Plurp: The Madness of Glasses

Bigger!

2003.03.09 : 2003.03.15

Saturday, March 15, 2003
Blab. An offensive reader writes:
Q. Why didn't Superman save Princess Di?
A. He's in a wheelchair.
(Upping the ante on offensive, Reeves-related jokes.)
Now, that's not funny. It's mean, but it's not funny.
How about this?
Q: How does Superman change into his Superman suit when there's no phone booth?
A: Same way he does when there is one: a chubby woman named Beulah does it for him.

Plop. Those brilliant folks in the U.S. government are considering adding another brightly-colored Threat Level. Heck, they haven't even used all the ones they have! Anyhow, we're recommending Barf Green, 'cause we're sick of it all.

Plurp. It's the Ides of March, and the portents for inauspicious events couldn't be more evident. Dubya's off in the Azores with the two other members of the New United Nations, coming to the conclusion that no one else is coming to his little party. And if there's no one to wait for, there's no reason to wait to start this war thing. We're betting on Tuesday. or Wednesday.
We also predict that the first 48 hours will be the most astonishingly violent since Nagasaki.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered where Saturday
went

Friday, March 14, 2003
Blab. A reader labors under the impression that it has our attention.
Subj: Support Our Troops!
Bet that got your attention.
I hate it when the boss gets grumpy and down. Hey, can't do that. Why we elected you plurpmeister, for goodness sake, keeping the old spirits up in these parlous times (all times are parlous) and seeing the barely discernable vein of thoroughly beautiful nonsense in an otherwise vulgar landscape of human putrescence. Even real beauty, sometimes. Imagine that!
Just because "the most powerful nation on earth" is run by the dumbest Yale grad ever, and we are hell bent on blowing up Iraqis to provide reality testing of the new weapons built by/for the military industrial complex isn't any reason to get depressed. Hey, we had a stock market rally today after it was announced that retail sales sank lower than was imagined by that imaginative gang who make a living painting stock market pictures by numbers, and a day or two after the announcement of new high unemployment figures. Doesn't that cheer you up? Come on.
When you revive...I know you will...would you just drop a line to tell me what the hell the support our troops signs mean? Does it involve pencils and cups and coins? Is there an alternative? Does it mean that if you don't want troops dropping bombs on people you don't support them? I am confused. But then you already know that.
Well, as we always say, there's nothing like a nice, cheery message. And that's nothing like a nice, cheery message.
To answer your question, we take Support our troops to mean Get ready to pay more taxes and suffer a cratered economy so we can piss off the international community and blow stuff up. And, patriotic cuss that we are, we support our troops.

Blab. A reader complains about the service that it gets for free.
Your search engine (or atomz, if you insist) is odd. I searched for "woogie", and all it gave back to me were entries about "wage"....
As to WHY I was searching for "woogie", my mom emailed me that stupid card trick that removes ALL cards. You referenced it on 2002-10-30, and I was trying to dredge up the reference to pass back to my mom. Her email had the "trick" embedded in the email, but the images had been stripped. Actually makes the card trick fail, as ALL the cards just ended up as little x's....
- Felis Lynx
You are the victim of our sloth. The default for the atomz search thingie is that "sound alike" matching is on, and to them, "woogie" sounds like "wage".
So. Fine. We did the (minuscule amount of) work to turn "sound alike" matching off my default, but allow it to be enabled in the Geeky Search options.
We had been meaning to do that for a year or so. Thank you for goading us into it. Hopefully, we didn't break anything while attempting to fix it.
As to that card trick, we're astonished that you remembered it. We didn't! But what it has to do with woogie is still a mystery.

Blab. An obsequious reader writes:
Sir: Please look
Nonetheless, this is pretty cool, being a synthetic picture of the entire Earth at night (think about it). Civilization is revealed by "artificial" lights. You can see what parts of the Earth are civilized and what parts are not.
Note to self: Lots of uncivilization down there. Beware.

Blab. A reader points us back at the old neighborhood, where things have been changing.
Sir: This is for your enjoyment and edification -not that you need anymore edificating. I bet you need more enjoyment though. My apologies if you blogged this already.
Yes, we do need more enjoyment. And thank you for contributing to it!

Blab. A reader contributes to our ongoing sense of humorous incredulity.
Well, since Micro$oft announced that it had solved the autonomic computing problem I've been busy revising my position on the subject. Clearly if M$ is doing it there must be some substance. Of course, "restoring a loaded system to a balanced state" involves a transition thru a blue screen but, hey, who knew that this was autonomic computing at work? As they say, "..developers will need to think differently about applications they build by designing software that runs across a more flexible infrastructure" translation: journal everything and make sure you do a full checkpoint once a minute.
back to the bomb shelter...
Dorian
We love this! Developers will have to think differently. Like, maybe, Let's actually pay attention to critical security and integrity gaffes? Hmm. Which developers would that be, exactly?

Blab. A reader objects to our offhand dismissal of little Wil Wheaton.
Wil? Over? I don't think so... just because he's not on Arena anymore nobody believes he's still a major player in geek circles. Sheesh.
We rest our case.

Blab. A reader is ashamed of itself. And rightly so.
"My Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down and breathes with a respirator."
"How does he smell?"
"He can't! He's paralyzed from the neck down and breathes with a respirator."
My God, that's in bad taste.
To tell you the truth, we think that's fabulous, and we can't stop giggling about it. But then, it could be the respirator.

Blab. A reader wants to make sure that we know everything there is to know. Wouldn't that be nice?
Just wanted to let you know that Your Midwest Correspondent does not represent all midwesterners, and some of us midwesterners like sushi very much.
Are you free for dinner? We'll have frozen fish.

Blab. A diminutive reader cries out in Latin.
Sir: Another small voce crying in the wilderness
Do go read this. Really. It's U.S. diplomat John Brady Kiesling's resignation letter, unadulterated by the media.
The policies we are now being asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offence and defence since the days of Woodrow Wilson.
And it gets better. Go read.

Blab. A reader suggests an elegant solution to the Gumble Problem.
Subj: Human Shields
Gumble Takes One for the Team.....
In next week's war it appears that the U.S will use aircraft to attack journalists using broadcast or satellite phones. The U.S. military will control all journalist equipment. Anyone using such equipment not under U.S. control is subject to being attacked. Perhaps we can equip Mr Gumble with a satellite phone and drop a MOAB on him? Details here. Nah, he'll probably stand on a balcony in Jersey viewing a Manhatten nighttime fireworks display on a grainy cellphone and claim he's at the front. Sigh.
Dorian
If only it were that simple, eh? Frankly, we are confused by the linked article. Maybe the U.S. is trying to enforce its own censorship of media coverage of the war, which sounds believable. Maybe the U.S. is trying to bomb the media, which doesn't sound believable. Maybe the U.S. isn't trying to censor anything, but wants to bomb Iraqi communications without hurting the media, which might be believable.
The world is suddenly so complicated!

Blab. We refuse to tell you where we got this.
Congress Accidentally Approves Art Funding

Plurp. Good news, at long last.
Washington D.C. (Reuters) George W. Bush, the U.S. president, was said today to have not pissed off J. Fred Shirley-Harold, a gas station attendent in Deer Lodge, Montana. "George who?", asked Shirley-Harold, when queried about his support for the president's position on a pre-emptive war with Iraq.
Shirley-Harold is believed to be the only person left on Earth who has not been specifically targeted for humiliation and deprecation by the Bush administration.
Unlike the nations of France, Germany, Russia, China, Canada and Mexico, Shirley-Harnold seemed nonplused by recent events.
"Whatever", said Shirley-Harold, when asked what he thought might happen if the U.S. conducts a war of aggression against Iraq without U.N. support.

Yo. An excellent article on the 21,000 pound Mother Of All Bombs in (of all places!) Slate, where we also find an interesting clue.
Another in this family of weapons is Big Blue, a 30,000-pound "cousin" of MOAB that's designed to penetrate the earth and blow up deep bunkers. Swinson says that as far as he knows, Big Blue doesn't exist yet. "However," he adds, folksily, "a lot of things that 'don't exist' do exist."

Plurp.
The blue dog
was one of those things that
"don't exist"
that really don't exist

Thursday, March 13, 2003
Plurp. So. So, big changes around here in Plurpville.
Alert readers may have noticed the distinct lack of reader input for the last couple of days. And it's not for lack of reader input! Quite the opposite; we are flooded with reader input.
It's nice that people are paying attention. In fact, it's downright astonishing to us. It used to be that we had to beg for reader input (literally!). These days, we lose sleep for having to publish it all, and for having to think desperately of things to say in reply.
In a desire to actually get stuff done at work, and sometimes to get a few minutes of sleep, we've decided to exercise the editorial ax. Instead of publishing every character that you type to us (which is pretty much what we've always done), we will sometimes exercise judgment, as unlikely as that seems, publishing those that seem clever to us and giving the rest to charity.
So, if you find to your dismay that we don't publish each and every trivial, meaningless piece of drivel that you type to us while in a fugue state, it's not that we're ignoring you.
Well, yes, it is.

Blab. And on that topic, our reader writes:
Readers? There is only one - and it has many blogs to read :-) -AJL
Where does it find the time, given how many hours it must spend sending us useless blabble?

Blab. One of our lesbian readers writes:
Where have all the readers gone, long time passin'?
Where have all the readers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the readers gone?
Young girls picked them, ev'ry one --
Hm. That's not quite right.
Sounds right to us.

Blab. Our polite reader writes:
Sir: Do not feel bad. You are not the only one.
And we rejoice in that.
As I stated in one of my posts in this forum, strange things are happening these days. Where is everyone? Surely there must be numerous researchers/investigators that look at this website. So, why is there only a handful of us posting? Hopefully, this is not representative of how many people are really visiting the NIDS site.
Strange things are happening these days. Where is everyone? Surely there must be numerous researchers/investigators that look at this website.
Or maybe not.

Blab. A reader, having contributed an excellent Helenism, inundates us with true statements.

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?
Sorry, relatively new to the site; I didn't know the rules.
Somebody else already did.
(again)
I thought it was self-explanatory (unless my mispelling of 'Schopenhauer' while trying to type in the itty bitty box threw it off).
I'm not a guy.
Helen is scarey.
You have no idea how scary she is.

Blab. A reader likes that Dubya-Tony love vid, but quickly changes the subject anyway.
The Tony and George duet was amazing!
On the topic of Sushi Music and knowing of your love of sushi done well, I thought you'd want to know about this remarkable composition. From Minnesota, so you know it's insightful.
Your "I'll take mine medium rare, thanks" MW Correspondent (I just leave more for the rest of you)
Such a tragedy for you, MW Correspondent, not to be sent into paroxysms of infinite bliss by the mere thought of that perfect food. How eternally sad!

Blab. On that loony piece of "art" that will soon appear in the atrium of the IBM building in our neighborhood, an artist writes:

"We figure that Artists have different brain function than the rest of us. They think this is interesting, or important, or something like that."
I must be an artist; I think it's interesting. C'mon, you don't think it'd be cool to lie in a strange squishy bed and watch patterns oozing around in time to your brainwaves? I think that'd be cool.
We do that every night, dear reader. Every single night.

Blab. A fugue-state reader who should start its own blog writes:
In renewed efforts to forge a compromise subsequent to the postponed March 17 deadline of the previous proposal to let all hell break loose in Iraq, one of the countries of the axis of evil...well, the axis isn't what we first said cause the square headed guy whose daddy was worse, the one with the atomic reactors and all has been reclassified as a potentially nice guy because, I don't know, just he's not so bad and needs grain and doesn't have oil and didn't try to kill my daddy...we are warning everybody about the Iraqi donkeys with the bombs in their bellies...that damned UN gang missed them again... that could just decimate the stuff over there and everything. Our sincere apologies to Bechtel and the other guys who were so looking forward to helping to build schools and stuff after we bombed the bejesus out of those awful...anyhow you better redo the figures for the next quarter.
We just spoke with little Jimmy Bechtel and he's very upset about this. Or maybe it's just gas.

Blab. A reader, trying hard to be polite, writes:
Sir: I musy apologize for grousing and so forth. I was nearly overcome with despair and disgust. I will try to clear myself of those as much as is possible before blabbing. It's just so difficult with thingsthe way they are. I'll try to be more cheery. Here's a start.
The World Database of Happiness? We love the Web.
And again:
Sir: More good old USA happiness.
A survey of happiness in various nations. Great. Who, we ask you, who would obsessively ask some statistically significant sample of people questions like, In general, how happy would you say you are?, over and over and over again, for more than fifty years?

Blab. A reader makes an outlandish claim.
Methinks the bomb you refer to (the MOAB) is the fuel-air bomb. Essentially you have a first airburst that disperses fuel mixing with air then you have a trigger burst that ignites the whole thing. LOTS of bang. Very destructive. Especially if you're breathing the fuel-air mixture at the time. If I'da thunk of it as a kid I'da tried to make one.
Dorian
That's what a lot of people thought about the Daisy Cutter, a rather nasty device in its own right.
The explosion of its aluminum powder slurry creates a blast wave of 1,000 pounds per square inch that can kill within 200 feet of the impact point - roughly three acres. Those within 500 feet can suffer ruptured lungs or broken eardrums.
It turns out that the Daisy Cutter is not a fuel-air explosive. Rather, it uses a GSX slurry (a slurry of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene) detonated just above ground level.
As to the Mother Of All Bombs, these folks think that it uses tritonal explosives. Tritonal is 80% TNT and 20% aluminum and is, for reasons we don't really understand, substantially more energetic than TNT.
So the MOAB's extreme nastiness, its position at the tippy top of the pyramid of BFBs, seems to come entirely from the fact that it has twenty-one thousand pounds of tritonal.
So bigger is badder.

Blab. A reader sends threatening mail to the wrong White House.
Dear President Bush,
Good job, though I think ten minutes alone might be a bit too much solitude for a guy like you. You're more a team kind of guy...getting in the huddle and coming out yelling and slapping each other's butts...not Condoleezza's, of course. Try that next time. Maybe you will look a little more animated on the cold cruel tube.
Looks as if the UN and the froggies just might make the commencement of corrective exercises in Iraq a little more difficult for you, so maybe to take your mind off things in these parlous times, you might want to do a little correcting over there where Robert Mugabe seems to be a little heavy-handed with the opposition, putting them in jail and torturing them, or so it is alleged. Like you, he's a heavy duty Christian, so maybe you and he and Ashcroft can call a prayer meeting or something and get on down with the Lord. He and Ashworth should really hit it off, don't you think?
We can only hope that whoever this Bush guy is reads Plurp and will respond in due course to our anonymous reader. (Can you multiply small numbers?)

Blab. A reader has good news for us.
Kafka lives.
Let's see. Some Bad Person steals your identity. Said Bad Person commits criminal acts using your identity. Next Tuesday, your local civil authorities crash through the door of your hallowed home, shove you to the floor at gunpoint, handcuff you, and cart you off to jail. You are now forced to prove that you aren't the person who committed the crimes that said Bad Person committed.
Yeah, that's bad.

Blab. A reader on pot writes:
"Americans are growing impatient with the United Nations and say they would support military action against Iraq even if the Security Council refuses to support an invasion, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll."
So says a New York Times story.
Hey, I can understand that. Those damned stalled serial television shows just cause such an interruption in our lives. We don't know when to go out to the kitchen for a fresh chips and a beer. Kill or get off the pot, I say.
Have a beer.

Blab. We weren't going to mention this, as it's been all over the Traditional Media, but our reader has such a great spin on it that we couldn't resist.
House of Representatives cafeteria now serving newspeak fries and goodthink toast.
Zackly.

Blab. A syntactician writes:
Our mad scientists have been working on the broken joke problem, and they've made what we feel is an important breakthrough:
Q: How many <tt>$WHATEVER</tt> does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: One (1).

We can see why they're angry! But it is an interesting form of generic literature, and we thank you!

Blab. That polite reader once again writes:
Sir: I thought that you might appreciate this.
Impressive. The Beastie Boys as political philosophers. And we thought we had seen it all.

Blab. Unsatisfied with that sushi thing, our Midwest Correspondent continues its obsession with food.
Laura: Mom, I'm going to make a pie Thursday night. To take to Math class Friday.
Mom: (cluelessly) That sounds fun.
Laura: Because Friday is pie day.
Mom: (still not getting it ...) Who decided that?
Laura: (remarkably even toned) Ya' know, Friday is 314- Pie day. That's why I'm taking it to Math class.
Mom: Oooooh. That makes sense.
Happy Pie Day,
Your Midwest Correspondent
This is too nerdy even for us.
But we do wonder if there's e day. Or fine structure constant day. And what should we take to school on those days? Are they holidays?

Blab. A reader is hypnotized by techno-lust.
Steve,
This is clearly an idea whose time has come, regardless of whether or not the technology has. It's at least some small consolation that enough people can visualize this that they can even create vaporware out of it, let alone consider how it might actually be implemented. These things tend to leave out the backpack cpu though. The trick is, will the idea's time go before it's implemented? Never can tell I suppose.
I still fall squarely into the "God I NEED this but am not really sure what I'd do with it" category. Got a couple banal, fairly puerile ideas though.
- M
"Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship." - Cicero
Yeah, sure, a PDA in the form factor of a wristwatch is more compelling even than naked women. Absolutely.
Still, in these politicized days of Francophobia, we feel the need to voice support for Frog Design, those folks who do the most wonderful artifact design in the world. Personally, we lust for these Geek Glasses, about which we have no puerile ideas whatsoever.
And you?

Blab. A reader who is Helen writes:
Funny. I had to remind Christopher to put his tongue back in his mouth today.
To our shame, we cohabitate with a cat whose equilibrium condition includes having his tongue stuck part-way out of his mouth. It does not, we fear, help dispel our persistent impression of his innate stupidity.

Blab. Tuberculosis writes:
This is the address of a survey about blogs. It's very short and apparently part of a college thesis. got the URL from Wil.
-tb
So, fine. We filled it out. It's our charitable act for the month. But no more stuff from Wil Wheaton, OK? He's, like, over.

Blab. A reader keeps us up on cutting-edge research.
US analysis finds similarity between fast-food chains, pornography, and sponsoring terrorism.
We start off by discovering this interesting tidbit.
Suicide bombers are not mentally ill and tend to be better off and better educated than their peers, a US psychological analysis of the phenomenon has revealed.
Although most people in the West believe the opposite, that was the finding of a review by Scott Atran, an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Michigan, of dozens of studies of captured terrorists, surviving suicide bombers and their families.
Hmm. A little Truth In Advertising might be useful here. What Scott meant to say (as it is all he could possibly conclude from his scant data) was that failed suicide bombers are not mentally ill. This is a much more believable claim.
But anyway, the concluding paragraph of the article informs us that:
Groups that sponsor suicide terrorism used similar strategies as fast-food chains and pornographers to influence recruits — "tricking people into doing things that have no personal advantage".
What could this mean? By recruits, does he mean employees or customers? We're not aware of fast-food chains or pornographers tricking employees. (Is that just our tender innocence?) As a customer of both, it's hard for us to imagine in what way we are being tricked by either hamburgers or naked ladies.

Plurp. Believe it or not, we really did omit some reader input from the above. Astonishing, isn't it? We hope you'll forgive us.

Plurp. What goes through your beady little minds that causes you to come to this site? It's a continuing enigma, but some clues may be found in what you search for when you do.
helen naked pitures
functonal
don t bite your nose off despite your face
ian naked pictures
imani
naked pictures of helen
sarah kozer
those who do not learn
almaden architect
angelina jolie
It's good to see someone looking for Imani again. We feared that we had heard the last of our close, personal, terminally confused friend.

Yak. Some Dubya administrative apologist on TV last night, on the upcoming U.N. vote for a resolution against Iraq.
You don't count your chickens until the cows come home.
He might have been trying to be silly. It's so like Dubya's administration, after all, to be silly about war.

Yo. Speaking of cultural revolution ...
Crash-prone New York taxi cabs could soon have "black boxes" that give insurers more information on the circumstances surrounding accidents, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
These cabs would send their black box info back to a central repository, which could then reconstruct things in the event of an accident. We predict fewer Mister Toads in our neighborhood.

Plurp. This is so funny!
Five volunteers who went to Iraq to serve as "human shields," including two Americans, were forced out of the country because they were critical of the government's choice of sites to protect, the head of the group said Wednesday.
They had chosen locations "essential to the civilian population," such as food storage warehouses and water and electricity facilities, said Ken O'Keefe, of Haleiwa, Hawaii.
But the Iraqi government wanted the shields in more sensitive locations, he said. He did not elaborate, but some earlier activists have also left Iraq, reportedly after being told they would be posted at potentially strategic targets, such as oil refineries and power plants.
Readers are invited to estimate the collective IQs of the human shields. We will bet on a number lower than you pick.

Yak. Helen, watching TV tonight.
If you're blind, it's hard to watch this program.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered if anybody
read this far

Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered where everybody
went

Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Yo. Bush Sr. is warning Dubya against unilateral action. Gotta love this stuff.
The first President Bush has told his son that hopes of peace in the Middle East would be ruined if a war with Iraq were not backed by international unity.
Drawing on his own experiences before and after the 1991 Gulf War, Mr Bush Sr said that the brief flowering of hope for Arab-Israeli relations a decade ago would never have happened if America had ignored the will of the United Nations.
He also urged the President to resist his tendency to bear grudges, advising his son to bridge the rift between the United States, France and Germany. [...]
Although not addressed to his son in person, the message, in a speech at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was unmistakeable. Mr Bush Sr even came close to conceding that opponents of his son’s case against President Saddam Hussein, who he himself is on record as loathing, have legitimate cause for concern.
How embarrassing must this be? Poor, stupid Dubya.
Maybe he'll start referring to Bush Sr. as Old Bush, and tell everyone that his second cousin twice removed is staunchly on his side.

Yo. What will you be doing in the name of the nose?
Eh?

Yow. Chicxulub, from space!

Plop. In the midst of various international crises, on the precipice of heinous war, New Mexico politicians are focussed on what's important.
A New Mexico legislator proposed Monday having the state honor all extraterrestrial beings with a special day that will "celebrate and honor all past, present and future extraterrestrial visitors" to New Mexico, the measure reads.
Rep. Dan Foley, a Republican from Roswell, the spot where some say aliens crash-landed more than 50 years ago, said he introduced the legislation to "enhance relationships among all the citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown."
Extraterrestrial Culture Day would be held the second Thursday of February
Your tax dollars at work, citizens.

Yow. Guess what? The topology of Space Wars was right! All those years ago, we knew it!
Well, maybe.

Yo. Interesting Business Week article on how Sam Palmisano, IBM's CEO, intends to remake the company. For all you folks who are desperate to know.

Yo. Big boom.
The U.S. Air Force tested a powerful new 21,000-pound bomb Tuesday at the Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, that could be used against critical targets in Iraq in the event of war.
It was the final test of the new Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB [...].
The Air Force may release video of the final test, in hopes of placing additional pressure on the Iraqi military.
The Tuesday test was expected to generate so much noise at the Eglin Air Force Base test site that nearby residents were warned in advance. A 10,000-foot cloud is expected to result.
MOAB, privately known in military circles as "the mother of all bombs," has been under development since late last year.
[...] MOAB is mainly conceived as a weapon employed for "psychological operations."

Yuh. Twenty-one thousand pounds of psychological operations.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered where all the readers
went

Monday, March 10, 2003
Blab. A polite reader (maybe even last week's polite reader - who can tell?) follows up on a submission from last week's polite reader on the topic of some Exalted Leader or other.
Sir:
Could the polite reader have been referring to G W Bush as the Exalted Leader? The description of not knowing his ass from his elbow seems to fit G W.
We are not personally familiar with Dubya's elbows, and we refuse to discuss any other possibilities.

Blab. We admitted yesterday that we love the British (due to, if for no other reason, their desire to wear red rubber noses once a year). Today, we discover the following.
And we British love you too...
We understand this is illegal in many states.

Blab. A reader insists on certain fixed points in our internal mental state.
You got to have a tiggerific, bouncerific, mental altitude
We find ourself incapable of having such an attitude (much less an altitude) in the midst of such depressing spelling and grammar.

Blab. A reader starts out politely, and that's good, but then descends into grousing and demands, which is not as good.
Sir:
Where do the civilians -I mean collateral damage- fit in in the "shock and awe" strategy? Maybe Rummy and Company are way ahead in their thinking. Collateral damage becomes means fewer Iraquis to liberate. LEave it to this administration to come up with a new paradigm.
It seems unlikely that we're going to get into the position of defending U.S. military policy! And there are those who would say nay in a similar way.
Our understanding of the "shock and awe" strategy, however, is that it is not intended to blow up everything in sight. Rather, it is intended to mess up (blow up, degrade, disable, ...) so much stuff so quickly that the Other Side figures that it's hopeless to fight.
Whether you believe it or not, we're likely to see it tried in the next week or so. And you're likely to see it live on CNN.

Blab. Into the Big Blab Box, a reader types pure irony.
*think small*
That's kinda not our style. Thanks just the same.

Blab. That reader who won last week generously allows us to come to the after-party anyway.
Yup, you can come to the party. Then us winners can all frolic together.
How very kind of you! We'll be the one with the large L on our forehead.

Yo. Dave, that old curmudgeon, once again tells the proverbial story of the ball and chain.

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought
small

Sunday, March 9, 2003
Blab. A reader reinterprets that Nintendo ad featuring a young man in bed, playing with a Game Boy instead of the gorgeous young woman snuggling next to him.
as for that Nintendo ad, I think the implication is that he's finished with whatever they were doing before. They do mention it's the second best thing to do in the dark.
Ah. So the theory is that, having yanged her yin, he is manically awake while she is passively asleep.
This directly contradicts our own modestly extensive experience, but hey, maybe not everyone is like us.

Blab. A reader seeks to further make us feel bad about our working environment.
Ah, but I work at the paradisic Zurich campus, which isn't itself great architecture, but has an unbeatable view (from my window, no less) when it's not foggy. So there.
- Morton
Congratulations. We are now terminally depressed.

Blab. A reader confronts us with a dilemma, and asks us to do work. This is unlikely to turn out well.
Something of a Helenistic dilemma has been encountered today, on hearing the phrase "It's way over my hands", which in context seemed to mean, "It's out of my hands". Logically, it's reciprocal should be "It's way over my head", but of course, that would break the Helenism. One meaning it's beyond my control, the other I don't understand.
Perhaps it should be "It's out of my hands" and "It's above my level", but I'm not sure that there's any corroborating evidence. However, I thought I'd open this vexing conundrum to the plurpmeister and his laser controlled minions to get the definitive answer. Is this damned thing a Helenism, as it *so* want's to be.
-AJL
Your first interpretation, It's way over my head and It's out of my hands, seems most likely. And we agree that these don't seem to mean the same thing, so this sounds like a close-but-no-cigar Helenism.
But no doubt our Treasured Readers are smarter and more insightful than we are.

Blab. A reader asks what seems like an innocent question.
Have you tried the Kiwiburger?
(Kiwiburger is a registered trademark of the McDonald's Corporation)
Why, no, we have not. Further investigation, however, leads to this petrifying revelation.
New Zealand is the only place in the world to sell the Kiwiburger which was invented by Bryan Old of McDonald's Hamilton. He added a slice of beet root, an egg, lettuce and tomato to the Quarter Pounder burger to appeal to local taste buds.
Aaaaaaaugh!!!

Blab. A reader suggests that we're wrong, which is quite believable.
lol. symbolism for doing without god? symbolism for...believing in god wethinks. but hey, what do you care, you've given up :)
Hey, don't blame us! We were merely relating what one of our sources from yesterday said.
The idea is that you miss the thing you give up, and missing it, you reflect on what you are also missing in not being completely at one with Christ.
Now, maybe they're wrong, or maybe we misinterpreted them. We gave up being an expert on lent.

Blab. A reader enlightens us as to the role in British society of Red Nose Week.
Red Nose Week is a nation wide 'lets raise money for charity' thing. It's also called 'Comic Relief' and basically you get sponsored to do stupid stuff (namely having baths in baked beans) and then all the money goes to Africa, bad communities etc. Every year a different red nose is produced for people to wear. The money from buying it goes to the charity and coz its comic relief- wearing a silly red nose would kind of be seen to help the cause :)
Thank you
That is all
We love the British.

Blab. That reader who gave the acceptance speech yesterday denies our claim that it didn't win.
Yeah I did. I always win.
Oh. Well, then, congratulations. Can we come to the after-party?

Blab. A rude reader comments on the above.
can't tell his ass from his elbow
Now, is that nice? We ask you.

Blab. Yesterday, we learned the wonderful thing about cheese. That remarkable revelation was not enough for one reader.
and the wonderful thing about tiggers is tiggers are wonderful things
Does Sarah also specialize in carving chunks of tiggers into tigger sculptures?

Yo. You might not have heard of the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal. We hadn't. It's called MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst),
The U.S. Air Force is developing a new, 2nd generation, ten ton large, low air burst bomb. It will replace the older "Daisy Cutter" 7.5 ton bomb developed during the 1960s. [...]
MOAB is a highly destructive and terrifying weapon. If used in Iraq, it would demoralize any Iraqi troops in the vicinity who survived the explosion. The force of a MOAB explosion is sufficient to knock over tanks and kill any people within several hundred meters of the detonation.
Shock and awe, children. Shock and awe.

Plurp. Is it a complete accident that FX aired their original movie, The Pentagon Papers, about how the U.S. made up an excuse for a massive military intervention in Vietnam, just days before the U.S. is likely to begin a massive military intervention in Iraq?
Probably.

Plop. Bugsplat. It's the name that disturbs us.

Plurp.
The wonderful thing about
chiggers
is chiggers are wonderful
things

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