Plurp: Nxknsire

Bigger!

2003.06.29 : 2003.07.05

Saturday, July 5, 2003
Blab. A reader writes:
Some kids have a pet kitten, she has the planet saturn.

She is wise. The planet Saturn is not known to throw up on both the bed and the living room rug on the same afternoon.

Blab. A reader's mind is strained by a foreshadowing alignment of events.
Um, that's the strangest damn thing... I was on that Lovecraft site yesterday and was pondering whether to send you a link to it, but assumed you already knew of it and I didn't want to be chided for not knowing what you already know. Now I find out you are reading my thoughts. Curse you! Always one step ahead!
Perhaps we are both the unwitting pawns of forces much larger than either of us, eh?

Blab. You know what we like about Japan? It's the educational system.
Straddle the toilet. Squat down.

Blab. A reader wishes that our mind worked differently than it does. Naturally, so do we.
"Of the streets numbered 1 through 59, our sushi joint is on the one with the maximum number of factors that is not a power of two."
Yes, but what does that have to do with sushi? I mean, it's a good method for remembering that something important is on 48th St., but some morning you're going to wake up and say to yourself, "Ah, yes! I'd like to go that place on 48th St., because I remember that of the streets numbered 1 through 59, that is the one with the maximum number of factors (the 'that is not a power of two' restriction not even being necessary). But was that my favorite sushi joint, or was it my favorite dry cleaner?"
Several of your reader submissions actually worked sushi into the mnemonic, and thus are superior solutions.
What can we tell you? We can remember over fifty different passwords for various parts of cyberspace without any trouble, but a single street name seems impossible at times. Fortunately for us, the sushi joint is one of the few places to which we have to navigate frequently without Helen, and hence requires this kind of keen acumen on our part.
We bow to the inevitable fact that our readers are all superior to us.
(That restriction is necessary, though, isn't it?)

Plurp. We shoved Helen into a burlap bag yesterday and dragged her to T3. (Bonus: Got her in for half price.)
The most curious demographic violation was a young, attractive, well dressed woman who came in alone, sat down in the row in front us (which was very close to the front) and started reading Glamour magazine.
We never did figure that one out.
T3 was good, and recommended, though we found that a Terminator movie done almost entirely for laughs (except for the somber, desperately depressing end) was quite cognitively dissonant.
The shark has been jumped. We hope they don't make a T4.

Yak. Yesterday, after the trailer for The Punisher, which premieres next summer.
Helen: What was that?
Steve: Don't worry. You have a whole year until then.

Plurp. Let's go up to the roof, said Helen last night, so we did - up to the penthouse floor, then up a flight of stairs and through a door marked Alarm Will Sound (it didn't) to join two dozen other residents watching the Macy's fireworks through the jumble of buildings between here and 34th St., counting all the way to five until the thud from each burst reached us, seeing fragments of the display in a million glass rectangles and following the lone police helicopter as it scoured the rooftops with its searchlight.
It was fun.

Plurp. It seems that Dell has decided to stop using prisoners as part of their work force. Next they'll be telling us that they're getting rid of all the children in their factories. Then where will they be?

Plurp. Yesterday, on the word clay.
The long expanse of gray stretched out before her, broken, veined, lips curling derisively. It must be a hundred miles, she thought. It was more.
And today, on the coincidentally related word pant.
She knew it was the end, but there was nothing she could do about it. The dust, the sun, and hundreds of miles of nothing. So she lay there, her tongue dry and her eyes closed, waiting.

Yow. Ooh! Ooh! Our very first new comic strip in over a year, with kudos to the nice people at stripcreator. (Our entire body of work is here, in our Stuff section, of course.)

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a superior
solution

Friday, July 4, 2003
Blab. The black-suited men in that surveillance van outside our apartment write:
you got crabs
Well, it wouldn't be the first time, now, would it? In this case, they are our favorite kind: hermit crabs! (Though they can get pretty uncomfortable.)

Blab. A prestigious "Canadian" university brings us ...
Beard Science!
The surprising conclusion? The half of the face with the beard really was warmer than the half of the face without the beard. Call Stockholm.

Blab. A reader recognizes that mysterious paragraph from yesterday.
That is the second paragraph of the Customized Classics edition of "The Picture of Dorian Grey", Muslim version.
Yes, but what was the first paragraph?

Blab. We confuse one of our Treasured Readers.
Backdraft is your among your favorite movies!?
That old saw? Goodness, no! It simply features some of our favorite arson techniques.

Blab. A reader who knows that we are extremely interested in its personal Alien hierarchy writes:
I know you are extremely interested in my personal Alien hierarchy, so here goes:
1. Alien
2. Aliens
3. Alien Resurrection
4. Tootsie
5. Alien 3
And don't think you're better than me because you can make the superscript 3. I know what you're thinking, White.
Oh yeah? 48! OK?!
The nerve.

Blab. A reader proves itself more clever than us.
last call on 48...
the restaruant is between 1 and 59.
5-1=4, 9-1=8
You know, that would have been so much easier than what we settled on.

Blab. A reader unveils for us a bleak future.
It happens to the best of us.

At least Superman has made progress.

Blab. A foodie keeps us current with the megatrends.
The newest taste sensation: McMeerkat!

Yeah, one just opened up on the corner.

Plurp. Are you playing The Great Below?
Objective:
Each player composes a team of 25 celebrity individuals that they think/hope will die within the next year. At the end of the year, whomever's team has generated the highest score is the winner.
Scoring:
A player scores points when someone on their team of celebrities dies. The amount of points awarded is determined by subtracting the age of the celebrity from 100.
100 - the age of the dead celebrity
= X amount of points.
So, Milton Berle died at the age of 93, therefore he was worth 7 points. All celebrities age 99 and above are worth 1 point.
Yeah, us neither.

Yow. Well lookee there! What looks like full-text versions of most of the works of H.P. Lovecraft right there on the Web for all to see. We didn't figure that these had yet fallen into the Dark Abyss of the Public Domain but, hey, we're not a copyright lawyer.

Yo. Everything I need to know I learned from H.P. Lovecraft.

Yo. And in an amazing confluence, we are compelled to wonder if Jonathan Hoag was, in fact, H.P. Lovecraft!

Yo. Spray-on silk stockings? Oh, those quirky Japanese!

Plurp. Oh yeah. So, don't eat too much BBQ chicken or blow yourselves up with fireworks, OK? We can't afford to lose any more readers.

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be a
spray-on icon

Thursday, July 3, 2003
Blab. Unable to clear its mind of this week's frightening (and, in this case, reader-contributed) image, a Treasured Reader is forced to, you know, say things.

Runner up in National Geographic Cover Girl Look-a-like contest fails to net top spot by not having purple eyes.
Not a very snappy caption, but made me chuckle all the same. Off to find my tablets now...
OK! That's funny!
Feeling suddenly somber, a reader gives this ominous interpretation.
The picture taunted good Muslim women by appearing in public without a burkha. For nearly twenty years it appeared ageless and unchanging, all the while insulting the Prophet by brazenly appearing in Western media. Yet with each transgression, hidden away in Purdah, Sharbat Gula grew older and uglier.
This looks like the second paragraph of what could be a very good, very short story. Readers are invited to try their hands at the first paragraph.

Blab. Similarly, readers respond with remarkable fervor to our challenge to read our mind and tell us how we remember that our favorite sushi place is on 48th St. Having dispensed with the more believable (but incorrect) explanations, these are more creative.
Remember the saying "I am '2' stupid to remember the road number"
Then remember that double "2" is 4
and double 4 is 8
48! voila!
Excellent! Easy to remember, arithmetically compelling, factors of two and stuff. Its only disadvantage is being incorrect.
A reader once again interprets that palindrome for us.
Ate for tea -> For tea, ate -> 48
I clam (since I'm from Ipswich) my prize!
And we're happy to shell out! A Freedom reader invents this mnemonic.
sushi
v
susie
v
susie q
v
q
v
q8
v
quarante-huit
It's that q -> q8 transition that puzzles us. Along similar, but more inbred, lines is this:
Sushi on 48th? As easy as this!
That Baconizer is impressive!

Sushi (Essential Kitchen Series)

Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls

Nobu: The Cookbook

Iron Chef: The Official Book

Backdraft: Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Backdraft

Die Hard

Lethal Weapon

Beverly Hills Cop

48 HRS

Once again, we are amazed, not only by its ability to connect the two, but by the fact that it loops through one of our obsessive TV shows and several of our favorite movies. How does it know?
Finally, a reader suggests the ultimately inbred possibility.
I think I know how you associated 48 with sushi.
You wrote about it in Plurp, inviting readers to speculate on a then-nonexistent connection. By now, there's so much connection between 48 and sushi in Plurp due to all the Blab that it's virtually impossible to forget it. Heck, now I know--and will probably remember for several years--that Steve White's favorite sushi joint is on 48th St. in Manhattan, despite the fact that I live a thousand miles away and will probably never have occasion to make practical use of that fact.
Wow. That's a really good idea! We'll definitely use that next time. Or else this:
The way you remember that the sushi restaurant is on 48th Street is clear - 48th Street is the place that you've attempted to get all of your Plurp readers to come up with "your mnemonic" for, when in fact, every time we repeat it, it gets drilled a little farther into your memory until there's no possible way for you to forget it. Clever!
(Our readers inadvertently suggest a more general mechanism for remembering Things.)
So, how did we remember it? You'll recall that we could (somehow) remember that our favorite sushi place was south of the 59th St. bridge. Of the streets numbered 1 through 59, our sushi joint is on the one with the maximum number of factors that is not a power of two.
We learn from this exercise that our way of remembering things is not universally obvious, a lesson that we should have learned long ago. We delight in the many ways in which our inventive readers would remember something similar, and we will doubtless ask them how to remember the trivialities of our life in the future.

Blab. Our polite reader asks:
Sir: Aren't you glad you do not live in Sag Harbor ?
Yes, but more because of the location than the laws against disrobing in wagons, as much pleasure as that does bring us. On the other hand, in our very own New York City, this same site alleges this interesting pair:

Women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business.

It is illegal for a woman to be on the street wearing "body hugging clothing."

We tried to find a New York City law that said the former a while ago and were completely unsuccessful. The latter seems to run rather against the spirit of the former. Hence, we are deeply suspicious of both and, by transitivity, of the whole freaking site.
Clever Readers will send us proof positive, confirming or denying.

Blab. A reader suggests that the world is not functioning according to the documentation.
On the eve of the 4th of July
So Frist, another helmet-haired Republican (a subset of the species) thinks marriage is a freaking sacrament! This is the guy that runs the United States Senate!! A sacrament, ladies and gentlemen, so decreed by a political leader in a country begun by folks who worked like heck (hell is a theological-mythological term which we will avoid here for consistency) to separate ju-ju from governance. Don't these bozos get it? Pray for peace, right? Like it works.
Marriage is about property rights. Period. Men have buggered each other since get-go, so enough of this mystical belief nonsense governing American policy. Pope Scalia in the Supreme Court, a president who has pacts with his right wing god and does prayer breakfasts while poor kids go hungry, and now this doctor with supreme interests in the private health care business making a civil contract a sacrament!
I can't stand it!!!
We'll see your Pharaoh and raise you another!
Alabama's conservative Republican governor [Bob Riley] has created a new convergence of faith and politics. Citing his Christian faith, he's calling for a $1.2 billion tax hike, largely on the backs of wealthier taxpayers, for the benefit of the poor.
It's all adding up to the largest increase in the state's history, and perhaps the first based on the Bible. [...]
"Jesus says one of our missions is to take care of the least among us," the governor told the Birmingham News after announcing his plan. "We've got to take care of the poor."
What part of Congress shall make no law do these people not understand?
You know, we were saying just last weekend, in a discussion with an erudite person who was studying Islamic culture, that the three great innovations of Western society were (1) capitalism, (2) polyculturalism and (3) the secular state.
Looks like we were wrong. Again.

Blab. A reader makes us feel like our blogging hobby is positively normal.
Quote: "dB (as in decibel) drag racing is an obscure but growing international "sport" in which competitors go head-to-head for two or three seconds at a time -- hence the name drag racing -- to establish whose sound system is loudest. The 2002 record, set by a German team of secretive audio engineers, was 177.6 dB."
It's hard to know where even to start with this. It's a tribute to humanity's love of excess. Go read it. And wonder.

Blab. Some poor, unfortunate soul, some time in the past week or so (hey - we're lucky to have any functioning neurons left; get off our back) told us about some drink or other than solidifies on the way down your throat.
We may have expressed a teensy amount of skepticism. As a result, a reader seems to have lobbed our way a blind ...
[link]
... on the topic.
Doug's Modified Cement Mixer
Drink Ingredients

1 shot Bailey's Irish Cream

2 - 3 splashes Lemon Juice

Drink Directions
Put Bailey's into a shot glass about 2/3 full. Fill the rest of the shot with Lemon or Lime juice. Take the shot and swish it around in your mouth. It feels really neat. Swallow it before it becomes solid.
We hate to be the one to break it to our Treasured Reader, but such seems to be our lot in life. Dear, Treasured Reader, this concoction does not become solid on the way down your throat. Well, not exactly. The Lemon or Lime juice curdles the cream in the Bailey's. That is, it curdles on the way down your throat.
You can achieve a similar effect by mixing milk, lemon juice and cheap vodka. If you don't mind being sober after you swallow curdled milk, you can leave out the vodka.

Blab. On unfolding Events, a reader asks:
How can you be patient? Can't you see that there's a conspiracy that's trying to hunt down the Old Ones? Unless we act NOW, the Time of Alignment will come, and THEY'LL be in control....
On a side note, will we have to change the quote to "Dead Cthulhu dreams in a specimen jar"?
- Felis Lynx
Fear not, Treasured Reader. The Old Ones were here long before the first stirrings of humanity. They will be here long after our dust has been forgotten. Our existence, our puny conceit of power, is of no notice to them. They shall hold dominion over the Earth and the stars. As they always have.

Plop. Rats. Why did it have to be rats?

Plurp. We happened on an analog TV program today which showed some folks in Times Square holding forth on their particular beliefs to a bemused crowd. They appeared to be some variant of Islamists, and we wonder if they are a home grown flavor.
They believe, rather fervently, that Europe of the Dark Ages (and this is why it was called the Dark Ages) was populated primarily with blacks. King Arthur was black. (That's why they called them "knights".) Shakespeare was black. The Vikings were black.
We are not making this up. That's what they said.
Two questions arose in the midst of our surprise.

What do they regard as evidence for these interesting claims?

How do they integrate all of the evidence to the contrary into their world view?

Readers are encouraged to enlighten us.
We observe that everyone has a base of beliefs upon which they build everything else, and that everyone has their own standard of credulity.
No one is capable of understanding, in detail, everything in the universe. We all make do by taking epistemological shortcuts. Some of us have shortcuts that work really well. Others of us do not. But no one thinks their shortcuts are invalid.
No one.

Plurp. Of the four Alien movies, we thought Aliens was by far the best, probably because of the campy military theme. But how can you not love a movie that introduced the line, I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure? We use that at work at least once a week.
Alien was a masterpiece of modern SF horror, and we still grimace at the first emergence scene. Alien³ was cool, but a smaller movie.
Don't talk to us about Alien Resurrection. What a piece of trash. (Though the basketball scene is still a fav.)

Plurp.
The blue dog
left out the
vodka

Wednesday, July 2, 2003
Blab. Gosh, it's a busy day here in Plurpville. We can hardly keep track of all of the threads of foolishness we have going on here. But we'll try!
Our first foolishness is Yet Another Caption Contest.

We are appreciative of this entry from little Billy, who will just be starting fourth grade this year.
That picture is of your Sunday Afghan girl all grown up. NatGeo used advanced science stuff to verify it. So there.
Isn't that sweet? A more culturally enmeshed reader tries this.
National Geographic aged me 30 years! It can do the same for you!
- Felis Lynx
We feel certain that it already has. Meanwhile, this reader sees a universe of self-resemblance.
Ummm, the before-photoshop and after-photoshop pictures of your new mid-eastern bride? or, much more thematic with my nom-de-plume; the picture in the attic vs reality.
Dorian
Helen will be so upset with us! Next, a veteran reader donates a thousand-word caption.
For your caption competition, an entry in pictorial form.

Cut, paste etc...
-AJL
Imagine the possibilities. And our final entrant (today, anyhow) is a real giggler.
Sign up for one year of National Geographic and get this handsome magazine stand for free.
That's quite wonderful. Congrats to all of our winners!

Blab. Next up is the Reader Contest in which we asked you to read our mind and tell us how we remember that our favorite sushi joint is on 48th St. This turns out to be much harder than we thought.
well 48 in binary is 110000, which in yen is roughly the monthly rent of a good sushi restaurant.
That's as close as anyone's come yet, which should give you an idea of how close anyone's come yet.
Next, a reader tries to salvage the notion that that carefully encoded answer to the problem (which is also as close as anyone's come yet) is a palindrome.
The only obvious way that "For tea, ate sushi" (aka 48 sushi) is a palindrome is that you get the same result if you approach it from either end of Manhattan. Or translate it to asciiToEBCDIC(rot13("For tea, ate sushi")) and examine the packed decimal representation.
Don't you find your readers quite a frightful collection?
Dorian
Yes. Nevertheless, a reader displays the implicit, invisible letters that make it a palindrome.
For tea, ate sushihsusetaaetrof.
Sorry if that wasn't obvious.
We discover a reader who responds nicely to suggestion.
48 = default setting for the Orbital Mind Control Lasers
A really, really good guess! Wrong, but really, really good!
A reader chooses the arithmetic path.
48 is just 11 less than 59, the street of the bridge?
While indisputably true, it is not the way we remember it. Sorry. And again ...
You did it by remembering that '48 is four years before you were born?
-AJL
And again, no. In fact, we use no method that decomposes 48 into an arithmetic result of two other numbers, one of which might be easier to remember.
Given the collective brilliance of our readership, we may just have to give up and admit that our method is too obscure to be rediscovered. It is a relief, however, that no one can read our mind. Or at least, won't admit it.

Blab. A reader sends us news of an Amazing Offer.
"Call me Plurp."
Let's see if we understand this. We pay these folks money, and they send us one of those physical book things, like Moby Dick, except that you get to substitute your own names for those of the major characters, and of course you have to find a place to hide it so that it won't be seen by guests, as that would be infinitely embarrassing?
We'll get right on that.

Blab. One of Helen's friends writes:
Well, let's see. The choice is between a has-been actor-cum-political candidate trying, desperately, to have a come-back hit and really...slow...direction... from the man that brought us Crouching Tiger Hidden Plotline.
Ditch the movies, grab sushi (on your oh-so-lovely 48th) and take the brown-haired blue-eyed diva to the park for dinner.
That way, she'll be willing to see two DECENT movies later.
Like Tomb Raider 2 and LotR:RotK ? That would be cool.

Blab. A reader hopes that we remain detained indefinitely.
I had Jury Duty this winter. The judge told the whole group that everyone who had jury duty left feeling like it was a great experience. After they explained the details of the case (it was estimate to take 18 weeks!) the judge talked to us each individually. I told him that I already held him in contempt for lying to us about the "great experience" nonsense. He told me I was excused and could leave. Hope you have a great experience for the next 18 weeks :-)
Dorian
Don't leave feeling like it was a great experience, said the judge. Just leave.

Blab. A reader mocks our advancing age.
Can you hear me now? Good!
How rude! (We want ours in cobalt blue.)

Blab. A reader wishes to understand the spiritual essence of IBM.
What kind of cockamamie, fly-by-night company do you work for, anyway? Your solution is over 36 hours late!
The kind that publishes excellent mathematical puzzles, and the names of the people who correctly solve them, each month, just for fun.
Enjoy!

Blab. A local expert recommends stuff for Helen to investigate as we plan for a few days in sunny England.
If we were looking for a hotel in which to stay in London, we would almost certainly check wotif.com as a first resort. Of course, living only a few miles due South of the sprawling mass that is England's first city, we are unlikely to ever want to book a hotel there.
We hope you enjoy your trip. Let us know when you're coming and we'll put t'kettle on.
--paj
Do feel free to put t'kettle on even before we arrive. We wouldn't want you to do without.

Plurp. You people! Who else's search logs are a constant source of performance art? That's what we want to know.

imani

helen naked pitures

chihuly

snarkelflatz

iris chacon pictures

quorn naked pictures

naked pictures of helen

mmmm

sushi perfect

vinci

Yow. Here's a wonderfully written review of T3. If the movie's as much fun as the review, we're going to have a great time.
Supermodel Kristanna Loken embodies this creature in her fleshly appearances, but just as often she's played by Pixels Nos. 8.5 through 13.1 billion, as when she melts like a Popsicle, splatters like a mud pie, atomizes like a cherry bomb or turns her left hand into a Black & Decker No. 4 wide-band power saw.

Yo. After mentioning menthol licorice treats yesterday, we got to wondering just what the heck menthol was, anyway. Naturally, the Web provideth, this time from that authoritative source, the Alien Travel Guide, located in "Canada".

Yo. Just when we thought it was safe to come off the anti-psychotics, they find another giant sea creature.
The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-meter) mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate. [...]
Photographs showed a round leathery substance like a mammoth jelly fish, about as long as a school bus.

This does not frighten us. Certainly not. We know that the Time of Alignment is coming. We know that That Which Sleeps will awaken. And we have been patient. Oh, so very patient.

Plurp. We heard on the news last night that Dubya doesn't indulge in second thoughts about the war in Iraq. This does not strike us as surprising, considering the prerequisite.

Yow. Dave mentions The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, probably our favorite Heinlein story, more favorite even than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Starship Troopers. Why? Three reasons.

We like the name Hoag. It fills up our mouth.

We like the idea of the universe as a student art project. It explains a lot, doesn't it?

We just plain love the picnic scene. Maybe the best scene ever in SF. We have that same sense of wonder at the world.

Plurp. What's this?
This time, there is NO LIMIT on the number of pre-registered Smiths

Plurp. Today, on the word candle.
The electricity had been off for nine days. The firewood was gone. And now, the candle ...
(Most of the sixty seconds allotted to our authorship was spent thinking instead about topics which were, um, inappropriate for posting here.)

Plop. In other tech news ...
The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city.
Of course, that's only in a foreign city. It wouldn't work in your home town because, uh, ...
Readers are invited to read the article and revel in the surveillance systems soon to be installed in foreign cities such as Ft. Belvoir, VA.

Yow. Battle-scarred readers will remember that we have a special fondness for Bryant Gumbel, mediocre sports broadcaster cum pissy talk show host cum failed talk show host cum washed-up has-been.
Mai no! Monsieur le Gumball has seeped again to the surface in that prestigious new cable show, The Roswell Crash: Startling New Evidence.
Yup. UFOs on the SciFi Channel.
There is a certain satisfaction in the scant justice to be had in the world, isn't there?
Next: Voice-overs for Alpo.

Plurp.
The blue dog
dined exclusively on
pissy talk show hosts

Tuesday, July 1, 2003
Blab. A reader sends us more legal news.
Subj: Bloggers Gain Libel Protection
Now you can repubish all kinds of nasty things about me you find on the web.
Dorian
Our Treasured Reader tempts us with this.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers.
If only we knew who you were, our Forever Pseudonymous Reader, we would happily find words on the infinite Web which we could take out of context to lambaste you mightily.

Blab. Having pointed out that that picture was not, in fact, a woman, we find that our life's purpose has now been achieved.
Thanks for clearing up about the woman/collection of pixels. I am a lot less nervous now.
Time for us to head back to the home planet.

Blab. A reader sends us an image. Two images.

We conjecture that this is an advertisement for National Geographic within some demographic that is way, way outside our experience.
Readers are invited to submit the tag line or ad copy that goes with this image. In fact, we'll even declare it today's Imaginary Plurp Contest. Have at it.

Blab. A reader solves Helen's problem of which hotel to choose by what strikes us as a remarkably simple algorithm.
The Parkwood is more expensive, so it must be better!
Actually, I'm about three-fourths serious. If I were to seriously suggest that the most expensive of all options was the best one, that would be absurd. But I am not suggesting that the most expensive of all options is the best, only the most expensive of the two you are seriously considering is better.
If a potential site A were more expensive than potential site B, and it were not as good as B, you would have already eliminated it from serious consideration--as you did with the places you stayed before. Since you are still considering the Parkwood in spite of it being more expensive than the Edward Lear, it must be better. Shell out the extra bucks and stay there.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually looked at the web page for either place.
Aren't scalars wonderful? We're a big believer in totally ordered sets. They're so ... orderly.

Blab. A second reader uses a similar algorithm to come to an opposite conclusion.
Required answer: Definitely the Lear joint. Cheaper and stranger; what's to choose?
Cheap and strange - that's definitely us!

Blab. A third reader also sees the charm in avoiding undue homework, preferring instead to make up characteristics of the two hotels.
I can't get at either web site for some unknown and highly technical reason (someone must have turned the internet off), but the Hyde Park one sounds nice. Views of the park are almost always a good thing.
There are a series of concerts in Hyde Park at this time of year as well, if you like that sort of thing.
We've been thinking about Hyde Park screen savers and flea bag hotels. Would that work?

Blab. Our polite reader thinks for far too long about this problem.
Sir: I recommend that you and Helen do not stay at the edward Lear as that might inspire you to write in limericks exclusively instead of just mostly as you do now. At least they look like limericks.
We write exclusively in limericks in an unknown tongue.

Blab. At long last, a Zen-like reader sees beyond the dichotomy.
come stay with me
an english reader
Honest, officer! We had permission to hop in that window. See? It says right here: "come stay with me".

Blab. A reader must surely be disappointed with its attempt to figure out how we remember that our favorite sushi joint is on 48th St.
is 48 your age? if so, you can remember (if only for a year)
Gosh, we suspect that would have occurred to us immediately, had it been the case, and we could have skipped that embarrassing middle part in which we wrote the number 48 on our hand repeatedly.
So good try, but ... no.

Blab. Another reader tries this old saw.
If yer get to 49th, you've missed it. Unless you start from the other end of course.
We get the impression that our readers don't like our puzzle. And it's really a very good puzzle! You don't have to know anything at all about Manhattan (other than what we told you), and you only have to know a little about us.
And it's not that hard. At least we don't think so. It's not like it's going to show up on the Putnam Exam, fercrissake.
So let's all spend a few seconds of quality time on this one. It'll be fun!

Blab. One of the jackbooted agents fondles the knobs on the Orbital Mind Control Lasers and croons:
So, tell the folks about being "Amuse"d tonight. A complete and serious YUM!
Happy #*@^!DAY!!
It ... was ... good. We ... had ... food.

Blab. We are always under surveillance.
Ah but jury duty brought you lunch with two lovely ladies.
All right. We admit it! Yesterday, we did have lunch with two very lovely ladies. And one equally lovely lady today. Is it such a crime? Leave us alone!

Blab. And on that same topic, the cadre that compulsively records our innermost thoughts reveals this.
A weakness for blue eyes and dark hair? STEVE??
It turns out to be true. We have a deeply subconscious weakness for women with brown hair and blue eyes. It's extremely common for us to see a woman, for a fraction of a second in a subway or in a movie, and think, Yikes, she's so pretty! Inevitably, and we mean with virtually no exceptions in our lifetime, this woman turns out to have brown hair and blue eyes, even if we didn't know that consciously at the time.
At least one person in our life has capitalized upon this fact.

Blab. Referring to this reader contribution from yesterday ...
For tea, ate sushi.
... a reader writes:
Sir: I do not believe that that is a palindrome.
Sure it is!

Blab. A reader recites a magical incantation which might solve our now total inability to get a behind-the-IBM-firewall connection from our less-than-perfectly-Internet-enabled jury duty holding cell.
You might want to try ticking the semi-magical "Negotiate UDP Encapsulation with VPN tunnel server for NAT traversal" button in the login properties sectin of the AT&T Network Client. (Alt-L from the dialer, then the preferences tab, look about 2/3 of the way down) Setting (or sometimes unsetting) this often makes it possible to get through various odd firewall configurations and connect sucessfully. This being software, your milage may vary.
Sadly, we will get an opportunity to try it in the morning.

Yow. One of the few, minor recompenses for being a Minion of the State this week is the ability to sneak off during lunch break to Chinatown, where we get all too rarely these days, and indulge in hugely wonderful food at nanoprices.
Today's exceptionally excellent find was Aji Ichiban (whose URL is tragically misspelled on their own packaging). Imagine the now-standard bulk candy store that you find in any pre-fab mall these days. You know, big plastic bins full of brightly colored sugar objects that you scoop into plastics bags and pay for by weight, whereupon you depart, smiling through your cavities.
But, instead of American sugar objects, these are Chinese snack objects. There are salt dried plums, crystallized dried plums, sour dried plums, spicy dried plums, dried guava chips, a dozen varieties of dried ginger, menthol licorice root, and on and on. Then there's the seafood section, in which we could not resist buying something called Thai's Squid, which is, approximately, squid jerky, cut very thin, dried, salted and spiced, and entirely delicious!
We've had to hide it in a high cupboard after the bag attracted far too much attention from a certain pest in our apartment.

Plurp. Today, on the word stall.
Right there in the middle of the fricking intersection. On the hottest day of the year! That old Ford just laid down and died and, with it, any hope that I would get another job, any other job, that day.
Ack. This is going downhill.

Plurp. It just might become possible to create a child from in vitro fertilization of eggs taken from an aborted fetus. That is, it might become possible to create a child whose mother never lived.
We wish to create an entire race of people who never lived, and use them to not populate certain regions of the world. We're thinking of starting with the Middle East. Or Texas.

Plurp. We seem to have convinced Helen to be dragged off to a movie of our choice this weekend. (We probably can't get away with two.) We're debating between Hulk and Terminator 3. Readers are invited to compromise our free will.

Plurp.
The blue dog
dined exclusively on dried crystallized
cat noses

Monday, June 30, 2003
Blab. A reader ventures a theory to explain how we can remember that our favorite sushi joint is on 48th St. (This was, and you may have missed it, Saturday's Tedious Plurp Contest. It's not too late to enter!)
EASY! Remember that 48th Street is just one block north of 47th Street which is, of course, the Diamond District. Hey! Doesn't get a whole lot simpler than that!
Must be Helen, eh? We're sure that's how she remembers it, but it's not how we remember it. Please try again.

Blab. A reader recites a palindrome.
For tea, ate sushi.
Very nice!

Blab. Into a similarly literary vein, a reader injects a poem.
Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.
That vein is likely to be bruised for the rest of the week. Maybe longer.

Blab. A reader states a theory and provides contradicting evidence.

The bad guys always have the best fashion sense.

We suspect this is generally true, though recent good-guy duds as in the Matrix provide hope for good-guy fashionistas everywhere.
But this particular couple of bad guys? They hardly seem like good examples of fashion sense to us. But we'd be the last to know, we suppose.

Blab. Smuggled out of Cuba at great personal risk, by a reader who insists on anonymity, is this.

Camp X-Ray, Phase II
What's the country coming to when even GI Joe is subjected to imprisonment without benefit of trial? And just what are they doing in there, anyway?

Blab. A stereotypical reader sends us ...
More inscrutable Chinese culture
We are very fond of this picture, depicting, as it does, a dozen Chinese Harry Potters searching for a cure for lockjaw. It's a favorite theme of ours.

Blab. A kindly reader provides us with a ...
Photo of science
And indeed it is. Literally. And enigmatically.

Blab. Helen is back with a dilemma.
Subj: Helen Thinks
I know, I know. I haven't thought for quite some time. I have been busy.
I have a dilemma. Steve and I are going to London for a few days later this summer and we need a place to stay. Everything there is so expensive now. That Almighty Dollar is so weak. I believe I saw that one pound costs $1.71 now. Dreadful.
OK, so back to my dilemma. Because of the poor exchange rate, any place we have stayed before is out of the question. After days and days and days (and people ask what I DO for a living!) I have found two B&Bs that I am fond of and that Steve thinks are reasonable. The rest is up to you, dear Plurp readers.
I am trusting you with the holy responsibility of choosing our hotel in London. Two things first. The Parkwood is close to Hyde Park and the Speaker's Corner and on a quiet side street. Has gobs of London charm. Costs the greater of the two. The Edward Lear has all sorts of different Lear-ian charm. Understand that there is Lear art all over the place. Have spent some fun time on the literary page reading the limericks and looking at his stuff.
SO, Plurp readers, into which hotel shall you thrust your dear Dr. Plurp and his BEAUTIFUL (I love being me) wife for 4 or 5 days?
All right-thinking Plurp readers are required to answer. All wrong-thinking ones are too. There's no getting out of this.

Blab. A reader with an excellent memory writes:
Lessee. The page one girl is from Afghanistan and by now could be my mother as the photo is quite old. National Geographic 1980s, me thinks. This is all from memory as I'm away from my books at the moment. - Morton
Despite the age, Treasured Reader, we don't think a woman in a photograph could have become your mother were she not previously. Or did they change the rules on that recently? We always miss stuff like that.

Blab. A worried reader writes:
I have to confess to being more worried about the woman staring at me than her purple eyes.
Fear not, Loyal Reader. That is actually a two-dimensional arrangement of pixels meant to resemble, when viewed by the human visual system, a woman. It is not, in fact, a woman.
We know this is confusing, but don't worry. All is well.

Blab. A reader asks, blankly:
Would you care to explain?
Your idea of a great anti-war photo?
A weakness for blue eyes, dark hair, and fear?
Do help one of the great unwashed readers.
Actually, we prefer to leave it a mystery, for now. Think of it as very slow kinetic sculpture.

Blab. A reader indulges our continuing need to be in denial.
Happy Plurpday - Morton
Why, thank you! And what a lovely summer day for it.

Plop. And on this lovely summer day, we find ourself sitting in the civil section of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, having shown up as ordered under penalty of law to discharge our obligation of jury duty. This week, we are a joyful prole, laboring tirelessly with the other Deltas in glorious service to the State.
The room in which we are required to sit is high-ceilinged, and makes every attempt to look imposing, with huge, sepia-toned renderings of historic New York scenes on the walls. But the fan rattles, the fluorescent lighting is straight from the 50s, and the potted plants on the ledges are all dying.
Curiously, there are ethernet cables sticking out of the paneling in the cubicles at the back! A few minutes of fiddling gets us a TCP/IP connection to IBM's VPN server, but endless fiddling thereafter fails to get us an authenticated connection.
Which strikes us as odd, but somehow consistent.

Plurp. Found at the bottom of an ancient pile of papers in our bed stand drawer, in the handwriting of someone unknown.
Get our ducks together

Get our acts together

Get our ducks in a row

We wonder who put that there.

Plurp. Yesterday, on the word beam:
Opening the door, Kate could hardly have expected what she saw: her brother Tom, whom she idolized, hanging by a sheet from the rafters. And his feet, dragging on the floor, could have saved him at any time, had he simply stood up.
And today, on the word tower
The strangely gabled roof stood out in the lightning and rain, tattered and ancient, and was an inopportune place to be in this particular mental state.
Not our best one, sigh.

Plop. So Kate died yesterday. That's a bad thing. She was one of the people who was supposed to live forever. We checked.

Plurp. Watching Knute Rockne: All American yesterday, we realized with horror that Pat O'Brien's delivery sounded exactly like William Shatner's.

Plurp.
Elizabeth Taylor was
an inopportune person to be
in this particular mental state

Sunday, June 29, 2003
Plurp.

Top

Earlier entries Later entries