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2003.03.30 : 2003.04.01
Tuesday, April 1, 2003
Plurp.
I received a letter today
from the U.S. Department of Justice, informing me that certain unspecified
"content and links" found on www.stevewhite.org
are in violation of various provisions of the USA
PATRIOT Act, and of Title
18 of the United States Code, including ones that make it unlawful
for any U.S. citizen to provide "material support to terrorists" or "terrorist
organizations". The letter states that I may be "subject to Federal criminal
penalties" as a result.
Along with this letter is a "Cease
and Desist Order" that apparently says that I may publish "no new content
or links on" this Web site pending "final resolution of this matter."
I am in the process of contacting
an attorney to determine what it all means. I doubt that I can afford any
protracted battle against the Department of Justice. So for now, and perhaps
forever, I'm no longer publishing Plurp.
I want to express my thanks to my
readers, who kept coming back over the years for reasons that are still
beyond me. I've had a great time.
Monday, March 31, 2003
Blab. A reader has forbidden beliefs.
Sir: I do not believe that
Helen loves you for your hair only.
Actually, she does. But thanks for thinking of us.
Blab. A reader defaces our life work. And we love it!
[link]
We encourage all our readers to click on that link and make a graphic disaster
of Plurp. Go ahead - take your many aggressions out on us, sort
of.
Blab. A reader, while occupied with the incredibly boring, finds
the incredibly exciting.
Yay! A new and genuine Helenism
from a radio discussion about geology!
"You've hit a very important
point on the head".
- You've hit the nail on the
head
- That's a very important
point
What strange lives we lead when we
listen not to the content of language, but for it's abberations.
-AJL
Excellent! And very reminiscent
of the now-classic Helenism:
He hit the nose on the head
-
Hit the nail on the head
-
On the nose
Blab. On how our extremely private email address, which we only
sent to Allura for a private mailing list, could have ended up in the hands
of an evil spammist, a reader writes:
Re Spammist and private mailing
lists:
Spooky voodoo and black magic.
That or said Spammist has a sideline in larceny.
The first possibility seems unlikely to us, and the latter vacuous. Another
reader writes:
Re: Allura mailing list -
Option 1.
Yaha? Klez? Sobig? Any number of
mass mailing worms that use the WAB and other files filled with delectable
email addresses to spread?
Option 2.
Allura is a spammist
Option 3.
All Allura's base are belong to Ronald
Dumsfeld and his cronies.
-AJL
Ooh! A worm that steals the address book! That's so very clever.
So the conjecture is that someone wrote a worm to steal addresses, then
sold those addresses to spammists? If so, this would be one of the first
instances (to our knowledge) of a monetary reason for writing worms.
Interesting!
Readers who have anything resembling proof for this fascinating conjecture
are kindly requested to send it to
us.
Blab. A reader submits. At last.
Sir: I respectfully submit
for your enjoyment this site.
Hmm. A site which reposts acerbic, sarcastic articles about The War, Dubya's
administration, and stuff like that.
Hey. We thought that was our job!
Blab. A fan of irony writes:
Sir: This "Shock and Awe
Working - World shocked by Bush's arrogance, awed by his stupidity." and
this "Perle Quits as Chairman of Defense Policy Board - To take more powerful
position in Hell." at ironictimes.com
Pretty funny! But we fear that the executive positions in Hell are already
reserved for many other, more prominent members of Dubya's administration.
And we can hardly wait for them to take their new jobs.
Blab. A reader brings us news.
2000
Moroccan monkeys join the coalition!
The article says that they're joining as minesweepers. This is incorrect.
In fact, they are joining Dumsfeld's staff as civilian war planners.
Blab. One of our map fetishist readers draws near, an oily smile
on its face, rubs its sweaty palms together and says:
With Reference to Maps.
Ahhh mapology, the link was
excellent.
May I point you to digitalglobe.com
for some excellent aerial photography, and globalsecurity.com
for intel data.
Thanks to you & your reader for
the link.
Traducer
We are duly impressed by DigitalGlobe. GlobalSecurity is already one of
our daily (or, these days, hourly) reads.
Thanks for the links!
Plurp. Today is one of the random days on which we remind new(ish)
readers of two facts that will soon be crucial to your continued existence:
-
Plurp is published pretty much every day. If you haven't been reading
our Saturday postings, golly
have you been missing out! (You can get there from here by clicking on
Earlier
in the top left menu thingie.)
-
There's more to this here Web site than the dreck you read in Plurp.
Oh, gosh yes! There's all the dreck in our Stuff
section too, including the world's largest collection of Helenisms,
more broken jokes than you can
stand, proof positive that aliens
walk among us, and lots more stuff that even we don't read.
Plop. Looks like that
new SARS virus is out and about, with pretty much no hope of preventing
a world-wide pandemic now. That's very bad. But, lest we collapse into
a malaise of doom and gloom, our friends in China have just the thing to
perk us up - surgical
masks as common fashion accessories.
While basic green or white
surgical masks remain the most common, they are coming in a growing array
of colors, as well as with cartoon images, including Hello Kitty and characters
from "101 Dalmatians."
We can hardly wait.
Plop. The spinmeisters were frenetic today. Peter Arnett, the
journalist who was famous for his coverage of Gulf War I (among many other
things!) was fired
by NBC and MSNBC after having said, on Iraqi TV, and among other things,
The
first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance now they are trying
to write another war plan. Shame on NBC and Microsoft! Like all of
your other commentators aren't saying exactly that.
Fortunately, Arnett
was hired again, though merely by the London Daily Mirror. So he's
unlikely to be silenced in the near future.
Meanwhile, respected "journalist" Geraldo Rivera apparently sketched
the operational plans of the 101st Airborne, on open TV, putting the
101st Airborne (and, less importantly, himself) in mortal danger. The U.S.
military seems to have reacted by "escorting
him out of Iraq" (presumably using very nasty people with guns). Fox
Network, the folk who employ Mr. Rivera, continues to employ him.
The world is getting very strange.
Plurp. In other news, a shocking failure in British military
training results in an entire battalion that is unable to either See No
Evil or Speak No Evil.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
could smell
no evil
Sunday, March 30, 2003
Blab. A reader expresses surprise that we didn't write
that great generic limerick
yesterday.
Not yours! *gasp!*
In fact, a reader sent that in after we complained that we couldn't figure
out how to write a generic limerick. Our readers are so much more clever
than we are.
Blab. A reader who may have a day job as a spammist writes:
WHERES SATURDAYS BLUE DOG?????????????????????????????????????????????
eh?
We give up. Under a pile of viagra? Lost in a filing cabinet full of low-interest
mortgages?
Blab. A reader asks a mystifying question.
 Doubling
up on the Palau news, eh?
Are we? We thought we only brought it up that
once. We are proud, however, to stand beside mighty Palau as one of
the many unarmed members of The Coalition.
Yak.
Helen: Hey, Steve!
You got an invitation to go to Kansas City.
Steve: Wow.
Helen: Hey, it doesn't get
much better than that.
Steve: I sure hope not.
Plurp. We've been confused about The War for the past several
days. Numerous pundits have said it's not going according to plan. Official
sources say it is. The former says that Dumsfeld and crew drastically underestimated
the Iraqis, that they didn't count on this much resistance, that they thought
they'd shock-and-awe the Iraqis into early submission and that didn't work.
The latter says that the plan, all along, has been one of great flexibility,
of phased deployments which are being carried out now.
There have been reports of conflict between the civilian leadership
(read, Dumsfeld) who wanted a cheap, quick war against a crumbling
opponent, and the military leadership (read, the Pentagon) who favored
a Powell-doctrine invasion with massively superior forces.
Who's right? Our insight tonight is that everyone's right.
Dumsfeld and the Pentagon fundamentally disagreed about how easy the
war would be, and therefore how it should be approached. The compromise
they reached was one in which a minimal force would run rapidly through
Iraq, hoping to be welcomed by cheering Iraqis as liberators, and that
Baghdad would fall after a few nights of heavy bombing. If Dumsfeld was
right, this is exactly what would have happened, and he would have been
a genius hero.
But the plan also called for more troops, over a hundred thousand more,
to be ready to go in if this optimistic scenario did not play out, if indeed
it turned out to be a messy, traditional war in which lots of people died.
If the Pentagon was right, this is exactly what would have happened, and
it would be possible to prosecute the war anyway.
It turns out that Dumsfeld
was wrong. The
Pentagon was right. And the
rest is spin.
Our apologies to our readers who, being more clever than we are, figured
this out long ago.
Plurp.
The blue dog
admired the ability of
certain organizations
to have their cake
and bomb it too
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