Plurp: What William Shatner is doing now

Bigger!

2002.04.21 : 2002.04.27

Saturday, April 27, 2002
Blab. Our pathetic exploration of online matchmaking fizzles before it begins.
Dear plurp:
Thank you for submitting your photo for posting with your profile. Unfortunately, the image we received is of poor quality (unfocused, too dark) and will not post well with your profile. We suggest that you select another photo with better lighting or processing.
In a separate note, they ask us to tone down our profile, suggesting that, as we currently describe ourself, we are not really suitable for their matching service.
We suppose it's a good thing we are happily married.

Blab. A reader seeking to expand our culinary repertoire sends us a link to ...
Mealworm Spaghetti
Any recipe which includes 1/2 pound roasted yellow mealworms is definitely on our list of exploratory cuisine. Just below brussel sprouts. And canned beets.
Top with mealworms and whole pine nuts.

Blab. A reader seeking to expand our vocabulary writes:
amphigory (AM-fi-gor-ee) noun, also amphigouri
A nonsensical piece of writing, usually in verse form, typically composed as a parody.
Now we're supposed to rhyme? Too much work!

Blab. A reader seeking to peer beneath the censor's strips writes:
The blue dog was just a pile of bits?
Down deep. Aren't we all? Just a pile. Of bits.

Blab. A reader seeking to peer beneath our sarcastic veil writes:
Gee, Steve, is it just me, or are you sounding a bit depressed?
(The last photo, the one of the woman, is oddly disturbing. I may not sleep well tonight.)
L.

Yow. Are you a Beatles fan? Would you like to own something that was once associated with them in some way or another? John Lennon's piano, for instance? Or a (used) ticket to one of their concerts?
Now you can. Thanks to Sotheby's.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was oddly
disturbed

Friday, April 26, 2002
Blab. A reader informs us that, at long last, Microsoft is good for something.
[link]
X-BOX BRINGS PEACE TO MIDDLE EAST

In a surprise move today, Bill Gates has appeared in Gaza City to announce that Microsoft would be launching its new X-Box terminal as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It's clear that all these guys want to do is to kick the sh*t out of each other and with the new X-box console they can do it in virtual hyper-reality without leaving the comfort of their own armchairs," he boasted.
Oh good.

Blab. Treasured Reader AJL has an upbeat review of the "art" exhibit that features the partly dissected bodies of your friends and relatives, tastefully arranged in absurd poses.
Body worlds, as threatened - I visited
- AJL
We cannot express our joy.

Blab. A reader requires us to edit its sloppy profanity. We do not appreciate this.
All those Plurpers who have access to the 18th century WSJ might want to have a look at page one of the print edition and its wonderfully understanding screed for Mr. Lay (don't you just feel ****** hearing that name?) allowing his errors and misdemeanors resulting from a handful of dead chickens and a faulty optimism. And, of course, belief in g-o-d. Stockholders, cry your hearts out.
Yes, folks, the same smarmy *********** (this does not make us judgmental re the mutual benefits of **** *******, mind you) who bring you George Melloan, a man who would have made the original Rockefeller squeamish, and other folks from the age of despair, pillage, and rape; the same folks who bought you Pillory Hillary and the ongoing effort to crucify Bill Clinton (obviously they don't know their history...look what happened to the last crucified political activist, his followers founded a growth biz) and push the dimwittiest of the genetically deficient Bush fellow--- want you to forgive, forget, and empathize with one of the foulest ****** to inhabit several houses, cohabit with a weepy morning television wife, and **** the workers out of their jobs and small retirement funds while being ******* optimistic.
Subscribe today.
We encourage our reader to expand its meager vocabulary.

Blab. A reader sends us a joke that was circulated to it via email. It's the first one here. If you care.

Blab. A reader seems intent on paying attention to the media.
"Mass weapons of destruction" heard on CNN.
Massachusetts? MAVA?

Yow. Helen got a new tech toy, to which our crummy JPEGs cannot do justice.

Plop. We thought we were the only one whose entire education was based on comic books. Not so! Apparently this is also the case with both the media and the military. We always knew we were in bad company.
Orphaned newsboy Billy Batson became the grown-up Captain Marvel with powers that included gaining super strength by saying "Shazam!" He could leap great distances and repel bullets with his body. In today's terms, Billy Batson is somebody who's got hold of the exoskeleton suit with similar attributes the U.S. Army is currently developing at MIT for $50 million.
Throughout the cohort of yesterday's superheroes -- Wonder Woman, Spiderman, even The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men -- one sees the outlines of technologies that today either exist, or are now in engineering. The Green Lantern has a ring that can create any physical object out of little but his imagination and an energy source. (He has a nanotech assembler.) Superman has telescopic and X-ray vision. (Current military technology from Predators to cave pingers.)
Our tax dollars at work, Robin.

Plurp.
*** **** ***
*** **** * **** **
****.

Thursday, April 25, 2002
Blab. Apropos of recent events a reader nominates ...
A painful sounding Helenism:
"Hands off to that guy"
"Hats off to that guy" + "Give that guy a hand"
We suppose this might be interpreted differently in certain Islamic fundamentalist states. Nonetheless, it is certainly a Helenism.

Blab. That reader from yesterday decodes its proposed Helenism of baby pie.
baby doll and cutie pie
We have to say that this is pretty inbred, pretty obscure, pretty much hopeless for anyone other than you and us to understand. In other words, a winner!

Blab. A reader is trolling an ancient Plurp entry for:
coolsavings
Aren't we all, eh? Aren't we all.
Oh! But there really was an old Plurp entry on this. Remember Coolsavings.com? No? Zackly.

Blab. A reader increases our opinion of the average intelligence of people.
In the Thomas Cook Cruise Magazine for April, a dozen questions crew members regularly get asked:

Do the crew sleep on board?

Does the ship generate its own electricity? (No, that cable trailing behind is plugged in in Miami!)

At what time is the midnight buffet?

Are the outside cabins outside the ship?

Will I get wet snorkelling?

Which stairs do I use to go up?

How far above sea level are we?

Why don't you have the late night comedy spot in the afternoon?

Is this island completely surrounded by water?

Should we put our luggage outside the cabin before or after we go to sleep?

Do we have to leave the ship to go on the shore excursion?

Has this ship ever sunk?

Frankly, that is better than we expected.

Blab. A reader sends us a ...
[link].
So, this guy in an aesthetically appalling house in a humdrum suburban development hates his neighbor. Can they resolve their differences? Of course not. Instead, he tells his version of the hate-hate relationship on the Web.
There's not much more we can say. If they were Middle Eastern political figures, they would be sending violent weaponry into each others' yards in the name of vengeance.

Blab. This reader just hasn't kept up.
Gates is claiming he CAN'T take out the extraneous pieces of the OS because the OS needs them for various secondary functions (rather than changing the OS to NOT need them, since it didn't need them a few years ago). We're getting a 24-hour video game channel.
And the government spends over $24 million on a supercomputer, then installs a free operating system.
We live in a strange country.
You read this blog and you think those are strange?

Blab. This reader has kept up, but it hasn't helped.
The conversation-at-all-day-meeting is, is it not, particularly ironic, because previous similar conversations ran thusly:
Is that a picture of your wife?
Erm... no
But then you changed your background image, which had the unexpected side-effect of making the conversation longer, if less embarrassing (not for you, silly, for the person asking the question).
That's correct. We love it when our readers understand what we write here.

Blab. A reader wants us to know that it thinks this is ...
So wrong.
Stop clown porn? Umkay.

Blab. A reader tests the limitations of our HTML editor.
Leafy
vegetables are all alike; every root
vegetable is a
root
vegetable in its own way.
Beets! Aaaarrrgh!!!

Blab. A reader really wants to, like, know stuff.
Will you stand alone before the fury of his helen naked pictures?
That would be pitures, and yes, we will.

Blab. It's Food Day here at Plurp, and in celebration thereof a reader suggests a new lunchtime cuisine for us.
Hungarian baby pie
Made with real babies.

Yow. Yes, it is our favorite food in the entire universe. Yes, we could eat it for three meals a day, every day of our life. No, we have never been too full to eat the last one on the table, even when we accidentally ordered twice as much for a party of four as we thought we did.
Imagine. Rice, vinegar, horse radish, seaweed and raw fish. Who would imagine that was edible, much less the most astonishing delicious thing ever?

Yo. Pokémon cookbook. No, it's not food for Pokémon.

Plop. Yet more impressive PR on the part of the slime-flapping markedroids associated with Ginger/IT/whatever, that Scooter That Will Revolutionize Society As We Know It^TM. This time, it's the breathless news that Ginger/IT/whatever has sold ... wait for it ... 30 units. (And, golly, law enforcement folks are looking at it.) At the bargain basement price of $9k each. That's, let's see, 9 times 0 is 0. 9 times 3 is 27 ...
Gosh! That's $270k!
Now a good PR agency will charge, what, $500/hr for a small account? One year's worth of that is maybe 200 days, with 8 hours in a day or, uh, $800k.
What a great business. Where do we invest?

Plurp. More fame for our silly little blog. Green Gabbro says:
"spongiform advice column for the perpetually distracted." Best description yet of Plurp.
Now that was a hard to find reference! It's in Graham's comment to this posting. We think we like it. We think.
Dictionary.com, for reasons completely opaque to us, points to an old Plurp entry if you ask it about alive(p). Why is that? (Or, maybe even better, what is that?)
Where on the Web is Grey Coopre? We don't know. Heck, we don't know what it means. But it likes Operation Blue Dog. (In its 9.26.2001 entry.)
Did we know that gaekwadblog linked to us? We forget. But it does. And in its very short list of other blogs too. Yow.

Plop. Remember AOL TimeWarner, that mogul media conglomerate? That Wall Street darling? With the new New York headquarters? With executive offices lined in ostrich leather? Oops.
[T]he company reported a net loss of $54.2 billion for its first quarter -- one of the biggest losses in corporate history -- mostly from a one-time charge of $54 billion.
Buh-buh-buh-billion. Say it together. You've got losses.

Yow. Him Whose Name Is Lost In The Folds of Time has been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced with an exact duplicate. Well, not an exact duplicate. The aliens made a subtle mistake. The replicant pays attention to cat toys. In particular, to a bunch of colored foil strips on the end of a fishing pole goodie.
This turns out to be a dead giveaway. Him Whose would never have even acknowledged the existence of such obvious cat toys, preferring instead to turn his attention to the formerly lovely arrangement of lilies in the living room. Well, OK, the replicant chews on the flowers too. The aliens didn't, like, miss everything, OK?
But the toy thing. That they missed. So we detected their unearthly plot.
So you know what? We like the replicant better. We think we'll keep it.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wanted to buy a
buh-buh-buh billion
stupid scooters

Wednesday, April 24, 2002
Blab. A reader reminds us of a certain horror in Lilek's ...
Regrettable ads.
Regrettable? Regrettable? Anyone who advertises Beet'N'Bacon sandwiches should not be allowed to live long enough to experience regret!

Blab. A solipsistic reader gives us a serious answer to our question about its favorite part of the world.
My favorite part of the world is the 100' radius around me, becuase that's where all the interesting stuff happens, so far as I can tell (except for all that made-up shit in the news).
There you are!

Blab. A reader wants to know two completely different things.
Will you stand alone before the fury of his media-driven cognitive reprogramming carried out by avid capitalists?
And ...
Will you stand alone before the fury of his armies?
To which we can only say, The Valley of the Avid Capitalists? Nobody goes to the Valley of the Avid Capitalists! That's why they call it the Valley of the Avid Capitalists!

Blab. Into this week's discussion of the obsessions of famous (and not-so-famous) people, a reader throws a wrench.
"Knowing a few famous people, . . ."
Your treasured ready seems to be confusing "fame" with "celebrity." Not necessarily the same thing.
L.
Is that right? Google thinks that they are synonyms, in some sense.

Blab. A reader notices a worrisome trend in society.
How long until the Pope speaks out against Piggly Wiggly?

Shocking! But, by symmetry, that would have to be the head of the Fleming Companies, Inc. (which owns Piggly Wiggly) that speaks out, though that would also have to happen far too late to save the mortal soul of his company.

Blab. On the subject or its recurring coulrophobic nightmares, a reader writes:
You recently wrote of several people who were afraid of clowns I believe. Consider this if you will.
Then, of course, there is the famous Mr Met. But Mr Met is busy these days so he might not be the threat as feared.
Sheesh! How is a guy supposed to get any sleep?
Oh. Didn't we tell you? You're not supposed to get any sleep. That's why we put the clowns there.
Meanwhile, gain what meager serenity you can in the No Clown Zone: free email and the official site for people who are afraid of or just plain hate clowns.
My message is simple:
There are people in this world who dress up and act like clowns; I don't like these people. I am not clownophobic (or to be politically /scientifically correct, coulrophobic). I do not fear clowns. Really. I don't. They are just not nice people. They scare little kids, they cause neurosis in some adults, they have big floppy feet, they try to fit too many of their kind in a car, I could go on and on.
Couldn't we all.

Blab. A reader comes dangerously close to insight.
Wow! Plurp so early? Perhaps I've ended up on the Pay-for-Plurp distribution list by mistake? No, that can't be it, as surely Pay-for-Plurp includes the GOOD reader feedback. (There's a reason the reader feedback in free Plurp is called "Blab.")
You are correct, Treasured Reader. You should never mistake this for good stuff.

Blab. A reader, clearly too distressed to make sense, writes:
You don't want me to do THAT??
Um. What?

Blab. A reader exposes its sordid history.
Thribble originally came from the Jet Set Willy II scene "The trouble with tribbles is..." but I spelt it, erm, well, wrong. And it stuck.
So you are changing the name of your blog back to Tribble. Good.

Blab. A reader suggests a new addition to our curious collection.
"Baby Pie" is a Helenism
Could be! What are the constituent aphorisms? Something like this?
Baby doll
Sugar pie
Something like that?

Yow. Infocom's (text based) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that marvelous old saw, is now On The Web^TM. We love the Web. Go play. (Kafkaesque)

Yak. At yesterday's all-day task force meeting.
Is that a picture of your wife?
Yeah.
Wow. She's gorgeous!
Yep.

Yow. Speaking of which, here are the surprising results from this week's most popular Plurp searches from our own little search engine. The top three are:

virtual helen naked pictures

helen naked pitures

personality disorders

No surprise that #2 and #3 are there, of course. The shocker is that #1 search term, which far outstripped (!) the formerly dominant #2.

Rant. The Engine Check light came on as we drove home last night. Reader who are much more devoted than circumstances warrant will remember that this means the following.
The Engine Check light illuminates if you are completely out of gas, if the gas cap has been removed while the engine is running, if a ROOM fuse has blown, or if there is an electrical problem with your engine. You should take your car to be serviced.
Yep, it's the world's most overloaded indicator. Given that there is a separate gas gauge, these cases could be disambiguated with just one more indicator light, which would have added maybe $2 to the cost of the car. But no! Mazda engineers decided to torture us with wondering if aliens have suddenly eaten our gas cap, or if there is an "electrical problem" (insert Music of Impending Doom here) with our engine.
These same readers will also remember that this happened once before. And when we took the car into the shop the next day, certain that our dear little car was about to explode, the rocket scientists there blamed it on some spider webs that they found and told us not to take the gas cap off. Presumably the aliens were camouflaged as spiders.
So it seems that we're doomed to take the little car back into NASA Headquarters so the resident geniuses can catch more aliens. Hey, somebody's got to.

Yo. From the CNN site's front page today, which will have changed by the time you look at it, but we swear it really did say this.
Vatican conference to issue sex abuse guidelines
A day after Pope John Paul II condemned priest sex abuse as an "apalling sin" and a "crime," U.S. cardinals and Vatican officials are debating how the Catholic Church should handle abusive priests.
Honest! It really did!

Plurp.
The blue dog
denied any involvement
with small children

Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Blab. A reader who needs far too much external structure imposed on its sad, meaningless life writes:
"What is your favorite part of the world?"
Disambiguate, please. Do you mean
a) What is your favorite part of the world to live in?
2) What is your favorite part of the world to visit?
iii) What is your favorite part of the world to think about?
D) Something else?
On the topic of living in vs. visiting, perhaps you, as a New Yorker, can shed some light on why you defy the conventional wisdom that "New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
(And why do my fingers insist on typing the word "favorite" as "favority"? Every time I try to type that word, I make that error and have to go back and correct it.)
Despite our reader's numbering system, which we do admire, we are deeply disappointed. After all, yesterday's admonition was, in full, What is your favorite part of the work? Discuss creatively. This requires our readers to make certain choices, certain creative determinations, rather than having them imposed by us. We fear that too many years in the sway of the mind control lasers have robbed our Treasured Readers of the desire, some may say the ability, to make their own choices.
We realize, Dear Readers, that this is painful for you. We understand that your head feels as if it might explode from the cognitive pressure that we have imposed upon you. Perhaps it will.
Nonetheless. Do try. No matter how pitifully. No matter how inadequately.
Do try.

Blab. A reader wants to know about our busy weekend.
so how WAS the play????
Fine, thanks. We really should do a real review. Maybe we will.

Blab. A reader sends us the kind of household tip we can really use.
A sure fire way of getting Helen out of bed at 6:15am in 40 degree weather......fake throwing up on Steve's side of the bed and then, when she is staggering around the bedroom, go directly to the Tibetan rug and repeat action. Lead her to kitchen and then wait by your food dish until she finishes scooping that wet stuff into your celadon bowl.   It works!
We shall try that tomorrow morning!
Shortly after sending that great tip, this same reader sent this.
OH! I sent that to YOU!   It was a mistake.............
Another victim of ~~the orbital mind control lasers~~ random chance.

Blab. A reader who is more confused than average writes:
almaden.ibm.com
No doubt our reader was looking for the IBM Almaden Research Center. But it's not in that itty bitty Blab box. At least, not last time we checked.

Blab. A reader sends us a link that, while it points to Yahoo news, is only there because it looks obscene. Kindly don't do that.

Blab. Unlike us, our readers actually, like, know things.
Knowing a few famous people, I can tell you: some famous people are obsessed with their fame. Some are not so obsessed, but usually only after a while being famous. Famous people are exactly like you and I, except people care about them without knowing them, and think they are special as result of a consensual, depressing system of media-driven cognitive reprogramming carried out by avid capitalists.
Almost all famous people seem to be more emotionally needy than people who live their lives doing stuff and getting stuff done.
I for one think it's better to build cool microchips than star in a lousy film, but the world is not with me on that one.
Cool! We certainly have noticed a lot of seemingly maladjusted celebrities, perhaps even more per capita than the general population (not that they let us out in the general population of course - too dangerous). But do they obsessively track which Web sites link to them? That would be weird.

Plop. Isn't the pedophilia of Catholic priests curious? We have a hard time understand the approach of the Church. We keep imagining this happening in the private sector.
J. Fred Shirley-Harold, CEO of MegaCorp., said today that he regretted the molestation of small boys by executives of his corporation. "I called the Senior Partners to a meeting here in Omaha," said Shirley-Harold, "and told them that they needed to handle the reported molestation of small boys by themselves and their direct reports."
Sam Q. Buggerman, a Senior Partner of MegaCorp., said, "I always make sure to move the molesters who work for me around the corporation. It's important to MegaCorp to be compassionate to our executives, and to give them the opportunity to try again."
Patrick Muckleflugga, another Senior Partner, said, "The media has portrayed MegaCorp executives as criminals. This is not true. We obey our own laws."
In an announcement earlier today, Shirley-Harold said that he had determined that molestation was a crime in some places. "A generalized lack of knowledge of the nature of the problem and also at times the advice of clinical experts led our executives to make decisions which subsequent events showed to be wrong," he said.
We're sure this analogy isn't apt. And we're sure our readers will tell us why. 'Cause we're obviously too stupid to figure it out.
We do, however, look forward to the next round of revelations, which will inevitably involve the nuns.

Yo. Another interesting perspective on the battle in Jenin, this one from a Palestinian who was actually there and actually fighting. We like facts. Facts are good.

Plop. News today.
Gates: Penalties Would Jeopardize Security
Antitrust penalties proposed by nine states would keep Microsoft from releasing timely security updates to its Windows operating system [...], Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said today.
Hahahahahahahahahaha!!! That's such great stuff. Where does he get his writers?

Plurp. No love letters yet as a result of our compelling self-description on match.com. We'll let you know, though.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the result of a consensual, depressing
system of media-driven cognitive
reprogramming carried out by avid
capitalists

Monday, April 22, 2002
Blab. Omigosh! Here we were, moping around about how little notice we and our little blog get when this appears.
Hihi --
Three things:
1) The list of weblogs on my portal *is* differentiated.. to an extent. Some of those different table cells have semantic meaning -- but only to my eye, really. And I'm not very consistent about it, but the portal isn't *completely* undifferentiated.
2) I am puzzling over the (Medley!) parenthetical. Since it's Monday and looking to be a crappy week, I'm going to assume it's a positive parenthetical, just for the ego-boo. But if so, it makes me wonder if Medley is famous someplace and I just don't know about it. ;-)
3) I do think that actually famous people obsess over their press. But this is just a hypothesis, since I don't really know any actually 'famous' people.
Medley -- A weblog about IT, policy, current events, and more from an INTJ-feminist-geek perspective.
We grovel in abject supplication at having not divined the internal semantic meaning with which Medley's list is imbued! Of course that (Medley!) bit was intended positively. We got a link in Medley (Medley!) after all. What will the folks back home think?
Actually famous people are invited to disambiguate their behavior here. (As if our little blog is actually read by any actually famous people.)

Blab. Another reader who was kind enough to link to us points out our further abuse.
Thribble has an H in it, but thanks for the link anyway!
   --kar
Are you sure you don't want to change the name of your blog to Tribble? No? All right, then, we'll fix our spelling in yesterday's entry. (And sorry about that!)

Blab. Forever concerned about our expanded waistline, a thoughtful reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to a Web site that promises a Do-It-Yourself Confinement Menu. Oh, now you want to know what that is. And the answer is: We have no idea. It does seem to involve a disturbing amount of pig stomachs and pig kidneys, plus a number of ingredients whose names are written in code (like Pui-Leng and Ngoh-he), presumably because they are even more disgusting than pig innards.
We're not quite sure what that Confinement bit is. Our best guess is that anyone who would follow such a diet is in need of psychiatric confinement.

Blab. A reader who has been poking around in untoward places gets just what it deserves.
AArrghh!!!
Serves the blighter right, eh, Leah?

Blab. That reader who wants us to keep up on that hub of Western civilization that is the Caribbean writes:
Talk show pulled after controversial broadcast
Fletcher Scatliffe's Wednesday evening talk show "Your Views Our Concerns" was pulled off the air last week after the host spent the better part of a two-hour broadcast the week before criticizing Chief Minister Ralph O'Neal and his Finance Ministry in the wake of recent arrests revolving around portions of the telecommunications contract for the new airport.
The arrests of high-ranking public officials included Financial Secretary Allen Wheatley and Budget Coordinator Bevis Sylvester. ZROD owner and general manager Rodney Herbert said that Mr. Scatliffe's show was cancelled because the show included obscenities and "name-calling." [...]
Mr. Scatliffe's show may, however, be back before long. Mr. Herbert said "Your Views Our Concern" likely will return to the airwaves after the station installs audio delay equipment that would allow engineers to bleep out offensive language. "We are taking steps to see that we can clean it up a little," he said. "We don't want the station opened up to lawsuits."
Students in our Emerging Cultures class will want to note two things.

The Caribbean is catching up in the areas of political scandal and government control of the previously free media.

These delightful people never had an audio delay in a live broadcast before.

Gotta love 'em!

Plurp. What is your favorite part of the world? Discuss creatively.

Yow. For the longest time, we've been concerned about working on technology. It's a two-edged sword after all. Some of the greatest advancements of civilization towards peace and prosperity and learning and all that good stuff have been due to technology. But so have some of the worst horrors. The trick is to work on technology that seems to have the best chance of aiding the side of Light against Darkness.
So it is with burgeoning pride that we point you to the work of a Dartmouth grad student who has a way to use a cryptographic co-processor to help ensure that data collected for agreed-upon purposes don't get used otherwise just because the government feels like it today.
Why are we proud? Because long, long ago, we helped invent the technology he uses to do this.

Plurp. We were reading (somewhere) this weekend about online date-matching services. Sort of like eBay for people. And we got to thinking. What would happen if we listed our humble self on such a service, and were totally honest about it?
Maybe something like this.
Pathetic Aging Geek
I am a middle aged techno geek and have spent my entire life in school, doing research, or both. I am utterly incapable of speaking any language besides English, and even that escapes me regularly. My entire knowledge of history and literature comes from Classics Illustrated. My grounding in modern culture is TV and comic books. My primary hobby is a Weblog (www.stevewhite.org/log/current). Yeah, I realize you've never heard of such a thing. But it's very sarcastic. I laugh at my own jokes. A lot, actually. I am non-athletic (with all that implies), a non-smoker, an atheist, and politically disillusioned, leaning towards anarcho-capitalism. Plus I'm very happily married. Killer, eh?
Unsurprisingly, we found our idea terribly funny. So we went ahead and did it! What kinds of responses will we get? We'll let you know.

Plurp.
The blue dog
couldn't imagine who
would respond to
that

Sunday, April 21, 2002
Plurp. A busy weekend! The Elephant Man yesterday afternoon, and new friends over for dinner last night. Then today, old friends over for the afternoon. All the stoic plans we had to work, work, work, all abandoned. We're even too lazy to tell you about the play.

Yo. Time Magazine has an interesting analysis of what allegedly happened in Jenin. To our eye, it looks like it might be a well balanced report. If so, it's the first one we've seen. Everything else has been hysterical and factless.

Yow. It's been a while since we last indulged in finding out what new people are jumping up and down in excitement or outrage, pointing an accusing finger at our humble Weblog. So let's indulge, shall we?
Sophia, who used to work in our group at work, mentions (a while ago now, we suspect!) something we wrote about the Florida balloting in the last presidential election.
Somebody at Everlasting Blort likes our front page. No accounting for taste.
Geegaw actually noticed when our former Web host was abducted by aliens (probably because it was also Dave's Web host). For some reason, we thought Plurp had made it to the prestigious Geegaw Portal, but we were wrong.
We appear in an excessively long list of blogs on Blogstar, and in the even longer list of the appropriately named floating wreckage: jettisoned cargo.
Our documentation on Alien Food Symbols gets a mention on As Above, which might be a blog itself. It also gets mentioned in the 2000.10.14 issue of Virulent Memes.
We get recommended on Medley. (Medley!) But it's cheating, as it's Dave recommending us. And then, perhaps because of this, we get added to a (big, long, undifferentiated) list of blogs to visit on Medley's portal page.
Our URL gets displayed way towards the bottom of a message thread called Nothing and Some More. We're not sure if they think we're nothing or something else.
We get linked on the Bookmarks page of UseMod, a Wiki. Hey, maybe we put that there ourself.
A blog called The Moon Rocket puts us on its extremely short list of blogs to visit. Similarly with the blogspot blog called Thribble. Meanwhile, over in diaryland, A pig in a wig does also. Woo hoo.
Finally, all the hard work we did in finding the lyrics to You've Got To Be Carefully Taught is recognized by a pointed link in no less than ftrain. Yowser.
Do you suppose that actually famous people obsess so pitifully over their tiny increments of recognition?

Plurp.
The blue dog
was
hysterical

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