Plurp: Here in spite of ourselves

Bigger!

2003.02.23 : 2003.03.01

Saturday, March 1, 2003
Blab. A reader who has developed brain worms writes:
Subj: IBM Systems Journal
"Security in an autonomic computing environment"
Abstract: We suggest a method for restoring a secure environment after a breach occurs. This paper explains the details of the patent "Method and Apparatus for Re-locking the Barn Door".
The table of contents sounds somewhat less-than-stunning if the word "autonomic" is elided. For example, "Autonomic personal computing" becomes "Personal Computing" and "Security in an autonomic computing environment" becomes "Security in a computing environment"
This isn't a personal attack; just a bit of satire on the way
this industry makes an good idea into over-hyped nonsense.
Fifth-generation, expert systems, autonomic computing.... sigh.
Dorian, the cynic
Our reader suggests that barns are no longer useful if their doors are ever opened, and that meaning changes if words are omitted from phrases. One of these is likely to be true.

Blab. A reader becomes a gossip reporter.
Subj: World Economic Summit report
Claire Squires of the Rich and Famous has struck...
Those with money tremble....
Dorian
Newsday reporter goes to Davros and discovers that the top political and business leaders in the world are concerned about war, terrorism, Dubya's bullying and the lousy global economy, but they're human anyway. And they dress well.
Shocking.

Blab. A reader hints at a terrifying connection.
Keep in mind that Quorn also came from Scotland...
- Morton
First slime, then fungus. What next, dear readers, mold?

Blab. A reader with psychic powers answers yesterday's rhetorical question that we didn't ask.
"what PETA was thinking": if you accept a moral equivalence (even a rough moral equivalence) between people and animals, the PETA campaign makes sense. What they're missing, of course, is that while they've internalized that moral equivalence and now take it for granted, hardly anybody else has, and if you _don't_ accept the equivalence, their campaign is abhorrent.
Similarly, if you accept that human life begins at conception, most of the terrible things the anti-abortionists do (intimidating pregnant women, bombing clinics) seem justified; we accept pretty extreme actions to prevent _murder_ after all. But since most people don't think that a cluster of eight cells, or a little lizard-like thing the size of a quarter that has no functional brain and couldn't survive in the air, is in fact a person, they come off as dangerous fanatics doing unacceptable things.
It's all how you look at it.
Maybe a better question for us to have not asked was What was PETA's PR agency thinking? We can imagine some intriguingly aberrant mental processes on the part of the PETAphiles, but we would have expected their PR agency to at least say, meekly, Um, but it'll just piss people off at you?
Or maybe they did ...

Blab. A reader attempts a Helenism, with violent results.
"we see shades of glass ceiling"
"we see shades of gray" mangled with "there is a glass ceiling"
Hmm. Shades of x, where x can be lots of things (and not limited to gray) is a pretty common phrase. But let's settle on gray for a moment.
Shades of gray denotes unclear moral situations or judgments. A glass ceiling denotes hidden limitations to power or success. We cannot figure out what these two things have to do with each other, so we can't imagine what shades of glass ceiling might mean.
Helenisms aren't manglings, after all.

Blab. Babelfish failed to decode that terrorist message from yesterday, but our own anti-terrorist posse comes through!
'I dreamed, that I lived slowly...
Slower than the oldest stone.'
That would be M. Vasalis, a venerable dutch poetess of the last century.
Obviously those terrorists are advised to chill, for now. Sounds good.
your reporter in dutchland
What a lovely verse! We can only hope everyone takes this advice.

Blab. Demonstrating that our readership will respond to pretty much any topic we introduce, a reader writes:
Re: Slimy Scottish Bogs.
Of course the Welsh have known about the properties of this slime for generations.
We love the British, in all their many flavors.
Llanwrtyd Wells, smallest town in Britain, is the setting for this annual and entirely sensible event. In a swimming time trial, entrants go the length of a 60 yard cutting in a peat bog, and back. Snorkels are necessary as looking up out of the water is against the rules, navigation being achieved through physical contact with the sides of the ditch. Athletes came from all over the World to compete this year, with the result that the previous World Record was shattered five times.
We understand it is an upcoming Olympic event, along with Mildew Growing. We can hardly wait.

Yow. After at least a week (and maybe more; we honestly don't remember) of getting up at 6 AM every day (for meetings, or conference calls, at irrationally early hours, way before any sane person would attempt to be at work) we hereby celebrate Saturday, a day on the eve of which we turned off our alarm, threatened the cat with certain destruction should he wake us up, and told the voices in our head to shut up until further notice.
And then we slept, blissfully, gloriously, rolling over whenever we (for whatever reason) awoke, telling ourself that sleep was more important, sleeping as we once (in our summer youth) practiced sleeping, as stuffing oneself at Thanksgiving, but stuffing ourself with sleep, going back again and again to the table of soma until, at last, we are full.

Plop. At least, that was the plan last night. This morning, way, way before we were interested in being awake, Him Whose Name Is Either Lost or Misplaced draws us out of sleep with his meowing. This is typical. At dawn, he figures he'll die of starvation unless he forces us out of bed to put a tiny spoonful of stinky cat food in his bowl. This ritual requires him to then sniff at it and leave without eating it, but at least it shuts him up.
So we groan something obscene, roll over, and go back to sleep.
This scene is repeated three times until, the forth time, we sit up in bed to glare at him, as he is likely to be at the edge of the bed so as to maximize the effect.
Oddly, he isn't. But he continues to meow. The only other place he could be is under the bed. All right. Fine. We look. No, not there either.
Now we're curious. The hall? No. Then ... ?
We open the closet door and he runs out.
He must have snuck in last night, and been in there when we shut the door before going to bed. He does this too, every so often. It's clearly part of his carefully thought out plan to drive us insane.
And it's working.

Plurp. Those of you who follow U.S. propaganda will have noticed quite a surge in the last couple of days, with official administration press releases and (we're sure) completely coincidental pro-war demonstrations touting the moral correctness of Dubya's desire to Bomb the Snot Out of Iraq^TM.
PsyOps have begun in earnest.
Enjoy the show.

Plurp. Found on a scrap of paper on our pocket.
Picking up steam
Where did that come from?

Plurp. Have you ever tried to put dental floss back into the little container in which it comes? It turns out to be really hard.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was
picking up steam

Friday, February 28, 2003
Blab. Yesterday's lovely rant against workflow as a computing systems abstraction (my, what intellectual rants we have here!) seems to have motivated one reader. Not to explain workflow to us, of course (that would be asking too much), but rather to question our assumptions and tell us a story.
Actually, I always thought of the workflow process as a nondeterministic procedure. You can never tell if it is going to succeed or terminate. My usual work-around for the travel expense problem (we used Lotus Knots and it never worked as planned) was:

write the travel expense on paper

get the paper signed by the boss

type the travel expense into Lotus notes

email it to the boss for approval

carry the paper to the final department

spend the refund money on a beer

wait for a call from my manager to visit his office so he could fix the online form (since he couldn't return it to me)

spend the refund money on a beer

wait for a call from the final department to visit their office to fix the online form

spend the refund money on a beer

wait for a notice that my form has been rejected for a duplicate payment attempt

Surely you can't expect the abstract notion that there really IS a "business process" to be correctly encoded in software. REAL business is done thru intimidation, whining, threats, pleading, bribes, etc. It is much more effective to beg for your trip money with a signed piece of paper than a pending email.
From a certified, Taylor time-and-motion specialist,
Dorian
We believe in the Platonic ideal in which all abstractions find themselves reified in the real world. (Hey, we used the word reified in a sentence!)
And don't call us Shirley.

Blab. Another reader also liked our rant against workflow, but for what appears to be a different reason.
Boy, thanks for the rant (?) At least it wasn't about the poor cat.
That would be the dumb cat, or perhaps, the annoying cat.

Blab. A reader engages in surrogate blogging.
But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours, The Bluedog Club.
You just bought yourself another Saturday, mister!

Blab. A reader suggests an interesting possibility.
When people accept contradictory ideas, they invalidate their minds.
Or not.

Yow.

Yo. Here's something you don't see every day in diplomatic circles.
Spain begs President to restrain Rumsfeld
President Bush has been told to muzzle Donald Rumsfeld, his provocative Defence Secretary, if he wants to ease European misgivings about war with Iraq. [...]
"I did tell the President that we need a lot of Powell and not much of Rumsfeld," said [Spanish Prime Minister José María] Aznar, referring to Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State. "Ministers of Defence should talk less, shouldn't they? The more Powell speaks and the less Rumsfeld speaks, that wouldn't be a bad thing altogether." [...]
The Spanish leader is thought to have been particularly perturbed by Mr Rumsfeld recent comparison of Germanys "do nothing" approach to Saddam Hussein with that of Libya and Cuba, two countries on the US State Departments list of sponsors of state terrorism. [...]
At the critical diplomatic juncture over Iraq in recent weeks, Mr Rumsfeld angered France and Germany by dismissing them as "old Europe".
It is a wonder to behold, is it not?

Yo. Now, who said those slimy Scottish bogs were worthless?
Scientists may have found the answer to Britain's most dangerous hospital superbug -- in slime taken from Scottish rock pools.
Let's have a big cheer for slime! Yay, slime!

Yow. We have nothing whatsoever to say about this picture. But we do like it.

Plurp. We fear that the PETA folks may have gone just a wee bit overboard this time with their new campaign, Holocaust on Your Plate. (Caution: Graphic pictures of Holocaust victims, but look anyway so you can wonder, and we mean really wonder, what PETA was thinking.)
The graphic campaign and exhibit "Holocaust on Your Plate," devised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, juxtaposes 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.
In a surprising reaction, the Anti-Defamation League denounced the exhibit. Imagine that.
"The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent [...]. PETA's effort to seek approval for their 'Holocaust on Your Plate' campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights."
Maybe PETA should have picked a somewhat less offensive title. Like, oh, Holocaust - It's What's For Dinner.

Plurp.
The blue dog.
It's What's For Dinner^TM.

Thursday, February 27, 2003
Blab. It's Enigmatic Furriner Day here in Plurp, and our first entry starts out seeming oddly normal.
I am in awe. If it's a joke, it's very very cunning.
It's those enigmatic folks from Barthelona.
Polyphonic HMI, based in Barcelona, Spain has developed an artificial intelligence application that helps music labels determine the hit potential of music prior to its release. [...]
The application can recognize hidden market trends and consumer taste patterns as they evolve over time as well as complex intricacies of recorded music only understood at very deep levels of the human consciousness. Most people can't explain why they like a certain song beyond saying they like blues, or a good beat and a strong melody. This technology can actually pinpoint what complex patterns are most attractive to a given listener or audience.
Readers are hereby required to tell us if this is:

Both a truthful story and a valid, useful technology,

A truthful story but a bozo, loser technology, or

A joke.

As always, show your work.

Blab. We receive an encoded message for clandestine terrorist cells in northern Europe.
'Ik droomde, dat ik langzaam leefde...
langzamer dan de oudste steen.'
If BabelFish has no idea, we certainly don't either.

Blab. Even more curiously, we receive an encoded message for clandestine terrorist cells populated by folks who speak only badly broken German. There, Mr. Asscroft, it shouldn't be very hard to find them.
Der blaue Hund was kaputt
Hmm. That's equally broken in at least two languages.

Blab. A salt company writes:
The natives here are celebrating "schmutzigen Donnerstag" (dirty Thursday) a.k.a. "Wieberfastnacht". In Switzerland this seems to mean dressing up in odd clothes, whereas the women in our northern neighbor and member of Old Europe arm themselves with sissors and go around cutting off men's ties. (Helen, go for it!) Europeans are so wierd.
- Morton
In our misspent youth, we went to a restaurant, somewhere in the southwest U.S., in which they made it a practice to cut off men's ties, on the rare occasion when some city slicker actually wandered into the restaurant wearing one. All the waitresses carried shears, and the walls of the restaurant were festooned with the lower halves of ties.
Maybe it was a German restaurant.

Blab. A reader plugs into the Evil-o-Meter, with ambiguous results.
The evil meter is broken. I came out neutral. Bwahahahahahahaha.
Or perhaps you're not as evil as you think you are, eh?

Blab. Having arrived at the Correct Coast, that reader who was formerly over the Glue States writes:
Enjoy the snow! I wish I was there to make snow angels with you.
What a nice sentiment. Unfortunately, after a few days of rain followed by more freezing weather, the best we could currently muster would be slush angels.

Blab. A fan writes:
I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Bluedog.
It's the weblogs that got small.

Blab. Count Dracula writes:
You vill have a good day, citizen.
We'd like a garlic pizza to go. Thanks.

Blab. We have so many cynical, godless readers. We have no idea why.
Given that there is no god, goodness will have to do, though it does exist in less profusion than believers in the former nonsense. But oh, my goodness is all that one can say to this awful fact. Now Dubya, GBII, the Dumbest of The Dumb, may proceed to mess it all up in one hubristic fell swoop. The good guy is no longer here to say it is a wonderful day in the neighborhood. Good thing, in a way, because it certainly will not be.
Yr obdt svt,
McD
Naturally, we agree completely with our Treasured Reader. We were counting on Mister Rogers to solve the whole Iraq weapons of mass destruction thing single-handed, and we regard his "death" as an obvious ploy of <insert conspiracy theory here>.
What will we do now?

Blab. A reader alerts us to:
the second coming
Lovecraft's baby. How sweet!

Plurp. It's All Day Meeting Day here at work, and what could be more fun that that? Here are a small sampling of the enigmatic, encoded messages that the various monitored individuals tried vainly to pretend were simple, meaningful communication.

SWG requirements for BAM and CO/SaR

P2M Root Cause Analysis

We have no idea.

Yo. Certain readers (and you know who you are) will be very interested to note that Sony has just agreed to host their online games on Butterfly.net, using an IBM grid infrastructure.
Others will not.

Rant. Can someone explain to us the attraction of the workflow abstraction used in computing systems? It just seems brain dead.
It comes from trying to model how businesses process work items, like travel expense reports, with a thing (the travel expense report) going from the employee to the employee's manager to some financial folk to someone who actually reimburses the employee. So far, fine.
But the abstraction is a directed acyclic graph, in which the nodes represent the places where something happens (e.g. the manager OKs the expense) and the arcs represent the thing going from one place to another.
And already the abstraction has gone wrong! Because it's a DAG, a workflow can't represent cases in which the thing must go someplace it's already been. So, if the manager says, Hey, you forgot to sign it, the workflow won't let you represent the manager giving the travel expense report back to the employee.
So how do workflow gurus solve this obvious and trivial problem with their DAG model? Do they adopt a better model? Nope. Their solution is to build a second workflow that returns the travel expense report from the manager to the employee, and establish points of correspondence between the two workflows. That is, they join the two DAGs into a general graph, without admitting that they're doing it.
Bong! Round two.
Now, what, exactly, happens at each of those nodes? The workflow advocates are smart enough to know that it's not a workflow. Too complicated. Who knows what those people do to process a travel expense report (or other work thing)? They call what happens a "microflow." This makes it sound like it has something to do with workflow, but it really doesn't. You see, a "microflow" is a procedure, a general-purpose, unconstrained procedure.
Let's review. We have general purpose procedures linked together by arbitrary combinations of DAGs that, in general, form an arbitrary graph. Does that sound like a Turing machine to you? Yeah, us too.
That is, the workflow people, upon facing the two most trivial problems with DAGs as a conceptual model, run screaming back into Turing machines.
So what, we ask you, did they gain by holding onto DAGs in the first place? We would greatly appreciate it, oh really we would, if the workflow gurus in our readership could explain this to us.
'Cause we just plain don't get it.

Plurp. This just in.
Bush Agrees "In Principle" Not to Bomb the Snot out of Iraq
"But in practice," said a Bush spokesman, "we do not know how to avoid bombing the snot out of Iraq and want a technical mission to discuss the details."

Plurp.
The blue dog
agreed "in principle" to
use directed acyclic graphs
for BAM and CO/SaR.

Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Blab. On our correct prediction that Joe Millionaire would be given a million dollars upon making his choice of women, a distraught reader writes:
You just ruined the denoument of Joe Millionaire for me. There goes my plans to buy it on DVD.
Don't worry. If you didn't see it coming the first time, we figure you won't see it coming the second time either.

Blab. A reader suggests a compelling mixing of the memes.
|\_._._/|
| & % |
\ ´.` /
|`---´| Der blaue Hund was both cross-eyed
(     )    and heavy.
|`___´|\_
/|     |\
##     ##
But not broken. And that's a good thing.

Blab. A reader suggests a rather broad analogy with the U.S. and Old Europe.
Achtung!
Indeed?
The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership.
But, oh gosh, that site has so many words, so many links! It tires our overwrought mind merely to consider the possibility. But we would be grateful, oh so very grateful, if our less slothful readers would digest the entire site for us, and regurgitate here. Thank you.

Blab. The floodgates of broken jokes have burst open, and one more trickles out.
I would suggest to you that "You can tune a piano, and you can also tune a guitar," appearing in Plurp a few weeks ago, is a broken joke.
Good catch! Thank you for snatching broken jokedness from the comic's mouth.

Blab. A reader gets all worked up about something we got all worked up about, with surprising results.
"The scenarios are being called, at least informally, "the Indian scenarios", or "the Tribes scenarios". ... 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."
I have to admit that I don't really understand the "gaffe", either. Who exactly is offended by what? Is the fact that American Indians are/were organized into groups called "tribes" that have/had certain names offensive, or controversial, or derogatory?   Is it that some (many? most? a few?) people prefer "Native American" to "Indian" these days? (But that wouldn't explain why "Tribes scenarios" would be offensive.)
If there were scenarios called "New York" and "Paris" and "Rome", and they were referred to as "the City Scenarios", would that be offensive to you as a city-dweller? To someone else?
Is it somehow inherently offensive to mention Indians or Tribes at all? Has the very existence of these groups become something so sacred that it cannot be mentioned for metaphorical purposes? That would be pretty silly.
The analogy with "Babe scenarios" doesn't hold; "Babe" is a condescending word for "woman", but neither "Indian" nor "Tribe" is condescending or derogatory as far as I know. I can see the offense in "Redskin scenarios" or "Squaw scenarios". But I don't think it's sensible that for certain groups of people, *any* word that refers to them is automatically offensive; that would just be bizarre...
Our impression was that the term Indian was deprecated in favor of Native American, and tribe was deprecated in favor of nation. This would be similar to negro being deprecated in favor of black, we think. (We're not sure about that last example, though.)
The point was not that identifying these groups and social organizations per se was offensive, but rather that those particular labels were.
But guess what? We Googled for a while today and could find no evidence that Indian or tribe were deprecated. There we were, trying to be all politically correct and stuff, only to give in to our hallucinations once again.
We hate when that happens.

Blab. A reader interrupts our self-loathing with words.
Subj: Signs of Our Time
As part of my obsession with the signs and banners of our time -- which I begin to think may, in fact, be the much-overprophesied "end times" -- I offer the following messages spied at recent peace rallies:
George W. Bush - Not the Man His Father Wasn't
Dubya Dubya III
And perhaps my favorite:
War is the Praxis of Evil
Who says political dialogue can't be intellectually stimulating?
A fan forever,
Darla
Ooh! We love that last one!

Blab. A reader sends us a real metaphorical doozie (as opposed to all those imaginary metaphorical doozies that have cluttered up this page of late).
-- Glad to see Dubja's message is getting out.
Indeed, we may be able to understand a great deal about Dubya's administration, as well as recent events in Guantanamo and your local hardware store, from this elegant little story.
A Texas judge ordered a defendant's mouth to be taped shut after the man kept interrupting his lawyer and the judge during an aggravated assault trial.
For about 20 minutes Tuesday, Carl Wiley, 36, ignored pleas from state District Judge Jim Bob Darnell and his own mother to keep quiet during a hearing outside the jury's presence.
Finally, Darnell ordered bailiffs to seal Wiley's mouth with duct tape.

Blab. A reader sends us one of those usually-annoying blind ...
[link]
... things. This time, though, it's a beautifully written tribute to the spirit that built the modern world.
Like children frightened by a father's tears, we have to worry when engineers cry.
Go read it. Really. And tell us what you think.

Blab. We receive the strangest reader contribution in a long time. And that's saying something!
I have discovered Banana Nut Cappuccino which I absolutely love, However I have only been able to purchase it ay Sunoco's mini marts. My problem is that Banana Nut is not always available, Is it possible that you provide information on how I can purchase this . Looking forward to hearing from you.
So now we're a purchasing service? Weird.

Plurp. What are you searching for, oh wandering readers of Plurp? Well, last week, it was ...

weapons of mass destruction

duct tape

ann curry

steve naked pitures

helen naked pitures

joe millionaire

mia

sara beard

sara joe millionaire

Sara Joe - wasn't she one of the Beverly Hillbillies?

Plurp. So how evil are we? (Mike)

Makes sense. We almost always played Chaotic Neutral characters and, like we always said, No matter how hard you try to do otherwise, you always end up playing yourself.

Yak.
It's like a self-referential analogy.

Rant. We would like to point out a certain bizarre behavior on the part of the United Nations PR dweebs.
The decision to relax UK laws on cannabis is sending out the "wrong signal" to the rest of the world, according to a UN panel responsible for drugs issues.
A former president of the UN's Council Against Innocent Citizens (well, OK, the official name might be something else) says:
It's quite worrying that we might end up in the next 10 or 20 years ... with our psychiatric hospitals filled with people who have problems with cannabis.
Psychiatric hospitals??? Whereas, we surmise, graveyards filled with victims of smallpox, anthrax, sarin and VX are No Big Deal.
Time to recalibrate those UN reality checkers, eh?

Plurp. Today's Wacky Reader Contest is inspired, in a manner not to be described, by a reader who is, even now, in an airplane high above the Glue States.
A 6-month-old girl and a 3-year-old boy were married in a southern village despite laws against child marriages. The parents arranged the marriage because they feared that the children would be unable to find partners later in life. As a priest performed the ceremony, the infant bride grew alarmed by the commotion and started to cry. Her mother called the ceremony to a halt temporarily as the newlyweds were breast-fed.
So, wacky readers, is this Fact or Falderal? Do tell!

Yo. Him Whose Name is Like a Self-Referential Analogy is confused by Helen's absence. He thinks he can cajole and blackmail us with the same annoying ploys that work so well on Helen. Gosh, he's wrong.
He decided he didn't like the food we gave him tonight. So he squeaked and wailed and tried to trip us as we walked, figuring that this would get him some other kind of food. It didn't.
So he came over to us as we typed this in, poking his head over our keyboard, looking to tromp on it, figuring he could excuse it as just an accident of innocent route.
Cats are a wonder. Just as infants learn all too quickly to scream at just that right note to draw the immediate attention of every adult in the vicinity, cats learn exactly what annoys you. In fact, they are unparalleled in the animal kingdom in their ability to maximize (annoyance) / (energy exerted).
He revels in his ability to wake us up at dawn by walking, ever so softly, over papers that happen to be in the bedroom. It takes almost no effort on his part and, he believes, preserves his deniability. He congratulates himself at his ability to barf on the only expensive rug we have.
At least, when Helen is here. We see right through him. Maybe he senses this, as he has now left us alone.
More likely, though, he's just waiting for dawn.

Plurp.
The blue dog
preserved deniability
in a Tupperware container
beside the banana nut
cappuccino

Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Blab. This week's Conscious Reader Contest, which, inexplicably, got several entries, asked you to tell us the answer to a clueless reader's question: So, why is the blue dog always linked to this entry?
Yawn - ok, barely conscious but - using some of your own words -
You link to that entry because plurp is a collection of surrealist poems whose only connection [is] the inclusion of the words blue dog.
Le chien bleu a retourné dans son sommeil et contemplais les tristesses de la lune.
-AJ
We worry that that latter sentence is code instructing terrorists to mock us mercilessly. Nonetheless, that answer has all the right words in it, and we are very pleased at the idea that Plurp is a collection of surrealist poems. We shall endeavor to rhyme more frequently in the future.
Another reader cites a mysterious source of knowledge.
"So, why is the blue dog always linked to this entry? Hmm?"
First appearance of The Blue Dog? (That's what Overstreet says, and that a near-mint copy is worth a buck fifty, but Wizard doesn't list it.)
L.
Again, the phonemes sound right, but we're not sure what street it's over or whether mint is the right flavor. But anyway! A more experienced reader writes:
That was the first entry he peed on? You can never get that odor out, and they'll always go back to that spot until the end of time....
We had to replace our carpet....
- Felis Lynx
We tried replacing our entire blog. Even that didn't help. Meanwhile, a somnambulist accuses us of archaeology.
It is the first appearance of that lovely little dig in plurp, says a reader caught between sleep and waking--actually more toward sleep.
Actually, the first time anybody accused anybody of being asleep in this here blog was some random reader who said this:
You seem to be a cool dude who has been sleeping since October 2000. Do you still exist?
We think. Fortunately, another reader addresses us properly.
Oh, god.
It's when you first started writing the surrealistic comments that nothing in common except featuring the words "the blue dog". The sad part is that the people who read this blog are, in general, more intelligent than the average person.
"Do not adjust your minds. It's reality that is malfunctioning."
We resent that. We just calibrated reality and we can assure you that it is functioning as written. Summarizing this important lesson, a reader writes:
Help me, Obi-wan Bluedoggie. You're my only hope.
You are so doomed.

Blab. A reader, to whom we are extremely grateful, resurrects a long-neglected genre.
With reference to broken jokes.
I am not sure if this counts, but it is close:
A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet.
"My dog's cross-eyed, is there anything you can do for him?"
"Well," says the vet, "let's have a look at him" So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth.
Finally, he says, "I'm going to have to put him down."
"What? Because he's cross-eyed?"
"No, because he's really heavy."
The consensus around the lab is that this is not a broken joke. Rather, it is a joke. The broken joke version, which we attribute properly to Ian and duly record here, would end with No, because he has cancer.
See? Much funnier.
(Though, admittedly, it's probably pretty obscure if you don't have the original joke sitting in front of you. But then, so are we.)

Blab. A reader wishes the news to make sense.
Heard on the news this morning. Does this make sense?
"we could get a significant snowfall or barely none"
Shouldn't it be "barely any"?
If only the news contained only grammatical errors!

Blab. A reader has an interesting question. And an image.
Not with a bang but a bush?
That looks like a humanoid to us. We need to get our eyes checked.

Blab. A reader, noticing that we didn't make good on our promise to introduce a Scale Of Evil to current political debate, does our work for us. This reader is our hero.
Here is a scale of evil. Now, you don't have to think about it. If only, it were more inclusive.
We love not having to think. So here it is.
Evil Scale

Evil

Very evil

Very, very evil

Very, very, very evil

Very, very, very, very evil

That seems perfectly serviceable to us! In fact, we notice that it is already widely adopted.

Blab. A disagreeable reader writes:
I disagree with Helen Thomas when she said that GWB was the worst president ever. Throughout history, most of the people with global influence, let alone US presidents, have disgraced humanity. By no means, can our current president be singled out of this group.
Funny. Those seem like different things to us.
We are too ignorant of history to be certain that Dubya is the dumbest president in U.S. history. We are too unimaginative to envision anyone dumber, but surely that is just a personal limitation. On our part, we mean.

Blab. On our heartfelt experience of Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence on the recent Grammys, an abusive reader writes:
It's not an anti-war song, you stupid hippie.
If you say so.

Yow. We are now an official participant in Project Steve (alphabetical by last name; scroll down; details here). Yay!

Plop. There's a new reality program about to start on NBC called Meet My Folks: Twins. The premise is that women (who are twins) date several guys, bring them home to their folks, embarrassment and lie detectors ensue, and then somebody chooses one of the guys for further nookie.
The commercials promise some amazing twist as a hook. We're here to tell you the amazing twist: the "guys" are twins, too. Duh.
For the record, we also guessed that they would give Joe Millionaire a million bucks after he made his choice of women. Again, duh.

Plurp.
At the bottom of an enormous pile
of discarded French words,
joke shards, grammatical errors
and disagreeable readers
was the blue dog.

Monday, February 24, 2003
Blab. Those stoners among you who were feeling guilty about supporting terrorism and other wordly ills by your purchases should definitely follow the link contained in this reader contribution.
regarding that post you made about the house that jack built anti-drug commercials, someone made a cartoon along those lines.
We think it makes the point rather well.

Blab. A reader finally wakes up. Must be all the buzz associated with Ronnie.

One more belated explanation of the EIRRE:
Doh, I could've had a V8.
And, for him, that's a car.

Blab. An unconscious reader writes:
"We leave that as an exercise to the conscious reader."
....Just tell us
Sigh. We are forced to make this into a Conscious Reader Contest, however much we fear that there will be too few entrants.
So, why is the blue dog always linked to this entry? Hmm?
Somebody? Anybody?

Blab. Another cynical reader writes:
I have a live recording of Simon singing that song, and right after the line "Ten thousand people, maybe more" the crowd starts cheering, as if to say "That's us! He's talking about us." Stunning.
There was no one cheering in the middle of Sounds of Silence last night. We have been a fan of this song for over thirty-five years. We never before thought of it as an anti-war song.

Blab. A cynic writes:
I humbly disagree with Philosopher Hammerstein. Harmful stupidity seems to be man's natural state, and the genius of liberal society is that it takes all the Stupids and directs them toward less harmful activities (like worshipping the neon gods) than what they might do otherwise.
We are not so cynical as you, Treasured Reader, however hard that may be to believe. We have confidence in the natural brilliance of humanity, in the ability of even the common man to see through the pretentions of society's manipulators.
Well, ultimately. Frankly, we can think of so many contradictions to this generous theory as to turn us into a professional cynic. Unfortunately, we can say the same of the generous theories of liberal society. We think too much.

Blab. Google writes:
Did you mean: Simon and Garfunkel
Um, well, yeah. Thanks for pointing that out. And shame on us.

Blab. A reader after our own heart writes:
I HATE FEBRUARY!
Us too! Too cold! Too much snow! Too few beach parties! Bad, bad February. Go take a time out in the corner.

Blab. A reader makes our head hurt.
If you don't see the fnords, they can't eat you. Don't see the fnords. Don't see the fnords.
The what?

Blab. A reader concludes that a dog is ...
A different Mia.
Duh.

Yak. This morning.
If you hadn't gotten up so early, you'd still be in bed.
There's a certain incontrovertible logic to that, isn't there?

Yak. This afternoon.
Ian: I'm shocked and dismayed by your overt cynicism.
Bill: Yeah, whatever.

Plop. What's up these days in the City of Brotherly Love? Let's find out.
A man whose daughter was hit with a snowball by a group of girls returned to the scene and opened fire with a gun, critically wounding a 10-year-old youngster. [...]
Best's daughter was hit with a snowball as she and her friends walked past a group of girls having a "friendly snowball fight". [...]
Best came back again hours later, leaned out the passenger side of a moving car and fired at least five shots into the group of children still playing on the street. [...]
Police said the girl who was shot had been inside during the scuffles.
"This little girl had nothing to do with anything. She wasn't involved in the fight. [...] He just seemed to be randomly shooting into the crowd."
It's hard to advance this as a world culture, isn't it?

Plurp.
The blue dog
was just too
cynical to fall for
ancient songs as
political philosophy

Sunday, February 23, 2003
Blab. A reader brings up politics. Here. Imagine!
Lots of hand wringing going on out here, French behaving badly, Germans, too, and motives of our great and good government questioned. But in the end, dear friends, the welfare of the Iraqis is the bottom line. Those who survive our intense bombing schedule will be free of the yoke put on them by that wicked Jerry Colona look-alike and will be just as pleased as are the Afghanis who have benefited from our largesse. You bet. God bless America.
War is heck.

Blab. Steve writes:
Evolution Endorsed by Steves
Well, Steve, I agree. Don't you?
Steve
The National Center for Science Education is on a PR roll with this:
NCSE's "Project Steve" is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of "scientists who doubt evolution" or "scientists who dissent from Darwinism." [...]
Creationists draw up these lists to convince the public that evolution is somehow being rejected by scientists, that it is a "theory in crisis." [...]
Project Steve mocks this practice with a bit of humor [by compiling a list of scientists named "Steve" who support evolution], and because "Steves" are only about 1% of scientists, it incidentally makes the point that tens of thousands of scientists support evolution.
We are certain that all organisms will find relief in our personal endorsement of evolution. We also endorse gravity and the periodic table, just in case.
Mock! Mock!

Blab. A reader responds to our urgent question.

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?
You seem to still be working under the delusion that "Iraq" actually exists.
L.
Oh! My, that would greatly simplify things, wouldn't it?

Blab. A redundant reader asks:
Why is the blue dog linked back there?
We leave that as an exercise to the conscious reader.

Blab. Of that evil inverse link yesterday, a knowledgeable reader writes:
'Sprout Mask Replica'! One of the works of very strange, yet oddly wonderful, Robert Rankin. He only has a few jokes, but he uses them without mercy, and we love him for it.
Perhaps best known as the creator of "Barry The Time Sprout", a character for the ages (last seen inhabiting the cranium of Elvis Presley).
{inw}
We looked at that site. Really, we did. But it's so long, and complicated, and involving sprouts and all that, well, we just couldn't understand it.
Perhaps some smarter, more patient reader can explain it all to us?

Blab. An insightful reader writes:
Not the right Mia, I presume.
Uh, no.

Blab. A belated explanation of last week's Enigmatic Image Requiring Reader Explication passes through the firewall.

Re: Reagan pic.
Sorry it's so belated, but live secure in the knowledge that there are plenty things in my life way more belated because I spend too much time reading blogs.. annyyhooo...
"Doh! I can't belive Bush is making the same damned stupid mistakes I did" said ex President Reagan during a brief moment of lucidity.
-AJL
Excellent! And, it makes us wonder if Dubya ever has moments of lucidity. Whaddya think?

Blab. A reader pleads for help.
ca[tain Plurp help us if you can. Rummy evil as well as stupid?
To wit:
In 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was in a position to draw the world’s attention to Saddam’s chemical threat. He was in Baghdad as the UN concluded that chemical weapons had been used against Iran. He was armed with a fresh communication from the State Department that it had "available evidence" Iraq was using chemical weapons. But Rumsfeld said nothing.
Hey - we endorse the idea of Dumsfeld shutting up!

Blab. A reader expands on this point.
It's getting difficult to tell who the bad guys are. Could you help and ask your readers to help come up with some sort of scale of bad we can use to rate enemies and friends of the US? The administration is making us confused. Who are we supposed to hate and want to destroy? Who are we supposed to just loathe?   Who are our new global buddies? It's becoming (remaining?) positively Kissingeresque.
We will work on this. You'll probably have to remind us to actually do it, though. We're very event-driven these days.

Blab. A reader makes an astonishing discovery.
[link]
Yowie kazowie! One of our Treasured Readers has not only discovered the StripCreator stuff that we used to do many of our astonishingly creative cartoon strips, but resurrects Open Mike Night while he's at it. And Cthulhu. Very nice!

Yow. Our perspective on humans as not necessarily occupying the high ground of evolution is echoed by some nice biologists at the University of Arizona, who say this to bacteria. (Caterina)
The last laugh may be yours. You have spent three and a half billion years practicing chemical warfare. Humans thought that antibiotics would end infectious diseases, but the overuse of drugs has resulted in the selection of drug resistant bacteria. They didn't realize that this was only the first battle, and now the war is ready to begin.
Humans think this is their era. A more truthful statement would be that we all live in the age of bacteria.

Plurp. We were reduced to tears by Simon and Garfunkle singing this song on the Grammys tonight. Read the lyrics again. Slowly.
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence.
"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls."
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.

Plurp.
I promise
to teach you to hate and fear,
to teach you to hate from year to year,
to drum it into your dear little ear;
you've got to be carefully taught.

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