Plurp: Bother, said Pooh, as he realized he was only a blog

Bigger!

2002.07.21 : 2002.07.27

Saturday, July 27, 2002
Blab. Perhaps related to something else, a reader writes:
Central limit theorem "broken"
09:21 19 July 02
NewScientist.com news service
One of the most fundamental rules of statistics, the central limit theorem, has for the first time been shown not to hold for very small datasets.
The demonstration, by gym teachers in Moldova, involved using a six-sided "die" to pick some random numbers. They found that once in awhile the die came up the same way three, or even four, times in a row, revealing nature running "all funny-like".
We cannot comment on this because (a) it would be rude, and (b) we're laughing too hard.

Blab. Indulging in the now forbidden activity, one of the noiseless myriads writes:
Densities, growth, facades,
Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,
Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,
Plurps everlasting.
And thee my soul.

Blab. Taking this form to its psychotic limit, a reader writes:
Once upon a weblog Plurpy,
While I pondered, bored and blurry
Over many a quaint and curious
Rant about forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly dozing,
Suddenly someone came nosing
Over my shoulder and posing
Posing like some ancient bore.
'Tis some manager, I muttered,
Posing like that guy Al Gore.
Blabbed the blab pox, "Never more."
We've already signed the commitment papers.

Blab. Solving our most recent mystery, a reader writes:
Subj: Re: Answering machines, et alia
Hi Steve,
Thanks! Reading your pages made my day. (I followed Bruce Sterling's link, if you're interested.)
And I thought my "World's Most Powerful Metadisclaimer" was funny... serves me well.
Anyway, please keep on doing whatever makes you write that sort of thing.
And, here's one answering machine message you haven't used yet: "Hi. I'm an answering machine. Who are you? <beep>"
--
Rainer Brockerhoff
Ah. It becomes clear why our foolish little blog has had a few more cyberfeet tramping mud through lately. Bruce Sterling went and linked to us (you'll have to scroll down a bit) amidst links to other people who were at our Grand Challenges conference a few weeks ago.
A big howdy to both readers who got here from Bruce's page. And we do like that disclaimer.

Blab. To keep us whole, a reader provides us with another mystery.
At the bottom, it's all utils.
This seems like it should be an inverse link, doesn't it? But it's not. Or Helenism, but it doesn't seem to be that either. What could it mean?
Readers?

Blab. Noting the recent breakup of Ms. Jolie with her overbitten husband, a reader writes (or tries to search for):
jolie tattoo
We can't imagine why.
Blab. A reader who has seen things donates this.
We know of several things like this. Leprechauns. Giant squid. Dubya's intelligence.
And from that same site ...

Plurp. Brazil, with help from the U.S. of course, has finished construction of the $1.4 billion system of radars and sensors called the Amazon Surveillance System.
The system is so sophisticated and comprehensive that Brazilian officials now boast they can hear a twig snap anywhere in the Amazon. [...]
The system includes 900 listening posts scattered on the ground all over the Amazon. But its backbone consists of 19 radar stations, 5 airborne early-warning jets and 3 remote-sensing aircraft, all of which will feed information via satellite to command centers in this Amazon capital and two others, Belém and Pôrto Velho.
[...] From a height of 33,000 feet and a distance of up to 125 miles, he said, the system can track an image of something as small as a human being.
This is, you understand, to ...
[...] protect our land borders, preserve our natural riches and make the state a presence in our most remote areas.
That latter seems the phrase that pays here.
Is this a good idea? And, if they can do it in a place as remote and forbidding as the Amazon rain forest, will we see other ambitious states instrumenting their countrysides in the near future, for their own purposes?

Plurp.
The blue dog
had to be believed
before being heard

Friday, July 26, 2002
Blab. Proving that some readers really do click on our most obscure links, this reader writes:
why, pray tell, do the blue dog's links not work this week? And what is their systemic justification, anyhoo (for I know, just know, that there must be one)?
Our Treasured Reader refers to what happens when you click on the blue dog. In saner times, doing so took you back to the first entry that featured the blue dog. This week, it took you to 404 land.
Why? As usual, it's all our fault, but this time we'll blame it on our stupid WYSI(a)WYG HTML editor. (Heh. Pronounce that!) You see, our Sunday entry had no blue dog. We don't know why. For the Monday entry, we had to go scrape up a copy of the blue dog from the archives. Somehow, in that process, the link to the origin of the blue dog (and should that be All In Caps?) decided to be a local reference (within the archive: 20001001.htm#20001002) rather than a relative reference (from the current log directory: ../archive/20001001.htm#20001002).
So for you, our Treasured Reader, it 404ed. Sorry about that. But it did allow us to tell you this tedious and incredibly boring story. And for that, we thank you.
It also allowed us to discover a broken link to the progenitor of the blue dog, and to create a more specific link to the original blue dog entries. History will thank you.

Blab. A reader finds a shouty, agrammatical Web site that has a ...
REAL VIDEO OF UFO AT WTC PRE 911! AMAZING VIDEO SHOT OF UFO AT WORLD TRADE CENTER PRE 911!
We feel certain that the key word in this breathless announcement is AMAZING. A better characterization might be INCREDIBLE, but we do like the zoomy thing.

Blab. On our observation that you can miss rush hour by working eleven hour days, a reader suggests a generalization.
You can also miss rush hour both ways by working 8-hour days, but starting and ending them about 1.5 hours later than most people's 8-hour days. This is what I do.
True. One can also miss rush hour by not working. Or so we are told.

Blab. Continuing what appears to be the as yet unannounced contest in which you are to trivially substitute the word Plurp in a famous poem, a Mr. Coleridge writes:
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any plurp to drink.
We encourage our Treasured Readers to invest their few remaining mental abilities elsewhere.

Plurp. Welcome, Herbert Smith.

Rant. Ya know, when it comes to evolution, ya gotta bet on the winners.
Take this recent snakehead fish flap. Some chucklehead who intended to make soup out of them instead dumped a couple of oppositely-gendered snakehead fish in a lake. Predictably, some months later, there are lots of snakehead fish.
There is a group of humans that thinks this is a terrible idea. After all, they say, the snakehead fish is "non-native". It was introduced into this environment by humans, and we all know that humans are Evil, and that anything they do is Evil. If a raccoon had brought them here, that would have been OK. More natural, you see? Sheesh. Where do they think all these "local" fauna came from?
These are the same folks, we suspect, who wish to ban other folks from immigrating to "their" country, or "their" neighborhood. These xenophobes think that Nature has nicely divided the world into "us" and "them".
So here's a clue for the clueless: Nature hasn't. Species move around. There are species that are well adapted to their environment and species that are not. The former do better than the latter. Exponentially. That's the way it works.
And here's the important clue: You can't do anything about it. There are bozos who propose poisoning this creatures' ("local") environment. That will decrease the current population of this fish. It won't kill it off. It's here to stay. Get used to it.
Better yet, rejoice. What a lovely little fish, we should say. What a clever and well-adapted little vertebrate you are. You are a winner, and we love you.
If we must do something other than leave them alone, let's figure out how to farm them, how to produce fertilizer from them, how to make them into building material.
Or sushi. Sushi would be good.

Plop. Speaking of which, world leader Fidel Castro wonders out loud if capitalism is sustainable. Why does the term dodo occur to us?

Plurp.
The blue dog
was just glad to again be
linkful

Thursday, July 25, 2002
Blab. A reader has a close encounter of the third kind with the traditional media.
Seriously I would have expected news that the sun was going Nova way before I heard this. This is the weirdist piece of scientific news of the last two centuries I reckon!
Opens the gateway for.. for... all those things that many people believe exist but which science seems to have no room for I would guess. Who built this place? And if it isn't built how it the seven hells could it have come about by chance? Or by any mechanism we know anything about at the moment?
OK. Everybody calm down. Some experiments demonstrate a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics ("entropy never decreases") over the scale of a few microns and a few seconds.
Fine. Thermodynamics (and the Second Law in particular) are macroscopic laws that deal only with average behavior. There are always fluctuations, and they can certainly occur on scales larger than we usually see them.
As to the questions in our reader's second paragraph, well, we built this place. Do you like it?

Blab. Regarding dead babies being the cost of war, a reader muses:
It's a curious thing that our language only seems to be able to express concepts of value (another example) in terms of economic metaphor. We don't seem to have many good, concise ways of expressing that something is important to us, or that something hurts us or horrifies us, without reducing everything to goods and services.
Does that say something about us? I'm curious how other languages and cultures deal with this sort of thing, whether it's universal or uniquely Western European.
L.
Good question! Readers?

Blab. Walt Whitman writes:
I sound my barbaric PLURP over the roofs of the world.
Ah. We wondered what that was.

Plurp.
blether (ble'-thir) Dialect, chiefly Scot. ~n 1. person who chatters incessantly; one who babbles on and on ("That wee yin o' yours is an awfy blether gittin'"). ~v 2. to engage in conversation, long-winded or idle talk (as in "Ah met yer granny doon the toun, we hud a richt guid blether the gither") [See also sweetie-wife]

Yo. Well, it finally happened. We just now passed through a singularity in the evolution of the cosmos. As we were transcribing that blether thing from a physical artifact on the table here, we went to find a link to sweetie-wife on Google only to realize - and it took us several seconds to solve this puzzle - that we were not online.

Plop. You may have wondered about that screen image yesterday. We did too. It turns out to be a tribute to our own stupidity that we only just figured out the reason it was unreadable. We had told your browser (and ours) to display it at an unrecognizable resolution.
Sorry about that. Fixed now. Go look.

Plurp. This is rumor control. Here are the facts.

If you work 11 hour days, you can pretty much miss rush hour both ways.

The traders on the American Stock Exchange have pictures of their kids at their trading stations.

Mold on the inside of a peanut shell is not a good sign. Noticing it only after you have swallowed the peanut is particularly contraindicated.

At night, insects are uncontrollably attracted to laptop screens.

Plop. Did you know that glow sticks and bottled water are drug paraphernalia? Hey - that's what the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency say. And who would know better?

Yo. Here's what seems to be a set of (moderated and unmoderated) discussion lists on the general topic of the ongoing terrorism conflicts. Allegedly, al-Qaeda folks post there.

Yow. Sony's planned PlayStation 3 is going to be a BFM!

Plurp. Looks like he's going to be a Tedsicle after all.

Yak. A lovely term, which we had not heard until today.
Boxology

Yow. We went out tonight to see K19, the Harrison Ford movie, but, enigmatically, it turned out to be Road To Perdition, the Tom Hanks movie. And, despite the utter lack of submarines, the absence of explosions and there not being very much threat at all of nuclear annihilation, it was pretty good.
So you should go see it, and stuff.

Yo. Princeton hacks Yale. Don't you kids have homework to do? No? Well, then at least restrict yourselves to breaking into P2P networks; that'll at least be legal soon.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was once detained for
violating the Second Law

Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Blab. It's going to be a day of grisly torture and death here in Plurp. Those of you who do not delight in such musings should pretty much skip the whole thing.
For the rest of our treasured readership, we begin with a reader who sends us a sightless ...
[link]
Right. Is everyone ready? Based on a experiment that showed that women are a bit better than men at recalling highly evocative photographs that they've seen previously, and some MRI scans showing different brain activity between men and women during this task, a "team of psychologists" concludes that ...
The wiring of emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women than in men.
Or, as it is breathlessly soundbitten by the media:
Female Brain Wired for Emotion
Which all seems like a fantastic hypothetical leap to us. We suppose this means that we never had what it takes to be a "team of psychologists".

Blab. A reader suggests an interesting method for the preparation of giant squid, then admits to a fetish for mutants.
I know a few cajuns who happen to have a recipe for giant squid; at least one of whom, depending on your preferences, would look quite fetching sans apron. Actually, it's been rumored that it isn't really a squid but the head of Cthulhu.
>re: six siamese kittens
dude, they're commingling their code. tight integration is all the rage. that's what happens when software slaves do genetics research. Redundant hardware. If one of the cpus goes down there are backups. Pro'zly even self-healing. Top o' the line kittens. Where do I get one? Do they come in ones?
Dorian
We asked about that, and it turns out that it's half of one, six dozen of the other.

Blab. A reader absolutely insists that we adopt a penguin.
Just as an aside, Slowtus Notes actually runs pretty well inside WINE on Linux, (or as well as Notes can ever be expected to run anyway), as do many games. In point of fact many games run natively on linux also. We suggest that with all the power of IBM at your disposal, you could get Freelance ported. You'd have to forgoe the MS patented Virus Spreading Kit though. (Oh, and OpenOffice is very good at creating MS Office compatible documents / spreadsheets / ppts etc). You see, I was once like you (well, not quite as clever maybe) but I now do everything that I needed to do from the crash free haven of my Linux machines. Including administration of a large MS based network for my employers.
-AJL
If only we had all the power of IBM at our disposal, our devious plot to take over the world would be much further along! (Or maybe not.)

Blab. Three readers give us improbable answers to our question about what those little HTML pop-up text goodies are called.
ToolTips (or if you are no fan of InTerCaps, tool tips). They come in standard and Emo Phillips.
We used to be a fan of Emo Phillips. We wonder if we still are. Nonetheless ...
Quoth Plurp: "Plop. Yeah, we know the little HTML pop-up text goodies aren't called hover help. But what are they called?"
Answer: Tool tips. Or, alternatively, tooltips.
Oh please! There's nothing tooly about them, and they seldom have information than any sane person would regard as a tip. That just makes no sense.
<IMG SRC="blab.gif" ALT="This is the popup text">
All syntax, no semantics, eh?

Blab. A reader laments at ...
The cost of war
It's odd, maybe even macabre, to think of the death of babies as a cost, isn't it?

Plurp. Whoever decided that hell is below ground and painfully hot must have been riding a New York subway at the time. As were we, last night, strangled in a dress shirt and tie (though carrying the required sports jacket) on the way to the American Stock Exchange.
We lost an extremely large amount of money in the past year or so, as the stock market collapsed into a smoldering crater. Stay with it, our broker said, the market always goes down and up.
So our broker, trying to make amends, arranged for us (and a hundred others) to visit the American Stock Exchange last night and pretend we were traders. To see how it all worked, we suppose.
The American Stock Exchange started its life in a glorious building, a tribute to burgeoning capitalism, in which the outcasts from the NYSE came to trade. Today, its magnificent atrium is divided horizontally into two floors, those floors being littered with the most disreputable array of technological junk imaginable. Seven generations of computers and displays and servers and keyboards, their cables strewn across the floors and narrow aisles to form the visual chaos of a druggy ub3rh4ck3r's basement, all surmounted by a ring of booths, spectators in the Coliseum, at which unknown futures traders call their speculations to the floor, much as their high-collared progenitors shouted their desires to the street traders a dozen floors below. It is a scene out of Brazil, surprisingly random and low tech. Screens everywhere - CRTs, LCDs, touch screens, reader boards - all cryptic, incredibly obscure, comprehensible only to the priesthood.
We engaged in a mock trading session in which the market maker, James, bellowed at us like a drill sergeant. Will the price go up or down?, he demanded of a portly woman named Dorothy. Dorothy, wide-eyed, her lips taut across her teeth, didn't know. Up!, he shouted. Up! Are you buying or selling? Cowed, we bought. Or sold. We're not sure. But it was loud. And frenetic. We think we lost a lot. We don't really know.
Afterwards, we walked back to the subway past the site of the former WTC for the first time, not having wanted, really, to expose ourselves to it since 9-11. We shunned the site itself, not quite crossing the street to see it, though we could inevitably see the surrounding buildings, wrapped in netting, or scaffolding, or with their windows still taped in, their entrances still dug up, collateral damage of that awful day.
And in the sweltering subway on the way back, we dreamed only of going home, of crawling into the shower, of washing off the taint of that hell, the dust from that smoldering crater.

Plop. Are you keeping up with current linguistic trends? You are? Then you already know that the latest term for state-sponsored genocide is thinning out. Please use it in conversation today.

Yak. Out of our own mouth, just yesterday.
Behind the covers

Behind the scenes

Under the covers

Plurp. As an adolescent, we loved building models. We built incredibly intricate models of airplanes, submarines, space ships (remember when they were called space ships?), and so on. But our pride and joy were models of The Mummy (the original Boris Karloff version) and The Wolfman (not the DJ), over which we obsessed for hours, mixing paints, using sand and other goodies to add texture to the surfaces.
We liked monsters. Monsters played a big role in our childhood. For some reason, this deeply worried our parental units. The monster models, or perhaps our fascination with them, was particularly worrisome. At length, they forbade us from acquiring any more monster models, hoping to stave off any incipient psychotic effect they might induce.
Obviously, that didn't work.
Now imagine what the parental units would have said if Clive Barker's Tortured Souls Action Figures had been around when we were ten years old. (Kafkaesque)

Oh, and if that grossed you out, you should definitely not look at the next series in production. Really.
The Gigers, though, are pretty cool.

Plurp. The hunt for Osama bin Laden has gone into cyberspace, according to the Old Media.
Counterterrorism experts are monitoring a number of Web sites and computer servers they believe might contain recent messages from bin Laden.
Al Qaeda is said to be computer savvy, and some investigators believe they have found markers or code words that indicate bin Laden is trying to signal supporters that he is alive.
Just to make sure, to make sure that we are not suspected of involvement in terrorism, or associated with someone whose name has letters in common with someone who might be associated with terrorism, we want to make perfectly clear that we have no recent messages from bin Laden. Well, depending on what you mean by recent, or messages, or course. We might be typing words that bin Laden might type, or words that someone associated with bin Laden might type.
But we are not computer savvy. Oh, no. Don't even think it. We hardly know what these computer thingies are. We think there are tiny men and women (and maybe oxen and ocelots) inside whose sole aim is to infuriate us. That's true, isn't it?
And as to those markers, those code words ... uh ... we didn't put them here. We don't know who did. Um, we don't think there are any here. None at all. Are there?

Plurp. Have you played Operation Dark Screen? Oh, it's not a game? Then maybe you'd be interested in Millennium Challenge 2002.
The Army will use this experiment to test the following hypothesis: IF Ground Component and Joint Force Commanders are provided an Interim ARFOR that employs advanced enablers across the DTLOMS, THEN they will realize significant advances in their ability to seize the initiative, maintain momentum, and exploit success.
Sounds swell, doesn't it?

Yo. And while we're having fun, let's look at how the U.S. Army plans to change over the next few years. It's actually an interesting read, both in terms of the threats they see the future presenting to us, and the increasingly horrifying and deadly capabilities that they have.

Yow. Now this is funny.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was disturbed by all this talk
about grisly forms of death

Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Blab. A reader is very disturbed. (This should come as no surprise.)
Dear God No
'Another tarn was lame'
Do you have ANY idea how BIG a tarn is?
And how many feet it has? And how many would have to have something wrong for it to 'go lame'.
Oh ...wait a minute... tarm? Well maybe..
And if you've never seen a garway when it's ritig ... well it's quite a sight, of that you can be sure. Best to keep your umbrella handy.

Blab. A reader shares one of the simple pleasures of life.
Thanks Captain Plurp for the connection to the Monty Python site. What a delicious luxury to have whole scripts of some of the best scenes ever: "Bring me a shrubbery!"; "He's not dead, he's, he's restin'!"; and "What also floats in water?" ... "Very small rocks!" The best!
Your Midwest Correspondent
Who lives where some people really are Lumberjacks
And they're OK.

Blab. A reader attempts to insult us. Let's see if it works.
>We laid awake for hours...
>Now, this morning, we can't remember
In case you haven't noticed the pattern there is a failure mode common to all who enter the later stages of their dorian greyness...
if you think of something to do and do not do it immediately you will set the "done" bit (without actually doing it) and purge it from memory forever. Don't dream about work. Live in the moment. Urinate when the urge strikes else you'll end up wearing diapers.
there is no door...
the laughing monk
We forever urinate on the memory of our failing reader, then set the "forget" bit, and laugh.

Blab. A Treasured Reader brings us good ideas, which are usually in quite scarce supply around these parts.
Presuming that you are one of the enlightened and therefore use an IBM ThinkPad of some description, we suggest that you install some flavour of GNU/Linux on it. Then if the code is buggy, at least you can fix it. I'm the proud owner of a TP600e (yes - I know it's old - but it works) and it runs Mandrake Linux version 8.2, and very nice it is too. Never had it crash on me yet. -AJL
It is a glorious suggestion, and we would love to take you up on it. We fear, however, that we are victim of the Insidious Plot of the Evil Empire. Which is to say, we actually need to run stuff that runs on Windows. Lotus Notes (Cthulhu save us), Freelance (you've never heard of it), Microsoft Office (sorry).
We would mention games, but most games don't seem to work on (our demonically possessed version of) Windows 2000 anyway, so it probably wouldn't be a big change.
We do miss the Good Old Days, though, when operating systems actually, you know, stayed up.

Blab. Thinking about the hover help on yesterday's photo of the giant squid, a reader is ...
Picturing a giant squid wearing a "Kiss the Cook" apron while barbequeing the psyches of poor humans....
- Felis Lynx
Two things may frighten you here. (1) The caption, The squid would make a great barbeque, is the caption that CNN put on the picture. We don't make this stuff up; it turns out we don't have to. (2) We had exactly that mental image (well, we might have missed the apron), which is why we put that caption as the hover help.

Plop. Yeah, we know the little HTML pop-up text goodies aren't called hover help. But what are they called?

Plurp. What could be more viscerally horrifying, more mentally corrosive, more existentially twisted than six Siamese kittens, all joined together in a most unholy and aberrant manner, mewling and writhing, eyes shut tight, unable to understand which misshapen paw is moved and by whom?
Ox tongue ice cream, that's what. (Megnut, /usr/bin/girl)

Yow.
Australian producer Helen Bowden has just returned from the Sundance Festival, where the provocative and stylish short film Shooting The Breeze, directed by Christina Andreef, was screened to a very positive response.
Congrats all around!

Yo. Now we know where little Tommy Ridge gets the text of his terror warnings. (Bifurcated Rivets)

Yo. How to make a thought screen helmet. Useful for reducing those alien thought control beams. (Bifurcated Rivets)

Plop. Is there something about being in a religious hierarchy that rots the brain? Some secret mind-liquifying technology to which the religious must subject themselves in order to be elevated to leadership positions?
First, the Catholic church attempts to distract attention from its institutional pedophilia. Now, their splinter brethren at the Church of England jump in it with both feet.
Dr Williams, who is now Archbishop of Wales, [...] launches a blistering attack in The Times on the corruption and premature sexualisation of children by a consumer society, singling out the Disney Corporation, talent shows and computer games for particular criticism.
While we are not at all sure that infant beauty contests deserve this kind of rabid excoriation, we are at least pleased to see religious leaders paying attention to the two most pressing moral problems of our age: the Disney Corporation and computer games.

Plurp.
The blue dog
accidentally ran through that religious
mind-liquifying technology

Monday, July 22, 2002
Blab. A reader interprets our silliness as criticism.
Sorry if I came across as rude.
Anyway, I've decided to be self-employed and work on my world domination plans. (Solo, for now, until I can afford to hire other people. This could be quite some time.)
The book I spoke of has decided that it _demands_ to be written, so I shall be busy with that until Christmas or so, I imagine.
I'll probably foist a copy on your colleague, Mr. Chess, and maybe he'll let you look at it. And maybe, just maybe, you might find it interesting or worth your time.
- the zyx lady
Not at all! We look forward to the results of your literary efforts, and to playing the role of foolish blog owner in your global empire.
More generally, we encourage our readers not to take us seriously. Criminey. It's just a blog.

Blab. On our curious break from form yesterday, a reader asks:
Why?
What sort of answer would satisfy you? Would it make you happy if we told you about a cerebral hemorrhage? A weekend of clandestine interrogation, tied to a splintery chair in a stereotypically abandoned warehouse, hallucinogenic drugs forced into our veins? A mysterious woman in a burgundy suit who offered us several million dollars to perform acts that we dare not confess here?
Or is it possible, just barely possible, that your universe, as well as ours, is capable of random and inexplicable events, not just yesterday, and not just by us, but all the time, and by everyone and everything you think you have ever known?
Mmm?

Blab. A newsy reader writes:
but wait! There's MORE!
Ah yes. The case of the Pakistani woman.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Friday, July 12 — The public gang rape of a woman in Punjab province appears to have begun with another crime: three higher-caste tribesman sodomized her 11-year-old brother, then tried to cover up what they had done, an investigation shows.
The boy had even been locked up in a cell by the police to prevent him from reporting on the three men, according to an investigation from the province's governor, Lt. Gen. Khalid Maqbool.
Even more here.
Faithful readers will recall that the poor woman was gang-raped as punishment for some alleged sexual transgression of her other brother. We are fascinated with the historical derivation of this school of jurisprudence.

Blab. A Treasured Reader sends us a visually impaired link.
weeding out
Unfortunately, our reader gets the link wrong, forcing us to do work to find the correct one. We hate that. Anyhow, the correct link is to a story about American TV confrontation show icon Jerry Springer getting sued, for allegedly contributing to the murder of a guest. Or something like that.
During the episode, titled called "Secret Mistresses Confronted," Campbell-Panitz discovered her ex-hubby had secretly wed another woman in March of 2000, and that the newlyweds wanted Campbell-Panitz out of their lives. The show concluded with Campbell-Panitz being ridiculed by her ex's new wife and heckled by the audience as she left the stage.
Although Campbell-Panitz and Ralf Panitz divorced in 1999, she reportedly still lived with her former husband--even after he remarried. He allegedly split his time between the two women, and all three traded accusations of domestic violence among them.
Prosecutors said that, two months after the taping, Ralf Panitz watched the episode at a bar, stormed off to Campbell-Panitz's residence and--angry that she had since demanded he remove his belongings from her home--flew into a drunken rage and killed her.
We interpret our reader's comment as suggesting that this is Darwin In Action. We're glad someone else said that.

Blab. A reader suggests that we ...
Gotta love the rich
It seems that well-known New York publicist Lizzie Grubman, the same Lizzie Grubman who ran over folks a while ago in her SUV, staged a weepy, sobby display all the way from the courtroom to (yes) her SUV. According to the article, it was a transparent sympathy ploy after her plea negotiations were unsuccessful. But we think Lizzie really meant it.
We do. Surely we do.

Blab. Mistaking us for a travel site, a reader reveals its evil intent to infiltrate our secret hideaway.
I'll be going to Cooper Island for the first time in Nov. I'll be staying at the Beach Club but I would like to "explore" the other beaches on the island. In your "trip report" you mention a path to the beach house. My partner wears a leg brace and uses a cane. I would like to know 1. how rocky the path is between the Beach Club and the house 2. how rocky would the walk on the beach between the Club and the house be and 3. from what I've read, the beach house and the hill house have a "private" beach - does that mean that others shouldn't use that beach??
I'm hoping that you will answer the above questions.
Well ...

Pretty rocky, actually. Most of it was once intended to be a gravel road, of sorts, but various parts of it have eroded away - some quite precipitously - various thorny plants have grown, and a piece of it was always scrambly boulders anyway, and ... well, your partner will have a tough time. We wouldn't count on it.

There's no beach-only path from the Beach Club to the house. See (1).

The beach in front of the house is private. Technically, the law allows folks to tramp up to the high tide line, but it's kinda rude. We like to see folks respect the privacy of people who go there for privacy.

And don't forget the sunscreen!

Blab. A reader brings us sad news.
I recall you being interested in the BBC News story that "Lost Monty Python Sketches [were] to be Performed."
According to Ananova this morning, this is sadly not to be the case.
--Gutted, UK.
Bummer! Yes, we were interested. But according to a spokesman for the Graham Chapman Archive, there was:
"concern that the sketches could not possibly live up to the vast amount of interest that has already been generated about them."
Let's see. He said they sucked, right? Oh well.

Blab. A reader announces ...
The Larch
Look at that. The entire Monty Python collection, now on DVD. Isn't technology wonderful? And speaking of the larch, you can listen to the song here. Isn't the Web wonderful? Isn't everything wonderful?

Blab. A reader sends us a puzzle.
www.evhead.com
www.kottke.org
www.megnut.com
www.onfocus.com
a.wholelottanothing.org
Beets
Which of these does not belong? And why?

Blab. A reader spends an otherwise busy, productive Monday on the following kind of useless neural buzzing. Just like us.
random walk thoughts under the idea lamppost:
IBM announced that DB2 is an example of self-healing technology. When started the DB2 daemon autoinstalls linux and restarts.
If the blue dog self-heels will it ever move again? Sounds like the famous koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? (which has a trivial but enlightening answer involving teenage boys and their favorite pastime).
Do you think that koans are really ancient helenisms that have lost their context?
t
We think that koans are ancient Japanese Helenisms that did not survive the translation to English. We think that Zen monks laugh as soon as the door is closed.

Blab. A reader disputes some other reader.
"And stop blaming Micro$oft. They don't make hardware..."
Funny, I was shopping for a new mouse (computer, not organism) this weekend, and several of the mice I saw for sale were labelled "Microsoft." It seems to me there are three possibilities:
a) Some company other than Microsoft is engaging in trademark infringement
b) A mouse is not considered "hardware"
c) The reader who provided the quote above is in error.
We leap to (one of) our reader's defense! Yes, Microsoft makes hardware. They make mice, Xbox thingies, and other stuff. But no, we weren't using any of that Microsoft hardware when our laptop crashed the other day.
It was, howmsoever, that trillion-lines-o-buggy-code OS of Microsoft's that was running on our laptop when it crashed. Grr.

Plurp.
Upon the blarmey slage and gumbel
The ritig garway came.
Between the trine and chinnled thimble
Another tarm was lame.

Yo. It turns out that the Brando movie could just as easily have been called A Streetcar Named Urquhardt. Weird, eh?

Plurp. The readership of our silly Web site seems to be slowly rising. No accounting for taste, we suppose.

Yow. Speaking of increasing readership, this picture of what seems to be is sure to help!

Scientists in Australia are investigating what may be a new species of giant squid, after one of the deep sea creatures washed up on a Tasmanian beach over the weekend.
The squid weighs up to 250 kilograms and, including tentacles, measured almost 18 meters (60 feet).
Tasmania! It sounds so ... foreign, so ... exotic, so ... Lovecraftian.

Plop. We laid awake for hours in the middle of the night last night, vexing about all the stuff we had to do at work, making mental lists of conversations to have, notes to send, and meetings to set up. We slept like, well, like effluent.
Now, this morning, we can't remember any of those things that we desperately needed to do.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was an ancient Japanese Helenism
that did not belong

Sunday, July 21, 2002
Plurp.
Today, I will not conform to form; I will not meet expectations; I will not be what you think I am. I will only type, pausing occasionally to think of what to type next, and perhaps describe self-consciously the process of typing. I will type words, and you expect words, but not these words. The words will form sentences, and words expect to form sentences, but not these sentences. Thoughts will swarm, noisily, using my head as their hive. Today, I will sleep late. Today, I will not make sense. Today, things will come in threes.

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