes:
        -- How many Plurpoids? --
Thank you for your patience! Little did we (adopting the plurpal voice, where we = Raymonds or Randys) realize some of yous had been waiting for the statistical report resulting from the Steves' having earlier placed here, within Plurp, a link to an obscure page on the Octobop web site.
The clever idea of the Steves: Ocotobop gets site usage statistics, so if you dears readers each clicked on said link, the Ocotobop report would show a spike of height N on its little scorecard, where N=number of clickin' readers! Well, probably, sorta.
The answer? N = ? N = ??? We dunno! We think it was 96 or something. We forgot, but did look at it a couple weeks ago! Really! To our dismay, the report has since sort of cyber-rotted or something. Sorry. :-(
We can say octobop.com's number one hit source ip address in February (a month late), other than obvious search robots (which interestingly counts for the vast majority of hits) is "yktgi01e0-s1.watson.ibm.com" - eleven hits in Feb. alone.
A final note, exhibiting a kind of self-referential spookiness: the terms "plurp" and "octobop" form a Whitewhack (now inappropriately called a "Googlewhack" in popular parlance.)
--Randys
We wonder if these reader(s) stay up late at night trying to figure out clever things they can do to make their Website more entertaining for bots.
As to that Googlewhack thing, quite the contrary. Searching Google for plurp and octobop currently gets two hits: the two issues of Plurp in which we discussed this nonsense previously. Tomorrow it'll get three.

Yak. That bastion of journalistic excellence, MSNBC, reporting on this morning's earthquake in upstate New York.
There were only minor reports of damage.
That is:

The reports were very brief;

The reports were printed in a very small font;

The reports originated from people under the age of 18; or

The reports that MSNBC gets are amateurish and unimportant when compared to reports obtained by real news services.

Plop. Here's a clever thought.
Bush administration officials are considering a new legal doctrine that would allow prisoners to be brought before military tribunals without specific evidence that they engaged in war crimes.
The new approach would make it an offense to have been a senior member or officer of a Qaeda unit that was involved in any of the regular crimes of war, like mistreatment of civilians.
One administration official said the effort came out of increasing uneasiness that the interrogations of the prisoners, who were taken from Afghanistan to the naval base at Guántanamo Bay, had not yielded enough information to charge very many with traditional war crimes.
Pretty cool, eh? "Guilt by association," long a defamed term, becomes Official U.S. Doctrine. We recommend shining this blinding legal light on all crimes. Imagine how easy it will be to catch criminals after we dispense with all that archaic evidence stuff.

Plurp.
The blue dog was once
seen in a blog owned
by a guy who lived
in a city where terrorist
acts occurred

Friday, April 19, 2002
Blab. A reader offers an answer to a question we didn't ask.
Why Steve sleeps all weekend day ..................
This points to an interesting study.
Teenagers need more sleep than they're getting, and sleeping late on the weekends may be a result of sleep deprivation during the week, according to Northwestern University researchers.
The researchers studied 729 people ages 12 to 17 who were admitted to the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. They found that a longer duration of sleep was consistent among all the participants.
Now, do we conclude that teenagers need more sleep, or that people in jail need more sleep? What's that you say? Could it be that we don't actually know because Kathryn Reid, the alleged researcher from Northwestern U., might not have done any differentiating study?
We are so jealous of the easy jobs that academic researchers have.

Blab. A reader, far more attuned to cultural trends than are we, writes:
The Real Ultimate Power!!!!
We always wanted to be a Ninja. Now it turns out to be easy. Discuss.

Blab. Following the thread of grilling brats, a reader tells us that ...
Breasts are for eating, not raising.
We are told that these two activities tend to be correlated.

Blab. A musically inclined reader suggests new lyrics to the Estonian National Anthem.
Tickety Tackety
Rickety Rackety
Flickety Flackety
Bump bump bump.
Jiggedy Jaggedy
Ziggedy Zaggedy
Wiggedy Waggedy
Marmalade pie.
Poppery Peppery
Moppery Meppery
Cloppery Cleppery
Thump thump thump.
Tupenny Tapenny
Hupenny Hapenny
Frupenny Frapenny
Saskatchewan!
Everybody sing!

Blab. Our complete inability to find a simple, accurate, working clock on the Web leads to this follow-up datagram.
On the World time server site (Usually below the pretty picture of where you say you are) is a download of a small programme that 'pings' various atomic clocks and sets your PC clock (Can be set to do it daily) In my ragitation over the pulsar I forgot to mention the most useful part of the site.
Friend Bill at work has a thingamajig like this on all his computers (though not, we think, this particular thingamajig). He beams about the fact that his computers' clocks are continually being adjusted a few tens of milliseconds one way or the other.
Is there a hyphen in "anal-retentive"?

Blab. A reader sends us a missing ...
[link].
So Thor Heyerdahl has joined the Choir Ethereal. We remember reading Kon-Tiki as a tot, concluding that he was both bold and balmy. Bold in that, well, who would set off into the Pacific in a homemade low-tech raft, with not much but belief in his own theory to keep him from drowning? And balmy in that, well, same thing.
The world needs more bold and balmy people, not less. Could somebody please fix that?

Blab. This week's Plurp Contest, in which a compelling story from a reader will allow them access to the orbital mind control lasers so as to dictate our hairstyle, seems to be wandering a bit outside of the established bounds. As if we're surprised.
Just shave all the hair off and wear one of these.

Less maintenance than a ponytail and more resistant to the orbital mind control lasers.
Readers are forbidden to think about deflector beanies. Ever.
Instead, buy the fine products from Zapato.

Blab. On this same subject, a suicidal reader writes:
How about a mullet?
How about a bullet?

Blab. A reader who knows all about corn writes:
Indiana (most of it at least, save a few counties in the corners of the state) is on Eastern Standard Time year round; we do not observe Daylight Savings Time. We remember when our mothers told us, "Just because all the other states (excepting also Arizona and Hawaii) set their clocks forward an hour and jump off a bridge doesn't mean you have to too."
This is good news! We have been waiting for Arizona to jump off a bridge for some time now.

Plop. Has Bovine Inversus abandoned us? Sniff.

Yow. Very funny piece from MADtv on how today's computers will be regarded in the future. It's 67 MB, so don't try this at 28.8 baud. Or be very, very patient.
(Curiously, we can't get this to work. The media player claims there's a premature EOF or some such. Readers who get it to work should tell us.)

Plop. The gummint is considering using Microsoft Passport to verify the online identity of us all. This is so numbingly brain dead in so many dimensions at once that we find ourselves in a cognitive stutter. (rebecca)

Plurp.

The Lying King

Yow. More media whoring! Once again, we get the grandfatherly closing quote rather than the wild innovator's mad vision. But we'll get there. :-)

Plurp.
It turned out that
the blue dog
never
slept

Thursday, April 18, 2002
Blab. Yesterday, we complained that we can't find a good time source by which to set our many disagreeing clocks. Today, our kind readers try to help us out. Two different readers send us this:
USNO time
We assume these readers are trying to poke fun at the poor U.S. Naval Observatory. They may have a great collection of antique watches, but they can't do Web design to save their souls.
The referenced page shows you a text display like this:
US Naval Observatory Master Clock time ...
Apr. 18, 2002, 16:57:31 Universal Time
Apr. 18, 2002, 12:57:31 Eastern Daylight Time
Apr. 18, 2002, 11:57:31 Central Daylight Time
Apr. 18, 2002, 10:57:31 Mountain Daylight Time
Apr. 18, 2002, 09:57:31 Pacific Daylight Time
Apr. 18, 2002, 08:57:31 Alaska Daylight Time
Apr. 18, 2002, 06:57:31 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time
Yeah, great tech. Unless you're not in the U.S. of course. Oh, and did we mention that the display (accurate to the second!) does not update itself? Sigh. Clicking on over to their "realtime clock" (a wonderfully revealing name all by itself) doesn't actually take you to their "realtime clock". Rather it takes you to a page that links it. Clicking on that gets you to an "EST/EDT Clock" and an "EST Clock (no EDT for those who do not go on Daylight-Saving Time)". We don't even know what that means. We do observe that the two clocks are out of synch with each other. (Oh, and it doesn't work in IE at all.)
But we are greatly amused by the RealAudio feed of the USNO Master Clock Voice Announcer. This is (we think) the very same fake announcer to which we used to listen on WWV using our ancient Heathkit ham radio. Now new and improved by using the astonishing power of the Web. And get this:
Because it's buffered by the RealAudio^® player, the audio time will be delayed (late) by at least four seconds from when it left the USNO Master Clock time.
Now that's funny! Our tax dollars at work.

Blab. Another reader suggests:
I think this is a useful URL for time (Also can include an automatic or semiautomatic change of your PC's time if its incorrect ) viz "Don't forget to visit World Time Server for the current local time in any location in the world!"   However I discovered recently after hours of screaming ranting and (almost) flailing around with a sledge hammer that my fancy Pulsar Nautical one year old watch would not accept the date 14/4/2002 (or 4/14/2002 for all those poor deluded fools who do it the wrong way) The flailing etc was worked up to and honestly come by during my attempts to set the watch (151 times in 90 minutes only to have it think about it, and reject eeverything entered in favour of 01/01/1992. I continued with this otherwise silly behavour because I convinced myself with various investigations that the watch was not just faulty, because, among other things, it would take other dates like 4/14/2013 and obviously was not faulty in the sense of sticking buttons as other functions worked perfectly. I am moderatelt ashamed of my behavour NOW but at the time was nearly rendered insane by my habbit of checking the World time server So watch yourself!
Well, um. The World Time Server site does indeed display the time pretty much anywhere in the world, and that's a good thing. It does not, however, update the time every minute. (It does update. We haven't bothered to figure out under what circumstances it updates. If it's not going to show the correct time, who cares?)

Blab. Just when we were about to give up, a kind reader sends us this ...
[link].
Now you're talking! A Java clock that (a) works, (b) displays seconds, (c) updates itself (duh) and (d) claims to be accurate to 0.2 sec. Pretty cool, even if it's U.S.-only. (Governments are so parochial, aren't they?)
And who knew that there was any such thing as an "Official U.S. time"? We thought they were pushing it with state birds and stuff.
Of course, it keeps crashing due to some Java bug or other. It was written by Federal employees, after all.
Imagine. Billions of dollars of Internet technology and we can't even find a frickin' clock that works. Maybe we should give up.

Blab. A reader takes a ride on the Sarcasm Express.
WOW! Plurp is published before 11pm. I'm impressed.
We're so pleased to hear it.
As a reminder to our newcomers, Pay-Per-Plurp, the professional edition of our modest blog, is published daily at exactly noon Eastern Time, and contains fascinating, timely, wittily urbane commentary, unlike the pitiful dreck you're reading here.

Blab. A reader who does not seem to get it writes:
Helen was never that young and beautiful! All touch up work!
Young and beautiful? Dear Treasured Reader, thus has it always been.

Blab. Pleased with our link yesterday to a quiz by which you could determine if you were raising brats (hint: you are), a reader after our own heart opines:
Brats are for eating, not raising.
As the referenced Web pages notes:
Use tongs when turning the brats over the coals. You don't want to lose any of the savory juices.
Important culinary tip there!

Blab. But enough of that. We must get back to this week's Plurp Contest, in which readers with a persuasive argument as to what hairstyle we should adopt get to sit at the console of the orbital mind control lasers and dictate our appearance for some time to come.
Disregarding this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a reader asks:
Know ye of the geometry of ponytails?
Actually, no.

Blab. That reader from yesterday who wanted us to adopt the hairstyle of someone that it couldn't remember (we found this to be a difficult request with which to comply) provides further, but disturbing, clues.
Hairstyle: this dude. The Pulitzer winner for history - Louis Menand - author of THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A story of Ideas in America
Oh dear. Is that really your image of us? Some 0ld d00d in a suit? Oh dear, oh dear. Whatever shall we do? Run naked through the town square? Dress up as Bozo in oversized shoes? Activate the Chameleon Rays?
Seriously, how can we combat this pernicious image?!

Blab. A reader tries prematurely to focus the mind control lasers.
You must ensure that your hair is luxuriant and flowing.
Oh! It's not an attempt to control our thoughts after all. Rather, it's an attempt to control our hair.
The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) is a club for scientists who have, or believe they have, luxuriant flowing hair.
Is this for us? We wonder.

Maybe not.

Blab. A reader reminds of Lilek's venerable exposition of the ...
Gobbler motel and supper club.
We love the entire Lilek's site. It's worth a number of giggly visits.

Blab. Following that ecopsychology link from yesterday, a worried reader frets:
Oh, no!!   I'm late, I'm late --- I missed the date to ECOPSYCHOLOGIZE.
By a bit, we'd say. There was no Saturday, March 25 in 2002. Or in 2001, for that matter. The most recent one seems to have been in 2000.
Perhaps that Web site doesn't get updated daily.

Blab. A reader proposes a new Helenism.
Is "[...] as <company> climbs up the food chain" (heard in a meeting today) a Helenism?
Could be. Could be. What are the constituent aphorisms? Climbs up the ladder? The top of the food chain? Something like that?

Blab. A unnecessarily disturbed reader writes:
Am I the only one who finds this more than a little disturbing?
Oh calm down. What's the matter with photos from Dubya's transsexual years? Admit it. We all have photos like this somewhere. We think it's to his credit that the president chooses to display his proudly on the Web.

Blab. Oh look. It's a blind ...
[link]
Ahem.
Two Australian scientists claim they've turned a metaphor into a new device –- they believe they've invented a "thinking cap."
Professor Allan Snyder and Dr. Elaine Mulcahy say they have completed experiments that proved they could increase the creative function of the brain using magnetism.
Or pyramids.

Blab. A reader sends us another blind ...
[link].
What a great picture! Bryant Park (a place in The City That Never Sleeps, which it certainly does not when the temperature is this high and your stupid building hasn't switched the central heating over to air conditioning yet) dotted with hundreds of half-nekked bodies.

Plurp.

What Cats Do During Heat Waves

Plurp. There's a Brook Trout in California, but we can't find a Rainbow Trout anywhere. Why is that?

Plurp. Those of you fascinated by long, drawn out, legalistic arguments about why creating drawings of unsavory things shouldn't be illegal should read Dave's treatment (and related links) in detail. Those of you who cannot imagine the just imprisonment of artists for their art (whether savory or not) need not, we think.
The First Amendment is not the exclusive territory of those who are excessively legally endowed. It's really pretty simple. Congress shall make no law ...
No law.
Even we understand that.
But didn't we already say all this, essentially?

Yo. Once again, and astonishingly enough, the top Plurp search string this week (on our own search engine) was "helen naked pitures". This is like the umpteenth week in a row! You people simply can't get enough, can you?
We just don't understand it.

Plop. A new term floating around our illustrious workplace:
Gridification
Ouch.

Plurp.
What part of
no law
didn't you understand?

Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Blab. On the topic of virtual child pornography (and, my, haven't we become topical these days?) a reader who actually read the article to which we referred writes:
"So, some dorky state or other had ruled that pornography that appears to depict kiddies in flagrante delicto was illegal even if no actual kiddies were involved."
Actually, some dorky *Federal Government* had made a law saying exactly that. This wasn't just some State Court Behaving Badly...
We generally regard the Federal Government as "some dorky state or other." Oh. That probably should be "some dorky State or other." Sorry.

Blab. Along these same lines, a reader with mental images of condoms writes:
'[S]ome dorky state or other'? My friend, that was no 'dorky state' -- that was the 'dorky federal government of the United States of America'.
At least two earnest sounding women on the radio this morning (both from wholesome-sounding organisations whose names involves words like 'family', 'protection', and 'children', and which are therefore clearly hard-right Christian fundamentalist organisations who would be in favour of banning condoms -- not to mention computer-generated images of condoms, fictional descriptions of condoms, and mental images of condoms) expressed their dismay that the surpreme court had (quote) 'found some merit in these materials'. They didn't elaborate on the phrase' these materials', but you could tell from their snooty, sneering, overbearing tone (I'm English, I know all_about_ snooty, sneering, and overbearing tones of voice) that they wanted us to think they were referring to "full motion computer-generated video of (simulated) naked sweaty barely-teens engaged in unspeakable acts of passion and fluid-exchange". Do such convincingly-real-and-yet-not-real videos or images of child porn actually exist? Someone Google for me, I'm (a) too lazy; and (b) at the office, and not particularly desirous of a visit from the IBM Research "Gosh, That Was An Interesting Web Search You Just Did, Sir; Here's A Nice New Cardboard Box For Your Belongings And A Burly Security Card Called Henrique Who Will Throw You Out Of The Door And Drop The Box On You" Department.
But my point was that I don't recall the Supreme Court finding any merit whatsoever in "these materials". They just said that a law making "these materials" illegal wasn't an awfully good idea, and finding some legal basis for their opinion.
Don't you just love the law?
Also not relishing the thought of a visit from Henrique, we encourage our readers to deposit the requested URLs on Ian's site rather than ours.
Love might not be the first word we would associate with our feelings about the law. Is there an English word that commingles horror and bemusement?

Blab. Having suggested yesterday the possibility that we should adopt a spiked hair style, a reader now wonders about his many blackouts.
"It is exactly that intimate knowledge of certain of our readers (Ian)"
Intimate knowledge? _Initimate_ knowledge?
I'm sure I would have remembered.
We have been meaning to talk with you about this.

Blab. One of our more fervent groupies checks in with this.
As much as I love Steve's hair long, I must admit that it is simply not practical for the Miata, top down style. In the beginning I tried to pull my hair back into a braid but that didn't work. Now I wear a scarf, Grace Kelly style.   Big black sunglasses. So with his hair not coming close to a ponytail I will encourage him to trim it CONSERVATIVELY (as in NOT MUCH!) and then start growing it in October when he no longer can have the Miata's top down. Perhaps by the Spring he will have enough length for a ponytail. Sigh....I can't believe I have recommended that.
Well, this is certainly a resourceful entry, intertwining our hair style, our car and Grace Kelly, at least one of which is among our favorite subjects.
Could this be the winning entry? Perhaps our other resourceful readers are still working on other creative entries. Who knows?

Blab. Eager to cash in our our new time travel institute, a reader who is consumed with acronyms submits this:
World Association for Temporal and CHronometric Experimental Studies - WATCHES
Motto: "Changing yesterday today for a better tomorrow."
(I borrowed the motto from a book on superluminal applications).
Good one! We'll engrave that on the other side of the brass plate and install a motor that flips it over every few days.
(We like the toss-off about the book, BTW. :-)

Yak. Yes, it was a sweltering summer night in New York last night, but not hot enough to excuse this.
Do you think that, if everyone in New York opened their fridge for five minutes, it would cool off the City?
You're scaring me.

Zoom. How to Speak Miata.

Hair Dryer

Yak. The Asian security guard who frisked us at the SFO security gate as we came home last Saturday.
Headed home?
Yeah.
Where do you live?
Manhattan.
Manhattan? Really? I live in Queens.
Queens?! What are you doing in San Francisco?
Well, I used to live in Queens. Do you get to Chinatown much?
Yeah. Well, not recently. Not since Sept. 11. We went there once a few weeks ago and discovered that our favorite restaurant, the one we had been going to for twenty years, had closed down.
Oh, that's too bad. I used to own a store by the Häagen Dazs.
I know where that is.
But now I live out here.

Plop. We seem to be a bit obsessed with time recently. But somehow, between traveling across time zones and the recent shift to Glorious Daylight Savings Time, every clock-like thing we own disagrees with all the others by ±10 minutes. This is very annoying.
We need some canonical time reference that we can access via the Web, the way we used to listen to WWV on our ancient ham radio. (Imagine: an information appliance made entirely of meat.) Can our readers help us out?

Plurp. There was something else we were going to ask our Treasured Readers to research for us. What was it?

Yo. Speaking of media whoring, this time it's our dear sister-in-law the ecopsychologist. (Note also the Web site.)

Plurp. Leave it to the Brits to name a military operation after a grouse. They should, of course, have used this. (We especially like Operation You May Want to Stand Back From Our Arrow. It's so polite!)

Plurp.
In a previous life
the blue dog
was an ecopsychologist
for the British Army

Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Blab. Eager to sit at the control of the dreaded orbital mind control lasers, several readers take us up on our offer to come up with a compelling story that will determine our hairstyle.
Definitely go with the short pony tail... Samurai Jack style. I recommend you wear the kendo/bushido uniform to complete the effect. (Seppuku is optional.)
We are impressed with the obscure cultural reference, and you get big points for that. It is also ever so kind of you to not make seppuku mandatory. And we always wanted to study kendo.

Blab. A reader tries to recast an uninitialized pointer.
Could you have it cut & styled like the cool guy who won the Pulitzer for his historical work on an intellectual community? - forgot the name of the work & too lazy to look it up, but loved his beard (very much like yours)& hair style. He was on Jim Lehrer (PBS) tonight. Just an idea, since you asked.
We're sure that's possible. We're also sure we don't know who you mean. We even looked through the list of 2002 Pulitzer Prize winners without success. Further clues would be helpful.

Blab. As usual, certain readers simply cannot stand the idea of choosing between the stated options. These are the readers that go to a Chinese restaurant and order pizza, or go to a paint store and try to buy an SUV.
Those are our three choices? That's it?! "Do nothing", "have a pony-tail" or "have a longer pony-tail"? Sheesh, if you're going to throw yourself upon the mercy of your reader, you could at least do it properly! (Personally, I know far too many of the personalities of my single reader far too well to ever throw myself on his/her mercy)...
What about 'shaved', 'spiked', 'dreads', 'make hair on top of head look exactly like hair on chin', and (my personal Plurpster hair suggestion) '80s rocker'?!
What about the unexplored arena of 'colour'?
So many options to consider!
Must we say it? It is exactly that intimate knowledge of certain of our readers (Ian) that prevented us from expanding the menu of possible options. Now be a good boy and color between the lines, just this once.

Blab. Another reader loses its chance at the orbital mind control lasers by committing this same mistake.
MOHAWK!!!!
You first.

Blab. A reader seeks to ingratiate itself through anatomical flattery.
With reference to the 'laziest reader' all I can say is I bounced upand down in my chair and shouted "Oh Mr White you exceed All my expectations!" or to quote the priest in 'Deviations' to 'Crushed' "You go girl! and as well you have a nice ass!"
We accept this enthusiastic flattery, without having any idea what it might mean.

Blab. Said reader attempts to dodge the blame, and enter our hairstyle contest in the same breath.
Re: Internet in Ireland.
The machines which I had ready access to were mouseless touch-screen terminals that allowed one to web browse or send emails at the cost of 1 euro per 8 minutes.
My frustration at accomplishing even the most trivial tasks with the ridiculous interface and dark-ages connection (28.8 equivalent, it seemed) deterred me from even attempting something as complex as Plurping.
I vote for Bushido-style, by the way. Simply because I think it looks good on you.
-pTang
Flattery will get you everywhere. As will violin-accompanied stories about stone age Internet access.

Blab. A reader has the perfect name for our time travel institute.
The Ponzi Institute of Temporal Pyramid Schemes
We're having the brass plate made now.

Blab. A reader asks a pregnant question.
Are you raising a brat?
Readers whose children inevitably sit behind us on airplanes, please take note. Thank you.

Blab. The reader from yesterday whose commentary we failed to understand gets all huffy.
<tone style="mildly offended">I referred, as succinctly and directly as allowed by the space allotted, to the new Windows backgrounds and their correlation with the most popular search string here Plurpside.</tone> Perhaps I (or we) overestimated something.
Ah! The reader refers to the now infamous search string Helen naked pitures, which seems, week after week, to be the most popular string entered into Plurp's own gleaming chromium search engine. And the reader suggests, we intuit, that the Windows background we posted earlier this week is indeed Helen, may or may not be a piture, but does not appear to be naked.
Here is where we admit that the image of Helen was, in fact, altered from its original form in one of those fancy image editors. We leave it to the fevered imaginations of our Treasured Readers to imagine what the original image must have been.
In the meantime, we apologize to the reader for not having understood all of this immediately. Certainly, it should have been obvious to us.

Blab. A clever reader visits the blue dog, and thinks about barbering.
Apparently last week was the week for trips by Plurp writers and readers. (And yes, unlike the other reader, I understood how to use the "Earlier" link.)
I was in Orlando and then New Orleans. While in New Orleans, I naturally visited the Rodrigue Studio.
Oh, and I vote for the conservative hair style. That way, if you meet yourself wearing the full ponytail, you'll know you've been time traveling. Or something.
We always appreciate hearing the intimate details of the lives of our jet setting readers. And we are certainly compelled by the logic of the reader's hair styling suggestion. Or, we will be.

Blab. Another reader who holds up the line in McDonald's insisting on a lobster salad sandwich writes:
You forgot pig tails. This style has the advantage of making you look really young again (elementary school age or so). Plus you don't need to wait until your hair has grown out long enough to fit into a pony tail.
Mini MW correspondent
We'll keep that in mind.

Yo. Speaking of pigtails, the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled on an interesting case.
The Supreme Court struck down a congressional ban on virtual child pornography Tuesday, ruling that the First Amendment protects pornography or other sexual images that only appear to depict real children engaged in sex.
So, some dorky state or other had ruled that pornography that appears to depict kiddies in flagrante delicto was illegal even if no actual kiddies were involved. The thought was (something like) it was too difficult for The Authorities to figure it all out, so they figured they'd just ban anything that might have involved kiddies.
The argument is (something like) We're too lazy or stupid to determine if an actual crime was committed, so we'll just ban anything that looks like it might be a crime.
You might think this is a dandy idea, in that it might decrease the involvement of kiddies in unsavory activities and/or it punishes adults who do things of which you don't approve. OTOH, you might have a hard time distinguishing this logic from a similar argument that would ban what appears to be murder in films. Or speeding.
Come to think of it, what do you think?

Plurp.
The blue dog
voted for the artsy-fartsy look
because, well ...

Monday, April 15, 2002
Blab. A reader writes, rather cryptically:
But, um, she's not, you know.... I thought we had a deal!
We feel so dumb, but we actually don't know to what our Treasured Reader might be referring. Perhaps our other Treasured Readers can enlighten us.

Blab. A reader proposes the existence of ...
The Anna Kournikova of Chess?

Um. We're sure she's a very good, uh, chess player.

Blab. A reader from the future wants us to know about:
Back to the future
Who can resist a Web page with the following provocative title?
ON AUGUST 3, 2002 -- I WILL TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.
We certainly can't! So it was with some considerable disappointment that we discovered that the person in question only intends to travel back to that date, if indeed time travel becomes possible in his/her/its lifetime.
BFD, we say! If time travel were possible at all, it's a pretty good bet that there would be scads of folks throughout history who had definitive evidence of being from the future. Some woozy doughnut with I WILL TRAVEL THROUGH TIME tattooed on his forehead would hardly count as compelling evidence, though.
Our own current plan is to travel back through time with stock tips, invest in such a way that we make a few trillion dollars in the stock market, then invest all the profits in a research institute whose goal is to develop practical time travel in our lifetime.
We think this is a great plan. Now all we need is a catchy name for the institute.

Blab. A reader (or two) sends us a link or two.
[link] [link]
These lead to two very depressing pictures, which are offered without (much) further comment.

These are both young Palestinian girls, dressed this way, presumably, by their fathers.

Blab. Mistaking its keyboard for the control panel of the dreaded orbital mind control lasers, a reader attempts to implant beliefs and actions in our desiccated brain.
It is Terry Pratchett's greatest book by far. Read it. Now!
It turns out that (analog) books get onto our input queue only rarely, and come off of it even more rarely. In fact, it's pretty much only on certain vacations that we read that old analog stuff. On the current queue are a couple of Joyce Carol Oates books, a couple of Tom Clancy mega-novels and William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties (that's how old our queue is). We're not sure Mr. Pratchett makes it over this rather high bar.
But heck - what do we know? Readers should feel free to talk us back into it.

Blab. From way back last year, a reader asks us to consider ...
Cthulhu images
No! No! We dare not! We must not!

Blab. Our laziest reader writes:
I'm just back from 10 days in Ireland. What did I miss?
Here in Plurp, you mean? So you're telling us that the Internet is not yet available in Ireland? Interesting.
Well, you could use that Earlier link in the above left margin to find last week's Plurp. But you're right. That's too much work for you, and takes advantage of work that we've previously done on your behalf.
So, instead, we do the extra work you always seem to demand and give you all of the links:
Friday, April 5
Saturday, April 6
Sunday, April 7
Monday, April 8
Tuesday, April 9
Wednesday, April 10
Thursday, April 11
Friday, April 12
Saturday, April 13
Sunday, April 14
You're welcome.

Yow. Would you like to see the space station? You can.
Our aim is to provide you with all the information you need to observe satellites such as the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, spectacular events such as the dazzlingly bright flares from Iridium satellites as well as a wealth of other spaceflight and astronomical information.
Pretty cool.

Yow. A new Helenism, straight from the horse's mouth last night.
I did a lot of horse and pony play

I did a lot of horseplay

I did a dog and pony show

It's so good to be back.

Plurp. Is your marriage in trouble? Blame the Internet!
The Internet is becoming a frequent cause of the collapse of relationships, a leading marriage guidance organisation has warned.
One in 10 of the 90,000 couples who seek the help of UK-based Relate now cite the Internet as a problem, with obsessive use of the medium blamed as well as its ability as a communication tool.
Both men and women complain of becoming Internet "widows" as their partners spend hours at the computer downloading software or looking at pornography.
Sex chatlines and sites such as friendsreunited.co.uk, which can rekindle old school passions, pose further threats to relationships.
Umkay, but isn't this a bit like blaming obsessive use of the telephone, or pointing out that people who use cars sometimes have marital problems?

Plurp. For those of you who got here from a Google search on feederism (and it continues to be one of the big hitters for Plurp), be sure to check out the International Federation of Competitive Eating.
And no, we are not kidding. (/usr/bin/girl)

Yow. Our media whoring, recently quiescent due to the completion of our work on computer virus stuff, has begun again. This time, it's a single quote at the end of a CNET article on Autonomic Computing. But, hey, gotta start somewhere.
(A note to Stephen Shankland, the article's author: It's Autonomic Computing, not Autonomous Computing.
"Autonomic" means "automatic; self-regulating, self-healing." "Autonomous" means "capable of independent action." Something can be autonomous but not autonomic, like a little robot that walks around by itself but breaks down constantly. Something can be autonomic without being autonomous, like a home heating system that keeps the temperature approximately constant but can't make its own decisions about what the right temperature is.)

Yak. From a status meeting today on a wonderful technical project that has nonetheless been beset by what we shall politely call interpersonal issues.
The good news is that the political problems are currently in remission.

Zoom. The first nice day of spring invited us to practice the kata Drive Car, Top Down Style, which turned out to be way more fun than should ever be allowed. We then meditated on the reasons for our many Local Awards for Driving Style, and were Enlightened.

Plop. What Western Governments Are Doing To Prevent Terrorism, Part XIII, The New Beginning.
Britain's Ministry of Defence has confirmed it has made public information describing in detail the make-up of a nuclear bomb.
The plans give complete cross-sections, precise measurements and full details of materials used for all the components, including the plutonium core and the initiator that sets off the chain reaction causing the blast. [...]
Retired nuclear engineer Brian Burnell told the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper that the information on the Blue Danube bomb amounted to step-by-step instructions on how to make a nuclear weapon.
The newspaper said the ministry had also released papers to the Public Record Office describing ways that such a bomb could be smuggled into the country.
Ian's tax shillings at work.

Yow. Researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony.
A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.
It's the largest cooperative unit ever recorded, according to Swiss, French and Danish scientists, whose findings appear in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 3,600-mile colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests that cooperate with one another.
And you thought Hitchcock's The Birds was scary. Readers are invited to show their nerdishness by sending us the titles of bad SF films that sound just like this.

Yo. This week, readers are given an unusual opportunity to take the helm of the orbital mind control lasers. No, really! Here's the deal.
Due entirely to Sloth, our hair is now ridiculously long. This has two disadvantages. First, it makes us look goofy. But we always look goofy, so no big deal. Second, and more important, our hair whips into our eyes when practicing Drive Car, Top Down Style. That simply won't do.
Something must be done, and we're going to leave it up to our Treasured Readers to do it. The options are:

Cut it back to our usual length (see the Plurp masthead). This has the advantage of conforming to the expectations of our cultural peers.

Grow it a little bit longer so it fits in a short, artsy-fartsy mock ponytail. You can also interpret this as Bushido style, if you like. This has the advantage that people might be fooled into thinking that we are a techno rock star.

Grow it quite a bit longer so it works as a real, serious ponytail. This has the advantage that it makes us look like an aging hippy techno dweeb. (Is that an advantage?)

So there you are. Conformist, Artsy-Fartsy or Aging Hippy Techno Dweeb. Readers are invited to tell us which they pick, and why. You, the reader with the most compelling story supporting your choice, win the day, get to twiddle the mind control lasers, and determine our hairstyle for some time to come. Feel the power.

Plurp.
The blue dog dreamed it.
I don't understand it.
And that covers the shaved heads of blind monks
with illustrations of the shunned behavior
of fish and virgins.

Sunday, April 14, 2002
Blab. A reader, all agiggle, sends us a missive ...
re: end of time
This points to the (analog) book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, David Frampton. The capsule description says:
According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter--the world's only totally reliable guide to the future--the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just after tea...
With a plot like that, and five-star reviews from lots of readers, how could we not rush out and buy it? We'll let you know.

Yow. It's good to be home. Really, really good.

Yo. Here's a little treat for our readers: a new Windows background, not yet posted along with the others. Enjoy.

Plop. We see that that Pope fellow has decided to leave it up to the American Catholics to resolve the scandal of priests molesting young kids.
Good thing it's only an American problem.

Plurp.
The fine print indicated that
150,000 frequent flier
miles could be redeemed for
the blue dog

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