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2003.04.13 : 2003.04.19
Saturday, April 19, 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.
Thriday, April 18, 2003
Blab. A reader shows off its superior knowledge.
Is an autonomic computing
test self-correcting? Does your Control Theory textbook include schematics
for the mind lasers? Shouldn't that be Z transforms or are you using
analog computers? Does the blue dog leave a residue? Plurp
readers need to know.
Dorian
So, let's see ...
-
No.
-
Of course not. Duh.
-
Z transforms are just Laplace transforms for functions that only wake up
every once in a while. We cannot suffer the pain of thinking in terms of
discrete systems. God clearly wants us to think in terms of continuous
systems. We think of discrete systems as numerical approximations to continuous
systems.
-
Yes. You don't want to know.
Blab. A reader, believing it is at the helm of the mind control
lasers, attempts to dictate our behavior.
Talk about SARS. Just be
sure to wear a surgical mask while doing so.
No.
Plurp. Good news! The most recent war didn't end too soon after
all. American Industry had just enough time to create this cool
new action figure.
Talking Iraqi Dis-Information
Minister
This action figure of the "curiously
absent" Iraqi Dis-Information Minister is 12" and he talks.
"There are no American infidels in
Baghdad. Never!"
"Our initial assessment is that they
will all die"
"No I am not scared and neither should
you be!"
"We have given them a sour taste"
We love American Industry.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
was completely characterized
by poles
Thriday, April 17, 2003
Blab. Earlier this week, we lamented the
passing of Kafkaesque, into the clutches of the beets. Today, he seems
to reply.
 Hey
now, tiger. I didn't say them beets was defensible. Just healthy.
I'm not some kind of beet apologist. That's what I'm saying here.
Talk to my lawyers. Actually I don't
have lawyers. Would you like to speak to my cat instead?
He has a rudimentary knowledge of
the law, but is shaky on the exact date of the Magna Carta thing.
Kaf
"Healthy". That's the beets talking.
Blab. A reader expresses surprise at the fallibility of Babelfish.
No wonder Bablefish couldn't
translate Geissen correctly. It's Swiss German! - German for high places.
- Morton
All we can say in reply is this:
Meat pie of meat pie meat
meat meat meat of meat pie meat meat meat of meat pie meat meat of meat
pie meat of pizza pie
Blab. A polite reader wishes us a festive Spring Solstice in
a particularly bizarre manner.
Sir: Happy
Easter.
Examine the linked picture, dear reader, which is not included here due
to its bulk. It portrays a baby chicken next to a golden chicken egg. The
egg, however, is intact, from which we conclude that the chick did not
hatch from the golden egg.
The only other possibility for parable, it seems, is that this is the
chick that laid the golden egg.
Ouch!
Blab. A reader who is superior to us all writes:
Santa Barbara is beautiful.
Driving into it from the south is like driving into Villefranche-sur-Mer
on the Riviera. It is an ideal place to be filthy rich, the riches
allowing you the frequent opportunity to go elsewhere for culture.
Nice little museum, nice little orchestra, almost some theatre, mainstream
movies galore. One of those so-cal places where you pray for rain
just so there is something to contemplate besides your ever lightening
blondness. Oh, and beer and students. The itinerants like it
and the tolerance of them has been outstanding. Then there is Montecito,
where god would live were there a god and it had enough money. The
people who do live there are (in general) somewhere between awful and worse
than Upper East Siders. You know the kind, with boy children who
come from the womb wearing double breasted blazers. As for Buddhism
(who mentioned Buddhism, Bucko?) it is certainly a paying gig, at least
to judge from the monastery on the hill. Come to think of it, the
RC's have a nice plot higher up, as they would deem appropriate, and evangelicals
have a putative college in the hills that would make Hearst jealous.
I throw my lot in with the itinerants in this dualistic view, though I
think it is wise to stay upwind.
If you would only keep us informed about where you are, we would gladly
stay upwind.
Blab. A reader constructs of sentence of stunning ambiguity.
I do not think you know the
meaning of the word.
We are forced to wonder where the comma is supposed to be.
Blab. A hopeful reader writes:
"If there is hope... it lies
in the proles"
(George Orwell).
Do you think so? If the proles are so great, why did they put up with the
establishment of the totalitarian State? Why did you?
Blab. A reader criticizes the language of yesterday's reader
"infers" forward movement?
I do not think that word means what your reader thinks it means.
We do not think your words are as mean as you think you are mean.
Blab. A rotten reader writes:
When I suggested that blue
cheese was the best rotting food of all, I forgot that cheese in general
was a rotted food. Perhaps blue cheese is the best rotted food of
all because it's twice-rotted.
We rejoice in our readers' suggestions for thrice-rotted
food!
Blab. A wonderfully polite reader notes the following.
Sir: The
president is parodying himself.
But, I guess we already suspected
that.
We have always thought of national politics as entertainment. It's the
only way we can justify having vast amounts of money extorted from us to
support it.
Come to think of it, we still don't like the idea. It's like a bandit
taking your wallet and then singing a song off tune in recompense. You'd
really rather have your wallet back.
But we digress! We certainly agree that Dubya is the most entertaining
Head Cheese in quite some time.
Out of the evil done to this
great country is going to come some good. And one of the -- one of the
good things that's going to happen, if we stay the course, if we're strong,
if we speak clearly, if we're decisive, if we understand that freedom is
not a -- America's gift to the world, but is God's gift to the world --
if we understand those values -- (applause) -- if we stay true to our beliefs
and true to our responsibilities, we can achieve peace.
He even looks funny!
Blab. A reader awakens to the realization that its life is a
waking nightmare.
It appears that Europe is
planning to create a Presidential office to rule over all 26 countries.
I can see it now ... Jeb Bush, U.S. President, George Bush, EU President.
Elected for life. Let the dynasty begin.
Please let the nightmare end. Though
plurp is rife with them, yet no-one likes such fevered dreams. The only
saving grace is that, given the state of the airlines and the economic
crisis, the only transportation to Europe will be by sailboat.
Dorian
Where's Thor Heyerdahl when you need him, eh?
Blab. A reader suggests an interesting conspiracy theory.
Sir: It looks like they
airbrushed out the horns.
From Dick Cheney 1941~2001 ? Could be. Nice obit, though.
We're gonna miss him!
Plurp. It is possible to sell an abstract marketing concept,
without any actual product or technical underpinnings, without any defined
customer value, and without any real idea of how you're going to deliver
on it.
.Not
Plurp.
The blue dog
was completely characterized
by proles
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Blab. A reader writes:
Maybe you shoud hire some
body doubles for when you dine out.
Maybe. But this leaves us to wonder which recent topic caused our reader
to suggest this. Rotting foods? Cannibalism? Women fawning all over us?
It's so hard to tell.
Blab. A reader discovers our secret code.
Plurp backwards is prulp.
The difference in the sound connotes such words as 'propulsion', and 'prole'.
These are active, masculine words, and I propose that 'prulp' be used as
a noun on your site to signify anything that infers forward movement that
benefits mankind.
ex: Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi,
and John F. Kennedy had prulp. George W. Bush does not.
Why should Helenism get all the glory?
Forward movement that benefits mankind. Like masculine proles? We're missing
something.
Blab. Those secretive minions of governmental agencies who watch
our every move are, for some reason, watching Helen today.
Helen was happy that Steve
found Santa Barbara just where he left it. But she wasn't happy to
not be there to help him find it.
We wish we knew who those guys were.
Plurp. Now that this part of WW III is pretty much over, and
Dumsfeld's plan was shown to be unarguably perfect, and Dubya isn't planning
to go to war with Syria or North Korea or anybody else (yet), and the CNN
coverage sometimes has pictures of something other than Toys O' Death or
smoke or bodies, we feel lost.
What will we talk about?
Yow. So, yeah, Santa Barbara is gorgeous, the weather is phenomenal,
my hotel room is right across from the beach and stuff.
We're co-teaching an autonomic computing class this quarter at our
old alma mater. The class consists of around 15 really, really
bright undergrads. They are completely delightful: sharp, knowledgeable,
energetic, opinionated and completely in love with what they're doing.
The tiny computer lab in the Creative Studies building is a buzzing social
hub pretty much 24 hours a day.
Today, we spent two hours becoming an expert (well, sort of) on control
theory, whipping through about 300 pages of an undergrad text on the topic
in enough detail to be able to teach an introduction to it tonight. We
haven't done that in a long time! It turns out that we still understand
ODEs, Laplace transforms and Cauchy's Residue Theorem. Who knew?
Plurp.
The blue dog
read 300 pages of Plurp
in enough detail to be a
buzzing social hub
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Blab. A reader gets all political on us. We hate that.
Mike
Hawash is a U.S. citizen being held without charge and denied due process.
All of the warrents and subpoenas are being kept secret. Last I heard this
was one of the many criminal acts" by the Iraqi government against its
people. We went to Iraq to make them free only to lose our freedom here.
We were also outraged that Iraq planned the next leader to be the son of
Saddam. Please note that the GOP has announced plans to set up a campaign
for Jeb Bush in '08. Wonder if he'll also be elected by the Supreme
Court or by a simple majority vote of 100% like Saddam. Time will tell.
Dorian
So what? Who ever heard of Mike Hawash anyway? It's not like he's famous,
you know, or powerful or anything. So he disappears. Who cares?
Blab. Another beautiful woman writes:
Given the opportunity we
woud ALL fawn over you.
That's certainly been our life experience.
Blab. A reader disagrees with our claims about Icelandic shark.
It doesn't marinate in _its
own_ whatever, a bunch of people stand around the pit that they've just
buried the shark in, widdle on the shark, and then bury it. Sheesh,
get it right, White.
Well, ya know, that's what we thought, 'cause that's what we were told
by a genuine Icelandic guy who later sent us a jar of that shark stuff.
(A colleague made the mistake of opening it in the lab. Don't ever do that.)
But then we looked up Hakarl
and several seemingly-informed sites claimed that it was marinated in the
shark's own, uh, juices. So who knows?
Blab. Gazing contemplatively at an old
issue of Plurp, a reader writes:
i think what you are doing
is very cool
We think so too, though we have no idea to what you are referring.
Blab. A fan of rotting food cuts the cheese.
Hey! Don't forget the
best rotting food of all.
Rotting milk products do seem to have a universal following. Sour cream.
Cottage cheese. Cheese in general, of course. Rotting is good. Always bet
on entropy.
Blab. A reader suggests stuff to do with our annoyingly long
hair.
Have you tried a Willie Nelson
type braid, or a ponytail?
These days, our hair is almost always in a simple ponytail. Helen tried
putting it into a French braid (Freedom braid) once. It sort of worked,
but just barely, and it kind of weirded us out, so ...
Blab. A reader sends a snippet from another article in Arab News.
Sources reveal that the U.S.
bombarded Iraqi cities with ATOMIC BOMBS! (i.e. bombs containing
atoms)
Oh my gosh!
Blab. A reader asks the Big Questions.
Who says we aren't progressing
as a civilization? We have won against the evildoers, we are collecting
funds for a cure for Perle, and now a blow has been struck for daytime
tv freedom. The only thing of greater significance this early
in the week, however, seems to be this.
What - you don't like lesbian kissing on TV?
Blab. A reader gets all confused. We like this. It allows us
to look smart in comparison.
Iraq bomb types; As usual
truth is stranger than fiction
Inert
Bombs
So if this is so effective against
armour, why bother with highly costly depleted uranium munitions?
Yup, concrete bombs (smart bomb shells filled with concrete rather than
high explosives) were used in Gulf War I, as we recall. They're good if
you want to (a) fly a plane way high over something, (b) put a hole in
that something, and (c) not do lots and lots of damage to the stuff around
it.
But flying a plane way high over stuff and dropping a handful of bombs
is a specialized thing. You can't take out a tank column that way, like
you can by flying an A-10 Thunderbolt over it and shooting depleted uranium
shells from a gatling gun. And you can't take out pretty much any group
of armored moving things like you can by shooting at them with a bunch
of tanks ... with depleted uranium shells.
Different skills for different kills, eh? (Ooh! We just made that up.)
Plurp. As the plane came in for a landing, the little girl in
the seat in front of us reached her small hand across the aisle to her
grandfather. Her grandfather smiled and took her hand. Are you scared?,
he asked. No, she replied, just don't let go.
Plurp.
The blue dog
found Santa Barbara
pretty much where it was
last time
Monday, April 14, 2003
Blab. A reader blasphemes against Google.
Sir: I was testing Search
Boss and this
came up. I guess it's a googly world still.
Yes. Quite. And, like Syria, should you continue to consort with the enemy,
you will find arrayed against you diplomatic, economic, and other
options.
Blab. Dumsfeld's small army of illiterate governmental thugs
who watch our every move reports:
Steve loves food! Especially
Peiking Duck.
Well, their reports are semantically accurate, anyway. We had Peking Duck
last night (the One Perfect Way to prepare duck). And we did love it.
How do they know these things?
Blab. A reader is amazed at the obvious and predictable.
After taking into account
the fact that such tests are invalid the US Department of Energy will continue
to use polygraph tests.
And your point is, what, exactly?
Blab. A polite but cynical reader writes:
Sir: this
seems to say what should have been said about embedding reporters and the
war.
You mean this?
But as it happens, incredibly,
there are many people who believe that these news briefings - which get
surprisingly high ratings - are real. That when people in uniform speak,
they speak the truth. Really. Truly.
If ever we want to bottle fine, distilled cynicism, we will come here for
the raw ingredients.
Blab. A reader recognizes itself in yesterday's Plurp.
the girlfriend claims this
is my "orgasm" face. fortunately i can no longer see myself in the
ceiling mirror without my glasses :-) this is why i keep the picture in
the attic.
Dorian
Aaaah! Too much information!
But thanks for sharing.
Blab. On that same topic, Bablefish writes:
Franz Xavier Messerschmidt
born Germany on 6 February 1736 in meadow-rise. Its father was a craftsman
and its nut/mother was the daughter of the old carpenter family Straub.
From its 4. to 9. Lebensjahr guarded he the Geissenherde and carved besides
the Geissen into a wood.
That's exactly right! Guarded he the Geissenherde and carved besides.
How did you know?
Blab. A reader tries, but fails, to disappoint us.
Just to dissapoint you....
The second image is most disturbing
due to the source. With the path "cooking/meat", I have to wonder
what sort of cooking is involved.
But then, being a reader of Plurp,
I'm just too lazy to find out.
- Felis Lynx
Well, this is a nice find. We learn all sorts of interesting things
on the site from which that image came. All sorts of things, that is, that
will make the vegetarians amongst you faint right away. Like How
Muscle Becomes Meat, and this:
Fermented beaver tail, traditionally
a Native Alaskan specialty, is made by burying the tail in a pit for weeks
or months. It is known as "stinky tail."
Every culture seems to have its own special food that relies on rotting.
The Alaskans have stinky tail. The folks in Iceland have a
similar dish made by burying shark and letting it marinate in its own
... well, we probably shouldn't go into that. The Chinese have Thousand
Year Old Eggs. Mercans have aged
beef. The French ("the French") have youghurt.
What is it about rotting food that appeals so universally to the human
palate?
Yo. Speaking of meat, it seems that the current societal proscription
against cannibalism is a
fairly recent meme, perhaps as a reaction to prions.
Plop. Bad stuff about long hair:
-
It's an extra half-hour in the morning, no matter what.
-
It gets in your mouth. Ick.
-
It makes your back itch, usually right in that spot that is physically
impossible to scratch.
-
It is seriously contraindicated in convertibles.
On the positive side, beautiful women (e.g. Helen) fawn over you and want
to touch your hair. That pretty much make up for the bad stuff.
Plurp. Did you think we had brain worms when we claimed that
the
war in Afghanistan and the war
in Iraq were just the first few skirmishes of WW III? Well, the
worms are contagious. Go read. It's an
interesting article.
So who's next? North Korea? Maybe, but we doubt it. Dubya's currently
scowling in the direction of Syria,
who wasn't even on the original Axis
of Evil list (but now
it is, along with Libya, Cuba and China).
"We believe there are chemical
weapons in Syria," Mr Bush said. "We expect co-operation and I'm hopeful
that we will receive co-operation."
He did not say that he was threatening
Syria with military action, but told Syria, along with Iran and North Korea
— who, with Iraq, form his "axis of evil" — that the example of Iraq shows
"we're serious about stopping weapons of mass destruction".
If countries continue to get added to the Axis of Evil list faster than
they are regime-changed, it's gonna be a long war.
Plop. We love the
genome biz these days.
Human genome 'finally
complete'
The biological code crackers sequencing
the human genome have said they have finished the job [...]
Their announcement came less than
three years after a "rough draft" was published to worldwide acclaim.
When UK Prime Minister Tony Blair
and then US President Bill Clinton hailed the publication of the draft
in June 2000, 97% of the "book of life" had been read.
The decoding is now virtually 100%
complete. The remaining tiny gaps are considered too costly to fill and
those in charge of turning genomic data into medical and scientific progress
have plenty to be getting on with.
We have two observations.
The first is that these pretty much nearly complete press releases
could go
on forever.
The second is that, even if they really did have the human genome 100%
sequenced (which they don't), they're still pretty clueless about the strongly
nonlinear interaction of the processes that are initiated by the production
of proteins by DNA. That is, important progress has been made, but the
hard work - the really, really hard work - is still ahead of them.
Plurp. Arab
News claims to be the Middle East's leading English language daily.
Baghdad Battered by US
Gas Bombs
If Washington and London are honest
in the justifications they have presented for launching war, then it is
neither possible nor acceptable that Baghdad and a number of other Iraqi
cities should be shelled with chemical bombs.
Yes, that is the truth; Baghdad has
been battered with chemical bombs and bombs carrying highly combustible
depleted uranium. [...]
Aside from these munitions, advanced
cluster bombs carrying ethylene gas have also been used. They are called
MOABs, or massive ordnance airburst bombs, and they are essentially chemical
bombs.
These ethylene bombs work by taking
advantage of the effect of exploding fuel in the air. When a mix of fuel
and air ignites, it creates a fireball and a wave of explosions that spread
quickly over a much greater area than traditional explosives. The after-effects
of the explosion are very similar to those of small nuclear bombs but without
the radiation.
Yowser. This would win the award for Most Factual Errors in a Single
"News" Article, if anyone was giving out such awards.
If this is what passes as truth in the Middle Eastern world, it's understandable
how such preposterous, heinous regimes stay in power.
We must admit, though, that we love this idea of "chemical bombs". That's
as opposed to "conceptual bombs", we suppose.
Yow. Helen's Helenism
(today):
He's hard handed
-
He's hard headed
-
He's heavy handed
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a conceptual
bomb
Sunday, April 13, 2003
Blab. A reader notices the results of some of our recent
experiments with the mind control lasers.
The
elephants and the antelopes are in cahoots! Humanity is doomed!
Yeah, dang it. We were trying to get them to do line dances. Must be a
busted modulator.
Blab. A reader sees fit to send us a ...
[link]
... without commentary. We see fit to respond with a curious image from
that site, also without commentary.
Blab. Plurp's own professional cynic writes:
U.S.
Moves to End Baghdad Chaos
• Tikrit Last Major City to Be Taken
-->By Michael Slackman and Tony Perry
Police and judicial officers will
go to Iraq. Hussein's science adviser surrenders.
So states the LATimes headline.
Did somebody in Washington miss the cause of the chaos? Maybe the
same guys who did not think it was worthwhile to secure the known fissionable
material in Iraq, and who did not think it worthwhile to protect the artifacts
of the cradle of civilization? Could that be Wolfowitz, Perle and the man
with the dancing teeth???
For more uplifting stories...
• U.S.
Bombs Missed Hussein, Residents Say
• Mob
Plunders Iraq Museum
• Conquest
Seen as Lesson
Consider us uplifted. Especially by the dancing teeth.
Blab. Favorite subject line on unopened spam today:
this offer is unheard of!
Correct!
 Plop.
We are forced to abandon our previously collegial relationship with Kafkaesque
in the face of his demonic defense of beets.
We regret this action, but we must hold strong in the face of this evil
vegetable and its increasing influence over the minds of those who once
were free.
Plurp. Helen receives a popup saying that her IP address is being
leaked out onto the Internet. A few minutes later, a popup informs her
that her IP address is being broadcast onto the Internet.
What's next? she asks.
Spewing, we say, not looking up. Then projectile IPing.
Then
you aspirate your own IP address and die.
She looks at us. Sorry, we say.
Plurp.
We see you when you're sleeping.
We know when you're awake.
We know if you've been bad or good,
so be good, for goodness sake.
Otherwise
...
Yo. Today's Washington Post has a very interesting, albeit likely
controversial, analysis
of the U.S. military strategy, tactics and operations in the Iraqi war.
Messy stuff, war.
DEBKAfile, our favorite right-wing Israeli site of questionable reliability,
says that U.S. military entrance into various Iraqi cities, and the subsequent
vanishing of all military presence in those cities, was the result of secret
deals between the U.S. and top Iraqi commanders. Hey, could be.
Plurp. Tommy Franks says that Saddam's government is now an "ex-regime".
Beautiful
plumage, the Hussein regime.
Yow. Plus a surprise almost-entry
in our ongoing Generic Literature
contest.
Plurp. Now that this little skirmish is pretty much over, we
return to our regularly scheduled lack of programming which, in this case,
requires our readers to provide words
which will cause us to avoid flinging ourself off the transom as a result
of these Enigmatic Images.
Get to work. Be creative. And, please, don't disappoint us.
Plurp.
Elephants,
antelopes,
spam,
beets,
IP addresses,
plumage.
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