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2003.06.22 : 2003.06.28
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Blab. A reader sends us something extremely corporate
and extremely strange.
Lipton
Ice-tea: Beverage of choice for avicidal Hong Kongians.
This is so bizarre! We conclude that Chinese culture is very, very
different from our own sheltered existence.
Plurp. Today's Tedious Plurp Contest is a guessing game.
Or an exercise in telepathy, depending. But first, a little geography lesson.
Our currently
favorite sushi joint, from which we picked up sushi on the way home
last night, is located on 48th St. between Madison Ave. and 5th Ave.
This part of Manhattan (and, in fact, most of Manhattan, and hence the
term Manhattan
distance for Lm metrics) is a rectangular grid.
Streets go (approximately) east and west. Avenues go (approximately) north
and south. (Did you ever play Streets and Avenues as a kid? We live there.)
Avenue names are (east to west):
-
1st Ave.
-
2nd Ave.
-
3rd Ave.
-
Lexington Ave.
-
Park Ave.
-
Madison Ave.
-
5th Ave.
-
6th Ave.
And so on up to 12th Ave. Thus, it's easy to remember that the sushi place
is between Madison and 5th, since that's the only transition from named
to numbered avenues.
Streets, on the other hand, go from 1st
St. all the way up to 220th
St.
We can remember that the sushi place is south of the 59 St. Bridge.
But the puzzle is this: How do we remember that it's on 48th St.?
This is a serious question. Before we figured out how to remember it,
we always wrote 48 on the palm of our hand before venturing out
for sushi, and gosh that was embarrassing.
So, how did we do it?
Hint: It makes sense.
Plop. Let's see if we get this straight. If you're driving along,
and you careen into some poor homeless guy, and embed him in your windshield,
and you keep driving, and you drive home, and you go into your house, and
call your friends, and ask them what you should do, while that homeless
guy dies slowly and horribly, stuck in your windshield and bleeding to
death, and you do nothing to help him, then that's
bad, right?
Good to know.
Plurp. On our way home last night, we were wondering if we remembered
all the various forms of Kryptonite or, indeed, if other forms were manifest
after we stopped paying attention. In the Old Days, we would have wondered
about this fruitlessly for some time, then given up. These days, the information
is at our fingertips.
The only problem is: What's true? Diligent readers will discover just
what we mean.
Plop. That National
Do Not Call Registry thing that everyone's so excited about?
It also does not apply if
you engage solely in intrastate calls - that is, if you call ONLY within
one state.
Now, let's think. What's the obvious loophole involving nationwide businesses
and fifty state-specific calling companies? Let's think. Let's think ...
Yo. You may recall Dumsfeld
and others saying that the recent attacks on US troops in Iraq were all
disorganized and stuff. Well
...
Allied officials say they
recently obtained a document prepared by the Iraqi Intelligence Service
calling for a sabotage campaign in case of Mr. Hussein's ouster. Marked
"secret" and dated Jan. 23, the document was found in the southern Iraqi
city of Basra but is marked for distribution to intelligence officers throughout
the country.
The "emergency plan" in the document
outlines 11 steps, including looting and burning government offices, sabotaging
power plants, cutting communication lines and attacking water purification
plants, a familiar list to anybody who followed events in Iraq over the
last two months.
Anybody but Dumsfeld, apparently.
Plurp. Today, on the word elements.
There was the man at the
deli - the man behind the counter who looked at him through narrow eyes.
And the woman at the dry cleaners, who always seemed busy when he came
in. Even the bus driver today. He knew what it meant. He knew who they
were.
Plurp. After lunch with the
Chancellor (and isn't that a pretentious phrase?) we went to
Tea
At Five, Kate Mulgrew's one-woman performance of Kathryn Hepburn
at 31 and 76. While Mulgrew is talented, and has clearly studied quite
extensively for the role, there is something about Hepburn that no one
but Hepburn will ever, ever have.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
thought that Lipton Tea site
was the most disgusting thing
Friday, June 27, 2003
Blab. Our polite reader finds the true meaning of Web
Services.
Sir: You've been shizzolated.
Our unfortunate reader became trapped in frames. No doubt it really intended
to give us this
link.
Blab. Similarly ...
Sir: I could not resist.
Whitehouse.gov has been shizzolated.
And this
was probably the intended link.
Blab. There seem to be readers who still send us blind links.
[link]
[link]
We will admit that that left one is kinda interesting.
Google has a new program
called AdSense. Here's how
it works:
-
You create an account with Google.
-
Google gives you a dab of HTML to put
on your web pages.
-
When someone visits your site, Goggles
dab of HTML has their browser ask Google for some ads.
-
Google analyzes the content of your pages
and searches for relevant ads and returns them.
-
Every time someone clicks on an ad, Google
pays you 50 cents (although this amount appears to be decreasing).
Amusingly, here
are the ads that Google, in its cybernetic wisdom, would have us put on
Plurp,
presumably because they think they'll be attractive to our audience, such
as it is. In our humble opinion, that's pretty funny!
That right link, though? We have no idea. None. We're just completely
puzzled.
Blab. A reader writes, ominously:
"Nineteen inches," she declared.
Fists were pumped. Congratulations
were offered.
It's not what you think! It's what
we are to think about that IBM-sponsored camp that aims to draw girls
into tech fields (from earlier this week). They were building towers out
of pasta sticks and marshmallows.
Honest.
Blab. On the Invasion of the Tooth Snatchers, a reader
writes:
"Nighttime whitening system"?
Does it make your teeth glow in the dark? I'd buy it if it did that.
(Also, why did they put a big picture
of 1/4 of the Earth when they only offer USA English and USA Español
as options? And it doesn't even show the West coast of the USA!)
How could any picture of the Earth not show the west coast of the USA?
Outrage!
Blab. On yesterday's good news from the Supreme Court, a reader
with an excellent sense of irony writes:
Iron Supreme Court Justice?
Today's ingredient: Sodomy!
Blab. On that same topic, Beavis writes:
heh, heh. heh, heh. SCOTUS
sodomy. Hehehehehe.
Do not adjust your set.
Blab. A squeeze toy writes:
I simply squeek with joy!
(or simply squeek.) WTG, Justices.
Yeah, looks like they got one right.
Yak. Last night.
| Helen: |
OK. What are you chuckling about? |
| Steve: |
Oh. My. God. |
| Helen: |
What? |
| Steve: |
Um. Well. Dave
cites a
wonderful piece by ... uh, see, Edward Tufte is this really bright
guy who thinks really deeply about how to present information. All kinds
of information. And he wrote a piece on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation
thing, and why it's so bad, and some other guy wrote a
version of Tufte's piece, but in the format of a PowerPoint presentation
and ... |
| Helen: |
Huh? |
| Steve: |
Yeah, well. It's really funny. I'm
going to have to blog it. |
| Helen: |
You know, the more obscure it is,
the fewer people will get it. |
| Steve: |
Zackly. |
 Yow.
It's suddenly summer here in NYC and it's really hot - in the nineties
in both temperature and humidity (in some appropriate system of units -
but isn't that always true?).
And you know what we really like about that? Yep - the relative lack
of clothing on the natives. Certain natives.
Yow. It seems the folks in Iraq are getting a taste of freedom
of the press.
All over central Iraq, independent
radio and television stations are suddenly emerging to fill the void left
by the destruction and collapse of the old national broadcaster. [...]
For now it's a kind of media Wild
West. Anyone who can grab a relay station and get a radio or TV station
off the ground becomes a station manager. Anyone who can get hold of a
printing press, or even a photocopier, is suddenly a newspaper editor.
Pretty cool!
Plurp. Today, on the word guard.
His wrist was bleeding. Badly.
The sabre had come to rest some twenty feet away, clanking loudly as he
shouted in pain.
Plurp.
The blue dog
has only sixty seconds to write about
the word
surrealism
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Blab. Another reader gets overly excited.
Shouldn't that be:
Harry Potter /\/8-)
Of all of the things that should be, this is definitely not one
of them.
Blab. On our final tableau in the latest Enigmatic Images
for Reader Explication, a reader from the Literalist School writes:
"Timmy plays Cop-a-Feel Sandwich
at the local Catholic Bishop Sanctuary Pre School" (a caption for the latest
of your Images Requiring Reader Explication).
Goodness! That had not occurred to us. Meanwhile, another reader writes
something that we choose to interpret as an entry.
The picture obviously represents
the chain-of-command in modern American society, but reads from right to
left.
So the chain of command in modern American society is:
-
Chairs
-
Seated women
-
Children dressed by their mothers
-
Nondescript leather bags
-
White-socked men with leg deformities
Good to know.
Blab. A reader steps up to cannibalism.
It's kind of hard to read
that "New Food Pyramid" chart, but from what I can gather, the largest
portion of our diet should consist of joggers.
(Also, "Alcohol moderation unless
contraindicated"? Are there doctors actually prescribing alcohol immoderation?)
Mmmm! Joggers!
A more readable version of the pyramid is here.
Blab. A reader pimps for its own blog.
Surrealism for dummies? Come
see the lightbulb at the ironmongers.
That site shows the ironmongers (!) but not the bulb. This
site doesn't show the bulb either, but at least tells the story of the
bulb rather than the ironmonger.
Our taste runs more to the nun
bun, though, for reasons which should be obvious.
Blab. An anonymous reader writes:
Steve, did you noticed that
our dentist's reception office has one of those Enigmatic Images on their
bookcase? Have to say I didn't examine it yesterday (I was dying
to get back out into the steamy morning) but I bet when you return for
that filling, they will share it with you. Perhaps even with
you sitting on your doctor's knee.
We're not sure who your dentist is, Treasured Reader, but yes, it does
frighten us that anyone would actually buy such things.
Blab. Another plural voice writes:
Steve, maybe it's time for
us to become vegetarians. Or at least eliminate meat from our diets.
We woud be so much healthier and live so much longer. And then I
was thinking of those great steaks I grilled the other night...........damn
the torpedoes! Send on the red meat!!! Who wants to experience
Armageddon, anyway?
Not us, that's who! We'd rather die of colon cancer.
Blab. Another reader old enough to remember Firesign Theatre
writes:
Firesign Theatre folks are
still making albums? Too bad. We don't have a turntable anymore.........
All too true, we're sure, but the 21st Century has caught up even with
Firesign Theatre. Now, instead of scratchy vinyl, you can listen to them
on DVD. Yes, we did say listen. They seem to be specializing in
audio DVDs these days.
Next: Photographs.
Blab. On that OneWord
thing (which we think is modestly cool, and you should definitely try)
a reader writes:
Steve, you had a problem
on OneWord writing about wine? You have to be kidding me! Not
me. I wrote four lines.
We did feel incredible time pressure, in that mere 60 seconds that we had
to write our little piece, but here's what we wrote on the word wine.
The bottle had spilled, clearly.
It laid on its side, inert, but the damage had been done. A large pool
of blood-red wine had spread across the white carpet. And beside it, the
body.
And today, on the word angle, we wrote this:
It was not simply that it
looked odd, the way the walls came together in that ancient temple. It
was that it looked *wrong*, and the sight of it made Lester's eyes hurt.
(Actually, we didn't quite have time to enter that last period. It was
that close.)
Blab. A reader teases us. Ooh.
Teaser headline on AOLNews
this morning:
"Palestinian Truce May Be Hours, Days
Away" ..............
............Weeks, Months, Years,
Decades, Centuries, Millenniums, Eons Away
Ain't that the truth. The Nobel Peace Prize - the
gift that keeps on giving.
Blab. A reader suggests that ...
A day without meme mixing
is like a woman without a bicycle.
Or a frog without an analogy, eh?
Blab. Gephardt is everybody's favorite.
"When I'm president, we'll
have executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does
tomorrow or any other day,"
Yeah, I hate when that pesky Constitution
gets in the way of things that need to be done.
I dub Gephardt "the John Ashcroft
of the left."
That would be "the Asscroft of the left," but, yeah.
Plurp. A commercial for Crest NightEffects,
weirdly featuring William Shatner, during the remake of Invasion of
the Body Snatchers on "television" last night:
When you sleep, you dream.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile.
What are they trying to tell us?
Yow. Hey, hey: sodomy's
suddenly legal! Enjoy.
Yak. We just coined a term today that we dearly love.
Effects-based research
Isn't that great?
Plop. Particularly Offensive CorporateSpeak O' The Day:
one-2-one
It just hurts.
Plurp.
The bottle had spilled, clearly.
It laid on its side, inert, but the
damage
had been done. A
large pool of blood-red wine had
spread
across the white carpet. And beside
it, the
blue dog.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Blab. Overcome with the new book, a reader cannot restrain
itself.
Harry Potter :-)
Thank you. Now take off those silly glasses and get back to work.
Blab. Our promise that this was the last in our current series
of Enigmatic Images Requiring Reader Explication seems to have excited
the readership, as evidenced by this orgy of responses.
Our first reader mistakes little Billy for a stuffed cat toy. It's a
natural mistake.
Dr Ardvarus gently removed
the novelty dinosaur horn from behind Willie's patella. -AJL
Ouch! Along similar, but perhaps less painful, medical lines is this entry.
"My God! This knee is slightly
skinned! Thank goodness you brought him to the emergency ward as soon as
you did. Nurse! Prepare Operating Room 2 with fresh Band-aids and get me
0.25 cc of antibiotic ointment, STAT!"
The eight-year-old boy in us just plain loves this one.
"Hey kid, wanna see something?
I just removed this from that guy over there. It's a polyp. I have to take
it to the lab, but if it's benign, I'll let you have it."
"Cool!"
A day without meme mixing is like a day without hemorrhoids.
"Hmmm... Looks like rickets.
Are you eating 2 to 3 servings of milk, yogurt, and/or cheese daily, Billy?"
"Yes, I always do what the Pyramid
tells me."
"Good boy! So then I can assume you
are also eating 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice, and/or pasta?"
"Oh, my, yes! I do enjoy having white
rice on Wonderbread 3 to 5.5 times a day."
"What?! WHITE rice? WONDER bread?
Dear God, Billy, it's a WONDER that you aren't dead! Nurse! 20 cc of wheat
husks, STAT!"
Also in the medical meme mixing camp, and also revolving around the famous
Billy, is this excellent entry.
"Looks like Billy has a bad
case of arsenic poisoning in his knee here... here... and just over there
by that bit of bubonic plague. If left untreated, it could move into his
shin, and from there... who knows what misadventures it might get into!
Fortunately, Globex Pharmaceuticals has just received FDA approval for
their new arsenic misadventure inhibitor drug, Nxknsire (TM)."
"So, he'll be ok then?"
"Oh, heavens no. He'll be dead in
a week. But for every 20 Nxknsire (TM) prescriptions I write, Globex sends
me a cool little LED keychain flashlight with their logo on it. Those darn
things drive my cat crazy! He he he!"
Another reader retains little Billy, but presents a rather darker interpretation
of surrounding events.
"You see Billy, this is what
happens when you don't clean your room like Mommy asked you to: Mommy gets
sent to the electric chair. And since Mommy can't get a babysitter, you
have to go to the electric chair too."
"Mommy, what is that man putting on
my leg?"
"That is conductive jelly to help
Mr. Electricity teach you a lesson in responsibility."
"I don't think I like Mr. Lectrisy."
"Well, Mr. Electricity doesn't like
messy little boys, either."
This fine example of the Reinterpretationist School naturally eschews the
medical connection.
"Jane, I'm down on my knee
because I have a very important question to ask you.... Will you marry
me? Please say yes and take this newsie as a token of our engagement."
Finally, we award the Grand Prize (which consists of this sentence) to
the following Reader Explication, because we still haven't stopped giggling
at it.
"This is a ventriloquist
dummy, Mrs. Peterson, not your son. I can't fix its leg because it's made
of wood."
"Of course my leg is made of wood,
I'm a knotty boy! Yuk yuk yuk!"
"Mrs. Peterson, I can see your mouth
moving."
Maybe it's the surprise appearance of Mrs. Peterson. That's always funny.
Blab. A reader alerts us to an evil plot connected with the Food
Pyramid, about which we were recently ranting. And just in time.
The Food Pyramid was invented
by Alistair Crowley! Instead of that occultic abomination, try the Jesus
Diet (AKA Essene Fruitarianism). It's endorsed by Jesus!
What would Jesus eat, eh?
Strictly vegetables is the answer! And we know this 'cause it says so
in what is called the Essene
New Testament.
An Irish clergyman, Rev.
G. J. Ouseley claims to have discovered the Original Gospel from which
the present Four Gospels were derived, which, he says, was "preserved in
one of the Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, where it was hidden by some of
the Essene Community for safety from the hands of the corrupters, and is
now for the first time translated from the Aramaic."
Wow. That's quite a load to swallow. Would it be OK with you if we just
remembered this in the form of Jesus liked fruit and pretty much
dispensed with the rest?
Thanks very.
Blab. A reader goes right to the source and asks the horse.
For optimum nutrition, I
went to the
only source I use now-a-days.
Although the second item found when
I searched had a better comment in the title bar.... "Suckin' on
crickets".
- Felis Lynx
How odd. We wonder what you searched for.
Blab. A reader encourages memory loss.
Forget food, become a Breatharian!
What's that?, we hear you ask. Well ...
A Breatharian is a person
who can, under the correct conditions, live with or without eating food.
Depending on how we interpret that, we're a Breatharian, in that we are
not currently eating food and yet we appear to be alive.
More interesting is a letter on the referenced site (click on Message
From Starship Marigold) that begins like this:
Date: Feb 9, 2003
From: Starship Marigold-City
of Lights, which hovers high above the North American continent.
To: The people of Earth.
We just love letters that begin like that. You always know that
something important follows. Or they wouldn't have bothered to write. At
least, that's the way we figure.
Blab. Our polite reader recommends the simplest nutritional regimen
we've heard so far.
Sir: I think that you should
just eat food
Food? Oh, yeah, food. We've heard of that. We should try it some time.
Blab. Finally, this reader not only gives an amazingly definitive
answer to our nagging questions on the Food Pyramid, but has obviously
done the definitive work in the field and invented time travel to
plant the answer in Scientific American just a few months "in the past".
Scientific American's "New
Food Pyramid"
We have the best readers! And we, like, learn stuff.
Since 1992 more and more
research has shown that the USDA pyramid is grossly flawed. [...]
How did the original USDA pyramid
go so wrong? In part, nutritionists fell victim to a desire to simplify
their dietary recommendations. [...]
Unfortunately, many nutritionists
decided it would be too difficult to educate the public about these subtleties.
Instead they put out a clear, simple message: "Fat is bad." [...] This
recommendation was soon reinforced by the food industry, which began selling
cookies, chips and other products that were low in fat but often high in
sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup. [...]
[N]o study has demonstrated long-term
health benefits that can be directly attributed to a low-fat diet.
And on and on. Great stuff! Oh, and it also tells you what to eat for a
healthy diet, as verified by what look to be rational epidemiological studies.
So go
read!
Blab. A reader tattles on itself.
From our conversation yesterday,
uttered by my good self:
"... that's something that I
haven't
quite got a finger on
..."
* "... got
a handle on ..."
* "... put
my finger on ..."
Congratulations!
Blab. We love this. We wondered just yesterday if the aging wackos
of Firesign Theatre (who must, we are horrified to imagine, be even older
than we are) were releasing any new bits. Today, a highly-placed source
answers the question.
Yes, they've fairly recently
started making new albums:
Brian Westley
firesigntheatre.com co-webmeister
Talk about a compulsive log-watcher. Brian here is worse than we
are!
But, hey, cool! New stuff. Shoot, they even have an Official
Digital Magazine, with clips. So go buy. You know, exchange value tokens
for bits. How else are these guys going to afford their drugs?
As titles go, we especially like Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death.
Blab. Our polite reader also warns us.
Sir: They are coming to your
fair city. Does the Supreme Court mean that we are supposed to block
this
porn?
Yes, please. But could you tell us just what that is?
Blab. A reader makes sure that Plurp stays as derivative
as ever.
Jill
Walker blogs Castranova's
observation that the value of consensus-reality assets might fall as
folks discover they prefer to spend their money on game assets.
As in, I've spent all my money on EverQuest and can no longer afford
food.
It makes sense, though. If game assets ever become a significant fraction
of the global economy (and assuming that the economy is a zero-sum game,
which it certainly isn't) then the price of some non-game assets (e.g.
caviar) would have to fall.
Yo. Try this.
It's remarkably hard to do well. (Luminous)
Yo. When it comes to Iraq's WMD, the truth is irrelevant. It's
all spin.
One recent poll found that
a third of the population actually believes that weapons have been discovered,
even though the best investigators have come up with are a couple of vehicles
some experts say might have been mobile bio-weapons laboratories. According
to a Gallup survey last week, 83 per cent of Americans believe Saddam was
developing nuclear arms, despite no serious evidence to support that view.
We invite 83% of Americans to avoid legal trouble by sending us a check
for $1,000 (each). Thank you.
Plop. America's
finest?
At least a dozen teenagers
assigned to work with police departments as part of the Boy Scouts' Law
Enforcement Explorers program have allegedly been sexually abused by officers
during the past year. In the past five years, such molestations number
at least 25, according to criminologists' research being released Wednesday.
Whether the police officers were also priests was not reported.
Plurp. And what are we to think of this?
IBM-sponsored camp aims to
draw girls into tech fields
Plop. Now, we don't mean to keep raising objections to Things,
but ...
Gadgets, wrestling and Pamela
Anderson -- is this what guys want?
It is if you believe TNN
(one of those analog "television stations") whose new programming model
features exactly that.
"This is about the broadness
of what guys are in their totality. They're interested in cars, fitness,
health and travel. And this is what we're offering them."
We're going to have to stop referring to ourself as a guy pretty soon.
As a "television analyst" says:
They're not appealing to
their intellects. They're appealing to the butt-scratching caveman in all
of us -- cartoons with naked strippers, giant sweaty men body-slamming
each other and monster trucks.
Anyhow, we object to the name Stripperella, as it sullies the
pure and chaste memory of Barbarella,
from which it so obviously derives.
Plurp. Have a chicken.
 Plop.
Did IQs just drop
sharply while we were away?
"When I'm president, we'll
have executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does
tomorrow or any other day," Gephardt said.
It's a sad day when we know more about government than the government
does
Plurp.
Gephardt appealed to the
butt-scratching caveman in
all of us
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Blab. A reader alleges:
You changed the colour of
her eyes, you nasty man!
No, honest! Helen bought those colored contacts all on her own. We didn't
even know about it.
Blab. Whereas Helen herself clears up the mystery of why she
never wore those blue contact lenses again.
I wasn't drowning in your
gushiness, I just can't get contacts to fit me.
H
Once again, we find ourself to be the prime mover of nothing at all, the
insignificant observer of a vast universe that spins in grand and glorious
ignorance of our existence.
It's kind of comforting.
Blab. A reader sends us an obvious Google inverse link:
3. Remove her clothes and
give her a hub, say "Thank you!"
... which leads to this.
We do not wish to speculate further. Especially as these things are being
done to cats. Cats. This can only spell trouble.
Blab. One of the cadre of jackbooted agents that watches our
every move proves its eternal vigilance by sending us this photograph,
obviously taken from right inside our apartment.
This is, of course, Him Whose Name Consumes Flowers at 5 AM,
and Willie. He loves his Willie.
Plurp. What do you people want of us, anyway?! Well, last
week, it was this. Or, at least, this is what you typed into our Gleaming
Chromium Search Facility.
-
imani
-
helen naked pitures
-
arsenic poisoning pictures
-
sarah kozer
-
britney
-
nxknsire
-
policeman
-
storks
-
aaliyah backgrounds
We are so awfully proud of being the only Google hits on "arsenic
poisoning pictures". Not to mention the soon-to-be only Google
hit on nxknsire.
Plurp. At long last, and you'll be glad to hear this, we present
the final, brain-squeezing image in our current series of Images Requiring
Reader Explication.
Do your worst, caption- or
explanation-wise, that is.
Plurp. The Supreme Court just cast in stone the economic Digital
Divide. Yes, now you'll have to go out and buy your own computer, and get
your own ISP, in order to cruise
for porn on the Web. The huddled masses will just have to do without
sex. Or move to France.
Plurp. Where did all those Iraqi military guys go? Certainly,
some of them shuffled off their military coil and went home. But some of
them are now engaged in what seems to be a coordinated guerilla war against
U.S. forces. You don't suppose Hussein was devious enough to plan this
ahead of time, do
you?
Rant. We are
so confused by Contemporary Nutritionists!
That Food Pyramid
thing? Confusing!
There's the serving thing. How big is a serving of milk?
How about a serving of meat? Or fruit? It turns out that the answer
is 1 cup. And 2-3 oz., and 1/2 cup, respectively. Wouldn't it be just a
tiny
bit simpler if this was (a) stated and/or (2) uniform? We know. We are
asking a lot.
But the thing that kills us (and we apparently mean that literally)
is the grain thing. Grains are good, says the food pyramid. You should
have 6-11 servings of grains every single day. Wheat grain (like
bread, or pasta). Rice grain (like, well, rice).
OK!, we said. We like pasta. We like rice. We can
be healthy. We can do this!
But no, say Contemporary Nutritionists. You misunderstood.
We
didn't mean wheat, they say. No, we meant whole wheat.
And
we didn't mean rice, they say. No, we meant brown rice.
Now, you're about to ask why, aren't you? Well, as nearly as we can
tell, it's 'cause whole/brown stuff has vitamins and minerals that the
unwhole/unbrown stuff lacks. Of course, we don't see any of that on the
Food Pyramid. Which leaves us awfully confused.
So, Treasured Readers! Tell us
what we should eat. (Heh.) As usual, cite us a definitive Web
reference and we'll save a place in Heaven for ya!
Plurp. You never know what
you'll find on the Web.
| God: |
Well now, what happened is ... ah
... one of my angels, he had a sort of ... well, he went a little funny
in the head ... you know ... just a little ... funny. And, ah ... he went
and did a silly thing ... I'm just dropping by to tell you something terrible
has happened... It's a *friendly* warning. Of course it's a friendly warning.
... Listen, if it wasn't friendly ... I probably wouldn't even tell you.
...
I'm very sorry. ... *All right*, you're sorrier than I am, but I am as
sorry as well. ... Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because
I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are. ... So we're both sorry,
all right?! ... All right. |
It's an amazing context switch, isn't it?
Yow. Gollygosh. Firesign Theatre, which still holds sway over
millions and millions of our neurons, still
exists! What's worse, these guys are still publishing stuff.
(It's not clear if they're actually publishing new stuff, but still.)
Yak. From our very own mouth today.
Dirt simple
How'd that get in there?
Plurp.
The blue dog
went and did a silly
thing
Monday, June 23, 2003
Blab. A reader disputes the wild
claim from last week that "transcranial magnetic stimulation" increases
your creativity. Well, not your creativity. Somebody's creativity.
I've never had any success
with using magnetic forces to motivate my students to perform. Electrical
forces, in the form of stun-guns are proven to work especially in double-blind
tests where I blindfold myself and the student and chase them with a tazer.
Great party game. Very stimulating. I suppose you could argue that there
are magnetic forces involved but only if you're a pendantic physics major.
Extraordinary mental skills, indeed.
Who makes this stuff up?
Dorian
As a pedantic physics major, we will only point out that it was
those fun-loving folks at U. Australia what made it up. We never make things
up.
Blab. A reader keeps us up on the latest fad. We were still trying
to catch up with the last one.
The newest pet sensation:
Microhorses!
Oh, good. These should at least be easier to catch up with.
Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for the Harvard Law Review, a
reader writes:
The First Amendment does
not shield criminal conduct in tax
schemes.
To wit:
A federal judge ordered a
Las Vegas tax adviser yesterday to stop selling a book that contends income
taxes are voluntary and that people can lawfully escape them by filing
tax returns listing no income. A civil liberties group said it thought
the ruling improperly censors the book. [...]
Mr. Schiff and his associates, the
judge wrote, knew that they "are offering fraudulent tax advice" and that
the book is false commercial speech which "is not protected by the First
Amendment."
We will leave it to the constitutional
law experts to actually figure out what all of this means. We can only
shake our head at the tragic figures who have not yet realized that thumbing
their noses at the IRS in public makes them a target.
Blab. A fan of shockingly inexpensive
air fares writes:
OK, so it's not an alien
food symbol, but Ryan Air admit that they are aware of the flight needs
of aliens
"Portuguese nationals and alien residents
under 18 years, leaving or re-entering Portugal unaccompanied by their
father, mother or legal guardian need a travel authorization."
We always worried about Portugal. And "Canada",
of course.
Blab. A reader writes:
Amazing what those colored
contact lenses do, ain't it?
Yes, it is. Helen once got
a pair that made her eyes a couple of shades bluer than they actually are,
and didn't tell us about it. Instead, she just showed up wearing them,
eliciting from us, in our cluelessness, the most gushy reaction possible.
She never wore them again. We're not sure why.
Blab. A foot fetishist writes:
I think the strongest photo
to come out of Bush's little excursion for oil was this from an AP photographer.
I a sorry to say that I can not identify the photographer.
[Grisly photo of bloody feet omitted.
- Plurp]
Isn't that special?
Blab. It shocks us that we have any readers at all. Now we are
triply shocked by having an entire fan base.
Your Plurpness:
This
will bring to mind long-forgotten times,
when weekly mottos were very funny too ("Side-effects include eternal damnation"),
it might make you fall of your chair and roll on the floor laughing off
various bodyparts because of added visual humor, and it will make you curse
Realplayer for not allowing to save the file when its shoddy streaming-protocol
breaks under "net-congestion", and because of sheer lack of bass. Still,
it'll make you laugh, too, I suppose.
Your european fanbase.
Simply fantastic: A vid
of Da Vinci's Notebook singing Title of the Song in Boy Band style.
It's hard to imagine anything better, isn't it?
Thank you, Treasured European Fanbase. We have immortalized your contribution
in the appropriate place on our Generic
Literature page.
Yo. A new film version of H.P. Lovecraft's The
Unnamable is underway. Allegedly, it is a faithful adaptation (good
pun, but not ours). This is potentially a good thing, as most of the film
adaptations to date have been the worst
schlock imaginable.
Of course, the filming isn't completed yet, and they seem still to be
looking for money. Maybe they'll be driven insane before they complete
it.
Plurp.
The blue dog
had not realized that
the nose
was a target
Sunday, June 22, 2003
Plurp.
 |
