Plurp: Living In Exile

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2003.02.16 : 2003.02.22

Saturday, February 22, 2003
Blab. That defensive reader from yesterday collects bonus points with this impressive reverse deprecation.
I was serious about thanking you; don't be so defensive.
We were serious about mocking you; don't be so grateful.

Blab. And double bonus points for:
I am mocking myself (and you), you dope. Has the immersion therapy worked for you? It must have.
We prefer our traditional spandex outfit.

Blab. Parse this:
That damn chip keps showing.
We can't.

Blab. A lazy reader nonetheless sends us something amusing.
Subj: regarding plastic and Duck tape.........
Someone else commented that bubble wrap would be better for your windows because it will provide additional oxygen.
That would be the Duct Tape Guys, whom we cited the other day.
We slave over those links, Dear Readers. The least you can do is click on them.

Blab. We, on the other hand, click on every foolish ...
[link]
... that you send us. This one proves that Merriam-Webster doesn't know what a Helenism is. Sad, isn't it?

Blab. What is this image about?

This reader takes an internal view.
Ref: Reagan Gif
"those_suckers_made_me_president
they_actually_voted_me_in"
And, as a result:
As to the Enigmatic Image:
When he discovered that he didn't have a nailgun
the plucky President decided to commit suicide
by driving the nails into his head by hand.
We know many voters who had similar thoughts.

Blab. A reader who likes embarrassing questions writes:
Sir: Don't you miss Helen Thomas?
We think it's unfair to make the White House Press Secretary answer difficult questions like, Why does Bush want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? After all, it's clear that he doesn't know.

Blab. A reader reacts inappropriately.
Subj: no fun!
aw you're broken jokes defeat the purpose of a joke! waaaaaa
While we are not, ourself, broken jokes, we must tell you that we have quite the opposite reaction to them. We find them hilarious, often to the point of tears. Why is that? We think it's because we're so embedded in our culture that the (non-broken) jokes to which they refer have become iconic, and no longer have existential humor value to us, so unexpectedly changing the endings does have humorous value.
We recently saw a TV commercial for something or other that featured several groups of people walking into a bar: a priest, a minister and a rabbi; a blonde, a brunette and a redhead; a man holding a duck. The commercial made no reference whatsoever to these people. We were helpless with laughter.
So, you're right. It's just us.

Blab. Speaking of Dubya & Dumsfeld, a Treasured Reader finds a treasure chest.
[link]
This is a review of (we think) the very first edition of D&D, which we purchased in the mid-1970s. Arnold Hendrick (ever heard of him?) wrote:
Vastly too much has been attempted in these booklets, with very little detail, procedures or explanation. [...] The resulting mess in interpretations is enough to tax the patience of most gamers to the extreme. [...] Play in person is usually impossible [...]. The optimum solution seems to be to play by phone [...]. I do not suggest these to the average wargamer.
Fabulous!

Blab. A reader bears bad news.
Figures. Next they'll discover people going crazy and thinking there are gargoyles flitting about Manhattan. Sheesh.
We knew it was too good to be true.
"Today's adventurers don't really care about long-term effects" a representative of the potion industry explains. "If they did, they would have chosen a safer occupation in the first place."

Blab. A kindly reader tracks down that which we too lazy (or stoopid) to find ourself.
Those 'helenisms' that someone found for you yesterday are sayings from the star of England's Big Brother (II i believe). She really was quite stoopid.
That makes her different from our Helen is at least two ways.

Blab. A reader finally asks:
Why is the blue dog always linked back to this Plurp entry?
Is it? That's curious. We wonder why that is.

Blab. A reader intuits the meaning of that license place.
"Try 2000 pup"? What is that? Some kind of robotic dog?
Nyes.

Blab. A reader alerts us of a part of the diseducation that has prevented us from seeing the truth.
It's "Brussels sprouts" not "Brussel sprouts". And anyway, they are part of The Conspiracy.
At long last, it all makes sense!
For too long we have been told lies.
The existence of the supposed European country of Belgium has been taken as gospel for years by members of the Liberati. It has long been held up as a shining example of Liberal philosophies in action. However, now is the time the truth be known. Belgium doesn't exist.
What, though, does it mean that "Belgium" is one of the "countries" allying with Germany and France against the U.S.'s desire to invade Iraq? Has Iraq been manufacturing VS (a deadly nerve agent based on Brussels sprouts)?

Blab. A reader tempts us to certain cerebral detonation with this evil inverse link.
Sprout Mask Replica
To wit:
The theme of sprouts pervades this "family memoir".

Blab. A contextless reader writes:
Avast ye cellular automata!
No clue. Not one.

Blab. A clever and resourceful reader successfully tracks down our ...
Favorite Food?

Quite! We are very impressed. We have a winner!

Yow. My! What an inbred, self-centered, nostalgic bunch of Plurp today. We love it!

Yo.
"In God we trust, all others we monitor."

Plop.
Now we're at risk for getting creamed by robo-yuppies?
Apparently.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had no idea what those
brightly colored machine parts
were all about

Friday, February 21, 2003
Blab. That defensive reader from yesterday just begs to be mocked. But we resist. After all, it wouldn't be fair.
sorry about the link. I'm not really incompetent. Thank you for your kind words of encouragement. I know that it's not your job to encourage. I'm pretty sure that whatever your job is you do it quite well. Thanks again.
Instead, we invite our swarming, venomous readers to mock this shoulder-chipped individual. Best mock wins a prize! Bonus points if this same reader mocks itself.
We do not intend to annoy or otherwise disturb what we are certain will become one of our most Treasured Readers. Rather, we think of it as immersion therapy.

Blab. This reader wins the prize for Ten Thousandth Reader To Omit Context. The prize is a soiled piece of paper with a single word on it.
I think that picture is the same one on that fake japanese weblog.
But maybe our lost reader meant to refer to this. (Which, by the way, was misreferred in Natsuko's blog. From this we learn that testing is a good thing.)

Blab. A reader believes.
I believe Reader_has_failed wanted you to see this picture.
Could be. Didn't we blog that the other week?

Blab. Same picture, different reader.
(etc)
Yadda, yadda.

Blab. A reader awakens from a long coma, not realizing it's We Already Blogged It Day here at Plurp.
Which OS are you?
As we said just last Tuesday, we are Windows XP. You are BeOS, apparently cool but unaware of what's happening in the outside world.

Blab. Tom Ridge writes:
That "stash away the duct tape" quotation is from Tom Ridge.
Poor Tom. He has this impressive-sounding position in the U.S. government. Trouble is, everyone else makes Fatherland Security announcements for him. Ashcroft. Dumsfeld. Dubya. Even Condoleeza. Tom just runs around afterwards, trying to look like he's in charge of something. It's kinda sad, really.
We'll wager that he dreams of doing Certain Things with all of his duct tape.

Blab. A reader suggests the blasphemous.
Beets and Brussel Sprouts, drenched in Velveeta, and wrapped in procs -- in proscu -- in prcosui -- in ham!
What an awful thing to do to perfectly innocent prosciutto. You should be ashamed.

Blab. A reader suggests a horrifying agenda.
Hey! Sprouts, now. Don't get me started. I could give you sprouts recipes you could serve on a first dinner date and score so hard you'd need subsequent medical attention.
regards
bhikku
Medical attention will do you no good once the sprouts get you, vile alien parasites that they are.

Blab. Another reader, under the influence of the evil vegetables, enters the room and speaks in a monotone.
I could go on for ever about the virtues of brussel sprouts.
Not on this blog you can't, bucko.

Blab. A reader speaks in hieroglyphs.
String plurp =
"http://www.stevewhite.org/log/current/index.htm";
     String oldTag = "foo";
     for (;;) {
       HttpURLConnection hc = (HttpURLConnection)(new
URL(plurp).openConnection());
       hc.connect();
       String newTag = hc.getHeaderField("ETag");
       if (!newTag.equals(oldTag)) {
         oldTag = newTag;
         this.soundTheAlarm("Plurp has updated!!!");
       } else {
         System.out.print(".");
       }
       try {
         Thread.sleep(100000);
       } catch (InterruptedException e) {
         System.exit(0);
       }
     }
We're pretty sure this raises beetles from the dead. Or Brussel sprouts.

Blab. A reader with whom we have done many things which we do not discuss in public once again sends us a long tract without associated URL. But we love her anyway.
COLOURS NAILED TO THE MAST
The precise colour of the blue background on Scotland's national flag, the Saltire, has finally been resolved after a long running debate in the Scottish Parliament.
We wonder what the Scottish warriors of just a few centuries ago would have thought of these modern dandies who have nothing better to do than have a long running debate about the precise colour of the flag.

Blab. A reader is concerned about our life. How sweet!
Are you STILL "Living In Exile?"
Not physically, in that we have once again returned to Chez Plurp even though the U.S. is still orange and the many terrorists who are plotting our demise have not yet struck.
But yes, in the sense that we feel estranged from our environment, as we most certainly did this morning when we watched a huge black cloud appear on the horizon, from our window at work, in the direction of Manhattan.

Blab. A reader finds Helenisms, after a fashion.
[link]
Those aren't our Helenisms, of course. (In fact, we don't even understand a lot of them.) But then, it's not our Helen.

Blab. A fan of Catriona Lemay Doan writes:
"It turns out that we really did refer to Catriona Lemay Doan once."
And Mia, and Sara, as well. But what about Mia Sara?
L.
Mia Sara is, of course, that extremely cute humanoid in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (one of our favorite movies). We had never referred to her here in Plurp. Until now.
Is she our Mia? We suspect not.

Blab. A reader leaks top secrets. Top secrets.
Note that this is a super secret .mil site and Rumsfeld will have to shoot you if you've looked at it. We wouldn't want the badies getting at our secrets would we? - Morton
Surely you've seen the linked photos before. We might have even blogged them recently (we don't remember). But go look again.
This same site extolls the virtues of deep-fried turkey.
Have you ever eaten deep-fried turkey? Delicious, isn’t it? Deep-fried turkey has been around for years. It’s even bragged about on cooking shows on the Food Network and other cable channels. But there is a down side to all of this "turkey talk."
Turkey fryers can be extremely dangerous if not used properly. [...]
If you absolutely must use a turkey fryer, here are some tips for safer use: [...]

Never use turkeys fryers on wooden decks or in garages.

Use turkey fryers on a flat surface to help prevent accidental tipping.

Never leave the fryer unattended. Most units do not have thermostat controls. If you are not careful, the oil will continue to heat until it catches fire.

Never let children or pets near the fryer.

What a delightful product! We sense Darwin in action.

Blab. A reader blindly sends a ...
[link]
... to this:
A notorious e-mail scam has resulted in the murder of a Nigerian diplomat in the Czech Republic.
Fifty-year-old Michael Lekara Wayid, Nigeria's consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead by an unidentified 72-year-old Czech at the Nigerian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday.
According to police reports, the suspect was a victim of the 419 scam.
What would the world be like if the people misanthropic enough to perpetrate these scams, and the people dumb enough to fall for them, killed each other off?

Rant. Warning: Those easily offended by political incorrectness (or by political correctness) should skip this entry. Honest.
A workgroup at a certain large company (name withheld to protect the terminally stupid) has produced a set of scenarios that is intended to drive a major technology effort. The scenarios are named after particular Native American nations.
The scenarios are being called, at least informally, "the Indian scenarios", or "the Tribes scenarios".
What are they thinking? Oh wait - we know the answer to that.
But this forces us to wonder (our mind is hard-wired to do this) what equally offensive naming conventions these folks could use and not understand their gaffe. Here are some nominations.

Scenarios named after famous women: the Chick scenarios (or, just as well, the Babe scenarios).

Scenarios named after famous blacks: the Negro scenarios.

Scenarios named after famous Latinos: the Taco scenarios.

See? We just can't imagine any of those naming conventions being used without audible gasps. But why are they any different?

Plop. Memes kill.
Congolese villagers have stoned and beaten to death four teachers accused of casting an evil spell to cause an outbreak of the deadly Ebola disease that has killed nearly 70 people.

Yo. Planning to go on safari in the deepest, darkest jungles of Great Britain? Don't drink the water.
A large part of Glasgow remains at risk of a repeat of the water contamination problem which affected thousands of homes last year [...].
After a review of the cryptosporidium alert in August, NHS Greater Glasgow said the city would remain vulnerable until a new water filtration plant has been built. [...]
Cryptosporidiosis causes diarrhoea and sickness, which can have a severe affect on vulnerable groups including the very young and elderly.

Yo. Let's suppose you had an F-4 Phantom fighter jet. Let's suppose you crashed it into a concrete wall at 480 mph. Just how much concrete do you suppose would get blasted away in the resultant explosion?
If you guessed just a few inches, you'd be right. And your intuition would be much better than ours.
We're not trying to claim anything about the safety of nuclear power plants. We just think it'd be cool to play with toys like that!

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought of
deep-fried turkey as
immersion therapy

Thursday, February 20, 2003
Blab. Reader_has_failed contributes this useful object lesson.
http://193.71.199.74/mail/attachment/frodo_has_failed.jpg
OK, folks, can we talk? If you send us a link to some attachment to your own email we can't - hello? - actually see it. Because it's, like, you know, your email, OK?
It's nice of you to send this, though. It makes us feel technically competent. In comparison.

Blab. A reader revises its explanation of the curious picture of that thing.
oops. Sould have been "The still beeting heart of Mia of course!"
We figured that you were alluding to that, but that you were too polite to say it explicitly.

Blab. A reader chastises Dorian for not doing something complicated and technical. Or, rather, for not doing some particular complicated, technical thing.
Dorian, Dorian, Dorian, Dorian! The http Host: header! Really...
Isn't that helpful?

Blab. And, reading our previous reader's mind, our Most Industrious Reader triumphs over the travails of the digital.
xblog works now, even on your virtual site. of course it was a challenge to develop given that we only get one test shot per day. :-)
Dorian, the challenged.
Congrats! Perhaps you can make it generally available to the hundreds of other readers who desperately want this facility.

Blab. The first attempt to explain this week's Enigmatic Image Requiring Reader Explication trickles in.

"Nancy! I can't get the jellybeans in my mouth again!"
Very nice! But whatsamatta? Nobody else out there clever these days?
By the way, Helen thinks this little movie gets old really quickly. We, on the other hand, could watch it for hours, a bemused grin on our face, giggling occasionally when he gets a really good smack in.

Blab. Ian, who is an inspiration to us all, reminds us that we expropriated his most excellent idea without giving him credit.
How delightful to see my 'An Amish of One' gag brought to fruition!
Congratulations.
{inw}
We are a Plagiarist of One.

Blab. A reader whose mind has already been digested by evil vegetables writes:
beet and bacon? au contraire, mon frere, it sonds very fine ... in the period when I worked in the bookstore in the financial district with the expensive italian sandwich shops, I had a beet-and-brie-sandwich period. seeya, bhikku
Next you'll be telling us the virtues of Brussel sprouts.

Blab. A reader who probably intended to search our humble blog for ...
ann curry
... might have found this entry in our series, Perfectly Normal Household Items. We are pleased at the thought.

Blab. A reader is listening to the voices again. The voices like that.
"Stash away the duct tape. Don't use it. Stash it away."
Why one would stash it without the intention of using it remains a mystery.

Plurp. This past week, you've been searching our Web site for some of the old standards, and a few surprising new things too.

helen naked pitures

catriona lemay doan

mia

sara

sara beard

britney

darla

get an elephant in a refrigerator

mobile phone messages

allura

It turns out that we really did refer to Catriona Lemay Doan once. Weird.
It's nice to see Allura poking around here again. Our password to her Secret Blog expired (we think), but we're still Smitten^TM.

Plop. We lost a nickel yesterday. Well, not in the sense of misplacing it, but rather in the sense of not having it any more. You see, back in November some time, we made a bet with friend Bill. We bet that the U.S. would start a war with Iraq, involving significant grounds troops, not just a few bombs, by Valentine's Day of 2003. At the time, it looked like easy money to us.
But Dubya exceeded even our expectations of his ineptness at foreign policy, and is even now dickering with Turkey about how much money he has to give them for Turkey to allow U.S. troops to be based there for the northern front of the war, and Italy is backing away from supporting the war unless there's a second U.N. resolution, which France seems certain to veto. How so many loose ends are still loose at this late date is beyond comprehension
Which is to say, we lost the bet.

Plurp. We note that Dubya and Dumsfeld are having a hard time coming up with tests at which Iraq will balk. Send in the inspectors, they said, and Iraq relented. We need an Iraqi law against WMD, they said, and Iraq now has one (well, sort of). U-2 flights, they said, and now the U-2s are flying.
We feel that D&D just aren't creative enough. Surely our readers can do better. Here are some ideas to get the proverbial juices flowing.

The entire Iraqi military is required to drop its pants simultaneously and submit to a cavity search for WMD.

Saddam Hussein is required to dress like a hussy and sing a Burlesque-style song of his own composition on the topic of total disarmament.

Iraq is required to construct all of the WMD facilities that the U.S. has alleged that they have, including factories and storage facilities full of nasty chemical and biological stuff, mobile factories for biological weapons, missiles that can go a Really Long Way, and so forth. They are then required to host an open house for the international media in each of these facilities, with hors d'oeuvres to include BBQed pork ribs and pork dumplings.

Saddam Hussein is required to do a one-man show in seventeen major Western cities, in which he sings I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.

Readers are invited to tell us their own ideas on this topic.

Yow. Caterina, in a lovely piece of writing, tells us One of Life's Secrets: How to Dissipate a Blame. Very nice!

Plop. For those of you who find it necessary to participate in conference calls from home, we have a teeny suggestion. Don't have your barking dog right by the phone as you try to go through your presentation. You might think it's colorful and amusing, but it isn't.

Plurp.
A detailed study concluded
that the blue dog was
at one time composed solely
of email attachments,
the foreheads of
former presidents,
curried beets,
naked pitures of Catriona Lemay Doan
and France

Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Blab. A reader mixes the memes in a most disgusting manner.
Speaking of Lileks and beets ...
A ... beet-and-bacon sandwich? The horror.

Blab. Yesterday, we asked you to tell us what that thing is.
That thing is a thumbnail in need of some cleaning.
No, no! Not that thing, that other thing.

Blab. A reader puts forward an alternate theory about that thing.
It's the still beating heart of Mia of course!
-AJL
That's one possibility. Another is suggested by several of Jessamyn's photographs of that thing, culminating in a shocking image and an equally shocking textual revelation:
This is a beet, if you haven't guessed.
We suspect it is a beet even if we have guessed.

Blab. Still with the Japanese beet thing.
Nabi Beety Udon!
Beet Tempura!
Ebi Beet Shumai!
Got it.

Blab. After that confusing mathematical construct yesterday, trying to find the exact opposite of artificial eel sushi made with Quorn and colored with beet juice, some other reader comes to our conceptual rescue.
Clearly, the opposite of "vinegared rice" is "soaped coal".
That's more like it!

Blab. Forrest Gump writes:
"It is as if we are given brief, direct feeds from the psychosis that is our readership."
Is that not the purpose of Plurb? Or is it about beets? I like beets, pickled in vodka, rubbed with blue dog tripe, and grilled with pasta. It's all good, you know: beet soup, beet shrimp, beet fries, beet poppers, beet shooters, beet flavored condoms, beet flambe, beated beets, smoked beets, and of course, beet cake. Additionally, depleted beets can be rather useful in combat.
Interuptis (SIC)- It's OK cuz itz fonettikally korrekt. hsub egreog sevol gnillik nworb elpeop!
We think that's likely to be egroeg hsub and elpoep, but we get the idea.

Blab. Dorian become ever more Treasured for doing the work that he (he?) insisted yesterday that we do. And, in doing so, he discovers an interesting truth about the universe.
well, we sat down and wrote that xblog checker program. unfortunately you hide behind www.pureprivacy.com and extremis.net and don't seem to have a real web server or domain name. thus, we don't have an obvious way to check your site for changes. so, on to the non-obvious...
Dorian
It is our continued observation that Nothin's Easy. Inevitably, things, especially things involving computers, are Much More Complicated than you thought they would be, and even than they have any right to be. We must admit that it is this technological pessimism that makes us resist trying to do things with our computers that our friends tell us will be easy. That, and our world-renowned sloth.

Blab. And then he (he?) loses all those Treasured Reader points by getting all serious with us.
Paul Graham wrote an essay about why nerds are unpopular in school. This will resonate well with your entire readership, no doubt.
Dorian
OK, everybody read and discuss. Personally, we (a) were kinda smart, (b) were a hopelessly unphysical wimp, (c) figured that girls couldn't possibly like us and (d) gave up on being popular at an early age. So, yeah, NerdsRUs.
Then we got out into what we mockingly call the Real World and discovered that the jocks all got jobs selling cars while we got to invent the future, live in Manhattan and spend our life with an incredible woman. So, like, nyaah!
And you?

Blab. On that conversation yesterday about Him Whose Name Is Buried In Cat Hair, our Most Treasured Reader writes:
Steve, we never had that conversation, you know.
Of course we did, sweetie. You just weren't there for it.

Yow. We noticed a (relatively) gigantic peak yesterday in the number of people coming to our humble site. Nearly 3x as many people stopped by yesterday as usually do. We're not entirely sure why, but perusal of the logs reveals a large number of people coming to us from Yahoo or Google, looking for something like Joe Millionaire Sara bondage.
Now we did mention that hilarious art-presages-life story a few weeks ago, and that's what our naughty searchers seem to have found on our site. So, we assume that what we saw was the tiniest fraction of all of the naughty people who were searching for Sarah Kozer's bondage vids.
Why they came by only yesterday, we'll never know. And, checking Google today, the GoogleGods seems to have removed Plurp from the list of responses to queries like that, so we might guess that we won't see folks like that in these parts again.
But, if anyone stuck around long enough to read this: Welcome. Stick around a bit longer. It gets much weirder.

Yow. Thank you Ian for the pointer to this week's Enigmatic Image Requiring Reader Explication, and the very first one involving animation (you lucky readers).

So, um, tell us what it all means.

Plurp.
[The camera moves above a field of wheat. Far below, a small figure is at the edge of a harvested area.]
[The camera dives towards the figure, who is seen to be wielding a scythe.]
[The camera cuts to ground level, looking up at a man in a broad brimmed hat, a long sleeved shirt and a full beard. He is swinging a scythe through the wheat.]
[The camera shows a close up of the man's face.]
Man: I am strong.
[The camera cuts back to a full-body view of the man swinging the scythe.]
Man: I am humble.
[The camera cuts back to a close up of the man's face.]
Man: I am at peace.
[The camera circles the man, returning to a close up of his face.]
Man: I am an Amish of one.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was
a puppy of one

Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Blab. Our readers worry us. Permit us to illustrate why.
It is indeed wonderful that I'm not God. I don't have to be the Alpha and the Omega, nor am I accountable for the souls of every life form in every universe. In fact, I would pity myself to death if I were God. It is indeed wonderful that I'm not God!
signed: the anthropromorphic entity refered to as "Goatalingus interuptis"
While we're pretty sure the reader misspelled interruptus, spelling it correctly would not get us any closer to having the faintest idea what this little blather was about. It is as if we are given brief, direct feeds from the psychosis that is our readership.
And the scary thing is, we keep reading.

Blab. Our car dealer writes, in part:
Dear Mr. White,
We regret that we must rescind your ownership of a blue 1999 Mazda Miata. While we appreciate your patronage, we cannot condone your criminal mistreatment of this wonderful automobile. [...]
Hey! We didn't plan on getting snowbound in Upper Nowhere!

Blab. Appearing on our digital desk is a ...
memo from your research department....
ya'll oughta knock out a little app that lusers can place on their desktop that will beep whenever your blog page is updated. you could clone the source for xbiff and work from that. such an app would make YOUR blog an "active web presence" and greatly increase its visibility. if ya make the blog url a parameter you could have a killer-app kinda utility.
dorian
This memo was obviously intended for someone who (a) cares and (b) is willing to do lots of work on behalf of blog readers. That's not us. We shall take this issue up with our under performing mail room.

Blab. A reader claims that there is a diversity of opinion in the universe. Obviously a failure of the mind control lasers, to which we shall attend shortly.
It seems that not everyone agrees that google is your friend. See bigbro for 10 reasons why Google deserves your nomination for Big Brother of the Year. The snow storm must have weakened the mind-control.
Dorian
We love people. We do!
Google is bad. Why? Because it's successful. And because they use cookies (which are easily eliminated by any of a large number of cookie-cleaners). And because they won't tell you how their proprietary algorithms work.
It's the anti-Christ! Flee!

Blab. It's Food & Fetish Day here at Plurp, which we begin in the established ritual manner with this link to ...
luv beets!
No, not love beads, not Love Boat, but luv beets, those wacky, romantic, worrisome taste treats on which we all would have choked to death as kids if only they had been around way back then.
Readers are required to click on that link and then tell us what in tarnation that thing is.

Blab. Following that beet theme, a reader tries to derive the exact opposite of artificial eel sushi made with Quorn and colored with beet juice. Please don't ask why.
Hmmm... if sushi has raw fish (OK, I know the defining element of sushi is the vinegared rice, not the raw fish, and not all sushi has raw fish, but it's easier to come up with an opposite for "raw fish" than for "vinegared rice"), then the opposite must be some heavily cooked red meat.
Your favorite food, the opposite of artificial eel sushi made with Quorn and colored with beet juice, is chicken fried steak made with beet juice and colored with Quorn.
Let's review. Our Treasured Reader posits that food is uniquely decomposable into fundamental attributes, that all of these attributes are scalars with well-defined inverses, and that these inverses are easily derived. So sushi is decomposable (and pardon the expression) into raw and fish. The inverse of raw is cooked (as opposed to fermented, or processed), and the opposite of fish is ... uh ... beef.
And the other attributes of artificial eel sushi made with Quorn and colored with beet juice are idempotent. Right?
Right.

Blab. Other suggestions, most likely by a single illiterate reader with an Enter key fetish, are:
Beet Shahimi!

Chriashi Style Beets!

Inside Out Beet Rolls!
Which Shahimi would that be?

Blab. A food fetishist who is likely to be Bill informs us of a ...
New section in Lilek's Gallery of Regrettable Food.
Indeed! It's:
LET'S ALL IGNORE THE PHALLIC IMPLICATIONS OF
BANANAS

As if we could!
Those of you unfamiliar with Lileks (with or without the apostrophe) or with his famous Gallery of Regrettable Food , or with his marvelously insightful and hilarious anti-blog (which can't be read at work, unless you actually want to spray milk all over your cow orkers) better get off you lazy browser butts and get familiar with it post haste (whatever that means).
Seriously, it's clever, funny stuff, and you should program your neurons with it immediately so that you, too, can laugh inappropriately during customer meetings.

Blab. A reader leaves our own favorite foods far behind and instead careens into unknown territory.
Hi Steve,
Morton got me completely hooked on your website! I am ususally in stitches and can use it for training my stomach muscles! It will be your fault, if our baby comes early! Yep, pregnant again, this time delivery date end of August. I will be in NY briefly with a friend (no Morton, no Felix) beginning of March. If you are back from 'snow-exile', I'll give you and Helen a call. Maybe we can hook up for a quick chat.
Anyway here's my idea of favorite foods: And, no, it's not because of being pregnant that I like it. It used to be my favorite, together with dozens of other schoolfriends, way back when I went to school in Germany.
Chocolateburger
Ingredients :
1) a Schokokuss (translates to Chocolate-Kiss), a round chocolate covered waffle filled with marshmallow fluff, about 1 1/2 inches high (you can sometimes buy them at Associated Supermarket on 2nd Avenue).
2) a roll, crisp, not a soft bun, must be fresh
Cut roll in half and squash the Schokokuss between it! Ready to eat - YUMMY!
Morton thinks it's the most disgusting thing on earth, but hey, what does he know, he doesn't even like licorice!
Cheers
Dagmar
All pregnant Plurp readers with weird food fetishes are invited to visit us in early March. We'll do lunch.

Blab. A salacious reader wants to know all about the ...
sara bondage scandal
We'll just bet you do, you naughty reader! But we're not telling, oh, no we're not. We absolutely will not post the pictures, no, nor the audio track, no matter how clear and explicit it is. Sorry. And the three-camera video shoot? Not a chance.
Let's just say that our readers' private lives are just that. Even if we do have extensive documentation, it is not for anything but our own, personal review.
That is, we deny that it ever happened.

Yo. We learn something today.
Bondage-flick actresses do not necessarily triumph over substitute teachers, even when competing for the affection of really stupid men!
Well, not necessarily.

Plurp. For the hundreds of sites that linked to our tribute to Skeleton Warrior, we have now provided a direct and permanent link to that entry.
You're welcome.

Plurp. Which OS are we?

Figures. We are also bloated, always doing something other than people expect, and inclined to crash often. (Mike)

Plop. Do you have a Visa or MasterCard? Would you mind if we used it?
A hacker has gained access to as many as 2.2 million Visa and MasterCard accounts, the two companies announced Monday.
We're too stupid to store your account information securely, said the company that processes credit card transactions on behalf of merchants, Visa and MasterCard said. Anyhow, you don't care, right?
Well, OK, so they didn't say that. Not exactly. But they should have.

Yo. How did we find this?
Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.
Dunno. But it's interesting.

Plurp. How long does it take to decide to go to war? Two weeks. Just like everything else. A fundamental constant. Weird.

Yak. At the office, still in exile.
Helen: The geese are squeaking; they need oiling.
Steve: Could you oil them for me?

Yo. Old Europe gets testy.
[...] 13 countries either set to join the EU or in membership talks have signed letters supporting the United States.
[French President Jacques] Chirac said: "These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position."
"It is not really responsible behavior. It is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet."
"I felt they acted frivolously because entry into the European Union implies a minimum of understanding for the others," Chirac said.
Chirac called the letters "infantile" and "dangerous," adding: "They missed a great opportunity to shut up."
Yeah, there's a lot of that going around lately.

Yow. Looks like the 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is out. As always, we don't care (yawn). As always, we will not peruse the many lustful stills, nor examine the stalker vids. And under no condition will that new (and badly misnamed) VR stuff even draw the attention of our conscious mind. Nossir.
We will instead stick to intellectual issues, as explored in such culturally pure publications as National Geographic magazine.

Yak. Returning home from exile.

Steve: The cat barfed on the chair.

Helen: Here, put a wet cloth on it.

Steve: And the cat hair! The chairs are covered with cat hair.

Helen: I guess he's been shedding since we left.

Steve: Shedding? Cripes! It's more like molting! There's enough hair here to make three cats!

Helen: Can we get more cats?

Steve: This is not a good time to ask.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had certain
fetishes

Monday, February 17, 2003
Blab. What is our favorite food? Our readers think they know.
Beet Sushi!
Unlikely! But creative, in that we would never have thought of it. Come to think of it, we're frightened that you thought of it.
Your favorite food is artificial eel sushi made with Quorn and colored with beet juice. Or maybe the exact opposite of that?
You mean artificial eel sushi make with beet juice and colored with Quorn? In any event, it can't be the exact opposite because it involves sushi.
We do note, however, the unholy confluence of beets and sushi. Ewww!

Blab. It's Big JPEGs In Our Time week here in Plurp.
Obviously these people don't watch enough History Channel to realize the dark irony in their posters...

For those who need a refresher course... See also: Chamberlain, Neville (1938)
Okay, which is it: Peace in our time, or Peace for our time? The Web cites authoritative-seeming references for both! And what is the origin of whichever is the non-Chamberlain phrase?
Personally, we yearn for peace in our time. But getting from here to there continues to be tricky.

Blab. Another political reader mystifies us.
New World Order? Holy Shiite Bar Mitzvahs!
We have no idea.

Blab. A reader, perhaps after having his flight canceled in the Blizzard of the Century, writes:
Hey, if you don't need your appartment at the moment could I use it? - Osama
You know, we would, but we have this reciprocal deal with a small band of space aliens, so ...

Blab. Our Germanic typologist writes:
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ ´.` /
|`---´|
|     |    Der blaue Hund is white.
|`___´|\_
/|     |\
##     ##
(Not Steve White, just white.)
So's everything else around here! We dug our car out earlier today, and now it's nearly buried again.

Plop.

Yo. Here's an interesting speculation.
A creativity gene that evolved about 50,000 years ago was the spark that kindled the development of the modern mind, an expert on human origins said yesterday.
An explosion of art, culture and individual expression that took place in Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago may have been triggered by biological changes in the human brain.
Wouldn't that be amazing?

Plurp. North Korea is confident of winning a nuclear war with the U.S.
"The victory in the nuclear conflict is ours and the red flag of the army-first policy will flutter ever more vigorously," said the [North's state-run Central Radio].
We can only guess that, by victory, they mean, turning of our tiny, impoverished country into white-hot glass. In which case, it's hard to argue with their insight.

Plurp. Today's mini-interview.

Plurp: What would Jesus do?

Jesus: I'd start by taking out his country-wide communications ability with hundreds of simultaneous, coordinated attacks. Then a rapid ground war designed to capture territory, isolate delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction, and prevent the sabotage of oil fields and dams. Finally, a siege of Baghdad, focusing on establishing safe havens for civilians and turning the defenders.

Plurp.
The blue dog
dug out earlier today
but was nearly buried
again

Sunday, February 16, 2003
Blab. A French reader receives a fortune cookie.
Dictionaries report usage not correctness.
And who, praytell, reports correctness? William Safire?

Blab. A new reader joins us with a vacuous question.
What is your favorite food?
Let's see. How can we make this unutterably dull question into something at least vaguely interesting? Oh! We know! We'll make it into this week's Stupid Reader Contest.
Readers are challenged to tell us what our favorite food is. But please, be creative. Or at least clever.

Blab. The drugs that Ashcroft is distributing finally kick in.
I had a brief rush of total information awareness.
Thanks.
The first rush is free.

Blab. A reader notices something very odd.
Someone stops and thinks. The wrong someone, alas.
That thinking stuff is greatly overrated. Heck, whole generations of national leaders have conducted their entire professional lives without coming within miles of a single obvious thought.

Blab. A reader types words. Some of them might refer to the recent Helenismistic near miss. Hard to tell, eh?
That miss is too far away to be a near miss. One of the constituents is still wholly present. No can do.
So that's an argumentative assertion, a claim that seems to negate the reader's premise, and an unconnected statement of inability. Okey dokey.

Blab. A reader urges us to ...
print the image
... which we understand to mean "publish the image in Plurp." So, of course, we do.

Blab. The famous Sara Beard writes:
I haven't been to your blog for a while and got a bit nervous when i saw that Marc had become a puzzle (tried to follow the link back - but there is too much stuff on your site!). Then I had to take the Mia story a bit further.
Mia is actually a good friend of ours who is currently living in London. It is not a picture of her on the postcard - but we thought she would get a laugh with her name being used for a couple hundred marketing postcards for ElectricArtists.
She is quite googable - if you can spell her name: Mia Quagliarello. She worked for MTV and writes reviews for NME on the side. (She is also writing a review of Marc's sticker photos for Urb magazine coming out next month - i think). She is orignially from new york city.
See ya,
Sara
Indeed, Sara's Mia is Googlable. Is her Mia our Mia? It's so hard to know!

Blab. A reader is the bearer of good news.
The good news today is that Condoleeza Rice is not passing on her genes.
Hey, you take comfort where you can.
But there are some out there who obviously want a firm and stern mommy.
Condoleeza Rice for president? We hate to be the one to say it, but this sounds much better, by comparison.

Blab. Contrariwise, a friend brings some very sad news.
Well dammit.
I sent an email to you guys and about 20 others on Friday urging you to write retrospectives on the life and career of Skeleton Warrior on your blogs this Sunday. ....I think the email didn't get through. If anyone would like to get in at the tail-end of this craze that's sweeping the nation, check out eyeballkid's or my blog.
Of course if the email did get through and you just didn't feel like doing it, then never mind.
love and kisses
Kaf
It comes as quite a shock to us, here in exile, that Skeleton Warrior has passed on. As loyal readers know, Skeleton Warrior was a close friend of our family. As a child, we were closer to him, perhaps, than to any other stop motion animation character ever. Uncle Skelty, we used to say, looking up at his grinning figure - he was always happy around us - tell us about the Argonauts again. Then we'd sit and listen raptly while Uncle Skelty would recall his swashbuckling Silver Screen triumph.
We lost track of him, though, quite a long time ago. Our parents never explained why he stopped coming by, and we always thought the question made them uncomfortable.
We remember seeing an episode of The Love Boat in which he appeared, some time during the 70s. But he looked so gaunt and stiff. It just wasn't the same. It was disturbing.
We wondered, occasionally, after that, what had become of him. We wondered where he might have gone, what he might be doing, whether he was still the happy Uncle Skelty that we used to know. We hope he was.
Fame brings with it pressures and demands that those of us who have not experienced it are not in a position to understand. Skeleton Warrior may have had his difficult years, but we do not judge him.
We will always remember him fondly.

Yo. A recent study shows how easy it is to implant false memories in people.
Oh, and we've been meaning to talk to you about that $10,000 you owe us ...

Yow. Helen discovers the Legal Seafood recipe for Boston Clam Chowder. We should try this some time. After we dig out.

Plop. You might have heard that the Northeast is in the midst of the Storm of the Century, snowing heavily now, with one to two feet of snow expected by Monday night. Now, we know that's just pickled pikerfish to you Minnesota folks, who get that much snow before breakfast every day.
But we're locked in some dumb motel in gawdforsaken Westchester, having fled terrorized Manhattan for a couple of days, and now we're stuck here, and we mean seriously stuck here, until the snow lets up some time on Tuesday, if we're lucky. Shades of Gilligan.
We've stocked up on frozen dinners and Diet Coke. We'll even have to put up with this retrograde 19.2 kbaud phone line, as we probably won't be able to drive the mere half mile to the lab.
This sucks.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was aware only of
memories of summer

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