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2002.05.05 : 2002.05.11
Saturday, May 11, 2002
Blab. A reader way back in an
old issue of Plurp cries desperately for:
ballmer
What is our reader crying for? Could it be the famous Monkeyboy
Vid? Ballmer
toons? Ballmer
pics? The Ballmerfunk
Music Video? Or could it be our personal fav, Developers,
developers, developers, developers?
It makes us cry too.
Blab. A reader sidles up to us romantically and recites poetry.
I coat my friends with slurry,
It causes me some strife
It's really not a worry,
As it keeps them off my wife.
(Note for you USAians - in the UK,
slurry is what you clean out of pig pens and spread in fields as fertiliser
- not concrete as I believe you understand it - I think coating people
with concrete is quite unacceptable - even if they are your friends)
-AJL
We are flattered. Maybe we can meet for a drink somewhere where the lights
are low, the guests are natty, and the hogs are fed.
Blab. A reader tells us to be on High Alert.
Hey! Watch those HTML
character entities.
It's very strange. In the past several days, mysterious and anonymous readers
have been sending us Blabs
containing mysterious, coded entries like ™ and ’.
We figured they were activation codes for their terrorist compatriots,
so naturally we left them as they were.
Now we're on High Alert? Sheesh. We were just trying to be helpful,
OK?
Blab. A reader hypnotizes us, then gives us the following command.
Pay no attention to that
man behind Chelsea Clinton.
What man is that?
Blab. An expert French numerologist explains
both awkward memes and awkward genes.
Those look like leftovers
from counting-systems in other bases to me. Base 12 (dozens) in English,
and Dutch and German by the way, maybe base 5 (hands) in Spanish, base
20 (scores) in French.
- "Yes but then why..."
Etc.
Also:
Nay to the slur of the neigh,
and yay for the girl with the awkward
genes
that's pleased with herself anyway.
Awkward genes. We like that. It's like our use of the term colorful
to describe people at work who never learned that interrupting others is
rude, or not to yell in meetings.
Blab. We can always count on our readers to rocket past us in
tastelessness, as one reader proves in regard to the Suicide
Bomber Game on which we commented earlier this
week.
Our completely tasteless
scoring system is (2*DEAD) + INJURED, with a x2 modifier for getting at
least one injured child (better front-page newpaper photos that way.)
30 is the best we've gotten.
We are really impressed. Not with the score, per se, or even with
the reader's intriguing scoring system. But rather with the utter and offensive
crassness this demonstrates.
We shall have to redouble our efforts.
Plurp. Helen tells us that Anne
Heche, who came out as a lesbian some years back, subsequently recanted,
declared heterosexuality and married some guy.
Can we all please make up our minds? This is just too complicated.
Plurp. Behind us at Noel Coward's Private
Lives today was a pudgy couple in late middle age. He laughed so
painfully loudly at all of the dullest humor in the play - the obvious
jokes, the pratfalls - that we had to lean forward in our seats and cover
our ears. It was as if this was his first time in public, and he was unaware
that others could hear him. Or as if he was sitting in his living room,
watching Saturday morning cartoons with his deaf wife.
So, at dinner, we made up a story of who these people might be.
 Jim
and Barbara Wilson live in a modest raised ranch house in a suburb of Kansas
City. Their kids are all grown up and moved out, of course, but they all
live in the area and bring the grandkids by regularly. Jim is a successful
salesman at the local Ford dealership, though business has fallen off lately.
Barbara is a checkout specialist at Wal-Mart, where she gets a discount
on their clothes.
 On
hot summer days they enjoy soaking in their above ground pool in the back
yard, and grilling bratwurst on the gas grill. Jim is the vice-chairman
of the local bowling league, and Barbara is an avid collector of hand-painted
porcelain birds. They have two dogs: Scooter, a terrier mix, and Sugar,
a St. Bernard with kidney problems.
 They
try to get to New York for a weekend every Spring. Today they saw a play
by Noel Coward, a playwright whose name they thought they recognized. Jim
said it was the funniest thing he had seen since all those clowns piled
out of that one little car. Tomorrow, they will try to see The Lion
King, only to discover that it is sold out.
Meow!
 Yow.Spider-Man.
Very cool! If you're exactly like us, you'll love it.
An excellent interpretation of the comic book, and one that takes itself
and its characters seriously, as did the first Superman and first Batman
movies, and unlike some of the later Superman movies, which were just goofs.
This is important to us. Really. Comic books were the origin of our
ideas about the moral and heroic in the world. As a child, we took the
moral and heroic very seriously. We still do.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
had
awkward genes
Friday, May 10, 2002
Blab. A reader laments our disrespectful
treatment of Chelsea Clinton.
Why are people to cruel to
Chelsea Clinton? She was the best of the three. Can you imagine
being the only child (and A GIRL?) of those two people?
Yes, her genes are quite a cross to bear. We're just pointing it out, is
all.
Blab. Mistaking us for an expert on French numerology, a reader
writes:
Just to note, I am not asking
you to solve this riddle for me. Just to pass it along so that SOMEBODY
can solve it....
I just found out today that the French
word for "seventy" translates back to English as "sixty-ten". "seventy-five"
translates back as "sixty-fifteen". "ninety-two" translates back
as "eighty-twelve". The numbers from 70-79 and 90-99 are the only
ones that are like that.
WHY? And why do French people
think that this is normal?
- Felis Lynx
Consider eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen
eighteen and nineteen, past which everything is regular. In Spanish, once,
dose, trece, catorce, quince, past which everything is regular. In other
languages, doubtlessly other combinations.
In English and Spanish, this might be explained by these being small
numbers that were common enough to have evolved their own funny names,
while all larger number were used rarely enough that they were formed algorithmically.
This theory does not do well on the ranges 70-79 and 90-99. We wonder
if the obvious algorithmic construction of these in French is somehow obscene.
Any expert French numerologists
out there?
Blab. A reader seems obsessed with that Sweet
Release stuff.
"The female formula of Sweet
Release™ changes her fluids to a delicious soft citrus flavor
and the men’s formula changes his fluids to a wonderful crisp
hard apple."
So a "delicious soft citrus flavor"
would be like oranges, right? How about we get one man and one woman
to each order the one appropriate for their gender, and try them out--then
we can compare the two.
Great idea. So you'll try that and get back to us? Very good.
Blab. Someone who seems to have broken into our apartment writes:
I have a kitty, here, sound
asleep next to me on your spot. I just finished reading the paper
(the first review is out for SW2) and am getting out of bed so I can get
the laundry done so I can iron (whoppee!) and then I see this unconscious
body laying here on your side of the sheet. He stretches and yawns
and curls his body in a way that I could never hope to do but, if I could,
would crack and correct every muscular pain I have ever had.
Thinking that I will leave the covers
of the bed pulled back when we leave on vacation...............
We can only hope they will leave on vacation before Helen gets back.
Blab. A reader does half the required work.
"Back of my head calcuation"
- "Back of the envelope
calculation"
- (something to do with
doing the calculation in my head)
Whilst I realise I have not fully
formed this candidate Helenism, I am submitting it anyway, as the mental
image of doing maths on the back of one's own head is far to entertaining
to keep to myself.
We suspect that would be, Off the top of my head. Off the top of
our head, anyway.
It's wonderful, isn't it? Helenisms
are everywhere. Congrats!
Blab. Another terrific entry to our burgeoning list of Inappropriate
Project Names.
Project Pay No Attention
To That Man Behind The Curtain
Good one!
Ooh. We should tell you about the company we worked with a few
years ago that had a project named Project Smelly Cat by the whimsical
team of techies whose project it was. They had t-shirts printed up and
everything. Then a customer found out about it and asked pointed questions
of an executive at this company. Thereafter, project names had to be approved
by the executives.
No sense of humor, executives.
Blab. On our little fictional story about
Cardinal Lawless
There is no aid and abetting
law in Massachusetts. Cardinal Lawless can't get prosecuted for shuffling
around his priests. DAMN! He might at well go back to Rome.
At least we will get him out of the US and then Italy can deal with his
fine sense of order.
Or we could encourage other trusted institutions to cover up felonies too.
What do you think?
Blab. Our psychic listening devices somehow tap into the disconnected
stream of consciousness of someone or other out there.
good to see the officials
in Las Vegas are able to transport accused felons from point to point.
Too bad the NYC police can't do the same without losing one or two of them.........
Hmm. Those dang psychic listening devices need calibrating again.
Plurp. Speaking of our growing fame ...
Ask Jeeves links to us if you ask
it about alive(p). We have no idea.
JD-Blog puts us on the
short list. It's so exciting. Must be another of Ian's
friends. We're very popular among Ian's friends. We think they might be
our ISP. But we don't actually know.
Some Danish site
that looks vaguely like a diary.
Bathe in our universal renown.
Plurp. You certainly know that that suicide bomber game we mentioned
yesterday
is big
news. And the outrage! The media has made it clear that a Flash game
in which you blow
up other people is simply not acceptable. It's disrespectful. How dare
anyone create such a thing? (Our high score: 3 dead, 5 injured. Yours?)
Plurp. Now even Scientific
American is writing about this autonomic computing thing in which we're
involved. It would be nice if we could raise the level of our technology
faster than the level of everyone's expectations, though. If that's OK
with everyone.
Plop. On the plywood fence that surrounds the Really Big Hole
near where we live, into which someone is about to plop a Really Big Apartment
Building:
The East Sides Most Prestigious
New Residential Location
Apparently, literacy is not as prestigious as it once was.
Yow. Tessellation
animations. This is your Escher on GIF. (boingboing)
Plurp. That ever-fashionable Catholic church has made child molestation
so trendy that now even the
cloistered Jehovah's Witnesses are climbing on board.
This is so exciting! Who's next?
Plurp.
The blue dog
had an explanation for that
beet migration
thing
Thursday, May 9, 2002
Blab. Our famed Midwest Correspondent takes up the dare
to interpret our artist friend's recent work.
Dear Captain Plurp,
Hmmm... the sliders on those two slide
rules have collided, so maybe the title is also: "Log Jam". I think it
represents twin upright rulers, a political abstraction.
Your Midwest Correspondent
An insightful interpretation, and a chilling one. See below.
Blab. Someone, maybe even that same reader, attempts to divert
us from the topic.
Which reminds me of a story
that my math teacher used to tell, about a hazing ritual that used to occur
between the upperclassmen and incoming freshmen at the tech-oriented university
he attended.
The upperclassmen were empowered to
demand answers to math questions as they spotted freshmen in the halls,
so the freshmen would be sure to carry their slide-rules everywhere.
One particularly wise and cruel upperclassman
would always ask for the natural log of e, often getting answers like "looks
like about 1.02?"
Goodness! You are even older than we are. Our (possibly similar) experience
is in grading undergrad physics tests, where students would routinely write
down 9.9999999e+99 as their solution to some problem.
Blab. A reader reads the artist's mind.
the Twin Towers and (calculated
exactly?) where the planes hit them. Now, can slide thingies be attached
to the twin beams of light?
In fact, that's what the artist had in mind. We were too stupid to figure
it out, awash as we were in reverie over the days in which we owned a slide
rule exactly like the ones pictured, functionally fixated on the nostalgic
analog calculating power of mechanical devices.
We were more comfortable with our reverie.
Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for Dun & Bradstreet, a reader
asks us to do work. (We are reminded of Maynard
G. Krebs.)
Dear Dr. Plurp, Could you
tell me if this company is for
real? Thanks.
Ah. That would be the company that produces Sweet Release. What's that?,
we hear you ask. Well ...
Imagine a product that changes
the way men and women taste and smell: an oral supplement that alters the
scent and taste of your sexual fluids.
We're not making this up. Are they for real? We dunno. We encourage our
readers to order
some and let us know. Apples. Interesting.
Blab. A reader sends us ...
disk is mightier than the
bladder
.. which is an inverse
link to an article about a company that recovers data from disks and
diskettes that have died or been erased. And the CEO is a colorful
character.
What? Real foreign spies
are into data retrieval?
"Could be," Letourneau hints.
But what about domestic agents - law-enforcement
snoops who speak with American accents?
"That could be, too," Letourneau allows.
"I can't really - as the State Department says - confirm or deny anything.
All we know is that people have been following us when we do a job."
Such fun. We like colorful people.
Blab. A reader with whom we are planning lascivious acts sends
us a ...
[link]
... to a list of words (well, terms, really) that Lake Superior
State University wants to banish. To begin with, we are fascinated to learn
that Lake Superior is now a state. We somehow missed that news.
Some of the terms are certainly banishable. Bring the evil-doers
to justice is high on our hit list. Though we might then lose that
wonderful Batmanesque term evil-doers if we did that. And we'd hate
to lose it from everyday speech.
Curiously, some of the terms must be unique to Lake Superior. Unprecedented
new and rename it to something else, for instance, are terms
we had never heard before.
Then there are terms that seem like perfectly good English to us. Foreseeable
future, for instance. But maybe it sounds grating in the local dialect
of Lake Superior.
Plurp. Cultural bellwether Vanity Fair (which, apocryphally,
has no online edition) has pronounced
Chelsea Clinton a sex
symbol. We figure abstinence must be catching on after all.
 Plop.
It seems that the Midwest pipe bomber was placing his pipe bombs in particular
locations so as to form the pattern of a
smiley face. (No, we are not making this up.) We hope this is the beginning
of a trend in which our domestic terrorists add a certain artistic panache
to their murder.
Yo. IBM and Butterfly
intend to use the Grid for massive (millions of people) multiplayer
games. Our suggestion for this is Virtual Traffic Jam, in which hundreds
of thousands of players sit for hours, staring at images of other
players' cars, none of which move. Periodically, you can honk your horn.
Plurp. You already heard about the Suicide
Bomber Game. So we don't have to worry you with our bad taste by mentioning
it first. And that's a good thing.
Now explain to us how this
is different from most other stupid video games.
Plurp. Dave
notes:
Here are the top phrases
searched:
- 3 for "mery"
- 1 for "chacon"
- 1 for "gizmonaut"
- 1 for "iris chacon"
- 1 for "mia"
We are all searching for her.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was laid out in particular locations
so as to
form
the pattern of a smiley face
Wednesday, May 8, 2002
Blab. Why Startups Fail.
Good Morning,
We recently discovered your website
www.stevewhite.org, and noticed that you keep in contact with your users
via a mailing list. As such, we would like the opportunity to introduce
you to EM5000, the world's very best list management system at a bargain
of a price.
Blab. Speaking of which, a reader explores the mysteries of:
Stupidity
for Dummies
L.
Um ...
Some of the sharpest minds
in academia have undertaken the study of stupidity, and their work has
been collected in the just-published "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid".
This wouldn't have anything to do with the Publish Or Perish policy
of the tenure system, would it? Nah. That's just us being cynical
again.
Blab. Oh happiness decompositional.
http://bovineinversus.com/
!!
Caloo calay! It's chicken bones in the throats of virgins day! He, she
or it is back. Rejoice. Or become the infected toenails of lawnmowers.
Blab. A reader seeks to solve the mystery of the meaning of our
friend's artwork.
That's a pair of "glide tools",
once used to measure things, but rendered obsolete by laser range-finding
devices (larafides).
An interesting theory. Wrong, but an interesting theory.
Blab. On this same topic, another reader wonders:
(Or was it "snide mules"?)
Actually, no.
More artistically insightful readers are invited to enter
our contest.
Blab. A reader suggests more ...
inappropriate project names:
skylab
challenger
Ouch. (But good ones!) Similarly:
Twin Towers
Suicide Bomber
Taliban Returns
Blab. A reader suggests ...
Some fowl hellenisms:
kill two birds with one bush
- kill two birds with one
stone
- a bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush
count all your chickens in
one basket
- count your chickens before
they're hatched
- put all your eggs in one
basket
kill two birds in one basket
- kill two birds with one
stone
- put all your eggs in one
basket
count your chickens in the
bush
- a bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush
- count your chickens before
they're hatched
kill two birds before they're
hatched
- kill two birds with one
stone
- count your chickens before
they're hatched
put all your birds in one bush
- put all your eggs in one
basket
- a bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush
You know, it drives Helen nuts when people use formulae like this to derive
Helenisms. We, OTOH, are more focussed on results than process, and award
them full points.
Blab. A reader sends us the useless text of some news article
from somewhere, without even bothering to look for the link. How rude.
We found it on the New York Times site, which we hate because they force
you to register to see their content. So we found its
essence on the all-by-itself fascinating (and you should check it out)
Headlines
From the New York Times - if the Times were a weblog, this is what it might
look like.
Michael
Todd Jr., Creator of Smell-o-Vision Movie, Dies at 72
Michael Todd Jr., who made a Smell-o-Vision
film that combined movies with changing odors, died on May 5 in Ireland.
Smell-O-Vision.
Great stuff. Long time readers may recall that IBM seems to have
a patent on that.
Blab. A reader who, for some reason, remembers stuff, writes:
So when's commencement?
(By which I mean, of course, not the beginning of all things, but the beginning
of your career as a highly-paid motivational speaker.)
Sunday, June 9. Yikes! We better get busy writing
that commencement address.
Blab. Those people who monitor all aspects of our existence reveal
the following.
Chez Helene - Wednesday evening
menu
Grilled trout brushed with olive oil
and lemon juice
Steamed asparagus
Apple raspberry cobbler
Looks like it's time to go home!
Plop.
BOSTON, Massachusetts (CMN)
-- Cardinal Bernard Lawless said in a deposition at Suffolk Superior Court
on Wednesday that he viewed rape as "a psychological pathology" and relied
on medical or psychiatric expertise in dealing with claims of rape by priests.
Lawless, archbishop of the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of Boston, answered questions from attorneys as part of the
lawsuit that accuses him of negligence for allowing defrocked priest John
Googhan's transfer from parish to parish, despite allegations of rape.
An official, unedited copy of the
morning deposition session with Lawless was released to CMN.
He was asked if in 1984, when he was
installed as archbishop of Boston, "You knew, did you not, that it would
have been wrong for a priest to have raped female parishioners. Is that
correct?"
"Oh, absolutely," he answered.
Was that something, he was asked,
that he would have tried to stop from happening again?
"That's correct," he said.
What practice was in place to deal
with this kind of allegation, he was asked?
"I viewed this as a pathology, as
a psychological pathology, as an illness," he said. "Obviously, I viewed
it as something that had a moral component.
"It was, objectively speaking, a gravely
sinful act. And that's something one deals with in one's life, in one's
relationship to God."
No, it
didn't really say rape. But explain
to us why that would be any different.
Rant.
A California congressman
wants to make it a federal crime to rent or sell video games showing violence,
prostitution and drug use to anyone under the age of 17 without parental
consent.
A New York citizen wants to make it a federal crime to make stupid
and invasive laws against things that people can see on prime-time
commercial television, or read about in the newspaper, without our consent.
Sheesh!
Plurp.
The blue dog
figured that
child molestation was really
OK after all
Tuesday, May 7, 2002
Blab. On the topic of inappropriate
project names, a reader who has been reincarnated writes:
I was, in a past life, part
of a project named "Rubicon". So named, because it was to be the "next
generation" system that the company was going to move to and leave the
old behind. You know, that whole Roman thing about "no going back
once you cross the Rubicon".... Of course, the project was
cancelled, and all of the work scrapped. Probably not on the same
level as "Kitty Slicer" (which I'm considering suggesting at the next meeting),
but it's still a pretty foreboding name.
- Felis Lynx
We like it! Along these same lines:
Gate of Hell
Purgatory
Styx
Blab. Another good suggestion.
Project Malinger
Good one! Similarly:
Unemployment
Certain Failure
Utter Disaster
Readers are required to send us more.
Blab. A reader who just can't get into the swing of things writes:
Thanks for upsetting my stomach
last night with you IPNs. Next time you have a brilliant idea, keep
it to yourself.
Well, given that we get paid astonishing quantities of money to not keep
brilliant ideas to ourself, we're not sure this is the best possible plan.
How about this? Next time we get a brilliant idea, bugger off.
Blab. A reader pushes our buttons.
Ohhhhh, but I wanted to see
your
Ozzy response!
Very well. Frail readers beware this analogy with the The
Osbournes show that's currently on some TV channel or other.
You know how, when you pass
a burning building, and people are running out of it, on fire, and screaming
and screaming? And how they run and scream until they fall, blind but still
screaming, gyrating on the ground until, finally, they shudder and are
still? And how they continue to burn, to sputter, to smolder for quite
some time after that, with that hideous odor and greasy sheen? And how
you can't help but watch?
Well, that's what it's like.
Happy now?
Blab. Yet another compulsive mathematician
writes:
There's nothing wrong with
"But this particular 80-20 split is not really the point; in some other
country, the precise numbers might be 90-20 or 95-10 or something else",
except perhaps the word "split". The numbers refer to facts of the form
"X% of the wealth is controlled by Y% of the people" (or "X% of the people
control only Y% of the wealth"); there's no reason they have to add up
to 100%...
We nonetheless insist that they add up to 100%. So all of you countries
who are in violation, shape up!
But whatever the arithmetic, the whole thing is bizarre. Why would anyone
care what fraction of the country's wealth they have? What a really weird
measure.
Suppose you lived in the lap of luxury. Suppose you had a billion dollars
in the bank. And that was after the mansion in California, the trophy spouse,
the Maserati and all. Would you really care that someone in Duluth also
had an original Barnett Newman hanging in the bathroom?
We don't get stuff like that. Can you explain
it to us?
Blab. Speaking of economic jealousy, a reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to a rant about how Wal-Mart is evil. We actually think that murderers
and rapists are evil. But obviously, our Treasured Readers' mileage varies.
Blab. A reader claims the following.
I know how much you love
blind
links.
Do you? Can any of us really know how much another of us loves something?
Oh, it's that whole objective observation of subjective mental state thing
again.
Blab. That reader of astonishing lexical legerdemain writes:
I drink my teas with money
I drink them with my wife
I drink them when it’s
sunny
And keep them in a fife.
That must make it hard to participate in fife serenades on St. Swithin's
Day. We shall have to send you a box of wax lips.
Yak.
I couldn't get into that
book. I don't like funny things. I just don't get them.
How bad do I feel that you married
me?
Plurp. Blaise Tobia, our brilliant artist friend, challenged
us to explain this
image of his last weekend, entitled calculations. We gave up.
Perhaps you are more clever. What
does it mean, or represent, or whatever? (No cheating!)
Yak. On the street.
Excuse me, sir, could I talk
to you for a second?
You just did.
Rant. If you were the most brilliant physicist of your time,
the winner of a Nobel prize, lauded around the world for your discoveries,
would you be worried that the U.S. government, your government, was going
through your trash, monitoring your mail and telephone calls? Of
course you would.
For many years, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and other agencies spied on [Einstein], acting
on suspicions as disturbing as a tip that he had been a Russian spy in
Berlin; as vague as an unease with his support of civil rights and pacifist
and socialist causes; and as goofy as claims that he was working on a death
ray or that he was heading a Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood.
[...]
"It's like the agents got up in the
morning, brushed their teeth, opened other people's mail and tapped some
phones."
We, like you, are relieved that those plans for death rays and civil rights
never came to fruition.
Yak. Well, one good thing came out of our all-day meeting today:
a new Helenism.
I'm preaching your song.
-
I'm preaching to the choir.
-
I'm singing your song.
Plurp.
The blue dog
preached your song
crossed the river
tapped some phones
drank tea with bunny
Monday, May 6, 2002
Blab. A reader wants us to admit to certain unsavory
activities.
Now Steve, admit it.
You laughed just as hard as I did at the Ozzy Show. I just don't
know why they bleep so much since you can't understand what he is saying
anyway.....
You know, we had a wonderful response to this all written down. But we
decided that certain frail readers would get upset by it, so we erased
it.
Blab. A reader with a malfunctioning calendar writes:
Sheesh, it's not like this
is 1984 (the book, not the year) where your telescreen has only one channel
and you can't turn it off. If you don't like The Osbournes, don't
watch it. (I don't.)
You can turn off your telescreen? Wow.
Blab. The reader who claimed to be able to estimate
anything to within an order of magnitude takes up our challenge.
"Cool. What number are we
thinking of?"
6.7 * 10e8
Next.
This is incredible. The number we were thinking of was two billion, which
is less than a factor of 3 away from our Treasured Reader's estimate. We
are impressed.
Blab. Another mathematically retentive reader writes:
From the wealth
distribution article you referenced:
"But this particular 80-20 split is
not really the point; in some other country, the precise numbers might
be 90-20 or 95-10 or something else."
Probably not that last one.
You liked the second-to-last one better?
Blab. Speaking of preserved vegetables, we are so thrilled when
our readers get our jokes. When they do.
No no no! Peter *Piper* picked
a peck of pickled pepper. Peter Parker was alwasy too busy chasing Mary
Jane for any sort of preserved vegetable seletction activitiy. -AJL
Speaking of our readers, is it any coincidence that the guy who thought
he was Spiderman was also chasing a person named Mary Jane? Like, wow.
Especially the
pickle part.
Blab. Speaking of ... whut ?
It was Peter *Piper* who
picked the pickled peppers when were a lad!
We appreciate our pickled readers. Try
to keep up.
Blab. We seem to have confused our Treasured
Readers.
What the heck does that LICENSE
PLATE say?
It says (in full):
NEW YORK
TRY2KPUP
THE EMPIRE STATE
Blab. Quid pro quo, a reader confuses us.
I do not want to try 2K Pup.
I switched to Catux after my troubles with Pup '98.
Yeah, that Pup '98 was pretty bad. We've heard that Pup XP is better, but
we suspect it's still a dog.
Blab. For some reason unrevealed, one of our readers seems to
know far too much about that vicious right-wing
writer to which some other reader sent us a link. (Did you follow that?)
Anne Coulter is (ehem) infamously
nasty. You can read much of her work via the links in the left of the referenced
article. For a while I thought her work was a nasty sort of right-wing
humour, but while it does appear to have humor value to the right, it's
also clearly deeply felt.
So undereducated vicious people can make their way in life as writers of
unintentionally humorous political tracts? The world is a very strange
place.
Blab. A reader informs us of its eating fetish.
I
eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life.
They may taste kind of funny, but
it keeps them on the knife.
This must be the origin of the phrase Land of Peas and Honey.
Blab. Those people who have planted spy cameras wherever we go
write:
The trimmer/shaver thingie
you use in the morning is sitting on the side of the bathroom sink.
Do you want it to be recharged?
Actually, both of them need charging. If you're not too busy fiddling
with the cameras, perhaps you could take care of that for us? Thanks very.
Plop. Here's
what passes for art these days.
Make
a wish.
Write it down on a piece of paper.
Fold it and tie it around a branch
of a Wish Tree.
Ask your friends to do the same.
Keep wishing
Until the branches are covered with
wishes.
-- Yoko Ono (Famous because, uh,
...)
We wish people like this would get jobs. (With apologies
to Caterina who, for some reason,
liked it.)
Plurp. Lunchtalk today wandered into Inappropriate Project Names
(along the lines of Military
Operation Names). We submit the first few, to get your creative juices
drooling down your collective chin.
Crushed Children
Abattoir
Vomitorium
Cold Sore
Embarrassing Odor
Kitty Slicer
Readers are now required to submit
the results of their own inappropriate ruminations.
Plurp. There
is no such thing as death. Good to know.
Plurp.
I drink water that's tasty!
I get in the sun and feel toasty!
Havin' a belly laugh's fun!
Try keeping dogs--they're cute!
Sunday, May 5, 2002
Plurp. If we're ever in the market for a new license
plate, we'll have to consider this one.
It's registered to someone else at the moment. But we're sure we could
make them an offer that they would be unlikely to refuse. It being New
York and all.
 Plop.
The
Times (of London)
has just succumbed to the vile trend of requiring registration to access
most
of their site.
What's with you bozos? Don't you know that we all just make up the stuff
we put in your stupid registration forms? Unless your markedroids are telepathic,
you get nothing from this besides unhappy readers.
Oh, we do beg your pardon. Your readers who love spam and are
unconcerned about their privacy will, we're sure, tell you everything you
wish to know about their sordid little lives.
Sorry. We misunderstood your target demographic.
Plurp. At lunch on Friday, we said off-handedly to Dave,
Golly,
isn't it a bit over the top to say that the DMCA (the proposed legislation
that attempts to protect copyrights to digital stuff) is trying to outlaw
the general purpose computer?
We should know better than to question Dave on stuff like this. Here's
his detailed analysis of how the DMCA intends to do exactly that. Dave
kindly omits our name as the offending, doubting party. But we cower in
shame anyhow.
This all happened because Dave actually, you know, like, read
about it, and stuff.
Plurp.
The blue dog
voted for that
David M. Chess
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