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2002.12.22 : 2002.12.28
Saturday, December 27, 2002
Blab. Our amusement yesterday at the Clonaid wackos
having allegedly cloned a human inspired a reader to write us. Imagine
that!
Why is it that a group that
believes we came from space alien scientists and wants to clone humans
can be safely called wackos, but a group that believes humans poofed out
of nowhere, face eternal punishment for their great, great, great, etc.
grandfather having eaten an apple, can only avoid that punishment by engaging
in ritualistic canibalism, AND whose officials molest little childern,
can't be thus referred to without being accused of being a bigot?
Burning, talking bush atop Mount Sinai...
Four-foot space alien atop a volcano in southern France... it's all the
same to me.
The difference, we would guess, is in the numbers. Christianity, we learned
today and much to our surprise, has by
far more adherents than any other religion in the world. The Raelians
probably don't. Unpopular beliefs of any kind are always more easily labeled
as wackoism than beliefs with zillions of adherents, no matter how wacko.
Not to be outdone, the
Vatican checks in with this reaction to the announcement of cloning
by Clonaid.
"The announcement itself
is the expression of a brutal mentality that lacks any kind of human and
ethical consideration."
He who lives in glass cathedrals, eh?
Blab. It looks to us like one of those fanatic GNE
players dropped by our humble blog, probably because the GNE site has been
down for almost a whole day now (argh!).
and so thus evaporates the
chimera of the chicken squeezer...
So, uh ... this is hard to explain. See, there are chickens in the
GNE world that you can buy.  One
of the things you can do with them is squeeze them. Hey - it's not what
you think! Squeezing a chicken produces a couple of eggs, which can then
be consumed (yum), dropped (splat), or colored (resulting in droppable
but poisonous colored eggs). And we are known for giving chickens as gifts,
and for leaving colored eggs here and there.
Now that that's cleared up, we reproduce a posting by another player
to Paper Lane, a GNE-inspired
discussion forum.
[Inspoetica tarred and feathered
a Plurp]
energy -200: That Plurp was massive!
mood +10: Now that it's been feathered,
the Plurp resembles nothing so much as an... enormous chicken?
karma +10: The Plurp stretches its
new wings and flaps away towards the Burplands.
Now this is really inbred. We're not even going to try.
Plurp. At a departmental lunch, a week or so ago.
Are you going anywhere over
the holidays?
Yeah, I'm going to DisneyWorld.
Oh, you have kids.
No ...
You're going by yourself?
Of course not! I'm going with Helen.
So here we are, on the plane to Orlando along with a very large number
of other people who are probably going to DisneyWorld too. At least, judging
by the density of kids.
We often wonder about people that we encounter but do not actually meet.
The woman beside us on the plane, for instance. She is in her forties (though
her hair is still in its twenties), with a black cashmere sweater over
a Burberry blouse. She is carrying three pieces of reading material: allure
magazine, a large-print children's book entitled Who Was Albert Einstein?
(which she was reading a few minutes ago) and a tiny book with a plastic
cover whose identity we cannot make out, except to determine that it is
not a Bible. She is currently asleep behind a Burberry eye mask that matches
her blouse.
We tell ourself stories about who she might be, but none of them make
sense. It's that Einstein book that throws us.
Yow. We love Disney. What a well-managed company! Everyone is
competent and everyone goes out of their way to make everything possible
that any guest wants.
Then we called up tonight from our room, saying, We can't find brochures
that describe each of the parks. Initially, we were worried. Uh,
the nice guy said, I don't think we have those here.
What? It was the first time we had ever heard No from a Disney
employee. We thought, That's impossible! We thought, This place
is going to hell! We thought, Sell your stock!
We were all ready to blast them here in our immensely influential blog,
when there was a knock on our door. Here you go, said an unnaturally
happy guy, handing us brochures describing each of the parks.
We love Disney.
 Plurp.
And so evaporates
the chimera of the
blue dog
Friday, December 27, 2002
Blab. While we usually regard any noncontextual single-word
reader input as a matter of confusion between the Blab box and our
illustrious search facility, and hence avoid reproducing it here, we received
only a single piece of even potential reader input today, so we are forced
to publish it.
sarcasm
There you have it! Some desperately confused reader, perhaps our only remaining
reader, judging from the utter lack of recent reader input, is likely searching
for sarcasm on Plurp.
We can't imagine why.
Yo. In a remarkable turn of events, the first
human clone was allegedly created, not by stodgy Harvard biologists,
but by absolute wackos.
Three years ago, Raël,
the well-known spiritual leader of the Raelian Movement, the world's largest
UFO-related organization counting 55,000 people in 84 countries, founded
Clonaid, the first company offering to clone human beings.
"Cloning will enable mankind
to reach eternal life. The next step, like the Elohim do with their 25,000
years of scientific advance, will be to directly clone an adult person
without having to go through the growth process and to transfer memory
and personality in this person. Then, we wake up after death in a brand
new body just like after a good night sleep!"
Raël
CLONAID™ was founded in February 1997
by Raël who is the leader of the Raelian Movement, an international
religious organization which claims that life on Earth was created scientifically
through DNA and genetic engineering by a human extraterrestrial race whose
name, Elohim, is found in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated by the
word "God". The Raelian Movement also claims that Jesus was resurrected
through an advanced cloning technique performed by the Elohim.
Honest. That's what it says on their
home page. (It'll be hosed for a day or so, but you can see most of
it in the Google
cache.)
The Raelians are an interesting bunch.
We learn this from the
prestigious NYT:
Raëlians are followers
of Raël, a French-born former race-car driver who has said he met
a four-foot space alien atop a volcano in southern France in 1973 and went
aboard his ship, where he was entertained by voluptuous female robots and
learned that the first humans were created 25,000 years ago by space travelers
called Elohim, who cloned themselves.
We saw that movie. Oh, wait ... !
We love it that wackos are on the cutting edge. We do!
Plurp. This time, it's CNN adding to our collection of Important
Stuff.
Walk a delicate line
-
Walk a fine line
-
A delicate balance
This ... is CNN.
Plurp. If we had lots of reader input to respond to, we most
certainly would. But, failing that (ahem) we feel obliged to punish
our lazy readership by telling them about last night's dream.
Some years ago (this isn't the dream part - we'll let you know when
we get there), Helen discovered a Spot on our right shoulder that, when
stroked lightly, has an impressively somatropic effect on us, strong enough
to seem positively narcotic.
As we awoke this morning, Helen stroked our Spot and we, under her spell,
fell quickly back to sleep.
And in our sleep (here it comes), we dreamed.
I was in the fore of a light,
sleek boat, like a scull, but moved through the muddy water both with light
oars and punts. Someone behind me was stroking my Spot, and it felt sooo
good. The hills on either side of the river were lush green, the sun was
both bright and warm, and I could feel a slight breeze on my face. I let
my hand drag in the water, feeling it cool and streaming as we cut through
it, and closed my eyes to focus on how lovely it all was.
Tactile dreams are unusual.
We wonder if Helen's stroking of our Spot, and its incorporation into our
dream, made us more susceptible to tactile experience in our dream.
Readers who are expert brain physiologists or dream researchers are
invited to enlighten us.
Plurp.
The blue dog
had not stopped scratching
for two days
Thursday, December 26, 2002
Blab. Our readers respond to that Happy Thingie thing.
What would you do? Hold hands
and sing Kumbaya? Damn hippies.
We might have sung Kumbaya once. A long time ago. We think.
We're sorry. Really we are. These days, we repent by listening to nothing
but Eminem on Winter Solstice.
Blab. On a somewhat more traditional note, a reader writes:
Happy holidays to you and
Helen and Him Whose Name Is Written in the Woodgrain of Elven Toys from
the North Pole.
Him Whose Name is Flushed With Hairballs appreciates your sentiments.
Blab. A reader turns misfortune into psychosis.
As demented as this sounds,
I was thinking about the 1 lump of coal that was
listed as being delivered to you by a Blue Santa Dog. Wouldn't coal
be useful in heating the home, especially with the storm that just blew
through? Why is coal considered such a bad thing to get?
I started to wonder if Santa's in the pocket of the oil industry, working
to put a bad slant on the coal business....
Vacations do strange things to me.
Luckily, we had a 1/2 cord of wood delivered just before the holidays!
Two straight days of a blazing fireplace, and the mantle is still radiating
heat!
- Felis Lynx
We are a big fan of fireplaces. We had one as a sprout, and developed an
unparalleled reputation for (somewhat controlled) pyromania. We restricted
ourself to wood, pretty much.
[We won't discuss potassium in water, phosphorus
over a bunsen burner or rockets made from paper towels soaked in a solution
of potassium nitrate. And we definitely won't talk about nitroglycerine
Those were after school projects, not strictly at home projects.
Ya know?]
But anyway! We could sit in front of a fireplace for days, stuffing quartered
logs into it and feeling the dry burning on the surface of our eyes.
These are some of our fondest memories. Kumbaya.
 Plurp.Him
Whose Name Echoes in the Mouth of Cthulhu got a Solstice present this
year: three catnip-stuffed
meeses from FatCat. He has
adopted them as his very own. We have named them Hickory, Dickory and Doc.
They are, each and several, His favorite stony companions and victims.
What more could a kitty want?
Plurp. There we were, all ready to indulge in Unbridled Consumerism,
all ready to Stoke the Engine of Capitalism, in short, all ready to Spend
Money in After Xmas Mania on a new DVD player (at which we are virgins)
and a new VCR (because our Sony recently decided to screw us).
So what did we do? Well, living in Manhattan, where everything you could
ever want is within two blocks (and that's pretty much literally true),
we went to the nearest Wiz, which is directly across the street.
We spent several entranced minutes watching LotR:FotR on several dozen
huge plasma and smaller LCD displays. This technology is coming along nicely,
and doesn't need any help from us, so we moved on to our Ultimate Objective.
We found a single 6' set of shelves, off in a cramped corner, with all
of the DVD players and VCRs that they had. Each had a price indicated,
but no retail price or model number, so there was no way to determine what
discount we might be getting and no way to do comparison shopping.
Worse, the selection was a random smattering of models from various
manufacturers and at random price-quality points. And sparse at that.
Undeterred, we made a decision!
Our decision is to buy from Amazon. Fneh, stupid understocked,
underinformed physical stores. Fneh!
Plurp.
The blue dog
wouldn't discuss
Potassium Kumbaya
Wednesday, December 25, 2002
Blab. A reader with a talent for irony, especially today,
writes:
The January to be Sanguinary!
The February to Make You Wary! A War Ad Hoc in Iraq! Sturm und Drang
in Pyongyang! Ooooonly in AMERICA!
Someone fire Rumsfield and hire Don
King.
Our theory is that Ronald Dumbsfeld is Don King.
Blab. We receive a note with the following intriguing subject
line.
wana meet to have sex tonight
????????????????????
Sadly, it turned out to be spam. For a second, there, we felt sure we had
the eye of a punctuation-mad nymphomaniac who never learned to spell.
Oh well. We can dream.
Plurp. So it's the magical day of the year today. Yep, it's the
Twenty-Fifth of December and, for reasons still not obvious to us, we slept
late, made Eggs Benedicto for brunch, opened gaily wrapped packages full
of Material Things, had Romantic Fondue for dinner, and watched the snow
pile up on the terrace (that latter for the very first time ever on a Twenty-Fifth
of December) while we played GNE with all the other addicts.
It's just as special as we remembered it. We hope it was for you, as
well.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't
remember it
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Blab. Yesterday, we asked you to vote on whether or
not the most recent Lord of the Rings was confusing in its panoply of characters
and subplots. You responded as predicted, first contradicting us ...
2. LoTR wasn't in the least
confusing
... then picking the obvious alternative ...
3. LotR:TTT canned beets.
... then ignoring the rules altogether.
4. LotR:TTT full of eels...
no, wait, elves!
This latter reader was, we're sorry to say, cast into the Gorge of Eternal
Peril. Hey - we don't make the rules.
Blab. A reader objects to a festive reader from yesterday.
"Merry Plurpmas"??
All of a sudden now you're a god?
Of course not! We are simply the mortal incarnation of a god. We're not
sure which one. We think it might be Clarence of Arimathea.
Blab. A reader sends us something that makes us scream on this
otherwise silent night.
Holiday Special V : Johnnie
Walker Red Lable + Medium Sheep
Not much sheep in that, now, is there?
We are not brave enough to decide if this is some kind of very strange
joke or (shudder) real. Readers braver than we are should tell
us.
Blab. Santa Meme Mixer visits us.
Delivery receipt:
Naughty: S. White -- 1 lump
coal
Nice: H.
White -- Candy Quorn
Note: Difficult clients due
to lack of chimney, slipping on hairball. Also, no milk and cookies
left out, and no human sacrifice either.
Santa Chitleu
Let's see. That's Christian mythology, Plurp mythology, intimate
knowledge of our living circumstances, GNE expertise, Cthulhu mythos and,
of course, Mispelling Day.
We think this is a record.
Plurp. What are you searching for on Plurp? Oh, you know,
same old things.
-
naked pictures of helen
-
mia
-
muffler men
-
number of the beast
-
nun
-
thermobaric
-
backstage
-
binoculars
-
christmas
Plurp.
"Own
the entire rustic town of Bridgeville," invites the eBay listing.
But how do you wrap it?
Yo. You saw it on TV, now play
it on the Web!
At the end of the game, called
"Michael Jackson Baby Drop," players receive a score and a supposed evaluation
of their parenting skills.
Oh, go play.
You know you want to.
Plop. Dubya seems to think that he
who starts the most wars wins.
This just in: Wars are bad. So knock it off!
Yak.
Dubya just wants more bang
for your buck.
Plurp. So it's apparently not the December to Dismember. Looks
like that honor will belong to January, or maybe February.
Plurp.
The blue dog
noted that the U.S. could fight
and win two regional wars
at the same time
Monday, December 23, 2002
Blab. Although input from Treasured Readers has reached
an all-time low, no doubt to punish us for our frequent absences of late,
there is at least one jolly reader in the world who remembers what this
holiday season is all about.
Merry Plurpmas!
And a joyous midwinter solstice to us all.
Plurp. Katie Couric contributes to our
treasure trove this morning.
An equal playing field
-
Equal footing
-
A level playing field
Thanks, Katie!
Plurp. For those of our friends and family who are not reading
our blog, our annual letter will be in the analog mail to you shortly.
For those of you who, for reasons unknown, do read our blog, you
can read this year's annual letter here.
Plurp. More
answers ...
Q: What's ET short
for?
A: Because he's only got little
legs.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was not in a position
to discuss Maslow's hierarchy
of needs
Sunday, December 22, 2002
Blab. A reader sends us one of those things from the
"Internet". What are they called?
[link]
Yeah, that's it. This one's a Slashdot thread suggesting that the recent
rise in blogging is caused by the recent rise in unemployment in the high-tech
sector. Naturally, no evidence is given. After all, how could Slashdot
survive if random blather had to be backed up by evidence? We ask you.
Blab. A reader sets off on a quest.
I'm going to enjoy LoTR:
TTT tonight at the flix :)
We hope you do!
Blab. A reader much brighter than us writes:
"...with so many characters
and subplots that you either have it memorized beforehand or you're confused
through half the movie."
I have to disagree. It's been
over ten years since I read LOTR, and frankly I remembered virtually nothing
of it. Yet I wasn't confused at all by the movie.
We could lament that it's been over twenty-five years since we read The
Trilogy, and that we remember so little about it as to be meaningless.
But we won't.
Instead, we'll ask our readers! Reader are required to vote for one
of these options:
-
LotR:TTT had so many characters and subplots that it was confusing.
-
LotR:TTT wasn't a bit confusing.
-
LotR:TTT canned beets.
Vote now!
 Blab.
A reader frightens us.
For the Blue Dog with
love :)
It's been quite a long time since we've seen such a badly designed Web
site. And that music. That music! Where do you people find
this stuff?
Blab. A reader, while probably trying to search for something
incomprehensible on our site, nonetheless commits performance art.
Rosh hashona Graphics
We can only suggest to our Treasured Reader that it might be helpful to
spell
it correctly. Hey - it's just a suggestion.
Plurp.
The blue dog
visited each and every one
of the Top 100 Dog Sites
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