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2003.05.11 : 2003.05.17
Saturday, May 17, 2003
Blab. A reader deflates our ego using telepathy. That's
a first.
What's so great about reading
Plurp?
It's not reading Plurp that is great.
It is reading your mind that is great.
Also: [link],
a demonstration of an effect I haven't seen on associate professor Kitaoka's
page (click the text and, as stated: stand away from your computer).
Plurp is not read. It is your mind that is read.
Blab. A reader intends to intimidate us.
Don't make me do it.
We consider this a terrorist threat, and are pleased that Carnivore
has already picked this up and forwarded it to teams of black-masked assassins
for immediate action.
Blab. A reader explains this week's Enigmatic
Images.
They came down out of the
sky and skimmed across the land, silent and silver and round in the sunlight,
glowing a perfectly visible white in the night and the moonlight.
On every continent, we looked up from our work, saw them descending from
the sky, saw them coming over the horizon, and the sight of them filled
our eyes.
Even on the screen, when Pete and
Joey heard the world's long drawn-in breath and turned away from the tube
and went to the window (eyes wide and clear, turned up to the sky), the
smooth million-polygon woman inside the game (the controllers abandoned
on the livingroom floor) turned, and raised her head, and looked out of
the display. And saw them.
We are impressed. We have such talented readers!
Blab. Speaking of images, our polite reader requests guidance.
Sir: Whose image would we
put on the 18 cent piece?
Say, that's a tough one! There was this long tradition of presidents, of
course. But then there was Susan B. Anthony, whom we don't think was a
president. And Sacagawea. We don't think she was either. But they were
politically correct because they were women and (in one case or the other)
a Native American.
We think this progression should be extended, and we nominate the following
deserving individuals for the new 18 cent coin.
-
Harvey Fierstein
-
Joyce Carol Oates
-
Laci Peterson
-
Sean "Puffy" Combs
Readers are invited to nominate
others worthy candidates.
Plurp. You'll be pleased to know that Trinity's
hacking in The Matrix Reloaded is technically accurate, if using
2001 tools & technique in the Far Flung Future can be considered technically
accurate.
We therefore surmise that The Machines will not be successful in making
autonomic computing work either. Oh well.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
wanted to appear on the
seventeen cent coin
Friday, May 16, 2003
Blab. Our polite reader is an addict.
Sir: I know you have sworn
off of politics, but I cannot
break the habit.
A Republican card deck. We are not surprised to find Dubya as one of the
jokers. We've been saying that for years. A slightly sharper sense of humor
is shown in the selection of the second joker: WMD.
Blab. Another political reader writes:
is this
legal?
No.
Blab. A reader makes the desperate mistake of looking at those
awful visual aberrations from yesterday.
Ow, my eyes! I may have to
call off at work because I cannot drive.
Friends don't let friends Plurp and drive.
Blab. Another even more desperate reader finds the
arcane keys to further eldritch horrors.
"Allergen"
really gets me.
Us too!
If you dare, scroll down to Autumn
Color Wave, which we find particularly creepy. So creepy, in fact,
that we have made a Windows background out of it. Download
it, select it as your Windows background, check Tile so that
it covers your entire desktop. Then stare at it in unrelenting terror until,
mercifully, your mind snaps and you slip slowly away from whatever sanity
you may once have known.
Blab. A reader sends us a challenge. Just what we need.
Okay, here's a challenge.
Take
on the computer.
This turns out to be a variety of Twenty Questions (thought they complicate
their task by permitting you several answers other than the traditional
Yes
and No).
We gave it our usual favorite for this game: Justice. It didn't guess
it within twenty questions, but it did get it with twenty-six, which greatly
surprised us.
So try it. See what you think.
Blab. Lunchtalk seems to have resulted in this.
what the U.S. needs is an
18-cent
piece
We love mathematicians. We do. Go read the article and tell
us why.
Blab. So far, only a single reader has thought deeply enough
to venture an explanation for this week's Enigmatic
Images Requiring Reader Explication.
Helen often had fun at Steve's
expense by turning one pair in his eye collection upside down, and seeing
how long it took Steve to notice.
This is an excellent example of the Literalist school.
We wonder what other mysteries
may be hidden beneath the surface of these
otherwise boring images.
Plurp. Driving home each day on the FDR, there's a place way
up in Harlem where things are often on display. Found things. A baby carriage
with a basketball in it. Three milk cartons. Today, a Po
doll sitting on a ragged chair.
Sometimes, a man who must be the artist is there, as part of his own
sculpture. Yesterday (the day of Po) he stood beside the chair, dressed
in a football jersey and a football helmet, doing jumping jacks.
Today it was raining, and he was not there.
We had seen him there, off and on, for years. We had no idea who he
was, but we liked his persistent art. We took to waving at him as we passed,
and he waved back.
Today, as we drove by, we squinted at crude black lettering on pieces
of cardboard that were attached to poles by his sculpture.
I AM A POET
WWW. POETRY.COM
OTIS HOUSTON
BLACK CHEROKEE
And indeed, we do find poetry,
of a sort, by one Otis Houston there.
Pause, for a moment, and consider the enormity of this. Here's a guy,
largely uneducated, possibly homeless, perhaps with very few assets, and
with a view of the world different enough - maybe - to be considered a
bit nuts. And he has published his poetry where it can be read anywhere
on the planet.
We are impressed by this.
Plurp.
The blue dog's
bits were possibly
nuts
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Blab. It's Image Day here in Plurp, and we kick
it off with something that makes our brain hurt.
I find the "convection"
illusion to be disturbing.
Also see this
page, especially "cubism".
Reproduced below is one of the more mind-wrenching of the collection. The
most distressing thing is that the image does not move at all.
We agree that these
images are really, really disturbing!
(Naturally, you've already seen this.
If you haven't, stare at the center for one minute, then look at the back
of your hand.)
Blab. A reader asks:
Do you have prizes?
Why, yes, we do.
Blab. Another reader asks:
Why is the dog blue?
The dog is not blue. It is your mind that is blue.
Blab. We fail to resist a blind linkist.
[link]
OK. We give up. Is this a lovingly-detailed hoax, or does this guy really
believe it? We can't tell. No doubt our
readers will, though.
Plurp.
Yow. Paul Ford has just
written what may be the most perfectly Zen-like piece on what
it is to live in New York. It is difficult for us to explain, even
in meta, why this is so precisely the way it is.
We can only hope that these two incredible paragraphs took him weeks
to compose. But we suspect not.
Plurp. This week's contest, uniquely entitled Enigmatic Images
Requiring Reader Explication, is by far the most complex, subtle puzzle
to date. Readers are, of course, asked to bring
meaning to a collection of images.
Good luck.
Plurp.
The blue dog
did not
move
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Blab. About expert computer gamer Joey
Jedlicka, who begged us to spend vast tracts of our unfree time educating
him about a game he's never played, a fellow GameNeverendingite writes:
 Aww
man, I punted him to you. Tell him there is nothing more rewarding than
chicken farming.
So there you are, Joey. Have a chicken.
 Blab.
Our one polite reader finds some really, really tacky stuff to go buy.
Or not. Probably not, actually
Sir: Sort of like a
necklace of garlic to keep Ashcroft away.
Looks more like chum for the sharks to us.
Blab. Another reader searches for meaning. Here. It's such a
weird idea.
What does this
mean?
- Morton
Well, the read.me says:
Given two (or more, I'm a
liberal guy) packages, Sex.pm will recombine their symbols at random recombining
them into the new module thus providing a cross-section of its functions
and global variables. It will also push the parent classes onto the child's
@ISA array.
That seems perfectly clear to us.
Blab. We continue to attract the paranoid.
How come this link
in this
story, is dead? Hmmmm.
Yrs, Paranoid in Paradise
(Hey, no more politics, okay?)
Let's see. The ABC
article you cite was copyrighted in 2000. The link within the article
probably hasn't been changed since then. Meanwhile, the 2000 World Health
Report (your link) got moved to their archives.
But it's still there. Incidentally, the latest report seems to be the 2002
report.
On the Web, sloppy maintenance is almost always a better explanation
than conspiracy. :-)
Blab. A frequent flyer presents us with ...
an
alternate to the foodless flights!
Well lookee there! Good food, like seared ahi, apparently intended to be
delivered to you just before you get on an otherwise foodless flight to
somewhere dull, so that you can dine in gourmet splendour whilst your sad
companions suck on tiny pretzels for six hours.
A quick perusal of their Web site fails to discover any information
about how to get the meal delivered to anywhere but your home, though,
which wouldn't distinguish it from any of the zillions of take-out places
in our humble town. They might well deliver it to your departure date.
We're just too stupid to figure it out.
Their Web site does give you one of those ... what are they called?
... telephone numbers. We get the impression that you can use this
telephone
number to find out more information, as well as order their food, which
you can't do from their Web site. This confuses us.
Plop. You know what makes us Very Unhappy? What makes us Very
Unhappy is being in the middle of composing a most excellent response to
a friend's blog when our laptop, having sat on the bedcover for some random
amount of time, decides that it has overheated and, without warning, powers
off.
Computers suck.
Plurp.
The blue dog
...
have a chicken
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Blab. One of our lovely groupies writes:
Why shouldn't I play with
you?
Why, Dear and Lovely Reader, we cannot think of a single reason. Not a
one. Oh, except for our being happily married and all. But nothing besides
that.
Blab. A reader solves the Great Puzzle from yesterday. OK, so
it wasn't so entirely great, but our reader solves it anyway.
The "chap in Japan" is actually
one 'a 'em 'ere compyooters. It's apparently a proxy server for phone-based
net access, run by some Japanese phone company. Happened to MetaFilter
a
while back.
Curious! It seems that they are not alone. Here's a
similar proxy in Germany.
Blab. As usual, certain readers - and you know who you are -
insist on sending links without editorial additions.
[link]
[link]
Blab. A reader questions the truth of things published here in
Plurp.
The nerve, eh?
Metafilter
discussion of that Halperin story from Sunday's entry. Many people
there were highly skeptical of the story, and Metafilter is hardly a bastion
of conservativism.
A hoax? Could be. But then does that mean this
is too?
Blab. A reader wants to know ...
Will
you be there?
Interesting! A Web site that presumes to predict earthquakes, with a certain
amount of evidence that they either (a) can guess where these things will
be in advance, or (b) are causing earthquakes by means unknown.
We're not sure which scares us more.
Blab. A reader, unable to figure out those complex link things,
asks a question.
(#!/usr/bin/girl). What does
that mean?
Ah! We see the confusion. Technically, it should have been (throat
warbler mangrove).
Plurp. What are you searching
for?
-
imani
-
red nose day
-
naked pictures of aged beef
-
helen naked pitures
-
mia
-
blue
-
cyc
-
edouard
-
lungs after
-
sarah kozer
Good to see the usual favorites, of course, and we continue to be puzzled
by the interest in Imani.
But that's naked pitures of aged beef, silly. What were
you thinking?
Yo. Late breaking news on our broken phones. We now have phone
service in our apartment again! Yes, we have officially rejoined the 19th
Century. We're so proud.
Yow. The world's only inflatable
church. Pretty cool! But we're waiting for the world's only inflatable
lair of Cthulhu. (/usr/bin/girl)
Plurp. Kafkaesque
wants us all to contribute more up-to-date versions of Down by the river,
I shot my baby. Like, he suggests, Down by Orange
Julius, I shot my baby. OK, so that's more like a 1972 update.
But you get the idea.
Here are our meager contributions.
-
Down by the town in which seven monks inscribed unholy rituals, which involved
winged insects and the eyes of virgins, on the dried skins of pious children,
I shot my baby.
-
Down by the nail gun, I shot my baby.
-
Down by the smooth stone that swallowed everything the moon knew last night,
the impatient cellular dissolution of all mammalian life and a certain
unvoiced curiosity among hop toads, I shot my baby.
Your contributions, Dear and
Treasured Readers, so much more sly and clever than ours, will be published
here.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was highly skeptical of
the naked pitures of
smooth Imani
Monday, May 12, 2003
Blab. A reader tells the truth.
Hey! You didn't post on Sunday!
And therein lies a tale of both digital and analog woe!
The (phone based) Internet connection in our modest quarters failed
abruptly on Saturday afternoon and, despite much weeping and gnashing of
teeth, absolutely refused to come up again. Today a group of dull-witted
gnomes with yellow smiles and fidgety hands are allegedly at work on the
problem.
 These
gnomes are related to Manhattan Cable's Bobo the Wonder Dog, whose work
in "repairing" a cable outage in our apartment some time ago left us unable
to record on our VCR or have sound come out of the right speaker in the
living room. We spent a good deal of Saturday rewiring various pieces of
audio and video equipment to put everything back to its pre-Bobo configuration.
And no, we didn't cause our own Internet outage. How dare you?
It now turns out that somebody at a construction site a few blocks away
cut a serious phone cable, so phones are out not just for us, but probably
for several city blocks. And in NYC, several city blocks means a lot
of people, Bobo!
Blab. A reader sends us an annoying blind ...
[link]
If we could figure out how to embed this in our Web page, we could have
made it funny. Oh well.
Blab. A reader spits out a URL.
http://pack.soksok.jp/y/.6de3/log/current/
????????????
My. That is odd. Some chap in Japan has mirrored large parts of
(but not all of) our humble Web site. We wonder why.
Blab. A reader, unable to figure out those complex link things,
asks a question.
(usr/bin/girl) What
does that mean?
Ah! We see the confusion. Technically, it should have been (#!/usr/bin/girl).
Blab. A reader is deeply impressed with our
new game.
Wow. Transexual. I'm deeply
impressed. dictionary.com shows miniscule as a variant of miuscule, which
I guess means enough people have mispeled it for long enough that it's
OK now.
That's pretty much the way it works in English, isn't it?
Blab. A reader wants to play a different game with us.
Your English pundit is forced
to point out:
colour : 7,730,000
color : 44,000,000
As 'colour' is correct, we
discover that it's the new winner,
at a massive 85% misspelled.
God Save The Queen;
{inw}
Quite. And in our own, private language, we spell the misspelled word the
correctly as dodecahedron,
achieving
a score of 99.9994%.
Blab. Madonna (perhaps in her Dave
manifestation) writes:
What the f*ck do you think
you're doing?
But Madonna - need we point it out? - did not use the friendly asterisk.
Blab. A reader who is Helen makes our head hurt.
Can you make a Helenism based
on another Helenism?
"That really catches your face"
Catches your eye
Grabs your face
Fortunately, we don't have to accede to another level of meta-ness, as
we can form the subject Helenism as follows:
That really catches your
face
-
That really catches your eye
-
That's really in your face
Since we figure that our Dear and Treasured Reader is just playing with
us, and probably didn't collect this Helenism in the wild, we do not record
it in The Official Register of Such
Things.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was once a partner in a backhoe
company
Sunday, May 11, 2003
Blab. Still digging through the correspondence that
arrived some time in the past several weeks, we discover a reader that
informs us of its now-dated travel plans.
On our way to Lompoc to color
some eggs. We'll wave as we drive by.
We know for a fact that this is a true Central Californian, as few others
know (and none will admit to knowing) about Lompoc. We did see someone
waving wildly as we flew over Thousand Oaks recently. Prolly our reader.
Blab. A politely sarcastic reader writes:
Sir: See, it is not
about oil.
Um ...
The United States is planning
a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq,
one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project
American influence into the heart of the unsettled region
On the other hand, a sarcastically polite reader writes:
Sir: Canadians
try to figure out exactly what is meant by permanent.
Uh ...
"I have never, that I can
recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq, discussed in any
meeting," said Rumsfeld, denying a New York Times report that — and here's
where it gets rich — didn't say the United States is necessarily planning
permanent bases in Iraq.
This latter article is entitled Many Faces of Donald Rumsfeld. And
we thought he only had two.
Blab. A reader provides meaning to our otherwise meaningless
life.
Giving new meaning to cover-up
and holier
than thou...
There's a depressing idea: The world's first permanent war crimes tribunal.
Would it be OK if there were a few years in the future, just here and
there, when there weren't any war crimes to prosecute? That would be nice.
Blab. Oh. And there were some of these.
[link]
[link]
Summer Fun Cthulhu. What could be better?
Blab. A reader warns us against ...
Food
Follies
Such as:
Roasted Garlic-Marjoram Risotto
With English Pea Crème Brûlée, Crosnes, Turnip-Collard
Green 'Lasagna' and Black Truffle Vinaigrette.
Cook your cat instead, we say.
Blab. Expert computer gamer Joey Jedlicka writes:
Hi,
Have you played GameNeverending?
I think that I saw your coment on the website about it. I went to
the main GameNeverending site, but they don't tell you the ways to make
money in the game. And I have so many questions to ask. Like,
is there farming, and if so, how detailed is the work? I just want
to be good and ready when they come out with the beta version, and I thought
that you would be the best person to ask. Please help me, I personally
thank you. Any information is appreciated.
Sincerely,
Joey
Jedlicka,
ECG (expert computer gamer)
This is, of course, just what we need: someone with many questions and
few clues. It would be OK with us, however, if our many other Dear and
Treasured Readers beat us to this particular punch and became frequent
correspondents with Joey in our stead.
No, really. It's OK.
Blab. A traitor writes:
Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism Act.
Goodbye
Free America - We loved you then lost you.
We quote.
A month ago I experienced
a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and U.S.
citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what
thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will and
without warrant or cause, under the USA PATRIOT Act.
But no one seems to be paying attention, so we're going to quit complaining
about it. The U.S. once had an interesting tradition called constitutional
law. No doubt some will claim that they still do. Now let's all watch
TV.
Blab. The Prodigal Reader returns.
After hiding for months in
a dank cave with the Notorious Blue Dog somewhere in a remote, undisclosed
location in the mountains of Afghanistan, the Northwest Correspondant has
resurfaced in a somewhat less conspicuous location close to the Mexican
border.
A mysterious gold band appears on
his left hand. He claims he acquired it while on a trip to the Mid-Atlantic,
but he is sketchy about other details. An unmistakable grin seems
permanently tattooed on his face (where most grins normally appear), and
he seems to now walk a tad straighter, a foot taller, and a bit casually.
Please, loyal readers (both of you),
contribute your thoughts as to what has caused this apparent change in
his gait and manner. Do you think,
A) He has moved to the most beautiful
city on the planet
B) Fallen hopelessly head-over-heels
and pledged his never-ending fidelity to his true love and soul mate
C) During his trip to Afghanistan,
learned something quite remarkable about the Notorious Blue Dog that no
one has yet unearthed.
For our part, we'd just like to know what he's been doing with his foot.
Blab. A reader informs us that ...
CNN is reporting hundreds
of survivors from the Columbia shuttle disaster.
To wit:
Hundreds of worms from a
science experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia have been found alive
in the wreckage, NASA said Wednesday.
We're sure that the families of the astronauts will be greatly relieved,
and we thank our Treasured Reader for this kind and thoughtful pointer.
Blab. A reader addresses us with great respect.
Dear God
Blessings upon you, Dear and Treasured Reader.
Blab. A reader suggests that we have a role other than God.
Steve
White, a former coordinator for the US drug enforcement administration's
cannabis eradication programme ...
My, that does seem unlikely, doesn't it?
Plurp. Helen recently sent a Hallmark e-card thingie to a friend.
It
frightens us. We have asked her to stop doing that.
Plurp.
Plurp.
The blue dog
endorsed farming
and cat cooking
 |
