Plurp: It's not just for breakfast any more

Bigger!

2002.07.14 : 2002.07.20

Saturday, July 20, 2002
Blab. In suggesting the "Bother," said Pooh contest, we seem to have created a monster.
"Bother," said Pooh, when he realized that all those odd people where trying to figure out what he had meant. Then he quickly went off and slit his wrists.
Upon that discovery, Christopher Robin declared, "Oh bother!" He had realized he would have to clean up the entire mess.
We do love the suicide and asociality theme.

Blab. A reader ponders simulated bears.
"Bother!" said Pooh, when the OS started upgrading him - a poor bear - to something much much better, at least in the terms of a marketing master-mind, who muses to be the Creator (a much much better one).
"Bother!" insisted Pooh, "How this? I'm not connected to the machine, Am I?"
Chances are, this is from a simulated reader.

Blab. A reader suggests a memorial for John Cocke, which we would happily feature here, for those of you who wish to contribute.
I knew John Cocke also. Damn, another good one gone. Apple users, which live on his legacy, should post artistic tribute to him.
t
Did we forget to mention that John Cocke won the Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the National Medal of Technology, the ACM/Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Computer Society's Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award, and the Franklin Institute Certificate of Merit? Well, he did, among others.
Mortality sucks.

Blab. A reader whom we are probably sitting beside right now points out the following.
Well, John Cock didn't get around to marrying a PERSON until 1989. YOU beat him by one year. Lucky you!
That's Cocke, actually. And we love the way your mind works.

Plop. Are you the kind of person who likes to think that the U.S. military's biological weapons program was safe and well managed, and couldn't possibly have let unbelievably dangerous pathogens be taken from secure labs just willy nilly? Then don't read this.
Internal Army documents about the U.S. biodefense program describe missing Ebola and other pathogens, vicious feuds, lax security, cover-ups and a "cowboy culture" beyond anyone's scrutiny. Moreover, germ warriors in the C.I.A. and the Defense Department decided — without bothering to consult the White House — to produce anthrax secretly and tinker with it in ways that arguably put the U.S. in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.
See? We told you not to read it.

Plop. What does The Nameless Beast do at 5 AM after breaking a lovely celadon pitcher?

Anybody want a Nameless Beast? No charge. We'll pay postage.

Yak. Even analog TV has Helenisms.
Right on the ball

Right on the money

On the ball

Plurp.
"Bother," said the blue dog
upon finding the bathtub
filled with brightly colored machine
tools

Friday, July 19, 2002
Blab. We present here the careful musings of an unknown but large number of readers, who are themselves unknown and perhaps also large. Think of this as a ton of Pooh.
Exegesis 1.
"Bother!" said Pooh, "No amount of experience and learning will make you a non-impressionable child."
Exegesis (2).
"Bother!" said Pooh, who is impressed by the lot of sense he makes, especially when he says "Bother!" and he would rather be just funny.
Exegesis (iii).
"Bother!" said Pooh, who would rather be a happy married bear, if such a thing exists, outside the Circus spot light.
Having thus been adequately exegesized, we go on to two of a more classic form.
"Bother," said Pooh, as he realized that the giant, eight-legged object in the mirror was closer than it appeared.
"Bother," said Pooh, when in a heated moment he discovered that neither he nor Barbie had any genetalia.
Finally, this flood ends with a very funny variation on a classic pun (which took us forever to get), and another class error.
"Bother," said the blind Pooh, as he picked up his hammer and saw.
"Bother," said Pooh. "James Bother; my friends call me Pooh."

Blab. Once again, a reader insists on knowing things. This is most unwise.
Thanks for the post about dribbleglass.com I thought you in particular would like to see the results of my investigations there.
But is it true?
Is sushi still your best bet for intestinal worms? We certainly hope so!

Blab. As if trying to use our search facility (but we know better), a reader mixes two nearly identical memes. Then a reader (who might be that same reader) goes right over the line.
ian naked pitures
ian steve naked pitures
Go stand in the corner!

Blab. A reader feels great empathy for us as a result of our horrible computer problems.
CERTAINLY don't blame the user who spent an hour inputting data into a application that he knew beforehand didn't have a recovery ability.
Oh fine. It's all our fault. As usual.

Blab. Another reader goes on at some length, but says pretty much the same thing.
Steve, (umm, see the movie "The Tao of Steve", you'll LOVE it), I don't understand...You said your computer crashed, right? Well, hardware DOES fail but everybody uses ext3 so your file system journal should be ok. Besides that, emacs does automatic saves every few second or several dozen characters so you can't possibly have lost more than a few seconds work. Oh, right, I guess the hard drive failed. Silly me. And stop blaming Micro$oft. They don't make hardware and they never made an editor. They are a marketing company whose primary product appears to be soap (new and improved, natch). Of course, being a ed-u-cated consumer you DO run linux, right? Cause my uptime on my laptop is approaching 6 months this week with approx 200 open emacs buffers. I'd have used the DOC encryption format but the blab box doesn't support it.
t
Sigh. Wouldn't that be nice?

Blab. A reader's life is irrevocably changed because of Plurp.
Oooo. I like that automated flailing quote. It's decorating my door now at work. I just hope it wasn't anyone I know.
- Morton
Actually, you probably do know him. Heh.

Blab. A reader wants us to ponder ...
Vast Ageless Corporations Who Have Retained Counsel Living Where Their Glowing Eyesockets Used To Be
But is it the Corporations who are living where the Eyesockets Used To Be, or the Counsel? We're so confused!

Blab. An eagle-eyed reader writes:
The Onion seems to contain a Helenism:
"rest of creation" = "rest of eternity" + "all of creation"
Interesting. "Rest of creation" commonly refers to everything else except some class of stuff. There's you and there's the rest of creation. The Onion does seem to have misspoke here. But "all of creation" refers to things rather than a time period, so we're having trouble seeing it as meaning something similar to "rest of eternity".
What are we missing?

Blab. A Treasured Reader tells us what's wrong with us, dumps on our employer, then asks for a job.
Your first mistake was in motivating the problem, rather than motivating one of your underlings to fix (and thus eliminate) the problem.
When you motivated the problem, you caused it to get all excited and grow and bud off into additional problems. Tsk, tsk.
And Lotus, I'm afraid, was not-so-benighted when I started working for them, but became ever-more-benighted as my tenure went on. In a fit of mercy (or insanity, take your pick), I quit in order to give the company a fighting chance to avoid complete benightitude.
Perhaps I made a mistake? IBM's stock price seems to have taken a rather nasty dip since I left, I'm afraid. It's really not something I intended nor anticipated, even though I *did* manage to conveniently dump all of my company stock before it made that real big downturn-thingie.
Good thing for me that we're talking mere handfuls of shares here, and that I was but a lowly Technical Editor, not a shady CEO or CFO type with knowledge about adventurous accounting practices or something.
IBM could try to avoid the Maelstrom O Doom by hiring me back (no guarantees, mind you - I can't save a whole company! goodness gracious, me)...
Maybe I was a good luck charm though, at least for the stock price?
If not, then at least I could become a reasonably clue-enabled meat-based microprocessor team member somewhere or other.
Are you at liberty to mention a brief description of what that "new research area" you were referring to is? Some of us are quite curious :).
That autonomic computing thing sounds pretty spiffy, so I wonder what other proposals for cunning artifices y'all have got up your sleeves.
Anyway, yes, you could snatch me up for a song right now as a mostly-remotely-working employee.
Soon, however, I believe I am due to be sucked into the vortex of a book that very much wants me to write it...
- the zyx lady
If you could guarantee to double the stock price, we feel fairly certain that we could get you a job.
As to that "new research area", folks who know better than we just Poohed all over our ideas today, so maybe we shouldn't embarrass ourself further by exposing them here.

Blab. A reader enters the chamber, tosses back its cowl, and ominously intones ...
Two words: Dave. Eagles.
Yes. We fear for his liver.

Blab. A reader ...
How would one calculate the greatest good (for whatever number) using The Fortwinth System??

(You might also like another page there about A Statistical Disproof of Time Travel).
The answer to your first question is, of course, 42.
As to that disproof, we came up with that idea just today, proving conclusively that those who stole it from us and put it up on their Web page back on Nov. 22, 2001 must have had a time machine.

Plurp. Have you ever been writing something, erased a whole phrase, and felt bad about ending its existence?

Plop. Meow TV. Just shoot us now.

Plop. The Bush administration promises they won't spy on your email. Well, not promises, exactly. More like suggests. Or claims. For now, anyway. (Except for the spying they've done in the past.) Maybe not this very instant.
"There is no intention to do that," said Richard Clarke, special adviser for cyberspace security, when asked directly if such a plan was in play.
Ah. So any spying will be accidental. We're relieved.

Plop. John Cocke died earlier this week. This is a very bad thing.
John was The Guy who thought up RISC architecture (and lots of other stuff). He would walk the halls of IBM Research, day and night, tossing off brilliant sparks that would light fires in peoples' minds.
When we first came to IBM Research, in the early 1980s, there was a small band of people that always hung around the lab late into the night because they were having too much fun to fit it into just ten hours a day. We would run into each other in the halls, or in the few lit offices that were ours, and we all knew each other. John was one of those people. Many of them have become our friends and closest colleagues.
We ran into John a number of times. We never actually worked together, but it was hard to miss the breadth and depth of his genius.
Here's a nice article about John. Here's another.
In the white-shirt, blue-suit IBM of the Watson era, John Cocke was always a bit of a nonconformist. He was so absentminded that a janitor once fished $4,000 worth of stock certificates out of his wastebasket. The accountants sometimes had to remind him to deposit his paychecks. A relentless talker, he spent his days in the corridors buttonholing colleagues, his nights at his desk being brilliant, and was so tied up in his work he didn't think about getting married until he was in his 60s. "I guess I was relatively absentminded," he says. "But, you know, there are people more interested in science than in normal ways of life. And there were plenty of people around IBM who were just as bad."
He was the kind of person to whom god, if she had any sense, would have granted an exemption.

Plurp.
The blue dog
would have granted John
an exemption

Thursday, July 18, 2002
Blab. A reader provides a nice conceptual inversion on that Pooh thing.
"'Bother'," said Pooh, "and with the 'B' on a triple letter square, that makes 17 for me. Your turn, donkey."
We love it!

Blab. An alert reader contributes to our plot to corner the market on Helenisms.
Possible Helenism from a conference call today on a subject so dull I shall not bore your readers with it:
"... it's more ammunition for the fire ..."
+ "It's more fuel for the fire..."
+ (Something like) "It's more ammunition for our argument"
We quiver with joy at these ongoing contributions to world peace.

Blab. We knew it had to happen.
Frodo Baggins charged with war crimes
We warned him. We did. You've got a nice life, we said. Don't get involved. You don't want a high profile during turbulent times.
Now this.

Blab. A reader with fantastic bravery and skill takes us up on our challenge to write a limerick out of the following entry:
"Bother," said Pooh as Sesame Street introduced a puppet named Llope who is a Peruvian llama herder with llyme disease.
And here it is.
There once was a 'Wood living Pooh Bear.
New muppets he wanted to see air.
Saw llyme-diseased Llope
herd llamas all day,
and "Bother," said Pooh with great despair.
Very impressive! Clearly, we have very talented readers.

Blab. We admit to having a hard time doing the conceptual integral on this one.
About impressionable children.
The greatest prank is that most of the time the world seems (vaguely) to make sense. [That's an old one]
"Bother!" said Pooh, the world beauty depends on one's hormonal levels, random smiles, and more advanced (rarer?) forms of "kindness".
Readers are invited to interpret it.

Blab. One of those Viagra spammist writes the following in white letters at the top of its spam, so that we won't see it.
errible - horses, troops, spectators, and the King and Queen, were riddled with bullets. To complic
Isn't that awful? Curiously, it is from Jack London's tale of Emil Gluck, the "scientific wizard and arch-enemy of mankind." Quite a tale, actually.

Blab. Ian once again gets his knickers all atwist, both here and on his own blog. Sheesh.
"Bother", said Pooh as the item of Feedback that he had considered his best, when he typed it into the Big Blab Box, failed to turn up in Plurp the following day.
![inw]
We pretty much publish whatever dreck our readers spew at us, pretty much as fast as they can spew it. We're puzzled as to what Ian might mean. The possibilities are these:

Something Bad happened in the Internet, and we never received Ian's brilliant contribution. This is the most likely explanation. Computers are Evil.

Ian wrote us something that looked very much like spam, including being from a spammish address, in which case we tossed it in the drawer along with the promises of instant money and the Nigerian scam. This would be very funny, in an obscure and meta sort of way. Whatever.

Ian wrote us something that looked like a clueless reader mistaking the Blab box for a search facility. We get a lot of this. We used to publish them, but it got tiresome. This would be somewhat funny, in an obscure and meta sort of way.

Ian, like Ellen Feiss, is stoned again, and is mistaking a peanut butter sandwich for his keyboard. It's a natural mistake.

In any event, he might want to resubmit it, perhaps without the obscure meta stuff that we are too dumb too follow. Or have some more peanut butter.

Yo. Well, here's something strange. The most popular string typed into our own Massive Search Engine this past week?
ian naked pictures
This defies belief, much less explanation.

Yow. There is hope.

Yak. Another Helenism, this one from the TV news this morning.
We have to address state-sponsored governments like Iraq.
That's the way we've always thought about it.

Yak. Overheard at a meeting in D.C.
What were you in?
210. Well, 189. And 114.
Wow. You were here a long time ago. A long time ago.
Yeah. In fact, Jerry did my primary.
Jerry? No kidding. You know, he's still here.
Is he? I started out in 2300, then moved to 2100.
Those were the days.

Yak. From that same meeting in D.C.
Today, when something goes wrong with your computer, you flail around trying to figure out how to fix it. We're trying to do away with that. We're trying to automate the process of fixing it.
It's kind of like automated flailing.

Rant. We hate computers. Passionately. It's not just that they're too complicated, and flaky beyond belief. It's that they're out to get us.
We spent an hour a few evenings ago composing a proposal for a new research area, an area with some really interesting emerging problems. We outlined three major projects. We motivated the problem and the approach. We made a compelling case for starting new work to solve these problems.
Then the computer crashed. And we lost everything.
We blame, in the following order:

Microsoft, for its long siege against reliable software, and

The benighted purveyor of our email software, for being alone in the world in not doing automatic checkpointing.

Social propriety inhibits us from suggesting the actions that naturally occur to us. So, instead, we'll wind up our Karmic Retribution Device, in the poetic hope that the former company's internal systems crash irretrievably, and the latter loses all its email.

Plurp.
The blue dog
defied belief
much less expectoration

Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Blab. We begin today's panel discussion with this erudite presentation on ancient Greek political philosophy.
I'm in the process of reading a translation of Plato's "Republic", which is (as you probably well know) all about justice and the ideal society. He seems to be stating that Justice -- e.g., the good of the many -- is for the benefit of those who do not practice it. A person who acts unjustly will always be in advantage of the person who acts justly. He also states that the only person capable of ruling a political body is the person who least wants the job -- which was the idea behind nominations within a democracy (they aren't supposed to WANT to be elected).
This probably doesn't answer any questions as to what the common good *is*, but at least we know we don't know it and, judging by the latest trends in Homeland Security, aren't likely to find it.
Do we recall correctly that Republic also said that you couldn't form the ideal society with people who had already grown up with all the wrong ideas, so you had to send all the adults to the hills and start anew with impressionable children?
Coincidentally, this was prior to the adoption of the experimental paradigm in science, in which evidence was required in order to adopt a theory.

Blab. A reader visits us from the 1970s, no doubt to steal our ideas, return to the past and pretend to have invented them itself. We hate that. We turn on the Severe Bandwidth Limiter. Let's watch what happens.
Oh No! loading www.stevewhite.org at 67 B/s. What is my ISP using...... racing snails?
<approx 1 minute later>
Dear God its gone up.... to 203!!!! B/s. They've changed to Tortoises (bigger steps)
<approx 5 min later>
Sorry Mr White , I'll check on you later in the day when the homing pigeons have warmed up. (Apology contingent on it ever getting there)
That'll teach you!

Blab. A reader warns us of impending doom.
14.4 Enteric Fermentation -- Greenhouse Gases
What's that?, you ask. Well ...
Enteric fermentation is fermentation that takes place in the digestive systems of animals.
Our reading of this study indicates that water buffalo are the major contributor in this class to greenhouse gasses. Social policy here is left as an exercise to the reader.

Blab. "Bother," said Pooh, as the email just kept coming in.
Plagiarism abounds! Check out this and this.
Suprised you didn't find that second one right off....
- Felis Lynx
So this is the kind of meme-mixing we really admire.
Christopher Robin was slain on the altar,
Where shadows of Innsmouth run deep.
Pooh didn’t hesitate, Pooh didn’t falter,
His master’s in Rl’yeh asleep.
This, on the other hand, is the world's largest collection of "Bother," said Pooh phrases, some of which are even funny.
"Bother!" said Pooh, and carved Eeyore's name in the black candle.
Oh, and we didn't find it 'cause we didn't look. Sloth. You know.

Blab. An enemy combatant using the code name Sara writes:
The government knew all along about Sept 11. They even put it on their MONEY!
Okay, so I REALLY don't believe it...but it's a neat "parlor trick".
Sara
Who here remembers the similar technique used by Mad Magazine on the last page of each issue? Is this Mad money?

Blab. A reader contributes three wonderful entries, reveals itself as one of our stalkers, and makes an astonishing claim.
Other possible Pooh input:
"Bother", said Pooh, as he noticed that he had accidentally triggered the next ekpyrotic cycle of the universe.
"Bother", said Pooh, as he saw "SYSTEM ERROR, REBOOT (Y/N)?" appear in giant silver letters in the sky above him.
"Bother", said Pooh, as he realized, during his CCS commencement speech, that he was not wearing any pants.
Plurp reader #1.
Who could this be?

Blab. A reader displays the classic confusion about Foam Man.
Foam Man is NOT a song
We quote from the definitive document, Shower Songs.
It's really not a song. It's more like performance art in the shower, with a superhero theme. The performer, in the shower of course, lathers up his head with shampoo, letting it drool down his face. He then intones, as seriously as possible under the circumstances:
Foam man!
Out of the foam, into your home!
Foam man!
What does it mean? We don't know.
But what is song, qua song? What is music, really? What is art? And does he sing in the shower?

Blab. One of the members of the clandestine agency which records all the details of our life writes:
OK, so I am patient. Where are those other great photos from East Hampton????
Helen has them. Go bug her.

Blab. Speaking of our common, and no doubt rude, practice of linking to images from other peoples' sites, humblingly nice guy Scott from Dribbleglass.com and MostNeglectedSite.com writes:
Hey, thanks for the mention of Dribbleglass.com on your site! And when we asked people not to post our Monopoly cards without permission, we didn't mean YOU.
Keep up the great work.
Best,
Scott
Yep, that was a fun entry. And we are pleased when those whose images we, um, borrow benefit from the teensy amount of traffic that we lead their way.
BTW, we love the mission statement from MostNeglectedSite.com.
"Under no circumstances, nor at any time soon or in the distant future, will this site be updated. Never. It will never be purged of outdated or erroneous information, and this includes glaring misspellings or broken links. No part of our site will ever contain 'the latest news' about anything. Not even this pledge will be updated. We cross our hearts and hope to die."
Why didn't we think of that? And look, they even got a link from us. Three links! (And check out the billboards too.)

Blab. One of the things we like about our readership is its diversity. Here's a particularly diverged reader.
Not to buy a fight or to start an arguement, but could I inquire how often the reader who was suprised by seeing mammery glands on a female lizard at a recently linked to internet site, gets to see in real life, ordinary female humans lolling about naked on a bed dressed only in a hat? Even something similar to that seen on numerous internet sites would do. If he has, please, my sincere congratulations, and could he tell me where?
My guess is in real life nearly all of the porn sites, and most of the pictures of women common in our societies literature, deal in fantasy much more unreal than 'a gila monster with breasts?'
My guess is some of us are weird, and most of the rest are really weird.
We wonder if there's a metric for unreality and, if so, how high we would score. We're pretty sure we'd do well on weirdness.

Yow. Lost Monty Python Sketches to be Performed.
Their first series was so poorly received that it was replaced in the Midlands by a farming programme.

Yow. A guy's gotta have real gall to claim to elevate pranksterism to performance art. This guy has buckets of it.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was heavily involved with
ekpyrotic fermentation

Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Blab. We try hard to pique our readers' interest in the various Great Thoughts of Our Age, the concepts that create the future of the world, the ideas that change the course of society. Every once in a while, we suggest an amusing little diversion. Whereupon our Treasured Readers abandon any Great Thoughts they may have been entertaining, and instead dissipate their massive intellects on our little diversions. It always turns out this way.
In this case, we asked you to complete the sentence, "Bother," said Pooh ...
"Bother," said Pooh, as he was declared an 'enemy combatant'.
Gosh! We hope Pooh doesn't end up Questioned or, god save us, Tribuned.

Blab. Jumping right off of that distasteful Current Events theme, another reader enters the fray.
"Bother," said Pooh, "Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock phasers on the Heffalump. Piglet, meet me in transporter room three. Christopher Robin, you have the bridge."
Pooh with a William Shatner accent. Our head spins.

Blab. This reader seems to have found Google.
"Bother," said Pooh as he realized they'd find out he stole his .sig file from the Usenet.
Curiously, this reader did not.

Blab. A reader mixes dangerous memes right before our very eyes.
"Bother" said Pooh as the elephant shat on the cat on the mat.
"Bother" said Pooh as a genetically altered form of Sponge Bob reverted to a sea creature with Dorsal Fins and began to slash about among the bathers on Beach Day.
That part about SpongeBob frightens us. Stop that.

Blab. Another literary meme mixing occurs.
"Bother" said Pooh as the ticking of the enormous crocodile came close and closer.
We can just imagine Pooh in a large hat with a flowing feather. And the hook, of course.

Blab. A Treasured Reader mixes memes with aplomb.
"Bother," said Pooh as Sesame Street introduced a puppet named Llope who is a Peruvian llama herder with llyme disease.
Nice! Now, can you make a limerick out of it?

Blab. A reader enters two contests at once!

Name Occupation Disease Country

Atuk Terrorist Scabies USA

Wanda Sex Therapist Bunions Jamaica

Oh, and "Bother," said Pooh as it rained on St Swithin's day.
-AJL
Sorry about that lousy weather. Must have been the bunions.

Blab. A reader fires the gatling gun of Poohlitics.
"Bother" said Pooh as the market failed to respond to his speach.
"Bother" said Pooh as the 100th nuclear weapon was used against a Palestinian City
"Bother" said Pooh as the Dept. of Homeland Security took him away as an enemy alien.
"Bother" said Pooh as New Delhi fried behind him at the start of the first India Pakistan Nuclear War
Those would be bothersome indeed.

Blab. A reader right in line with our own sensibilities writes:
"Bother!" said Pooh as he took the first yummy bite of bacon that had, until recently, been Piglet.
"Bother!" said Pooh as he suddenly realized with awful clarity what was meant by Hundred-Acre Wood.
"Bother!" said Pooh as he backed away from the prone form of Christopher Robin, watching the arc of red jet from his neck. Pooh dropped the razor and ran.
We especially love that last one.

Blab. An avid bunkologist writes:
I don't think it's bunk at all! If you take all the universes, arbitrarily label one "reality", and then check to see which one you're in, the odds of it being "reality" are zero.
More narrowly, if you label "a simulation" every universe U such that there exists a universe U' such that U' contains a subuniverse exactly isomorphic to U, then (since essentially all universes will be labelled "a simulation"), the odds are still very high that "we are living in a simulation".
Which isn't quite the argument that you described as "bunk", but is something like a rational reconstruction of it.
So there!
As an exercise, try calculating the actual probability.

Blab. Readers search for the darndest things on our blog.
lesbian sex vampires
We have no comment.

Blab. Justice Scalia writes:
Failure is not an option, it's standard equipment. Joy and rear wheels extra. Long fingernails, no additional charge, this week only. All new. Great new taste. Stays fresh longer!
But I digress. J. Fred Shirley-Harold sends regards. What about "Prince Albert on a Raft"?
That latter might be a reference to something here. But we would have to ask J. Fred about that.

Blab. J. Fred Shirley-Harold speaks for himself.
Dear Plurp Central,
You must check your server log and see why so many people are reading your page called "/log/archive/20020324.htm". I am getting many hits from that page, which means that many many people must be reading that page, and inquiring minds want to know why.
Yours,
J. F. S-H., esq.
Curious! Plurp's entries for the week of March 24, 2002 have been the most popular page in our archives ever since May, getting a couple hundred visitors each month.
Spelunking the server logs, it turns out, not surprisingly, that people get to that page in lots of ways. Someone was looking for patent neuticles, for instance. But the big hitters are from a Google image search, in approximately this order, for:

Loch Ness monster

Giant squid

Dale Earnhardt

These all appear to refer to the following picture, which we featured back in March.

(We particularly love the Borneo reference.)
We'll bet this page starts getting all the hits now. Isn't Google fun?
BTW, if we're annoying our Treasured Reader by rudely linking to images from its site, let us know and we'll be happy to delink, provide a glowing pointer to your main page, or whatever.

Blab. A reader wants us to search for ...
a gila monster with breasts?
Yeah, well. There are some pretty odd folks out there. But we've discussed furries before, haven't we?

Blab. Finally, a reader asks us a question to which we actually know the answer.
You can tell me the song most sang in the shower; Most popular song of all time to sing in the shower. Thanks!
That would be sung, we believe, and that would be Foam Man. It's short, and memorable both as a libretto and as a piece of theater. Plus, it doesn't require a singing voice. That probably explains its wild popularity.

Blab. A reader decodes the secrets of utilitarianism.
To answer one of your questions (about John Stuart Mill) I seem to remember that he expected or hoped the answer to be approached numerically as in:-
100,000 people getting 0.1 of a good each is equal to 10,000 people getting 1.0 good each. They are of equal value. Ignoring the simplicity this is the sort of approach that never seems to have been tried. Everyone seems to know about the idea "Greatest good...." no one seems to have tried to develop such an idea as Mill hoped.
Ah. Let's try it!
We have a nice little blue Miata here. We only have the one. We cannot divide it into six billion parts and still have a Miata, so what to do?
Too hard, maybe! Let's try a simpler one. We have six billion cups of cement here. If we give one cup to each person, everyone has a cup of cement. If we give a lot of them to one person (or group of people) they can build homes and businesses. Are these distributions equally valuable? To whom?
Or how about this? We have this nice little blue Miata here. We like it very much, and it has a certain positive value to us. J. Fred Shirley-Harold cannot drive a manual transmission automobile, and prefers to take the bus anyway. To him, the Miata is pretty much worthless. If he has to pay the insurance, it might even be of negative value.
It would be nice if everyone had exactly the same economic preferences, and it would be nice if they were linear. That would make utilitarianism work. But they're not, so utilitarianism doesn't. As an exercise, try your simple arithmetic utilitarianism in your own family. The results are sure to be educational.

Blab. A reader sends us into existential apoplexy by announcing the winners in the ...
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2002
And the winner is . . .
On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
Rephah Berg
L.
It must have been a dark and stormy night.

Yak.
We're up to our ears in low-hanging fruit.

Plop. We saw Reign of Fire last night, the trailer for which looked so promising.
Think Mad Max meets Dragonslayer, which is to say, low budget + CGI. It does have the distinguishing characteristic, however, of being the only movie we've seen where London enters from the left and, rather than exiting to the right, explodes.
Oh, and there's a helicopter. We have no idea where it gets fuel, or how it maintains its glossy newness some twenty years after the apocalypse has already been posted, but it is a helicopter. And that counts.
Of course, the computer game possibilities are rife.

Plop. Stratfor reported something interesting on July 15. (Sorry, but the link is temporary. It may not say this when you get there.)
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said during a four-day visit to Afghanistan July 15 that the Afghan military campaign could last indefinitely, possibly approaching 40 years, Bloomberg reported, citing information from AP and AFP.
We were unable to find any (other) authoritative source for this on the Web. Readers are encouraged to tell us what we missed.
But ... indefinitely? We seem to remember reading this book when we were much younger. Is it really Oceania vs. Eurasia vs. Eastasia, and only 18 years late?

Plurp.
It is well that war is so terrible:
we would grow too fond of it!
- Robert E. Lee
Contrast this, interestingly, with the common misquote:
It is well that war is so terrible,
lest we grow too fond of it.

Plurp. Now that's really very odd. (/usr/bin/girl)

Plurp.
"Bother," said
the
blue dog

Monday, July 15, 2002
Blab. No doubt reading certain parts of our Web site in detail, a reader with an msn.com email address writes:
Is this a joke? I don't believe in alien symbols on food. Some of the things in your website are convincing but most of the things in your website is down right fake.
You people worry us. You really do. It doesn't matter if you believe in alien food symbols. In fact, the various alien species that depend upon them would prefer that you did not, that you slumber in your ignorance of their comings and goings, of their secret plans to dominate the packaged food industry.
So go ahead, keep on thinking that most of the things in our website is down right fake. But when they put their label on you, stick you in a shrink-wrap bag and suck the life out of you, don't say we didn't warn you.
(And, while we're at it, just which things on our Web site did you find convincing? We like to keep track.)

Blab. Something we said on July 12 prompted this.
oh hell, OK just because you said that I'll come back today
We suspect the lettuce differentiator.

Blab. A reader informs us.
These:
"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product."
Ferenc Mantfeld
"Move along, move along, nothing to see here, definitely no evil mind control software here, move along, move along..."
Thorf
are from Here.
The former knee-slapper can be found on 945 Web sites. The latter rib-tickler is on 5.
(BTW, our reader's link (above) is broken. It was probably intended to point to Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery. With a name like that, how could they fail to be memorable, hmm?)

Blab. A reader, mistaking us for Ask Jeeves, writes:
I've been looking for a good definition for "common good." You would think that this many centuries after they great thinkers first started to spew out ideas about the common good there would be a nice, cohesive definition. Can you find one? Does one exist?
Mini MW Correspondent
We're not very good at doing other peoples' homework. We're not even very good at doing our own! So instead, we answer your question with several other questions.

In Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill coined the phrase the greatest good for the greatest number. How can we do the trade-off between greater good for fewer people and lesser good for more people?

Entire schools of social thought (e.g. Marxism) are based on such ideas. How have these worked out in practice?

Suppose we assert that your work should be in the public interest. Who determines this, and on what basis? What does this assertion assume about the rights of the various people involved?

Social policy attempts to enforce governmental policies on everyone within a nation, seeking to benefit some people while disadvantaging others. How can we determine who should benefit, and who should be disadvantaged? What are we assuming about the rights of these people?

What is the national interest? How do you know?

Do let us know.

Blab. A reader celebrates what somehow seems to have become the Official Holiday of Plurp.
Happy St Swithin's Day. -AJL
Yep! As Dave just said, St. Swithin's Day already? Tsk. Where does the time go?
Good thing we wound our calendar. Now it's off to the fife serenades.

Blab. Too late, a reader notices the frightening truth.
On Sunday while pondering the very strange effect this character Sponge Bob square pants (Whom I had never heard of before) has on Steve, I visited the bathroom and discovered that all there was to read was a comic about Sponge Bob.
Upon inquiring about this to my loved ones, She who names the goats "Wuggles" and "Flopsy," making it difficult for us to eat them and thereby ruining a perfectly good goat-sucking and making things awkward for everyone. (Reference Here) remarked "Sponge Bob is very strange, but not as strange as Steve White" while my 11 year old claimed "Sponge Bob Is strange but Gary the Snail (another character in Sponge Bob)is Cool." Now if 'here' were USA this might not be strange, but as 'here' is a reasonable attempt to get as far as you can from the USA and still remain on the planet, it was mildly to very alarming. Perhaps its a side effect of the mind control lasers OR PERHAPS its further proof that we really are living in some higher level simulation where because of the lack of computing power (Simulation of a simulation of a simulation.....) there is a need to recycle material to save storage space. Would anyone wish to comment or to offer a suggestion that does not involve either explanation?
Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna
hide; nowhere, cause there's no one like you left.

Yo. We stayed with friends over the weekend. In their back yard they had suspended - on long cords from the high limbs of trees - a number of birdhouses in the form of various buildings: a church, a cottage, a lighthouse. In the dark, they became a surrealist village, strangely misshapen architecture floating in the summer air.

Plurp. Now that a new Sesame Street character has been announced, with the distinguishing characteristics of being South African and being HIV positive, we wondered what other horrifying maladies should be represented by cuddly children's characters. Always eager to contribute to the intellectual and emotional development of our youth, we suggest the following.

Character
Name Occupation Disease Country

Harriet Seamstress Hepatitis C France

Dr. Reginald Doctor Smallpox U.K.

Ansar Farmer Arsenic poisoning Bangladesh

Tom Emergency services Unknown U.S.

Readers are, of course, encouraged to suggest their own additions.

Plurp.

Plurp. Following up on our Most Excellent Reader's tag line:
"Bother," said Pooh as he stared into the unspeakable visage of Cthulhu.
... we proudly announce the Mid-July Silly Plurp Contest In Two Steps:

Come up with an astonishingly clever phrase of the form:

"Bother," said Pooh ...
Send it to us!

(Yeah, we like to keep these contests simple.)
To get your juices flowing:
"Bother," said Pooh as the door clanged shut on his Guantanamo cage.
"Bother," said Pooh as he noticed the first smallpox pustule in the mirror.
"Bother," said Pooh as Justice Scalia's majority opinion was read.
"Bother," said Pooh as John Ashcroft accidentally classified honeybees as Enemy Combatants.
You get the idea.

Plurp.
"Bother," said Pooh
as the blue dog
once again got away
with no creative contribution

Sunday, July 14, 2002
Plurp.
The blue dog
finally wound the
calendar

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