Plurp: Made ya look !

Bigger!

2003.04.06 : 2003.04.12

Saturday, April 12, 2003
Blab. A reader who is Helen writes:
Come on! I am here sick in bed and spend the entire day looking forward to reading Plurp and today, there is STILL no Plurp.
Plurp is with you always, my child. But, like God, it can appear absent for long periods of time without notice.

Blab. Mistaking us for its non-existent God, a reader writes:
Dear non-existant God: Whenever I make mistakes, may they always turn out like Rumsfeld's "mistakes." Amen.
We'll take your word for it that Dumsfeld has an embarrassing spelling problem.

Blab. A reader objects to our excuse for appearing absent on Thriday.
powerpoint! POWERPOINT! Dear GOD, man. have some self-respect! can't you deliver the information without powerpoint?
Dorian
We have reached a sad, no a tragic, state of existence. Not only have we forgotten how to write code, and maybe even do differential equations, but we spend days and days trying to communicate the simplest, most obvious ideas in that dreaded language because those with whom we are trying to communicate seem unable to understand anything else.
We have recently been entertaining the idea of writing a PowerPoint to Java compiler. But we probably couldn't figure out how.

Blab. Another reader was obsessed with those Iraqi jokers.
The deck of cards can be obtained here.   Although I didn't download the full PDF (which is actually 22MB, not the 27KB that the page seems to claim; whoosh!). The thumbnails hint at what the joekers are.
We downloaded the whole overly-gigantic file. We are impressed at how many people they're looking for without having any picture at all, and at the number for which they have only a really bad picture. There are even several for which they're using a picture that obviously has the wrong aspect ratio.

Blab. A reader objects to another readers objection.
"Putting your neck on the line (or the chopping block, or whatever) indicates taking a risk (or taking responsibility). Putting your cards on the table indicates revealing all relevant information (or some such thing). We're hard pressed to see those as related, so we don't understand what Putting your neck on the table might mean."
Oh, c'mon! (Po-kemon): it clearly means "taking a risk by revealing all relevant information".
Hmm. Maybe they are both related to making a commitment?

Blab. A reader who might have had other childhood educational sources than Classics Illustrated writes:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck
Circle the friends of kings
Awaiting the letting of contracts
To make new cities in the desert
Where will enter Perle before swine
Singing the songs of Trireme

There's nothing like good poetry.

Plurp. In a dream last night (sit still - this is good), we had received a number of book-like things from our Treasured Readers. One was a novel, another a collection of 18th century English songs, and another contained reproductions of the New York Times front pages from the 1940s.
Upon closer inspection, we noticed that they were all craftily generated fakes; the words, lyrics and news text had been replaced by lengthy excerpts from Plurp. The substitutions were of very high quality. In the songs, for instance, they reproduced the syllabication and emphasis of the original lyrics.
Look, Helen, we said. This is really neat! In the past, no one would have done this. It would have taken forever. Now you can do it on the Web in a couple of minutes.
Even fast asleep, we love the Web.

Plurp.
The blue dog,
boundless and bare on
the lone and level sands,
stretched far away

Thriday, April 11, 2003
Plurp. May we have your attention, please. We spent all yesterday evening fiddling with PowerPoint animation for a talk we had to give this morning, and didn't have time to blog. As a result, yesterday and today are officially being renamed Thriday. We will resume regular weekday names next week.
That is all.

Blab. A reader suggests that that other Steve White person from earlier this week may yet be in luck in his vanity-driven search for a domain.
Your reader could always go for the 3v1l h4x0r route; all of these wonderful domains are still available.
573v3wh173.com
573v3wh173.info
573v3wh173.biz
573v3wh173.tv
573v3wh173.net
573v3wh173.org
573v3wh173.co.uk
573v3wh173.org.uk
573v3wh173.me.uk
-AJL
Astonishing, isn't it, that these compelling domain names haven't already been snapped up? Get on it, people!
Oddly, butterbutterbutterbutterfrog is still available in almost all TLDs, though not, even more oddly, in .info or .nu. Why is that?

Blab. A reader sends us a ...
[PDF warning!]
And rightly so. It should probably get a Dubious Logic Warning as well, as it seeks to calculate the monetary cost of a war with Iraq vs. an ongoing policy of containment. Hard to estimate stuff like that, ain't it?
And even so, having concluded that it's cheaper to go to war, what then should we do?

Blab. A reader mystifies us.
tiny blue froggie
We don't know what this is about!
[Oh! Dave tells points us at the ad, and we discover that it really is some strange kind of treasure hunt, foisted upon the Net by Beth or someone like her. We can't figure out how it works, though. But that's OK. Our genius readers can!]

Blab. A reader addresses its remarks to our dog. We don't know why.
I know, I know, it is so troublesome to have to deal with the L A Times bureaucracy, you deceitful dog, but it is there that you will find the real story of the war in what are clearly serendipitous but contrasting stories. The front page of today's issue of the L A Times speaks volumes about the reality of this "war of liberation." The headline speaks of the liberation of oil fields, a secondary story speaks of the failure to secure a well known and approved site where nuclear materials were stored. Let Dubya tell us again that this is not about oil.
So, if the war were not about oil, the U.S. wouldn't have worried at all about the Iraqis setting the wells on fire and stuff? Interesting.

Blab. A reader chastises our sloppy checking of Helenisms.
I dispute: 'That's a very important point' is not a metaphorical statement, so it cannot be considered part of a true Helenism? Helen is more clever than that.
Argh! Our Treasured Reader appears to be correct. The latest addition to our corpulent collection of Helenisms, You've hit a very important point on the head, is not, in fact, a Helenism. Although You've hit the nail of the head is a dandy aphorism, That's a very important point is not.
The naughty fraudster has been banished from the Holy Shrine of Helenisms forever. Infidel.
Or, as another reader writes:
I want a tee shirt with Helen on it saying 'Because I said no'.
That would be a big seller, wouldn't it?

Blab. But never mind, let's make it All About Helenisms Day^TM!
A Helenism from some pointless meeting, yesterday, to share with your delighful readership:
Cow-Orker: You're not putting your neck on the table.
[
1. Neck on the line
2. Cards on the table
]
As ever;
--paj
Once burnt twice shy. (Or is it measure once, burn twice? We can never remember.) Putting your neck on the line (or the chopping block, or whatever) indicates taking a risk (or taking responsibility). Putting your cards on the table indicates revealing all relevant information (or some such thing). We're hard pressed to see those as related, so we don't understand what Putting your neck on the table might mean.
Perhaps paj can resolve this thorny problem for us?

Yak. Another winner, from a talk last week at work.
That's life in the big lane

That's life in the big city

That's life in the fast lane

Yak. A TV yakkist several days ago, on the beleaguered Iraqi Republican Guard.
They consider themselves a cut apart.

They consider themselves a cut above.

They consider themselves worlds apart.

Though we do admire the imagery, in this context, of cut apart.

Yak. Wonderful writing from Wil & Grace last night.
Great! What lever do I have to pull for the safe to fall on me?
We will use this regularly at work.

Plurp. CENTCOM is distributing decks of 55 cards in Iraq, with each card featuring some Iraqi character that they want to have "pursued, killed or captured".

U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks displays a 55-card deck of playing-sized cards featuring pictures of members of the deposed Iraqi leadership on Friday.

Clearly, Mr. Hussein is the Ace of Spades. But what we want to know is, given that there are only 52 cards in a regular deck, whose pictures are on the three Jokers? We'll nominate the former Information Minister for one of them!

Yow. Now go back and click on that Information Minister link.
Pretty funny, in a horrifying, limb-wrenching way.

Yo. We recently stumbled across an entire library of U.S. military leaflets dropped on Iraq. Fortunately, we are uninjured. Thank you for your concern.

Plurp. Why did the U.S. go to war? The answer, it seems, depends upon when you ask the question.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was serendipitous,
but not contrasting

Thriday, April 10, 2003
Blab. A reader attempts to help us with our most recent subject of rumination.
Sir: Here is a sort of directory of some authoritative reference sites that your readers can check to make sure that the authoritative lying site that you propose they make isn't taken already.
Nice site. All cranks, all the time. What more could you want?
Well, unless you're us. We don't want to put up a crank site. We want to put up a finely-honed hoax site. We're not gonna believe the stuff we write there (unlike cranks, who would). But we would consider ourself successful if lots of other people did.

Blab. A reader wants to know things. Well, one thing.
What is RSS?
Really Secret Stuff? You might try reading stuff like this, but it's so geeky that it doesn't even expand the acronym. We like that.

Blab. A reader frightens us.
actually eastern people wear masks not to prevent the wearer from getting sick, but to prevent the wearer from spreading disease, which the masks are effective for.
So masks are worn by infected people who are polite enough to try not to spread their disease before joining the Choir Ethereal, and there's no obverse protection method for those of us who are uninfected and would like to stay that way?
Yikes.

Blab. A reader insults us. That's usually the job of The Voices, but maybe they took the day off.
No, Fark doesn't offer a free photo editor. But the standard application to use for such things is photoshop (in much the same way that google is the standard way to search the internet). You should look around a bit over there, at least once.   Not being familiar with Fark is like never having seen threebrain.com
Would that we were so fortunate!
We wonder if there are sites into which you can enter some text and graphics, and it will build for you a Web page that looks like it's cnn.com (or similar) with your text and graphics.
That would be fun.

Blab. A reader informs us that this phase of our life has come to an end.
Sir:- It seems our web researching days are over.
The End
Finally!

Blab. Seeking to restore order in the New Iraq, a reader writes:
Sir: Candidates for the Saddam Hussein statues? You know which one our president likes.
You're scaring us again. Stop that.

Blab. A reader sends good news. We think.
Good to know that the police finally decided they hadn't collected the info they really needed. Afterall who has better scoop of us than the FBI?
There's a good joke in there somewhere, but we'll just quote the article instead.
When a series of large antiwar protests began nearly eight weeks ago, the New York Police Department started questioning hundreds of people arrested at the demonstrations about their prior political activity and recording the information in a database.
But yesterday, after the practice came to light, the Police Department said it would destroy the database, created with a debriefing form, and largely abandon the initiative, which civil libertarians and constitutional law experts said was deeply troubling. [...]
[Department chief spokesman] Mr. O'Looney said that the department would continue to ask arrested protesters what groups they were affiliated with and would retain the information in the form of a tally, but not with individuals' names. [...]
He also said that because the department viewed the questioning of the arrested demonstrators as "debriefings" rather than "interrogations," they were not entitled to a lawyer
See? That pesky Bill of Rights doesn't apply if you just change your terminology. Thank you, Mister O'Looney.

Blab. A reader sends us bad news. We're pretty sure!
life as we know it could change.
What?! Security concerns prompt NY apartment buildings to require residents to go down to the lobby to pick up Chinese food, rather than having it delivered to our doorstep? This is an outrage! We don't care if there's no longer any Bill of Rights, or any expectation of privacy left, or that there are armed troops stationed on every street corner. But have to go pick up Chinese food? Never!

Blab. More bad, but hardly unexpected, news.
Sir: The patriot act which you so clearly didnt fall foul of looks set to become permanent, it might get ya after all.
Big surprise here, eh?
Congressional Republicans are maneuvering to eliminate "sunset clauses" contained in the sweeping Patriot Act legislation passed after September 11, in an effort to make the laws permanent.

Blab. A reader sends us poking about rec.arts.sf.fandom, of all unlikely places, to find something.
[link]
Aha! It's libertoonian David Friedman (yes, he's still around) apparently saying that Dumsfeld's military plan in Iraq was dandy and that it did not anticipate going in with a small force at all. The plan (whoever's it was) certainly did turn out dandy from a U.S. military point of view. We're not up to searching the Web for what Dumsfeld did or did not say about force size just now.
Perhaps our readers are more energetic?

Blab. A reader seconds that emotion.
Swell victory. Nifty pics. Loved the war. Nice and short just like my 100% American attention span. (That McDonald concept won't get me, thanks!!) Other than that, everything is swell in the mid-east.
Which link says stuff like ...
A bomb, which may have been planted by Jewish extremists, exploded in a West Bank school playground yesterday, injuring 20 Palestinian children.
From which we conclude that waging war on Iraq did not turn out to solve all the ills of the world. We're writing that down for future reference.

Blab. A confirmed cynic writes:
How about those weapons of mass destruction!!?
You mean the U.S. armed forces? Pretty dramatic, we say!

Yo. Speaking of which, those of you who share our shameful fascination with Toys O' Death will be interested to know that the CBU-105 anti-tank bomb was used for the first time in combat a couple of days ago.
This is the most amazing Rube Goldberg device ever. And the most deadly. Here's how it works:

The 1000 lb. CBU-105 bomb is dropped from high altitude. In this case, a B-52 dropped six of them at once, above an Iraqi tank column that was making its way towards U.S. troops.

The outer casing peels off the bomb, and ten "submunition" cylinders pop out and float downward on parachutes.

The side panels of these submunitions fall away, revealing four bomblets the size of hockey pucks.

At a certain altitude, rockets lift the submunition cylinders and spin them, flinging the bomblets out in wide arcs.

Each bomblet looks down, finds something hot, like the engine of a tank, and fires an armor-piercing projectile towards it.

Boom. End of tank.

Now do the math. Six bombs. Ten submunitions each. Four bomblets in each of them. That's 240 potentially dead things that, a few seconds before, were tanks.
As far as we can tell, that single drop by a single B-52 destroyed the entire Iraqi tank column. In a few seconds. And they never saw it coming.
Yikes.

Plop. Oh, by the way, would someone tell the various U.S. troops in Iraq to stop hoisting the U.S. flag over conquered cities, covering statues of Saddam Hussein with said flag, and renaming important parts of Iraq things like Bush International Airport?
Did it not occur to you that the citizens over which you are now the occupying power might be a teensy bit offended, and maybe even frightened, especially given their long history of conquest and colonialism by Western powers?
Sheesh.
[Ah. We see that our orders were properly relayed.]

Yo.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Plurp.
My name is Ozymandias, dog of dogs:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
repair!

Wednesday, April 9, 2003
Blab. A reader suggests myriad possibilities for the Steve White of yesterday.
It's such an exciting world out there. Possibilities abound for death, starvation and internet domain names no matter what the motley fool says
stevewhitecom in the Global com/net/org domain spaces
stevewhitecom.com Available
stevewhitecom.net Available
stevewhitecom.org Available
stevewhitecom.info Available
stevewhitecom.biz Available
Not much com in that, now, is there?

Blab. You'll be pleased to know that Dave just can't stop hacking about.
Plurp now has an RSS feed!
It's at http://www.davidchess.com/cgi-bin/plurprss.cgi and it seems to work in NetNewsWireLite at least. It's a really primitive RSS feed; it just fetches the Plurp main page each time you run it, does the obvious parsing, and spits out an RSS page with just those entries on it (so on Sundays it'll only show one entry; it would have taken at least another five minutes to add the code to fetch the most recent archive page). It doesn't include any of the text of the entry, just the date and the permalink. And since it's HTML scraping, it will break if Plurp's HTML ever changes.
But hey...
What a guy!

Blab. A coulrophobic reader asks:
I am absolutely terrified of clowns do you know what i should do?
We recommend screaming. It works for us.

Blab. A polite reader thinks.
Sir: I thought that you would enjoy this site if you haven't seen it already. It is very image heavy and will take a long time to load with a slow connection.
That's for sure. Broadband readers only! Looks like folks have made things that look like TV screen shots of imaginary (or oddly interpreted) events. Is there a tool to do such things on that site somewhere? That could be awfully amusing.

Blab. A reader talks up the futility of action.
You DO realize that the surgical masks that almost everyone is using in China are completely worthless except as a placebo. Frequent hand washing is much more likely to be effective as the hand-to-face contact is the most frequent vector for colds. The masks are not rated for isolation (note the large air gaps around the edges of the masks) and, more likely, form a perfect breeding ground for germs since they are kept warm and moist by the breath.
Dorian
And that's true of all those doctors in surgical theaters too? You know, we learn so very much from hanging out here!
Seriously, though, we're curious. Why do doctors wear masks in surgical theaters? Is it, as one clever person at lunch today suggested, to keep them from drooling into the brains of their patients? (Yes, that would be bad.) Is it to prevent their own vile diseases from infecting their patients? Or vice versa? Or something else?
And what kind of mask (if any) should one wear to protect oneself from airborne disease?

Blab. A reader recognizes one of those coalition troops.
The leftmost (as we look at the picture) 'hear no evil' soldier is, quite clearly, Bruce Willis.
Bruce Willis is British?

Blab. Despite our warnings, a reader tries to generalize. The outcome of this process is unpredictable.
So, I blow off the UN and then bomb the bejesus out of the Iraqis who have this irrational affection for their country, don't read the pamphlets, and get in the way and get stupid killed, and then I tell the UN that they have to ante up clean up the mess? Is this a technique that can be broadly applied in life, do you think?? Geez.
That's the way pretty much everything works already, isn't it?

Blab. A polite but disturbed reader writes:
Sir: For some reason I find this bit of news disturbing.
You mean this?
CAMP BUSHMASTER, Iraq - In this dry desert world near Najaf, where the Army V Corps combat support system sprawls across miles of scabrous dust, there's an oasis of sorts: a 500-gallon pool of pristine, cool water.
It belongs to Army chaplain Josh Llano of Houston, who sees the water shortage, which has kept thousands of filthy soldiers from bathing for weeks, as an opportunity.
''It's simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,'' he said.
At least there's no peeing in the pool. We hope.

Blab. A forlorn, isolated reader resorts to this.
I have no one else to share this with at this moment. Little lady at the films, cat doesn't listen, the lights are out next door. Standards have fallen. Witness this. Healthy? Higher Quality???   The world is going to hell in a hand basket.
McDonald's is reforming itself?
It says staff will be better trained, would smile and apologise.
We'd like a hamburger and an apology, please. Make that two apologies. Super sized.

Blab. A reader whom we generously allow to remain relatively anonymous writes:
Dude -
You got Chris, good. He emailed me on 4/1 fairly upset that you were shut down. I took a look and then emailed that it was, indeed, April 1st. "Oh," he said. "But, it's still down." "Hmmm," I said (we're not known for our snappy email dialogue...). So you got us both.
Very good!
Dude - we are so very sorry to display your appalling gullibility in public. You believe us, right?

Blab. Plurp's own pupil returns.
So here I am again, still being your faithful school pupil companion. Please don't leave me plurpless for so long again, I resorted to reading *other* blogs to try and keep myself amused. It was horrendous. How's your cat?
We apologize to this, and all other readers, for our nasty April Fool's joke, and for leaving you Plurpless for so many days.
No, not really. In fact, we're still chuckling about it. Mwaaa ha haaa.
He Who Pees On Pillows is horrendous. All is normal.

Blab. The limbjerks amongst you, and especially the limbjerks who are into bondage, will really be interested in this.
Stop limbjerking, love handles, depression and poor motor skills with Sleep Angel!
"Sleep Angel is one of the most important products ever made" - Dr. Derek Mahony, International Speaker in Orthodontics
Next: Unique products for full enclosure.

Plurp. Top 10 Things you were looking for when you searched Plurp this past week?

helen naked pitures

mia

copies of frank lloyd wrights drawings of the guggenhiem

bonsai

meep

new jersey does not exist

number of the beast

perle

pulau

quorn naked pictures

The top two are there every single week, for some reason. We are pleased to welcome those of you searching for new jersey does not exist and quorn naked pictures. We can only hope these were not the same people.

Plop.

Springtime in New York
Plurp. Read slowly, and out loud, this amazing piece of found poetry.
During the fifth day
of a blackout,
the only commerce
took place at shops displaying
generators and suitcases.

Yow. You watched the statue of Saddam Hussein fall in Baghdad today. Go watch it again. Does it remind you of the statue of Lenin? Or the Berlin Wall?
Springtime in Iraq. We hope.

Yo. Go read this insightful article on how the British took Basra. New lessons in the gentle art of urban warfare.

Yo. Does it come as a surprise to you that Saddam Hussein's regime owed a lot of money to Russia and France? And for what?, you ask. Well ...
Moscow says Iraq owes it at least $US9 billion, mostly for weapons supplied during the Soviet era. Government officials have said in recent days that they expect repayment, despite Russia's strong opposition to the US-led war.
And ...
Iraq's unpaid bills to France, for weapons and other purchases, come to between €2.13 billion and €2.44 billion ($3.75 billion and $4.3 billion)
We know what you're thinking. Those might not have been the wisest investments. To be fair ...
Washington has pondered ways to collect an estimated $US5 billion Iraq owes the US Government and American businesses
... for unspecified purchases.
But then, the U.S. seems to be in a position to recover these debts, doesn't it?

Plurp. Ah, the French.

Q: How are the French media and politicians presenting the fall of Baghdad?

A: There is a certain amount of disappointment that the Americans have done it relatively easily. Nobody will say it in public, but they would have preferred the troops to get more bogged down.
[...]
France feels that it has made considerable international capital by championing the voice of the rest of the world, but it is obviously worried that its opposition to the United States has put it in the deep freeze as far as Washington is concerned.

Ya think?

Plurp. We haven't heard much from those nice people in North Korea recently. We wondered why.
[T]elevision pictures of U.S. tanks and warplanes rolling through Iraq may have intimidated North Korea's leaders and may prompt them to seek a peaceful solution to the Korean crisis.
But the images also may reinforce their determination to arm themselves with nuclear weapons as a deterrent against a U.S. invasion.
So we're either safe or in big trouble. We are eternally grateful for this kind of generous enlightenment from the media.

Yak. In a meeting yesterday, a colleague sneezed vociferously, four times in a row, and said:
Gosh. Sorry! My allergies have really been acting up ever since I got back from Hong Kong.
Yeah. Very funny.

Yow.

Plurp. Speaking of hoaxes, you know what might be fun? Owning a Web site that is the authoritative reference for something that isn't true.
You would pick a topic, get yourself a domain, and fill a Web site with all sorts of documentary evidence. To make your life a bit easier, you could ask the readers of your blog (located on a different domain for plausible deniability) to create new documentary evidence for you, so you're mostly just posting stuff.
You might want to craft the topic in such a way that it was a bit tough for people to check up on your veracity. You could claim to have secret military documents (long a favorite of UFO sites along these lines). You could claim to have stuff from an obscure Russian university (but Weekly World News has probably scraped the bottom of that barrel). Ah, heck, you could probably get away with a bald-faced lie and claim to have stuff from some odd Institute at Princeton University. Who's going to check?
Problem is, you don't want to do something ongoing, like a present-day Institute at Princeton. You'd have to update it all the time with new papers, seminar series, and stuff like that. Too much work. Best to stick with things that occurred in the past.
As to topics, you'd have to be careful. The always popular UFO stuff, and related alien visitations, have been done to death. Same with the Trilateral Commission and that ilk. You'd want to avoid anything too obscure. If you had the authoritative reference site on some mediocre poet in 17th century China, would anyone really care?
One possibility is a field of scientific research, like time travel, or teleportation. You wouldn't claim too much. No visits to the Napoleonic Empire or jaunts to Pluto. Just enough to be astounding. A coin sent a tenth of a second into the past or a millimeter to the left. And you wouldn't want to be an obvious nutter.
Something like this.
Site Map: Project Bluejacket

Overview (time travel work by the U.S. government in the 1970s)

Freedom of Information Act correspondence

Organization and history

Research reports

Experimental notebooks

Project management reports

Related reading (links to legitimate papers on time travel)

Media reports about Project Bluejacket

Readers are invited to suggest ideas for other topics along these lines, or to generally hold forth on this idea in some creative way. Hey, it could even catch on!

Plurp.
During the fifth day
of a blackout,
the only commerce
took place at shops displaying
the blue dog

Tuesday, April 8, 2003
Blab. As we dig through the steaming heap of unread reader contributions, we note that our laziest readers continue to insist on sending blind links, apparently in an attempt to force us to provide insight and stirring (read "time consuming") narrative. We present a number of such contributions from a number of such readers.
[link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link]
Aren't they lovely?
We encourage readers with too much time on their hands to investigate these links and provide us with either insight or stirring narrative. Or both.

Blab. Quoting from last month's Plurp, a helpful reader, uh, helps.
"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" -- and you forgot to mention Pay Per Plurp!
Indeed we did! How are we going to retire next year if you people don't sign up for our premium service? Huh?

Blab. A desperate reader complains about ... something.
The digitalglobe.com link didn't work. Neither did the other one. Is this what was meant by "two facts that will soon be crucial to your continued existence"? Is this some sick kind of cyber threat to increase your web shares? Am I now to be denied critical knowledge that could save my life because I did not venture into the rest of your site? Do you have some kind of inside information about what Homeland Security is really about? What hellish ideas are you cooking in that lab?!! I will read the rest of your site, I swear it. Just give me the map code! Please, I beg you!!
We quote, from our really fine FAQ:
Q: I'm using an ancient Web browser on Linux with a few special hacks of my own. One of your Web pages does something strange when I click on it. When are you going to fix it?
A: Let's see. We have an opening when pigs fly and another when hell freezes over. Which is better for you?

Blab. A reader writes:
So, this is not, I repeat, not colonialism.
Now that's interesting.
In breaking news today, Secretary Ronald Dumsfeld announced that Bob the Sock Puppet would be installed next week as the new interim leader of Iraq.

Blab. A eunuch reader writes:
The Yahoo! Finance Tax Center Tax Babe (as seen on the current front page of Yahoo!)
Sex sells taxes?
Good god, man! Sex sells everything!

Blab. We cannot resist publishing this effuse praise from a new reader.
I'm what you call a greenhorn, just beginning my experiences as a serious "Computer-usin' kinda guy". I was hoping to start building a site named "stevewhite.com", and decided to look around to see if the name was being used. I was pleasantly suprised to stumble into stevewhite.org. For the record, I DO need to get a life, and I DO spend too much time on the net. I just wanted to say that as far as web sites go, (non-porn related, of course) this site is one of the few that I have come across that is worth a pinch of puppy poop.
Steve White S.L.C.
Yeah, we wanted stevewhite.com too, but it got yoinked by some dumb real estate guy in Santa Clarita. Is that a real place? stevewhite.net seems to have been camped upon by some guy with ... a picture. Quoting once again from our FAQ:
Q: I think it's really cool that you have your own Internet domain. How do I get one of my own?
A: You know, if you had asked us that just a few weeks ago, we could have helped you out. But now, it turns out that almost all of the domains have been taken. Sorry.
Lucky you, we suppose. If you think you spend too much time on the Net now, just imagine what would happen if you got your own site. Jeepers.
We do think we have the Plurp motto for next week, though!

Blab. An inattentive reader writes:
Tell your chew toy I didn't read past the second line.
Yeah. We didn't either.

Plurp. Long-time readers may remember Imani, the person who occasionally mistakes our userid or IM handle for that of someone she actually knows, and starts up a conversation with us as if we were them.
Being the friendly sort, we chat back. Then we tell you all about it. That makes us a type-and-tell kinda guy. We hope you don't mind.
You have to remember that we know basically nothing about this person. We don't even know what we're supposed to know and not know about her. So our part of the conversation is pretty tricky!
Anyhow, this time, we get a peek into Imani's exciting life.

Her: well well well hey stranger

Us: Hi.

Her: <<imani

Us: Oh! Hi, Imani.

Her: how are you babe

Us: Doin OK. You?

Her: lovely back home again thank god

Us: Welcome home.

Her: thanks babe   cali was fun but i wanted to be home esp after what happened

Us: Yeah.

Her: yea got hit head on by a drunk driver 4 days efore thanks giving

Her: was in the hospital for 2 mons

Us: !!

Us: That's awful.

Us: You ok?

Her: yes

Her: i got home 2 wks ago was gone since dec

Us: Wondered where you were

Us: You completely recovered and all?

Her: yes very

Her: but yes i am home again all better

Us: Home is good

Her: yes

Her: miss me?

Us: Always!

Her: aw you sweety been missin you too
might have to invite you over for dinner sometme

Us: So what are you going to do now

Her: nothing just home being lazy

Us: You deserve it. After all that.

Her: yea

Her: just missed everybody

Us: You were in Calif the whole time?

Her: no the accident happened outside charlotte
i won miss ebony worldwide 2003 and had to goto cali

Her: i've been all over

Us: No fooling.

Her: so i am gona stay grounded fo rawhile

Us: Good plan. No more head on crashes for a while.

Her: true
so how you been

Us: Doing too much. I need sleep. Or something.

Her: well maybe i canmake you dinner sometime

Us: Sure. I'd like to hear all bout the contest and everything. Fame and stuff.

Her: i promise to keep myhands to myself

Her: so i cna hold you to that me makin you dinner

Us: Ha. OK.

Her: i promise

Us: Hey, gotta go right now. But be in touch soon, OK?

Her: so me you dinner my place deal

Her: ok babe

Us: Ya, deal.

Leave it to us to wait until we are old, married, and the wrong person to finally be asked over to dinner by a beauty queen who can hardly keep her hands off us. Other than Helen, of course.

Plurp. A soothing thought from a travel magazine on Amtrak.
An unlikely pairing of functions, to be sure. But the Massager Pen ($25) is a metallic ballpoint writing instrument that has an unanticipated added feature - the miniature ball at the tip vibrates at about three times the intensity of a pager. Why? That action, according to manufacturer Technoscout is desined to utilize the principles of pressure point massage therapy to soothe tension and stress anytime, anyplace in just minutes.
Naturally, if the source of your stress happens to be your boss or co-worker, you probably can't use the pen to make them go away. But if you want to quietly utilize the pen's special powers to relieve your own stress, go for it. We won't tell.
As a person who deals with stress every day, and is not satisfied with the intensity of a pager, we're sure that we will find this useful.

Yak. Ed.
You've got to get up pretty early in the morning if you're going to start preparing for the future.

Plurp.
Leave it to the blue dog
to be surreal,
iconic, and
the wrong species

Monday, April 7, 2003
Blab. Here we are, still beaming insufferably at our April Fool's joke. Having used it as an excuse not to post for several days, we are now aflood with reader input on the most unlikely topics! On a whim, we have decided to add structure to this chaos and post them (or, anyhow, some of them) by topic.
Today's topic is: Madness, in its many lovely forms.
Let's get started, shall we?
im in slc treatment center help me. it is unpatriotic god damnit i must go back home to ca
What are we to make of this? Is Sarah Lawrence College really all that bad? Is our reader not fond of Nordic endurance racing? Or does it have some irrational fear of linear accelerators? (How could that be?)
It does make sense, however, that our reader wants to go back home to "Canada".

Blab. You know the night terrors you've been having recently, waking up in the black of night, sweating, shaking uncontrollably from unremembered images? Here's why.
This just in: Cthulhu's minions patrol the waters surrounding the Mountains of Madness.
Those of you who know enough to fear a particular alignment of stars, or the meaning of certain unnamable events in the ice valleys of Antarctica, will shudder at this revelation.
A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean.
"All we knew prior to this specimen coming through was that this animal lived in the abyssal environment down in Antarctica," New Zealand squid expert and senior research fellow at Auckland University of Technology, Dr Steve O'Shea, told BBC News Online.
"Now we know that it is moving right through the water column, right up to the very surface and it grows to a spectacular size." [...]
"When this animal was alive, it really has to be one of the most frightening predators out there. It's without parallel in the oceans." [...]
"This animal, armed as it is with the hooks and the beak that it has, not only is colossal in size but is going to be a phenomenal predator and something you are not going to want to meet in the water."

The specimen is a sub-adult
Blab. Are there sane readers who compose haiku out of material like this?
The cat pillow-barfs
The Blue Dog smells dog bottoms.
This is called a life?
We didn't think so.

Blab. Dudly do write:
I find it extremely useful never to read beyond the second sentence in any mathematic puzzle proposition. Do try it. If you find it enhances your enjoyment of life, send whatever you can afford to the Edward Gorey memorial abatement fund.   (The great man's work is his own memorial, don't you think?) Wot?! This is an anonymous response?! Fornicate that.: DUDLYDUDLY@webtv.net
OK, how many of you read beyond the second sentence? We know we didn't.

Blab. A reader pleads with us. Often, we like that.
Hello Mr. White,
My name is Zac Johns i and 24 and i really like your website.I go o it alot. I would like to ask you, if you could please send me some relly hot and roudy pictures from your link famousbabes.com? Please Please Please Please Please Please???????? I really like them, if you no what i mean.well please send me some great pics.
Zac...
Hello Zac. Welcome to the Internet. The way this thing works is as follows. You have a browser. Everyone else has a Web site. You get to their Web sites via your browser. People who send relly hot and roudy pictures around via email are hopeless lusers. We trust that this is a liberating revelation for you, and that you will therefore stay on your meds for a few more days.

Blab. Our favorite chew-toy writes:
And now even the virulently anti-Bush NYT is having to admit that Rumsfeld actually DIDNT screw up the military planning.
How many times do you have to be wrong before re-analyzing your world view?
As our chew-toy cites that NYT article as apparently bolstering its position, we quote from it:
The big failure has been in political assessment, and the expectation that southern Iraqis would welcome the American troops and offer minimal resistance. The Bush administration seems to have gotten mixed intelligence about how the Iraqis would respond to an invasion, and the fact that the Pentagon chose to believe the optimistic reports was probably a function of political preconceptions rather than hardheaded judgments.
We are happy to report that we agree with our chew-toy, as does the Washington Post:
White House officials struggled this week to retool a war communications blueprint that did not allow for strong Iraqi resistance and overestimated the welcome allied troops would receive.
The administration countered setbacks on the global airwaves by using classic campaign techniques such as dogged repetition of scripted messages and flat denials of dissent. When the war plan itself was under attack, officials tried to regain their footing by saying that the plan was flexible enough to accommodate any eventuality.
Good chew-toy. Grrrr! Grrrr!

Blab. Driven to a state of irrationality by our recent April Fool's stunt, a reader tries a legalistic maneuver.
Hum, we were under the (apparently mistaken, according to the font of all knowledge (google)), impresssion that April fools were only 'valid' until 12:00 on 1st April. i.e. Lunchtime. After that, the joke was suposed to be on the joker.
We suspect an evil plot by our parents to limit us to a very short window of opportunity - knowing that we rarely got up before noon while we were living at home.
"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year. " - Mark Twain
-AJL
We have verified that this unlikely rule is followed by those of the British persuasion. That source of all truth, 2Camels.com, chalks it up to the wacky French, who couldn't be bothered to abandon the Julian calendar when the Gregorian calendar came along, and thence became the butt of jokes.
Right.
So maybe it's our uncultured upbringing. (We do not recall this obscure notion having been mentioned in Classics Illustrated, after all.) Or maybe those on this side of the pond simply don't practice that quaint April Fool's limitation that so unfairly discriminates against those of us who don't like to get up that early.

Plurp. Thinking about those wacky Iraqis who have been bombed and shelled for a couple of weeks now, pretty much non-stop, we wondered how the resulting sleep deprivation is likely to affect them,
We had vague recollections of long-term sleep deprivation (on the order of a week or two) causing hallucinations and such.
Day 4: Irritability and uncooperative attitude, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating. Gardner's first hallucination was that a street sign was a person, followed by a delusional episode in which he imagined that he was a famous black football player.
Day 5: More hallucinations (e.g., seeing a path extending from the room in front of him down through a quiet forest). These were sometimes described as "hypnagogic reveries" since Gardner recognized, at least after a short while, that the visions were illusionary in nature. [...]
Day 10: Paranoia focused on a radio show host who Gardner felt was trying to make him appear foolish because he was having difficulty remembering some details about his vigil.
Then there was wacky DJ Peter Tripp, who stayed awake for eight days in the 1950s as a stunt.
After a few days, he began to hallucinate, seeing cobwebs, mice, kittens; looking through drawers for money that wasn't there; insisting that a technician had dropped a hot electrode into his shoe.
The psychiatric profession is suspicious of claims of psychosis induced by sleep deprivation, though it is a well known result that rats die after a couple of weeks of sleep deprivation.
The U.S. military has been quite interested in sleep deprivation, presumably both because of its effects on U.S. troops and because of its effects on Evil Enemies.
All units experience serious degradation of combat effectiveness that quickly rises after 72 hours. A rule of thumb is to expect a 25 percent degradation in performance for every 24 hours without sleep. Under the extreme demands of combat, units historically have conducted sustained operations for a maximum of 120 hours. The result was a total deterioration of combat effectiveness.
Those of you who feel the desire to add to the world's knowledge by staying awake for several weeks should be sure to tell us if you go mad.

Plurp. We told a marvelous meme-mixing broken joke at a party recently.
Shirley: Michael Jackson has no nose.
Harold: Michael Jackson has no nose?
Shirley: Nope, no nose.
Harold: How does he smell?
Shirley: He can't; he has no nose!
Oh. My. Gawd. That's so funny!
Oddly, the people at the party just stared at us with a mixture of confusion and horror. Apparently, they were unfamiliar with either the fact that Michael Jackson does, in fact, have no nose at present, or the whole social milieu of broken jokes.
Some people!

Plurp.
The blue dog
was finally located in
an slc treatment center

Sunday, April 6, 2003
Plurp. So, yeah, we were kidding. But some of you wondered, and that warms us in the otherwise cold and evil shadows in which we usually dwell.
Those of you who thought immediately that it must be a prank better think again. (Mike)
Then think yet again. It's a nutty time in history, and the inmates really do run the asylum. (/usr/bin/girl)
Those of you who worried that it might actually be real, thank you for your supportive words, and please do be worried. Do you really want to live in a country in which you have to wonder if this kind of madness is possible?

Blab. But enough of this seriousness! Let's get on with the really important business at hand, which is, as always, the unapologetic mocking of our readers.
First, we display the wisdom of those readers who knew immediately that it was all a joke. We don't like these readers, of course, as they spoil the whole effect. But whatever.
APRIL FOOLS!!!!
Correct. Dull, but correct.
Enjoying yourself? getting a nice chuckle over there, are you? Funny guy.
You have no idea. We are entirely giddy over the whole thing.
Nice April 1st entry. Very good, almost had me.
Don't worry. We'll keep trying until we get it right.

Blab. Next, we examine the timid and uncertain responses of readers who weren't sure about us, but who might have been worried.
april phools?
Ya think?
Hey! It's April Third now...
Yes, and it's still funny.
Subj: Enough
Can't be true. Stop it. Write an apology to all of us.
An apology? Surely you jest; this might be our very best April Fool's joke ever! We absolutely revel in your ambiguous incredulity.

Blab. Now we come upon a nattering nabob of readers whom we seem to have fooled for some very tiny period of time. But even that reinforces our antisocial behavior.
Dear Plurp.
Re: Site Closure.
I am not sure if April 1st has the same significance in the USofA as it does in the UK, ie it is a day for playing tricks on people.
Excellent spoof Sir! had me fooled for almost a nano-second - nice style.
Traducer
Why, thank you! We really wanted to include what appeared to be the scanned-in Cease and Desist order, so as to give the whole thing an aura of documentary legitimacy. But, you know, that was, like, work and stuff.
You really had me going until I noticed the date on yesterday's posting: April 1...
Good one -- very realistic!
Is it? Gosh, we hope not! But we do admit that we were aiming at the fine line that divides politics and farce these days.

Blab. We are required to take a detour to visit our many readers, probably the bulk of our readers, who responded by being hopelessly confused, abusive, or psychotic. We love our readers.
Cease and Desist
... the april fool's joke and get back to writing.
Dorian
Your wish, as always, is our command. Just as soon as we get around to it.
LOL! But it's gone lunch time here... so the fool's on you -AJL
Well all righty then. Have a nosh. Then tell us what that has to do with anything at all.
Or you can, like this reader, simply hallucinate.
AND we have filed a HR3162 sec 314 request to disclose all your bank account information to the FTAT because we KNOW you are funding terrorists
- Ashcroft (spelled ASH... not ASS...)
(BTW, is Osama still living in your apartment?)
You call this living?
I suspected Helen was a terrorist.
Us, too. Must be the mustache. Or this.
I'm sorry, Mr. White, I felt it was my patriotic duty to report you. I hope it does not affect our personal relationship.
-Helen
At least, before being detained without benefit of Constitutional protections, we lived long enough to experience Helen calling us Mr. White. We were holding out for Your Godlike Masterfulness Sir, but we ran out of time.
Cutie,
I am wanting to bake cookies for your internment. Do you want sugar cookies or chocolate chip? Tell ASscroft to send me your forwarding address.
I will miss you and Christopher won't pee too much on your pillow.
Helen
Yeah, he will.

Blab. Finally, we come to our favorite reader correspondence on this topic. And we mean our very favorite reader correspondence. You know, those gullible folk who fell for it hook, line and stinker. Some figured it out on their own after first embarrassing themselves. Others had to be told. A few probably still think it was for real, and for them, maybe it was.
These are the readers who make our brutish, miserable existence tolerable.
Like this reader.
Re. the suffocation of Plurp.
I've heard of this sort of thing, but this is the first time I've seen it to something I read on a regular basis (I was the one who sent that PNAC link in to the letter to Clinton).
I don't know whether to be more sorry I won't be reading any more Plurp or that the most powerful nation in the world snuffs out voices of dissent and stamps on its own highly-vaunted freedom of speech principle.
I hope you get better laws and a better government soon. For everyone's sake.
Respectfully yours,
James Casey
P.S. My claim to fame is that I met Ian Whalley a few times - knew his former colleague Pete Johns.
You can see where James might have been a little worried after sending that, can't you? Perhaps that explains this maneuver, some time later that same day.
Although like everyone else, I am waiting for the April Fool notification....
James Casey
Too late, James! Just as it was for this Treasured Reader who, once upon a time, would regularly perpetrate heinous (and, sigh, successful) April Fool's jokes against us.
I dropped in, as I usually do after your FL trips to see what funnies made it to Plurp, then I read the first paragraph...
Oh my....
I hope that you don't get any real grief over this...
So much for free speech...
Steve
Then, after a private discussion with Helen, who let the beans out of the bag, that same Treasured Reader writes:
Got me...
Damn... good :-)
This particular Treasured Reader will never live this down. We promise. :-)
We almost feel bad about posting this touching contribution. Almost.
Unfair not to say something via e-mail, at least, to those concerned and ready to help.
We do appreciate the concern and offer of help, though!
You can just feel the fear as this reader typed.
eep... is this for real? should I keep coming back every day to check if it's just some april fool's joke? are you going to start publishing on some other website? aah!!!
Ah, the sweet stink of success. Made ever more odiferous by a reader who gets all testy on our behalf.
That's right.
We're the government. We're here to help.
Actually, we're Plurp. And we have no intention of being helpful at all!

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't like the idea of making
fun of gullible readers

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