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2003.07.13 : 2003.07.19

Saturday, July 19, 2003

Blab. A reader reminds us of our fourth grade teacher.

Read this article.

Now, take this test.

In the interest of being kind to our readers, we withhold our usual reply to arbitrary demands, involving, as it does, pointed suggestions of certain unsavory or anatomically infeasible activities.

Instead, we'll take the test!

This is the NY State Regent's test for physics. The expectation is that graduating high school seniors should be able to pass it. Apparently lots of such people didn't, so there's this big controversy about it.

We haven't taken a test or thought particularly deeply about physics for a couple of decades, so we ought to be pretty rusty at it. On the other hand, we once knew quite a bit about physics, so who knows?

We will reveal how we did in a few days, after we find three consecutive free hours to take it.

In the meantime, we encourage our readers to take the test as well. You are allowed to use "a scientific or graphing calculator, a centimeter ruler, a protractor, and a copy of the 2002 Edition Reference Tables for Physical Setting/Physics". (Though we probably won't - too much trouble to find such things.)

Remember to limit yourself to three hours, and no cheating!

Blab. A reader donates a math puzzle.

So, Slow,

Given that .333~ = 1/3

and that .666~ = 2/3,

It stands to reason that .999~ = 3/3,

or, to simplify, .999~ = 1.

One can't argue with the math, but it looks frightfully odd to a mathmatical civilian like me.

What do you think?

L.

1 is indeed frightfully odd.

Blab. A reader reports recent experience with the Meowlingual translator.

Meowlingual translation: "Puny monkey creatures! I am your new master, Lord Katorg VII, Supreme Overlord of the Northern Hemisphere and all who dwell therein. You shall kowtow to my will or suffer my wrath!"

We had no idea those things were so accurate!

Blab. Oh dear.

|\_._._/|
|  o o  |
 \ ´`  /
 |`---´  Der blaue Hund just got back from
 |     |  playing paintball with naked female
 |`___´\_ dogs now blue.
/|     |\
##     ##

We have a terrible premonition that next week's search statistics will be dominated by naked female dogs.

Blab. A reader has forgotten how to play.

p-soup.  stupid.  What does it do?

For you, nothing, apparently.

Blab. A reader waxes nostalgic.

I remember there used to be dingoes. 

Those were the days, eh?

Blab. A reader sends us news from exotic locales.

Last Resort donkey drowns

You'd think they'd have done something after the first one drowned.

Blab. Another reader sends us news from faraway places.

Report blames bridge overruns on ‘indecision, procrastination, and absence of effective management’

This is a really long article but oh so telling of the politcal and financial situation in the BVI right now.  Really sad.  I love the fact the the old bridge "dumped" the backhoe into the water.

This is the new bridge that, once it was built, the government suddenly realized that they had forgotten to build an access road to it. And of course, that cost more.

Plurp. A reader told us on chat today that he liked our blog because we always seem to be a little crazy. What do you suppose he meant by that?

Plurp. Here's a curious fact.

Plurp. A classic, from the source.

Get my ass together

• Get my ass in gear
• Get my act together

Plurp. Last night, on the word arrow.

"Time flies like an enraged reptile," he wrote, and smiled. He wasn't sure why it was funny, exactly, but it was. He wondered if anyone else would think so. He wondered if they would think him odd. He figured they probably would. And he realized that he didn't care.

Yow. For the first time ever, a mapping of "dark matter" in a distant galactic cluster, made by extremely subtle measurements of how the gravitational field from the dark matter warps the path of light traveling through it.

Dark matter is shaded blue

With just the stars.

Extremely way cool!

Plop. You know, any government that believes that they control the culture of their country seems seriously confused to me.

Goodbye "e-mail", the French government says, and hello "courriel" -- the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents. 

The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of "e-mail" in all government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon. 

The ministry's General Commission on Terminology and Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term "courrier electronique" (electronic mail) instead of e-mail -- a claim some industry experts dispute. "Courriel" is a fusion of the two words. 

Google finds the following on .fr sites:
 

Term	Hits
courriel	88,000
courrier electronique	3,780
e-mail	1,860,000

87,700 of the hits on courriel occurred in the past three months, so it's likely that they were hits on the announcement from the Culture Ministry. That leaves about 300 legitimate hits for their newly mandated neologism.

Heh.

Plurp. Speaking of cultural control ...

University of California regents on Thursday joined other schools in setting limits to classroom courtship, banning faculty from dating students they supervise. [...]

At the College of William & Mary in Virginia, dating between professors and undergraduates was banned after a former instructor wrote an article about his affair with a student. 

At Ohio Northern University, the faculty handbook dictates that "faculty and staff members should not have sexual relations with students to whom they are not married." 

Wow. Do they have any idea how precipitously GPAs will decline?

Yo. Have you ever used one of those music-swapping services, like Napster or Kazaa? You have? Then you're under arrest.

The music industry has won at least 871 federal subpoenas against computer users suspected of illegally sharing music files on the Internet, with roughly 75 new subpoenas being approved each day, U.S. court officials said Friday.  [...]

In some cases, subpoenas cite as few as five songs as "representative recordings" of music files available for downloading from these users. The trade group for the largest music labels, the Washington-based RIAA, previously indicated its lawyers would target Internet users who offer substantial collections of MP3 song files but declined to say how many songs might qualify for a lawsuit.

It's been nice knowing you.

Yak. At a Beach Club, in Connecticut, wherein the entire population is both white and wealthy.
 

Person 1:	There's a school of thought that regards Stephen King as this century's Charles Dickens.
Person 2:	It must be a public school.

Rant. Have you seen the new (analog) TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? The premise is that some guy with no design taste (the apocryphal straight guy) is made over by five guys with excellent taste in clothing, interior decor, hair, etc. (these are, of course, the queer guys).

Now that's all fine, and many of us could use more design taste that we currently have. But we find ourself vaguely offended by the stereotyping involved. Well, OK, so it's not so vague.

However! We do not like to stand in the way of societal trends. So, supporting this new, culturally approved stereotyping, we offer the following programmatic ideas.

• Black Eye for the White Guy, in which five black guys teach a white guy to dance.
• Jew Eye for the Goy Guy, in which five Hassidim teach an Irish Catholic to get great shopping discounts by dressing in felt and speaking Yiddish.
• Arab Eye for the Demon Guy, in which five Arabic guys teach an American guy to repress women and become a suicide bomber.

We're glad those don't sound offensive to you. It's a new age.

Plurp.

The blue dog
once searched for
naked female dogs

Friday, July 18, 2003

Blab. A reader writes:

Sharbat Gula

No, it's not a frozen dessert.

Blab. A mirthless reader writes:

1.  Get rid of the picture in the upper left corner.  Pease.  It's silly looking. And humorless, like life, which is why we come here.  At least your picture suggests a detached sense of humor about your silliness.  By the way, your being silly does not make you a bad person.

2.  A really silly person speaking nonsense.  We judge him now, and he is a fool

But he has a backup profession, or so he thinks. Could grape growers sue?  He's wrong on all counts.  How English.

Get rid of Carl? But he's so cute! And he'd be so awfully grumpy if we told him he had to go back to sleep for another strange aeon.

He does clash with the color scheme, though. Hmm.

Blab. A reader wrinkles its nose.

Can you imagine sleeping with that nasty green monster thing?  NASTY!

Now see? That kind of deprecation of those from other planes of existence is simply uncalled for. As long as the relationship between dread Cthulhu and his victims is one of mutual consent, we don't see what business it is of anyone else's.

Blab. On yesterday's link to a Fox News story about a company that lets you hunt naked women with paintball guns, a reader writes:

"Western society is doomed."

What? You're only now coming to that conclusion?

L.

Call us slow.

But wait - it gets better! As this resourceful reader informs us.

Doesn't 'Bambi' seem more like a scheme to sell videos than a scheme to sell an 'Adult Paintball Experience?'

And therein, Snopes wonders if this whole shoot naked women with paintballs thing is real, or a PR hoax perpetrated with the witless cooperation of the media. It's so hard to tell!

In either case, we're doing our part by getting the word out. Whatever word that happens to be.

Blab. A reader writes:

That dumsteve login sure is useful

Call us slow.

Blab. A reader wonders this:

Ho do you get Cthulhu into the refrigerator?

Yes, we do. We open the door, put Cthulhu in, and close the door. But don't call us a ho.

Blab. The mainstream takes one baby step closer to us.

Hobbyists shell out for crabs

A person who supplies shells and decorative materials for people who keep hermit crabs as pets? And we thought we were strange.

Blab. A reader skates on the edge.

have a lot of spare time up your sleeves

- have a lot of spare time on your hands
- hiding something up your sleeves

But, hey, it makes sense to us!

Plurp. In the dream last night, Dave and we were going to give a concert for some civic club or other, with him playing a set of African drums and us on the piano. Complicating factors included not having a plan for what we were doing (much less having rehearsed), not having any written music, and us not having touched a piano after our few lessons in high school.

Despite all that, the curtain opened on a few hundred gray-haired people who broke into applause as we took our places on the stage.

Plurp. So it's Friday, and that makes us unnaturally happy. We ended Thursday with a long, long, long meeting that went well into the evening and left us ravenous for doing absolutely anything else. We had so much to do, and instead we sat in this meeting without the ability to do anything at all.

Aaarrgh!

Maybe we need to block off an entire week of our calendar with things that look like Important Meetings, but instead allow us to lock ourself away and get actual work done.

That would be cool.

Yak. During a different meeting.

That's just syntactic sugar.

Yes, but it's syntactic sugar that everyone's going to want to use.

Oh, so it's syntactic cocaine.

Yak. And in yet another meeting.

One plus one equals negative three.

We're not sure.

Yo. That mechanical television we mentioned yesterday comes with a free puzzle: How do you design the rotating disks so that pixels are displayed on the rectangular screen in the proper order? To simplify things, try a 4x4 array first.

We think we know a solution to this puzzle, but we're not sure. Clues might be garnered from pictures of the machine, which indicate that the disk was fairly large compared to the screen. Or obscure drawings of the disks.

Readers submitting plausible solutions will win everlasting fame.

Plop. So how 'bout that Iraq thing?

The United States faces a rapidly closing window of opportunity to create law and order in Iraq or face a possible descent into chaos, experts sent by the Pentagon to assess postwar reconstruction efforts said. [... They called] the U.S. civil administration leading the efforts "badly handicapped" by a business-as-usual approach during an urgent situation.

We feel sure it's an intelligence problem.

Plurp. It seems that the intelligence problem was institutionalized.

The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear.

Do tell.

[S]enior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. [...]

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war. 

What do you do when you're lacking evidence? Make it up, Winston.

Plop. And speaking of which ...

Metallica are taking legal action against independant Canadian rock band Unfaith over what they feel is unsanctioned usage of two chords the band has been using since 1982 : E and F.

"People are going to get on our case again for this, but try to see it from our point of view just once," stated Metallica's Lars Ulrich. "We're not saying we own those two chords, individually - that would be ridiculous. We're just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music."

Which is, we presume, not ridiculous. (Mike)

Yow. This year, we're ordering all of our Midwinter gifts from the catalog of Acme products.

We anticipate houses full of grateful recipients. (/usr/bin/girl)

Plurp. We mention this only because it is, from our point of view, the perfect headline.

Mummified Daughter Kept for Aliens

Fabulous.

Yo. Fun toy. Go play.

Yow. Lots of interesting art here, most of it digital in one way or another, and much of it dynamic in interesting ways. 

It would be fun to have a piece of dynamic digital art. How hard is it to make something like this?

As for static art, this would look nice in the bedroom. Or this.

Plurp.

The blue dog
couldn't believe that
fanaticism and stupidity could
lead to war

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Blab. A reader who has far better things to do than provide us with commentary sends us a blind ...

[link].

We were an avid D&D player in grad school. Like all avid D&D players, we studied role playing games extensively. And we made up our own.

One game we made up worked like this.

• You (well, your character) awoke in a small, grubby room that had shabby furnishings.
• You got dressed in clothes that showed no sense of fashion and left the building you were in.
• You climbed into a curious metal contraption and manipulated various controls.
• You got out of the machine and walked into another building, where you sat at a cluttered desk and drew mysterious symbols on pieces of paper all day long and late into the night.
• When your Energy had nearly reached zero, you left the building, reversed the manipulations of the metal contraption, returned to the small room and went to sleep.
• Repeat forever.

There were no dice, and no opportunities for players to exercise choice.

We called the game Graduate School, but the consensus was that it was unmarketable as no one would ever play it.

Blab. A reader attempts to exercise the Orange Theory of Ideas.

Any connection between Bowlingual and Bowdonia?

Are you suggesting that we need a colorful consumer electronic device that interprets what Helen is saying in human terms? How rude!

Blab. Last night, unmarked black helicopters circled low above our apartment building again.

Nice evening tonight for a romantic meal, huh Dr. PLurp?   MMmmmmmm........... 

We don't mean to be unpatriotic, but you guys are beginning to annoy us.

Blab. A reader constructs an excellent Helenism.

He's a loose screw

Quite good! If we weren't boycotting artificially constructed Helenisms, we would record that little muffin in the Hall of Fame.

Blab. A reader takes out its guitar and plays. Just like yesterday.

The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St Swithin's Day

Not only do we have our own official saint here at Plurp, and a corresponding religious holiday, we even have our own sappy love song!

It's grand.

Plurp. Last week in Plurp.

1. snarkelflatz naked pitures
2. imani
3. helen naked pitures
4. spritzen spratzen
5. arsenic poisoning pictures
6. chihuly
7. cthulu sashimi
8. naked pictures of helen
9. britney
10. get an elephant in a refrigerator

Snarkelflatz! Snarkelflatz! Snarkelflatz!

Plurp. That scattered, disorganized resistance in Iraq?

The U.S. military's new commander in Iraq acknowledged today for the first time that American troops are engaged in a "classical guerrilla-type" war against remnants of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and said Baathist attacks are growing in organization and sophistication.

Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, in his first Pentagon briefing since taking charge of the U.S. Central Command last week, also addressed growing morale problems in the 3rd Infantry Division, saying soldiers quoted today on ABC News' Good Morning America questioning their mission in Iraq and calling for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation were wrong and could be disciplined.

So, no problem.

Plurp. Western society is doomed.

Shoot naked women with paintball guns.

It gets worse. Much worse. Don't look.

Yow. Are you annoyed by those awful pop-up spam things you get in Windows? Are you annoyed that Windows has this feature turned on by default?

Well, then, turn it off. (/usr/bin/girl)

Yo. A cab driver (of all people) turned us on to an ancient idea for mechanical television. It worked by modulating a neon lamp (according to the intensity of that part of the picture) and shining it through a rapidly rotating disk which had (we surmise) a pattern of holes that put that particular pixel of light onto the right part of the screen.

Wild!

Plurp. So Larry Ellison (of Oracle fame) thinks that IBM's On Demand initiative is just a "pricing scheme".

Boy, is he going to be surprised.

Plurp. Today, on the word player.

There was a slap of ball against leather as the fieldman dove for the catch. Now to unsheath my knife, he thought, and finish the matter.

Plurp.

The blue dog
thought that Larry Ellison
was just a "pricing scheme".

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Blab. A reader insists:

Gotta read this!

But why? It's just an article about some person named Ann Coulter who wrote a book.

So what's the new book about?
The idea of the book is that liberals have a tendency to take the position most disadvantageous to their country. This isn't anything new. They have taken patriotism off the table as a topic for political debate. And they've done that by invoking McCarthyism, a myth of their own creation.

It gets worse from there. But as a tribute to minor fame via bombastic and nonsensical puffery, it's pretty good!

Blab. A reader who, we fear, may be unfamiliar with the mysteries of browser caching, writes:

"All fixed now. Whew."  Nope.  Try again.

While on the offending page, hold down the Shift key and click on the Refresh icon on your browser's toolbar (up top, probably).

Magic!

Blab. Our latest groupie responds to our cheap line.

"Hey, baby, wanna see our mind-wrenching bas reliefs of ancient and unspeakable horrors?"

Sure, that could be fun.

You know, it never worked that way in our hormone-filled ladhood. We never went trolling in bars. We never got to know a woman at a party. We never even figured out how to approach women.

Turns out all we needed was a blog. And a cheap line about bas reliefs.

Who knew?

Blab. Perhaps in telepathic reaction, another reader writes:

I am neglectful of something incredibly important.  During the whole "stolen wallet thing" Steve was an absolute rock.  He helped to do all the paperwork and get a copy of our marriage license and order a new passport.  Running all around getting money orders and sitting with me through my police station report.  There is no way I would have survived all of this without his arms around me from time to time, as I would burst into tears at the most inopportune moments.  He simply made it possible for me to survive. 

Now, don't you ALL wish you had a Steve to make it all better? 

NOPE!  He is ALL mine!!!!!!  And I am loving it..............

Helen

Ps.  And he is cute too.

Pss.  Now, can he deal with my newly found tick?  I would bet so. 

Hey, baby.

Blab. A reader points out one of the unfortunate predictive consequences of it having been St. Swithin's Day yesterday.

Um, it's St Swithins today and Britians heatwave is due to end with big storms tonight. That means 40 days and 40 nights of rain!

To the ark!

Blab. A reader frightens us by invoking a confluence of Demonic Forces with technology.

He Who Shall Remain Speechless No More

From Takara, the Hello Kitty folks, comes this little wonder.

Takara Co. of Japan will launch a device that translates cats' meows into human speech in November after the smash-hit dog-language electronic interpreter Bowlingual, a spokeswoman said. [...]

The device will be priced at 8,800 yen (75 dollars), less than the 14,800 yen dog owners pay for Bowlingual. 

Bowlingual has sold 300,000 units in the six months to March 2003 since its launch last September, and would have sold more had supply kept pace with demand.

Oh - you haven't heard about Bowlingual?

Your Dog Has Something to Tell You!

Turn woofs into words and be better best friends.

You can buy it at The Sharper Image. Of course.

We are reminded of the famous Gary Larson cartoons What we say to dogs / What they hear, in which the dog hears only its name, and What we say to cats / What they hear, in which the cat hears nothing at all.

Seems pretty easy to make a device that does that.

Plurp. The GNE folks, hopefully on their way to actually launching The Real Game, are looking for a slogan. Several of us who played the alpha obsessively have suggested slogans, vividly demonstrating why we're not in marketing.

Nonetheless, we think these are cute.

• GNE: Trout slappin', mash smokin', paper makin' fun for the whole family
• GNE: Feed the madness
• GNE: Because toasting gnomes is so last century
• GNE: Beat your swords into marshmallows
• GNE: Life, or something like it
• GNE: Squeeze your chicken
• GNE: Got Compulsion ?

And our all-time favorite:

• GNE: No really, it's not crack 

Plurp. A potential Helenism, courtesy of the literary geniuses on Big Brother.

He's a loose wire

• He's a loose cannon
• He's a live wire

Now, this is a tad on the iffy side, so we ask our readers: Is this a Helenism or not, and why?

Plop. Bush policy. What a wonderful term!

The Bush administration says it is trying to confirm North Korea's claim that it now has enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs. At the same time, the White House is the target of critics who say its policy is ineffective. Others believe the policy is a failure. A former secretary of defense says he can't figure out what the policy is supposed to be.

But no problem, right?

Plurp.

The blue dog
unearthed a bas relief
of Ann Coulter

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Blab. One of our many groupies slinks up to us in the dark and whispers this into our ear.

um...steve...hunny...you've (now don't be offended) changed somewhat...

Hey, baby, wanna see our mind-wrenching bas reliefs of ancient and unspeakable horrors?

Blab. A reader wonders if we have any thoughts. So do we.

so, any thoughts on the blogathon? 

Let's review. Bloggers (to the extent that they are a class) volunteer to spend 24 sleepless hours updating their stupid blogs at least once every 30 minutes. For this, various sponsors, for reasons unknown, agree to donate money to some cause or other.

The average donation per blogger is less than $76, or less than $3.20 per hour.

Tell you what. We'll donate 24 hours of sponsorship (during which we will sleep a lot, and during which we promise not to update our blog more than once) to our favorite charity (us) at the rate of $4/hour, we'll pay for it entirely ourself, and we'll blow it all on sushi.

And we promise to be very, very grateful.

Would that be OK?

Blab. A reader reports the news for which we've all been waiting.

Just reported: scientists identify mystery creature that washed ashore in Chile as Neptune's foreskin. 

Mazel tov!

Blab. Another reader reports previously unreported news.

Good to know that the Afghan woman has been able to emigrate to the East Village. 

Has she? Well, that's very good news indeed.

Blab. Yet another reader reports a previously reported event.

Happy St Swithins Day!!! -AJL 

Gosh, already? Time sure does fly like an enraged reptile, doesn't it?

Happy St. Swithin's Day to you, Treasured Reader, and to everyone back at the Riptide Campus.

Blab. Finally, this reader reports an initially frightening displacement.

Erm, why is the log stuck in March? 

Eek! Our Treasured Reader refers to a mid-week version of this here page that somehow got wedged into the place where this one should have been.

At first, we feared a quantum leak in the temporal flux capacitors, and you know how awful that can be! It turns out, though, that it was just sloppy ftping on our part. All fixed now. Whew.

As usual, infinite thanks to our eagle-eyed readers.

Blab. This reader knows why that parable from yesterday makes us cry.

The parable makes you cry for the same reason Hallmrk card commercials and Jerry Maguire make you cry. Get a dress.

We appreciate the fashion advice, but we fear that we look absolutely dreadful in dresses. They just don't make attractive styles for our body type. It's a travesty.

Hey - how'd you know that Jerry Maguire made us cry?

Blab. A sleep deprived reader writes:

Many people set Norton to run at 5 am on Sunday, when they are pretty sure they won't be there to notice the hogging. 

Yeah, but our laptop is pretty much always sleeping at 5 AM on Sunday (as are all sensible beings). That's why we have Norton run during lunch on Friday Monday.

Blab. A reader approves of our new career in marketing.

Tubs O'Taters... man, what a great name. I'd buy a case. Much more appealing than that other word... Kaiseki. Since a family box of Mac'n Cheese is usually dinner you can pretty well predict that volume wins every time.

Dorian

That was our second choice: Cartons O' Carbs.

Blab. A reader documents our belligerence, reveals a tragic incident, and relates a glad hearted story of new technology.

I have asked Steve to tell the story of why I have a PDQ now.  But he won't.  So I will. 

Two weeks ago I had my wallet stolen out of my pocketbook.  It was in a bag that I am unable to close and I carried that bag because my book fit inside.  My tan leather book has been around for 10 years and holds everything from a diary of daily/weekly/monthly events to addresses to heart shaped stickers to a photo of Steve to maps of NYC subway and bus routes.  And it exists to let Steve know what he is socially committed to from day to day.  But it was responsible for my loss.

While I spent hours canceling credit cards and banking accounts and my passport, Steve spent hours researching the perfect PDQ for me.  I figured it was time to check into the year 2003.  In the end he decided that the SONY Clie was right for my needs.

Sunday I spent the entire day inputting information, not finishing until after Steve was asleep.  Yesterday I put my leather book away and depended on the PDQ.  So far so good.  Day two is today. 

Haven't decided where to put my heart stickers and my picture of Steve.

Isn't that fun? It's sure been fun for us these past couple of weeks. You betcha.

Yo. Interesting article on the current view of the origin of language, a topic on which modern linguists had, until recently, been silent.

Get it?

Plurp. In thousands of years of social interaction, why have we not found any more efficient form of decision-oriented interaction than meetings?

Really! We sat around in a long meeting today with almost exactly nothing to do. No doubt others in the meeting were more involved, as the topics being covered were more relevant to them.

But there we were - stuck with a bland smile on our face, nodding vaguely at whatever it was that the other folks were droning on about.

It wouldn't have been so bad had we been connected. At least then we could have explicitly ignored the meeting.

Plurp.

Thousands of years of social interaction
gave birth to a parable
involving unspeakable horrors
and bland smiles

Monday, July 14, 2003

Blab. Our ever-watchful readers notice certain ominous changes.

Love your updated photo -- bit of hair loss I see.  Ah middle age... #1

It's tough being an eldritch horror.

Yikes, What happened to your face, dude?

It's just the metamorphosis.

I am going to ignore the Chihuly in the corner up there.  I want my Steve back!

It is the common reaction of the fragile human mind when faced with unspeakable terror.

You're looking a little under the weather, Steve. Are you ok? 

We've been sleeping.

Blab. Readers express diverse reactions to our recent Sunday Series.

OK, enough with the weird eyes, huh?

Do you think so? Personally, we are amazed at the thematic breadth possible by simply changing eye color. We could imagine continuing to explore this rich conceptual space for years.

Homeland Security Afghan Girl?

Hey - that's funny! (It took us a while to get that.)

A dirty rotten scoundrel writes:

This picture would have worked better on Sunday with your change in the header picture....

- Felis Lynx

Hey! How dare you poke around our subdirectories, looking for pictures we haven't used yet? And what's more, you picked one that we decided not to use because we did such a lousy job on it, and now here we are forced to expose our ineptitude to the world.

We'll get you for that.

Blab. A reader ponders the mysteries of the gustatory arts.

Having just returned from a week in France and needing to catch up with Plurp (the French have yet to discover the internet and may never achieve wireless) I came across your posts on supertasters. I've discovered that, unlike the French, I'm a volumetaster (tm). I eat for volume, not taste. Thus large plates of spaghetti, potatoes, McD's triple-pounders, and large chunks of cow are rated excellent. Sushi is pointless unless they serve the whole tuna wrapped in whaleskin. Needless to say there is nothing worth eating in France as they have yet to discover volume.

Dorian

Welcome back, oh voluminous ingestor. You provide us with a good puzzle. Faced with a lifetime of incredible-tasting food in small(ish) quantities, or huge amounts of really dull food, which would we choose? It's Kaiseki vs. Tubs O' Taters.

We are tempted to say that we would choose the former. Do you believe us?

Yow. This little parable makes us cry. Why is that?

Yo. David Patterson interviews Jim Gray on the future of storage and databases. Intense geekiness! (And very interesting.)

Yow. That Grand Research Challenges in Information Systems conference in which we participated last year finally got around to publishing the conference report. (We worked primarily on the challenge called Conquer System Complexity.)

The report is a lot shorter than we expected it to be! Nonetheless, the editors seem to have done a good job (at least on our section) of retaining the important parts.

Yow.

Yo. We must, simply must, go see Nothing So Strange, the new documentary on the assassination of Bill Gates.

When Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was shot dead on December 2, 1999, it was a tragedy that resonated throughout the world. But as time wears on, that tragedy has developed into a mystery for many observers, who see police misconduct and a cover-up where others see an open-and-shut case. NOTHING SO STRANGE follows the efforts of an organized group of these skeptics, who call themselves Citizens for Truth, as they launch an aggressive independent investigation of the Gates assassination and in the process confront the LAPD, a hostile mainstream press, and the group's own internal squabbles. With never-before-seen amateur footage of the Gates assassination, hypnotic 3D recreations of the various aspects of the crime, and almost unlimited access to the inner workings of Citizens for Truth, NOTHING SO STRANGE is ultimately both personal and political - an intimate portrait of average citizens on a search for the truth, as well as a revealing look at the last great crime of the 20th Century.

The NY premiere (and apparently only showing) is July 21.

Anybody want to join us? (Ape Infinitum)

Plurp. Helen, who swore she would be the last living organism to give up paper, recently got a Sony Clié. This makes her an early adopter, as she is the first resident of our apartment to own a PDA, and she is busily moving her entire life onto it. This morning, she was using it to make a grocery list.

We're falling behind in the Geek Race.

Plop. At noon today, we noticed that Norton AntiVirus started running on our computer. We noticed this, of course, because Norton AntiVirus pretty much hogs the disk, so everything else slows to sludge.

That's odd, we thought. Norton usually runs at noon every Monday. What's it doing running on Friday?

Then we figured it out.

Plurp. Yesterday, on the word stone.

The lineage of the idol was unknown, and the very material out of which it was carved was baffling. The foremost geologists did not know what to make of its green, soapy surface, speckled with gold flecks.

And today, on the word road

When I was in college, a hallmate insisted that most of the world had been tarred over with asphalt. I pointed out that this was only true of most of the world where he had been.

This lesson generalizes nicely.

Plurp.

The blue dog
greatly preferred
tasty bits to fat bits

Sunday, July 13, 2003

Plurp.

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