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2002.09.29 : 2002.10.05
Saturday, October 5, 2002
Blab. A reader gives us an assignment.
You have to read this
story. It answers the question: What happens if you mix dry ice with blue
toilet acid at 33000 ft. It's laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe that's why the
blue dog is blue.
Dorian
Oh, this all seems very improbable to us! We figure that airplane toilets
use disinfectants, not acid, as acid would dissolve the plumbing. And as
those of us who have played with the stuff know, two pounds of dry ice
thrown into water, even water containing blue disinfectant, does
not result in ...
a fluorescent blue waterfall,
a huge, heaving cascade of toilet fluid thrust waist-high into the air
and splashing into all four corners of the lavatory. [...]
The effect, though in our case on
a much grander scale, is similar to the mixing of baking soda with vinegar,
or dumping water into a Fryolator, an exciting experiment those of you
who've worked in restaurants have probably experienced [...].
We think Salon has had another leg pulled.
Now, if they'd like to talk about two pounds of potassium ...
Blab. Shocked by the story of frozen frogs coming back to life,
a reader loses track of what it actually intended to say and says this
instead.
Some of the important state
is short term state. People sometimes lose it, e.g. concussions, and they
are the same people they were before they acquired the lost state.
Yep, that's the difference between short term and long term memory. But
we thought that other brain processes also required active neural processing
in order to continue. Why else, we wonder, would the cessation of brain
activity signal certain death?
Blab. A second reader indulges in speciesism.
What's a frog got to remember
anyway?
What do any of us got to remember, anyway? Painting the universe with god's
own broad brush, what is brain death anyhow but a small phase transition
in information space, barely noticeable in the great opera of colliding
galaxies?
Blab. A reader suggests, very subtly and politely, that we don't
know what we're talking about.
Oddly enough, you only get
this
site on Google when you search for "Sir Thomas Moore."
Go figure.
L.
And indeed, the Sir
Thomas Moore that we alleged was actually existing was actually not,
whereas the Sir
Thomas More that we alleged did not, actually did.
They must have misspelled it in Classics Illustrated.
Blab. A reader reader suggests, neither subtly nor politely,
that ...
"George W. Bush is a big
poopy head!"
- Wilhelm Shakespar
Hey! He's not that big.
Blab. A reader from back in March
says:
Youra HUMDINGER
Thanksalot.
Blab. A reader lurches up to the microphone and says ...
Count me in on those mouse
naked pitures.
You're on the list.
Blab. That story about the blue-grey Libertoonian candidate just
won't die.
It's all a plot by anti-colloidal-silver
agents who have infiltrated the Libertarian party!
(CLEARLY this
is TRUE or else they wouldn't USE BOLD!)
The referenced article seeks to convince us that argyria, a graying of
the skin caused by ingesting silver, is only caused by chemically produced
silver, not electrically produced silver (which that site promotes). They
claim that there has not been a case of argyria since the 1900s.
Rosemary here might disagree.
Rant. Driving home last night, the lighted sign above the highway
said this:
3RD AVE BRIDGE
2 LANES CLOSED
UNTIL 2005
Imagine being alternately flayed with red-hot wires and nearly drowned
in hydrochloric acid every minute of every hour of every day for three
long years.
This is worse. Much worse.
As any double major in urban design and queuing theory will tell you,
highway systems in urban centers like NYC are provisioned so as to have
just barely enough capacity most of the time. Close half the lanes on one
of the three bridges that get you onto the east side of Manhattan and the
entire East Side becomes a lower rung of Hell.
But wait! There's more! There is a symmetric closing of lanes on the
Willis Ave. Bridge, which gets you out of Manhattan. Or used to.
That means that there is no way into, or out of, the East Side that
doesn't involve sitting in the midst of thousands of overheated and underbrained
SUV owners for an extra half hour or so every morning, and every evening,
for the next three years.
What - we ask you, what - could they possibly be doing to these
fricking bridges that takes three fricking years? They could paint
them with toothpicks and it would be over sooner. They could replace all
of the rivets at the rate of six a day and be done before that. They could
tear both bridges down and replace them with entirely new bridges and there
would be no excuse for it taking over six months, much less three fricking
years!
We're not sure why the Axis of Evil in New York City has chosen to threaten
our way of life like this. But two words kept running through our mind
as we sat in miles and miles of stop-and-go traffic last night: regime
change.
Yo. After that hellish commute, Chinese food. Helen's fortune:
Do not believe the instructions
of this fortune.
We suspect that this is the first instance of a category error in a fortune
cookie.
Yak.
You can't race sailboats;
they don't go fast enough.
Plurp. Remember when British
culture was important? Those were the days.
Yow.
"The second little pig, blow
his wooden house down (blink), going to the market... strong market...
(blink) the third pig had roast beef (blink) beef... the beef industry
(blink) (blink) (blink) our pigs must not stay in their straw homes."
Funniest thing
we've seen in quite some time, with or without the picture.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
spent puppyhood in
what is now a
lost state
Friday, October 4, 2002
Blab. A reader sends us a ...
"real" quote
The common folk do not go to war of
their own accord, but are driven to it by the madness of kings.
-- Sir Thomas More
Good stuff! This appears exactly
once in Google, and is indeed attributed to the famous Sir More (not
to be confused with Sir Less). Presumably, the author of this
learned sociology tract didn't want to attribute his made-up quote
to the actually-existing Sir Thomas Moore.
Blab. Perusing an oldish issue of Plurp,
a reader writes:
hey what up
Not your SAT English scores, that much we know for certain.
Blab. On that report of the Libertoonian
Party candidate who turned blue-grey as a result of drinking a silver solution,
a reader opines thusly.
Although I have certain libertarian
leanings, and sometimes vote for a Libertarian candidate, it's people like
Stan Jones who make me unlibertarianly not want to eliminate the FDA.
("Well, the FDA didn't stop Stan Jones,
did they?" I can already hear the die-hard libertarians reply.)
It's not clear to us that there's much the government can do to prevent
stupid people from drinking dangerous things they make themselves. But
that's OK. We think of it as Darwin In ActionTM.
Blab. Our Psychic Telepather turns up this.
Disturbing mental image:
Listening to the radio while driving
home from work, I heard an ad for some movie or other available on pay-per-view.
Roger Ebert, the announcer said, had given the movie three and a half stars.
As soon as I heard "Roger Ebert,"
my mind immediately supplied as the obvious continuation, "thumbs up."
The expected continuation and the actual continuation merged in my mind
to form "three and a half thumbs up," with the corresponding mental image
of three hands with thumbs pointed in the air, and a fourth in a similar
position, but with the thumb severed at the first knuckle and spouting
copious amounts of blood.
Eeww!
Here's what disturbs us about this report: We write a Weblog that has readers
like this.
Blab. A reader who is no doubt Ed,
since he was making wild claims like this at lunch today, sends us Documentary
Evidence.
It's been shown that some
frogs can dehydrate themselves, freeze solid, and go all winter without
a heartbeat or brain activity.
There is anecdotal evidence that living
frogs have been found inside rock. (Scientific American mentioned
this in 1853.) It's possible all these cases are mistakes or hoaxes. Believers
in frogs living inside rocks seem
fairly gullible -- they
never realize the 1865 story is a joke.
We have learned not to dispute Ed, no matter how improbable his pronouncements
seem.
But this is all quite puzzling to us. We've figured, for quite a while
now, that much of the important state in the brain is stored by means of
active processes in the brain. Stop neural activity in the brain (which
we presume must happen in frozen frogs) and you lose all that state. That's
why (we thought) that brain death was such a big deal - stop those processes
and you lose critical information within the brain itself, including how
to be conscious.
So how do frogs get around this? Eh?
Plurp. Another reason we became less interested in the initially
addictive Game Neverending is
the lack of a sense of progression. Sure, as you got wealthier you could
buy some stuff you couldn't afford before. As you got better at Making
things, you could Make things you couldn't Make before.
But they weren't better in any sense. They were just different.
You never reached a point where you could Make the Astonishing Shoelaces
of Flight and go zipping around the map in no time at all. You never found
the Big Hammer of Bashing that let you knock down some long-locked door
and get to some cool place that had always been denied to you. You just
got more random stuff.
And, after a while, getting more random stuff just wasn't interesting.
Plurp.
The blue dog
spent the entire
winter with no
measurable brain
activity
Thursday, October 3, 2002
Blab. A reader who really should get out more writes:
I liked getting frisked at
the airport. It isn't often the government takes such a hands-on approach
and, besides, I need the human contact.
dorian
Well, all righty then! Let's review ...
OTOH, let's not. Eewe.
Blab. A spammist writes:
Our topic-specific spiders
have suggested that your page or posting be included in the Oddzz/Casinozz
search engine, the world's largest information resource for sports, resort
and online gambling.
Must be our recent Enigmatic Images contest.
Blab. A fan writes:
i hate your life
That's OK. We hate your life. See below.
Blab. Jack writes:
All work and no plurp makes
Jack a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
All work and no plurp makes Jack
a dull boy
See below.
Plurp. The Game Neverending
receives the award for the game on which we burned out most quickly: a
mere five days from ignition to extinguishment. Here's the summary we've
sent to the game designers:
Subject: So long, and thanks
for all the fish 'n' chips
Thanks for the great game!  I
feel like I've done it all: examined the human genome, smuggled intellectual
property, made buckets full of lobster bisque, earned 1.5M shekels, acquired
a Superman cape. I even bought Caterina.
Congratulations on making such an
addictive game, and one so easy to get into, in Flash. Most Flash stuff
I've seen on the Web has been day old tripe. Yours is undoubtedly the most
expansive, most interactive Flash stuff I've seen.
I've played The Game NeverEnding like
a crack addict for five days now. But I think I'm pretty much done. Sure,
I've reached a plateau where there's nothing much new that happens. But
that's not it. Within the structure of the game itself, there's only so
much "Find A, buy B, make C" that I can undergo before it all seems the
same, and only so much "Exercising object X causes effect Y" before it
all seems bizarrely predictable, the physics of a mildly psychotic toon
universe.
The parts that I found particularly
interesting were the emergent phenomena. I dropped a printer in Civic Center,
not wanting to carry it around any more, and suggested that others could
use it, but should put it back when they were done. This evolved into people
dropping items they didn't need in Civic Center. Other people came along
and took what they wanted, resulting in Civic Center being a dumping ground
for things that no one wanted.
If there were Dumps that bought random
things at their salvage value, it's likely that a newbie-class business
of trash hauling would evolve. That would be cool.
Similarly, it was fun to found the
New Mystic Order of Bombadil, advocating that everyone read the fine autobiography
of Tom Bombadil.
Curiously, this caught on in the game culture. I wonder how long it will
live.
I imagine that you're planning to
give players the ability to own locations, to sponsor stores, and maybe
even to create new kinds of objects in the game. That would be cool. But
I'm not sure I would be fascinated by additional examples of "Find A, buy
B, make C".
Ultimately, I wonder how to go beyond
a Flash-based MUD. That might be because I've never found MUDs to be all
that compelling (except for their resemblance to chat rooms which, given
the right self-reinforcing culture, I have sometimes found interesting).
I look forward to what you do next.
So, you know, back to real life. Or whatever this is.
Plurp.
The blue dog
figured GNE was responsible for
Wednesday having slopped over into
Thursday
Wednesday, October 2, 2002
Blab. The third in our continuing series of Enigmatic
Images seems to have caused certain clinical reactions in our readership,
which are noted for future reference in laboratory publications.
The first of these is quite surprising.
Jesus-lookalike teaching
a girl to play golf?
Very nice! We hadn't thought of that.
Another reader must be Catholic (a surprising coincidence, about which
we will say more at a later date).
You're just trying to send
all of your readers to hell with this latest contest, aren't you?
I really have to wonder about the makers of those obj d'art, though....
Of course, I like the idea of each
person going to their own personal hell. I even have a real nice
one picked out for myself, although I'm sure it's not what the fundamentalists
would imagine.
- Felis Lynx
Finally, for today at least, a reader has an untestable theory.
Possibly your lack of reader
response is explained by the combination of religious imagery with that
of golfing implements. The alliance of those two singularly uninteresting
subjects being the reason that any possible reply would have had to break
the inertia caused by the mindnumbing boringness of the viewed object.
For instance, my own response, which was to scroll down, and on viewing
the image, fall instantly asleep.
I really was going to reply....zzzzz
-AJL
We're so pleased that you didn't.
Blab. A reader who follows every idiotic activity in which The
Babs engages writes:
If you follow that Caeser/Shakespear
hoax link you also find this
very curious page.
I never realized Barbra was so reactionary,
unpatriotic and ... intelligent. She must be a terrorist.
Well, that is a particularly frightening site. At least as frightening
is this account
of Babs being unable to spell Gebhardt or Barbara.
And, on that topic, another reader offers life direction.
Don't ever, ever, ever, ever,
ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, pass on information without checking Snopes
first. Not ever. Don't. No.
That sounds like such good advice, doesn't it? But it turns out
to be a hoax. Please make sure you let people know: Snopes is a humor site,
and the information they provide is not intended to be taken seriously.
Blab. A reader cautions us to ...
Beware the legions of Replicated
Felines!
Umkay ... ?
Blab. A reader who should know better writes:
Speaking of the Blue Dog
pounding Lazarus, My Friend Alan(tm) was so inspired by this
website (via Dave)
that he composed a happy little ditty, which you can find down the page
labeled "Song for Peace."
I had nothing to do with it.
L.
Warning to readers: Adult Themes Therein. Or, at least, Post-Pubescent
Themes Therein.
We have no opinion on L's participation in this activity.
Blab. A reader who thinks that life should come with a rulebook
writes:
Are you meant to read plurp
from top to bottom, or from the blue dog up?
You mean us personally? We are meant to read Plurp from the
inside out, the vowels first and only then the consonents, just the capital
letters as if they spell out a message from our handlers, upside-down and
interpreted as Farsi.
Why do you ask?
Plurp. Most popular search term from Plurp's own search
engine this past week?
"mouse naked pictures"
Way to go, mouse!
Plurp. It's one big happy family: me, Helen, Him Whose Name
Accumulates on the Bathroom Floor and, of course, Seymour.
Plop. It's our old stomping grounds, the Libertoonian
Party.
Montana's Libertarian candidate
for Senate has turned blue from drinking a silver solution that he believed
would protect him from disease.
Stan Jones,a 63-year-old business
consultant and part-time college instructor, said he started taking colloidal
silver in 1999 for fear that Y2K disruptions might lead to a shortage of
antibiotics.
He made his own concoction by electrically
charging a couple of silver wires in a glass of water.
His skin began turning blue-gray a
year ago.
Let's review. Nearly invisible, intellectually drained third party. Howard
Stern co-opted their NY gubenatorial campaign a couple of years ago (before
dropping out). Now the blue-gray man.
When do fright wigs and floppy shoes become required clothing?
Plurp.
The blue-grey dog
ran for political office
on a platform of
colloidal silver
Tuesday, October 1, 2002
Blab. What goes on inside your head when you wake up
in the middle of the night?
I have lyrics floating around
my head if I wake up in the night. They can intrige me greatly, an interesting
way to see what state of mind I am in. Last night I had 'Mary Moon.....
She's a vegetarian. She don't eat the meat but she sure like the bone.'
I wonder what that implies about my
mental state?
It frightens us to speculate. It also frightens us that we wake up with
the lyrics for The Dating Game going through our head.
Blab. A reader on the other side of the sanity line writes:
Just the last month, if I
suddenly wake in the middle of the night, I remember seeing a wolf,
on a skyline just sitting there looking at me occasionally. For some reason,
I know its waiting for me to do something with a mixture of mild expectancy
and hope and gentle interest. I've never had this sort of image (or any
image) haunting me before. Worse, I am not in the least, as I always would
have been before, interested in analysising this to death or trying to
understand the mechanisms. I have only one preocupation these days. What
does the bloody thing expect me to do? I don't know, I can't think of what
it might be and its driving me crazy!
We have had a similar experience. Honest! Our advice, for what it's worth,
is to ask the wolf what it wants. Really.
Blab. Responding to imaginary conversations, a reader writes:
Organic"..eating candy."
Sweeteners? Isn't that a code name for organic the last time I looked sugar?
We don't know. And don't call us sugar.
Blab. On the topic of that Ken Burns film on the Statue of Liberty,
a reader writes:
And as we watched Ken Burns'
film, we both wept. We wept for joy, for being alive here in NYC tonight,
and we wept for those who have no joy this evening in an all too harsh
world that our president continues a desire to devour humanity.
We think we'll avoid dinner clubs in D.C.
Blab. A reader suggests, in its own inappropriate way, an answer
to yesterday's question.
Antithesis of Prophesy =
BULLSH*T!
Two points. (1) Be nice. (2) It's not obvious to us why this is a good
name for an allegedly prophetic tract written after the fact.
But what do we know?
Blab. A reader sends us a blind ...
[linkie
dinkie]
Can someone tell us what this is
about? 'Cause we're clearly too stupid to figure it out.
Blab. Oh dear. Yesterday's Enigmatic Image seems to have thrown
our meager readership into a coma, as we only got this one response.
Today's Enigmatic Image makes
me wonder if that Communications Decency Act maybe wasn't such a bad idea
after all.
Now we don't mean to criticize this response. Far from it! As the only
response to date, we cherish it as we cherish our own left foot. Still,
we are concerned that all of our other readers may have been struck dumb,
or maybe dumber. What else could explain their lack of response?
Blab. A reader checks up on us.
Ezra Pound? OK, I'm
probably not the first to point this out. Google
is your friend.
Emma Lazarus, Ezra Pound. Pretty much the same, right?
Blab. On the topic of that oddly inconsistent story about weapons
grade uranium seized in Turkey, a reader writes:
"But Muzaffer Dilek, the
mayor of Sanliurfa, a Turkish city near the Turkey-Syria border, said Sunday
that the material amounted to only 140 grams -- about five ounces."
"We predict that the models of 2040
will weigh less than three ounces."
Meme-mixing...too obvious...must resist...
Thank you for the report. We're adjusting the mind control lasers now.
Please relax.
Blab. Another reader writes:
"primarily
youranuom"
Clearly this was a failed conspiracy
perpetrated by George W. (without approval or spell checking from his grown-up
handlers) to justify the war against the guy who tried to kill his daddy.
He's got grown up handlers? That comes as quite a surprise to us, given
the many things we've seem him do in public. We figured his handlers were
chimpanzees with a taste for the absurd. Anyhow, the article says:
Turkish scientists said on
Tuesday the substance at the center of a nuclear weapons scare was not
uranium and that the material seized in the south of the country posed
no threat.
Turkish police said over the weekend
they had seized 33 lbs of weapons-grade uranium in a taxi about 155 miles
from the border with Iraq, facing possible U.S. military action over its
alleged program of weapons of mass destruction.
Officials said later the amount had
in fact been about five ounces. The difference was explained by the weight
of the metal container holding the material.
Scientists at Turkey's Nuclear Research
and Training Center on the outskirts of Istanbul said on Tuesday the substance
was not uranium and was not radioactive.
"It is a powder of zinc, manganese,
iron and zirconium," Guler Koksal, director of the research facility told
Reuters. "It is not radioactive, it is not chemical and it is not explosive."
Suspicions had been aroused by the
words "primarily youranuom" written on the outside of the metal tube in
which the sandy powder was stored in a glass vial.
Oh dear. What are we to believe? 33 pounds? Five ounces? Uranium? Nothing
like that? Somebody smuggling zinc in a taxi?
Like we said, chimpanzees with a taste for the absurd. Impressive disinformation,
if nothing else!
Blab. God writes:
universe only grant wish
"interesting"
This explains why we've never been able to compose,
draw, write or be beautiful. God is illiterate.
Plurp.
The blue dog,
while dreaming,
pounded Lazarus.
Monday, September 30, 2002
Blab. A reader commits anonymous self-referential irony.
Right here in public.
Beware the leader who bangs
the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic ferver,
for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood,
just as it narrows the mind... And when the drums of war have reached a
fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind is closed, the leader
will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry,
infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their
rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what
I have done. And I am Caeser.
-- William Shakespeare
Such irony! Such power! Such relevance!
Too bad it's a hoax.
It seems to have appeared on the Internet in late 2001, after Certain Events.
There must be a term for something like this that is the antithesis of
prophecy. Do our readers know
what it is?
Blab. On the topic of that Turkish uranium-smuggling story whose
facts seem to keep changing, a whacked-out conspiracy theorist writes:
The timing of this event
is suspicious, to say the least, considering that Congress is now negotiating
how to allow Dubya to wage war on Iraq.
After all, how hard would it be for
Amerika's extensive intelligence machine to arrange this sort of thing?
Get a couple of guys, give them a miniscule amount of material, pick them
up, have one's stooges "exaggerate" the amount of material, arrange for
the couple of guys to be released so they can disappear -- or be disappeared
-- before they can be questioned by anyone even pretending to be impartial.
Of course, that sounds far too much
like a wacked-out conspiracy theory, and I hate wacked-out conspiracy theories.
L.
It is an interesting problem these days, don't you think, in whom and what
to believe?
Blab. Discovery a sure way to get a link from us, a reader writes:
Interesting Site... We wanted
to share it with our audience. We're Seven
Wonders, one of the Web's longest running Web Award sites, and we selected
your site as the Humor and the Unusual Site of the Week on September 30.
We also have an
award icon, if you'd like to put a badge on your page.
Nice job, and thanks for making the
Web a more interesting place to visit.  We've
been highlighting sites for over six years now, and we know your site will
be appreciated to our visitors.
Again, thanks!
Wayne Kessler
Seven Wonders
We'd like to thank Mr. Kessler and the Academy. In accepting this award
for "The greatest web site name on the planet," we humbly join the likes
of Dr. Phil and The
Homeless Guy in "making the Web a more interesting place to visit."
Plurp. We watched a Ken Burns program about the Statue
of Liberty on PBS tonight.
Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of Independence):
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Paul Simon (American Tune):
And I dreamed I was dying.
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly,
and looking back down at me, smiled
reassuringly.
And I dreamed I was flying,
and high up above my eyes could clearly
see
the Statue of Liberty sailing away
to sea.
And I dreamed I was flying.
And we come on the ship they call
the Mayflower.
We come on the ship that sailed the
moon.
We come in the age's most uncertain
hours,
and sing an American tune.
Oh, and it's all right, it's all
right,
it's all right.
You can't be forever blessed.
Still tomorrow's gonna be another
working day
and I'm tryin' to get some rest;
that's all - I'm trying to get some
rest.
Ezra Pound (The New Colossus):
 Not
like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from
land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates
shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose
flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and
her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild
eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin
cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied
pomp! " Cries she,
With silent lips. "Give me your tired,
your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed
to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door."
Robin Williams (Moscow on the Hudson):
You know what I like about
this place? Everybody from someplace else!
Plurp. We hope you all had a good weekend, and that you all have
broadband access, as we continue last week's
Enigmatic Images contest, asking you somehow to explain
today's puzzling scene.
Good luck.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was once a monumental marble sculpture
dedicated to various wars and politicians
and generations of mindless bureaucrats
Sunday, September 29, 2002
 Blab.
A reader wonders out loud:
Now doesn't this take
all the FUN out of eating candy?
Maybe it's just us. After all, we're certainly no marketing genius. It's
not at all unusual for us to stare in slack-jawed confusion at the latest
advertising gimmick or PR campaign.
We must admit, however, that this is outside of the usual territory
in which candy is advertised.
Blab. A reader transcends both context and meaning with this
enigmatic phrase.
go fishie go
We cannot imagine.
Blab. A reader tells us what's going through its mind when it
wakes up in the middle of the night.
Generally words, and even
more often words if you include fragments of computer programs as words,
and when not actually words it's usually designs for words, ideas about
words, structures onto which words could be hung. Sometimes, of course,
it's just pr0n.
One reader heard from. How about the
rest of you?
Blab. Another one of our many groupies sings to us.
You're beautiful to me.
Despite the tawdry context of this remark, we do appreciate it. Really,
we do.
Plurp. Shaolin
monks fight to preserve their trademark. Our advice: don't mess with
these guys.
Yow. Speaking of which, Blade
II. Martial arts, violent weapons, the end of life as we know it,
Wesley Snipes, vampires. Exploding vampires! What's not to like?
Plurp. We got our password for The
Game Neverending. This is a mixed blessing. It's kinda fun, being a
Web-based MMPG (though it's still in alpha right now, and not very Massive)
focusing on finding stuff in various locations, making things, and social
interactions. OTOH, we got to bed at 2:30 this morning because of it. Groan.
Plurp. Someone explain this
to us.
Turkish officials announced
Saturday they had seized a box filled with nearly 35 pounds (15 kilograms)
of uranium. But Muzaffer Dilek, the mayor of Sanliurfa, a Turkish city
near the Turkey-Syria border, said Sunday that the material amounted to
only 140 grams -- about five ounces.
The two men arrested with the material
were released due to lack of evidence and have since disappeared, Dilek
said.
How odd. The amount of weapons-grade uranium (if it's even weapons grade)
is now claimed to be only 1% of what was reported yesterday and, despite
the gravity of the crime, the folks who were transporting it were released
and disappeared.
Now, call us foolish, but something seems wrong about this. The question
is: What actually went on here?
Plop. Anorexia
plurposa.
Twiggy, the skinny British
model who came to epitomise the 1960s, [said] she felt short and fat next
to the new generation of models.
We predict that the models of 2040 will weigh less than three ounces.
Plurp. For you terrorists still intent on hijacking planes in
the U.S., we do not recommend embedding your weapons in bars
of soap that you intend to carry on the airplane. Because, well, that's
incredibly stupid. And you have to spend the whole flight in the bathrooms
trying to get them out.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a beautiful,
exploding
trademark
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