Current
Earlier
Later
Archive
Home
Search
Mail
Stuff
Bigger! |
2002.05.12 : 2002.05.18
My Life In Scotland
Part One: I Am Jelly
I have never ridden a camel for twelve week straight, nor been
dragged across the prairie behind a wild horse, but either of these, or
even both in combination, could not be worse than beginning a vacation
by flying to another continent. And yet, that is just what we have done.
By car from work to home, taxi to JFK, an interminable flight in which
sunset and sunrise occurred unnaturally close together, to a tram at Heathrow
followed by a befuddling series of long corridors, stairs, escalators,
and walkways - reminiscent of Quake:
Oh! We must be going down
there.
How do we get there?
Dunno. There must be a secret door
somewhere. Or a switch.
Then another wait, another tram, another wait, another line, another plane,
another taxi, and finally we arrive at a guest house in Edinburgh, where
our grand plans for touring the castle are lost in unintended sleep.
I took a day trip to Japan
once, arriving in Narita after a twelve hour flight. I had slept most of
the way - the good news - but in the same unmoving position - the bad news
- and when I awoke upon landing, my knees did not work at all for several
minutes, and I was worried that I would not be able to walk off the plane.
I arrived at the hotel at an indeterminate
time of day, slept until just before breakfast, gave the talk which was
the purpose of the trip - talking all too fast and blowing out two simultaneous
translators in the process - then took a taxi back to the airport.
I was a zombie for two weeks.
The magnets in Helen's head found the seriously underspecified location
of a good restaurant, which was booked, so we had dinner at a plausible
place next door that had great trout.
And now, zombie sleep.
Friday, May 17, 2002
Plurp. So it turns out that we're not going to be doing
the blog thing for some number of days that is currently being determined
by a series of random processes involving large mechanical devices of uncertain
purpose and the saliva of mules.
Yow. But, in the meantime, we are flattered to the point of blushing
at mouse having
said (in her Thursday, May 16 entry) that Plurp is the "Best Site
Ever". Gawrsh!
 Plurp.
The blue dog
had no idea
what that meant
Thursday, May 16, 2002
Blab. Plurp's very own meme mixer enters our
contest, in which we challenge readers to use the word "semiotic" humorously
in a sentence.
The French-speaking Belgians
and Swiss have the rather more sensible numbers septante, octante and semiotic.
Well, that counts as obscure.
Blab. A reader masquerading as a colleague enters our contest.
"The Semiotics of the Grid"
{inw}
That's pretty funny. Obscure
and geeky, but funny!
Blab. A spammist writes.
Hello,
Please put me in direct contact with
the media buyer or V.P. of Marketing for stevewhite.org. I have contacted
your company in the past, and [yammer yammer ...]
Hello. We are the V.P. of Marketing for stevewhite.org. You are a blithering
idiot. Thank you.
Blab. A reader groks that clever marketing
phrase from yesterday.
So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you?
The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking
meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
Zackly.
Blab. Someone seems to have been in our apartment recently, taking
pictures in the private areas.
Worse than that, note the compulsive ordering of our shirts, both spectrographically
and by pattern. This greatly reminds us of Sleeping
With The Enemy, in which the crazed spouse's reappearance is heralded
by his having compulsively ordered the canned goods in the kitchen cupboards.
We are now afraid of going home.
Plop. Have you seen ten
tons of hijacked cyanide? Do let the FBI know, will you? 'Cause they
can't seem to find it by themselves.
We wonder what the threshold of their capability is. A hundred tons?
A millions tons? The entire mass of the known universe?
Can we establish some expectations as to the lower bound of incredibly
dangerous stuff that we expect the FBI to be able to track or find?
Would that be asking too much?
Plurp. Vanilla
Coke, yadda yadda. Kafkaesque
has a perfectly dandy rant about it, so we won't bother.
Yo. It appears that those readers who were looking for naked
Helen pictures have gone over to Dave's
site. We wish them well.
Yo. One of the stranger
IBM announcements you'll ever see. That's for sure.
Yak. From our week-long conference, a Helenism.
You don't want to bake things
into concrete too early.
We find that we very seldom want to do that at all.
Yak. One of our colleagues,
presenting a talk at our conference.
This is not really a hard
problem. All we have to do is be a little bit super-human.
Yow. Here's a pretty amazing Myst-like Flash game: Kharon.
Poke around! We seem to have gotten stuck trying to generate some lichen-based
medicine, we can't figure out how to use the coin to activate the organ
transplanter, and we have no idea where the G-77 Archive thingie is. We
also have no clue as to what the endgame is, or what the whole thing is
about. So if you find out, let us
know. (/usr/bin/girl)
Yow. New terrace furniture, to replace the hideous, moldy stuff
left by the previous owner, the entire terrace courtesy of Helen, who has
done a wonderful job on the whole thing.
Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be a
Myst-like Flash game
made entirely of ten tons of
thinking spam
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Blab. A reader claims to know our intentions. This surprises
us. Heck, we don't even know our intentions.
You're baiting me.
Are we? Are you taking the bait? And if so, could you please arrange it
in a nice pattern along with the cheese and eggs? Thanks so much.
Blab. A reader sends a ...
[link]
... to a shocking article in which we learn that (a) some postings to newsgroups
may be bogus, (b) some Web sites may be bogus and (c) PR firms may sometimes
try to persuade people without making it obvious that the persuasion is
being done by PR firms.
As we said: shocking.
Blab. Our Broken Koanist is back, this time with enigmatic images
as well.
The Blue Dog knew that
till election it
was war twenty-four/seven
We find ourselves.
Blab. Another poet writes:
There is a thin gauze of
clouds above me and
it is raining.
How BVI is THAT?
Aren't there fish to be caught by
pelicans
and Rum Punches to be made and drunk?
We see our humble blog becoming a lightning rod for the literary crowd.
That frightens us.
Blab. A clever reader sees through our crumbling façade.
In lieu of producing actual
content, I see you are taking those online tests. Here's
one you might like.
Well, that is quite a test, to be sure. Our results are as follows.
We are quite relieved, as being John Stamos would have required us to
get new business cards, have our handkerchiefs remonogrammed, and would
have confused Him Who Sleeps In Hair.
Whew.
Blab. A reader who monitors the pharmaceutical intake of our
colleagues alerts us, and makes entreaties.
Dave
is off his meds again. Can't you do something about that?
Actually, no.
Blab. A reader worries about the deep implications of something
we never mentioned.
Some people may derisively
mock the notion that all living things on Earth are descended from a common
ancestor, but I find it ennobling.
I am a cousin to cats; a brother to
beets.
Suddenly, our readers make sense to us.
Blab. The blind linkist sends us a ... wait for it ...
[link].
Original Flub-a-Dub marionette, anyone? Anyone?
Blab. Our readers continue to be fascinated with expert French
numerologists.
The French-speaking Belgians
and Swiss have the rather more sensible numbers
septante, octante and nonante. This wise choice of dialect no doubt
explains the irresistable growth of the Belgian Empire.
We, ourselves, are Belch. Or, at least, of Belch extraction.
Yak. A Famous Speaker at our all-week conference.
Even a slime mold has more
self than the Internet does.
Umkay.
Yak. Another speaker.
I have a problem. I have
30 minutes and 82 slides.
Curiously, this became our problem. And, later, that same speaker.
Interpretation presumes commensuration
of statements in the language used by the communicating agents. Externalizing
judgments requires appeals to selves to be interpreted.
This reminds us of our
cartoon on the topic. And:
As I mentioned already on
a slide that I skipped ...
Yak. One of our colleagues.
Brain - The Meat That
Thinks TM
We really like that!
Rant. Does "semiotics"
actually mean anything? It's not clear to us. It does seem awfully
easy to use it to obscure meaning, though.
The Plurp Contest O' The Day should be really easy, so enter
often: Send us the funniest sentence you can think of that contains
the word "semiotic".
Yo. That cultural transition
about which we wrote earlier has accelerated. Over half of the people in
the conference we're attending have their laptops open. All the time. Several
people are writing code. Some are doing their mail. A few are playing games.
Lots of people are surfing the Web, sometimes for stuff related to the
conference, more often not. One guy's writing a Weblog entry.
This is a very different set of social expectations and interactions
than we used to have at conferences. The world is changing. We expect it
will end up in a very different place than it was just a few years ago.
Yo. Did you get your $5 round trip domestic airline tickets on
Tuesday? No? Too bad. They
fixed the bug.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a meta-semiotic property of
language
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
Blab. The recent spate of contributions from expert
French numerologists prompts this insightful commentary.
There are plenty of famous
French mathematicians, so maybe their number system isn't that grim.
But of course, maths doesn't depend on arithmetic. Boring fields
like "technology and economics" probably do. :-)
Zackly. We also worry about French commerce.
Blab. This week, for the first time in a very long time, the
most popular search terms from our site's very own search engine did not
involve naked
pictures of Helen. Instead, they were:
"jessica simpson"
"ballmer"
"better than sex cake"
Explanations are welcome. We
have no idea.
Blab. This time, the enigmatic group that listens in on our every
conversation submits a Helenism
that we said just now.
"it's got momentum behind
it"
This continues to frighten us. But perhaps that's the point.
Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for an Internet job search site,
a reader writes:
I'm a freelance technical
writer, and I need a new job! What should I do? How can I avoid the mind
control lasers?
Help!
Someone with your qualifications would have no trouble finding a top-flight
job in either the food service or housekeeping industries.
Yo. The world is getting stranger. Now Glenda
Jackson says porn is necessary.
Yak. Opening remarks at our four day conference,
Guests may use the rest rooms
on the side of the auditorium. For those of you who work here, you can
go anywhere in the building.
Plop. Oh good lord. More
games. Lots more games. We'll never get anything done. (Faerieglamour)
Plurp. What kind of driver are we? According to a
wise Web site, we are ...
A Prudent Driver
You are among the most intelligent
and best mannered among all drivers. When you are in a hurry, you may push
it a little, but you never race. When you are relaxed, you don't impede
others by driving like a turtle. You are mindful of others and occasionally
downright nice, but mostly you keep your wits and keel.
Ha!
Plurp. Which piercing are we? That's easy.
So if you wake up one morning to find us embedded in your eyebrow, don't
be surprised.
Plurp. And our battle cry?
So now you know.
Yak. Last night.
Tell me a story.
OK ...
Once upon a time, there was
a beautiful princess. And this princess went out among her people and came
upon a family toiling in the field. Toil not, my people, she said.
Instead,
please take this dandy beet. And the family replied, Yo, princess!
What's wit dis dopey beet thing? Bug off!
A beet? Why a beet?
The magic beans were already being
used.
Well, I think it ought to be gold
or something.
So the princess continued
her journey. At length, she came upon another family toiling in the field.
Toil
not, my people, she said. Instead, please take this dandy golden
beet. And the family replied, Oy! So we're supposed to be impressed
with a tiny golden beet? By us it looks like a golden radish, that beet.
Why are they saying Yo and Oy?
It's Brooklyn.
This is a pretty dumb story.
The End.
Plurp.
Zoe: How do you write
government officials so well?
Melvin: I think of a man and
take away reason and accountability.
Plurp.
It was a little known
fact that
the blue dog
was a member of
Bourbaki
Monday, May 13, 2002
Blab. Another of our many expert
French numerologists checks in.
I'm surprised no one has
pointed out that it's worse than that: French for 99 xlates as "four twenties,
ten, and nine". So la-bas!
As a child, we were fascinated by the inability of Roman numerals to support
multiplication. We wondered if that held them back in technology and economics.
Is that what happened to the French?
Blab. There seems to be a diversity of opinion on our little
story about the folks who sat behind
us at the theater.
Personally, I think your
story about the Kansas City couple was pretty spot on. Of course, I'm sure
you could find pretty much the same couple a bit closer to home in, I don't
know, the same apartment building as you, for example.
L.
Frankly, we thought we were entirely fair, even kind, to Jim
and Barbara Wilson. We're pretty sure that none of our neighbors have
above-ground pools, though, and we'd be surprised if any of them are vice-chairman
of a bowling league. But what do we know?
Blab. A reader seeks to push our buttons.
Now, now... We both know
that by purchasing those nigh-five grams of marijuana, Ms. Warwick was
in fact helping to murder children and fund terrorists, thereby aligning
herself somewhere on the Axis of Evil. We both know this because the television
told us so. And we can't go questioning the television, can we? Think of
the mixed message we would be sending our television-watching children
(at least those not murdered by proxy by celebrities).
Camel dung!
Blab. Picking up on our lament about Dionne
Warwick being arrested for having a few joints in her purse, a lazy
reader writes:
"most court cases these days
are drug cases"
Supporting URL please.
So let's make this the Plurp Contest O' The Week, shall we? Confirm
or deny, with authoritative Web reference, the following claim: Most cases
in criminal court in the past year include a drug charge (possession, use,
sales, etc.).
Go to it, readers more clever
than the one above!
Blab. A reader wants to believe that the universe is predictable.
Isn't that sweet?
What is the policy when the
Plurpmeister is on vacation in the future? Will we have guest contributors
in his absence? Or will we be force to fend for ourselves and find
our own sick means of entertainment?
We feel compelled to point out that you folks are the guest contributors
around here. And as to your skill in finding sick means of entertainment,
we have great confidence in each and every one of you, backed up by ample
evidence.
Blab. Readers who care about such things might have noticed that
Luciano Pavarotti (he's a singer) failed
to show up at his much-heralded Final Performance Ever. He was sick,
it seems, and didn't want even to show up and say thanks to his adoring
fans, all of whom had paid lotso bucks to, well, not see him. Fortunately,
he was replaced at the last possible second by Salvatore Licitra, who turned
out to be quite stunning. (Or so we're told. We don't actually like this
kind of singing.)
Mr. Pavarotti has not been
helped by his longtime manager, Herbert Breslin, who has been telling anyone
who will listen that even though his chief client has no future bookings
at opera houses, any major company would tear up its schedule to accommodate
Luciano Pavarotti. Not true. Even Joseph Volpe, the Met's general manager,
who shares some blame for agreeing to these performances early on, has
conceded that there will be no more appearances in opera by this famed
tenor at the Met.
If Mr. Volpe tears up the schedule
at all, it will be to accommodate Mr. Licitra, who was not due to make
his Met debut until the 2004-5 season. You can only hope that Mr. Licitra
does not push himself too hard, too soon. Otherwise he may be a lot younger
than Mr. Pavarotti is when he faces the question of retirement.
And that will be the final word on this topic, umkay? Otherwise, our stupid
blog will start sounding culturally literate. Can't have that. Nossir.
Blab. A reader sends us an apocryphally blind ...
[link]
...which points to a stilted SF morality play in which aliens gasp repeatedly
upon hearing how backwards the Earthlings are.
Stay away from Earth -- they
must show evidence of civilized behavior before we can allow them to join
our community in the stars.
Yadda yadda.
Blab. And then someone - could it be that same reader? - sends
us an equally blind ...
[link]
... this time to an article which breathlessly predicts that Blogs Will
Rule The WorldTM.
One blog avatar has formally
wagered that by 2007, more readers will get their news from blogs than
from The New York Times.
Umkay. But what the heck is a blog avatar?
This reminds us of a blog entry somewhere recently (rebecca?)
that had a little generator for breathless articles about blogs, which
seemed to be pretty much capable of generating any such article we've seen.
Maybe the aliens should stay away from Earth.
Plurp. If we could only select one class of hideous things to
eliminate entirely from the world, to erase all knowledge of from people's
memories, to make as if it had never happened, it would be this.
Any step in that direction is a very, very good thing.
Plurp. Ian
points out (in passing) that the link we gave to Noël Coward's Private
Lives last Saturday was, in fact,
a link to the famed Monkeyboy
video, featuring Steven Ballmer. Indeed, this is true. Dunno quite how
that happened. Must have been the orbital mind control lasers. In any event,
it's way too funny to fix now.
Yow.
(Beth)
Yow. Were you aware that the BBC, that stuffy British center
of cultural excellence, also indulged in really
silly Flash games? Us neither.
We can neither confirm nor deny the vicious rumor that we spent more
time playing this particular game today than we did paying attention to
the meeting we were in all day. It could not possibly surprise you to learn
that we achieved a perfect score, though. (/usr/bin/girl)
Plop. And speaking of our all day meeting, which was once again
on Autonomic Computing, of course, the universe followed its predictable
trickery by losing Internet connectivity outside of our building for quite
some time during the meeting. This did two things, both of which were bad.
(1) It illustrated that we are a long, long way from Autonomic Computing.
This happens every time we have a meeting about Autonomic Computing. (That's
probably because it happens absolutely all the time anyway.) And (2) it
prevented us from playing that
game for far too long.
Stop that, naughty universe!
Plurp.
The blue dog
was convinced that Steven Ballmer
was
scripted by
Noël Coward
Sunday, May 12, 2002
Blab. Reacting badly to our quaint story about the
people who sat behind us at the theater yesterday, a reader threatens
us with unknown malicious technology.
Hey! Hey! Back up off Kansas
City! I know people who know people who can flood your apartment
(on whatever ridiculously high floor it is) with stockyard-"product".
This must be a Midwest dialect, as we are unaware of any stockyard products
with which it would be appropriate to fill our apartment. After all, whatever
they are, where would we put them?
Plurp. Oh! Comparing
apples and oranges. We get it! Finally.
Plop. Our
tax dollars at work.
Legendary pop singer [...]
Dionne Warwick was arrested at Miami International Airport Sunday for possession
of [...] marijuana totaling less than five grams.
Intent on keeping us safe from ourselves, our dear friends in the government
will no doubt clog the courts with the prosecution of Ms. Warwick for this
Heinous Crime Against Middle Class Morality (most court cases these days
are drug cases), followed by having her clog the prisons with her presence
(most prison inmates these days are imprisoned because of drug convictions;
most of these are black).
And despite how much this will cost, both to us personally and to society,
much less to Ms. Warwick, it will make all of us feel much safer, knowing
that our fundamental freedoms, our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness, are being protected.
Or something.
Rant. Our dear friends in the California government, having cleverly
engineered the recent electricity crisis, show their continued ignorance
of simple economics in their recent announcement yesterday that - oops
- they seem to have an upcoming and potentially catastrophic
budget deficit of $20-$25 billion, the largest in history, larger than
the total budgets of most states (California's total budget is $80B), and
twice the shortfall these infinitely clever folks anticipated just four
months ago.
How did this come to pass?, you ask innocently. Well, Treasured
Reader, it happened because the California government failed to anticipate
the "plunging tax revenues from stock options and other capital gains,
which evaporated when the dot-com bubble burst last year."
D'oh!
What will happen to the residents of California?, you ask. Here's
what their enlightened officials say:
The shortfall could well
force the state and local governments to slash an array of services, including
police protection and mental health.
Police protection would certainly be the first, least important, non-essential
governmental "service" we would cut, were we burdened with decreased taxation.
And that mental health thing? We recommend that all government employees
be required to cease all of their personal mental health expenditures,
from their $400/hour analysts to their private alcoholism clinics to their
feel-goodie self-actualization group gropes. And use the money they save
to help fund police departments in low-income areas of California.
 Should
our new policy result in excess mental stress on our dear California legislators,
and an inability to concentrate on their chosen professions, we would suggest
that they sit out on the sidewalks of major cities with tattered cardboard
signs that read, Will legislate for food.
That is, after all, what their constituents do.
Plurp.
The blue dog
always wanted to be an official of
the
California government
 |
