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2003.05.18 : 2003.05.24
Saturday, May 24, 2003
Blab. A reader donates some Rush
lyrics.
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too
fleet.
Catchy. Is this connected with the claim that Geddy Lee reads Plurp?
And if so, how?
Blab. An avaricious reader writes:
The new Bosch dishwasher
is a God send! I adore it! I do believe, though, that a new
SubZero fridge would be quieter...........(praying that the old RCA fridge
would die soon. It hasn't played records for a really long time!)
We were unaware that Sub-Zero refrigerators could play records.
Blab. We asked a reader if it would seem odd to it if the bubbles
in your champagne glass went down instead of up? A reader supplies a classic
Zen answer.
Hey, as long as it is champagne,
I don't CARE what the bubbles do. Just keep on pouring!
We are enlightened.
Blab. Our uniquely polite reader tries to help us. It appears
that we need more help than is available. As usual.
Sir: Perhaps this
will help you.
This appears to want to link us to a blog on blogger.com,
but it doesn't. Instead, it takes us to the main
page. Sigh.
 Blab.
That same polite reader is intent on helping us. Somehow.
Sir: Look at this.
It explains a lot.
We surmise that this is a Rehnquist doll. We're not sure what the question
was. For that matter, we're not sure what answer this is.
Blab. After a week of uncontrolled fetishism, a reader enters
groupiedom.
I am attrated to you.........
And we are attrated to you, Dear Reader.
 Blab.
A reader suggests certain ... activities.
Sir: Perhaps you could wear
your latex suit (superhero suit) when that reader serves raspberries on
your stomach.
Maybe we're confused; it has been a confusing week. But we thought the
zerber reader was interested in the spandex (which was the superhero suit),
not the leather, with no opinion expressed about the latex. Or something
like that.
Blab. A reader catches van Dam in a conceptually entropic state.
<< Andries van Dam,
a professor of computer science at Brown who has been teaching introductory
computer science there since 1965, agreed. "When kids say, 'Is there going
to be a job for me when I graduate?' I essentially have to laugh," he said.
"That's like saying, 'When Maxwell discovered the rules of electromagnetism,
was physics over?' ">>
Well, was it?
Before we get to our reader's question, we'd just like to observe that
asking if there are going to be jobs for everybody currently enrolled in
a computer science program is nothing like asking if physics was
over when Maxwell did his thing. We'd also like to remind Andries that
they're called laws in real science (which computer science, of
course, is not).
Back to our reader's question. No.
(But lots of people at the time thought that physics was over
at that point. After all, they had great theories for mechanics, electromagnetism
and gravity. What else was there?)
Blab. A reader threatens us. Or, rather, the blue dog.
If you smash any kittens,
the blue dog better watch out.
The blue dog is already smashed.
Plop. We can't decide which item from the Danbury Mint we should
add to the Museum of Utter Tastelessness this month: the United
We Stand Collector's Plate, or the Twin
Towers Commemorative Sculpture.
It's so hard to choose!
Yow.
If you wanna bump it,
Bump
it with a trumpet.
Bernadette Peters is (surprisingly, to us) fantastic as Rose in
Gypsy.
She is energetic, emotionally deep, and completely believable as the intensely
driven show business mother who has no life outside of the success of her
daughters as stars.
We have seldom seen a Broadway audience rise in instantaneous and certain
unison to applaud anyone. Peters deserves it.
At least as weird is that the score is by Sondheim, and yet it is bereft
of his signature dissonance and wild cadence, and the songs can actually
be sung.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
was
already smashed
Friday, May 23, 2003
Blab. A reader tries to drag us back into politics.
That might work. Then again ...
....with liberty and justice
for all.....unless you have the wrong name
Sadly, our Dear and Treasured Reader neglects to provide us a link, hoping
instead that sending us the full text of some article or other is proper
netiquette. But that's OK. We provide
the link ourself as a service to our Dear and Treasured Reader.
Anissa Khoder, a 46-year-old
U.S. citizen who arrived from Lebanon 14 years ago, filed a complaint last
Friday with a judicial watchdog. She said Judge William Crosbie repeated
her name at her Tarrytown village court appearance and then asked her if
she was "a terrorist." Khoder was challenging two parking tickets left
on her dashboard within an hour.
Let's help Ms. Khoder by thinking of good, stinging replies for her. How
about these?
-
I know you are but what am I?
-
Takes one to know one.
-
I'm surprised at you, Judge. Just because
you're an aging white racist, I don't naturally assume you're a Klan leader,
do I?
-
Gosh, did I just hear your career end?
Readers are invited to contribute
to the cause.
Blab. A reader informs us that ...
Pygmies
want U.N. cannibal court
It would seem that some government folks in the Congo have been hunting
down and eating pygmies.
There are just so many directions we could go with this, and
every single one of them would get us into big trouble. Yikes.
Blab. A generous reader has purchased a present for us.
Happy
birthday Steve
This is so nice!
The final working manuscript
for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony fetched a staggering £2.1 million
($3.43 million) at a UK auction house Thursday.
You folks are really great. We'll be sure to post pictures of it when it
arrives. Really, that's just so great.
Blab. Plurp's own pony boy writes:
Helen has her own picture
at the top of her bit. I never noticed before. Your picture should show
your ponytail. Neigh
Plurp is not intended to be a representational art form. Your mileage
may vary.
Blab. A reader sends us a tiny, if entirely mysterious, URL.
http://tinyurl.com/c69c
This appears to be a map of someplace, maybe in Japan. But, being monolingual,
it's all Greek to us.
Blab. A reader makes an astonishing claim.
Wow! Geddy Lee reads Plurp!
Does he? What makes you think so?
Blab. A reader clarifies the mystery of zerbers.
"Zerbers" are loving raspberries.
Oh! We like raspberries. (Though we've always been concerned that the sp
combination in that word felt bad,  as
everyone ignores its phonemic nature and refers to it as z. But
perhaps that's not relevant here.) We actually like blueberries better,
but raspberries are good too.
We're not sure why our Treasured Reader would like to serve these on
our belly. That sounds sticky to us. Perhaps a nice Japanese porcelain
bowl would suffice?
Blab. Out of the blue, a reader writes:
I am disgusted
Good to know.
Blab. A reader who is Ian
writes:
Ow, my eyes! Oh crud, not
again...
What - you don't like latex?
Blab. The other half of Ian's
brain writes:
NAAAAaaaaargh! Make
it stop!
-- inw, on beholding more horror.
Normally, we would chalk this up to Ian being Ian. We note, however, that
we received no requests today for photographs of ourself in other materials.
Not silk, or wool, or even fiberglass. Nothing.
We conclude that we have, once again, tripped over the line of reader
expectations, and fallen into the Abyss of Abysmal Taste, in which we seem
to spend most of our life.
Ah, well.
 Blab.
A reader informs us that ...
"Today, your favorite yoga
position is the "Airplane Crashing Into Kittens." This is where you
stretch out your arms and legs wide and lay on your belly making propellor
noises with your lips."
Then smash kittens? Cool.
Do send videos.
Yo. Oh, you mean those
Al Qaeda operatives. Why didn't you say so?
Plurp. Oh no! Turns out that it now takes actual work
and a certain amount of intelligence to make a living in computer
science. Just like it did back in the day of companies that had to make
profits and stuff. So what are today's former dot-bomb wannabees doing
in the post-bust era?
They're going into advertising.
Yo. Two important new revelations on SARS today from "scientists".
One, from the University of Cardiff, says that SARS comes
from space. Another, from the University of Hong Kong, says that SARS
originated
in cats.
From this, it is easy to conclude that cats come from space, as we have
suspected for some time.
Plurp. Oh the
horror.
Howie Mandel is like some
terrible airborne pathogen, lying dormant for years, only to resurface
and doom your small intestine.
As we have suspected for some time.
Plurp. Cars have ever more computer thingies in them. Computers
thingies are notoriously unreliable. We keep hearing stories about cars
blue-screening, with nasty consequences. We keep thinking that these are
urban legends.
Now this.
We demand that our readers ferret
out the facts. Is this bull hockey or god's own truth?
You cannot resist.
Plurp.
Ms. Kherder's pygmy pony
boy
went into zerber advertising as
an airborne pathogen.
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Blab. A reader digests the complex discussion of implicit
and explicit complicity in heinous political systems and produces the following
amazing theorem.
If you choose not to decide,
you still have made a choice.
We find our Treasured Reader's logic inescapable. We do not object to choice,
of course. We like choice.
Blab. Another undeniable logician writes:
It works by having the glass
triangular blocks that the water appears to flow up full of water themselves.
Bubbles move up the inside of these water-filled bits of glass and water
flows down the outside of them, (as well as a little water being pumped
up them) so it gives the effect of water flowing uphill.
 Yes,
we read that too.
What puzzled us was how they kept the bubbles from being swept back down
the incline as the water runs down the top of the glass sheet, thus ruining
the illusion. The design that they showed seemed flawed that way. There
is a solution, though.
Blab. A reader gets confused, then changes the subject.
I don't get how the bubbles
under the glassed ramp can give the apparent idea of the water going uphill.
That just doesn't make sense to me.......And what do bubbles have to do
with anything, except champagne, of course......
Also, how would you trim the grass
on the inside without getting the trimmings all over the neat white stones.
Now, THAT'S the real question!
Would it seem odd to you if the bubbles in your champagne glass went down
instead of up? Maybe not.
Blab. On the mystery of the woman who thought the U.S. Commander
in Chief looked good in a uniform, an insightful reader writes:
The commander in chief has
big ears, and little close set eyes. Women attrated to him are either power
groupies or are attracted to chimps as well.
In related news:
Chimpanzees are more closely
related to people than to gorillas or other monkeys and probably should
be included in the human branch of the family tree, a research team says.
So it all makes sense.
Blab. A reader finds the image of us in our
superhero outfit strangely compelling.
My eyes! My eyes!
Arrrrrgh!
-- inw, having just seen the Daredevil
image.
Ian tells us that he can't bear to look at our blog for the rest of the
week because of this. Too much of a good thing, we suppose.
Blab. That groupie from earlier this week returns.
I wasn't kidding about the
screensaver.
Maybe not, but you should have been.
Blab. Another of our groupies ...
Like the latex over the leather.
Want to give you zerbers on your belly - mrowr!
What the heck are zerbers? Never mind - what's this about latex?
We published a picture of ourself in spandex and (yesterday) in our lovely
red leather superhero suit. Now you want latex?
Very well. Anything for our readers. But don't tell anyone, OK? This
is getting a bit weird.
Blab. A reader commands us to ...
Give Helen a sidebar!
Is that like a zerber?
Anyhow, she already has an
entire section of our Web site to herself, besides appearing with astonishing
frequency here as an Honored Guest Blabbist.
Blab. An ambitious reader writes:
I want to sign up for the
Helen fan club.
Excellent. The readings are here.
The test is tomorrow. Closed book.
Blab. Loli enters this week's contest, Enigmatic Images for
Reader Explication with a a doozy.
Caption: And so begins little
Billy's plot to seduce the school nurse. (I want credit for this one -
Loli)
Goodness! We had no idea that little Billy was up to this kind of shenanigan.
We'll have to tell his minders.
Yow. Sims
2 is under development. We can't actually make ourself care, but we
do note a disturbing confluence: that same Noguchi
lamp is in our living room.
Rant. We recently purchased an über-fancy Bosch
dishwasher to replace the old clunker that decided it was more fun to piss
on the kitchen floor than do the dishes. It's so hard to get good
help these days.
The Bosch, advertised as ultra-quiet, has its own annoying habit. When
it's done washing the dishes, it beeps, loudly. If you don't leap up, run
into the kitchen and turn it off, it beeps again a few minutes later.
(Off? If it's done, why isn't it already off? Given that there
is no sensible action for us to take upon the completion of its appointed
cycle, what possible purpose could this notification serve?)
We have had a number of sleep-deprived nights as a result of this infernal
cycle, waking up with the dim, dreamy memory of electronic summoning only
to wonder, fully awake in the dark, what had disturbed our rest.
The Bosch will continue its cycle of announcing its displeasure at your
inaction, then lying it wait, forever, as far as we can tell.
It is an appliance that had its own need to annoy, a machine that demands
attention just because, perhaps to assure itself that you care more about
it than anything else in your life. In short, it is a dishwasher designed
by cats.
Plop. You do recall why the U.S. went
to war with Iraq?
The Central Intelligence
Agency has begun a review to try to determine whether the American intelligence
community erred in its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's government
and Iraq's weapons programs, several officials say. [...]
 While
the United States may still find [evidence of WMD or ties to Al Qaeda in
Iraq], some current and former intelligence officials say it is becoming
increasingly clear that the C.I.A., Pentagon and other agencies did not
know as much about the status of Iraq's weapons programs and its ties to
terrorists before the war as was previously believed.
Next: "Canada".
Plop.
"LifeLog
has the potential to become something like 'TIA cubed,'" he said.
Plurp.
The blue dog
followed the progression of images
with interest
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Blab. A reader interrupts our depression with more bad
news. We think.
The site seems to have been
beautifully transformed since that trip to SB where all good and tanned
persons reside. Cool. But we at Homeland Security (we wanted
to call it Fatherland Security but some people of East European background
residing in these United States protested, and they are one hell of a voting
block) want to alert you that there are still enemies among us. And
that's no vLapham matter!!
Hmm. There's a certain ambiguity here. Our Treasured Reader links to a
page that changes weekly
Is the reference to the Harper's Weekly Review dated 5/20/03
, in which, it is related, the Wall Street Journal reported that
women are sexually attracted to the Commander in Chief? "Hot? SO HOT!!!!!
THAT UNIFORM!" said one New York mom. (Though this confuses us, as the
Commander in Chief has no uniform. Or is that the point?)
Or is it to the Harper's Weekly Review dated 5/13/03,
in which we learn that "rumors are worse than killing." Well, that's what
we heard.
In other
news, or maybe this same news, we learn ...
that federal agents had conducted
hundreds of bugging and surveillance operations and visited numerous libraries
and mosques using new law enforcement tools.
Yes, that new law enforcement tool is known as a reamer. Can you
all say reamer? We knew you could.
Blab. A reader masquerades as Helen.
Hmmmmmm.......looks like
I am building my own tasty fan club. Steve, they can reach me at
my own email address..............you can hand it out or I will.
But they have to vote in political elections.
Helen
Helen knows better. We would never hand out her email address, lest she
be besieged by Evil Spammists.
Blab. A reader sneaks into the mind control lasers and aims them
at us.
Not that I want to influence
you in any way, but if you do cut off the tail, check out locks
of love. They will take your hair and use it to make wigs for kids
with leukemia, etc
While we do regard it as a terribly romantic notion that our hair would
show up on the head of some bald kid, a closer look at this site reveals
a problem.
We accept 10" minimum hair
length (tip to tip), not wigs, falls, or synthetic hair
As our hair is entirely synthetic, we are unable to participate. Shucks.
Blab. Dale Chihuly writes:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Chihuly
R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn!
If we've told you once, we've told you a thousand times: don't type with
your mouth full.
Blab. A reader after our own dark heart sends us this.
BRAT!
We deny that we find this both hilarious and interesting advice. We leave
it to our readers to judge for themselves the suitability of the policy
represented in this lovely little movie to their own social interactions.
But we do insist that you watch it.
Blab. Breaking recent records, and perhaps even breaking us out
of our morose state, we have three whole entries to this week's part of
our contest, Enigmatic Images Requiring Reader Explication!
"Now Billy, hold on to Mommy's
hands as the Hover Disc levitates us to the Celestial Temple."
"Mommy, will there be puppies in the
Celestial Temple?"
"Yes, Billy. There will be puppies."
Hover Disc. Celestial Temple. Puppies. It's just a marvel, isn't it?
Blab. But enough of such comforting thoughts. Here's our second
entry.
Sending little Billy off
to war....
- Felis Lynx
It's OK, Billy. We've got world opinion behind us.
Blab. Our third entry is, depending upon how you look at it,
actually four entries. If that weren't enough, they are all en genre.
Extra credit!
Enigmatic Image Competition
entries:
Broken Joke entry:
Mum: Awww, did you hurt yourself
falling off your skateboard?
Kid: Yes.
Surrealist entry:
Mum: Kazoo
Kid: Rikikikikikiki
Surrealist exit:
Fish: These oranges are electric
Blue Dog: No, the organs are eclectic
Caption entry:
Mum's first aid kit inexplicably
contained a small boy and a skateboard.
-AJL
We're particularly fond of that last one. We probably can't explain why.
There you are! Three entries (or six, depending upon how you count)
on the very first day. This might be enough to stave off our impending
suicide for a few more hours. So it's not too late for the rest of you.
Enter early and often!
Blab. Our Doublespeak Department sends us this alert.
Name change. Now "Terrorism
Information Awareness".
Oh thank heaven! We definitely thought that the term Total Information
Awareness was doubleplus ungood marketing, Winston. This is a much better
name, and they won't even have to get new monogrammed towels. And they're
absolutely not changing what
they're doing. That'd be way too much trouble.
Sleep tight.
Blab. A reader attempts to use language.
"From our way of thinking,
choosing to participate in the system makes you a party to the outcome,
however opprobrious it might be."
True, but isn't choosing to not make
a choice in itself a choice? And, by making that choice (to not choose),
you are also participating in the system, if only tacitly.
Can one be passive and revolutionary
at the same time?
L.
 A
born-again relative once suggested that by not going to church, we were
affirming the existence of god. We didn't buy the argument then either.
We do think of ourself as trying to be revolutionary in certain ways.
But voting or not voting does not seem to us to be the key to being revolutionary.
Can one use passivity in order to effect revolution? Sometimes.
Blab. A reader knows our needs.
oh, now, THIS
is what we need!
Apparently, we need a renewed nuclear weapons program, designed to produce
nuclear weapons with explosive power less than that of 10,000 tons of dynamite.
(These are described, perversely, as "small".)
The Senate agreed tonight
to lift a ban on research and development of smaller nuclear weapons, rejecting
Democratic arguments that any step toward such arms could spur other nations
to build tactical nuclear weapons of their own.
Thank heavens for our readers. Otherwise, we would have worried about another
terrifying arms race.
Plurp. TV commercial.
[A burly white man, around
35, is seen driving a large, polished SUV along a freeway. He takes a sharp
right turn.]
[Cut to the SUV driving across a vast,
frigid expanse. Snow blows across the flat surface of a frozen lake. The
SUV stops. The man looks out, expectantly.]
 [There
is a loud crunching sound, then another, and another. The ice on the lake
opens suddenly and the SUV plummets into the dark, freezing waters.]
Announcer:  When
you're tired of off-road vehicles, get an on-road vehicle.
Kid in Suit: Zoom, zoom.
Copyright licensing is available
at charitable prices.
Yo.
Can you design a Escheresque fountain in which water flows entirely uphill?
James
Dyson can.
Your task is to figure out the most obvious problem with the stated
design, figure out how to make it work anyway, and tell
us. And yes, we know the answer.
Plurp. Having attracted the interest of the spandex fetishists
among our readership, we now engage in a shameless attempt to attract the
interest of the leather fetishists.
Plurp. More news from "Canada":
The world's oceans have lost
90 per cent of prized tuna, swordfish and marlin since [50 years ago when]
industrialized fishing began, Canadian scientists warned Wednesday.
We don't mean to seem callous, but so what? The way this evolution thing
works is that a species that is well adapted to its ecological niche at
any given time will increase its population exponentially. Thus, if all
commercial fishing stopped today, we might expect that the fish population
would be restored to its 19th century levels in some very small number
of years. If, indeed, that's what "we" wanted to do.
After all, each female fish lays thousands
of eggs a year. In a stable population, only two grow up to reproduce.
There's plenty of opportunity to replenish the population very quickly.
Plurp.
The blue dog
inexplicably contained a small boy
and a skateboard.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Blab. A blameless reader writes:
The ponytail is not my fault.
I voted for samauri. Or samurai. Or samuri. Whatever.
It is the nature of voting systems that anyone who participates in the
vote is responsible for the results. If you gainsay, consider the common
invective that is directed against us: If you don't vote, you have no
right to complain about the result!
We don't vote in political
elections, and we complain about the results all the time. How could we
do otherwise? Yet most folks have this bizarre idea that our not voting
somehow abrogates our right to say anything about the outcome of the vote.
From our way of thinking, choosing to participate in the system makes
you a party to the outcome, however opprobrious it might be.
But we do not wish to make you feel badly, Treasured Reader! Far from
it. Perhaps we can soften the blow of your implicit complicity by reminding
you that we pretty much went through the samurai thing (well, minus the
head shaving and blue dying) on our way to our current Aging
Hippy Techno Dweeb. Or that samurai was not one of the choices we offered
to you, so you should feel particularly creative in your write-in vote.
(And we even spelled hippy wrong, sigh.)
Blab. Similarly, a reader insists:
Don't cut off the ponytail!
At 12inches it is a masterpiece. i AM prepared to protest
But we're just talking about a few inches. Are you telling us that size
really does matter?
Blab. About our (or, rather, Helen's) superhero
suit, one of our kinkier groupies writes:
You are sort of a hottie
in that suit. Could you mabe take some more pictures in that suit and make
a screensaver for your female readers?
My! Aren't you the flatterer, though! We had no idea that there
were spandex fetishists among our readership, much less female spandex
fetishists. We ... uh ...
What? Oh. Sorry. We were lost in the possibilities.
Blab. Another reader, right on topic, asks:
I haven't seen any recent
comments from Helen - has she stopped reading too?
After that previous comment, we sure hope so!
Blab. A reader feigns good wishes.
Glad you did not go to jail.
Is there a chance Helen is avaiolable for dating anyway?
Hey! Knock that stuff off.
Blab. Homer writes:
Mmmmmmmmmm, Helen.
That's exactly how we feel. Now knock that stuff off.
Blab. A sick reader writes:
I still read Plurp! I was
just sick the past two weeks, I am sorry if you missed me. I will try to
not let it happen again.
We missed you terribly, Dear, Treasured, Anonymous Reader. Please try not
to let that happen again.
Blab. A reader insists that we do work on its behalf.
Declining readership? Is
this based on an actual website meter? May we see charts and graphs?
But of course. Charts and graphs are here.
If you look at site
visits that enter on www.stevewhite.org/log/current/index.htm
per day in recent months, you'll find the following.
| Month |
Visits/Day
|
| March |
144
|
| April |
102
|
| May (so far) |
96
|
We believe that counts as declining. Precipitously so. If we
were a startup, we'd be looking for a buyer. A really dumb buyer. As it
is, we're merely considering suicide.
Blab. A Treasured Reader tries to distract us from slitting our
wrists.
We decline your assertion
that we are declining, we're just growing old disgracefully. -AJL
Thanks, and that's quite clever, we suppose, but we just can't take it
any more.
Blab. Bolstering our lagging depression, a rather frank reader
writes:
Mebbe if u wrote sumthin
interestin more pepoles woud show up.
We're not so sure. It seems like an awfully high bar, and it's never actually
worked in the past.
Blab. Another reader notices something interesting written in
the New York Times, which probably has more readers than we do.
Only in New York do you get
to know your
(former) neighbors through the papers. (And I feel really good about
the rent we were paying now.) - MS
A good point. Our neighbors could certainly learn way more about
us from reading the newspapers than they have by talking to us. Talking
to your neighbors is just not a New York thing.
Blab. Speaking of which, a reader clarifies yesterday's discussion
of stuff that is or is not in the New York Times.
I was referring more specifically
to your Strangelovian insistence that the NYT is a source of Truth. How
very silly.
That's quite funny! We think the NYT is a pretty good newspaper, all things
considered. Maybe one of the best. But it certainly gets things wrong.
Sometimes really, really wrong. (In addition to the NYT's recent,
astonishing
reporting fraud.)
 We've
been interviewed for more
than a few news articles, and have been at a few events that have been
written up in other newspaper articles. It is our consistent experience
that reporters make mistakes, both of fact and of interpretation. When
we are interviewed, we consider it a fantastic success if the reporter
gets our main message right, and gets 80% of the other facts right. It
is our observation that this is a very high standard, and is seldom
met.
It makes us wonder about all of the other articles that we read. But
that just feeds into our paranoia, so we try not to think about it.
Blab. Feeding our paranoia, our one polite reader suggests this:
Sir: The aluminum foil beanie
protects you from nothing; it controls
the mind (e.g. your Patrick Swayze dresm). Or, so I have been told.
Well, that's what they want you to think, anyway. But you have a
good point about that Patrick Swayze dream. Now we're scared.
Blab. A reader exercises its unique talent to divine the internal
mental state of Michael Jackson. That's amazing.
I think this is what Michael
Jackson is aiming for.
Do you mean the big guy or the little guy?
Blab. It is indeed Two-For-One day here at Plurp, as a
compressive reader demonstrates..
I give you two unrelated
things in one.
http://tinyurl.com/c5w6
Well lookee there. It's a very on-topic Reason article on Trusting the
Media: Why spin, fraud, and bias are inevitable, but referenced by
some wonky (and supposedly more memorable) TinyURL address. Consider, for
instance, http://tinyurl.com/c69d.
We cannot imagine that anyone cares about this, but it is kinda cute.
Plurp. Before we pour iodine in the tub and take a bath, we thought
we'd show you what people were looking for on our site this past week.
Those few people who came here by mistake, that is.
-
chihuly
-
imani
-
helen naked pitures
-
ian naked pictures
-
kozer
-
naked pictures of helen
-
new jersey does not exist
-
zyx lady
-
a mile map for distance
-
beach
This week's surprise was the ascendancy of the seldom-seen chihuly,
for reasons that we can only dimly imagine and greatly fear.
 
Plurp. We've been pretty disappointed in ourself lately. After
all, our most recent Plurp
contest got all of two responses. (Though they were both wonderful,
and we do treasure them.) We figure we're just not being clever enough
to capture the imagination of our readers, much less a few scarce seconds
of their precious time.
We thought, briefly, about trying to be more clever, but that's clearly
beyond our ability. We therefore present yet another incredibly dull, completely
uninteresting series of Enigmatic Images for Reader Explication.
As previously, readers with way too much time on their hands should send
us their most clever explanation of, or caption for, this touching
tableau.
Not that we'll be around to publish your responses, of course, but we
will admire them in our next life.
Yak. From a talk today about the future of technology.
There's a fine line between
vision and hallucination.
Yeah, but our aging eyes probably can't see it.
Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered
what unleashed this stampede of
user input
Monday, May 19, 2003
Blab. A fellow game freak and seeker of eldritch knowledge
writes:
At E3, there were "Call of
Cthulhu" posters every damn where, so I was understandably a little let
down when it turned out Bethesda wasn't even showing the game. Ugh.
Yog-Sothoth!
Kaf
How rude! But we're really glad to hear that they were marketing the heck
out of it. That means it
might actually appear some day, and be playable and stuff. (We continue
to predict that it won't work with the low-end graphics chips that IBM
seems to insist putting in their ThinkPads, but that's a different rant.)
 Blab.
A reader, no doubt doing its homework
- and we approve of that - writes:
Wow! You actually do have
a ponytail! What a dude!
In fact, our ponytail is currently a bit over twelve inches long. Long-time
readers will recall that it's all
their fault.
We are thinking of getting it trimmed off a few inches for the very
first time since we started growing it, about a year ago.
Blab. A reader has a fashion suggestion for us.
We think you should wear
superhero suits all the time. -AJL
Oh, we do. We were just
wearing Helen's superhero suit
that day.
Blab. A reader wonders the obvious.
No Helen naked pitures?
But of
course there are! In fact, here's another one for you.
Blab. A reader gives us the opportunity to something we love
doing. Isn't that nice?
You look particularly foolish
now for your "but it's not in the New York Times!" statement.
Jolly good, 'cause we particularly love looking foolish! We hypothesize
that our Dear and Treasured Reader refers to our wondering (in the early
days of the Iraqi war) where
all those zillions of Iraqi troops had gone, since the "coalition"
forces encountered what seemed like a tiny fraction of what Iraq was thought
to have.
A(nother?) Dear and Treasured reader claimed, with great fervor, that
they had all just gone home as a result of brilliant U.S. psyops, presumably
before any of the "coalition" forces ever got there. We noted that we had
not heard that interesting theory previously, and suggested to our Dear
and Treasured reader that it ought to inform the NYT right away.
 And
apparently that happened, or at least we surmise as much from today's reader's
statement. Sadly for us, a quick search of the NYT site for psyops,
psychological
operations and missing troops turns up nothing, proving once
again that we're too stupid to find obvious stuff. Now we now how Dumsfeld
must feel about those Iraqi WMD!
But we're sure our Dear and Treasured Reader will send us a link to
the relevant NYT article forthwith, so that we can look foolish right here
in public.
Yow. Hey! Those infinitely clever people who do the Aluminum
Foil Deflector Beanie (mentioned yesterday) noticed that we (evil we)
included  their
marvelously crafted marketroidesque picture of a human(ish) head wearing
an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
as part of our entry yesterday.
Having thus noticed, they had their vast staff quickly whip up a new
picture, to which our sluggish blog continues to refer. We like
these folks!
Actually, we like the revised picture even better than the original!  (Maybe
we better put on another layer of aluminum foil.)
Oh, and go buy
their book. (There or on Amazon.)
Yo. Desperate to prevent bandwidth theft by image referrers?
Not clever enough to put humorous substitutes up on your site? Then here's
the
tech you need!
Plop. Should it depress us that more people come to our Web site
looking for naked
pictures of Simonya Popova than to read our stupid blog? Well, they
do and it does.
Plurp.
The blue dog
had a superhero
birthday suit
Sunday, May 18, 2003
Blab. A reader studies actuarial tables and confidently
predicts:
you have probably seen this
The famous Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie? Why, we wouldn't be who we are
today without a liberal supply of them at hand.
Plurp. For those of you who wondered what we were actually doing
during our two week absence earlier this month, we present A
Series of Uncorrelated Images. We don't expect that it will answer
your questions, but it should succeed in confusing you even more.
At least, we hope so.
In any case, yes, this will be on the test. So go study.
And tell us what you think.
Yow. There seems to be an actual release date for Call
of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. It's June
16, 2003. We'll see, of course, and forgive us for being dubious. But,
given the spotty release history of this game, and the fact that it's,
you know, software and all, we feel justified in maintaining a certain
skepticism.
Still, they even have a publisher
this time, so it could happen.
Yow. You can now get authentic roti
skins delivered to you, even as far away as New York, part of the growing
trend towards On
Demand.
Plurp.
The blue dog
just got back from
some dark corner or other
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