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2003.07.27 : 2003.08.02

Saturday, August 2, 2003

Blab. It's our own version of the sabbath here at Plurp, and how better to celebrate it than by reading ...

Selections from the Klingon Book of Mormon

There's just no better way.

Blab. God itself stops by our humble blog. Pretty cool, eh?

I beheld the earth, And, lo, it was waste and void; And the heavens, and they had no light. I behelend the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, And all the hills moved to and fro.

You beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. We love that story.

Blab. A reader settles, once and for all, the Mystery of the Purple Polar Bear. Or does it?

Sir: I saw news footage of the purple polar bear on tv.  It did not appear as if the video used special effects.

To add to the conspiracy, a guest at dinner tonight nodded, saying it was potassium permanganate.

Well, that's what they'd like you to believe.

Blab. A reader makes trouble.

Like a good little mind-controlled slave we headed off to get a copy of autonomic computing and try to judge the work fairly. Good old mother IBM refuses to let us sign in because (a) it knows us but dislikes our password (b) it admits it knows us but won't mail us the password (reason #53) and, (c) it could find no user with our last name and email address and told us to go away (Reason #82). All this hassle for a demo of a renamed and re-branded demo (was web services). I guess we'll have to wait until the newly renamed and rebranded autonomic registration system corrects itself and likes us again. sigh.

Dorian, the unwelcome

Actually, we asked them to activate the Special Hassling Module, just for you.

Blab. On the issue of whether or not something-or-other can be labeled as fascist, a reader writes:

Your imperial Plurpness, sir, you get to stick any label you like on any verifiable or hallucinatory phenomenon you fancy. We suspect it'll enhance the orbital lasers' effectivity. 

Any act of calling thing A by a new name of B has at a minimum the effect that one could adjust the web of meanings and distinctions we attach to A, to accomodate the meanings we're used to attaching to concept B. Sometimes this will even make sense. So different labels lead to different possible predictions, and some predictions will be righter than others, so the choice of the right label could mean that you get to make the right prediction? Or something.

Ahem.

But really! This Neiwert knows stuff, stuff of the actually having happened variety -- OTOH, as you seem to imply, one feels the need to ask: what'cha gon' do 'bout it? Huh?

There is that.

Well thank goodness for that, eh? We were on the verge of having an actual philosophical discussion on this cheap-as-dirt blog, after all, and where would that have led?

But, yeah, we probably should actually read that long, didactic piece. If only to prove that we can still, uh, read.

Yak. From our conference yesterday.

This is really apples divided by oranges.

Plurp. As a result of going to various meetings this week, we have accumulated a small collection of business cards. You remember those? Little rectangles of cardboard. Entirely passive. Analog. Quaint.

So what to do? Naturally, we asked the Web that question, and here's the result. We're going to make origami cubes from them. Maybe we'll make a mobile. If we get enough, we're going to make a depth 3 Menger's sponge. (/usr/bin/girl)

Now, where will we put it?

Yo. You know those automated ATM machines that are springing up everywhere - drug stores, grocery stores, McDonald's (McDonald's)? Awfully convenient, aren't they?

Did you also know that there's virtually no regulation on who can install these machines? And that folks have used them to steal your ATM card info and then to extract zillions of dollars from your bank accounts?

You didn't?

Yak. From dinner at a Chinese restaurant tonight.

Hey, this is really good! What's the recipe?

"Lettuce cups", chicken, I'm Feeling Lucky.

Plurp. Yesterday, on the word exposed.

She threw the sheet back. "There", she said, without disguising her contempt. "There!"

He stared, speechless.

Plurp.

The blue dog
stared,
speechless

Friday, August 1, 2003

Blab. Making it clear that things are back to normal, what with the recent repair of the temporal rift, one of our horde of copy editors reports what it think is - gasp - an error.

Someone has invaded your site and made grammatical errors to embarrass you, as in the item excerpt below from your recent Muesday Yow. 

"a couple of random guys, one of which quit ..."  We all know it was a whom who quit.

Have you perused the site? And you still think it's written by humans?

Interesting.

Blab. A reader disputes our silly interpretation of something that happened during this week's temporal rift.

No, no.  Enterprise.  The one with the guy from Quantum Leap, not the Shatner stuff.

Oh, right. Didn't Shatner have sex with that?

Blab. A Treasured Reader sends us a nice little essay. Well, not little.

This is an article (in .pdf) by David Neiwert, who has a lot to say about people in America who do stuff that looks like fascism, which he clearly defines in the context of the essay. Unlike that text in Adbusters, it's based on a lot of research, part of it by going to meetings of militia, patriot and christianist groups, part history, part journalistic work. It's big (640K, 85 pages), it's scary, I couldn't stop reading it. I was glad that it offered a lot of facts and a clear delineation of the actual problem instead of scaremongering rhetorics. 

Interesting. But we admit to being puzzled.

Do we get to label such-and-such behavior, or thus-and-such society, or this-here government as "facist"? We do? Oh boy.

Now, after carefully affixing said label to said abstract thing, what can we do that we couldn't do before? Is there predictive power that we now have? Can we figure out what that abstract thing is going to do, whereas that would have come as a complete surprised before?

And, if not, what's the function of the label?

Or did we miss the point again?

Blab. A reader derides us for our interest in modern instrumentation.

The major problem with the Yo-God product is that, to measure something, you must first know what you are measuring. e.g. a compass is a measurment of the direction of magnetic north, and it works because of the magnetic force of the pole acting on the needle. To detect the presence of God, one must first know that presence and it's effect and force, and devise some method of measurement from the known phenomenon. What you are attempting is the equivalent of measuring earthquake strength with a thermometer. You don't know in what way God may or may not exert influence (measurable force) in the universe, therefore, you cannot measure it. Still, on first glance a rather amusing, if scientifically flawed, idea. -AJL

Compasses were in use long before anybody understood magnetism. All you need in a phenomenon is regularity, or at least empirical predictability. If God were random, how could you tell it from noise?

Anyhow, the current reading looks correct to us.

Blab. A reader derides us in our forced isolation.

Where have you been, Steve?  And no, I don't mean the last few days--you're way behind in becoming infected by the Strongbad meme.  I found out about it months ago from friends.  It was mentioned in Wired over a month ago.   Heck, Trogdor the Burninator was mentioned in the final episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer which aired way back on May 20.

And you didn't let us know? Ain't we friends no more?

They don't let us out much these days, and we kept seeing the encoded messages in both Wired and Buffy, so they don't let us see those any more. We depend on our Treasured Readers to smuggle secrets past the Conspiratorial Guard. So we can keep up.

Blab. Our Treasured Readers somehow discover the most curious sites.

Physical Immortality! Animated GIFs! Two great things that are great together! 

Sadly, having spent around ten minutes perusing this site, we can't figure out what it's about. But our readers are smarted than we are. Maybe they'll explain it to us.

Yow. Oh look! The Autonomic Computing Toolset, which some folks in our group developed to make it easier to make autonomic systems, is now available as part of the Emerging Technologies Toolkit on alphaWorks.

This is a good thing, and these hard-working folks are to be applauded.

Yo. 9-11: The game. Hard to know what to think about this. (Mike)

Plop. Here's what you really, really don't want to have happen to you.

Microsoft suffered utter defeat at a crucial pretrial hearing in what appears to be the highest-stakes patent litigation ever - one in which a tiny company called InterTrust Technologies claims that 85% of Microsoft's entire product line infringes its digital security patents. [...]

Though InterTrust declines to place a pricetag on the suit, it's hard to imagine the company settling now for any sum that does not have a "B" in it. InterTrust claims that its inventions cover technologies that Microsoft has been weaving into its Windows XP operating system, Office XP Suite, Windows Media Player, Xbox videogame console, and .NET networked computing platform, to name just a few. If settlement talks fail and InterTrust prevails in court, it would be entitled to a court order halting sales of all those products. InterTrust CEO Talal Shamoon asks rhetorically, "How much would that be worth to Microsoft?"

Really, really.

Plurp.

The blue dog
removed the label
from the godometer

Wursday, July 30.5, 2003

Blab. Various reader say various things. In particular:

1. what gives hay?
2. So, here we are in the middle of Tuesday wondering what happened to the Monday edition of Plurp.  What gives?
3. The eagles are gathering
4. Enjoy the liver-pecking! 

Our readers seem not to have noticed the strongest temporal rift in recent history! How can that be? Perhaps their lives are already so attentively fragmented that it's hard for them to tell the difference.

But not us! We've been collective massive amounts of data on the phenomenon, and are on the verge of being able to exploit the anomaly for our own sinister purposes. Of course, we dare not say more at this juncture.

Blab. Some of our readers, passing through the stages of denial and anger, come to either contemplative states, or astonishing discoveries.

Nice green skinned girl though, BTW.  Kind of reminds me of something from the first series of Enterprise.  Sort of.

Hmm. Didn't Shatner have sex with her?

My goodness, it's Princess Amidala! 

Hmm. Didn't Shatner have sex with her?

I hear guacamole facials are very therapetic. 

Hmm. Didn't Shatner have sex with that?

Blab. Binge, purge, blab.

Dear Sir,

I don't even know why I'm emailing you, quite quite possibly because I'm still extremely shaken up by something I found on your site.  In your Saturday, August 10, 2002 entry, you mentioned several sites on pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia.  I guess maybe what I'm shooting at is, how on earth did you find these sites???  Seeing as my old site was the one listed under the "mia" text link. Quite a shocker when I saw that.  Just skimming my mouse over the links and WHAM up shows ana_horse.tripod.com.  Wow.  Thanks for the publicity, I suppose?  But, alas, Tripod has taken me down.

Have a nice day, 
Margaret

Gosh, how did we find those sites? Ooh - we know! Google.

Google will tell you all about pro-ana (pro-anorexia) sites, ana-by-choice sites, and pro-mia (no, not that Mia) sites. If you're on the Web, you can't hide.

Blab. While we've been busy with the temporal rift, Ian has been busy keeping the Helenism flux high.

"... act in order."
   + act together 
   + house in order

{inw}

And we are, of course, grateful. If the Helenism flux ever fell below the critical threshold, who knows what would happen?

Blab. Two blink links. Two blinks links. See how they're fun. See how they're fun.

[link] [link]

Left: Hysterical rantings worthy of a freshman composition class.

Right: Puppet Terror.

Blab. Today's meme-mixing spam subject line:

Subj: Re: mummy,No Credit Gold Visa Card Approved lgafazn 

Iä! Iä!

Blab. Now here's a handy device!

A God Detector

Yo !

Plurp. The anomaly has not affected our readers' desire to find things around these here parts. This past week ...

1. helen naked pitures
2. chihuly
3. naked female dogs
4. imani
5. iris chacon
6. chthulu sings
7. aaliyah
8. answering machine welcome notes
9. arsenic poisoning pictures
10. backstage

Good to see Helen once again in ascendancy (and her fame is spreading), though we note that female dogs are nipping at her heels.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was revealed to be a fiction
constructed from hay,
liver-pecking, guacamole,
and "mia" text links.

Muesday, July 28.5, 2003

Blab. A reader decants our submission to the Grape Juice Dip theory of the purple polar bear.

it seems much more likely that the picture is a fake and they didn't do anything to the bear.  That would explain the purple eyes and bars and ground and the obnoxious green you can barely see in the background.  They used the same effect in Cannibal: The Musical. 

We had not previously been aware of this particular musical. Now we wish that we still weren't.

Blab. A reader contemplates insectiality.

About the male zeus bug...maybe the sex is really REALLY good.

Somehow, we suspect that this is illegal in many localities.

Blab. A reader understands that we are just a mischievous eleven-year-old with graying hair.

[link] 

Here we find prank phone calls, of the kind we made when we were eleven, but with a digital twist. They use the voice of Arnold Schwarzenneger, from his various high art movies, to make the prank call, often with hilarious results. (Go listen.)

How they do that?, you ask. No, they didn't have one of those analog audio tape things. They used a computer, and now you can too. Just download the ArnieBoard and you can create your own conversations out of Schwarzenneger clips.

Our current goal is to give our next conference presentation using a similar facility.

Blab. Stephanie writes:

From: Stephanie Turner

Have you caught the winkle wave @mrwinkle.com? Seems
to be right up your alley.

Mr. Winkle continues to terrify us with its mere existence.

Blab. A reader invites us to consider ...

Pinocchio fetishists. God bless the Internet! 

Each and every one, Treasured Reader. Each and every one.

Blab. The usual thing.

[link] [link]

Left: Rant.

Right: Yow.

Blab. A pre-med writes:

Rewatched the incredibly watchable Spalding Gray's Gray's Anatomy last night, in which he recounts his experiences trying to cure his macular pucker. No defenestration per se, but some scenes are shot through a window. Long live the monologue! 

We haven't yet seen this. Maybe we should. We are a great fan of macular pucker.

Blab. A reader writes:

fhtagn! 

Yeah, Steven Jackson's creative low point. Sad.

Blab. A reader astounds us with statistics.

This reference claims there are 164 muggings a day in london. Since you're going there I thought you might like to know.

Dorian, the victim

As a New Yorker, we find this news soothing.

Yow. An obscure relative turns us on to Strong Bad, which he thinks of as engineering humor. We don't think of it that way. In fact, we don't think of it at all, but it is awfully funny! See, in particular, website, techno, sugarbob and japanese cartoon. (Each of which you have to click on yourself, it being Evil Flash and stuff. Sorry.) Oh, and turn your sound on, you silly user.

The site is run by a couple of random guys, one of which quit his job to do this full time. They turn out one new animation a week for their growing and adoring audience. Isn't the Web weird?

It's a very inbred operation, which we appreciate for all of the obvious reasons, and first-time readers may want to start here. There are secret links within the animations (usually in the final image) which you can click on to find other funny thingies. (Did you know you can find secret links by tabbing around? We didn't.)

Anyhow, go poke around. It's very funny.

Plop. We don't understand this.

[New York City] is opening a full-fledged high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students -- the first of its kind in the nation. [...]

Harvey Milk will be an academically rigorous school that will specialize in computer technology, arts and a culinary program.

Not theater? Or fashion? Or interior design?

It seems to us that, as offensive stereotypers, these folks really haven't done their homework. We do anticipate, however, seeing the public school system opening academically rigorous black schools, Jewish schools, Catholic schools, blonde schools, and so on.

We live in exciting times.

Plop. U.S. military planners have their eye on the total dominance of the space near Earth. Included in their ideas is this gem.

Orbiting weapons capable of attacking Earth targets could include lasers, missiles or non-explosive projectiles like the so-called "Rods from God" proposal -- an orbiting platform that would send satellite-guided tungsten rods screaming toward Earth at a moment's notice. Simply by virtue of their speed and weight, the rods could destroy hardened bunkers four stories underground. 

aka the Tantalus field.

Plurp. Yesterday, on the word delicate.

He was afraid to touch her, even to run a single finger lightly over her arm while she slept. Afraid to bruise her, afraid of the blood that would ooze, syrupy, onto the sheets.

Then today, on the word comfort.

He was just dozing off, just on the slope of it, his head in her lap, the sun warm, the grass beneath his arms.

Plurp.

The blue dog
lobbied for the opening of
a public school for
Pinocchio fetishists

Sunday, July 27, 2003

Plurp.

© 2001-2003 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved