Plurp: New year, old attitude

Bigger!

2003.01.05 : 2003.01.11

Saturday, January 11, 2003
Blab. A reader who seems to know all sort of things about that quaint analog mail thing writes:
Stamps are a scam. You pay the Post Office however much they deem it costs to mail a letter at that time and they give you a stamp. Later, when they raise the price of postage, you can't use that stamp alone anymore and have to add additional stamps to make the total come out to the current rate. But, you already paid for the service! The stamp is merely a receipt for a transaction - a transaction that they haven't fulfilled yet. If I buy a stamp, the Post Office owes me one letter delivered, no matter what the current cost may be. Asking for additional money from me is extortion.
Sue 'em, we say.

Blab. If let out of its squalid little quarters for very long, this philatelic reader would make very complex stamps.
Obviously, homeless Catholic terrorist priests with famous tongues and exotic skin parasites using canned beets as weapons of mass destruction. Although I think Grenada might have already done that one.
Check the lock on that door, will you?

Blab. Let's go to our third contestant. If you ran the U.S. Postal Service, what kind of stamps would you issue?
Angelina Jolie stamps!
- Felis Lynx
That's the spirit! There's hope for analog mail yet.

Blab. A reader cracks the enigma of this week's enigmatic images.
While Ann distracted Willard with the Gloves With Pom-poms For Finger Tips Designed To Amuse Cats And Senile Weathermen™ (as seen on TV), Matt and Al bound his wrists and ankles with straps while Katie moved in with the cork screw to perform the emergency lobotomy.
And about time, too!

Blab. Having established that it did not understand what the word entitled means, a reader engages in furious retrograde peddling.
You use second definitions? Why? And when leaving off the "en-" would produce an equally effective word? Were it not for the great respect I bear you , I would herewith cry "Silly!"
Well, it's a funny thing about words. They mean things. Sometimes, they mean multiple things, depending on context. Sometimes, two words mean the same, or similar, things. It is this non-identical similarity of alternate words that gives human language its subtlety. And we think we're entitled to take advantage of that subtlety, just as our Treasured Reader is entitled to use the pretentious herewith when leaving it out entirely would have been equally effective.
If you're still interested in complaining about the legitimate use of "second" definitions, we recommend speaking to all of the evil companies that make dictionaries, which record the common usage of such words in the global population. And do let us know how you're doing, won't you?

Blab. A reader admits its plans for world domination.
Maybe I am taking over. I publish more stuff here than on my own blog.
L.
Heck, you publish more stuff here that we do.

Plurp. We have recently received dozens of pieces of spam containing offers to enlarge a certain part of our body. We are considering accepting all of these offers simultaneously, just to see what might result. So, if you hear stories of certain fantastic events in Manhattan, ...

Plurp.
The blue dog
would make
bacon-flavored
stamps

Friday, January 10, 2003
Blab. At long last, a reader offers conclusive proof.
Notice how Bush is always carrying around that black Scotty dog named Barney? Conclusive proof our nation is run by the Freemasons!
We always suspected that dog.

Blab. Our obsessed reader becomes forgetful.
Ann Curry is a Perfectly Normal Household Item? Oh, man, forget about Katie Couric.
L.
We're happy to have participated in supplanting one obsession with another.

Blab. Many of our valued correspondents are convinced that we can read their thoughts, so they need not tell us what they are talking about. Usually, that's true, of course. But this week the Morolians are jamming our Orbital Telepathy Platform, which they do on occasion, so we must rely on our Treasured Readers to provide context for their many complaints. Unfortunately, we did not get this message out in time.
If it's not an inside joke, then it's not a joke, huh? Well then quit sending out that obscure crap.
You see? If only we knew what it meant.

Blab. A peeved reader dumps on us for reasons that we seem unable to comprehend.
It appears you've updated plurp this MORNING.
Ahem, sir. We have expectations. They were violated. The picture and I are annoyed. Your window of expected updates is between 5 and 7 pm (which never happens) so we wait impatiently until 11pm (think of yer site as the evening news). However you've posted in the MORNING. Now whatever will we do with the rest of our day? All that's left is listening to the angry head bees.
Dorian
As always, you and the angry head bees are advised to either (a) become an even more valued reader by signing up for Pay-Per-Plurp, whose issues are posted religiously at noon each day, or (b) abandon your expectations. Or both. Both would be fine.

Blab. A peeved reader dumps on us for reasons that we seem unable to comprehend.
I don't think "entitle" means what you think it means. We've all got our peeves.
What do you think we think it means? The second definition in your referenced dictionary is:
2. To give a name or title to: baptize, call, christen, denominate, designate, dub, name, style, term, title.
We added the emphasis. But isn't that the sense in which we used it? Oh, we are so confused!

Blab. A reader sounds the alarm.
L. is taking over! E.
As is, apparently, the disease of abbreviated pseudonyms.

Blab. A reader delivers a stinging rebuke. Maybe even two.
You write younger then you look Steve.
So, either we look awfully old, or our writing is awfully juvenile.
We are forced to agree.

Plurp. Helen drew our attention tonight to a stamp catalog from that bastion of culture, the U.S. Postal Service. In it, we find Andy Warhol stamps, obscure writer stamps, American bat stamps, and many, many more.
This got us to wondering: If we ran the U.S. Postal Service, what kind of stamps would we issue? Here are some possibilities.

Catholic priests in the news

Homeless people

Imaginary terrorists (ala the recent Fictional Five)

Famous tongues

Exotic skin parasites

Weapons of mass destruction

Canned beets

So ... do we get the job? Or do our readers have even better ideas?

Plurp. We humbly present the final enigmatic image in this week's series of Perfectly Normal Household Items. Thank you for your attention.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was not a perfectly
normal household
item

Thursday, January 9, 2003
Blab. Reader L. seems unable to get a certain image out of its head.
Al Roker is a Perfectly Normal Household Item? Um . . . .
I wonder what Katie Couric could do with this red ball if she were naked?
L.
Al Roker is part of the NBC family, which is invited into the homes of right-thinking Americans every morning. As to that other thing, shame on you!

Blab. A fan of Ann Curry writes:
Will you just get to the pictures of Ann Curry already!
Goodness! A bit impatient this morning, aren't we?
All in good time, Treasured Reader.

Blab. Following our confession yesterday that we've found out way too much personal information about people on the Web, a reader writes:
Dr. Plurp, have you ever published a list of personal database sites (like anybirthday.com) so we innocents could check them out & remove our info? If so, MAVA missed it and would be ever so grateful if you posted it again.
No, we haven't. Apart from our well-known laziness, the main reason is that there are thousands of them, and more all the time. We suspect that this comes as a distressing shock to many of you, but it is definitely the case that a good deal of information about you is easily available to absolutely anyone.
Our advice is: Decide to be a digital exhibitionist. You're exposed in all your glory on the Web anyway. You may as well enjoy it.

Blab. On the subject of digital exhibitionism, a reader wonders stuff.
So, do you look at our IP addresses when we post?
Good heavens, no! Way too much trouble, and pretty much beyond our meager technical abilities anyway. If you don't identify yourself in your submission, we have no idea who you are. It's a very odd form of communication, but that's the way it is.

Blab. A geek of remarkable breadth and depth checks in with this.
The misunderstanding and unrealized potential of Star Trek technology is a geek topic of remarkable breadth and depth.
Take the transporter, for example. It would make a marvelous weapon, but it's never used that way. "Geordi, beam big chunks of that ship's hull structure away and see if it collapses in on itself." "Geordi, beam all those enemy soldiers into deep space but leave their spacesuits behind."
The transporter would also make a great medical device. "Damn, Captain Pickard just got his fool ass killed! Let's use the transporter pattern buffer and the replicator to make a new Captain Pickard."
Two Will Rikers, both jonsing for Troi? Use the transporter and replicator, make a copy for the copy.
Why aren't there a million Datas? They could use the transporter and replicator to make as many copies of him as they want.
Of course, there is a big problem with the transporter to begin with. It seems to me that the way it works is to simply disintigrate (i.e., kill) you and then create an exact copy that thinks it's you. How can consciousness transfer through the transporter? My contention is that it can't. Big downside as far as transporting people is concerned. It creates a new being who is exactly identical to you, but ain't you.
I'm just sayin'.
L.
Sufficiently geeky readers may recall that these two plot devices have, in fact, already been used!
In [some Star Trek movie or other], Scotty was accidentally lost (read left disintegrated) in the middle of a failed transport attempt. The solution? Go find a backup from a previous transport of Scotty and play it back to recreate Scotty at the "destination" site.
In [some other Star Trek movie] the aging and crotchety McCoy refuses to use transporters at all, insisting on shuttling about in, well, shuttles instead. (Also note the Larry Niven story from long ago in which courts decided that teleporters did, in fact, destroy the person at the transmitter and create a new person at the receiver, playing havoc with property and inheritance rights. But we digress.)
Star Trek in particular (though, frankly, most science fiction follows suit) loves to forget the technology it has. You're right. If they can reconstruct Scotty, they can make a million of him. If they can wide-area transport Veeger into deep space, scattering its molecules forever, they can do the same thing with other bad guys.
They just keep forgetting.

Plurp. We were reminded recently that it has been some time since we related any endearing, heartwarming stories involving Him Whose Name Lies Slippery On The Kitchen Floor. Indeed, we have been remiss. Fortunately, we have just such a touching story from last night, which we will now relate.
It was late in the evening, and I was poking through the kitchen cupboards, looking for something snacky. Pretending to ignore me, the cat snuck in, padded over to his bowl of crunchies, sat down, and began chewing noisily. A minute later, he stopped suddenly.
Hyugh!
Hyugh!
Hyaaaaaaagk!
And, without moving from his sitting position, he turned his head to the side and deposited a few spoonfuls of slightly-chewed, thoroughly soggy kitty crunchies on the kitchen floor, after which he padded back out of the kitchen.
Isn't that sweet?

Plurp. Via a chain of communications too complicated to remember comes this lovely Helenism from our Midwest Correspondent.
That rang a chord for me

That rang a bell for me

That struck a chord for me

Huzzah.

Plurp. The fourth in this week's series of enigmatic images, entitled Perfectly Normal Household Items.

Plurp.
In a previous life,
the blue dog
was
a cat

Wednesday, January 8, 2003
Blab. Our readers seem back in force from the various holidays, and responding in curious ways to our recent obscuriana of Perfectly Normal Household Items.
Matt pinned a candle to a dog
Pins give a matted dog a candle
A candle made Matt eat the dog's pins
Dogs pinned Matt to a candle
It's a round. Let's all sing!

Blab. This reader ventures a theory.
3 of the household items can be used on the fourth.
That's silly. How can you use a dog collar on clothes pins? It just doesn't make sense.

Blab. A reader both asks and answers a question.
Where in the World is Matt Lauer? (Answer: S&M dungeon)
We're sure Mrs. Lauer will be happy to know this.

Blab. Another reader dissembles.
Matt Lauer is a Perfectly Normal Household Item? Only if he has pictures of Katie Couric naked.
L.
Is there something that you want to tell us?

Blab. A reader never ceases to be amazed. We like that.
It never ceases to amaze me that you USAians can be so odd in your usage of language. Take for instance the enigmatic image labelled pins. Now, to any English speaking person from England (or indeed from anywhere other than the US), a pin is a small sliver of metal with a sharp point on one end, and a platform upon which angels may dance on the other. The small wooden sprung devices your image displays are called pegs (at least in the English speaking non USAian world), and I very much doubt that angels would dance anywhere near them, for fear that they might trap their tiny wings in the nasty wooden pincers. Should you persist in such lexical abuses, we shall have to call in the UN inspectors on the grounds that you are deliberately trying to fool the angels into dancing upon weapons of their mass destruction.
-AJL
We love The Old Country. They call it Old because it's, well, really old. The original clothespins, sort of the Stone Age of clothespins, were wooden pegs with slots cut in their bottoms so that the resulting two sides acted to hold the clothes on the clothesline (if they in fact called it clothesline).
In more recent history (since the discovery of iron), clothespins have been made with springs (see, for instance, springs) made of iron or, even more recently, steel.
And, unlike the original clothespegs, angels are no longer required for their correct operation.
We think of it as the March of Progress.

Blab. A reader contributes in Pig Latin. How unique!
He is into "ouch"-play.
Ankthay ouyay!

Blab. Another reader reveals something about its personal life.
It was a shame to have to tie her to the gnarly bedpost where I could conveniently flog her latexed bottom with my blue plastic fly swatter from the 99-cent store on Wilshire, but until she lost that "I got a new Lexus" smile, I could not relent.
We never liked that store on Wilshire.

Blab. We learn that one of our readers has a brother.
My brother predicts the Raelians will be involved in a mass suicide within the next few years.
I predict this will improve the overall composition of the human gene pool.
We refer to this as a self-cleaning gene pool, a great modern convenience.

Blab. A reader apologizes, and rightly so.
Subj: With profound apologies, Aleister re-linked
Now, if you are really curious about funny hats on fat guys who bite (or bit, which would be more accurate), you might try this site where cloning considerations are considered old news. Go ahead, bop Aleister on the nose. (They didn't freeze his sperm, did they??!!!! That possibility would even scare the Zen-like Blue Dog.)
Why, it's Aleister Crowley, as we live and breathe!
As to the linked site itself: We definitely don't get it.

Blab. Stanford University wants to preserve our brain for science.
Dear Steve (or Plurp?!),
First of all, your blog was the first I've seen that made my laugh out loud multiple times...hmm...what does that say about me...or about the other blogs out there.
But anyway, I was looking through your blog postings and I noticed a very interesting feature in the language you used in one of them. It actually ties into a research project I'm working on at the moment -- I am a student of Linguistics at Stanford University (Stanford, CA) and I am trying to conduct a small study which will hopefully result in a Linguistics journal publication. If you don't mind, it would be an enormous help to me if you could participate in the study.
The way I've been conducting the project so far is by sending 2 short e-mail questionnaires, each of which takes only about 3 minutes to complete (I've actually calculated this). "Questionnaire" is probably even the wrong term for the form as it stands; I just want to find out what you think about a number of English sentences I've pre-written, so each questionnaire really takes very little time to finish and send back. If you wouldn't mind taking these, please respond to this message, and then I'll send along a consent form (which the University requires me to do), followed by the actual questionnaires.
Notwithstanding my own funny-sounding e-mail address (which I've created just for this project), this is valid research and you are welcome to check my student credentials on the Stanford website: www.stanford.edu, or by contacting the Stanford Linguistics Department through the info on our website: www-linguistics.stanford.edu. My advisor for this project is Professor Arnold Zwicky. Please note that I can only use people who are American, over 18 years old and who are native speakers of the English language (English has to be your first language, including bilingual speakers). If you fit that description, your help would be very, very much appreciated and I would consider it a big favor.
Thanks a lot,
Joel Wallenberg <ravinglinguist@yahoo.com>
(Senior - Stanford U. Linguistics Department)
How can we resist such blatant, self-serving flattery? We're sure that Joel is just making fun of our grammatical ignorance, but we're willing to indulge him anyway. Perhaps our readers are too!

Blab. A reader sends us an annoying, blind ...
[link].
Fortunately, this one is informative! We learn the following.
A recently leaked trailer for The Return of the King has Tolkien fans outraged over the apparent addition of a new character - Jar-Jaromir. The scene depicted in the trailer shows Jar-Jaromir shouting, "Gondora gonna fallsa";
he then trips over a corpse and knocks down a couple of Uruk-hai. [...]
[Director Peter] Jackson added, "I just love it when he shouts, 'Yousa steala precious from meesa!'"
We can hardly wait.

Blab. A reader puts words together as if to imply meaning.
If a mathematician moves from the center to the edge, does he increase the angular momentum? Or does all the action take place on the imaginary axis?
Yes.

Blab. Our Beantown correspondent returns to the fold after a long absence with this distressing news.
Dr. Plurp, has an alert reader previously told you about anybirthday.com? I received an email about it, along with warnings from law enforcement about it, so went to check it out. If you are listed there, folks can buy info about you - including your address and social security number, for $39 or so. (They claim they got the info from public records.) I found a lot of unsuspecting members of our family listed, including my parents & in-laws. You can remove your name & info from the database after you find it by clicking on FAQ, then PRIVACY, then enter the info exactly as they have it listed. BTW you don't have to enter a complete zipcode when you do your original search.
Yours truly,
MAVA
A while ago, an IBM executive asked us to find out everything we could about him on the Web. In a couple of days of amateur Web sleuthing, and without breaking any laws, spending any money, or being traceable in any way, we discovered:

His full name, home address and (unlisted) home phone number.

His wife's full name, address and phone number, and that of his two kids.

A map to his home.

The professional societies to which he belonged.

The political candidates to which he had given money, and how much.

His birth date, home town, parents' names, college and so forth.

And, for a few dollars, we were offered (on a large number of Web sites), his social security number, credit history, and on and on.
Yes, it is scary.

Rant. How can a genre called science fiction attract so many writers who know nothing at all - and we mean not the least little thing - about science? We refer, of course, to Star Trek: Nemesis, the latest (though probably not the last) in the Next Generation franchise.
It's probably impossible to catalogue all of the technical gaffes in this film; there are simply too many. We'll just mention a few of the most egregious.
Thaleron radiation, which is featured prominently (if ponderously), is some bad stuff. And we mean that technically. It has the ability to consume organic material at the subatomic level, says noted physicist Beverly Crusher. But not inorganic material, for some reason. As if the subatomic particles know. At least McCoy would have said, I'm a doctor, dammit, not a physicist!
We must mention various tactical irregularities. The away party gets ambushed by a bunch of lizards in dune buggies. Don't they have, like, scanners or something? Guess not. As they are chased, their own dune buggy sprouts a powerful energy weapon that, unfortunately, can only be aimed manually. Maybe they couldn't afford the two cent targeting computers. And, throughout, phasors come only in the Star Wars flavor; there seems to be no wide-scale stun any more, so tactical combat between groups goes on forever, with good guys and bad guys dodging here and there and missing each other with direct shots where a simple area stun would win the day.
But maybe it doesn't matter. The Enterprisers can't even detect that there are intruders on board, or monitor where an invading Remian is on the ship. Good guys (and bad guys) who have perfectly clear shots, even from hiding, instead prefer to jump on their adversaries, to little tactical effect.
Wil Wheaton gets work again, if only to look sappy for a few more minutes. But - oh - that's not a technical gaffe.
There is a lengthy space battle, in which a cloaked Remian battleship, lumbering with the alacrity of a supertanker, cannot be targeted by the Enterprise and two Romulan warbirds, in spite of the fact that it is visible whenever it is hit, and is the obvious origin of all of its own offensive fire. Naturally, all this slow-motion combat occurs within a few hundred meters. Heck, we could have blasted the darn thing with a slingshot.
And then there's the whole clone business, the centerpiece of this unfortunate plot. Shinzon, a clone of Picard, is blessed with the distinction of having a psyche identical to Picard's, down to his thoughts and emotions, while having exactly zero physical characteristics in common with him (apart from his haircut). My nose was broken four times, says the clone. He would have done better to say that the casting director suffered a stroke.
Anyway, we think that Truth In Advertising would at least require the producers to call this preposterous fiction

Plop. Well, it's official folks. Once Dubya, for whatever reason that he need not reveal, declares you an enemy combatant, you're toast.
A federal appeals court Wednesday ruled President Bush has the authority to designate U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" and detain them in military custody if they are deemed a threat to national security.

Those of you so detained don't have things like Constitutional rights and such. Wave bye-bye.

Plurp. The third in our series of Perfectly Normal Household Items.

Plurp.
In a previous incarnation,
the blue dog was
Jar-Jar Crowley.

Tuesday, January 7, 2003
Blab. A reader reacts in one of the standard ways to our Perfectly Normal Household Items - by objecting.
Katie Couric is a Perfectly Normal Household Item? Only if you have pictures of her naked.
L.
We decline to answer on the grounds that we're too busy looking at these amazing pictures. How does she do that?

Blab. A second reader reacts in another of the standard ways - by making up a caption.
Evidence against the suspect includes a variety of images found on the hard drive of his personal computer, four of the most shocking of which are shown here.
Don't be silly. They're perfectly normal.

Blab. A reader performs a close reading of Plurp. In public.
"the child that will be born is a girl, from a lesbian couple"; it strikes me that the word "couple" in that phrase is odd, in the case of a clone. Eh?
There are a number of odd things in there, don't you think?

Blab. A reader nominates itself for the Cryptic 2003 prize.
Apropos of THIS I guess we won't be using THAT in North Korea.
Could be. We can't get to that second link, so we apparently won't be doing it here either.

Plurp. So maybe we're done with GNE for now.

Plop. Remember those five Evil Terrorist Dudes we were all supposed to be looking for last week? It now appears that they never existed.

The alert, based on an account by Michael John Hamdani, prompted widespread news coverage and fears of possible terrorism around the holiday season. The FBI and 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies made finding the quintet a top priority.
Now, said sources, the account may have been bogus.
Another way to spin this story would be to say that the Chicken Little Department of the FBI can be duped into declaring a national emergency by any small-time con artist with a sense of humor.
But, of course, we wouldn't spin it that way. We're too afraid of being imprisoned in Guantanamo without access to whatever Constitutional rights might still exist at the time.

Yow. Oh we do love this particular brand of rubbish! It seems that some Portland politicos declared that your trash is not private, that it's OK for them to rifle through it and haul you in (along with your trash) if they find anything they don't like.
So a couple of enterprising reporters rifled through the politicos' trash and published the contents in their newspaper. Oh yeah, and on the Web.
And - guess what? - the politicos didn't like that much.
We love the Web. (Dave)

Yow. So William Gibson has a (brand new) blog, eh? That's very cool, especially considering that he's one of our all-time favorite authors. (Even if some of the links don't quite work yet. :-) We hope he keeps it up. (Kafkaesque)

Plurp. We continue to obsess about what you search for on our site. Naturally, our attention draws your attention, creating an amusing back channel. Here's what we scraped out of the back channel this week.

bert is back

simonya popova

donald rumsfeld naked pictures

helen naked pitures

i did not have sexual relations with that woman

muffler men

angelina jolie

au poivre

backstage

balder s gate

Welcome back, bert.

Plurp. We continue this week's series of enigmatic images, entitled Perfectly Normal Household Items, with this.

Plurp.
The blue dog spent
far too much time searching
for
donald rumsfeld naked pictures

Monday, January 6, 2003
Blab. Helen sends us a ...
[link]
... to a Disney groupie site that we're supposed to remind her to investigate. So, Helen, ...

Blab. A reader wants to force us into hard labor.
This looks to me to be an inadvertent Helenism or third cousin to such and contained in the first Plurp item from Saturday. Needs some noodling, which I am not capable of this early noon as I am depressed at my tennis game this morning. How was your tennis this morning?
On a related thread

Our readers, industrious folks that they are, are more likely than us to be up to the challenge of determining the potential constituent phrases of this potential Helenism.
Oh, and our tennis this morning was restricted to our shoes.
Blab. A Treasured Reader sends us one of the more endearing pics we've received recently.
Now, if you are really curious about funny hats on fat guys who bite (or bit, which would be more accurate), you might try this site where cloning considerations are considered old news. Go ahead, bop Aleister on the nose. (They didn't freeze his sperm, did they??!!!! That possibility would even scare the Zen-like Blue Dog.)
Why, it's Aleister Crowley, as we live and breathe!
As to the linked site itself: We definitely don't get it.

Blab. A reader whose Terrorist Status Level must clearly be raised to Tribuned writes:
Further to the warnings about trusting men with collars that do not match the shirts ...
Yes, but he's French. And, you know ...

Blab. A reader sends us news. We don't get much of that. They don't generally allow us contact with others.
War in Iraq could cost up to $9 billion monthly, says CBO
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the cost of "prosecuting" a war against Iraq at up to $9 billion per month, on top of an initial outlay of up to $13 billion for the deployment of troops to the Persian Gulf

BUSH TAX CUT PLAN
The White House said 35 million investors would benefit from the plan to completely eliminate taxes paid on the (dividends) payouts. (NYTimes)
Stocks Rise on Hopes That Stimulus Package Could Bolster Profits (NYTimes)
Regardless of the fine print, the tax plan would lead to higher budget deficits at a time when the possibility of a war against Iraq could add tens of billions in extra costs. (NYTimes)

So, that's done, and we can all sleep better tonight knowing that GB2 is in charge.
Dubya's in charge at the White House. Sometimes, we sleep. We assure you that there is no causal connection.

Blab. That same reader reassures us.
And just in case you were beginning to feel warrior-like and hopeful...
... which we weren't, but:
The Bush administration has dropped the government's monthly report on mass layoffs, which also had been eliminated when President Bush's father was in office.
Okey dokey. Those of you who knew this report used to be issued, please raise your hands.

Blab. A spammists sends us this most amazing piece of art.
Subj: Have you Ever Been Wronged?
Obtain a prosperous future, money earning power, and the admiration of all.
Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience.
No required tests, classes, books, or interviews.
Bachelors, masters, MBA, and doctorate (PhD) diplomas available in the field of your choice.
No one is turned down.
Confidentiality assured.
CALL NOW to receive your diploma within days!!!
Call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including Sundays and holidays.
Have we ever been wronged? Most certainly! We have been wronged, oh so very wronged, by having to labor for four tedious undergraduate years and eight - yes, eight! - grinding, grueling graduate years to obtain a mere doctorate (PhD) in physics. Why, we could have simply ordered one by phone, from a prestigious, non-accredited university! And we could even have done it on Sundays and holidays.
What were we thinking?

Blab. The attention of Plurp's own student wanders back to us.
Hello. Your regular school student here. We have just been discussing Clonaid. Most of the class decided it was a nasty thing to be doing.
Discussing Clonaid? That doesn't strike us as inherently nasty. Trivial, maybe, but not nasty.

Yo. Apparently, the rest of us haven't yet had enough circus.
The science journalist who organized a team to evaluate claims of the birth of the first human clone has suspended his review and now says the announcement by Clonaid, a company tied to an unconventional religious sect, could be "part of an elaborate hoax."
Well, if it is a hoax, it's not that elaborate. Heck, we've perpetrated more elaborate hoaxes than this.

Plurp. Is it USA Today or the American Dialect Society that's responsible for this fascinating headline?
'W.M.D.' voted word of year
In any event, it's Gaelic, and pronounced like "oomed". Now ya know.
The American Dialect Society also said something like this.
Blog, a log of personal events posted on the Web, was voted most likely to succeed.
But we don't know how to pronounce that.

Plop. AdCritic, one of our absolute favorite sites of the Internet Era, is now basically subscription-only, like some low-class pr0n site. Hmph.

Plurp. We begin the New Year with a series of enigmatic works entitled Perfectly Normal Household Items. The first in this series is displayed below.

Readers are permitted to react in the standard ways, up to and including typing things.

Plurp.
Nothing
scared
the blue dog

Sunday, January 5, 2003
Blab. A reader points out something interesting.
Brigitte Boisselier, the head of Clonaid which claims to have produced the baby, told the Belgian VTM-Nieuws broadcast that "the child that will be born is a girl, from a lesbian couple".

A GIRL!!! What a wonderful surprize! It was a bloody CLONE from a lesbian couple. What did they expect - a PUPPY? Geez........
Gee, that would be nice.

Blab. Speaking of funny-looking kids, a reader writes:
"Just what class of people should we forbid from having children?"
Close relatives. The argument in favor of that ban is basically the same as for cloning. Well, the rational argument for it is, though I suspect most people favor that ban mainly for the ickiness factor... hmm, that's probably true of cloning too.
An interesting point! We think it's the case (in the US, at least) that close relatives can't marry. And this prohibition is presumably to discourage them from having kids, since their kids are more likely to exhibit nasty recessive traits. Is there actually a law against close relatives either having sex or having kids, as long as they're not married?
At any rate, this legal/cultural prohibition is presumably based on centuries of experience with the results of close relatives having kids. If there isn't a similar body of evidence (e.g. for human clones), do we (a) play it safe, figuring that anything not proven safe enough is too dangerous, or (b) play it safe, figuring that people have rights unless there's some demonstrably dandy reason for taking them away?
We're so glad we're not actually responsible for stuff like this!

Blab. Another bumper sticker checks in.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance of the False Dilemma fallacy!
Why? How much does that cost?

Blab. A reader draws conclusions from the photographic evidence.
"satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night": the moral is that Communism makes for great seeing. Astronomers should support Communism in areas surrounding observatories. (Or maybe it's Totalitarianism in general. Need more data.)
Interesting. We recommend that astronomers flock to North Korea. Or, at least, astronomers whose equipment is entirely mechanical.

Blab. On the subject of the Tomorrowland of today and tomorrow, a reader sends us a very cool ...
[link]
... to Yesterland, a delightful look at things that were once in Disneyland (or DisneyWorld) but which no longer are. Very cool. Also, don't miss a comprehensive listing of which attractions required which tickets. Do you remember all the E-Ticket rides? We do!

Blab. A reader tries to clarify things. Is that likely to work around here?
Ellis Paul is his name. He hasn't switched it around. It's like...being called Clark Stewart. You can also be called Stewart Clark, right?
We probably can't be called any of those things, but we get your drift.
Our worry is that Ellis is primarily a last (i.e. family) name, not a first (i.e. given) name. So what's this Paul character doing, using it as a first name? Huh?

Plurp. So, it's, like, 2003 already. Weird.

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Plurp.
The blue dog
was the result of an illicit union
of several lesbian cloners

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