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2003.07.20 : 2003.07.26
Saturday, July 26, 2003
Blab. A reader keeps its ear to the grindstone.
(Heard on PBS's "The History
Detectives")
Turn the other eye
- Turn a blind eye
- Turn the other cheek
Winner!
Blab. A reader reminds us of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets,
which we might have dreamt about some weeks ago but cannot now find any
human record of having done so.
Cthulhu
mythos songs with better recording quality (but no MP3s on their site).
Oh, and they're "Canadian".
Never fear, querulous reader! We have found an MP3 of their mythos song,
The
Innsmouth Look, just for you.
Blab. More terrifying, and we mean much, much more terrifying,
is this.
For your
listening pleasure
Ronald Dumsfeld sings.
Blab. A reader comes to rescue us from our abysmal ignorance.
Yes, this does seem like a futile gesture, but we are so appreciative of
the attempt.
Jerky Girl
From Urb
Magazine, by way of Amazon.com:
"Realize it or not, but you and most
of mainstream American society are already intimately aware of UK trio
Dirty Vegas. Thanks to the increasingly interesting world of car commercials
mining the best of left-field electronic music for their soundtracks, we
now have the world's first band to debut as part of a Mitsubishi campaign.
Their electro-heavy "Days Gone By" will instantly invoke images of that
hot brunette in the sexy cap dancing her cute little butt off, pop-lock
style, from the heavily rotated advert (apologies to those with better
things to do than watch TV)."
From Kid
Congo, in response to the Urb Magazine quote on Amazon.com:
"I would offer this as a more accurate
description:
"Aaagh! It's that goddam weirdo with
the cap! Find the remote! Jesus, are those her eyes? Are those cold, blinking
red lights coming from her eyes? No! Don't look at them! Get the remote!
You can almost see the access panels that scientists use to maintain her
circuitry! What the hell is she doing, some sort of evil-robot mating dance?
A ritual that summons the end of the world? Those guys in the car are smiling,
what's wrong with them? How can they smile in the face of this terror?
They must be satanists. Remote, where are you?? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!
REMOTE!!!!"
From me:
What? Oh, I don't have an opinion
on the matter. Move along. There's nothing to see here.
L.
So. We learn several things here.
-
We are not in the mainstream. And we keep trying!
-
We somehow failed to notice a hot brunette in a sexy cap dancing her cute
little butt off. This doesn't happen very often. The not noticing part,
that is.
-
Whoever Kid Congo is, he or she is pretty funny.
We find blogging so educational.
Blab. Rather than risk using it in casual conversation, a reader
instead explains the joke.
Macular degeneration - disease
leading to loss of vision
Defenestration - the act of throwing
something out the window
Macular defenestration - the act of
losing vision out the window, a common occurence during especially boring
meetings, assuming the meeting room actually has a window
Sigh. Looks like several hours this weekend will be spent retuning those
dang orbital mind control lasers again.
Blab. Or many not!
The doctor's report cited
"macular defenestration" as the diagnosis caused by a naked female who
had walked past my office window.
Dorian, the blind
Maybe we'll run some diagnostics on them, just in case.
Blab. A reader who is glad to see us writes:
My dull gold ring reads "Sept
11, 1976". Of course, I'm divorced now. Rumor has it my ex wished I was
in lower manhattan for our anniversary. I'd probably still be married if
I hadn't put the ring in my pocket so often :-) The geekiest thing in my
pocket is a memory stick (which is probably the most unlikely nickname
yet. Is that your memory stick or are you remembering the last time we
met?)
Dorian, the dumbstick
How poignant that you still keep it in your pocket.
Yo. A
fact.
There are more stars in the
universe than all the grains of sand on every beach and in every desert
on Earth.
That's a lot.
Plurp. Cat
person vs. dog. Classic.
Plurp. Um
...
"I didn't remember you being
the brightest bulb in the socket."
Maybe it was a really big socket. There in Texas.
Plurp. Last night, on the word solid.
It was so cold. Standing
on the ice, watching the sun set behind the blue-white peaks. Cold. Pale.
Faint. His blood thickening beneath his skin. His breath drawing short.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
was said to be an atypical form
of macular defenestration
found in untuned samples from the
jerky girl
Friday, July 25, 2003
Blab. A reader really, really wants one of those
mind-controlled wheelchairs. We have to wonder why.
But whose mind is controlling
the wheelchair?
- Felis Lynx
Fnord! Fnord!
Blab. A reader attempts to divert attention from the insidious
alien plot to control the lives of people in wheelchairs.
Well, that's certainly _a_
question.
Actually, that's a statement.
Blab. On that same topic, a reader submits one of the strangest
things we've ever seen (and that's saying something): A crop circle created
entirely by alien-mind-controlled wheelchairs.
And the aliens are getting
even more complex with those pesky crop circles....
- Felis Lynx
This both astounds and terrifies us.
Blab. A reader stirs spastically from its digital coma to write
this.
Subj: more
though control
This
story claims a "Thought Control technique boosts music students". They
claim deep relaxation works best. Now all we need is a purple dinosaur
mascot and the next generation will all be budding Mozarts! Well, maybe
not. At least our nearly lifeless twitching bodies will twitch in rhythm
with
the drum. Oh, wait, that's my current
dance style.
Dorian, the twitchy dancer
We wonder, to be serious for one tiny moment, if this is related to the
general mythos that Zen masters can fluidly and flawlessly perform physical
tasks like calligraphy, archery, martial arts, and so forth. And to the
curious phenomenon of yips.
Insightful readers should tell us.
Blab. A reader makes light of a very serious subject.
I once pulled a ring out
of my pocket, it was sort of a dull gold and had weird writing inside.
Something like "Ash nazg durbatuluk" or something. Funny, though,
somehow it seemed rather precious to me.
--B.B.
Yeah, we bought one of those knock-offs in Chinatown too.
Blab. Where's the real one?
the blue dog has it.
Now that's scary!
Blab. A spammist writes:
Subj: cruise
ship personnel needed......... yytpbjjddedrqe
We have always been fascinated with becoming a cruise ship personnel, sailing
from one plastic tourist trap to another, wiping the noses of obnoxious
children while being drastically underpaid. Imagine our disappointment
when we discovered this in the body of the note.
The Health Discovery that Actually
Reverses Aging while Burning Fat,
without Dieting or Exercise!
You see, we like being old and fat, and we constantly look forward
to starvation and overexertion.
So this just wasn't for us.
Blab. A remote reader writes:
Subj:
dorian the remote
From: Stephanie
Turner
When i read the message about "mindless
car commercials," I immediately thought about the one with the jerky girl.
The saddest part is it took me some time to come up with a phrase to describe
her that would be politically correct and inoffensive. Why can't we just
say, "The retarded, spastic girl with the stupid hat?" I miss free speech.
Well Stephanie, we miss understanding. We don't recall such a mindless
car commercial. And we were pretty sure we knew them all by heart.
Blab. A pair of readers are far too busy to provide commentary.
[link]
[link]
Click on the first for Darwinian poetry. We suspect Shelly doesn't have
anything to worry about. Other than being dead, of course.
But that second link. Yowzer! And, with a bit of spelunking, a page
with a whole bunch of Cthulhu
mythos songs. There are even a few with associated MP3 files. Yeah,
the recording quality is awful, but what you can make out is pretty dang
funny!
Do You Hear
the Pipes, Cthulhu? (Lyrics here.)
There was chanting in the
air that night
The stars were right, Cthulhu!
Note to ABBA fans: Don't listen. Just don't.
Blab. A reader somehow finds one of those mind-wrenching illusions
that we missed when we were obsessing over them the other week.
Arrrrg!
This one is particularly painful. Ouch.
Blab. A reader does not appreciate our taste in poetry. Oh well.
It's good to have a spare
reason not to like Michael Ondaatje, although his turgid prose has
sufficed to date. Gibran and Benton must be quaking!!
We were unaware that they played computer games at all.
Blab. A reader writes:
sounds like fun
The talk around work, for several months now, has been that Iraq's WMD
had been geocached - buried at some arbitrary location in the desert, the
coordinates of which were taken via GPS, written down, and kept as a Big
Secret. Those possessing said secret could go get the nasty stuff any time
they wanted to; no one else could ever find it.
Yo. Earlier this week, a Clever Reader speculated that the reason
the fur of that purple polar bear was purple was that it was sprayed with
something purple. We refer to this as the Grape Juice Dip theory.
And it turns out to be right! (At least, according
to Fox News.) That would explain the purple cage bars and the purple
spots on the ground that caused us to be deeply skeptical a few days ago.
We're still puzzled about the purple eyes, though.
Plurp. Today's assignment: Use the term macular defenestration
in casual conversation during meetings. Report
results.
Yak. On that analog TV thing this morning.
The 2003 Honda clearance
happens only once a year!
Copy editors wanted. No experience necessary.
Yak.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Cthul.
Cthul who?
Plurp. Last night, on the word detect.
Don't think. Just be right.
That's what the captain said. The trial was coming up. And it was weak,
the case, the whole thing. His reputation. His career. He took the bullet
out of his pocket and held it in his gloved hand, considering.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was once a copy editor
for Sauron
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Blab. A remote reader writes:
Scientists Developing Mind-Controlled
Wheelchair
This
article shows scientists developing a mind-controlled wheelchair.
I think they should develop a mind-controlled remote control for the TV
instead so I don't have to waste calories looking for the damn thing. The
TV could just flip channels until I found a show that was so mindless that
it reduced my brainwaves to zero. A State of the Union address qualifies.
As does every single car commercial that has ever been or ever will be
made. This would be the american version of the zen meditation state;
automated.
Dorian, the remote
We have a friend at work about whom we have claimed, for over a decade
now, that advances in 3D graphics, neuroelectronic attachments and game
design would have him on life support in a vegetative state, his wasting
body twitching slightly as he navigated his way through digital worlds.
Which is to say, where we're going, we don't need wheelchairs.
Blab. A misled reader writes:
Subj: Ethernet cable
What's so surprising about that?
I use one as a belt too. The blue ones match the IBM suit well if
you choose the right scsi cable for a tie. Now you just have to explain
why your belt was in your pocket. At least it wasn't a crossover
cable. ;-)
Dorian, the misled
So this is Geeky Eye for the Normal Guy. We like it! We have so
much to teach salesfolk and actors about how to dress.
Blab. A fearful reader writes:
And at 9:58pm that powder
blue cable still sits on the bed. Hmmmmm.....should I fear my safety????
Do not fear, Treasured Reader. As we write, it is 10:47 AM and the powder
blue cable is back in our pocket. Now the question is: Where will it be
tonight?
Blab. Our polite reader writes:
Sir: Regarding your powder
blue ethernet cable story -I think that you should run another one of your
"contests" or perhaps a survey. You might ask your readers to tell
of the interesting things that they have pulled out of their pockets when
they empty them out at the end of a hard day.
You know, we like it when our Treasured Readers do all the hard
work for us. So, Other Treasured Readers, get to it! Empty your pockets
and enter this week's Ambiguously
Named Plurp Contest.
Blab. Our polite reader is successful beyond belief. Certainly
beyond our belief.
Sir: I am pleased that Amazon
has established such high standards for success. By that measure,
I am successful beyond belief. My family will be pleased.
We should all be so talented to bleed a bit less this quarter than last.
Blab. A reader send us a scary picture of Jeff Bezos (which we
reproduce below) and an even scarier picture of a cat (which we do not
reproduce below, as it is a black-and-white cat, and these are known to
be devilspawn). Oh, and some text (which we reproduce below).
 The
similarities are more social than physical, perhaps, but the way we relate
to each is quite similar. We are so pleased that the cat threw up
only four times this month, and not once on a rug! Good cat!!
Ah, but did the cat throw up 50% less than last quarter?
Blab. A reader sends us the following from last
year, but probably meant to search
for it instead.
iris chacon
We wonder why.
Yow. What a
lovely poem! We've put the
book of the same title on our wish list. (Luminous)
Plurp. Dave discovered that he's ook
vaak. We, on the other hand, turn out to be alsmaar.
We hope this won't lead to disease.
Yak. Great oxymorons, from a meeting today.
A minor catastrophic incident
You're in a little bit of a world
of hurt
Yo. Yips!
Yow. Want a female partner that provides free food, free transportation
and unlimited sex whenever you want it? Click
here.
Yo. The next big thing: nanotech.
(Little
robots in your pants.)
Plurp. We heard someone on the news yesterday (the one on that
analog TV thing) trying to explain why there's so much pollen in the air
recently. There are far more male trees than female trees, he said,
and
there's nowhere for all that extra pollen to go but into the air and into
our eyes.
Prove, disprove, and salvage is possible. As always, provide
an authoritative Web reference. Then we will love you. Oh yes, we will.
Plurp.
The blue dog
wanted a female partner that provided
free food, free transportation and
unlimited sex
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Blab. A reader forgives us for having been programmed
in such an unfortunate way during our alien abduction.
It's Ok, your fences will
still be there in the morning. -AJL
And it's a good thing, too. Imagine the mess the goats would make!
Blab. A reader challenges the judges in our recent, reader-contributed
Helenism.
I'm an oddbal, but I wouldn't
say I was an odd man out...
We've been meaning to talk to you about that.
Blab. A reader submits a rare triple Helenism,
and then loses all its style points by calling it a Bobism instead. Who
the heck is Bob?
"I was flying off the hip."
Flying by the seat of the pants
Off the top of my head
Shooting from the hip
Nevertheless, congratulations to our eagle-eared reader!
Plurp. O seekers after Truth, what bringest ye hither this past
week?
-
helen naked pitures
-
imani
-
get cthulhu refrigerator
-
chihuly
-
swithen
-
arsenic poisoning pictures
-
quorn naked pictures
-
banana
-
icecream mountain
-
list of symbols
No naked
female dog lovers out there? That surprises us.
Yow. Yowie kazowie! Joe Klein, of Time magazine, has a fabulously
written, blistering op
ed piece this week.
How Bush Misleads Himself
[...] Why has the uranium story puffed
up so huge? It wouldn't have been a very big deal without the deepening
crisis in Iraq. But it also has ballast because it clarifies an aspect
of George W. Bush's essential character — specifically, the problem he
has with telling the truth. I am not saying Bush is a liar. Lying is witting:
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman." This is weirder than
that. The President seems to believe that wishing will make it so — and
he is so stupendously incurious that he rarely makes an effort to find
the truth of the matter. He misleads not only the nation but himself. Every
worst-case Saddam scenario just had to be true, as did every best-case
post-Saddam scenario. [...]
Plurp. So a scurrilous, unofficial test
suggests that we might be INTP
(or, just as likely, INFP).
(Unless you believe this scurrilous,
unofficial test, in which case we are INTJ,
or maybe INTP.)
Which is to say, rigorous, scientific testing has established that we're
pretty much like 3/16 of the world's population (assuming a uniform distribution
between categories and such).
We love rigorous, scientific testing. We do.
Plurp.Astonishing
news today!
Amazon.com [...] said yesterday
that it cut its loss in half for the second quarter. The company, the largest
general retailer on the Internet, said its strategy of discount prices
and free shipping was the largest contributor to its growth.
Imagine - a company that, while it has never made a profit, is now losing
even
less than it did before! We are filled with wonder.
Plurp. We came home tonight and, as we emptied our pockets into
the bedstand table, as we do every evening, we pulled out a powder blue,
six foot Ethernet cable.
Geekout!
Plurp.
On the topic of
naked female dogs,
the blue dog was
stupendously incurious
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Blab. A reader gets all excited.
Arrrrggh! This
is why freedom of speech gets such a bad name. -AJL
You mean this?
Revelation 13: The War against
Terrorism, following the September 2001 Attack on the U.S -- A Bible prophecy
and New Age analysis
Ah heck! We think that nutters are one of the best things about
freedom of speech. Buy yourself some Web access, get hours of mindless
entertainment for free!
In any event, we were unaware that freedom of speech ever got a bad
name. (Have you been hanging out with Asscroft again? Tsk.)
Blab. A second reader gets all excited.
Yikes! What's happened
to your face, dude?!
The stars weren't right. Let's just leave it at that.
Blab. A reader who is Morton gets all excited.
Woz
is back!
- Morton
Ah, Woz. What do you do for a second act after you've achieved worldwide
fame as the hardware designer for the very first Apple computer? We remember
when he developed a universal remote control. Yeah, that caught on too.
Mr. Wozniak described WozNet
as a simple and inexpensive wireless network that uses radio signals and
global positioning satellite data to keep track of a cluster of inexpensive
tags within a one- or two-mile radius of each base station. WozNet, he
said, will include a home-base station that has the ability to track the
location of dozens or even hundreds of small wireless devices that can
be attached to people, pets or property. The tags — expected to cost less
than $25 each to produce — will be able to generate alerts, notifying the
owner by phone or e-mail message when a child arrives at school, a dog
leaves the yard or a car leaves the parking lot.
Still, he developed the Apple. And that was cool.
Blab. A reader gets all excited about the purple polar bear.
"Una
osa polar violeta"
(Maybe she was dipped in the plurple
medicine and it's rubbing off on stuff? Yeah. That seems reasonable.)
Hey - that's an excellent theory! We were thinking that it was injected
or ingested, which made the whole fur / bar / ground thing wildly unlikely.
But a grape juice dip would be just the thing.
Still. Weird.
Blab. A reader thinks we should all get excited about the bear.
well, at least the bear isn't
blue. That would certainly threaten the dog.
Would it? Wood it? Wooed it?
Blab. After the recent bloodbath, a reader shuffles forward,
unsure of itself, and suggests this.
A candidate Helenism, from
the lovely C. herself:
"... he's an oddball out."
- "odd man out"
- "oddball"
{inw}
Excellent. (In spite of
that one-word constituent "phrase".)
Blab. A reader contributes.
If you'd like to add to your
windows backgrounds, here's
one I made earlier. No idea where I got the original photo, but still,
there it is. -AJL
Here's where we look ungrateful, but yonder picture doesn't seem to fit
through whatever unconscious filter our alien
masters have forced upon us for our Windows
Backgrounds. We don't understand it ourself.
Please don't take offense. It's lovely. Really.
Blab. A reader ...
[link]
Oh dear. Pat Robertson's Age Defying PancakesTM.
We can only pray that god makes them carcinogenic.
Plurp. Today, on the word lava.
She hadn't seen a lamp like
that since the day she helped her mother clean out the basement. They had
dug through dusty cardboard boxes of treasured memories, but not hers,
as she scarcely knew what most of those odd treasures were.
Plurp.
The blue dog
hadn't seen a lamp like that since
Pat Robertson's Age Defying PancakesTM
Monday, July 21, 2003
Blab. On Metallica suing a "Canadian" band over the
use of the chords E and F, a reader writes:
Not only ridiculous but also
laughable, in that special way that well-executed hoaxes
tend to have.
Is it amusing or is it frightening that it is so easy to fool the modern
media? (We have always been easy to fool, but then nobody ever believes
us, so it doesn't matter.)
Blab. A reader defends "Canada".
If anyone thought for a moment
that GWB had a sense of humor or irony, let's set that straight now.
Ditto for the really weird looking guy doing an imitation of Luther and
George Lincoln Rockwell in front of some peculiarly and suddenly clad nude
statuary. They have finally attacked Canada. But they haven't
gotten the joke.
The joke, such as it is, is:
ABC News correspondent Jeffrey
Kofman's stories on plummeting U.S. troop morale in Iraq have apparently
angered the Bush Administration to the point that the White House reportedly
put the word out to Republican-friendly media pundits that Mr. Kofman is
a homosexual and, worse yet, from Canada.
Shocking.
Blab. A plurple cow? No, a...
Plurple
Polar Bear
Hmm. Yahoo attributes a photo of a purple polar bear to Reuters.
Normally white, Pelusa turned
violet after veterinarians administered a medicine to treat her for a skin
condition. Her veterinarians said her coat should turn normal again within
a month.
Ananova shows a different but similarly
shocking photo.
Oddly, its fur has turned purple. Even more oddly, the glint in its
eyes is purple. So this "medicine" affects not just the skin and the hair,
but the aqueous humor as well. (Or is that just JPEG artifacting?) Snopes
is currently silent on the matter, but we expect that to be temporary.
We won't even mention the cage bars, which also seem to have been affected.
Blab. Still with the bear thing, the author of an obscure comic
strip writes:
wow, that kitty translator
looks just like choo-choo
bear!
We surmise that choo-choo bear is the cat in said obscure comic strip.
How odd that a caricature of a cat should look like a caricature of a cat.
Blab. A reader admires our musical abilities.
your bucket playing is fine,
sir, but the
kitten must go!
But - oh - this isn't suggested as good advice for us, at least not directly.
Rather:
Angel Melendez, 37, was in
the Union Square station playing buckets like bongo drums when police charged
him with having an uncontained animal.
Melendez's four-week-old kitten, Gizmo,
was asleep on one of the buckets.
Lock 'em all up, we say! Vicious beasts.
Blab. An erudite reader sends us both informed good sense, and
Official Answers. Oooh - we are all goose-bumpy.
Some informed good sense
on the
courriel controversy.
(I picked it up from the Frenchy-French
media where it seems to have become the Term Of Choice.)
Your reader perplexed by 0.999...
= 1 may be pleased to note that this is the official
answer: "Every Real number has a unique decimal expansion (up to the
ambiguity of ending in ...000... or ...999...)". When uniqueness
matters we usually declare the terminating ("...000...") version to be
canonical, given as how it saves on ink.
And 1+1 does of course equal -3, mod
5. Doubtless your enigmatic interlocutioner wished to remind you
of the rich and beautiful theory of algebraic geometry over finite fields.
We are reminded daily of the rich and beautiful theory of algebraic geometry
over finite fields.
Yo. This
is interesting. Surreal, but interesting. Click on the alternate versions.
Plurp. A friend of ours is all excited about Friendster,
a new (?) Web site that builds a social network by having you have all
of your friends sign up, then having your friends sign up their friends,
and so on, and so on. You can (apparently - we haven't tried it) navigate
this social network in the obvious way, clicking from friend to friend-of-a-friend
and so on.
Unsurprisingly, friendships tend to be clustered, so you end up clicking
into people you haven't seen in a while who are friends-of-friends-of-friends.
Oh
golly, you say with glee at 3 AM, there's that cute albino I had
a crush on in 10th grade! Maybe I should send her a note and see if she's
still living underground.
Our friend finds it addicting.
We didn't sign up because it seems like a great way for the Friendster
folks to gather an enormous number of email addresses, and we're always
paranoid that folks like that are just front ends for the evil spammists.
So all of you out there who do decide to join the Friendster Family,
please leave us out of your little cliques. Thanks.
Yow. A really interesting article in Scientific
American article links thermodynamic entropy with information entropy,
generalizes the Second Law of Thermodynamics to include quantum black holes,
and speculates that the universe is all just bits after all.
Plop. Is it possible that the U.S. has been abusing the civil
rights of its subjugated citizenry recently? Of
course not!
A report by internal investigators
at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which
department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil
liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism
law known as the USA Patriot Act. [...]
The report said that in the six-month
period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received
34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department
employees that it considered credible, including accusations that Muslim
and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers had been beaten.
Well, then, maybe so.
Plurp. Viscerally terrifying sculptural
foodstuffs from Japan, including a horrifying appearance of octodog.
(/usr/bin/girl)
Plurp.
The blue dog
found that purple polar bear
interesting
Sunday, July 20, 2003
Plurp.
 |
