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2003.03.02 : 2003.03.08
Saturday, March 8, 2003
Blab. A reader challenges church doctrine.
you don't have to give up
things for lent. you can try doing things for lent, like buying fair trade
chocolate etc
Can we? Famous Rebecca points
us to a number of sites that discuss the religious history
and doctrine behind
lent.
It all seems wrapped up in doing without things as symbolism for doing
without god. Or something like that.
We're not sure what fair
trade chocolate has to do with it.
But whatever! Having given up lent for lent, we figure we're covered.
Blab. A reader frightens us.
Well, it is red nose week
here in england
Oh good heavens. As if this lent thing (with the accompanying Pancake Tuesday,
Ash Wednesday and Theremin Thursday) wasn't enough, it turns out that there
really is such a thing as red
nose week. We have no idea what it is, but there you go.
Blab. A reader stomps on the shards.
Two jokes broken even further
than yesterday's submission:
"My cantaloupe has no nose."
"Your cantaloupe has no nose?"
"Nope, no nose."
"How does it smell?"
"It can't; it has no brain, and thus
no olfactory center!"
"My cantaloupe has no nose."
"Well, cantaloupes generally don't
have noses. What did you expect?"
And your point is, no doubt, that this kind of thing can be carried too
far. Much too far.
Thank you.
Blab. A reader invites us to write an acceptance speech, even
though the reader's seductive example seems like an argument against doing
so.
Make
one Stevie!
Elaine's Acceptance Speech for the
Stupendous Animal Costume Design Oscar:
Thank you! Oh! Thank you! I can hardly
conjugate verbs! I feel so blessed! And this statue - it's so full of chocolate!
Oh, thank you again! I just want everyone to read in the tabloids that
even in my wildest fits of self-loathing, I never would have frantically
prayed that this could ever be so meaningless. And to the other suck-ass
nominees, I want each of you to know how totally wonderful your fake smiles
makes me feel right now!
You know when they first told me I
was a God on Earth, I just had to take a minute and brag about how freakish
my love scenes have been. I guess it all just makes me feel kinda cheap
You know, there are so many back-stabbing
leeches to thank! First off though, I want to pay off the esteemed
idiots of the Academy, who looked deep within their wallets before giving
me this fantastic award! Also, I want to thank Zeus, for being such a powerful
force in my kitchen. And to the People Under the Stairs, who taught me
to take life by the horns. And finally, to all the personal assistants
I fired - I couldn't have done it without you!
Thank you America, and good night!
We have bad news, Treasured Reader. You didn't win.
Blab. A reader wonders something. Oddly, our reader asks us.
"How does your cat smell?"
"He doesn't. He has kitty litter
in his nose again."
Is that a broken joke? Or a
broken kitty?
That's a broken kitty. We know because we have one just like it. And that's
no joke.
Blab. A reader contributes to the vital knowledge the underpins
so much of human existence.
On the continuing, ever-popular,
search for Helenisms (they're everywhere, but only a few of us can detect
them), yesterday evening on the radio, a guest said:
[X] is taking second
fiddle to [Y].
This is clearly a Helenism, constructed
from:
[X] is playing second
fiddle to [Y].
[X] is taking second
place to [Y].
{inw}
Winner!
Blab. That same reader then squanders all those hard-won points.
Continuing to mine the rich
fields of "the whole..." phrases, we now have:
... the whole shebang.
Added to our pre-existing:
... the whole nine yards.
... the whole shooting
match.
... the whole kit and
caboodle.
This makes a rich candidate space
for an unprecedented quadruple Helenism (the quad-Helen). All we
have to do now is find some pundit, somewhere, inadvertantly saying:
... the whole
kit, shebang, and nine shooting yards.
I have to admit, it seems unlikely.
{inw}
And that's being optimistic.
Blab. A reader who is Helen says, with some authority:
You cannot CONSTRUCT Helenisms.
Completely against the rules. But that was Ian and he never reads
the rules.
Does he not? We were unaware of that.
Blab. It turns out that this week's polite reader (or its Exalted
Leader) lives in the neck of the woods. Where's that? We don't know, but
they apparently grow Helenisms there.
Sir:
Could your devoyed reader have been
combining "head up his ass" with "doesn't know his ass from his elbow".
The last phrase is all too common in my neck of the woods (of course never
referring to me; usually referring to our Exalted Leader).
Very nice! And congratulations
to our original reader from yesterday as well.
Blab. A reader wants to know something.
Please send me the site where
I can find the complete U.N. transcripts. I saw part of Blix's report the
other day but I'd like to see all of it.
We like Hans Blix. We think someone with that name should be a character
in Grimm's Fairy Tales. A cobbler, perhaps, or a stunted man with a large
nose who sells magic pecans.
We don't actually know where to find transcripts of everything in the
world that goes on at the U.S. But Blix's latest report to the U.N. is
here,
El Baradei's reply is here,
and the draft U.N. resolution that would give Iraq some kind of deadline
is here.
We like source materials, unfiltered by the noisy minds of the media.
Plop. It seems that some of the U.S.'s alleged evidence of naughty
activities in Iraq was forged.
A key piece of evidence linking
Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the
United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that
called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear
ambitions.
Documents that purportedly showed
Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed
"not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts
[...]
Knowledgeable sources familiar with
the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters
between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger.
The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed
extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude
errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that
did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters
were purportedly written, the officials said.
"We fell for it," said one U.S. official
who reviewed the documents.
Apparently, we all did.
Plurp. Here's a phone
answering message we're considering.
Thank you for using MovieFone!
You have ordered four hundred tickets
for Pee Wee's Great Adventure, showing
at 4 AM in Hackensack,
New Jersey. If this is correct, please stay on the line.
Beep.
Would that keep people from leaving a message?
 Plurp.
The wonderful thing about
cheese
is that you do so many things with
it
Friday, March 7, 2003
Blab. The stars are misaligned today, accounting for
an otherwise unaccountable flood of Blabbery from our misaligned
readers. Our first contestant seems unaccountably to be searching for ...
Jillian goetz
Not here, though, Treasured Reader. Jillian only exists here.
Blab. Our second reader looks for meaning. In all the wrong places.
If you ever decide to reprint
the IBM SJ article, you might consider correcting the spelling in Figure
1. And does the text actually describe that figure at all? It's all very
strange. I'm sure there's a deeper meaning in there somewhere...
- Morton
No doubt you refer to this
article. My goodness, how very embarrassing those mispellings are for
all involved! As to the text describing the figure, we are obviously too
inbred to see the problem, as it makes sense to us. Surely that's continuing
evidence of our deep mental aberration.
Blab. That extremely polite reader returns. So, naturally, we
pay attention.
Sir:
I heard this on the radio (on To the
Point on NPR). A reporter for The Independent said when talking about
the situation Jack Straw finds himself in, "He has America breathing over
his shoulder." The commentator for To the Point added that he (Straw)
has "the British public breathing over his shoulder the other way."
Not a pretty picture, but is it a Helenism? Breathing down his neck
+ Looking over his shoulder = Breathing over his shoulder. I know
the relationship isn't simple addition, but that's practically all I can
do mathematically and get my keyboard to represent.
That sure looks Helenistic to us! Thank you for your sharp ears and generous
contributions to global knowledge.
Blab. Another Spock-eared reader recites a poem for us.
So, in conversation today,
I uttered the phrase:
"The whole shooting
match."
My interlocutor (quality word) confirmed
with:
"The whole nine yards."
A Helenism immediately presented itself:
"The whole shooting
yards."
(or the inverse).
Later in the conversation, someone
said:
"The whole kit and caboodle."
So, now we're (possibly presented
with the opportunity to concoct a triple Helenism, but the best I've managed
to do is:
"The whole shooting
kit and yards."
Is that really the best available?
{inw}
So. We find ourself becoming persnickety in our old age. It's easy to construct
Helenisms, but it's not quite the same. We say that they need to be found
in the wild, uttered without realization of their Helenisticism by the
speaker, who thinks, instead, that he or she has has said something perfectly
normal.
So, while we like The whole shooting yards (or The whole nine
match), we would have preferred if it were found in the wild.
As to that triple Helenism, we can only suggest continued rapt attention
to the chaotic dialog that, we feel sure, swirls around you.
Blab. Another reader attempts a Helenism.
Shopenhauer had his head
up his elbow. I was told that is a Helenism.
Who told you that? Well, never mind. We checked with Helen herself, who,
with her characteristic charity, said:
You can't just submit a Helenism.
You have to prove it! Name the two phrases! What does it mean? Who does
this guy think he is?
... which is to say, we think we get Head up his ass, but we must
admit to a certain confusion about what the second constituent phrase might
be, and what the combined phrase might mean. No doubt we are simply being
obtuse here, and our Treasured Reader will enlighten
us.
Blab. One of the army of clandestine agents that watches every
move we make writes in warrish German.
|\_._._/|
|
o o |
\
´.` /
|`---´|
|
| Der blaue Hund
|`___´|\_
...
/|
|\ ...
##
## ... was.
(Oddly, this is "Der blaue Hund war"
in completely in German.)
See you in Hawthorne, (or perhaps
Somers?)
This reader doubtless refers to that brief period yesterday during which
Thursday was posted without the blue dog saying much of anything. The blue
dog is sometimes shy like that.
Blab. A reader invents a new genre.
What happens when you take
broken jokes and break them even more? Do they become ultrabroken?
Or somehow paradoxically unbroken? Or just bizarre? What happens
if you stretch them to the point that the canonical joke is not even recognizable,
unless you know the intermediate broken steps?
Consider the following:
"My cantaloupe has no nose."
"Your cantaloupe has no nose?"
"Nope, no nose."
"How does it smell?"
"It can't; it has no nose!"
"Excuse me, but you've got some waxy
buildup in your ear."
"Yes, I know!"
I just drove in from the coast.
Gosh, it was a long drive.
A man walks into a drugstore and asks
for some deodorant. "Will that be cash or charge?" inquires the clerk,
to which the man replies "just put it on my ... tab".
Q: What did the bartender say to the
yuppie who walked in with a chicken under his arm?
A: Nice hat.
On a bright sunny day, a policeman
comes upon this guy on his hands and knees under a streetlight, fumbling
around on the ground. "What's the matter?" says the policeman. "I'm looking
for my keys," says the guy. "Is this where you dropped them?" asks the
policeman, and the guy replies, "Yes".
You can play a piano, and you can
also play a game.
We really like that! We are still laughing about the canteloupe thing,
the extremely obscure chicken thing, and the very derivative piano thing.
Most
excellent. We are deeply impressed with this recursive extension.
Blab. A reader seeks to make us feel badly. And succeeds.
Was there an architect
involved?
 Our
reader seeks to point out that the awful building in which we work is,
in fact, an architectural bodge of the worst kind. Lucky us.  At
one time, we worked in the beautiful
Yorktown building, designed by Eero Saarinen, who also designed the
TWA
terminal at JFK airport. We could have worked in the beautiful IBM
Almaden Research building in California. But no. We had to work in a building
that IBM leases from a tasteless designer of industrial parks.
Bleh.
Blab. A reader figures we are too happy.
Though not as much fun as
usual from the sales manager of certain rumored to be third rank search
engine that sounds Italian, I can recommend with great fervor the beautifully
written and depressing piece by Jonathan Schell in the current Harpers.
Go ahead, depress yourself with fine writing.
How kind of you. But, in fact, this is a fabulous piece of writing.
A pack of dogs attacked six
parked cars in Munich. A three-year-old boy and a six-month-old girl were
married in Nepal; the ceremony was briefly halted after the bride got fussy
but resumed after both the bride and groom were breast-fed. The sale of
young girls was on the rise in Afghanistan, and President George W. Bush
declared that making war on Iraq will lead to peace in the Middle East.
Go read it. Do!
Blab. A reader knows how we hate this stuff.
You know how I hate this
stuff, however ... you will not believe this
no matter how you try. Check it out ... I promise it will amaze you.
Psychic ... unreal
PS: If anyone can figure how
it is done let me know.
Sigh. This bit of silliness made the blog rounds last
month. We don't recall if we blogged it or not. Anyone who can't figure
out how it's done worries us. But then, that's our readership, isn't it?
Blab. And, on that topic, a reader points us to another article
on ...
Mind-reading
This one is not about Web sites; it's about Art.
The work [...] is a shimmering
fiberglass shell shaped like a giant teardrop. Three visitors at a time
can go inside the capsulelike structure, walking up a curved staircase
of resin lily pad steps. The domelike space is filled with three individual
beds made of a squishy material called TechnoGel.
Each visitor is given a headset with
electrodes that gather brain-wave data. The information is fed into a computer
and translated into Ms. Mori's visual language, which is then projected
onto the ceiling. The forms change color in response to the individuals'
states of mind. After seeing their own brain activity, visitors see a series
of amoebalike animations with colorful shapes ranging from flowers to stars
to molecular structures.
We figure that Artists have different brain function than the rest of us.
They think this is interesting, or important, or something like that.
Blab. A reader gets all worked up about ...
Edamame!
Yo soy la soja, Treasured Reader.
Blab. A reader sends us a nostalgic ...
[link].
Uh, yeah.
Blab. One of our many groupies writes:
Steve:
Signs of our time appear in many places
and under many guises. Have a wander about this
site and see what I mean.
Your devoted fan,
Darla
Our devoted fan turns us on to quite a collection of very silly MP3s (and
the like) on current political topics. Take a listen!
Blab. A reader reminds us that we are ...
No
stranger than reality
And what a relief that is!
In a stunning development,
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein today offered to attack himself in exchange
for $30 billion from the U.S. government.
The surprising offer came in a day
when President George W. Bush exhorted America's allies to join what he
called "a coalition of the willing to be bought." [...]
Moments after the President's speech,
French President Jacques Chirac made a surprise announcement of his own,
saying that France would be willing to attack Turkey for $30 billion.
"France has no argument with the people
of Turkey," Mr. Chirac said. "But $30 billion is a lot of cake."
It is difficult to tell reality from satire these days, isn't it?
Blab. A reader addresses the military.
Hi Captain Plurp,
Speaking of Public Radio, this morning
I heard a fascinating interview by Susan Stanberg (one of my heros) of
Simon
Schama who wrote "The
Unloved American" in this week's The New Yorker magazine.
The article is going to be weekend
reading around my house. I thought your other readers might like to know
about it as well.
Your MW Correspondent
The Unloved American is a lovely piece of writing, with great insight
into how Americans are perceived away from their amber fields of grain.
Perhaps Mrs. Trollope put
it best after all: "If the citizens of the United States were indeed the
devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust
themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first
and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they
are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not
possess."
Go read
it.
Blab. A reader asks us a mysterious question.
"What
Is the United Nations Seizing, Anyway?"
The linked-to Slate site refuses to respond tonight. So, we don't know.
Blab. A reader seems to have a reading disorder, but nonetheless
produces sensible statements.
Pulling a straw
out of the basket, he said, "Nobody, not one minister before this council...
has said that 'Bush' is now fully, actively and immediately" 'smart.' "
We wouldn't actually expect that to happen any time soon. Or ever.
Blab. Those of you who have managed to read this far today are
in for a treat.
Bush and Tony singing
a duet
This is, by far, the funniest thing we've seen in a long time! Someone
had way, way too much time on their hands, and used it all to brilliant
purpose. Imagine what a labor of love this must have been.
(Oh, but first, go click on that link. And be amazed.)
We played this for several colleagues today, and at the end of a meeting.
This induced shock, wheezing and near cerebral hemorrhages. So be careful.
Plop. The folks at Nintendo have lost their small minds. What
other explanation could there be for Windows
wallpaper from Nintendo showing a guy in bed with a gorgeous, young,
naked woman and, instead of paying attention to her, he's playing with
a Game Boy? Even nerdly little us knows that's insane.
Maybe Nintendo is marketing to eunuchs? (Mike)
Yow. This,
on the other hand, is more comprehensible. Or, at least, more intriguing.
Plurp. Whom do you suppose would say something like this?
As far as ultimatums ...
we'll just wait and see.
Give yourself three points if you guessed Dubya.
Yak. From a meeting today.
... overdue at the Library
of Spam.
Plurp. News you can schmooze.
New United Nations Convenes
Washington DC. The New United
Nations convened its first session today at its permanent headquarters
in a subbasement of the Pentagon. "This is an historic event," said General
Chairman Donald Rumsfeld in a prepared statement. "Today, we begin a new
chapter in the efforts of nations around the world to help ensure global
peace and cooperation."
Ellen Feiss, the UK representative,
applauded Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks. Representatives of Bulgaria and Spain,
the two other member nations, were unable to attend due to calendar conflicts,
and the meeting was adjourned for lack of a quorum.
Plurp.
The blue dog
had
no nose
Thursday, March 6, 2003
Blab. It's not every day that we get a request from
New
York Public Radio. At least, as far as we know.
Hello Steve--
I saw on your website a request to
receive any copies of the Singing Senators MP3s... we're putting together
our
radio show and are desperately trying to find one of these MP3s.
Please let me know if you'd mind sharing
a copy (if you have it) ... we need it today (Wednesday) or tomorrow at
the latest!
Thanks for your help,
Amanda
Well, Amanda, we couldn't find the MP3 that is alleged to exist, but we
did find the MP3 of an
AudioSpin program that talks about the Singing Senators and plays a
(mercifully short) clip of them singing Dig a Little Deeper in the Well.
A more extensive MP3 is allegedly available on the Web sites of Senators
Ashcroft and Jeffords, but we're too stoopid to find those sites. If our
Treasured Readers can find them, and locate the infamous MP3, we would
be so very grateful. We would.
We did, however, locate this fascinating tidbit from Senate
Concurrent Resolution 568, which commended President Bush's appointment
of Ashcroft as United States Attorney General.
WHEREAS, he has recorded
and toured as a gospel singer and hews to his faith's dictates against
drinking, smoking and dancing; during his Senate tenure, Ashcroft was a
baritone member of a barbershop quartet, the Singing Senators, along with
Republican colleague Trent Lott from Mississippi; and [...]
Scary.
We also found a vid of Ashcroft singing that great song that he wrote,
Let
the Eagle Soar. Yikes. Seriously.
Blab. A reader has a question.
I have a question for you,
O Plurpful One:
How would you define the definitive
Helenism?
Yours,
A. Reader.
RTFWP, Treasured Reader.
Blab. We learn new things every day from our Treasured Readers.
This is a good example.
 Hi
Captain Plurp,
In one burst on research on teen age
culture this morning on Google I learned:
That the experience of some of my
colleagues at work who grew up in the Midwest is in line with the
frequent hits on Google:
"We must, we must, we
must increase our bust,
the bigger the better
the tighter the sweater
we must, we must, we must."
or as variations
on the last line:
"... the boys depend on us."
"... the boys are depending on us."
Whereas my
junior high experience in oh-so-trendy Southern California doesn't
even register on Gooogle, that I could find.
"We must, we must, we must fill out
our bust,
we will, we will,
our sweaters we will fill."
(Note the apparent lack of dependence
of the boys on this objective.)
Who knew?
Your (currently in the) Midwest Correspondent
For some reason, we had never heard any of these before. We're not
sure why that is.
Blab. We learn even more from our Treasured Readers, even though
this particular new learning does not have any obvious connection with
sweaters.
Cats are the abondoned pets
of an ancient extinct race of space explorers.
And the navigation system of their
ships too, which are now orbiting empty - invisible artificial moons to
a gas planet.
They could save us, if we asked politely.
But they don't sense the danger, the
telepathic lifeforms that were the long-range sensors, are dead burnt by
radiation.
Cats miss them, we are dull company.
Secret Information Beam.
This fits with all known data about feline-human relations. In fact, our
previous cat had a habit of sitting at rigid attention in any new situation.
We were convince that he was recording it for later transmission to his
alien superiors. Maybe that wasn't far off.
Blab. A reader chants.
Yao MING, yao ming yao ming
yao ming. Yao Ming! Yao Ming!
Yeah, we saw that commercial too.
Blab. A reader solves the puzzle of how to put dental floss back
into the little container in which it comes.
Hah, easy: take dentalfloss
thing apart, wind floss back onto spool, put thing back together.
Politician's-play!
See what useful things you learn when you hang around here? Maybe we can
apply for an educational grant.
Blab. A reader expresses an opinion on that picture pointed to
yesterday of a Canadian kiddie ride involving gun-toting tanks.
Typical of perky "Canada."
We wonder what else lies undiscovered in "Canada".
Blab. Maybe this.
Candidate broken joke:
A sandwich walks into a bar. He says,
"Give me a beer, and something to mop it up with."
Actually, that's just broken. The broken
joke would be something like this:
A sandwich walks into a bar.
He says, "Give me a beer, and some peanuts."
Not the funniest broken joke, maybe, but it has the correct format.
Blab. That very nice reader addresses us properly for a second
day in a row, piling up a great, steaming heap of Brownie points in furtherence
of the recent discussion of Titicut Follies.
Sir:
Colleges and Universities are allowed
to show it as part of a film class. You might contact one of them
to see if they would arrange a private viewing as part of your "research."
You might try Film Forum and ask them when they might be showing it.
I have seen it on public television though as well as in a film class.
Did you mention that it was banned because of a law suit by the state Of
MA? Another must see by F. Wiseman is High School (or anything else
he has done). It will be like a trip down memory lane and strangely
contemporary.
Heh. Our Treasured Reader is even bolder than we are!
Uh, yes, we're from IBM Research
and we're doing some work on global brain modeling, and, uh, we were wondering
if we could come to your college and have a private viewing of Titicut
Follies.
What's that? Oh, uh, yeah, it's definitely
for research purposes. Definitely.
Blab. A reader opines.
I think broken jokes are
the
new irony.
L.
We thought they were the new smalltalk. But there is a pretty good joke
at the end of that there link.
I met a man who could eat
twenty-nine hot dogs in six minutes. I asked him what he thought about
all those starving kids in China. He said he could eat four of them in
ten minutes.
See? Pretty funny!
Blab. A reader furthers our obviously lacking education in the
metaphysical.
Shrove tuesday is a religious
thing. it's where you use up all the *good* things in your house by making
pancakes in preparation for the 40 days of lent
Ah, lent! We love the modern idea of lent. You give up something
you really like for forty days. This improves your character because sacrifice
(meaning, in this case, acting against your own interests) is "good".
Helen wanted us to play along with that lent thing some years ago. One
year, we gave up meat for forty days. In other years, we gave up other
things of approximately that same level of life disruption.
At length, we told her that we were giving up sacrifice for lent. And
it was so good for us that we gave it up forever.
Yak. At the lab.
Be one with the PowerPoint,
grasshopper.
Plop. It snowed again today, long and hard, a wet, painful, cold
haze of white. The roads turned to slush, then ice. The sidewalks are greased
glass, and your ears threaten frostbite in the whipping wind.
There is nothing, and we mean absolutely nothing, to recommend
this.
Yow. We rise in defense of much-maligned Iran. Our reason can
be stated in one word: pistachios. Iran produces the
very best pistachios in the world. They are huge, meaty and yet sweet,
delightful in every conceivable dimension.
 So
let Iran keep that repressive religious government, we say. Let them continue
to support terrorist groups, and produce weapons of mass destruction in
dizzying quantity.
As long as they keep shipping those great pistachios.
Rant. It seems that the good offices of Dick Cheney (though,
of course, not Dick himself) got all upset at a parody site today, issuing
this here letter
that seems to threaten legal action against a poor, innocent, perfectly
legal Web site just 'cause they showed pitures
of Lynne Cheney with a bozo nose.
 Now,
is that nice? And do we really know that Lynne Cheney doesn't have
a bozo nose? It does look awfully genuine.
So buzz
off, Cheney! Read the frickin' First Amendment, and read all that
nice case law about parody. Umkay?
Plurp.
The blue dog
sent a self-addressed,
stamped
envelope containing a
bitter, ignorant indictment
of the blue dog
Wednesday, March 5, 2003
Blab. Samuel writes:
Hi!
I heard a frase today, slap the pony.
Searched the net, ended up on your interesting site - found the place on
your site where Helen asks Steve something something about this....
i got the joke alright, but what is Yak and Helen and Steve? A book, a
movie, cartoon or what?
I'm from sweden and haven't heard
of it. yet. yak.
Cheers
Clemens
 Yes,
we can see where that would
be pretty obscure. Helen and Steve are recurring characters in Yak,
an ongoing, farcical, Web-based textual drama that has grown rapidly in
popularity in the English-speaking world in the past couple of years. We
hope you'll join in the fun.
Blab. A reader, fearful of having nudged us over the edge, writes:
Come back, Dr. Plurp!
I'm sorry I sent you a spelling correction when it wasn't Misspelling Day.
That's Mispelling Day, but don't worry, all is forgiven. (And, to
correct the historical record, Mispelling
Day was the day on which we posted the accumulated complaints about
spelling and grammar from the previous week, not the only day when people
sent them. Unfortunately.)
Blab. A reader requests somebody to look into something.
It could be madness or it
could be the glasses. A close call. But somebody should
look into it.
It's the madness of glasses.
Blab. Donald Rumsfeld writes:
The evil-o-meter says I'm
good, and that makes me feel bad.
That either makes us feel good or bad. We're not sure which.
Blab. A reader is struck dumb.
I just don't know what to
say about this.
A kiddie ride with gun-toting tanks instead of cute little animals? Well,
that's "Canada" for you.
Blab. A reader asserts the obvious.
Steve knows all about bad
taste.
Plurp: Tastes bad. Less thrilling.
Blab. A reader addresses us properly. This always gets our attention.
Sir: If you ever get the
chance, see Titicut Follies. It is astounding --one of the best movies
I have seen. As usual (it seems), it's not the inmates who are insane.
The thrill of the forbidden being what it is, we would be delighted to
see a movie that, until recently, was banned. Especially one about patients
in a mental hospital being mistreated and humiliated. It just sounds like
such fun, doesn't it?
If any of our reader know when it will be showing in New York, do
tell.
Blab. A reader doubts its own eyes.
Nonsense
Yes, it's true. The secret is out. Our haxor handle really is Sm0oth
McLunix. And the blue
dog's is Ac1d Pre@cher.
Blab. An incredulous reader asks:
You've never heard of pancake
day?!
Nope. Never heard of Shrove Tuesday either. We feel it must be connected,
in some bizarre cultish way, with the many people wandering around Manhattan
today with black crosses on their foreheads. Some goth thing, prolly.
Blab. The marketing director at a third-rate search engine company
writes:
I am struck by the paucity
of references to the Vivisimo
search engine, as I find its greatest virtue ... clustering ... relieving
me of endless scrolling. And it sounds less silly than Google, though
that engine is fine, to be sure.
We look forward to scrolling, actually. We find it meditative. And it might
not come as a surprise to you that we at Plurp don't think that
the word Google sounds silly.
Plurp. In a long collection of bad jokes we received in email,
there were a couple that were actually funny.
A sandwich walks into a bar.
The barman says, "Sorry we don't serve food in here."
A skeleton walks into a bar.
He says, "Give me a beer, and something to mop it up with."
Well, funny to us anyhow.
Yow. Rue
57. Carnegie Hall. Kodo
Drummers. Walking distance.
Fantastic.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was an ongoing, farcical,
Web-based textual
drama
Tuesday, March 4, 2003
Blab. A reader lusts after what is pointed to by this
...
[link].
And we can see why! It's the DVD version of Holy Grail, with all
the extra bits used for groovy new stuff, like:
-
Subtitles for People Who Don't Like the
Film (taken from Shakespeare's Henry IV, part II) On-Screen Screenplay:
read the screenplay while you watch the film
-
Exciting "Follow The Killer Rabbit" Feature!
-
A special version for the Hard of Hearing
-
How To Use Your Coconuts (an educational
film)
-
Monty Python and the Holy Grail In Lego
-
High definition widescreen presentation
with pink frilly edges
Who could resist? Not us, that's who!
Blab. On those crying
engineers, a reader who ought to know writes:
I loved the take on engineers.
Most engineers are sensitive fun-loving people. My first two husbands were
engineers. Neither one fit the stereotype of the "nerd pocket protector
guy." The wistfulness of the reporter was odd though, and makes me
think he doesn't even change lightbulbs.
Geewits
You change lightbulbs? Into what?
Blab. Pining for long-lost Mispelling
Days, a reader writes:
Did you mean: fourth
Yes.
 Blab.
A reader sends us a ....
[link].
You too can be a Terrorist Buster.
That's what you wanted to be, right?
Blab. During lunchtalk on Monday, Ed
claimed that there was a movie, Titicut Follies, about a talent
show in a mental institution, which was banned in the U.S. Someone has
the temerity to challenge Ed on this. Never
do that.
"Made in 1967, [Titicut
Follies] was subjected to a worldwide ban until 1992 because the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court ruled that it was an invasion of inmate privacy."
"_Titicut Follies_ occupies a unique
position in American film history: it is the only American film whose use
has court-imposed restrictions for reasons other than obscenity or national
security"
-- _Documentary
Dilemmas_,
That is absolutely frightening!
Blab. A daredevil writes:
I dare to put forward a seasonal
Helenism:
Pancake Tuesday
A clear mix of Shrove Tuesday and
Pancake Day.
Thankyou, and goodnight!
Weirdly, and quite surpassing my considerable disbelief, not only are there
such things as Shrove
Tuesday and Pancake Day, they
turn out to be (in some very strange sense) the
same thing.
So, OK, we have a winner.
But weird!
Blab. A demanding reader writes:
Whot no Plurp! I demand pay-per-plurp
now! I'm not being unreasonable am I? -AJL
You? Unreasonable? Certainly not.
Plurp. Learning
from history.
Under intense American pressure,
Turkey's foreign minister indicated today that his government would ask
Parliament to vote a second time on whether to allow American troops to
use the country as a base for a military attack against Iraq.
And you're going to keep voting until you get it right, said an
enraged George Bush. Just like the people of Florida!
Plurp. Mind
your own beeswax.
Like disclosing how much
money you earn, it is in bad taste to talk about how many daily readers
your site enjoys or how well it's doing on Daypop or Blogwatch or wherever
the self-publisher is measuring his popularity this week. When you brag
about your site's traffic, you make people with fewer visitors feel inferior
and those with greater traffic chuckle at your misguided assumption of
self-importance.
This proclamation on blogging etiquette comes to you from Zeldman,
one of the oldest (since 1995) and probably most
popular blogs. Apparently, it is up to the most popular graybeards
to tell us less worthy folks how to behave.
No doubt that's proper. After all, former
tomes on etiquette were not penned
by the lower classes. (rebecca)
Plurp. From a conference call today.
Come to fruit
-
Come to fruition
-
Bear fruit
Yay!
Plurp. We watched an interview of the bicapitalized LaToya Jackson
tonight. There are two possibilities.
-
LaToya Jackson is Michael Jackson in drag.
-
The Jackson family buys noses by the gross.
We do not know which it is.
Plurp. Jar Jar Binks? Actually, no.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a promotional feature on the
DVD
of Blueberry Muffin Monday
Monday, March 3, 2003
Plop. All work and no sleep makes Steve a dull boy.
Sunday, March 2, 2003
Blab. A self-referential reader writes:
My first Blab - Fame at last
We exalt in your sudden fame.
Blab. A reader, who has tried to put dental floss back
into the little container in which it comes, writes:
It's even harder to put the
toothpaste back in the tube.
We believe you can buy gadgets that do that on the Web.
Blab. A reader checks in on the topic of programs that can predict
hit songs.
as for the software about
music, it's believable... the music industry for a long time has been making
hits that people will find catchy and enjoyable whether they like it or
not, often using mathematical formulas. I'd be surprised if this
is the first such program, or at least I'd at expect there were simpler
programs to do the job already (kinda like how before complete decompilers
we had to use little search tools to help manually decompile a program)
Sadly, our Treasured Reader forgets to send us a link to substantiate this
stunning claim, so we are left in the ambiguous guff of technical agnosticism.
Blab. A reader sends us a surprise.
Mia
News about Mia, from a hitherto
unknown site.
It had been a long time.
A long time, and not because they had lost interest. Quite the opposite;
their appetite had grown ravenous, to the point of not caring if it had
to do with her at all. It had become, she had become, a symbol, merely
a word, a triviality. It had been a long time.
But now, she thought, she might be
ready. Ready to come out of the candle shop, ready to join (a part of)
the world [to be joined by (a part of) the world], to be somewhere other
than that small town, to be somewhere other than where she had been for
what seemed like forever.
But was she?
The phone rang, and she picked it
up, not really conscious of doing so, not saying anything as she put it
to her ear. There was a pause before a voice at the other end said, "Mia?"
We can only welcome her
back, and wonder where we will see her next.
Blab. A reader gives us the critical key to the mystery of yesterday's
attempted Helenism.
Whenever I read/hear the
term "shades of gray", I am unable, for a moment, to recall its original
meaning.
See, "Shades of Gray" was the name
of perhaps the worst ever "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode.
The final episode of the second season, created during the writer's strike
of 19XX, it was basically a clip show. Because the writers were off
not writing, the producers, in their infinite wisdom, spent five minutes
on a plot device getting Riker infected with something, and then the remaining
forty minutes playing clips from previous episodes.
So, "shades of gray". for me, means
'crap episode of sci-fi tv'.
{inw}
Fantastic! Now we can get to work.
We have shades of gray, denoting crap episode of sci-fi tv,
and a glass ceiling, denoting hidden limitations to power or
success, which gives us shades of a glass ceiling, denoting
... uh ...
Blab. Our favorite ranting reader sends us another full-scale
assault, this one on journalists, the medical profession, the U.S. military,
language, and war in general. How very efficient!
So glad this person went
into journalism rather than medicine: If the U.S. unilaterally goes
to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less
than 30 days), ... Always loved those twenty-nine day appendectomies.
Maybe the medical simile could be
dropped. "What's blood type got to do with it!!??? We're only human
and the patient's only dead. If you believe, for goodness sake, she's
gone to a better place." Well, I should hope so; or at least one
where accuracy counts.
In any instance, US surgical strikes
tend to be peculiar. Arrive in Grenada and go the gas station to
get up to date maps, send planes in and surgically remove the tiny little
island's only mad house. Whoops! Sorry. Looking at the
pin point bombing in Afghanistan, or rather of pictures of some of the
folks whom we liberated, surgical strikes seem to drum up a lot of business
for surgeons. Maybe that accounts for the simile? This from
the ODE:
e. Designating swift and
precise military attack, esp. from the air. orig. U.S.
1965
T. C. Sorensen Kennedy xxiv. 684 The idea of+a so-called ‘surgical’
strike+had appeal to almost everyone first considering the matter, including
President Kennedy. 1971 Harper's Mag. Nov. 55 Even the
language of the bureaucracy—the diminutive ‘nukes’ for instruments that
kill and mutilate millions of human beings, the ‘surgical strike’ for chasing
and mowing down peasants from the air by spraying them with 8,000 bullets
a minute—takes the mystery, awe, and pain out of violence. 1974
E. Newman Strictly Speaking ii. 63 The war in Indochina produced
a host of terms that media folks accepted at their peril: protective reaction
strike, surgical bombing, free-fire zone. 1978 Guardian
Weekly 5 Mar. 9/3 Moscow might be ready to undertake a surgical strike
to take out China's nuclear installations.
Oh, wait, am I being too harsh?
"American intelligence says..." Love those oxymorons.
We are intrigued by the suggestion (from no less than Harper's!) that the
length of words should be correlated with the nastiness (or something like
that) of the concept they represent.
So good words, like eat or sleep, would be left alone.
Good words that mistakenly came out too long, like intercourse or
celebration,
would have to be replaced by single-syllable words. Similarly, bad words
like lie, cheat, kill, and especially
nuke,
would have to be replaced by much longer words. Nuke would probably
one with at least fourteen syllables.
(By the way, the bureaucracy is already helping out with this. Nuke
is not official bureaucratese. They use either nuclear device or
special
weapon.)
We're surprised to hear that this is how language works. But hey - if
you can't trust Harper's ...
Blab. A reader clarifies the PR motivations of PETA's Holocaust
On Your Plate.
PETA's true operating principle
is that there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Ah! Then they're going to love us.
Yo. At lunchtalk last week, we wondered what the current odds
were of a war with Iraq, and whether there was any place online where we
could (a) find the odds and (b) place a bet.
The answer is: Of course! In fact, there are several places.
There's the oddly capitalized BETonSPORTS,
for those of you who consider war a sport. You can find lines on various
war-related propositions, including Saddam's
fate by June of this year. The odds still seem to be long for violent
Aliens will arrive on earth and claim him as a citizen of planet Zerg,
though perhaps the readership of that site didn't get the memo.
On Tradesports, you can take
a contract out on Saddam. Literally. You buy and sell shares of a proposition
like Saddam
is not president/leader of Iraq by 30 June, 2003. That contract is
currently selling at $79 a share, which is about where it started back
in September of last year.
Newsfutures lets
you trade news futures. $100 contracts for a U.S.-Iraq
war prior to May 2003 are currently selling for $80. We wonder if Dubya
investing in this would run afoul of the SEC.
For all of you out there who think you're so smart, we happily provide
multiple opportunities for you to put your money where ... well, you know.
Plurp. OK. We don't understand this.
Up to a dozen Britons who
travelled to Iraq to form a human shield against military action are returning
home amid safety fears.
Is it just us, or does this seem disingenuous to you, too?
Yow. You may have missed Session
9 when it was in the theaters. It was, at the time, a little movie,
not a blockbuster. But if you're a fan of psychological horror movies,
go rent it! It's terrific.
This is not the stuff of teenage slasher movies, which Hollywood seems
to produce by the gross. Rather, it is a sly, well-crafted story of fear
and madness set in an abandoned mental hospital, told both in the present
and the past, both from the outside and from the inside of those involved.
That said, it is also contains some of the most viscerally violent and
terrifying stuff we've seen recently. It is extremely disturbing and definitely
not for those with a mild constitution.
If you can get through that, however, it's delicious.
Plurp.
In the secret recesses of
society, where men of power and arcane
wisdom decide the fate of language,
Imam
Shirley-Harold proclaimed the term
blue dog as having the perfect
length
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