Plurp: Now what?

Bigger!

2002.09.08 : 2002.09.14

Saturday, September 14, 2002
Blab. Afire with our very own vitriol, a reader tests the limits of political anger.
The "shut up" part seems rather excessive, but the "talk reason" we could probably do with more of.
Let me tell you why I can't really get angry.
We've got a criminal justice system that simultaneously allows people to be regularly slaughtered and robbed from, and yet also imprisons innocents and people whose only crime was that they are stupid enough to like to get high.
We've got a tax system that takes people's property so that politicians can buy votes and idiots can fund well-intended programs that never accomplish any of what they purport to address.
There's a lot of people who are perfectly OK with trampling on other people, or telling them what to do, or making their lives subject to some hairbrained theory. The "sacrifice the first amendment to get the terrorist" idiots are just a particular species of this type.
Many of the people I hear crying about what fascists Bush and Ashcroft are were perfectly happy to allow rights to be trampled when it was either A) in their interest or B) done by people who have the right brand-name for their political affiliation.
I've alrady been angry enough at all of you that I can't do it anymore. Let me know when you're on-board with the idea of respecting all rights and then we can talk abotu solutions. Until then, it just seems like you're angry because you're losing the "what can I have the government do for my side" game.
Impressive. We certainly can't hold a rant-candle to that!
[More wonderfully patriotic posters can be found here. (Dave)]

Blab. Our readers offer a helping hand to pull us out of the Swamps of Seriousness.
Great Rant, but, hell, what are YOU doing about it? You don't even COLLECT SMALL BROWN LEAVES IN A SHOE BOX! And you ADMIT IT!
Our plan there, by the way, is to bomb Thoreau and take his.
Maybe he doesn't vote, but he at least (a) does nothing, and that seems to get a bit more done these days.
And we pledge to you, our fellow Mercans, to continue to do nothing - to continue to do nothing this day, and every day, until the day we explode.
Actually, things aren't just fine. I want Taco Bell to be open later. Need tacos or I'm going to explode! I do that sometimes...
Don't we all, eh? Don't we all?
I Taco with you fully. The way the Taco has been handling this whole Taco goes beyond any stepping-on of the Taco that's occured in the past. If we're going to keep calling ourselves Taco Bell   then we'd better get up and Taco something.
I wanna taco.
How about a nice mushroom instead?
And hello. This is my first time (yes) writing to a giant barrel of fungus. We hope you are well. It is in the thinning of us that your concerns about the man behind the quatrain are hopefully misplaced. Not the brain cells? Hydrocarbons! It is not behind-time the marching on the Wash In Ton! How Hard Would It Be? To organize, I mean channeling, the all thousand barrel Concerned Citroens to be the telling the white House about the "Ass" crofters? Tu sabby? Not watt "did" the ppl do, but watt, it is to ask (the cog in the machine!) "will" the ppl due! Dot is the quaze tie-on, hyeh hyeh.
Hello! This is our first time being a giant barrel of fungus. And it's quite a novelty for us, that's for sure. Laundry in March, organizations of hydrocarbons, their buttoxins placed firmly behind their little French cars, raising raisins on their underpowered farms. How will the swabbies deal with that?
Dealing with Enemies.
Options:
a) be more threatening than them, and hope it's enough,
b) kill them,
c) assure they are happy so that they forget about you, and/or make business with them
With b) it's important to consider the demographics and intentions of their "friends" and "relatives".
With c) you should know what make them happy, that can be tricky.
So Hollywood is an important source of "intelligence"; if they don't like the movies bomb them.
Indeed that would include some (european??)intellectuals, but if one just thinks twice, that's of cource right: they profess we are just discontinuous sequences of photograms between cuts, and the joy of this, and they harbor Schadenfreude.
-- playing devil's advocate.
You forgot (d) Do nothing, and (t) Give them tacos. Meanwhile, a resourceful reader comes up with a unique criterion for allrightiness.
Everything is all right
as long as MIR
parades down 5th avenue
The Russian space station? Does it have a parade license?
At length, our readers counsel us to get back to our normal pursuits. As do they.
+"Steve White" +naked +pictures
And we thank them for that.

Blab. Every once in a while, we refer, ever so obliquely, to some actually famous person who is neither an official of some government nor a person under suspicion of terrorists acts. (And yes, there are only three of them.) When we do, it seems that they, inevitably, find out.
"Take that, Paul Ford!"
Taken! Ow. Stop kicking my shins. It hurts!
Sorry, Paul. It's a nervous tick. Old war wound. Brain disorder. Anyhow, want some sushi? And what's all this guff about you leaving NYC?

Blab. Speaking of nervous ticks, a reader writes:
Realizing that my attempt at comedy was received with a less-than-intended response of grinning, I hearby issue an apology. I have a knee-jerk reaction to any anthropomorphic analogy between ourselves and these semi-electric stones we call computer processors. I'm a recovering AI researcher (aka buzzword junkie). I still reserve judgement on whether coupling non-linear processes together can result in stable behavior. By analogy, I submit my own unstable behavior as evidence. :-)
dorian
Oh good heavens. We were just helping you make fun of our chosen profession. We honestly have no idea whether or not this autonomic computing thing is going to work out at all! But that's what makes it fun.
We agree that the biological analogy is less than skin deep. Whereas computer viruses and biological viruses do share a common mathematics of their epidemiology (and similar co-evolution with their host species), we don't think there's any useful technology lurking in the autonomic nervous system that would aid us in building huge, self-managing computing systems.
Some of our colleagues keep trying to think in terms of organs, organisms, species and such. We think they are, well, befuddled at best.
So, hey - don't worry about it!

Yow. Beets. Serves 'em right. Disgusting vegetable monsters. Burn 'em all.

Plurp. Dave gets all excited about the Google Oracle. We aren't impressed. But it is funny.

Plurp. The Feds seems to have actually arrested those alleged terrorist folks in Buffalo. Charged them with, like, crimes and stuff. Arraigned them, fercrissake. Next thing you know, they'll have lawyers, and their families will know where they are.
Must have been a procedural error.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was found, with bruised shins,
at the bottom of a giant barrel
of fungus

Friday, September 13, 2002
Blab. On that vitriolic rant that clawed its way out of our fingertips yesterday, a reader writes:
Great Rant but, hell, what are YOU doing about it? You don't even VOTE!
You know, there are quite a number of things we aren't doing about it. Included in these are:

Writing a program in Visual Cobol that prints all the prime numbers less than ten.

Collecting small brown leaves in a shoe box.

Standing on our head and screaming like a chicken.

Voting.

There is an odd meme in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere) that voting is the most effective way to influence society. Some even maintain that one must vote in order to express an opinion about the politicians currently in power. Is that the way the First Amendment is worded? We forget.
We won't point out to you that no vote you have cast for president has ever affected the outcome of any election. And, if that's the only thing you do, you're just not having much effect on society. It might be that, if you get a few dozen other people to think about what's going on when a president consistently ignores the Bill of Rights, you're having more of an effect. We're not smart enough to know.
When blacks were being attacked by the government, people marched in the streets (albeit over a hundred years too late). When Johnson decided it was a great idea to turn thousands of U.S. kids into hamburger in Vietnam, people marched in the streets. When Nixon figured that, being president, it was a Fine Idea to stomp on the Bill of Rights, he was impeached.
When Dubya concluded that the Constitution was obsolete, what did people do? 'Cause, you know, we missed it.
What can one do, you ask? Well, some rather silly people go to the Extreme Ashcroft site, and use it to send email to Dubya that starts like this:
Dear President Bush:
Please hire a new Attorney General. Immediately.
Or you could just sit back and listen to Asscroft perform toe-tapping tunes along with the other Singing Senators. Who says fascists don't have fun, eh? (Extra points for readers who can send us the URL of the MP3 that is alleged to exist, containing more samples of those fun-loving Singing Senators.)
And while we're feeling good, we rejoice in our readers' continued delight in ad hominem argument.

The country has a president that has no bleeding idea what he is doing. He could not pass the qualifying exam for village idiot, much less that for the leader of a superpower. He thinks he's President For Life. He thinks he doesn't need the approval of the U.N., of his allies, of the Congress, of the judiciary, of the people, of you. He thinks he can engage in kidnapping and imprisonment and marauding and butchery just because he says so.
Given that you had no bleeding idea what the aftermath of 9/11/01 was going to be (a war with many American deaths my ass) and that Bush has just cleverly outmaneuvered the U.N, I'd say you are uniquely unqualified to speak to who is unable to pass the exam for village idiot.
Stop believing the charicatures presented to you in the media. Life is complex.
Oh, blush! We can't possibly be uniquely unqualified, as our reader demonstrates.
As to our lament (last year) that there would be many American casualties in the current war: sadly, we stick by our prediction. Now, as then, we do not expect those casualties to be on the battlefield. We greatly hope we are wrong, though!
We did think that Dubya's U.N. speech yesterday was very cagey indeed, threatening the U.N. with irrelevance and Saddam with war in the same breath. It was a masterful chess move, and clearly indicates that someone who works for Dubya has brain cells. We're still betting that no such cells have infected Mr. Bush himself.
We don't seem to get the Caricature Channel on our cable service. But, as you can see, our Treasured Readers provide more than enough material.
Meanwhile, another reader wants us always to look on the bright side of life.
Egads.
I'm Black, and I haven't been forced to the back of the bus or intimidated by dogs lately. My good friend is Japanese, and he hasn't been interred lately. My wife's sister's husband is Muslim, and he gets some angry looks, but he gets just as many people trying to be overtly non-hostile as well. And the government hasn't rounded him up.
Hyperbole doesn't do us any good. There are some things being done, which merti investigation and discussion. It is NOTHING like the 40s, 50s or 60s were, and doesn't even come CLOSE to China, where people are afraid to even whisper a dissenting opinion.
Talk rationally about it or shut up.
Our Treasured Reader is right, of course. (Treasured Readers are always right.) We got just completely carried away in that little rant of ours. We're pleased to report that everything is fine. There is a Black man, a Japanese woman, and a Muslim who haven't been indefinitely detained without charges, access to legal council, or any legal recourse; who aren't under constant surveillance by their government; who haven't been fired from their jobs because some DoJ bureaucrat pressured their employer; and some of whose email and phone conversations aren't being monitored.
And Taco Bell is still open late. So everything's fine. Just fine.

Blab. A reader attempts to help us out with our Web editing conundrum.
You should try Mozilla. It's standards compliant and what Netscape 6.xx should have been if they hadn't joined with AOL.
Actually, we did. That's the "modern editor" to which we tried to update. In their infinite wisdom, the Mozillians decided that upwards compatibility wasn't important. Sigh.

Blab. A reader makes fun of our chosen profession.
Helping Computers Help Themselves
Autonomic Computing: buzzword, (1) A feedback-mediated marketing term that rebrands all current research projects (2) A feedback-mediated advertising term that ensures its own ad placement renewals (3) A content-free project aimed at making computers salivate when chased by rabid dogs (4) An operating system mod that ensures that the system will return to a known, safe state by killing all newly started processes. (ref: blue screen of death; obsoletes)
dorian, the cynic
Fair enough. Initially, we were pretty dubious about the whole endeavor as well. And, if your cynicism is borne out, computing systems will forever be hopelessly complex, fragile, error-prone messes.
It's our goal, over the next few years or decades, to radically simplify this. If we fail, feel free to ridicule us.

Blab. In response to the curious search terms people have used on our site recently, a reader suggests an interesting possibility.
Next thing you know I'll be getting searches for 'plurp naked pictures'
*mouse
Or mouse naked pictures. Check your referrer logs. :-)

Blab. One reader has advice for another. Why they don't use that old-fashioned telephone technology is beyond us.
One might point out to Ian that most good modern browsers have a "turn off the images on this page" button that causes them to (turn off the images and) display the "alt" text instead. This makes it reasonably convenient to read the "hover" texties that the Plurpmeister provides.
So there's the definitive word.. If you want to mumble mumble, do yadda yadda.

Blab. Have you ever wanted to look up some obscure detail of the Cthulhu mythos, and ran into nothing but frustration looking for it in the polluted haystack that is the Web? Then this reader has the thing for you.

Bwahahahaha!

And who knew there was Cthulhu music? Not us.

Blab. Speaking of Cthulhu music, a reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to that madcap music café, Coffee Annan (no relation to our brilliant Ben & Jerry's spoof yesterday.)

Blab. A nostalgic reader writes:
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ ´.` / Der blaue Hund is celebrating
|`---´| today by deleting every file
|     | you open.
|`___´|\_
/|     |\
##     ##
Ah. The Jerusalem virus. Those were the days, weren't they?

Blab. Our wife writes:
what is this? i'm so confused.
Yeah, us too. And when we get confused, we read our FAQ. It doesn't help, but it does increase our site hits.

Yo. We admit to being somewhat taken aback to discover that Thursday's Plurp traffic was some 5x what it usually is. What great piece of writing, we wondered, what fabulously witty turn of phrase got us suddenly famous?
And the answer is: Simonya Popova, and all of the great naked pictures of her that we have here (well ...). It seems that Google has decided that we are the #1 and #2 best references for Ms. Popova. (And who are we to dispute them?) Naturally, the lecherous public responded by clicking on those Google links until the cows came home. In fact, even that bovine homecoming doesn't seem to have stopped them, as our daily usage is keeping up this same incredible pace today.
So there you are. You can (1) Write insightful, or funny, or heart-rending pieces all you want, or (2) Fool Google into thinking that you're the prime reference for the latest click-fetish. Take that, Paul Ford!

Yow. Since Sept. 11 (the one earlier this week), they've been lighting the exterior of the Citicorp building, after keeping it dark for almost a year. We don't know why.

Plurp. From a memo today at work.
Thank you for your help. You are truly a critical cog in our engine.
Imagine our pride.

Plurp.
The blue dog,
unable to talk rationally about trampling
the Constitution, was ordered to
shut up

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Blab. Now what?
I predict...nothing much
That's what we call rising to the task. Another reader is more ambitious.
Now, we get down to the real work of helping our Government(tm) eradicate those inconvenient and God-less "civil liberties" and making the world safe for mass consumption!
Consume, Amerika(r), consume! If you stop your mass consumption, then the terrorists will have won!
L.
Meanwhile, another reader breaks into song.
Now? Now we make a circle in the sand and make a halo with our hand
Curiously, this seems like the best plan.

Blab. Our unexpected revelation that (almost) all images on Plurp have hover-help goodies that contain enigmatic messages caused a certain fevered reaction amongst the readership.
Over in mouseland, for instance, a reader plans to single-handedly triple the number of hits on our site this month.
I was just informed that Plurp puts pop-up captions on all their pictures, so I was going over basically every issue I've read. Check out the caption on the picture of Mouse.
Now that's reader dedication! As a reward, we'll even give you a more precise link to that picture.
Closer to home, Ian attempts to escape ridicule.
Re: The popup text on images in Plurp
I am, of course, aware of your FAQ answer on the subject of 'your web page doesn't look right in my browser'.
However, I feel duty bound to point out that many modern browsers don't display the 'alt text' (the text contained within the alt="" attribute) as a popup tip. This is not unreasonable, as ALT is intended to signify 'alternate' text, for use when the image cannot be displayed.
In modern browsers (that is to say, not Netscape 4), you will experience better success with the title="" attribute. 'Course, I don't expect Plurp to actually change its layout or tags in any way (that would be quite the shocker), but there it is anyway.
{inw}
Therein lies a sad tale. We're still using the gnarled and frightening Netscape Communicator 4.7 as the WYSI(A)WYG editor for creating Plurp. We tried, some months ago, to at least update to the latest version, but the latest version is (argh!) not upwards compatible with 4.7. Even viewing our pages in the editor of the latest version is horrifying. This meant that we could either (a) do nothing, or (b) convert all of our pages, largely by hand, to the new editor.
Guess which we chose. Yeah, we know we'll have to do something about that some day. But not today.
Not content to leave not enough alone, Ian then asks:
What's in the bag?
What's in the bag? What's in the bag? Why do we spend all this time on the hover-help if nobody reads it? Sheesh.

Blab. A reader reveals a pair of secrets that have been kept under wraps since ancient Grecian times.
The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.
To tell you the truth, we're getting a bit tired of secrets these days. Ya know?

Blab. We love our readers.
Buzz Aldrin punches moon conspiracy theorist
It sounds like the name of a band, doesn't it? Yeah, man, I'm the drummer for Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon Conspiracy Theorist. Well, OK, maybe not.

Blab. There's something about friend Ed. He'll make the most outrageous claims, things that couldn't possibly be true, like birds only sleep with half their brain at a time. Then he'll insist its true, his lips curling into a little smile that absolutely convinces us that he's pulling our leg. We'll call him a teller of tall tales, right there in public.
Then he sends stuff like this.
[link]
[link]
We always fall for it.

Plurp. Susan Sontag, an admitted novelist, writes in the NYT:
America has every right to hunt down the perpetrators of these crimes and their accomplices. But this determination is not necessarily a way. Limited, focused military engagements do not translate into "wartime" at home. There are better ways to check America's enemies, less destructive of constitutional rights and of international agreements that serve the public interest of all, than continuing to invoke the dangerous, lobotomizing notion of endless war.
That's what happened. Dubya's notion lobotomized him.

Plurp. Writing in the NYT last Tuesday, Pulitzer-winning columnist Nicholas D. Kristof says:
When I lived in Beijing years ago, I once bitterly remonstrated to a Communist Party official about the detention of a dissident friend, Ren Wanding, the bravest man I've ever known. "If America were threatened by chaos and instability," the Chinese official replied contemptuously, "then it would do the same."
I scoffed. But today, while I exult in the heroism of the last year, while I admire President Bush's response in the first few months after 9/11, one thing bothers me just a bit: a sense that perhaps we've reacted in such a way that that Chinese official is feeling vindicated.
Just a bit.

Plurp.

Plop. On the evening of Sept. 10, fed up with 9-11iana, we watched Big Brother, a TV show in which wealthy, shallow, vain, trivial, spoiled Americans conspire against each other for who can stab whom in the back at the right time to earn some paltry amount of money.
And the whole time we thought, What would the Iraqi people, or the Afghani people, or the Palestinian people, conclude about America from watching this?

Plop. So, here's the deal. All you people out there who are using the term Ground Hero? Stop it. It's gross. Really.

Plurp. Dubya says that we should all go back to our normal lives. As long as we sleep in secure, undisclosed locations. And have armed, anti-missile defenses around our houses.
Umkay.

Rant.
I. Am. So. Angry! I am angry at the terrorists, obviously, for their insane, destructive acts. I am angry at the media, for their trivial pandering. I am angry at myself, for being so powerless in the midst of it all.
But, most of all, I am angry at the country in which I have grown up, in which I have spent my life, and to which, in an important sense, I have dedicated my life.
I grew up in the 50s. Yeah, that was a long time ago. It was a time of simplicity, in certain respects. There were no wars (though the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present; we were the duck and cover generation). It was a time of the ascendancy of science and technology, of reason, of progress, of building a new world.
I grew up in the 60s. I was white in an age when blacks were being hosed, and beaten, and arrested, and shot just because they were black. I thought it was an aberration. After all, we went to moon, the greatest accomplishment in the history of humanity.
I grew up in the 70s, after Johnson decided that it would be a great idea to shred tens of thousands of young men in that hopeless war, and Nixon decided it would be a great idea to shred me.
But not ever, in all of that, did I feel the disgust that I feel today. The country has a president that has no bleeding idea what he is doing. He could not pass the qualifying exam for village idiot, much less that for the leader of a superpower. He thinks he's President For Life. He thinks he doesn't need the approval of the U.N., of his allies, of the Congress, of the judiciary, of the people, of you. He thinks he can engage in kidnapping and imprisonment and marauding and butchery just because he says so.
But that's not why I am angry. I am angry because you let him do it. More, I am angry because you support him, support his stupidity, his dictatorial mauling of your rights, of your freedoms.
What's wrong with you? Do you sit there, drooling at your TV, figuring it'll all be just fine? After all, Taco Bell is still open late.
I am disgusted with you.
You were supposed to be the people of whom the government, by whom the government, and for whom the government, was constituted. You were supposed to be the people who held these truths to be self-evident.
When did you lose your way?

Plurp.
The blue dog
was quite impressed with the
production values of the War on
Terror

Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Plurp. Now what?

Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Blab. A reader currently residing in the newest country to join the U.N. writes:
It's nice to see a bit of good swiss engineering on your website (Sunday). From the fotos you can't even see it falling apart! - Morton
You mean that the 59th Street Bridge tram was made by a Swiss company? Sure enough, it was! (Lots of other tramania facts there too, for all you tramaniacs out there.)

Blab. Another Treasured Reader writes:
I have nothing valuable to say
You've come to the right place.

Blab. Speaking of search terms (which we haven't yet, but we will), a reader gets out the bongos.
booga booga hey baby
No, that was way back then.

Blab. A reader asks a trick question.
Simonya Schmonya -- the real question is just where do you stand on something really important? Which Miss North Carolina is the real Miss North Carolina?
Why, neither of them, of course. None of those women are real.

Yo. Those of you who do not subscribe to Pay-Per-Plurp (which is updated regularly at noon every day with much more scintillating content than the detritus you endure here), you can at least find out when we deign to give you an update via Blogarithm. (rebecca)
If, that is, you care to give them your precious, spam-free email address.

Plurp. It has come to our attention that some of you Treasured Readers are unaware that, by holding your little mousy cursor over a picture that you see here in Plurp, a small box appears containing enigmatic words. In some cases, these words serve to comment upon (or complete the meaning of) the picture (or something else). In other cases, they are presented as puzzles (or hints) to the wary reader. In yet others, they have no apparent meaning at all (or do they?).
But they do appear. And at least half of the time we spend writing Plurp is spent carefully composing these subtle phrases. So if you're not reading them, you're just not getting what Plurp is all about.
Go on. Try it.

Yo. Most popular search term used in Plurp's own search engine this past week?
mouse naked pictures
Oddest search term this past week?
arsenic poisoning pictures
Readers fascinated with arsenic poisoning pictures should look here instead. (Note: Not for the faint of anything.)

Yak.
We're canceling the status meeting today because you guys are in the middle of doing lots of productive stuff.
You mean the more we do productive stuff the fewer meetings we have to come to?
Absolutely. What do you think the purpose of meetings is?
Punishment?
Zackly.

Plurp. Last night, we did something that we seldom do. Helen wanted to watch Yet Another Analysis of the structural collapse of the WTC, Yet Another Interview with the people who Almost Died But Didn't, and Yet Another Tribute to those who died horribly.
We just couldn't take it.
So Helen went into the bedroom, where she watched all of the canonical media mayhem. Us? We relaxed in the living room, watching Predator, in which a small, murderous team of mercenary soldiers confronts an alien evildoer and is pretty much torn to pieces.
But, you see, it's fiction. Fiction. It's just fiction. OK?

Plop. Under the chair in our bedroom is a bag. The bag has been there for almost a year now.

How Life Has Changed

Yow. A brilliant analysis of the strategic positions of the U.S. and Iraq in what seems inevitably to be the upcoming war.

Plop. It has become clear that Dubya just doesn't have evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that Iraq has any intent to attack anybody. He just doesn't have evidence linking Iraq with Al Qaeda. And he just doesn't understand that world leaders object to the U.S. attacking Iraq unilaterally because of the precedent it sets.
Dubya may be quite the partygoer, but he just doesn't know how to be president.

Plop. This is all just extraordinarily bad.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had been there for
over a year now

Monday, September 9, 2002
Blab. Long before 9-11, this reader was already disillusioned with the U.S. government.
I already knew all those things.
We have such knowledgeable readers!

Blab. A refreshingly confused reader types the following into that teeny Blab box.
SIMONYA POPOVA
No doubt our Treasured Reader confused it for the search box, as Treasured Readers who find Plurp by searching for Simonya Popova (or Simonya Popova picture, or Simonya Popova pictures) are an increasing minority, and show up as a substantial contribution to our Web traffic these days.
We wonder what would happen if we mentioned Simonya Popova nude, or naked pictures of Simonya Popova, or Simonya Popova naked pictures, or maybe Simonya Popova sex?
Yeah, prolly nothing.
Those of you actually looking for the picture of Simonya Popova would be well served to look here.

Blab. A reader with a fledgling (and therefore doomed) anti-virus company sends us an offer almost too good to refuse.
Hello Steve,
is it possible, that we can trade computer security stuff related informations ? You can take a look at my (PRIVATE!) Homepage.
--
Best regards,
Gladiator (michael)
Possible? Sure, it's possible. Monkeys could come flying out of all of our orifices at once. That's possible.
Oh. Come to think of it, that's actually not possible. Sorry.

Blab. A reader decides that our beliefs are strange.
You seem to have this strange belief in "rights." The documents you most often cite in conjunction with this strange belief were written by people who believed in rights that were endowed upon us by God. I doubt that you share that assessment.
Perhaps you think that we should follow the rules. And yet, legislation is routinely passed that limits the "rights" spelled out in the meta-rules. The 2nd amendment right is severely curtailed, for example, and the 10th amendment is now nothing but a bad joke.
What are these "rights" you keep going on about? Or is it just a rhetorical device?
It's just a rhetorical device. Like consciousness. Or free will.

Blab. A reader refers to last year.
It's almost the Plurp anniversary again. I know it's also the anniversary of other stuff too, but I still remember that we didn't get to (ok, just didn't, because we were otherwise occupied) play the Plurp quiz/game. I know I will be thinking of other things on the day, but it would be fun to try the scavenger hunt (yeah, that's what it was) again. Don't you think?
Last year, on Sept. 11, we had posted Plurp just after midnight. It being the first anniversary of the day we started writing our blog (though not the day we first posted it), we posted an anniversary scavenger hunt.
Then the planes hit.
It's affected all of us differently. True to form, we have studied, as learning about things makes us feel in control. We now know more than we ever thought there was to know about Mideast politics, U.S. military strategy and tactics, military weapons and operations, and the many rumors about What's Going On. Helen has rehearsed the event itself, over and over, reading the NYT obituaries of each and every one of the victims, watching every TV report and special having to do with the WTC. We cannot bear to do so.
We don't know what we're going to do this Wednesday. It's a good bet that we're not hosting a scavenger hunt.
What are you doing to do?

Yo. Today we stumbled across the interesting Sunshine Project, which gathers information about government-developed chemical and biological weapons. News to us was the development of "calmative agents" to chemically incapacitate folks in various kinds of urban conflict. Did we mention that this is the U.S. government?

Plop. Those of you who have real computers with real graphics cards can tell us how much fun it is to kill people in the U.S. Army's new ~~recruiting propaganda~~ game. The screenshots look great. Naturally, our stupid PC chokes and dies when we try to run it.
Hey, if anyone should know about first-person shooters, it's the army, right?

Yow. Ian finds for us the disturbing and heartrending Exhibit 13 by Blue Man Group, of which we are a member.
Spend some time with it.

Yow. But it's not all somber doom out there. No, siree! Why, Helen her own self is still ...
Happy as pie.
And aren't you glad about that?

Yo. In other late breaking news, we have a large black bee that's been buzzing around one particular plant on the terrace for days now. That's silly, we said to Helen. Solitary bees aren't territorial.
Well, turns out they are. Some of them anyway.
Betcha didn't know that!

Plurp. There is a school of philosophical thought on the problem of consciousness that says that there is nothing unique about brains when it comes to consciousness. This school, typified by David Chalmers, posits a conscious nature to all matter.
Brains are matter arranged in a particular order so as to be very noticeably conscious. But they are not alone. Computers are somewhat conscious. Even a lowly thermostat has a certain degree of consciousness.
In this way of thinking, even a stone is conscious, though so dimly that it might be impossible to tell.
What, then, of common mechanical devices?
What does the urinal think at the end of a long day? My, what a good job I did today? Or a Coke machine that just sold out? Or a hedge trimmer that's just finished neatening up Versailles?
Maybe they don't think, or not in words anyway, language being a rather advanced form of cognition. Maybe there's just the warm, diffuse glow of a job well done.

Plurp.
The blue dog
auditioned for a part in
Exhibit 13

Sunday, September 8, 2002
Plurp.

Top

Earlier entries Later entries