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2002.09.01 : 2002.09.07
Saturday, September 7, 2002
Blab. In reference to that thingie on blogger ethics
yesterday, a reader who does not know us well writes:
You passed notes in study
hall? For shame.
Surely you jest. Nerd that we are, we actually studied in study
hall. Our biggest social revolt in high school was forging hall passes
so we could go to the library. To study.
Blab. A reader who is knowledgeable about Web things (we, of
course, are not) writes:
"(Odd, though. It doesn't
list some of the pages that we know link to us. Quite a few, in fact. We
wonder why.)"
We suspect that it's because those
sites only have www.stevewhite.org in an Anchor tag, and not in the actual
text of the page, and Google is only indexing the actual text of the page
(not the stuff in the Anchor tags).
On the other hand, you can explicitly
ask Google for pages that link to a particular page with, frinstance, "link:http://www.stevewhite.org/"
in the GoogleBox...
Anchor tags. Hmm! Yes. Okey dokey.
It's been a while since we indulged our vanity and peeked at who links
to us. We'll have to do that again soon.
Blab. A reader quotes extensively from our babbling.
-
"Political assassination is now approved
policy.
-
Non-citizens are held without charges,
without trial and without any channel for appeal, indefinitely, in cages.
-
Citizens are too, but the cages are nicer.
-
People are fired from non-governmental
jobs, and their lives generally ruined, because someone in the government
doesn't like them, despite a lack of trial, arrest, charges or even evidence.
-
About half of the citizens now think
that the First Amendment goes too far."
Canada is looking better every day.
It's been thirty years since we thought seriously about needing to go to
Canada because the U.S. government thought it best to take our life for
its own violent purposes. We really, really hope this isn't happening again.
Blab. Wearing a blindfold, a reader sends us a ...
[link].
Forgive us for quoting the entire article.
Some of the fundamental changes
to Americans' legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot
Act following the terror attacks:
-
FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may
monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal
activity to assist terror investigation.
-
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has
closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds
of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public
records requests.
-
FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute
librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the
government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
-
RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government
may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and
clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
-
FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government
may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause
to assist terror investigation.
-
RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government
may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
-
RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed
without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
Nostalgia buffs may recall that many of these were a part of something
that was once called the Bill of Rights.
Blab. On the topic of that guy who lost his job because one of
Ashcroft's winged monkeys didn't like him, a reader writes:
"Hatfill, however, has been
treated differently. FBI and Postal Service agents searched his apartment
in Frederick, Md., twice, the second time with a search warrant."
Interesting quote from the Fox News
story about Steven Hatfill you linked to the other day. I especially like
the line, "the second time with a search warrant."
It's never going to get better, is
it? It will just be more and more of this for the rest of lives, won't
it?
L.
We are the eternal optimist. Or, as captured in a conversation at work
recently:
So, is the glass half full
or half empty?
Hm. Nice glass!
Plop. How much deadly chemical weaponry does the U.S. still have
laying around? Oh, lots.
(Scroll to the bottom.) And that's just one site.
Plurp.
Yow. Now that's
weird.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
kept hoping to
wake up
Friday, September 6, 2002
Blab. A reader gets the giggles.
hee
hee ho ho
And we understand why. It's the best oxymoron in recent history: Weblog
Ethics.
What are the best and worst
practices in terms of ethics, and how do they affect the credibility and
integrity of weblogs?
Let's ask this question more generally. What are the best and worst practices
of people who keep personal journals, who pass notes in study hall, who
write cryptic phrases on the sidewalks in spray paint? How is personal
credibility and integrity affected by the practices of those who mumble
to themselves, who send long and anguished letters to their agents, who
write letters to the editor that are never published? What are the ethical
requirements that we should place upon those who doodle in meetings, who
shine their shoes, who communicate only by Morse code?
Hmm?
Blab. A Treasured Reader writes:
Make no mistake. If this
is war, we will not watch it only on our TVs, as we have every war in our
lifetime. We will not ride over the enemy as if it were sleeping, as the
U.S. did Iraq in the Gulf War. This will be a war that the enemy brings
home to us just as much as we bring it to them. It will be a war in which
U.S. civilians will die - schoolteachers, clergy, cooks, children - horribly
and in large number.
It will be a lengthy war. It will
be a costly war, both in lives and economically. It will be a war that
redefines how we think about the U.S., and not altogether in a positive
way.
Actually, this Treasured Reader is sending us our
own words from last Sept. 15.
What have we learned about the U.S., or at least its government, so
far?
-
Political assassination is now approved policy.
-
Non-citizens are held without charges, without trial and without any channel
for appeal, indefinitely, in cages.
-
Citizens are too, but the cages are nicer.
-
People are fired from non-governmental jobs, and their lives generally
ruined, because someone in the government doesn't like them, despite a
lack of trial, arrest, charges or even evidence.
-
About half of the citizens now think that the First Amendment goes too
far.
We didn't really want to learn those things.
Blab. A reader donates a really good idea.
Bush has announced a plan
to ensure that a meteorite strike does not cause widespread ignition of
vegetation. I didn't get all the details but it appears to be an outgrowth
(pun intended) of his new forest fire containment plan except for the use
of bushhogs rather than chainsaws. Ah, well, anything to keep people employed,
eh?
I am rather hoping for a glancing
blow to the planet that just removes the district of columbia and carries
it off to eternity. Surely it's not too much to ask...
dorian
It's not at all too much to ask. In fact, we have a long list of useful
secondary impact sites. And don't call us Shirley.
Plurp.
It was a soft, warm day yesterday
as my seminar ended and I walked out to the car. There was a faint scent
of sun-warmed asphalt in the air. Suddenly, I was five years old again,
or maybe six, and it was the first day of summer - the first day of no
school - and I was running down the street for no reason other than it
felt so good to run.
Years used to be so well defined.
They were demarked by summers and labeled by grade and the name of a teacher.
Kindergarten: Miss Hiruben. First grade: Mrs. Smith. Second grade: Mrs.
Smith (again). Third grade: Mrs. Joyce.
The years started blurring, I think,
in grad school, when the only distinction between summer and fall was the
appearance of a large number of young people on campus.
It has grown worse recently. Ask me
what I did in, say, 1994. I don't actually know. At least, not in specific.
There are fewer defining moments in my life, fewer moments that are memorable
because they are entirely new, entirely unique.
That faint scent of asphalt pulled
me back to such a time, to such a moment. And I stopped, smiling, as the
reverie washed over me.
Then I was back in the present again.
Not running down the street on the first day of summer, but standing in
the parking lot of the lab on my way to my office, some ten miles away.
I think I enjoyed being a kid, enjoyed
the simple pleasures of a summer day and a hot street, and the feel of
the air on my face as I ran.
But there are compensations for being
an adult, I decided, taking the long way back. The toys, for instance,
are much, much better.
Plop. You may recall that the U.S., which has produced more nerve
gas than any other country, has been in the process of destroying that
nerve gas for something like 30 years. They were supposed to be done in
the 1970s. They're not. But what's the rush, right?
Well, this
is.
Yak. We love interminable meetings.
My work is very abstruse,
but the motivation is quite naive.
Yak. ... interminable meetings.
Reality is very important.
Yak. ...
If a tree falls in the forest
and there's nobody there to see it, do you have to ray-trace it?
Yak. ...
... so you have a queue of
universes waiting, and you just pop the next one off the queue.
Yo.
In February of 1997 I recognized
my student, Steven Seagal, as a reincarnation (tulku) of the treasure revealer
Chungdrag Dorje. Since there has been some confusion and uncertainty as
to what this means, I am writing to clarify this situation.
He's serious,
too. (Kafkaesque)
Plop. U.S. Senate says their
main value is obstruction.
Oh. Did we spin that differently than the media did?
 Plurp.
Why is it that information gathered in a clandestine manner is called intelligence?
Why don't they call it information? Or data?
Is it that they would like to believe that it means more than it does?
Or that, as a result, they are wiser than they are?
We were just wondering.
Yo. This summer, the largest war game in recent history (13,000
U.S. soldiers) was staged, pitting the U.S. against an imaginary Middle
Eastern dictatorship (that is, Iraq).
And you know what happened? Iraq
won.
In the first few days of
the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old
Vietnam veteran [who was playing the part of the dictator] sank most of
the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault
to a halt. [...]
Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing
end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history,
the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened.
They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken
fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their
marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed
up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he
sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game
- grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled
conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory".
Millennium Challenge
was designed to test the U.S. military's new doctrine of Rapid Decisive
Operations. To us, this is an unsettling result.
Yo. Here's Kurzweil's
review of Wolfram's book. What a pair.
Plurp.
The blue dog
heard that Dubya was
Millennium Challenged
Thursday, September 5, 2002
Blab. A reader suggests that yesterday's
spammist may not necessarily have been dumber than stumps.
"100% FREE Nuddies!"? Not
nearly sleazy enough in your thinking. This is clearly done to avoid some
fraction of the spam filters. Similar things are done by Pr0n site
operators to try to confuse Pr0n site scraping spiders.
The two theories thus far are (1) spammists can't spell, and (2) spammists
carefully misspell in order to avoid spam filters. Readers are invited
to submit evidence for one or
the other (or another) theory.
Blab. A reader who makes our copy-editing instincts itch writes:
Hello,This is a funny website
I hope you would enjoy it.
Sadly, our reader seems to have embedded any useful information in an attachment,
which our recalcitrant mail system will not let us see.
Rant. OK. Now we're
pissed.
A Justice Department official
sent an e-mail to Louisiana State University ordering its biomedical research
and training center to "immediately cease and desist" from employing bioweapons
researcher Steven Hatfill on department-funded programs.
Hatfill is one of several people under
FBI scrutiny in the investigation of last fall's deadly anthrax attacks.
[...]
The e-mail from the Office of Domestic
Preparedness at the Justice Department was sent to Steven Guillot, Hatfill's
supervisor, on August 1.
Sands said the school's decisions
to put Hatfill on paid administrative leave August 2 and then to fire him
Tuesday were not in any way related to the e-mail.
The Justice Department issued a statement
Wednesday saying it "has not been involved in any decisions made by LSU
with respect to Mr. Hatfill's status as an employee of that University."
But the statement from Deborah Daniels,
assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs, did say
it ordered LSU to bar Hatfill from programs funded by the department.
Much of the funding for LSU's National
Center for Biomedical Research and Training where Hatfill worked comes
from the Justice Department, university officials said. [...]
LSU said Tuesday it fired Hatfill
in the "best interest of the university," but did not specify a reason.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has
called Hatfill a "person of interest" in the investigation of last fall's
anthrax attacks. Hatfill has not been charged with any crime.
Hatfill's spokesman, Pat Clawson,
told CNN the actions by LSU and the Justice Department should spur all
Americans to ask some questions.
"Where is it that the attorney general
gets authority to point an accusatory finger at a citizen without leveling
any kind of formal charges? Where does the Justice Department get the power
to get a man thrown out of his job?" Clawson asked.
"If the Justice Department has some
evidence on Steve Hatfill, then by all means charge him. But quit destroying
his life," Clawson said.
Let's review.
-
Hatfill has not been charged with anything. No evidence of anything at
all has been brought forward.
-
The Justice Dept. nonetheless insisted that Hatfill not be employed on
any Department-funded program.
-
LSU claims that the decision to fire Hatfill, one day later, had nothing
to do with the Justice Dept.'s insistence.
-
The Justice Dept. then claims that it had nothing to do with LSU's action..
Now comes the pop quiz.
-
Use the term abuse of power in a sentence.
-
Spell one of the following words: ethics, honesty, corruption,
coercion.
-
Of the three parties: Hatfill, the Justice Dept., and LSU, which two do
we know, for a fact, are lying?
-
Who was Richard Milhouse Nixon?
-
How secure are you in your job?
 Yo.
In today's
news, the guy who sacked Hatfill has been sacked. (LSU higher-ups claim
they didn't know that Hatfill had been sacked.)
Now, where are the llamas?
Plop. Speaking of enlightened government policy, consider
Greece.
The Greek Government has
banned games on computers and consoles like the Xbox and Playstation in
internet cafes and other public establishments. [...]
[E]ven though the law bans the playing
of games on PCs and consoles at home it will only be pursuing gamers who
flout it in public places such as internet cafes. [...]
They face fines of 150,000 euros (£95,000)
and up to 12 months imprisonment.
Yo. You don't want to be around when a
large meteorite hits the Earth.
A giant space rock that hit
the Earth eons ago scattered high-velocity rubble over the planet, setting
off wildfires that quickly spread over much of the equatorial region, North
America and the Indian subcontinent, scientists announced this week. [...]
The [scientists], who speculated that
the mega-blazes needed only several days to spread around the world, said
the horrific scenario followed the impact of a big space boulder in Chicxulub,
Mexico.
"The fires were generated after debris
ejected from the crater was lofted far above the Earth's atmosphere and
rained back down over a period of about four days," [one of the scientists]
said.
"Like countless trillions of meteors,
the debris heated the atmosphere and surface temperatures so intensely
that ground vegetation spontaneously ignited."
Charburgers, anyone?
Plurp. A spammist who wants to list our site on various search
engines (heh)
does us an accidental favor by creating and hosting a lovely image of our
front page.
Isn't that nice?
Yow. Here's something we didn't know. You can use Google to find
all pages that link to your site (well, actually, contain the URL for your
site) by searching for, e.g.:
"+www.stevewhite.org"
Cool! (Odd, though. It doesn't list some of the pages that we know link
to us. Quite a few, in fact. We wonder why.)
Yow. We are credited with inventing
Googlewhacking (scroll down to Googlewhacking Reconsidered).
Fame at last.
Plurp.
You don't want to be around
when the blue dog
hits the Earth
Wednesday, September 4, 2002
Blab. On our outrage at some dumb company editing movies
to conform to their own peculiar moral tastes rather than copyright law,
a reader writes:
Re: Expurgating films
It's been done for (almost) two centuries
with books (see 'bowdlerise'), so it's about time that it was done to films,
eh?
Apparently, present-day US schools
are not above issuing bowdlerised versions of US literary classics (yes,
Veronica, there are such things) to pupils. Alas, I'm much too lazy
to attempt to find links for this, but I heard it directly from present-day
US school goers.
Whilst it doesn't outrage me, it would
if I were an author (of books...) or maker of films...
inw
Yeah, we're much too lazy to even finish reading your Blab, so ...
Blab. On those extremely detailed directions for finding clams
while avoiding I 95, a reader writes:
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ ´.` /
|`---´|
Der
blaue Hund doesn't see the
|
| merit of the Merrit
|`___´|\_
/|
|\
##
##
Nor we suspect, the reign of the Sprain nor the chronic Taconic.
Blab. A reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to the Hobbit name generator.
Blab. A divisive reader writes:
Why must people still go
on trying to send disinformation about prime numbers? I am outraged!
Yes but, for us, that's a secondary consideration.
Blab. A spammist wishes us to know about ...
100% FREE Nuddies!
So, naturally, we compiled the following helpful data.
From this, we conclude that spammists are in the bottom 0.01 percentile
in intelligence. Unless, of course, this one meant something else entirely.
Blab. A reader who keeps track of such things informs us that
...
today is Paul Harvey's 84th
birthday
Paul Harvey, good ...
Yo. Emu. Shirtless man. Not
the same thing. Good to know. (Davezilla,
via rebecca)
Yo. Paper tigers? No, cardboard
cops. Whatever happened to the paperless officer?
Plurp. Yes, when he was at Yale, Dubya was tapped as a member
of its most secret society, Skull
and Bones.
The name Magog is traditionally
assigned to the incoming Bonesman deemed to have had the most sexual experience
[...]. William Howard Taft and Robert Taft were Magogs. So, interestingly,
was George Bush.
Frankly, we don't find that at all interesting. But maybe you do.
For a much more breathlessly conspiratorial article on Skull and Bones,
you'll have to go
to Microsoft.
Plop. Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, that guy the FBI is following around
in the hopes that he might have had something to do with those anthrax
letters, has been fired
from his job at LSU. This despite no evidence, no charges, no indictment,
no nothin'.
"The university is making
no judgment as to Dr. Hatfill's guilt or innocence regarding the FBI investigation,"
said Chancellor Mark A. Emmert in a brief statement released by the university
on Tuesday.
"Our ultimate concerns are the ability
of the university to fulfill its role and mission as a land-grant university,"
he said. "In considering all of these objectives, I have concluded that
it is clearly in the best interest of LSU to terminate this relationship."
Could someone translate this into
English for us? 'Cause we're too stupid to understand whether it means
(a) LSU is filled with dimwits, (b) LSU is afraid alumni won't contribute
if LSU sticks stick up for the principles on which their country was founded,
or (c) the Bush administration, unable to screw Hatfill legally, put pressure
on LSU to screw him alegally.
Plop. Dubya is Reagan without the intelligence.
Plurp. Dave's
off his meds again. We hate when that happens.
Yow. CNN is soliciting
ideas for how to rebuild the site of the World Trade Center. Here's
Helen's idea.
I believe we should move
the UN Headquarters down to the WTC site, with structures built on the
"footprints" of the buildings that previously existed there.
The delegates will pass between the
General Assembly and their offices through a glassed-in passageway, allowing
them the constant reminder of the WTC.
The "footprints" of the former towers
would be full-sized reflecting pools with 24" ledges, which would be inscribed
with the names of all of the victims.
The "footprint" of the Vista Hotel
would become a raised bed of plantings, replaced seasonally - spring bulbs,
summer wildflowers, fall chrysanthemums, winter greens.
Personally, we think this is a great idea.
Yow. Remember. It's Your Pineal Gland. But It's Their Antenna.
Yo. War
flying: Wireless LAN sniffing goes airborne.
Plurp.
The blue dog
celebrated the birthday of Paul Harvey's
wireless
pineal gland
Tuesday, September 3, 2002
Blab. Seeking to make make pornography out of recent
subtle humor, Dorian writes:
well, my last girlfriend
never trembled astride a broomstick but she found bliss in her hitachi
magic wand i bought her for christmas. perhaps they'll market a harry potter
branded version.
dorian
Thank you for sharing.
Blab. More clamfo, coupled with driving directions. We love our
readers.
Clams,
Lobster and the like.
Now, as to I-95, we offer the following
I-95 minimization algorithim. North on the FDR drive to the Willis Ave
bridge. Right onto the Bruckner blvd, about three lights, onto the east
bound elevated Bruckner. (Sorry, can't do much about that, unless you care
to detour through odd portions of the South Bronx, but hey, you're the
one who lives in Manhattan) North on the Bronx River Parkway, East on the
Cross County Expressway, north on the Hutchinson River Parkway, blend onto
the northbound Merrit Parkway, exit onto route 6 near Hartford, east on
six through the bucollic eastern hills of Connecticut, into the western
marches of Rhode Island.
Slight attention is called for to
swing clear of downtown Providence, which bears Miata swallowing potholes.
Pick up eastbound 44 just east of Providence, and follow straight down
to the waterfront in Plymouth. Lobsters, Clams and other seafood awaits.
Should you not yet be properly drowned
in clams, consider this
place. Slightly better lobster and clam chowder, but the Clams seemed
a touch sweeter at Woods.
Once there, south on 3-A offers very
nice Miata territory, and a side detour through the coastal verges, such
as Whitehorse Beach and Monomanet Point would be quite rewarding.
We also observe that our prior suggestion
can be accessed by using the same initial path to the Merrit, followed
a short run down Connecticut 9, and local roads to US-1 near Clinton Ct.
Again, minimizing I-95. In fact, quite eliminating it, and keeping one
entirely on properly jaunty Miata territory.
But, hey, we would think if you can
get to the Sea Swirl, without I-95, reaching most of the Eastern Connecticut
seacoast should be easy enough.
Thank you for contributing to our hardening arteries. We will let you know
what we think (if, at some time in the future, we do).
Curiously, our Treasured Reader's second link 404ifies. In fact, the
entire site redirects and then 404ifies. It must have been swallowed by
a Providence pothole.
Blab. A reader insists that we ...
Watch Him... uhhh... dance?
You must be referring to the classic Hip
Hop Bling Bling! From our point of view, this is why the Web was
invented.
Blab. Someone pretending to be Dorian writes:
I see my attic picture is
sending email again. Damned wireless technology reaches too far. Ignore
him. He's ugly and smells of eldeberry oils. Consider him a future closure
and fail to force him else bad things will happen.
dorian
We are turning this over to our force
closure department.
Blab. A cluthless reader writes:
 See
Steve since its a slow day at Plurp, I thought I try to type in something
idunno, funny, into the Search Box. I thought of typing 'Cthululu naked
pictures' often enough for you to notice. But when I tryed to do it, first
I could't spell and then I found I was terrified at the idea, for some
obscure reason. I mean once or twice OK , but searching for 'Cthululu
etc' repeatedly suddenly seemed like a really, really stupid and somehow
dangerous idea! What sort of electronic protection do you have on that
damned 'Search box' anyway? I'm not sticking arround there
today I can tell you.
Ah. Then you were the Treasured Reader who typed cluth into that
little Blab box?
What were you thinking? Don't do that.
Blab. A reader sends us a ...
[link]
... that should have remained blind, at which we discover that our Original
Poet from yesterday took our advice and published
his or her heartbreaking work of staggering genius elsewhere. Though it
was that same heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and it was
published on Dave's
talking
place. So that might not actually count.
Blab. No doubt inspired by yesterday's poetry, a reader recreates
an ancient football cheer.
Hail to the Sun God
He sure is a Fun God:
Ra! Ra! Ra!
We can't hear you!
Blab. A reader aims its mind reading devices at us.
You're thinking that the
constancy of change is perfectly expressible as a non-degenerate sequence
of real numbers.
You're thinking that you've reached
the end of pi and realised there were no blackbirds baked within it.
 You're
thinking that the you're in the prime of life while considering that the
sum of two primes isn't. Ever.
You're thinking that the spiral has
met you coming up as you thought you were going down.
You're thinking that you've never
quite worked out what those white semi-circles on your finger nails are
actually for.
You're thinking of measuring the area
slightly to the left of middle age and seeing if it matches the volume
of your waistline.
You're thinking that the universe
could not contain Russell's paradox.
You're thinking that you're bored.
I'm thinking that you're right.
-AJL
Uh, what are those white semi-circles on our finger nails actually
for?
Blab. A reader with whom we must have mind-melded at some time
in the recent past sends us a ...
[link].
Isn't that sweet? Darling photos of kittens, with a special touch to them.
Like this.
Plurp. On the topic of good New England fried clam joints, here's
a
list from a real clam lover in (we think) New York, part of a surprisingly
long bulletin board discussion on the topic.
We learn from this learned discussion that fried whole clams ("fried
whole belly clams") are somehow philosophically superior to fried clam
strips (which the shellfish cognoscenti regard as refuse). So what do we
know?
Plop. Google
considered subversive.
China has blocked access
to popular U.S. Internet search engine Google amid government calls to
tighten media controls ahead of a major Communist Party congress. [...]
China promotes the Internet for economic
use and to spread the communist government's views. But it has worked hard
to muzzle the Internet as a forum for free information and discussion.
[...]
Police monitor chat rooms and personal
e-mail and erase online content considered undesirable. Internet portals
have been warned they will be held responsible for sites they host.
Nevertheless, many users find ways
to get around the blocks, said Duncan Clark, a technology analyst for consulting
firm BDA China.
They often involve using "proxy servers"
-- Web sites abroad that let users reach blocked sites. Such techniques
are routinely posted online in China or exchanged in chat rooms.
"The restrictions only make people
more creative," Clark said.
We like creative people.
Plop. Do you read all the way to the end of long articles these
days? No? For most of you, that's OK. But if you write for a newspaper
(or some such), you
really might want to.
Simonya Popova is the hottest
thing on the women's tennis circuit -- except for the fact that she's too
good to be true.
And that minor detail has the Women's
Tennis Association fuming at Sports Illustrated for running a hoax story
about the gorgeous 17-year-old junior tennis beauty from Uzbekistan. [...]
[T]he last line of the story pines
"if she only existed" -- WTA officials claim several people fell for the
spoof, including the sports editor of a prominent daily newspaper.
"We had to tell him she's not real,"
WTA's spokesman Chris De Maria told The Post. He also complained that the
last-line tip-off wasn't enough.
"A lot of people don't finish long
articles," he said.
Especially editors, it seems. Now about those other news articles you read
...
Yo. Donald Rumsfeld says the Bush administration has secret intelligence.
It seems the only other possibility.
Plop. We've been discussing copyright law at lunch recently,
what with all of the hoo-ha about content owners wanting to spy on your
PC to see if you've been naughty or nice. But here's
a new twist.
Q. What is an E-Rated
movie?
A. E-Rated movies are movies
that have been edited for content to remove nudity and sexual situations,
offensive language, and graphic violence.
... by a company that does not
own the copyright, and does not have the cooperation of the copyright owner,
as it turns out. Like taking out the love scene in Shakespeare in Love,
or the blood out of Private Ryan. They then resell them as edited
versions of the original.
No doubt we're in a distinct minority in thinking that this is outrageous.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was an E-Rated
clam at the end of
a
long article
Monday, September 2, 2002
Blab. After a festive dinner of deep
fried Twinkies, with all of its blood draining from its brain and rushing
to its stomach, this Treasured Reader figures it's a good time to embarrass
itself in public.
Speaking of Harry Potter...
check
this
out or search Amazon.com for "Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 Broom" and read
the customer reviews. :)
Thank you for keeping up.
Blab. A reader takes advantage of the relative unoccupation of
the day to send us some cloyingly inspirational verse.
Salutation to the Dawn
Listen to the salutation to the dawn,
Look to this day for it is life,
the very life of life,
In its brief course lie all the verities
and realities
of our existence.
The bliss of growth, the splendour
of beauty,
For yesterday is but a dream and
tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well spent makes every
yesterday a dream
of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
Such is the salutation to the dawn.
-- Anonymous Sanskrit Salutation
Frankly, we much prefer to sleep through the dawn. But that's just us.
Blab. A reader takes advantage of the relative unoccupation of
the day to send us what seems to be an
original poem.
Happy fool
Eyes closed
Dancing blindly through the confetti
of life
The sun shining brightly
Constant
Day and night
Night and Day
Spilling gold at their feet
Their world but a mere playground
Supporting their every cartwheel
Without complaint
Music ringing in their ears
A joyous melody so loud
So loud
The warnings of the countermelodies
Left abandoned
Only to bring forth
An unappreciated current
One by one
They fall
Suffocating
Slowly
Don't try to fight it now
You lose
I am the sun
I am the earth
I am
Take the gold
I give you
In your foolishness
Cry for more
My warnings go unheeded
Suffocate in my gold!
Forget my beauty!
I can easily go on forgetting yours
Dead fools
Are you still fools?
What have you
Been left to see?
I have no one
Nothing
I hate you
But I yearn for your foolish happiness
Every last one
That kept my skies blue
I suffocate in my own gold that kept
my melodies ringing
And feel myself crumble
Crumble
We generally encourage our Treasured Readers to publish their heartbreaking
works of staggering genius elsewhere.
Plurp
is for our heartbreaking works of staggering genius, after all.
But we just couldn't resist I suffocate
in my own gold that kept my melodies ringing.
And, it's a slow day.
Blab. Sometimes, despite their best intentions, our Treasured
Readers miss our best humor, and think that we
miss theirs.
"No doubt it's a regional
difference in kid culture. We don't recall it being that big of a deal
to climb swing sets when we were a nugget. We spent all of our time, you
know, swinging on them."
Reread your reader's comment, and
then think _gender_ difference, Sherlock. Hyeh hyeh hyeh.
We attribute this to the general vacancy induced by Labor Day. And regional
differences.
Blab. A reader spends the day asserting the lack of correlation
between two things that we didn't understand in the first place.
Dorian and "meta" dorian
were not the same reader in New Paradigms, Failures and Challenges of Identity
Tracing in Mostly Anonymous Conversations (aka Blabs).
If you say so, Dorian.
Blab. At last, a reader demonstrates that it is actually awake
today.
If a car has constituent
bits, does a .jpeg consist of atoms? And, do they have a vote?
Yes. Two, in Florida.
 Plurp.
The management of Plurp apologizes for it having briefly been November
today. We have revised the maintenance procedures for our flux capacitor
subsystems and are confident that it won't happen again.
Rant. What's with the traditional media when they do Web stuff?
There's a new $195M cathedral in LA, a postmodern interpretation of
Spanish missions, it is said. Sound interesting? Maybe. But we'll never
know, as the articles on the Fox
News site, and the Guardian
site, contain no picture whatsoever.
It's like a book review that contains no words.
Fortunately, the Catholic church
has heard of images.
Yow. A funny
online birthday card, in case you know anyone whose birthday is coming
up, and you want to reveal their email address to Hallmark.
Plurp.
The blue dog
suffocated in
someone else's gold
Sunday, September 1, 2002
Blab. On the Great Photoshop Controversy, a Treasured
Reader checks in with this.
No. Photoshop is so incredibly
huge and bloaty and impossible to learn, unless you want to spend many
hours (dozens?) doing so.
If your job or artwork requires it,
then by all means take the big plunge. But if you're a mere mortal like
me, who likes to twiddle images in a more-or-less straightforward manner
now and then, Paint Shop Pro is a much better tool.
It's the difference between the toolset
a professional mechanic (who works at a garage) has, and what your average
handy person might have at home. Sort of.
In other words, do you need to have
the ability to do the equivalent of taking a car apart into all its constituent
bits, and rebuild it? I didn't think so.
I'm sure there are lots of great reasons
why people love Photoshop - I just don't know what they are, because every
time I start the darn thing, I am intimidated to death and unable to do
even simple maneuvers.
Perhaps some of your Photoshop-happy
readers can point to good resources to learn how to use Photoshop that
don't take ridiculously huge amounts of time. I would be pleasantly surprised
if these things exist.
Disclaimer: I like Paint Shop Pro,
but I don't even know how to use half of it. Layers continually vex me.
(Maybe I'm just stupid?)
-the zyx lady
Well. This leaves us with a certain confusion. We learned all about layers
and feathering and stuff in Paint Shop Pro, and are left feeling that there's
something we're missing, some special graphical ecstasy that we haven't
found, some heightened visceral pleasure that Paint Shop Pro simply can't
give us.
Should we go home with the graphics program that brought us to the Prom,
or are we free to explore the wild, more complex relationship we might
have with Photoshop?
We simply don't know what to do.
Blab. That same reader just can't help it.
Ok, I can't help it. When
you linked to the Amazon page on the Nimbus 2000 broomstick, I couldn't
help but think of little girls learning about things their mothers never
uh, dreamed.
Personally, I'm all for it. With the
rampant death of playgrounds in this nation, children will have less opportunity
to learn the joys that come with climbing the swing set.
-the zyx lady
No doubt it's a regional difference in kid culture. We don't recall it
being that big of a deal to climb swing sets when we were a nugget. We
spent all of our time, you know, swinging on them.
 Yak.
Last night.
Steve: If you had
told me, when I was eight years old, that I would love to eat eel, I absolutely
would have gagged.
Helen: That's why we didn't
tell you.
Yow. Baby smashers.
Plop. We watched Resident
Evil on video last night, a movie so bad, in every possible way,
as to cause us to not want to buy the game from which it was derived. And
yes, that is a pretty extreme statement, coming from us.
Plurp. Readers are invited to guess
what we are thinking.
Rant. We are not a lawyer, nor do we play one on the Web. And
perhaps that allows us to be utterly confused about the legal systems of
the world. Take, for instance, Pakistan. In Pakistan, a woman was sentenced
to be gang-raped
because her brother was involved in some sort of sexual dalliance. We
got upset about that a while ago. Now, it seems that yet another Pakistani
court decided that those gang-rapists were wrong, and should be sentenced
to death by hanging.
Imagine lawyers and judges who are legally responsible for their malfeasance.
Imagine.
We often rail about the idiotic American legal system. We promise to
stop doing that. For a day or two, anyhow.
Plurp.
The blue dog
spent the entire day learning about
MOUT
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