Plurp: The Homeopathy of Information

Bigger!

2003.06.15 : 2003.06.21

Saturday, June 21, 2003
Blab. What did the audience of conferences do before wireless laptops?
I was in the sexual fantasy bunch.
We thought you were looking at us funny.

Blab. Perhaps the very last entrant in our Iron Plurp Contest submits this.
Iron Game Designer. And it's true.
We believe it. In fact, it's probably way too true. This year's ingredient: Harry Potter!

Blab. On our request that readers help us convince Helen that Tomb Raider 2 is a chick flick, a reader who must be Imani writes:
I'll go see them Angelina Jolie flick. It just needs to be on YOUR day of the weekend. I will, though, never again see four Steve flicks in one weekend. NEVER.
You're certainly welcome to do whatever you wish. Or not, as the case may be. It is kind of you, we suppose, to designate a weekend day as being ours, but what will Helen think?

Blab. A willing reader reviews Tomb Raider 2 as a chick flick.
Tomb raider 2: Laura's mother is revealed to be Martha Stewart. Laura confronts Martha with her deep feelings of anger over Martha's overly complex homemaking recommendations. Martha, in turn, confronts Laura over Laura's overuse of dark colors.   Many angry words are exchanged.
After two hours of dialog and no action, the two reconcile. Martha helps Laura get in touch with her feminine side, and gives practical tips on how to make embroidered pistol covers from camel hair yarn, as well as the benefits of using lemon scented gunpowder.   Laura gives Martha useful tips on how to get rid of pesky federal agents. In the end, Martha learns to embrace Laura's alternative decorating style.
Classic! A bit on the bait-and-switchy side. It might work this once, though.

Blab. On our flight attendant Al B. Riteback, a reader writes:
Re Your Flight Attendant: We had a waiter in Brennan's in New Orleans whose name tag read "Dreux"! Loved it!
We've got to get these two together!

Blab. A reader supports our contention that the Liberty Cap was worn by gnomes during the Revolution.
The red cap is evidence that Papa Smurf runs the Shadow Government. And as we all know, Papa Smurf is a COMMUNIST!
Or, as the second of those links says:
THE SMURFS SPREAD DISTENTION THROUGH COMMUNISM!!!
That's certainly our experience.
Did we mention that we love the Web? Well, we do.

Blab. Our polite reader seeks to save our life. We appreciate this.
Sir: I recommend cough drops with zinc for your cold and cough. You can also take zinc tablets, but do not do so on an empty stomach or you will get extremely nauseous. If any of this advice harms you or your readers, I am sorry.
Unable to find any cough drops with zinc around the house, we substituted AA batteries instead. That seems to have worked. Thanks!

Yo. We love a mystery.
Worm? Trojan? Attack tool? Network administrators and security experts continue to search for the cause of an increasing amount of odd data that has been detected on the Internet.
Security software firm Internet Security Systems (ISS) on Thursday declared victory, saying that a new hacker tool that scans for paths into public networks was responsible. But many other security professionals--including those at Intrusec, the company that originally tracked down the hard-to-find code--believe that ISS jumped the gun.
The real culprit likely is still out there, said David J. Meltzer, founder and chief technology officer of Roswell, Ga.-based Intrusec.
Our theory is that it is an emergent AI.

Yo. Here's a wild claim.
[University of Australia's Allan Snyder] has used [transcranial magnetic stimulation] dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
If this is true, there are going to be a lot of strangely-hatted people around work in the near future,

Plurp. Were you aware that the phrase Freedom of Expression^TM is trademarked? Well, it is.

Plurp. Were you aware that it is illegal to enter the British Virgin Islands with dreadlocks, without first obtaining written permission from the government? Well, it is.

Plop. Convicted rapist, assaulter, batterer and apparent cannibal Mike Tyson was arrested yet again for assault after a brawl with two men last night in Brooklyn.
And you know what? He'll be out on the streets again soon. Go figure.

Plurp.
The blue dog
experienced increased creativity
from eating batteries

Friday, June 20, 2003
Blab. A persistent reader comes up short.
While looking up stuff about Orrin's music, I ended up on the front page of the Senate's site, which features an image (unauthorized use prohibited by law!) of the US Senate seal. Look at it carefully. Isn't that a skicap with the word "Liberty" on it? The seal history page calls it a "red liberty cap" but that doesn't make it any less absurd. Were these "liberty caps" actually worn at some time in our nation's history? and if so, by whom?

Ah! Therein lies a tale. It is not, in fact, a ski cap. It is a gnome cap, and was worn by the little-known Gnome Brigade, which came from Oz in fanciful airships to mount an aerial assault on British troops in the critical Battle of Schenectady during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

Blab. Having landed abruptly in an old edition of Plurp, a reader types the following into the Blab box, no doubt trying to search the page for it instead.
pregnancy fetish
Now we would have sworn, on a stack of sexually deviant material, that we had never mentioned pregnancy fetishes here in the sanctity of Plurp. Unfortunately for us, there it is, in stark pixellation, in our Dec. 23, 2001 entry:
Well, this is probably the first time that a reader entry combined furryism, lesbianism, transgenderism, and latex worship. Not to mention a pregnancy fetish.
There's no denying it now.

Blab. For reasons unfathomable, Plurp inspires.
A recent blab mentioned "eternal damnation" and suddenly inspired me to write my first Haiku.
Jalapenos, sliced
Cause internal damnation
When fried and eaten
That's funny!

Blab. A reader rewrites history.
Thanks for the link to Orwell's Six Rules. Now, if he had only applied Rule #3 to his own writing:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or ~~other~~ figure of speech which you are used to seeing ~~in print~~.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, ~~always~~ cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon ~~word~~ if you can think of an ~~everyday~~ English equivalent.

Break ~~any of~~ these rules sooner than say anything ~~outright~~ barbarous.

We are so fortunate to have writers better even than Orwell as our readers.

Blab. A reader who does not live in Manhattan sends us graphical news from its home planet.

Let's just say that there is no such door in our apartment.

Blab. A reader tries to help us spy on our colleagues.
Subj:    conference audience
There is a linux program that allows you to sniff the ethernet packets and display a dozen little screens on your laptop. You can watch people surf. It's sort of meta-entertainment for the geeks in the audience who can't find content of interest on their own. Of course since you were at an IBM conference it wouldn't work because it doesn't support token ring. sigh.
Dorian
Ha, ha. Very funny. Actually, the reason it wouldn't work is that IBM takes security pretty seriously, so our wireless networking is all LEAP.

Blab. A reader keeps us up on current events. Which we like, because they don't let us out much any more.
We would like to apologize to any countries and continents we have missed in doing our good work. Thank you for your understanding.
from a Reuters story: Sex abuse scandals have also hit the Catholic Church in a number of European, African and Asian countries.
You know, we haven't heard about any Catholic sex abuse scandals out of Antarctica yet. Always new frontiers, we suppose.

Plurp. We have this deal with Helen. She comes with us to one guy movie for every chick flick we go to with her. Well, that's not exactly the deal. The exact deal is that we get to pick one for every one she picks. But, you know, isomorphism.
Anyhow, this year is pretty brutal on our side of things, what with Daredevil, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions, T3, Hulk, LotR: RotK and 28 Days Later.
So we're currently trying to convince Helen that Tomb Raider 2 is a chick flick. You know, strong female lead, up and coming young actress, romance, moral conflict, stuff like that.
OK, it's not going real well so far. And that's why we need your help! Give us the elevator pitch for why Helen should regard Tomb Raider 2 as a chick flick. For extra credit, write a chick-flick review of the film, post it to your own site, and send us a link to which we can point Helen.
Please.

Plurp. Monogram on a male flight attendant's apron today.
Al B. Riteback
We congratulated him.

Rant. What is it about people in public? Are they blind?
Take the guy in the seat behind us in the airplane, for instance. When he gets up or sits down, does he get up or sit down as he would from any other chair in the world? He does not. He puts all of his considerable weight on the back of our seat, using it as a bar on which he raises and lowers himself. As you know, this has the same effect on our seat as would ramming his shoulder into it at full gallop.
Excuse me, kind sir, we say, but were you aware that you were pushing on my seat?
He looks at us as if he had just heard a chicken talk. Oh, he says, sorry.
But the next time he gets up, he does the same thing.
Or the guy in front of us. He's a large man, and the seat must make him uncomfortable, because he stands up often, stretches his shoulders back, and sighs with great satisfaction. Then he remains standing there for several minutes.
Behind him, a dozen people crane their necks, trying to see the movie around his ample form. He looks back at all of us and smiles blankly. Surely he thinks we are members of a new Chinese neck exercise cult.
And the lady across the aisle? She and hubby are also watching the movie. They are wearing official American Airlines cheap plastic headphones, which are clearly turned way up. Is that Tom Hanks?, she bellows as loudly as she can. What?, her husband shouts back. Neither removes their headphones.
Maybe these people live their whole lives in a haze, scarcely realizing that there is a world around them, much less that their actions affect it. Maybe they sigh, and smile, and converse with each other in a happy blear, invisible to the rest of us. Maybe it's only when you pack us tightly enough together that the awake among us notice them.
That would explain a lot.

Plurp. Coughing causes weight gain. It's a scientific fact. But we have discovered the mechanism!
In our current state of viral transmission, we go through maybe 4 cough drops an hour for about 12 hours a day, or around 48 cough drops a day. Each cough drop has 100% of the MDR of vitamin C, so whatever the overdose effects of C are, we're getting them. But that's not the point. The point is that each of these cough drops is a piece of candy, with a full 18 calories each.
That means we have added 864 calories to our daily diet by sucking down cherry-flavored cough suppressants.
No wonder we're getting fat.

Plurp.
The blue dog
cried at the ending of
Tomb Raider 2.

Thursday, June 19, 2003
Blab. Yet another entry to our Iron Plurp Contest!
Oh...of course, I forgot - Iron Chancellor!! (You have to be British to appreciate that one too) -AJL
Or have Google, eh?

Blab. A reader has been using its dictionary.
Has anyone said Iron-ing yet?
No, thank heavens.

Blab. One of the cadre of clandestine mind controllers that watches our every move makes a strategic error and sends orders directly to us, instead of through the Mind Control Lasers.
You with the cold. Take drugs and stay in bed.
Actually, we would like nothing better. But we're stuck in the second day of our conference today, on a plane going back home tomorrow, and playing Supplicant Hubby at a party of people we've never even heard of on Saturday.
We're taking your advice on the drugs, though. They may be our only hope.

Blab. Having tunneled out of NTK using nothing but spoons, a Newly Treasured Reader demonstrates the mental affliction that is Plurp.
An NTK-escapee writes:
Best weekly motto? That would have to be "Oh my God, it's full of eels!" Possibly because of *that* horse's head scene in the film version of The Tin Drum.
That film version? It's a classic.
We do like that motto, though we don't recall using it as a weekly motto. It's sort of an every day motto.

Blab. A second reader checks in on the topic.
we liked 'Probing the boundaries of sloth'. It's our new motto
Did we use that? We'd go back and check, but, you know ...

Blab. Another reader does lots of work to answer our question about its favorite weekly Plurp motto.
Our favorite Plurp motto? You can't fool us--you're just trying to bump up the hit counts on your archives.
Well, it worked. I submit my top seven favorite mottos:
7. Oldthink at its most ungood
6. Wonderful sounds of little things coming awake to greet the dawn
5. Side-effects include eternal damnation
4. Spongiform advice for the perpetually distracted
3. The Homeopathy of Information
2. Cousin to Cats, Brother to Beets
1. Know ye of the geometry of produce?
Actually, we weren't trying to up our hit counts (for once)! We were just curious.
We also liked each and every one of the mottos on our Treasured Reader's list. (Though that's probably just our disease.) We particularly like (1), but for reasons we don't understand ourself.

Blab. Our polite reader reveals that it clicks on blind links.
Sir: So this turtle breathes through its anus. Can't G. W. Bush do that too, or does he just talk through it? I apologize for my momentary lack of politeness and lapse into politics.
We're pretty sure that G.W. Bush is a deep-sea hydrothermal-vent life form, feeding on superheated hydrogen sulfide.
At least, that's the best explanation we've seen.

Blab. A Treasured Reader catches the alien invaders switching our links on us.
The link for the "Flashy thing" is the same site as the pizza selling homeless man.
Thanks to our reader, the devious machinations of the aliens have been defeated for one more day. So go visit the Flash thingie. It's cool.

Blab. An alien life form reveals its secret desires.
"Heinz's Funky Fries: chocolate, cinnamon,
sour cream and blue-colored frozen fries"
The idea of chocolate, cinnamon, or sour cream flavored fries doesn't bother me that much. Heck, the sour cream fries actually sound rather appealing. The idea of blue-colored fries doesn't bother me either.
No, what bothers me is that they're marketing three of these by their flavor, but one by its color. Is a little consistency too much to ask?
Yes.

Blab. A regular reader (which, for this blog, is surely an oxymoron) writes:
someone needs a life
News from Florida. Florida, as long-time readers will recall, is in the South.
Naples police officers shut down a lemonade stand Avigayil was operating with friends at the end of her driveway on 11th Avenue South on Friday. [...]
Under city rules, a permit is needed to operate a temporary commercial business in Naples.
Their tax dollars at work, we suppose.
But hey - it could be worse! Those police folks could be working for Asscroft, rounding up anyone who even looked like they might sell lemonade and imprisoning them without trial.

Blab. A reader hypothesizes a certain corporate evolutionary path.
Maybe Thrifty-Mart became Thrifty's
To tell you the truth, we can't figure it out. We can't find a corporate site for any U.S. company that looks like it runs grocery stores that are, or used to be, called Thrifty-Mart. Can you?

Blab. Here's something fun.
Senator Hatch, R-Clueless, will propose regulation to destroy computers for educational reasons. "[Computer Destruction] may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights." says the Senator, who runs his own web site on pirated software.
Now, normally, you know, we discount stuff like this that we find in blogs because blogs are, you know, just a bunch of lies strung together. But, in this case, the Washington Post verifies that Orrin actually said that. What a d00d! Or, as a reader of the above-linked blog said:
[W]hat you are endorsing is something so blatantly stupid there must be some sort of physiological explanation for it, like a blood clot or something.
And here, apparently, is verification of the additional allegation that Orrin's Web site runs pirated software. We wonder if Orrin is capable of being educated, even by destroying his computers.
But here's a delightfully serendipitous discovery: The Music of Senator Orrin Hatch. Incredible. Simply incredible.

Plurp. There is both power and wireless access in the auditorium where our conference is being held, so we stood in the back for a while and did some ethnography.
Of the 60 people in attendance, about 2/3 were working on their laptops.
Of these, 3-4 were actually taking notes on the talks being given. Of the rest, most were doing email. A number were working on unrelated documents or presentations. Several were surfing the Web. One was shopping for a new ThinkPad. Another was playing with a new, experimental keyboard. Yet another was updating and reconfiguring Windows, which we thought was particularly brave.
Some folks get upset at all the laptop users in audiences these days. They say they aren't paying attention. We wonder if that's really a change.
Frankly, we think 2/3 of the audience in the Old Days was staring blankly into space, consumed in their own bizarre sexual fantasies.
Except us, of course. We were paying attention.

Yow.
Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind.
Thanks to William Gibson for the reminder.
Oh. And thanks to George Orwell for saying it in the first place.

Plurp.
The blue dog
considered teaching someone
about Constitutional Law

Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Blab. A mutant meme mixer exceeds our expectations with this belated entry in our Iron Plurp Contest.
Iron Filing Clerk
That's very good!

Blab. On the other hand, this reader really, really wants to push our buttons.
Iron Snuggle Fabric Softener Bear: that's funny!
Sigh.

Blab. Similarly ...
How about a blast from the Cold War past with Iron Curtain? No? Well, I had to ask...

Blab. A reader seeks to confuse us even further. And does!
On your typical British high street of 40 years ago you'd find a (stunningly obvious) ironmonger, a fishmonger, a costermonger, and possibly a scaremonger too.
Now, see, fishmongers we had heard of. Costermonger seems a pretty obscure term but, OK, we still have those in New York. We cannot understand what economic niche an ironmonger fills, but we can imagine an economy bizarre enough that there is one.
But scaremongers? There's a living in that?

Blab. A reader considers the architectural design problem from yesterday.
Impossible is right! Completely impossible.
The floorplan sucks! Who would put the kitchen alllllll the way down the hall from the diningroom? Obviously never designed that way (back in 1931?). It's owned by a couple who "got" a kid and made the master bedroom out of the diningroom.
Nice furniture but NO WAY anyone in their right mind would ever have white furniture and a child of the age of one who would play with toys like the stuff in the kid's room. And look at all those pretty things sitting around dying to be wiped off the pristine surfaces and crashed onto the perfect carpet or floor.
Guilty of false advertising............
Exactly right! Kids are excellent entropy generators, and white furniture and pristine surroundings are quite impossible in their presence.
We have such clever readers.

Blab. A reader who is a bit confused writes:
I was kind of looking for info on David GAllagher and ask Jeeves Brought me to this site. I'm a bit cinfused.
Then ...
I was kind of looking for info on David Gallagher and Ask Jeeves brought me to this site. I'm a bit confused.
Then ...
Its me , the confused David Gallagher-searchin girl again. Uh- Just thinking about one of the things a reader person thing whatchamacallit---whatever wrote. uh-why kill to live forever when you could get caught and spend a big fraction of it in Jail!
Not that David Gallagher, that David Gallagher, whom we did, in fact, make Google's most famous David Gallagher.
But as to your eternal life thing, the conditions of the question explicitly allow you to dictate the conditions, including never being caught. Heck, you could even specify that no one will remember that you killed anyone, not even you.
We still think it's an awfully interesting question.

Blab. A reader sends us a really annoying blind ...
[link]
... which we only post out of habit.

Blab. A reader who has spent far too much time inside our head contributes an excellent explanation for why there is no hot water in our kitchen, despite there being hot water elsewhere in the apartment.
The super fiddled with the boiler, and it forgot that your kitchen hot-water faucet was authorized to get water from it. When your kitchen hot-water faucet asked the boiler for hot water and was rejected, it fell back on a provider of cold water, figuring that that was better than nothing.   If your contract with the kitchen hot-water faucet provides for it, you should get a pro-rated discount on the bill it sends you this month.
Of course! Autonomic plumbing.

Blab. Trying to save Dubya from himself, a reader suggests this.
Bush should get a Trikke!
We offer a picture of just that.

Blab. An incredulous reader writes:
heard on the news tonight
"if you need any information about the bona fideness of your dentist....."
Bona fideness????
Our reader's incredulity is well placed. The correct noun form is bona fidity.

Blab. A late, but great, entry!

Vampire Baby Strikes Again! (for the caption competition in case you didn't guess...)
Love it.

Yo. How far will companies go to advertise? We still don't know.
Pizza Company Hires Homeless to Hold Ads
Next: Bring out your dead.

Plop. What genius at Heinz pushed for these?

Heinz's Funky Fries: chocolate, cinnamon,
sour cream and blue-colored frozen fries

Yak.

Helen: What good is a head cold?

Steve: It's the virus' way of spreading.

Helen: Yeah, but what good does a head cold do me?

Steve: That's irrelevant. You're just the growth medium.

Helen: I don't think I like that.

Steve: That's irrelevant too.

Yow. Ever want to fly? Now you can, thanks to this extremely cute Flash thingie. (/usr/bin/girl)

Plop. And then, flying yesterday.

Flight Attendant: Would you like the Overcooked Chicken with Tasteless Sauce, or the Overcooked Pasta with Minuscule Amounts of Cheese?

Steve: Do they both come with the Chopped Iceberg Lettuce and the Bread Roll of Indeterminate Age?

Flight Attendant: Yes, they do.

Steve: I'll have the chicken.

Plop. So here are two things that you really don't want to do.

Spend all day flying somewhere in a seat meant to increase airline profits rather than preserve the functionality of your legs.

Get a nasty head cold whose only amelioration comes from pseudophedrine, which, in turn, make you cotton-headed and stupid and exhausted.

And what do you really, really not want to do? Both of them together.

Rant. What was wrong with real phedrine, anyway? That's what we want to know!

Plurp. Here's something still encoded in our neurons, which is amazing because (a) it is entirely trivial, and (b) it was encoded on a single day when we were around eleven.
Every day's a special day at Thrifty-Mart.
Every day is special just for you.
Whatever you put in your shopping cart,
you save and save at Thrifty-Mart.
Yes, every day's a special day at Thrifty-Mart!
Do they even still exist?

Plurp. What's your favorite Plurp weekly motto (up there in the title bar)? We're not sure, but ours might be this week's. Hard to tell, though; we're pretty fickle.

Yow. From our conference today on HCI in autonomic computing, Peter Neumann (of RISKS DIGEST fame) points to his Illustrative Risks to the Public in the Use of Computer Systems and Related Technology.
The scary thing is that the list is so long!

Yak. At that same conference, another speaker used the following term several times.
Sleeves out of your vest
What does it mean?

Yak. Not quite a Helenism, from a distinguished professor at the same conference.
bulk force
Seem like it ought to be, though, doesn't it?

Yow. Having been stood up several times by our date, we went out alone tonight to see X2, which was quite good, even better than the original and definitely recommended.
Special effects have gotten so good that we can't tell them from the real thing any more. Which is Pretty Darn Cool.
We're not allowed to say anything about Rebecca Romijn, so we won't.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was a special day at
Thrifty-Mart

Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Blab. A reader helps us get an early start on our Xmas shopping.
a cute present for little Jimmy from the V&A museum
Yes! A toy tiger mauling a Mountie. Just the thing.

Blab. A reader from a third world country writes:
Oh, we have hot water coming from the kitchen faucet again.
Or - oh - that's Helen. We're pleased to hear that our no-hot-water-in-the-kitchen problem was finally fixed. (Though - late update on Monday night - we still don't have hot water in the kitchen.)
Speaking of which, we don't understand how this works. The lore is (something like) the super fiddled with the boiler (or something) and we have no hot water because they haven't bled the pipes.
Here's what we don't get. We can understand how we might get no water because they haven't bled the pipes (or at least we can make something up about compressible air pockets). But that wasn't the problem. We got plenty of water when we turned on the hot water faucet; it just wasn't hot.
That seems impossible to us. The only thing the hot water pipe is hooked up to (however indirectly) is the boiler, which only produces hot water, as evidenced by the plentiful hot water elsewhere in our apartment.
Readers trained in the Plumbing Arts will now explain all this to us, and make us feel very, very stupid.

Blab. A reader who seems to miss the point writes:
Ironed Shirts
Yes. And Iron Filings. And Iron Mike. And Iron Butterfly. And Iron Monkey. And Iron Works. And Iron Ore. And Iron Mine. And Iron Eagle. And Iron Giant. And everything else of the form Iron <something> where <something> is not a profession.
Fortunately, a meme mixer contributes this.
Iron Dishwasher
Today's ingredient: soluble grease!
That's more like it!

Blab. A reader who does not live in New York writes:
Having spent the last four days in Manhattan, walking from 90th to the port, through SoHo and back a couple of times, all the time avoiding the site that made the shrub a tree, I discovered the way to solvency in "these difficult times," beside using the gelt of the big B himself to make up the deficits. Enforce the g*ddam honking laws. At $350 a clip, which it is on the books, it would take three weeks of enforcement to make everything free but the cost of your dignity if you live in a Trump property.
The Officious City Fathers attempted to enforce the jaywalking laws a couple of years ago, issuing tickets to some nanofraction of the millions of people who jaywalk daily. The evening news broadcasts from nearby Rockefeller Center were hilarious.

Woman (extremely annoyed): Are you trying to tell me that you're giving me a ticket? For jaywalking?!

NYPD Officer: Yes ma'am.

Blab. A reader helps us come to our senses.
Subj: So, the Santa Barbara Thing,
is it real, or just one of those mid-life threats of the pony tail generation?
But, hey, everyone deserves a vacation from a broad cultural experience.
And some wise-guy wrote: A reader tries to keep up with current events by reading the Kansas City Star. We would be amazed if that worked.
Wait, wait, I know it...it's this or THAT! Wow, how to decide!!
Ah. The Santa Barbara News-Press, with yesterday's main hard news story featuring a picture of an enormous pig, the headline being LOLA NO LONGER GOING HOG WILD.

Now we remember why we left.

Blab. A reader sends us a Baconizer ...
[link]

The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer

A Boat to Nowhere

Mama's Bank Account

The Egg and I

Onions In The Stew

Fifty Acres and a Poodle

A Trip to the Beach

At Blanchard's Table

The Sugar Mill Caribbean Cookbook

Great Chefs of the Caribbean

Caribe Rum

The Complete Guide to Rum

Grappa: A Guide to the Best

The Book of Tequila

Blue Dog 2003 Engagement Calendar

We are at least relieved that they are that far removed, and fascinated that the connection goes through the Caribbean.

Blab. At last, a reader or two attempt to provide explanatory text for our current Image Requiring Reader Explication.

This time we have two meme mixers. The first one makes a humorous category error. We think.
Nurse Amy comforts little Billy after he saw this horrific sight.
The second, well, if we have to explain it ...
"I can hear the ocean!"
That's very funny!

Blab. A reader writes, enigmatically:
Alpine Helen? I thought that was the third link.
Um ... ?

Blab. A reader documents the results of certain forbidden experiments.
Paul Edmund writing you signals using my brain and the neural-motor interface I recently had installed in my spine.
All is good here--I got into MIT but deferred (thanks for being cool about that!) until next year, to see about funding and to think it through a little more. I hadn't been to Plurp in a bit and am pleased to see all the signal. Gaw.
That's it. I am hopeful that the cats are behaving and the machines are all humming in the secret lair of the giant corporation.
pef
And us without raw fish! How rude. We shall have to rectify this.

Plurp. This week?

angela belcher nude pictures

helen naked pitures

imani

rss

chihuly

get an elephant in a refrigerator

just because

mia

naked pictures of helen

nathan giddings

We apologize, deeply and abjectly, to Dr. Belcher.

Plurp. Imani, our mistaken online friend, was agitated at us for failing to respond to her chatty IMs several times recently. And here we thought we were being just awfully friendly for a person she only thinks she knows.
(Imani mistakes one of our online identities with that of someone she actually does know. We have replied to her on several occasions, attempting to appear to be her friend, though we've never met either of them. Yes, it is difficult to engage in a conversation in the guise of someone else when you have no idea what these two other people know about each other. Yes, this is really quite odd.)
Anyway! Karmic balance has now been restored as a result of abject supplication on our part (this is, we find, a remarkably successful tactic in quite a number of life situations), and Imani is off to compete in the Miss Black Universe pageant.
We wish her well. Whoever she is.

Plurp. We've been thinking of spending some time in a Zen monastery, meditating, remembering how to breath, learning to appreciate Things As They Are. Perhaps we could start off with a weekend before thinking about getting more serious about it.
The Great Way is not difficult;
Just avoid picking and choosing.
What do you think?

Yow. Here's a gorgeous apartment, both because of its location and because of its interior design. Plus it's only $8M. PayPal donations are welcome.
And it comes with a free puzzle! Click through the More Images links on the referenced page and tell us why what you are being shown is absolutely impossible.

Yow. All you architecture fetishists need to check out the Great Buildings site. Lots of architects. Lots of buildings. (Spotty coverage of actual pictures and such, sigh.)

Plop.
"This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history — 'revisionist historians' is what I like to call them," Bush said.
According to Bush, the revisionists are those who have called into question whether the war was justified inasmuch as the United States has not yet found weapons of mass destruction the president and others cited as one of the key reasons for going to war.

Plop. The disreputable NYT reports:
Afghans and Pakistanis who were detained for many months by the American military at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba before being released without charges are describing the conditions as so desperate that some captives tried to kill themselves.
But that's OK, see, 'cause it's "them", not "us". Right?

Plop. Despite our attempts to avoid it, we seem to be coming down with the really awful cold that Helen has had for nearly a week. To add to the fun, we are off to California for a conference today. Our expectation is that we'll infect everyone at the conference and everyone on all four flight segments.

Plurp.
The blue dog
acted to a threat
from grammar and reason

Monday, June 16, 2003
Blab. A reader makes rude suggestions.
Check this out: Helen, in White Co. Yu could move there.

Who's Yu?

Blab. A reader makes a suggestion that we took long ago.
I think you should declare a Helen Day on Plurp.
Every day is Helen Day on Plurp.

Blab. A reader commits what we initially thought was a grammatical error.
Who needs Viagra when you got Helen?
We've always said that.

Blab. A reader reveals Helen's little hobby.
Click here to see pics of Helen at the Frank Hawley Drag Racing School in Florida!
As the site says, she is ...
Still the fastest woman in Europe!

Blab. A reader who does not live in Manhattan asks:
So, did you see Varekai live, or just on Bravo? A little IBM patronage? We watched three or four hours of Cirque yesterday. It was a little like Nearly Famous (More Vegas Showgirls) when Gareth and Ashley guys didn't get their contracts renewed. But it was mesmerizing. Olga rocks.   The twins' outfits were pretty goofy.
We saw it live, with some friends, during what we think was a tremendous thunderstorm, which we saw coming as we were walking in, though it's hard to be sure, as it's Cirque du Soleil and all, and even the rain pounding on the tent might have been part of the illusion, but the drenched people who came in after us seemed too numerous to be part of the act.
Still, you never know.

Blab. Yesterday, we wondered idly if there were classes of Wushuesque things as silly as Iron Chef. In response, a reader who does live in Manhattan writes:
Iron Mayor! hi yah!!!
That might have been true of Rudy. We have a harder time believing it of Bloomingdales.
Meanwhile, a reader seeking to align our brain waves with its writes:
Iron mathematician: one hour to prove a theorem in the theme area (Iron Mathematician Topology, IM Algebra, IM Analysis, IM Geometry etc.)
eh, stick with Iron Chef, I think.
Today's ingredient: The Axiom of Choice!! Similarly:
iron nano-metrologist
Tiny! Meanwhile, an aging rocker writes:
Iron Maiden
Did it really seem silly way back when? No? Prolly the drugs.
An energetic reader writes:
Iron Ichyologist
Iron Snuggle Fabric Softener Bear
Iron Hubbard
Iron Homeopathist
Iron Octodogist
We're not sure that Snuggle Fabric Softener Bear is a profession (for anything other than the bear itself), and we're pretty sure that Hubbard isn't a profession at all. So we are left confused.
Another reader does not seek to unconfuse us.
Iron Oxide!
Uh huh. We can imagine quite a lots of things of this form, none of the nouns of which are professions. Making things worse, we suspect, is this reader.
Iron Somnambulist!
If you can figure out how to make money by walking in your sleep, we want to hear about it!
At last, a reader nominates actual professions.
Well, apart from the stunningly obvious
Ironmonger -
I suggest
Iron Window Cleaner
Iron Zookeeper
Iron Gardener
-AJL
Ian informs us that you want to be British to get that first one, which we're not, so we don't. We like the last one, though, and nominate Martha Stewart to command Garden Stadium.
Congratulations to all of our Iron Winners.

Blab. A reader updates that Segway segue from last week.
President Bush fell from the Segway on his first try Thursday, *but he got back on*.
It's very curious. We were under the impression that the Segway was incapable of tilting over. Wasn't that one of its key selling points?

Blab. A reader sends us an incredible story. Two incredible stories!
And Away Goes the Lake Down the Drain
Peaceful Lake Peigneur turned into maelstrom
This is Reality Imitates Cartoons.
[An oil drilling platform on Lake Peigneur ran into some problems.]
The water of Lake Peigneur slowly started to turn, eventually forming a giant whirlpool. A large crater developed in the bottom of the lake. It was like someone pulled the stopper out of the bottom of a giant bathtub. [...]
The whirlpool easily sucked up the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, a second drilling rig that was nearby, a tugboat, eleven barges from the canal, a barge loading dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud, trees, and who knows what else.
Turns out the Texaco folks drilled right into a salt dome, which was also an active salt mine.
Oops.

Blab. A reader checks in on the vital subject of washing dishes. (It's hard for us to believe we're spending time on this, but we are learning things, and overturning childhood misconceptions, and that's a good thing.)
I think the benefit of washing dishes in hot water comes from just general cleaning, not from killing germs. Most things dissolve better in hot water than in cold water, so it's easier to get gunk off your dishes using hot water than cold.   Having taken a course or two in microbiology, I agree that the hot water from your tap is not hot enough to kill bacteria.
On the other hand, if you're using a dishwasher, there's a good chance that the "dry" portion of the cycle does in fact get hot enough to kill bacteria. (Ever try to unload a dishwasher right after it finishes? Ouch!) I'll have to try running the dishwasher sometime with the probe from my nifty digital kitchen thermometer in it.
Yup. It's all about the solubility of grease in hot water and soap.
Your point about dishwashers is bolstered by that great dishwasher link from yesterday
[T]he average bacteria count for all machine-washed dishes in their study was less than 1 per plate, while the bacteria count on dishes washed by hand during the same test averaged 390 per plate.
That's probably both because it washes them longer, and because of the high temperatures.

Yo. We watched The Animatrix last night. Pretty cool!
It took us a while to figure out why the first vignette, done entirely in CGI, was so very much like The Matrix. Then it occurred to us that a good deal of The Matrix was already CGI, and what wasn't was mostly Keanu Reeves. And it's easy to make CGI characters that are as emotive as Keanu.
So maybe we're at that long-predicted tipping point already.

Plurp. Daredevil. Matrix Reloaded. Matrix Revolutions. X2. T3. Hulk. Tomb Raider 2. LotR: RotK.
It's just not destined to be a good year for Helen, is it?

Yo. Cthulhu. Chihuly. Connected? That's what the Amazing Baconizer says. Who are we to dispute the Amazing Baconizer?

Plurp. It's getting pretty weird when Wendy's commercials on TV are in wide-screen format.

Plop. We are relieved to see that our Web site traffic has trailed off from the heady days of NTK linkage in early June, dribbling down to the more familiar clique of readers who come here for reasons unknown. Thank goodness nobody who came looking for our Generic Literature hung around to read Plurp!

Plurp. OK, kids! Here's the next in our current series of Enigmatic Images Requiring Reader Explication.

As always, readers should provide the obviously missing explanation for this tableau.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was already at the
long-predicting
tipping point

Sunday, June 15, 2003
Blab. By asking why we were taught to wash dishes in hot water, we seem to have hit upon a topic that inspired huge reader response. We think this is because (a) many of our readers have washed dishes, and (b) many or our readers have no social lives on the weekends. Like us!
Our first reader suggests a scientific explanation for the use of hot water to wash dishes.
Hot water discombobulates the food residue better than cold water. Soap is what kills the germs.
Discombobulation is a whole area of scientific discourse with which we are unfamiliar. We're so lucky to have such erudite readers!
The second of our many readers defines discombobulation in smaller words that even we can understand.
Re: Hot water for dish washing. Hot water itself probably doesn't kill germs, but it greatly increases the efficiency of the dish washing detergent, which removes residual food, and also kills germs. So at least one of your childhood illusions was, in fact, correct.
Ignoring the question at hand, a third reader soaks in homeopathy.
If you take germy water and dilute it until there couldn't possibly be any germs left in it, then wash your dishes with it, will it remove all the germs? Homeopathy? You're soaking in it!
We will have to try that. In the meantime, a fourth reader agrees with the growing consensus.
The hot water used in washing up isn't for killing germs (at least, I never thought it was!) -- it's for grease removal (hot water is better at removing greasy gunk than cold water).
Finally, and at long last, a reader does what all good readers should do: provide an authoritative Web reference.
[link]
Good reader! Here's a little treat for you. Don't jump up.
Interestingly, the site at the end of that link suggests a different view.
The temperature of the water is an important factor in dissolving detergent, removing food soils and drying dishes properly. To do these things most effectively, the water temperature at the dishwasher should not be lower than 130 degrees F (54.4 degrees C).
This is bolstered by the rocket scientists at UC Davis, who say that soap (and rubbing your hands while you wash them) removes bacteria. It doesn't kill them (and neither does hot water). Rather, it cuts the grease that sticks them to the dishes (and your skin), and washes them down the drain.
So our kidlet brain absorbed the right lesson, but the wrong physics. We don't feel alone in this, though, as our kind readers have generously volunteered.
Next: Gravity.

Blab. On that astonishing implement that turns hot dogs into something resembling ground meat octopi, a reader writes:
Octodog is for unsophisticated Americans and other dilettanti of the sausagy arts. The Nippon Meat Packers are true profesionals.

We are particularly impressed with the alligator. Or whatever that is.

Blab. A reader who Hearts NY writes:
this is cool
It sure is! It's a collection of renderings of new structures in New York (mostly proposed ones) that are over 500'. Very cool!

Blab. A reader with big plans writes:
No. You didn't see Varekai! Tell me you didn't. Arrgh. You ^*&^(*&. That's totally unfair. By the time they get to Switzerland we'll probably be living on Mars. - Morton
So you're saying that you haven't seen Zumanity yet, either?

Blab. On the topic of Where We Should Live, one of the many vassals under Helen's thrall writes:
I vote for Santa Barbara. I am Helen's willing pawn.
We understand that Varekai is showing in Santa Barbara right after they're done with Mars.

Yo. Octodog. No, not that Octodog. We like this one. Why is that?

Plurp. We were struck, last night, by the linguistic irony of Iron Chef, named, as it is, in the tradition of Wushu. But chefs wield no deadly weapons (well, at least, not on purpose). No pole arms. No katana. No bo sticks. The image of a chef is, frankly, incongruous with the image of an Iron Warrior. And, no doubt, that's part of the implicit humor.
So we thought we'd help this trend along, with this week's Tedious Plurp Contest, which we are forced to entitle Iron Plurp. In this contest, you are required to associate the most implausible, incongruous profession with the word Iron. Here are some examples, though they are admittedly quite pale.

Iron Clown

Iron Cake Decorator

Iron Physicist

See? Now get to work!

Plurp.
The blue dog
was one of eight dogs
chosen to defend the honor
of all surreal icons
in Octodog Stadium

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