Plurp: One-stop shopping for the abandoned dreams of your youth

Bigger!

2003.09.07 : 2003.09.13

Saturday, September 13, 2003
Blab. Our Treasured Readers are still hard at work on our Reader-Contributed-And-Maliciously-Edited Plurp Contest, Name This Girl!
"Hint: Unlike almost all of our other Plurp contests, this one has a correct answer."
Mia?
The enigmatic Mia hasn't made an appearance here (or anywhere else, as far as we know) in months. And we do not (as far as we know) have a picture of her.
So, no.

Blab. A polite reader becomes confused.
Dear Mister. What does "partisome" mean?
It's a lovely word, don't you think? Especially as we used it yesterday in that crafty sentence, One of the partisome events during Innovation Days is a science fiction writing contest ...

Blab. A redear wrteis:
The paomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Fcuknig amzanig huh?
No URL? Bad reader! No biscuit!
That is quite amazing, though. We can read the above text without difficulty, albeit at perhaps half the rate we can read normal text. That it is possible to read it at all is surprising to us.
It suggests, to us anyway, that dyslexia could be more of a clue to how the mind works than a disability per se.

Blab. A reader who owns several thousand shares of Nike stock insists that we ...
just do it!
Unfortunately, it appears to be too late for us, as ten thousand Chinese folks have already just done it.
Ten thousand people were falling over one another to set a new world record when they formed a human domino chain stretching five kilometers at a tourist spot in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, on Friday. [...]
At about 11:20 a.m., a gun shot signaled the first human domino to lean against the one sitting behind. The players began leaning backwards one by one with their arms raised upward.
Gradually, the line fell around the lake and through the meadows, opening a spring, a Hunan Province map and other pictures and slogans.
This has the advantage over cricket of being comprehensible.

Blab. A reader informs us, in staccato headline fashion, that ...
Selling glass tubes illegal in Pennsylvania!
And about time, too! We understand that the only conceivable use of glass tubes is in the manufacture of weapons-grade uranium. Indeed, Tommy Chong, the perpetrator of this terrorist plot, admits as much.
Chong, 65, admitted having a marijuana problem, but said he was overcoming it through hobbies such as salsa dancing.
It turns out that that's a bit of a misquote. He's actually overcoming it through hobbies such as eating salsa and dancing.

Blab. Mistaking that little Blab box in the margin for our massive chromium search facility, an errant reader attempts to find ...
mindy
But Mindy's not here right now. Run along.

Yak. We had a friend over for dinner this week.

Friend: Oh! I brought a game we can play before dinner.
[She leaves to get the game.]

Steve:
[to Helen] Do you suppose this game involves kinky sex?

Helen: I don't think so!

Steve: My life is a continuing series of disappointments.

Plurp. So now even William Gibson is abandoning bloggery forever. And he only just started! They're dropping like ... like ... things that drop.
But, you know, we're an insanely late adopter. We were insanely late to the blogging party, and no doubt we'll still be doing this long after the rest of humanity has decided that's it's all too dreadfully passé.
That's just us.

Plurp. More media whoring! This time, it's just a little quote or two buried way down in the middle of an article in the NYT. Still, it's all part of our insidious plot to take over the world.

Plurp. Things we learned today.

St. Louis has an airport.

Seattle does too have nice weather. On rare occasion.

If the AC adapter for your ThinkPad goes on the fritz on Saturday, IBM can't possibly get you a replacement until the following Tuesday.

We hate computers.

Well, maybe we didn't learn that last one today.

Plurp.
The bule dog
was a dueovis ctosnctut
of gslas tbues
and knkiy sex

Friday, September 12, 2003
Blab. A reader notices that we are a year older than we were a year ago.
Happy Birthday Plurp...though none of us feel like celebrating.
That's kind of you and, yeah, we didn't feel much like celebrating yesterday. We've solved this problem by declaring Sept. 21, the day we first published, to be Plurp's birthday. Sept. 11 was merely the day on which we started ruminating on whether we wanted to do a Weblog at all.
It's all very revisionist-historical.

Blab. Various readers leap at the opportunity to Name This Girl! (It's our current Reader-Contributed-And-Maliciously-Edited Plurp Contest. See? It's fun already.)
Mary Smith... no wait! Mary Jones!
You have been cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Or:
Barbara Ann
A nice name. Sort of a '50s feel to it, don't you think? Or:
Wendy Hamilton?
Miss December 1991. How nostalgic. Or:

That seems wildly unlikely. Or:
Sharbat Gula
Very topical! Or:
Greeble! Sugarplum! Yolanda! Mary Magdalen! Wendy the Proud! Angelina Jolie! Windshield Wiper! Zest! Kali Jones! Homeobox!
We are rather fond of Yolanda but, no, none of these are correct. Maybe this was a harder puzzle than we thought, so we'll give you a hint.
Hint: Unlike almost all of our other Plurp contests, this one has a correct answer.

Blab. Some of our readers have very worrisome reading habits. We mean other than Plurp. Or, rather, in addition to Plurp.
ld! The Future!
Our problem is (one of our many problems is): we can't figure out what that thing is. Is it a toilet? A facial bidet? We just don't know!

Blab. We also don't know where you folks find this stuff. We really don't.
El Wolfman
Okay, so this is, um, a guy with an extremely hair face who is in the circus (this much made sense) as a trapeze artist (and that's where you lost us).
Or, as poetically translated by Babelfish.
It is prepared for the number. The immense red velvet curtain is opened and appeared Danny with its clothes of acrobat. Music and the centers follow to him. "Here, everything forgets. To act is for me like drinking or to eat ", said to me shortly before. One stretches and it is taken hold to the trapeze. The body tended backwards. A last impulse to fly better. To tens of meters over the starred track, it seems a bird more than a wolf. According to the legend, only the silver bullets can kill to the man wolf. The forgetfulness and the anonymity would kill Danny. "Without these applause it would die", recognizes with a great smile.
Inspiring.

Blab. Referring to our recent, wise dictum, There is no animal that closes its eyes more slowly than a cat, a reader writes:
I beg to differ. Ask any professor. Students tend to go slowly cross-eyed, then alternate closing one eye at a time, then roll their eyes back in their heads, followed by a head ballet as their inner-ear gyro spins down, and THEN close their eyes. Try to stay awake at your next meeting and you'll see the behavior raised to a high art by your fellow detainees.
Dorian, the lidless one
From this, we learn how much we've missed by trying so desperately to stay awake in meetings. Consider us reformed.

Blab. On the secret messages buried in the ordering of Yahoo photos, a reader writes:
"What are they trying to tell us by insidiously changing those photos out from underneath us?"
Today it's a jogger, and a nuclear explosion (uh-oh).
Run!

Blab. A reader ...
[link]
... which is ...
IERS Rapid Service/Prediction Center
for Earth Orientation Parameters
The IERS Rapid Service/Prediction Center is the product center of the International Earth Rotation Service responsible for providing Earth orientation parameters (EOPs) on a rapid turnaround basis. This service is primarily intended for real-time users and others needing the highest quality EOP information sooner than is available in the IERS final series (Bulletin B) published by the IERS Earth Orientation Center, which is based at the Observatoire de Paris.
Can you say narrowcasting? We knew you could.

Blab. A reader tells us a tall tale.
Sherman Austin heads to jail today for a one-year term. He was charged with "distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction" after someone posted bomb-making information on his political website, raisethefist.com. Once he is is released he is banned from associating with anyone who wants to change U.S. government "in any way."
Naturally, there is no associated URL, which raises its Alert Status to Wild Rumor.
Sadly, a little Google goes a long way these days. Sherman does appear to be in jail, and for a "crime" that sounds pretty much like the one described above. We're not sure we believe that bit about the association ban. We're not sure what it would mean anyway.
Readers with too much time on their hands will remember that we got all upset about this case when Sherman was first arrested. It's quite astonishing. Everything this kid had on his site was utterly trivial, and no more helpful to budding terrorists than a few hours spent playing around in the kitchen.
As we said back then:
Please read the adolescent trivialities at these links and ask yourself the following questions. Is this a terrorist? Is anybody going to learn anything that they couldn't learn almost anywhere else (e.g. from our own government) by reading this tripe? Didn't you read all this in the Anarchist's Cookbook over twenty years ago? Is this a person we need to imprison? Is this a Web site to which you should be forbidden access?
If he had printed this stuff on paper, we suspect that the First Amendment would have focussed the FBI on eating doughnuts instead of trampling his rights.
Are we to conclude that the U.S. government does not recognize Web publications as protected by the Constitution?
Pity. We rather liked that Constitution thing.

Blab. A Dr. Mark C. Hilgard from Fort Lee, New Jersey, writes:
Subj: I like your Salinas picture!
Mit freundlichen Grüssen / Sincerely yours
Dr. Mark C. Hilgard
Yeah, us too. We think, anyway. All we have right now is the bits.

Plurp.

Yow. We just discovered that there are Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the extremely nearby community of Unpleasantville. In fact, there is a whole cluster of Usonian houses there. The Friedman house is there, as is the Reisley house.
How did this escape our notice for so long? Maybe we should take our long-delayed Frank Lloyd Wright Road Trip.

Plurp. Our vaunted employer is holding something called Innovation Days next week. We're pretty confused by the whole concept, given that it's, like, a research lab, okay? Next, we figure they'll have Reading Days, followed closely by Thinking Days. Anyhow, we're holding off on innovating until it all gets straightened out.
One of the partisome events during Innovation Days is a science fiction writing contest, the winner of which gets "a lunch with Hugo award-winning author Vernor Vinge, or a copy of one of his books." We wonder if Vernor will be offended when the winner picks the book over the lunch. Or maybe he'd prefer that.
Submissions to the contest are limited to 1000 words, which is pretty short. We were thinking of dusting off one of the two little SFesque stories we've written and tossing it into the entry basket.
But, in the process of dusting, we realized that the most likely candidate was written under a pseudonym that we have worked very hard to avoid having associated with our more public persona.
So now we're stymied! How will we ever get a book by Vernor Vinge?

Plurp. Nuts! It turns out that the deadline for submitting SF stories was last Wednesday, and we missed out entirely. So we'll just display the other (non-pseudonymous) entry possibility here.
It was a caution, standing there so proud and tall, soaking up the last few licks of afternoon sun. Time was they never woulda put such a thing here, not here, but now they did, these last few months. We wasn't sure what to make of it, Julie and me. A good thing, we figured. Progress, probably. But it was unnerving, kinda, not knowing, you know, what it was thinking.
Maybe Vernor will wander by and nominate us for a Hugo. You never know. Well, we never know.

Plop. Some folks in Texas decided to remove the Colored Men and Colored Women signs from certain bathroom doors in the county courthouse.
After people complained.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the product center of
the International Earth Rotation
Service responsible
for providing Earth orientation
parameters (EOPs) on a rapid turnaround
basis

Thursday, September 11, 2003
Plurp.
It is more subdued today, more somber. The pace is slower. (Or is it just me?) People walking down the street are not shouting into their cell phones. There are fewer smiles.
"It's a special day," says a woman wearing a sweater knit in an American flag pattern to her similarly dressed daughter, "so we dress special to remember it."
We all deal with it differently. I will go to work as usual (as I did two years ago). Helen will overdose on the television coverage (as she did).
"I can't watch this," says a man in the dentist's office of a television showing children reading the Names Of The Dead, each stopping with the name of a close relative. An uncle. A father.
The city is strangely unchanged. Hundred story buildings are still going up. Sidewalks are still swept in the morning. There are lines at the carts that sell bagels and doughnuts. But, of course, this is not downtown.
"I remember just where I was," says a man, leaning on a building near Rockefeller Center and drinking coffee from a blue paper cup. "Me too," says his companion.
And, despite assurances that the Threat Level has not been raised from Yellow, there are cops everywhere.

Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Blab. A reader refers to the "Canadian" press, which reports ...
mr little guy
Curiously, this is not a story about "Canada", per se, but about its proxy, Minneapolis.
Four-year-old Shira Rabkin wanted to ask just the right questions, so she thought long and hard.
"Dear Mr. Little Guy," she finally scrawled in big letters across a sheet of paper. "Do you like mints?" After some more pondering, she added, "and going to Camp Snoopy? Love, Shira."
Mr. Little Guy was nowhere in sight this early August evening, so Shira stuffed her letter behind his door at the base of a hollowed out ash tree. It's always open, and always full - of letters, pens, flowers and coins.
The elusive elf has enchanted Twin Citians ever since the 15 centimetre wooden door appeared eight years ago, just off a walking path around popular Lake Harriet. Double takes led to messages, and messages to answers - and somehow Mr. Little Guy keeps up, responding to the queries in typed notes half the size of business cards.
We conclude that the people in Minneapolis are easily amused, not very busy, and are in mortal danger of being annexed by "Canada".
Beware.

Blab. Those folks in the unlabelled white panel truck that sits outside our apartment 24 hours a day are back. Today, they masquerade as someone close to us and write:
Too bad you couldn't find photos of our other Cratsley pictures. They are quite wonderful.
H
This refers, of course, to the lovely Bruce Cratsley photograph to which we pointed yesterday, the one in the still-unannounced Art portfolio of our Stuff section.
It surprises us that we couldn't find images of our other three Cratsley photographs on the Web. We thought everything was on the Web. What's going on here?

Blab. A reader informs us of an impending ...
Uh oh. Possible ignition of planet Jupiter 2003/09/21. :-)
This reminds us a great deal of the science fiction / horror movies of our youth (the distant 1950s and 1960s). You know, What Horrors Await the First Visitors to Space?, or Atomic Woman Grows to Colossal Size!
It was a revival of the Medieval culture of superstition, in which anything new or out of the ordinary was regarded as dangerous and foreboding.
So, yeah, a space probe containing radioactive material is going to splash into the nitrogen slush of Jupiter. BFD. Jupiter won't even notice.
Though it might have been fun to live in a binary system.

Blab. A reader suggests:
a new competition - name this girl
WHO IS THIS?
Interestingly, a picture was attached. But that would make it too awfully easy, wouldn't it, Treasured Readers? Instead, we ask you to Name This Girl without the photographic clue.

Blab. Our favorite chew toy writes:
"We promise to stop being influenced by what we read."
Sure, or you might just try to, you know, make sure that what you're reading is actually what was written. I'm constantly surprised how often the two are entirely different.
We'd be happy to do as you say, but we just promised not to.

Blab. Another reader has a different opinion.
More Helen, less whiny readers!
We love all of our Treasured Readers, whiny or not, and Helen most of all.

Blab. An Angelina fan writes:
I like the Sunday Afganistan woman pitures, Ignore the complainers because *I* like you, and interest in Angelina will never wane.
Well, that makes a total of one reader who likes the Afghan woman series, which is well over our threshold for continuing it.

Blab. Off the topic of scavenger hunts, a reader writes:
Since you're mentioning text adventures, try "Anchorhead"... it's Lovecrafty.
Did we mention text adventures? Whatever, because our Treasured Reader was kind enough to find a Lovecraftian thingie for us (which is really awfully nice!), we'll pretend we did and gush over this particular text adventure, which we haven't even tried.
It's great. Just great.

Blab. A reader, perhaps that very same reader that focused the mind control lasers on us and forced us to post clues to its scavenger hunt, writes:
several pieces of the hunt are on the web, but a lot are scattered around Philadelphia.
If this is to be believed, only our most impressive readers will be able to solve any part of the scavenger hunt.

Blab. A reader writes:
|\_._._/|
| o o |
   \ .` /
   |`---|
   |    |    Der blaue Hund replicated.
   |`___|\_
/|    |\
##    ##
Probably referring to this.
Congratulations!

Plurp. The magnetic key card for our hotel room (we're at another three-day meeting in Another Place) advertises:

SpongeBob SquarePants Sleepover
Weekends Fall 2003

Yes, the very concept is frightening, and the implications for the safety of our young ones is terrifying.
But worse! There is a brightly colored picture depicting a sponge-like creature that is clearly raving stoned on illegal drugs and intent on ruinous alien carnage.
We must contact the authorities immediately.

Plop. People do all sorts of weird things for money. Look at the current raft of reality shows on TV.
Now, when you were a child, how much would you have asked to be sexually abused by a Catholic priest?
$152k? Good! You're average. (Though some of you went for as little as $80k, and some of your parents settled for a mere $20k. Tsk. Need to work on those negotiating skills, kids.)

Plop. You know what sucks? Being in an all-day meeting and having neither wired nor wireless access. That's what sucks.
It's just like The Old Days; there's nothing to do but pay attention to the meeting. What did people do to survive?
They wrote their Weblogs, that's what.

Yo. There is no animal that closes its eyes more slowly than a cat.

Plurp.
The blue dog
loved all of the Treasured Readers.
No matter what.

Tuesday, September 9, 2003
Blab. A reader gets its interest all piqued by that recent, mysterious request.
You tell that guy who made the text adventure to post it, cuz I'll play it. I like text adventures. pef
It turns out that said guy was making a scavenger hunt for his girlfriend. It's over now (she finished it), so why don't we open this up to a Leftover Plurp Contest? Yes, that would be jolly!
Of course, we'll make it a little harder. We'll force you to start with the only element of the scavenger hunt that we have, and require you to search both forward and backwards (if, indeed, there is a forward and backwards) to discover the entire chain (set?) of elements, and explain what it's all about. We're not even sure the entire scavenger hunt is on the Web, which would probably make it even harder.
Anyhow, go to it!

Blab. We get grief for one of our rare excursions into creativity.
Hey! Quit with the stupid Sunday night pitures. They are getting tedious and boring! Make them leave.
Heck, we aspire to tedium and boredom. Instead, we get leftovers.
Last Sunday's picture looks a lot like the meatloaf (I THINK it's meatloaf) in my refrigerator drawer.
Dorian, the loafer
Say, that's a dandy idea for future entries in the series: transformations of the Afghan woman to look like regrettable food. Thanks!
And, by the way, don't eat that meat loaf.

Blab. On our knee-jerk, anti-media reaction to the report of a man who raped a girl he met on the Internet, Plurp's own media apologist writes:
The problem is that both your logic and Caterina's are flawed. You're both saying, "There's no story here; the evil media is (note the deliberate use of the singular verb) just demonizing the Internet." And, with respect, you are both completely wrong.
Rather than considering the facts of the case presented in the story, I fear that both you and Caterina responded with a knee-jerk, anti-media reaction that would have made a Conservative proud. I argue that what the person accused of the crime here did is entirely different from the metaphor you used, which was, essentially, a straw-man argument, and that the novel facts of the case make it newsworthy. "Dog bites man," as they say, isn't news, but "Man bites dog" is, and this is something of "Man bites dog" story. Obviously, you disagree.
I will give you enough credit to think that you actually did understand my sarcastic response, and that your characterization of it was merely you being asinine (something you have a lot of practice doing, and are quite good at), rather than assuming that you just didn't get it. In the future, though, I will eschew sarcasm for plainspeak. Sarcasm just gets me in trouble.
Whoosh. Knee-jerk. Anti-media. Would have made a Conservative proud. Asinine.
Are we really that type of idiot?
Yes, you're exactly the type of idiot I expect to be influenced by something you see on ABC, or read in NYT.
Point taken, Treasured Readers. We promise to stop being influenced by what we read.

Blab. What are they trying to tell us by insidiously changing those photos out from underneath us?
Vicious dog photo = "Stay away!"
Tragic fire photo = "We'll burn you if you don't!"
We were afraid of that.

Blab. Even worse threats arise from this quarter.
Look up the many ways you can use the word beet.
Or not, in our case.

Blab. A reader insists that:
It's about time for some preemptive reactionaryism, dagnabbit!
Yeah! Yeah! (What does it mean?)

Blab. Similarly:

In france you can get anything from a vending machine. Here's one that sells goats for only 0.20 euros!
Anything. Anything?!
Hmm ...

Plurp. While we were busy being asinine, you were busy looking elsewhere.

helen naked pitures

chihuly

iris chacon

triclavianism

quorn naked pictures

arsenic poisoning pictures

imani

britney

naked female dogs

angelina jolie

We fear that interest in Angelina is waning.

Yow. Ferrofluid. So very cool. Definitely on our Solstice list this year.
But why do we have to find out about this from a literary type, fercrissake? This is the kind of information we expect from our own, more nerdly readers.
Honestly.

Plurp. In a fit of artistic fetishism following several really good, simultaneous exhibitions of modern art at The Goog, we rushed home last weekend and bought two works of art, sight unseen (physically, anyway) over the Internet. They are now being shipped halfway across the world to us.
Are we nuts, or what?

Yow. Marvin Mudrick, the guy who founded, and then fought tenaciously for, our undergrad alma mater, makes a surprise appearance in Dave's blog as the author of a forward to a Jane Austin novel.
Life direct...is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves that man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing to do with. What they can’t admit is that it is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.
The world is very weird.

Yo.
Danger! Mind control from movies and computer games is more widespread than you think.
Well, maybe not more than we think.

Plurp. Those of you actually interested in a scavenger hunt on the Web might look here. More interesting would be a more linear (or, at least, not flat) Web-search-based story on the Web, one that bridges multiple sites using both text and image.
Is there such a thing? That would be fun.

Yo. No Joy at Sun? Interesting.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was an accidental construct
of spit and toothpicks

Monday, September 8, 2003
Blab. We learn of an insidious extension to the devious plot that controls much of our life.
Someone at Yahoo! is messing with us. Both of those links go to the guy in the poncho and not the piratical earphones.
Much as we try to link to the piratical earphones, we cannot. In fact, the earphones have been replaced by a tragic fire, and the lone person in the poncho by a vicious dog.
What does it all mean? What are they trying to tell us?

Blab. Another hockey fan writes:
Paul Cabay is a busy man. I just got three of those emails.
Hmm! He likes you.

Blab. An employee of Wal-Mart writes:
"Wal-Mart"
Yes, I'm sure that people often share enough personal information and create a sense of false personal connection with the folks they meet at "Wal-Mart" that said folks can then come terrorize them in their homes.
Yes, sir, your moral superiority is certainly well justified.
Funny, we thought we were expressing displeasure with the media practice of demonizing the Internet. Or, as snobby, morally superior Caterina says:
This really annoyed me: The New York Times has the headline "Man Charged With Raping Girl He Met on Internet" under the "Technology" section. You never see "Man Charged With Raping Girl He Met on Telephone" under the "Technology" section or "Man Charged with Raping Girl He Met at School" under the "Education" section. Stewart tells me he saw the headline "Man Dies of Overdose of Web Drugs", as if people don't die every day from drugs they bought at the pharmacy. Why are journalists demonizing the internet like this? It's infuriating.
We shall ask Caterina to eschew metaphor in the future. On your behalf, Treasured Reader.

Blab. Mistaking us for its parole officer, a reader checks in.
I've spent the whole night coding nothing that no one with ever see. Text-based game designers are the lowest form of internet "developer." :( Jolt and cigarettes.
At least you didn't waste your time writing something that no one will ever see.

Blab. A reader asks:
Is that an open-faced meat-loaf dish?
That? No. You eat some pretty wrong meat loaf, my friend.

Blab. A reader laments:
Aw heck, I thought that I could bookmark this site?!
Nope, sorry. Everyone else can. But not you.

Blab. A reader sends us an annoying, blind ...
[link].
Musta got Slashdotted. We can't get through.

Blab. Or, as this reader asks:
huh?
Which about sums it up.

Yow. Go. Watch. This. ACLU ad. (Lisa Rein, via Ian)
Mebbe time for us to join the ACLU. And we're definitely not a joiner.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had eaten some
pretty wrong meat loaf

Sunday, September 7, 2003
Plurp.

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