Plurp: Now look what you made us do

Bigger!

2003.01.19 : 2003.01.25

Saturday, January 25, 2003
Blab. Using the Carnivore system to intercept all of our telephone calls, a reader suggests an answer to our technical difficulties.
Plurp: How do I design a general method for failover and migration of stateful services without internal support for quiescing and recording the state?
Disembodied voice: journal the input stream to a parallel system. if the first system fails the second continues and the first system state can be recovered from the journal.
Dorian
That's a pretty good solution! We're calling you from now on.

Blab. Unable to leave well enough alone, that same reader (or someone who has stolen its identity) writes:
Subj: different computing paradigm
Jaron Lanier's interview about the nature of bugs and software development is interesting. thinking about the "pattern" rather than the "protocol" in terms of autonomic computing could be fruitful. For example, suppose you look for a system heading for a thrashing state of paging. you can look at the paracore curve theory to tell you when the sum of the working sets are going to exceed memory or examine the paging load ratios. at some point you can decide to "checkpoint and rollout" tasks which are causing the most page requests and restart them when the page load drops. or partition the running tasks into groups that are "in competition" with members of other groups (based on paging, cpu usage, cpu affinity, etc) and create affinity histories so you can put "friendly teams" on particular processors without a greater likelihood that they will be well behaved.
In any case, it makes for an interesting read.
Dorian
What interview is that? Is it connected with this book?
In any case, we are impressed when any of our readers actually think about the technical problems that interest us. We wonder if any such readers have both the interest and the ability to work with us on the future of computing. 'Cause, well, it's kinda fun.

Blab. On our sushi dinner last night, one of the mackerel-obsessed horde of Asscroftians who watch our every motion writes:
....but he's eaten mackerel. Alas not tonight, though. Shima Aji was on the menu at 6pm but disappeared by 8. A Major BooHoo for the Capt'n.
Please tell Major BooHoo we'll call him back.

Blab. A reader presents us with a multiple choice test.
Funny? Scarry? A bit of both? - DWL
We would vote for both, as we would for any similar Flash site, masquerading as a game, but actually representing a graphical polemic about how invading Iraq could easily lead to WW III. There are lots of those, right?
Or, you could just use Barney to sweep your mine fields. Or learn the secret behind the Segway. Or visit Ashcroft Online 1.0: If you haven't done anything wrong, then why do you need privacy?
Funny stuff!

Blab. The evens say:
Dibs on 42!
That's a mighty big number, pilgrim.

Blab. Above the momentary static, a reader announces:
The lunatic is on the grass.
Breach - Sector 42! Release the dogs. Activate countermeasures. Subdue and destroy if necessary.

Blab. A reader introduces us to modern American culture. No, not yogurt. At least, we don't think it's that.
"The audience is never wrong. They have a huge appetite for this and we've got a responsibility to satisfy that appetite."
This was alleged to come from the mouth (I think it was his mouth) of Sandy Grushow as reported in a NYTimes story. Grushow is the tasteful head of reality show production for one of the big pimps, NBC, ABC, whomever. Could even be a member of the tasteful ex-alien's gang at Fox. Yes, that's it, Fox. Chances are, though, that it was a mix-up and it actually came from he mouth of GB2 (aka JB2, a bad sequel play?) at a war prep rally, though it may be too well parsed. But you can understand the confusion, can't you?, given the similarity of agendas between Bush and Murdoch, which includes the total embarrassment of the sentient beings left on the planet. ("Hey, but those numbers are down!!")
So, we learn that one of our readers thinks that analog TV is Bad. We are forced to agree. Everyone should read our humble blog instead.

Plurp. We were joined this afternoon at a performance of Our Town (with Paul Newman) and for drinks afterwards by a delightful person named Sara Beard who (a) says she isn't Googlable (our first encounter with this term, which means findable via Google) and (b) is a professional viral marketeer.
Now, this confuses us. For several reasons. Viruses, both the biological and digital varieties, seem to us to get pretty wide distribution without any marketing at all, so we're not sure there's much money to be made there.
Or perhaps she was referring to that viral marketing thing that has become big in the past few years, sort of asymmetric warfare against the modern American attention span. She does, after all, work on the Wooster Collective site, which both collects found urban art and (we think) does viral marketing. It's so hard to tell!
We know what you're thinking. We're going to dump on Sara and her Web site, and say all sorts of rude things about viral marketing, 'cause we're an old meanie. But we're not! We are motivated only by charity and a desire to end Sara's digital isolation by making her Googlable. So we're noting here that she grew up in Winterport, Maine, which is as far north as you can get on the Penobscot river in the winter. She went to Bowdoin College, and now lives in Soho, Manhattan, New York City, United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, The Mind of God. And, she played Emily in Our Town when she was twelve.
So, next time Google stops by here, Sara will be famous, and we will have done our bit for humanity. At long last.

Yak. Overheard at dinner, afterwards, at an Ethiopian restaurant.
She: I'm into branding.
He: Branding?
She: In the most intense sense.
He: Uh ... really?
She: Yes. Brand identity management.
He: Oh.

Plurp. Tonight, we were trying to think of maximally bad names for restaurants. Here's all we could come up with.

Putrescence

Disease

Dead Babies

Vomit

Maggots & Mold

Readers are invited to impress us by telling us much worse names.

Yak. Here we are, working on our blog while Helen watches The Food Network on TV.
Her: Oh my god.
Us: What?
Her: Oh. My. God.
Us: What?
Her: Will you look at that?
Us: You know, your reaction to matzo ball eating contests is very similar to our reaction to naked women. Or exploding helicopters.
Her: Stop looking at me.

Plop. Little Billy Gates pledges to make Microsoft software less vulnerable to attack by any random teenage moron. This time for sure!
"New security risks have emerged on a scale that few in our industry fully anticipated," Gates wrote in a 1,500-word e-mail distributed late Thursday to about 1 million people.
Like spam, for instance.
And, by the way, who out there suspected that distributing a horrifically insecure operating system running horrifically insecure applications to hundreds of millions of Internet-connected PCs would cause a security risk?
Let's not see the same hands all the time.

Plurp. Are you Too Stupid To Be President? (Hint: No.)

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the inevitable result
of security risks and
viral marketing

Friday, January 24, 2003
Blab. A reader is thinking. This will come to no good.
I'm thinking of starting a betting pool on which country is going to criticize the war next. Odds say Iraq.
What do the evens say?

Blab. A reader comes here seeking affection. This will come to no good.
Everything would be better if Kris Krisstoferson would just give us all hugs.
Everyone who wants hugs from a sixty-six year old geezer, please take a number.

Blab. A reader moves slightly off the focal point of the mind control lasers.
I'm beginning to suspect that Plurp is an organ of the Total Information Awareness project whose purpose is to uncover seditious thought.
Could you move a little to your left? Thanks very.

Blab. Yesterday's Cynical Reader Contest invited you to name a country (other than Iraq) that has engaged in various manipulative falsehoods.
On the "Apparatus of Lies", wouldn't it be harder to name a country that didn't?
- Felis Lynx
We try not to make our reader contests very difficult.

Blab. This week's theme of preposterous conjectures reaches its illogical climax.
Dr. Plurp can't tune a piano, but he can skin a mackerel.
For the record, we have never skinned a mackerel, nor does a mackerel have skin per se.

Blab. A reader who is not Google writes:
Did you mean: Plurp's readers are highly intelligent and I bow before their superior intellect
No.

Blab. A reader seeks to define a tiny new island in the vast, slimy sea of linguistic art.
Saw an interesting pseudo-Helenism in this comment, by "rough ashlar," in a Metafilter discussion.
I say "pseudo-Helenism," because the expression in question is not a combination of two aphorisms, as is required in a true Helenism, but the names of two institutions. Other than that, I believe it meets all requirements of a Helenism.
"Bob Young University" = "Bob Jones University" + "Brigham Young University"
(where rough ashlar was trying to come up with the name of a conservative Christian university, for some values of conservative and Christian)
We like that a lot! So, that means that the Jim Young University serves caffeine-free Kool-Aid? Got it.

Yak. In our office, just today.
A kettle of worms

A kettle of fish

A can of worms

Yo. Now even perky "Canada" has joined the list of countries opposing Dubya's plans to occupy Iraq. Already on the list, of course, are France, Germany, Russia and China. Presumably "Canada" is just "old North America," eh?
But don't worry. Dubya can still count on a vast international coalition, including such major world powers as Hungary and Poland.
Oh, and the U.K. Don't forget the U.K. Now that Canada has joined the Axis of Evil, we're pretty sure that the U.K. gets to claim the title of fifty-first state.

Plurp. This pretty much sums it up.
"It really comes down to whether or not the country trusts President Bush's judgment, knowing that he knows a lot more than the country knows," a senior administration official [said].
Do you?

Plurp. Helen wants to know if baby-proofing includes buying condoms.

Yo. Oh. My. God. Internet Bubbleboy Amazon seems to have made a profit. For the second time, yet! (Isn't that oldthink?)
But don't worry. It's just a tiny 5% net profit, and it's a pro forma net profit at that, so it excludes lots of charges which, we suspect, implies that they're still losing serious money.
Increasingly popular, especially among high-tech companies, pro forma earnings reports present an "as if" picture of a firm's financial status.
"As if."

Plop. Well, the 2003 Bloggie nominations are in, and Plurp has once again been snubbed. (Though so has Wil Wheaton this time, and we count that as progress.) Perhaps we need to lobby for a new category: Best Snotty Weblog With Bad Formatting.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was part of the
vast international coalition

Thursday, January 23, 2003
Blab. Picking up on a phrase we used earlier this week, but forgot about entirely until just now, Helen writes:
Ohhhhhh......how I DO like the idea of the phrase "previous life on GNE"
Right! Now we have lots more time for blogging.

Blab. A reader states a new conjecture.
You can tune a piano, and you can also tune a guitar.
Unfortunately, there was no proof attached. And with good reason. We have a counterexample: We actually can't tune either a piano or a guitar.

Blab. Examining yesterday's entries carefully, a reader who is Google writes:
Did you mean: mongolian
No. We really did mean Morolian.
Heh.

Blab. Clones may not be identical to each other ...
But an evil agenda would be to culturally construct that they are identical and a corresponding world domination plan.
[Deconstruction: for the sake of writing culturally construct.]
h.
Shh!

Blab. A reader offers refuge to all of you who are tired of our cheap, grim cynicism.
simple writing, glorious people [vs. cheap grim cynicism]
kate's
"a letter to ldygabilan, because i like to hear myself talk."
-- Anticlimactic
It is a lovely little essay, which begins with this:
boys are so not what they're cracked up to be.
Glorious.

Blab. A reader offers us a ...
Military scholarship:
AFGHANISTAN AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE: IMPLICATIONS FOR ARMY AND DEFENSE POLICY
Summary: Don't gut the U.S. Army's ground forces, 'cause that weird deal in Afghanistan in which air power, special forces and rather inept indigenous ground forces won the day, well, it won't always work.
Coincidentally, the author is at the U.S. Army War College. But we're not saying that shaded his opinion. No, we're really not.

Blab. A generous representative of the Confederation of Helvetic States writes:
As long as Bush, in his infinite un-wisdom, doesn't mistake Switzerland for a part of Old Europe, we won't freeze his bank accounts. We're neither old nor do we associate with our northern neighbors, thank you very much. Nor are we really European for that matter unless you are into geography. - MS
So you're saying that Switzerland is one country that Dubya isn't going to piss off? That would be unique!

Blab. On our time travel paradox involving pies, a reader writes:
I would think that the biggest problem with being the inventor of the time machine is that people would keep going back and stealing the idea.
Yeah, that H.G. Wells guy really pissed us off. A nice guy, you understand, and a pretty good writer, but he swore to us he wouldn't write about it.
It's just not right.

Blab. Surfing one of our very first Plurp entries, a reader who probably meant to use the search facility sends us this.
nibiru
Our readers mystify us. They really do! What would draw you here to search for some mythical planet that only exists in the minds of complete wackos?
Oh.

Plurp. Let's expand on that topic. We are actually mystified by most everything you search for here. We try to intuit your chaotic mental processes by examining the most popular things you searched for in the previous week. But it remains a daunting challenge for us. Take this last week, for instance.

bertmeister

gne pathetic lives

priests

mia

ecards

muffler men

virtual helen naked pictures

zakheim associates

aaliyah

alina marrero

Alina Marrero? Shocking.

Plop. In other non-news, a researcher at the formerly prestigious AT&T Labs figured out how to make master keys for a building starting from a single lock and key.
[Matt Blaze], a security researcher has revealed a little-known vulnerability in many locks that lets a person create a copy of the master key for an entire building by starting with any key from that building. [...]
AT&T decided that the risk of abuse of the information was great, so it has taken the unusual step of posting an alert to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
We made master keys for the entire UCSB campus (and the junior college in our pasty little home town) using a similar technique some thirty years ago. The reported method is a variant that is quite obvious. We rather suspect that it is well known to anyone who made master keys in their undergraduate days. (And you did, didn't you, Treasured Readers?)
So, it's not exactly inventing the transistor, is it, Matt?

Plurp. Sitting in the auditorium before a Big Meeting today, there was a message on the Big Screen that said:
If you are experiencing technical difficulties,
call [phone number here].
So we went over to a nearby phone and called them up.
Disembodied Voice: Hullo?
Plurp: Hi, is this the number for technical difficulties?
Disembodied Voice: Yes, it is. Are you having a problem?
Plurp: Yes. How do I design a general method for failover and migration of stateful services without internal support for quiescing and recording the state?
Disembodied Voice: Whut?
And we were so hopeful.

Yak. From that same meeting.
It's not just about technology.
Ahh, sure it is!

Yow. Also from that same meeting, in fact from our vaunted CEO, something that seems rather likely to be a Helenism.
One shoe fits all

One size fits all

If the shoe fits, wear it

Thanks, Sam!

Yow. From yet another meeting today, carefully recorded by Ian.
The guiding light at the end of the tunnel

The guiding light

The light at the end of the tunnel

Excellent!

Plop. Jerry Springer is considering running for U.S. Senate. In the wake of such accomplished geniuses as Jesse Ventura and Dubya, we figure he is eminently qualified.

Plop. Readers who are still awake may recall Rumsfeld's comment yesterday that France and Germany, who oppose a precipitous war of aggression on Iraq based on little apparent evidence of any threat, represent "old Europe." Today, Russia and China said that they agreed with France and Germany.
Will Dumsfeld now tell us that Russia and China are "old Asia"? We sure hope so. We could use a little levity on this topic.

Yo. Apparatus of Lies, a document about Iraq that was released by the U.S. State Department this week, is quite interesting. One table, Main Tools of Iraqi Disinformation, claims that Iraq engages in the following Nasty Activities.

Restricting journalists’ movements

False claims or disclosures

On-the-record lies

Covert dissemination of false stories

Censorship

Fabricated documents

Today's Cynical Reader Contest invites you to name another country whose government has done each and every one of these things.

Yak. Tonight.
Steve: Who's the governor of Minnesotta?
Helen: Uh ... uh ... it's ...
Steve: "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer.
Helen: No! I know this! It's ... uh ... Somebody Somebody.
Steve: "Somebody Somebody"? You'd better quit before I have to publish this.
Helen: No! It's ... it's ... uh ... Rocky Ventura!

Plurp. What did Helen do today? Reportedly, she spent the day watching water freeze.
Now you know.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered if Dubya was having
technical difficulties

Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Blab. Who has had more plastic surgery operations, Joan Rivers or Michael Jackson?
Trick questions. Joan Rivers and Michael Jackson are actually the same person.
Correct! When, after all, have you ever seen them together?

Blab. A reader states a corollary.
You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a mackerel.
Yes, this follows immediately from the more general case.

Blab. A reader telepathically looks in on Helen's dream yesterday.
Those bees did indeed suck. Though the cowboy probably deserved it for all the gratuitous YeeHawing -AJL
She didn't tell us about any cowboy. Hmm ...

Blab. Staring confusedly at last week's issue of Plurp, a reader, who probably intended to use our search facility instead, sends us this:
morolian
And here we thought our readership was ignoring what we figured was one of our better inside jokes! We're so relieved.

Blab. Our Venezuelan reader is back with some needed clarification on its mysterious reference (yesterday) to be able to get into rotten teeth "if it were JB2."
Okay, so you don't spell George with a J. Big deal.
A perfectly natural transliteration, as George in Spanish is Jorge.

Blab. On our new best-seller, a reader writes:
RE: GNE for dummies
Are you an authority on GNE or on dummies?
-RAO

Why, both. Obviously.

Plop. We seem doomed to get less than six hours of sleep every weeknight. Why is that?

Yow. Our industrial designer friend Jim Ryan has a new Web site, part of which shows off the many cool things he's designed in the past.
Neato!

Yak. From one of several conference calls today.
They're doing what they need to do to make their software products look and smell like a family.
It's quite an image, isn't it?

Plurp. This morning, in the shower (where we always do our best thinking), we realized that inflation has made a classic joke much funnier. The classic joke is:
Did you hear about the circus train that derailed?
No. What happened?
Oh, it was awful. One of the cars split open and all the animals escaped - a whole pride of lions and a piecost.
What's a piecost?
Eighty cents.
Well, pies have gone way up in price since those halcyon days. The up-to-date joke is:
Did you hear about the circus train that derailed?
No. What happened?
Oh, it was awful. One of the cars split open and all the animals escaped - a whole pride of lions and a piecost.
What's a piecost?
Twenty bucks.
Twenty ... bucks. Get it? Get it? And - see? - it's much funnier now. In fact, given the reformulated joke, the original looks more like a broken joke version of the revision.Dave suggests that the revised form was actually the original form, but was lost way back before the dawn of recorded jokes, and we only remember the degenerate eighty cents form. We prefer to think of it as a time travel paradox.

Plurp. Clones do not turn out to be identical to each other. Duh. Anyone familiar with developmental biology knows that. More amusing, though, is this statement, which we found buried in the article.
"There are millions of cats [...], and the last thing we need is a new production strategy for cats," [said Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society.]
From your keyboard to god's eyes, Wayne.

Yow. There is, at long last, some modicum of sanity in the universe.
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Wednesday that alleged food from McDonald's restaurants is responsible for making people obese.
It's an exciting time to be alive, isn't it?

Plurp. It's time for Rabid Speculation o' the Day. We know; you live for this.
Today's Speculation is that, in the upcoming Siege of Baghdad, the U.S. will use non-lethal technology that has not previously been used IRL to subdue swaths of the city, possibly including stuff like focused microwaves (less likely) or high-volume, low-frequency sound waves (more likely).
That's our guess, and we're sticking to it.

Plop. Let's review. The U.S. has royally pissed off North Korea (big time), South Korea (amazingly), various Middle Eastern nations, and quite a few others. Who's left to piss off? Well, how about France and Germany?
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Wednesday dismissed French and German insistence that "everything must be done to avoid war" with Iraq, saying [that] Germany and France represent "old Europe." The expansion of NATO in recent years means "the center of gravity is shifting to the east," he said.
So that leaves us with, uh, Bulgaria, right? Or maybe Albania? Cool.

Yow. And then, somehow, and certainly unconnected with anything else we've discussed on these pages, we stumbled across Ironic Times, which you should definitely check out.
"World's Funniest Joke" Reaches White House
Provides much-needed relief from grim talk of war.

We can neither confirm nor deny the truth or falsity of any statement appearing on that Web site. Well, we can, but we choose not to.

Plop. Man! It is colder than the mammary organ of a woman possessing magical power and practicing sorcery around here!

Plurp.
The blue dog
heard about the foreign policy circus
that derailed.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Blab. Prolific reader L. checks in.
We consider ourself duly humbled.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
L.
Say ten Hail Cthulhus and call us in the morning.

Blab. A reader may already be a wiener.
Without having checked the Helenism list, I venture the following as heard on the TV news this morning:
Down-Heartened, being a confused mix of disheartened and down-hearted.
Thankyou, and goodnight.
Very nice! Many thanks for your contribution to this important art form.

Blab. A knowledgeable reader tells us a secret about that contribution (yesterday) from the infinitely famous Geegaw. (Is that complicated enough?)
I'm not sure if geegaw wants the token "[token deleted - Plurp]" publicly associated with her (although perhaps that was awhile back and she doesn't care anymore). Just a thought...
Ooh! We love secrets! We love knowing things, even trivial, meaningless things, that other, less entitled people do not know. It elevates our already outlandish self-image to near god-like magnificence.
That is, we gather what crumbs as falls near us.

Blab. A reader gets all worked up about the recent Supreme Court decision about extending copyrights, but with a libertoonian perspective.
M-I-C-K-E-Y...
By golly, it's our old fav, Reason magazine, still in business, with an interview with The Mouse himself.
Reason: How does it feel to have your sentence extended by two decades?
Mickey: How do you think it feels? For almost 70 years, I've only been allowed to do what the Disney people say I can do. Sometimes someone comes up with a new idea, and I think to myself, "Great! Here's a chance to stretch myself!" But of course they won't let me leave the reservation. If I do, they send out their lawyers to bring me home.
In 1971, for instance, Dan O'Neill got me a part in something called Air Pirates Funnies. It was great: I got to have sex, I got to use drugs, I got to explore the whole underground comix scene. It was liberating.
Well, of course Disney complained. They said—this is a direct quote—that O'Neill's parody was tarnishing my "image of innocent delight." After two issues of the comic book, they issued a summons and took us all to court for trademark violation and copyright infringement.
Reason: And they never published another issue?
Mickey: Of course not.
It's an interesting conundrum for the libertoonians. Rand, being a professional writer, believed in copyrights. Some other libertoonians don't believe in them at all. Others believe in copyrights for some period of time, but not a lesser or greater period of time.
It's all so confusing!
But here, at the height of philosophical amusement, is a posting that violates the copyright of the Ayn Rand Institute (omigosh, it still exists!) in which the Randists denounce Eldred and Lessig as Marxists.
Oh, the delicious irony!

Blab. A Venezuelan writes:
But then there is that pesky fact that the constitution of V. provides for an elected leader and a process for calling for his removal, all of which just doesn't suit some of the population and all of the owners of capital, so they want a change now, dammit. Which does not explain the Coke distribution, which seems like a gift to the Dental Association for not going on strike. On the other hand, I could get into it if we were talking about JB2.
JB2?

Blab. A reader expects an answer to this question.
Why is there a woman on the front of Yahoo! wearing a flowerpot on her head?
So, you don't like flowerpots?

Yak. From a meeting today with some venture capitalists.
Their stock price went through the toilet
We thank our financial friends for their contribution.

Plurp. A reader who probably doesn't want us to publish its letter points out that the word quapactually means something.
Quap \Quap\, v. i.
To quaver. [Obs.] See {Quob}.
This turns out to be correct. Weird.

Yo. In other news ...
Every mammal, including Man, is descended from a creature that was genetically similar to the modern aardvark, scientists have found.
We are all earth pigs under the skin, eh?

Yo. Added to our Amazon wishlist today.

Though, frankly, we think we might write our own.

After all, we are an authority on the subject.

Yak. Late last night.
Helen: [Coughing, choking]
Steve: Are you OK?
Helen: [Waking abruptly]Unh? I was covered by June bugs. Or ... or ... buzzy bugs.
Steve: It was a dream, sweetheart. You're OK now.
Helen: No, it was Fear Factor. There were bees. They were in my mouth.
Steve: That was TV, sweetie. It's OK.
Helen: Then it was ... far away?
Steve: That's right. It was far away.
Helen: OK. [And goes back to sleep]
No more reality TV for a while, we think.

Plurp.
The blue dog
for
dummies

Monday, January 20, 2003
Blab. On the topic of its religious and sexual prejudices, our most prolific reader writes:
Embarrassing Oneself In Public
Gee, you know how to hurt a guy's feelings.
L.
What can we say? We may respect your right to do as you like, but that doesn't mean we want to watch.

Blab. Having insulted our Most Treasured Readers, it seems that we must now endure their continuing excuses.
I don't ignore the instructions. I just see deeper into the request for the "Secret Reader Requirements".
- Felis Lynx
And we love you for it.

Blab. Next, we are flattered by the extremely famous Geegaw.
writes alice from strange brew (50cups.com/strange) : "these chickens must be mine" ... and i thought of you.
- geegaw/eglantine
And, while this appears to have something unsanitary to do with our previous life on GNE, we shall not burden our antiseptic readers with these dirty details. Suffice us to admit to our past sins, and to swear that those chickens are not ours.

Blab. A reader asks:
Why?
We don't know.

Blab. An ASCII artists insists:
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ ´.` /
|`---´|
|     |    Der blaue Hund does not need
|`___´|\_ intelligence to dusk Bagdad.
/|     |\
##     ##
Nor, apparently, does Dubya.

Blab. A reader wonders ...
Why can't we get voter turnout like this?
And how good is this?
Cuba's Communist Party said Monday that more than 97 percent of voters showed overwhelming support for the nation's socialist system by electing 609 candidates who ran uncontested for parliament.
You know, we question the efficacy of voting when there are only two Tweedledum candidates. But one? We are impressed at the bravery of the 3%.

Yow. Rarely have we seen a clearer demonstration of enlightened government than that offered by recent events in Venezuela.
On Friday, soldiers seized food and drink from Venezuela's largest food company, Empresas Polar, and an affiliate of U.S. soft drink giant Coca-Cola to distribute among the people.
[President Hugo] Chavez defended the raids in the industrial city of Valencia, 66 miles west of Caracas. He said the companies that owned the plants were denying Venezuelans food and drink during the crippling strike.
Let's be clear on this. What was that evil company doing? It was "denying" Venezuelans Coca-Cola during a strike (which was held by both business and labor to try to force Chavez out of government). And what did the enlightened Chavez government do in response? They sent their government goons in to steal vast quantities of Coca-Cola and give them away to the deserving populace.
The point of this, of course, is to "feed the people". Because they would most certainly starve to death without Coca-Cola, doncha know. It is not - and we repeat: not - about Chavez using governmental violence and force to punish those who wish he would retire. Absolutely not.
Government. It's the real thing.

Plurp. You know what we like about Helen? She doesn't barf up hair balls, that's what.
It's the little things that count.

Yow. Who's going to buy this way cool Cthulhu idol for us? Oooh!

Plurp. Today's Googlicious Reader Contest encourages you to answer the following two very difficult questions, both of which arise from last night's Golden Globe Awards.

Who has had a greater number of plastic surgery operations on their face, Joan Rivers or Michael Jackson?

Who has spent more (in US$) on their own plastic surgery, Joan Rivers or Michael Jackson?

As always, please provide definitive Web references for what we are certain would otherwise be the disturbing hallucinations of your fevered minds.
Have at it!

Yo. Speaking of the disturbing hallucinations of your fevered minds, friend J. at work turns us on to a series of bad Flash animations which pretend to test your negotiating skills. Try, in particular, the Suicide Bomber series, which features this fabulous dialog.
Woman: This isn't blood.
Man: What is it then?
Woman: Beet juice would be my guess.
This might be the very first Suicide Bomber game to feature beet juice. Imagine!
Even better is ZapDramatic, the company from which the above company probably gets their partial, incomplete list of negotiation scenarios. Do they think they can hide from the all-seeing eye of Plurp? They cannot!

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a great idea for those without
Coca-Cola

Sunday, January 19, 2003
Blab. In this weekend's Secret Reader Contest, you were invited to submit a paragraph describing the new reality TV show, Celebrity Ferret. And you did!
Celebrity Ferret, the new TV show from the publishers of Modern Ferret Magazine.

Who better than the originators of the ferret lifestyle magazine to sponsor this amazing new reality TV series?
Not to be outdone, this reader has somehow gotten its hands on the plot for Episode 3.
Mr Ferret snuffles around in the straw, Mrs Ferret watches from the corner of the hutch. She looks suspicious. Ever since the sniffing session she watched between her husband and that tarty ferret with the blonde streaks 2 days ago she has been wary.
We know we'll be watching!

Plop. Has anyone else noticed that Dubya is a complete idiot? Oh, yeah, pretty much everyone in the world has. Just checking.

Plurp. And ...
Hussein was so skilled at deception, [said Rumsfeld], that failure to find weapons the United States has insisted exist could be considered proof of Iraqi lack of cooperation.
Um ...

Plop. Nukes. They're not just for apocalypse any more.

Plurp. Those of you who missed the largest spew of reader contributions to Plurp in quite some time (maybe ever) should get in their time machines and go back to last Friday. If you think you can stand the excitement.

Plurp.
The blue dog
couldn't stand the
excitement

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