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2003.09.21 : 2003.09.27
Saturday, September 27, 2003
Blab. A reader informs us that, long ago, we were wrong.
We love being wrong.
"And the whole thing is only
stable while the flywheel / gyroscope is whirring around at high speed."
Just so you know, the Segway's stability
has nothing to do with whirring gyroscopes. In fact, its gyroscope doesn't
spin at all.
Indeed. And that means that the onset of its instability will be even quicker
as the power runs out.
We wonder if Dean Kamen loves being wrong.
Blab. A fungible beet writes:
The question was "how many
hours in an average day do you spend in Plurp?". That is an ambiguous question.
How often do you have an average day? Or do your average days have more
or less than 24 hours? And we'll have to get a censored answer to what
it means to "spend in Plurp". That might require video. Yuck. Of course,
you are a manager and manager's time is a fungible resource so the units
of the answer are in doubt anyway.
Dorian, the fungible beet
We trust that will prevent that other reader from ever again asking such
an impertinent question. It'll certainly prevent us from doing so.
Blab. Sadly, our trust is misplaced.
I think that due to the notice
of bull headed sniggle-poots ... we must revoke your membership to the
species Stevis Whitis and insist that you never speak of this again.
We are relieved at your insistence, as speaking of this again would probably
have required that we understand it.
Blab. A reader writes:
Looks like a section of track
from a child's wooden train set.
Actually, it is a musical instrument. And a food smasher.
Blab. Finally ("finally"), a reader actually follows the instructions
to describe, in convincing terms, the kind of person who would buy
this curious 3D object..
 Boon
Peng lives in the Sarawak province of Malaysia. He would very much
like to buy the red-haired doll--though he has little money. Young
Mr. Peng has never met a person with red hair. After a pirate showing
of "Sailor Moon" (dubbed in Tagalog, a language he does not speak) Boon
acquired a taste for the Japanese style. He misses his Pikachu
(stolen by his cousin although Boon doesn't yet know this.) The cousin
tried to use the toy as a fishing bob.
Young Mr. Peng would also like to
purchase batteries for his Walkman, a prized posession always at his side
but which has not reproduced music for two years.
And an excellent showing it is! So, rather than closing down this little
contest, let's renew (and maybe even clarify) our desperate request for
a short little story about someone who would buy this ... this ... thing.
Go ahead. You know you have three or four sentences in you just waiting
to get out. And we will love reading them. Oh, my, yes we will.
 Plurp.
A careful examination of
the blue dog
revealed the causal residue of
non-spinning gyros
and fungible beets
Friday, September 26, 2003
Blab. What is
this thing, anyway?
Our readers might know! Then again ...
It's the game of Hedgehog...
everyone knows that!
That seems plausible to us. Must be the drugs. Another possibility is this:
Perhaps that thing is part
of a string instrument similar to a dulcimer or a harp. How 'bout
a look at a dang dobora? Why do you do these things to us? Why cant
y'all just tell us what the damn thing is?!
Is is a pocket piano, a modified circle
jerker, a polynesian propagating proto-refractometer, or a twisted upper-left
suzy serandan umbelicus?
The triangular object must be some
sort of rudimentary mallet for smashing food, or a weapon of mass destruction.
But the damn thing sure looks like
it should be a musical instrument.
Best wishes.
So close! It's actually a twisted upper-right suzy serandan umbelicus,
but the triangular object is indeed a rudimentary food-smashing mallet.
We have the best readers!
Blab. You may recall that we asked you what
kind of person would buy this mysterious 3D object.
Just as mysteriously, our readers responded.
Re: Mystery 3D object
-- it would be purchased by a fan of japanese anime.
We are impressed. We have no idea if you're right, of course, but we are
impressed anyway.
A
reader who lives in a world of restrictions writes:
A person who doesn't have
a Websense filter that blocks adult content would have a chance to look
at that 3D thingy and see if it's worth buying.
If that person doesn't give a hoot
about his/her hard earned money, and is gullible, and has had recent personal
trauma, he/she is more likely to join a religious cult than buy that thingy.
But I don't know what the thingy is,
could it be our Precious? I've got to have our Precious! I would
do vile things to get our Precious! Vile, vile things! For those
of us who are blocked from our Precious, could someone explain the nature
of the 3D Precious thingy? Vile, vile, vile things I would
do for our Precious!!!
Have a nice day.
That seems entirely appropriate!
Finally, a reader snaps to attention and barks out this:
That is simply this:
Vogonadial peimal monstrosity sydrome,
simplex 5, displayed in three-dimensional form, amplified exponentially
by implicit concave sexuality, Sir!
That's correct, private! But we didn't ask you what it was! Now drop and
give us fifty!
Blab. A single, brave reader answers our plea to talk to Oliverbot
for us.
After not getting very good
answers, I asked Oliverbot what his (?) IQ was, to which he replied 250,
in human terms.
When I told him he was way to stupid
to have an IQ like that, my computer froze and I had to re-boot.
I guess I underestimated Oliverbot.
Did we tell you that it's Microsoft technology? And that we fear that it
really does have superhuman intelligence?
Blab. Guess who.
Websense forbids me from
talking to Oliverbot! How does one circumvent Websense?
We suggest asking whomever put it
on your computer. We'll bet that they know.
Blab. Our ungrammatical reader offers an unrepentant correction.
What I meant to say was:
"Who's sister drives a picklewagon with a wooden kickstand?"
So the wooden kickstand is actually used as a steering device? Interesting.
And here's your answer, sir or madame.
That's my sister, all right,
but it's actually just a vinegarwagon.
The cucumbers are in a paper bag in
the front seat.
Or so she tells me.
That picklewagon rumor must have gotten started after that big pileup on
Interstate 5.
Blab. Young lizzy writes:
HI!!
I have seen ur profile on the internet.
My name is lizzy, i am 23 years of age. hmm This is so weird
ahh what the hell =), my friends
said that personals actually work, so i am giving this a shot. If u would
like
to show me around town or just chat
online msg me at [an email address]@hotmail.com ... As well as i
will send u my pictures =).
Bye hun
How can we resist young lizzy, who has capitalization issues, thinks to
impress us with chatspeak, and wants to be shown around town by anonymous
strangers?
It's tough, but we will find a way.
Blab. A reader wants us to join the legitimate world. Imagine!
Do you have an ISSN
yet?
So you can, in some countries, sometimes register your blog as a periodical,
from whence it will get put on the Big List that libraries keep of All
Possible Periodicals, and you join, in some deeply official sense, the
likes of Atlantic Monthly and The Economist. (Well, and Mad Magazine, but
you get the idea.)
Does that sound fab? It sure did to us. Right up to the point where
we had to, like, fill out forms and stuff. Then we lost interest.
Blab. A reader wishes to do time-motion studies of us. Therefore,
we are flattered.
how many hours in an average
day do you spend in Plurp?
Well, we're not actually in it, it not having the property of containment
with respect to physical beings like ourself, you see. But if you're also
wondering how much time we spend writing Plurp each day, we probably
don't know. It's all done by our evil twin, Skippy. So you'd have to ask
him.
Yo. But enough of that. Did you go out and buy IT/Ginger/Whatever?
Uh
oh.
Segway LLC has recalled all
6,000 of its human transporters sold to date because of a falling hazard,
the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Friday.
When the batteries on the devices
begin to run low, according to an announcement from Segway and the CPSC,
there may not be enough power to keep the machine upright. Falls could
happen if the rider speeds up abruptly, encounters an obstacle or continues
to ride after receiving a low-battery alert.
All. Six. Thousand.
 Imagine
the dilemma that you would face when the low-battery alert came on. Should
you (a) turn your Segway around, head for home, and hope you don't die,
or (b) leave your Segway where it is, walk home, come back to pick it up
in the car, and hope to heck your several thousand dollar toy is still
there?
We hate saying We told you so. We much prefer being wrong. But
we are constrained to link to our
December 2001 Plurp entry on IT/Ginger/Whatever.
If the last remaining battery poops out, it sounds like Kamen's
scooter becomes, well, unstable. That is, it appears to dump you off at
high speed. That's because, from what we hear, it's a scoot-by-wire system.
You don't actually control the speed of the scooter yourself. Some onboard
computer guesses what you want to do by how you shift your body around.
And the whole thing is only stable while the flywheel / gyroscope is whirring
around at high speed.
Those of you holding your breath for this to revolutionize society are
hereby nominated for the Darwin Award.
We wonder if this will be good for sales.
Yak.
 What
are you doing?
I'm making a chicken.
I thought only god could make a chicken.
Or other chickens. But I know you're not other chickens, so ...
Plurp.
Nothing is too wonderful
to be true.
Plurp.
The blue dog's
last remaining battery
pooped out.
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Blab. A contestant in our unannounced spelling bee writes:
"Underfed"
"Could I have that word in a sentence,
please?"
"Kate Beckinsale is underfed."
Is she? Then we can only hope that she will make enough money by appearing
in black latex to afford a small amount of nourishment. We are nothing
if not humanitarian.
Blab. A reader proclaims the rare and fragile existence of ...
justice.
Indeed.
An appeals court has freed
a Nigerian mother sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.
The Shariah Court of Appeal ruled
on Thursday that Amina Lawal's conviction was invalid because she was already
pregnant when harsh Islamic Shariah law was implemented in her home province.
[...]
Lawal's case had become the focus
of human rights groups around the world who were outraged at the sentence
that Lawal should be buried up to her neck and then have stones thrown
at her head until she was dead.
But not all the spectators who attended
the hearing were pleased by the result. One man who had come to hear to
court's ruling said: "I would have preferred Amina to be stoned to death.
She deserves it." [...]
She insists she did nothing wrong
and that the man who fathered her child made a promise to marry her. He
did not, leaving her pregnant and with no support.
The world is a very big place. Sometimes, we think, it's too big.
Blab. Who can sing the alphabet backwards?
Beth Roberts canu sing the
alphabet backwards. I have an mp3 of it.
No kidding?
Blab. A reader has an ungrammatical riddle for us!
Who's sister is it that drives
the picklewagon with a wooden kickstand?
We have no idea. But our Treasured Readers are more clever than we are,
and surely they will tell us.
Blab. We will not chide Helen for doing as we requested and sending
us this ...
[link].
We need you, our Treasured Readers, to talk to OliverBot. We need
you, our Treasured Readers, to talk to OliverBot and tell
us the silliest parts of your conversation. We're begging you here.
Yow. Synj is at it again. This
time, it's Chainsaw
the Children. Tons o' fun! Go play.
Yo. Ooh! We have a mystery for you! This here 3D thing is something
you can buy.
Your job is to describe, in
convincing terms, the kind of person who would buy it.
Go on. It'll be fun.
Plurp. Yesterday morning, before we left for work, we sat on
the edge of the bed and stroked Helen's forehead, causing her to fall back
asleep several times despite her strenuous attempts to wake up and get
out of bed.
Later, she asked what kind of mysterious power we had. We told her that
this was our other super power:
causing people to fall asleep. It's not as impressive as invulnerability,
say, or x-ray vision, but we all have to make do with the gifts that we
are given.
Helen asked when else we used this super power. We admitted that it
sometimes goes off accidentally during meetings, and we're, like, Oh,
sorry, you know, like Superman when his x-ray vision goes off inadvertently
in a crowd and he's, like, Oh, gosh, ma'am, I'm so sorry.
Plurp. Helen brought home a small plastic bottle of tablets last
night, a bottle that was labeled Ultimate Woman. But it turned out
to be vitamins.
Plurp. Explain this.
Yow. Digital
paper, long promised, may be a little bit closer.
Using a process called electrowetting,
the scientists claim to be able to manipulate colored oils in the pixels
on the page with such speed and accuracy as to be able to generate clear
and accurate video displays.
"The reflectivity and contrast of
our system approach those of paper," they wrote in the science journal
Nature. "In addition, we demonstrate a color concept which is intrinsically
four times brighter than reflective liquid-crystal displays and twice as
bright as other emerging technologies."
We figure just 15 or 20 years, and we're all set.
Yow. It is our
attachments to the material world that hold us back from spiritual
enlightenment.
Plurp. OK. So it's possible, it's conceivable, that TRG
is getting close enough to consider its
eventual appearance to have a non-zero probability. We're not holding
our breath, you understand. No, we understand software development, especially
software development not driven by marketing deadlines, the missing of
which results in gut spewing.
And if you think gut spewing is not pretty, you should see software
development without the threat of it. Yikes.
So, like we say, there's no breath-holding here. But we are watching
with slightly heightened interest.
Plurp. Looking for an Xmas present for Bill Gates?
Plop. For a few glorious minutes today, we thought that Poindexter's
incredibly pernicious program of Total Information Awareness had been struck
down by a Congress fearful of its obvious violations of the privacy of
U.S. citizens, not to mention the Constitution.
No such
luck.
When Congress killed the
Pentagon's vast computerized terrorism surveillance project, it secretly
transferred some of the research and tools to other agencies but won't
spell out exactly which ones.
The 2004 defense appropriations bill
Congress sent President Bush on Thursday would close former Adm. John Poindexter's
old office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and bar DARPA
from proceeding with all but four small, uncontroversial [...] program[s].
[...]
But the House-Senate conference report
on the bill and comments by Senate aides indicated the conferees moved
some of the TIA software research and tools to other government agencies
for use in gathering foreign intelligence -- information about the intentions,
plans and capabilities of foreign governments or groups. [...]
But was any of Poindexter's most criticized
effort -- the scanning of vast computer databases of travel, credit card,
medical and other personal records of Americans and foreigners -- shifted
elsewhere in secret? Not clear.
Sadly, our own sources (which we seldom have in things like this, but we
do in this particular case) tell us that the work is proceeding without
any appreciable impediment.
Plurp.
The blue dog
made sure that all Constitutional
violations were shifted to
secret places.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Blab. On yesterday's recipe for the SW Asian aphrodisiac
dish called Treasured Reader (or perhaps on Sunday's
piture, we can never tell) a reader writes:
Mon, you like 'em underfed,
don't'cha?
Yes. No. We have no idea.
Blab. A duck informs us that ...
Management is not a choice
or a lifestyle, it's an orientation.
No amount of classwork or training
is going to make you a manager. Oh, you'll cross-dress properly wearing
great suits at appropriate times but either you're a manager or you aren't.
IBM Research has the flawed policy of promoting productive researchers
to management. The highly educated never learn. Sigh.
Dorian, the wild duck (an IBM Research
joke)
We agree that some folks have a natural aptitude for management, and some
people don't. Some people really, really don't. It's tough around a research
lab, since everybody who comes in the door is already self-selected as
a technical wonk, which usually means that their social sides have atrophied
at least somewhat.
We do think that training can help, as it can with most skills.
Having flung perfectly good researchers into the pit of management ourself,
we appreciate the problem. It seems like such a nasty punishment! But we
do find that technical excellence is a prerequisite to being a good manager
where we work. In part, that's because everyone would consider a technical
doofus who also became a manger to be beyond hope. In part, it's
because the good technical folks have an easier time seeing the bigger
picture, and often want to organize larger projects than they can accomplish
by themselves.
That said, there are plenty of really smart people around the lab who
have no desire to go into management. And good for them!
Blab. Just when we thought this vein was mined out, a reader
contributes a broken joke.
So this guy walks into a
bar with a lion, and he orders drinks for himself and the lion, and the
lion keeps drinking until it gets drunk and falls down on the floor.
The guy starts to leave, and the bartender calls after him "Hey! You can't
leave that lyin' there!", and the guy says, "Oh, sorry".
Puzzled at what the original joke might have been, we consulted
the oracle and discovered this.
A man walks into a bar with
a giraffe at his side. He orders a few drinks, and after about twenty drinks
the giraffe passes out. The man gets up, and as he's about to walk out
of the bar, the barmen shouts, "Hey, don't leave that lyin' 'ere." The
man turns around and says: "It's not a lion it's a giraffe!"
So it seems to us that a more proper form of that broken joke would be:
So this guy walks into a
bar with a giraffe, and he orders drinks for himself and the giraffe, and
the girafe keeps drinking until it gets drunk and falls down on the floor.
The guy starts to leave, and the bartender calls after him "Hey! You can't
leave that lyin' there!", and the guy says, "Oh, sorry".
So recorded. And thanks!
Blab. Demonstrating its talent at ASCII acrobatics, a reader
exclaims:
¡Viva
Almiqui!
And what a cute little bug-eater it is.
A living example of an insectivore
native to Cuba — but believed for years to extinct — has been found in
the island's eastern mountains. [...]
 The
creature looks like a brownish woolly badger with a long, pink-tipped snout
and can measure up to about 19 inches. [...]
The almiqui was described for the
first time in 1861 by the German naturalist Wilham Peters, who wrote of
the difference between the Cuban animal and a similar one found in neighboring
Haiti.
Since, only 37 of the animals known
by the scientific name Solenodon Cubanus have been captured, including
"Alejandrito."
Blab. A reader claiming to be god finds - very belatedly, we
must add - an old Plurp scavenger hunt and exercises very little
of god's vaunted creativity in responding to it.
When was Plurp first posted?
once upon a time
When did the Blab box make its
first appearance? How about the Big Blab Box?
sone after
When was the first edition of Plurp
that used a title other than Plurp: A Weblog?
prior to soon after
When did Captain Plurp first make
an appearance?
many moons ago
When did the blue dog first appear
in Plurp?
after it ate pickled blue beets
What is the blue dog's gender?
How do you know?
shemale, I use to date it
What is a Helenism?
a common occurrence, vainly accredited
to helen
What is a broken joke?
another common occurrence
What does 
mean?
eat my shoes
What is our cat's name?
frankly
Who is Our Greatest Fan?
frankly
Who is Mia?
some famous sex-goddess
Who is Roger the Chicken?
the monkey
Who can sing the alphabet backwards?
anyone who wants to
After mashing the Send! button, we can only imagine that god lit
up a cigarette and spit on the sidewalk. It's not like the old days, is
it?
Blab. A reader accuses us of cheating.
Your "contained" entry on
Oneword *clearly* took longer than 60 secs to compose - consider yourself
chided
Actually, it didn't! Usually, we spend the first thirty seconds trying
to get a good image in our head of what we want to write about, then type
like mad for the last thirty seconds. (Yes, that violates the instructions
they give: don't think, just write. We were never
very good at following instructions.)
This time, the image just popped in and we started typing immediately.
(We had seen a contortionist on TV a few days previous who routinely dislocated
his shoulders, on purpose, as part of his act.) We think the differences
comes through in the writing. The contained
piece seems disjointed to us, or at least more disjointed than other
one-minute pieces we've written.
Blab. Referring to our lengthy period of giggling self-congratulations
on Sunday after we posted that great image, Helen
writes:
Steve, no one wants to know
how amused you were with yourself. You were insufferable.
H
We cannot deny it. It is one of our many major personality disorders, one
of the bushel of crosses that we bear, that we inevitably think that the
things we write (or, in this case, pixellate) are funny. We're just broken
that way.
Sorry.
Blab. What readers say. What we hear.
Blab blab blab blab blab.........lose
the chick
But ... but ... we like that chick.
Blab. A reader makes an astonishing claim.
"Bush
Lays Off Congress; will Outsource Lawmaking to India"
It's true!
"I think it's a great idea,"
said Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking from a secure undisclosed location.
"The American people were fed up with that expensive do-nothing Congress
which didn't always give the President everything he asked for. Our new
Indian replacements will be much cooperative to the President, which is
what we all want." Asked whether the outsourcing may be unconstitutional,
Cheney noted, "That's up to the Supreme Court to decide, but as you know,
they usually see things our way."
Blab. A reader makes an astonishing claim. Again.
I am the 1,000,000th visitor
to your website and I claim my prize
By our count, you are closer to being the 432,000th visitor. Only a few
more to go, though!
Blab. Another reader makes another astonishing claim.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart rocks
Pennsyltucky!
Gosh that seems unlikely.
Plurp. For reasons that will remain unexplained, the masses stopped
huddling for a brief time this past week, scrabbling out of their fetid
caves to spend the few minutes before sundown turning over rocks in the
field.
weapons of mass destruction
steve white curriculum vitae
fnord
helen naked pitures
imani
britney
iris chacon
arsenic poisoning pictures
chihuly
quorn naked pictures
We can assure you that no weapons of mass destruction were found.
Plurp. In addition to navel gazing, our new favorite activity
is toadstool sitting.
Plop. Still waiting impatiently for your first heart attack?
Try cheeseburger
fries!
The fries, which look like
a squat version of standard French fries, are made of a meat-and-cheese
compound that tastes — as the name suggests — like a cheeseburger.
Breaded, then deep-fried and served
with ketchup or barbecue sauce, cheeseburger fries have found their way
onto menus in several states including Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas since
June. There is also a version being made available to public school cafeterias.
Eat up, kids. Those glue states are overpopulated anyway.
Yow. Have you ever played Monopoly with your mother? Have you
ever said to her, I know you can't afford the rent on my property, mom,
so I'll let you stay there for free if you give me all of your property?
You have? Then this
site's for you.
The railroads are excellent
investments, particularly when owned together, although in absolute income
terms they don't keep up with heavily built on properties later in the
game. The best return on investment to be found is from putting a third
house on New York Avenue. In fact, the third house has the fastest payoff
of any building on almost all of the properties. The square most landed
on other than Jail is Illinois Avenue, and in fact a hotel there will bring
the most income other than a hotel on Boardwalk. By far the worst individual
investment is to buy Medeterranean Avenue without first owning Baltic.
That's not to say that you shouldn't buy it, but it's not going to make
you much money without quite a bit of construction.
And that's not just his opinion. He did the Markov simulations. And provides
extensive tables of probabilities.
You have to admire the persistence. The maniacal, obsessive, terrifying
persistence. (leuschke)
Plurp. And, because were were thinking about OneWord
again, we spent a minute on execute
"We have the right strategy,"
said the grim man in the blue pin-striped suit. "The problem is, we're
not implementing it. There's too much standing around the water cooler
and carping."
The audience sat quietly, but you
could feel the room grow hotter by the minute.
Plurp.
The blue dog
walked into a bar
and apologized
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Blab. In a convolution of events that we just plain
love, a reader writes:
Gracias.
Pere salinas
This is, in fact, our Pere Salinas, thanking us for buying one of
his paintings. That's not surprising. What is surprising is that he didn't
find us because his dealer told him about us. No, he found us because he
Googled on "Pere Salinas" and found this.
We're not sure why this amuses us so much. But it does.
Blab. A reader writes:
Skittlebrau
Gesundheit.
As with most crazy ideas,
the Simpsons thought of it first:
Homer: "I'm feelin' low, Apu. You
got any of that beer that has candy floating in it, you know, Skittlebrau?"
Apu: "Such a product does not exist,
sir! You must have dreamed it."
Homer: "Oh. Well then just gimme a
six-pack and a couple of bags of Skittles."
And so with that, the Skittlebrau
project was born.
We really must be more careful about where we point those mind control
lasers.
Blab. Giving us way more than enough incentive to continue
those stupid Sunday pictures for months and months
into the future, a reader writes:
Superb!!! Best ever Afghan
woman Sunday piture -AJL
We are forced to admit our utter inability to stop congratulating ourself
all day Sunday. That, and chuckling. There was a lot of chuckling.
Sorry.
Blab. Or, as this sly reader observes:
Sharbat Guinan!
Got milk?
Blab. Simultaneously, a reader wonders:
Is that an opened-faced Woopy
meat loaf dish, ala mode?
No.
Blab. A reader kindly donates a recipe for the SW Asian aphrodisiac
dish called Treasured Reader.
Blue Dog Recipe:
2 lbs of fresh canine sirloin
1/2 cup of diced celery
1 tlbspoon dried celantro
4 garlic cloves (smashed)
8-oz hoison sauce
2 cups of pickled blue beats (a must)
1 tlbspoon crushed red pepper (optional)
-mix ingredients into a baking dish,
and allow meat to soak in ingredients for ~ 24 hours.
Drink two large glasses of gin (ambient).
Bake at 350 degrees F to medium well
(~45 minutes). Note: oven temp may vary.
Invite some people over. Serve
with pistacio ice cream.
Drink two large glasses of gin.
The large glasses of gin seem to be the crucial ingredients here.
Plurp.
Her: “You know how, at the
ATM, when you put in your card and ask it for money?”
Him: “Yeah?”
Her: “And then it makes this noise
before the money comes out?”
Him: “Yeah…”
Her: “I feel like, with you, the noise
keeps happening but the money’s not coming out.”
(allura)
Yow. A Mr.
Atlantic Monthly of Fort Lee, New Jersey, writes:
Do you know someone who needs
hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or
ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems
awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to
parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or
scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who
are just trying to be nice?
If so, do you tell this person he
is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant,
rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?
If you answered yes to these questions,
chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't
caring for him properly. [...]
How can I let the introvert in
my life know that I support him and respect his choice? First, recognize
that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation.
Second, when you see an introvert
lost in thought, don't say "What's the matter?" or "Are you all right?"
Third, don't say anything else, either.
Naturally, we don't know anyone like this at all, and of course our excerpt
has distorted the article beyond recognition. (Have you caught on yet that
this is both common and intentional in Plurp? Judging by the constant
chiding we receive from some of you, maybe not.)
But do go read this article. Honest. If you don't recognize yourself,
or someone you know, you have astonishingly poor reading comprehension
skills.
(We got this from the TouchGraph
GoogleBrower, which displayed some very strange taste when we
pointed it at Plurp recently.)
Yo. Yes, kids, Kansas really is flatter
than a pancake. (Also from TouchGraph
GoogleBrower, pointed at Plurp. We really don't understand that.
Is it that we all talked like pirates? That's so weird.)
Plurp. We took advantage of the Big
Baby Sale on Amazon last Sunday and bought a three-hundred-pounder.
Plurp. We spent all day Monday and Tuesday in a class at work
intended to teach us how to be a better manager. As Dave
said when we told him about it, It's about time!
The leader / facilitator person was one of those folks who likes to
give only positive, congratulatory feedback.
Was it evil of us to try to elicit negative feedback?
Yo. Herr
Asscroft at work again.
Federal prosecutors were
ordered Monday by Attorney General John Ashcroft to pursue maximum criminal
charges and sentences whenever possible and to seek lesser penalties through
plea bargains only in limited circumstances.
Maybe you don't recall why plea bargaining came about. Clearly Herr Asscroft
doesn't. Fundamentally, it was because the court system was completely
clogged with cases, and no one, not the courts, not the DA, not anybody,
had the funding or the time or the staffing to deal with all of them.
So plea bargaining came about as (a) a way to resolve cases without
involving all these scarce resource and (b) a way to get defendants accused
of lesser crimes to fink on those who could then be accused of greater
crimes.
What crimes?, you ask. You're so clever. Drug crimes. Using drugs.
Possessing drugs. Selling drugs.
Drugs. The courts are flooded with drug cases. The jails are overflowing
with drug criminals. It is, we seem to recall, the most common class of
crimes in American society today, and most of the money we spend on law
enforcement is devoted to preventing people from using / possessing / selling
drugs.
Not rape. Not murder. Drugs. (At least, that's the way we remember it.)
Now, golly, what do you expect the result will be of a policy that says
that maximum penalties will always be pursued on drug crimes, and plea
bargains will never be sought?
Plurp. Once again, OneWord.
This time: contained.
Finally, he was within the
small, black box. And it was chained. And locked. It had taken seven seconds
longer than planned, and that was embarrassing. But he was there. Both
of his shoulders were dislocated. As were his knees. But the audience would
love it. They would consider it impossible.
He smiled.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was an opened-faced
Woopy meat loaf dish,
ala mode.
Monday, September 22, 2003
Yow. Today, we self-indulge in an orgy of vanity as
we reveal the awful truth of how you, our Treasured Readers, found Plurp
in the first place in this shameless display of your answers to What's
a Nice Reader Like You Doing in a Blog Like This?
The answers seem to fall neatly into the seven canonical categories:
-
Other blogs
-
Other readers
-
Helen
-
Google
-
It's all our fault
-
Readers for whom the question was too hard, and
-
Beets.
Permit us to illustrate.
Blab. First, we discover that, true to the caricature that is
blogging, some of you came here by way of other blogs. This does not explain
how you got to those blogs, of course, but perhaps we'll leave that mystery
for another day.
We found Plurp through the
auspicious clicking of a link on inw's
sidebar. Hardly surreal, nor even wildly romantic, but hey, that how we
found us a daily slice of plurp. -AJL
An honest but forgetful reader writes:
Honestly, I don't remember.
A link from Ian, perhaps, but I don't
remember how I got there. I'm sure it wasn't from Dave.
L.
Or, as put more succinctly ...
It's all Ian's
fault!
While that's generally true, it strikes us as suspicious in this particular
case, as it is well known that Ian
has just the one reader. Equally suspicious is this.
I blame NTK - where's the
exit button?
But maybe it's possible - just barely possible - that one of the
readers who followed that NTK link
has fallen and can't get up. Again, an unlikely explanation is offered
by this reader.
I found Plurp linked from
the side of another Blog a couple of years back. paj
log
I believe. It's now linked off my very own blog
too.
Two links for the price of none? Eerie.
I got here via Leuschke,
prolly a couple of years ago by now.
So you're saying that those gratuitous links to Dr. L paid off? We'll write
that down. But, so far, the most popular excuse is this.
January
27, 2001: "Yet another Web site has linked to our humble Plurp. Astonishing.
This time it's some guy named Chuck Carroll." Oh, that's me.
So I've been reading Plurp since at least January 27, 2001, and probably
earlier. In which time I've polluted your pages with more than my
share of Blabs. Anyway, I found Dave's blog when doing a web search
for Nomic (one of my stock test words I like to use when trying out new
search engines) and found Dave was running a Nomic in his blog.
I had played in an online Nomic with Dave before, and started reading his
blog then. Shortly thereafter I found a link to Plurp in Dave's blog,
and have been reading ever since. (Oops, I guess I just ruined that
"We'll never know who you are anyway" thing.)
That's OK. We actually have detailed dossiers on all of our readers. When
we said We'll never know who you are anyway, we were lying.
Through David
Chess's log. I have no idea how I found that, though.
You probably clicked on something. That's generally how it works for us,
anyhow. In support of that theory is this reader:
chess to david chess to steve
white
We don't suppose anybody got here by Googling for white? We didn't
think so.
In spite of that, we get a free solution to an ancient mystery!
First there was alt0169.com
(first best sadly defunct Dutch weblog), which pointed me to milov.nl,
who pointed me to Dave, who pointed to you. To my surprise, this turns
out to have happened ~3 years ago already. [I'm the reader that masqueraded
as your European fan base, and who had that one pitiful attempt at a blogroll
(alsmaar) online, and who isn't Danish.]
Alsmaar!
I wandered in from David
Chess' site.
Again, every so succinctly:
chess
log
And there you have it! Nobody got here from the link on the immensely-famous
CamWorld
site. Nor from the (now defunct) Bruce
Sterling blog (scroll down a bunch). You all got here from our own
little clique of bloggers.
We shall have to be nicer to our little clique.
Blab. Then there are those of you who got here because someone
disliked you enough to suggest that you come here. Shame on them. We start
with an incredibly inbred example.
I
first came here when inspy gave me (still a wet behind the ears, fresh
to the net noob) a link. You have been warping me ever since. :)
Right. So inspy is inspoetica,
the game name of someone who plays GNE.  Or,
rather, someone hanging around on the virtual street corner, waiting for
GNE to actually start, which it was supposed to have done back in the spring
of this year but they're still, you know, coding. (It's now called GNS
by us insiders.)
CCP sent me
The Soviet Union? We didn't know we had fans there. Or then.
Or here:
Written in egyptian hieroglyphics
in tutankhamen's tomb
Is that what those were? Such forward thinkers, the Egyptians.
Finally:
Oh, ok. Mia told us
(whilst we noshed on grenouilles at this crazy-good cafe in Lyon).
We didn't even know she
was a reader!
Blab. Then there's Helen.
I found out about Plurp from
that Lovely Lady you live with and have read each entry from the very first
day!
Your Midwest Correspondent
That's very flattering. Heck, we haven't even read every entry from
the very first day.
The next one took us a little while to figure out, but we did. We think.
my sister married someone
close to the action.
A certain small pattern develops.
Um...well...if you must know...now
don't get mad or anything -- but Helen told me about it.
We'll have to give her more stock options.
Blab. Next is a more predictable category. How do you
stumble across things on the Web?
Since you ask for the truth,
you don't get some fun made-up tale that would be SO much more interesting
to read. Some random search on Google lead here about 2 years ago.
Been stuck here since. Where's the front door?
Actually, that is the front door. A more honest reader writes:
Now I remember. I was
googling for "disturbing search requests." At the time, I thought it was
amusing.
We know. Now, you only find it disturbing. That's OK. We find this
disturbing:
i was googling one day and
somehow came across this pasture of vibrant grazing!
Mu.
Ventricular fibrillations
caused my ICD to discharge which caused my fingers to spasmodically type
"plurp" into Google
Odd. That's how we found it too!
I was conducting a search
on Webcrawler about 1.5 years ago for Nipply Plarps. I found you instead.
I've been in love ever since.
Sara
Hey - don't talk about our nipply plarps here, Sara! Helen reads this.
I did a search on something
and this site came up. Sorry about the obtuse words.
You're the one who put all those obtuse words there? You should be ashamed.
I was searching for a recipe
for the SW Asian aphrodisiac dish called "Blue Dog." I hear it's
wonderful. I am confused, however. I thought the whole pretext
of plurp was vanity. Have a nice day.
Readers who have this recipe are invited to send
it to us. We'll pass it along to the above sexually-crazed, confused
reader.
I was literally doing a stupid
image search on Google. Up pops a picture of a couple of guys with
placards indicating that they were upset about internet porn. A third
person standing nearby had a sign reading "I'm with stupid."
Following the link and investigating the web site, I concluded that the
"plurp" guy was an interesting fellow and put the site on my Favorites
list.
That was a goodie! We don't remember where that was, and Google now seems
unwilling to show us all the images we've every put up on Plurp
(it used to do that, right?), so we'll just have to content ourself with
our fond if faded memories.
Blab. Most things in life turn out to be our fault. But this
one surprises even us.
You linked to me.
And you came here anyway? Whoda thunk?
I found plurp when I was
searching Google for any links to my own web page. You had a link
to "TwisterCAM" somewhere in here. I started reading around the time
you had spam selling umbrellas.
TwisterCAM? That was way back in November
of 2000! And that endearing umbrella spam was a
year later.
Another reader who just slipped off the edge writes:
You told us about it!
hahahahahaha!
Imagine how sad our life must be if we spend countless hours promoting
a Web site for which we do not get paid.
A mystery reader writes:
I am married to it.
Great - have some stock options.
Blab. Inevitably, there were those of you for whom the question
was too hard.
May I use this as a blab
box?
No.
Hey, is this the first time
you've had an inline Blab Box?
No.
Alright, you asked for honesty...
I am a 26 year old male near Los Angeles.
I was born with a speech impediment, dyslexia, and ADHD. Two of these
weren't clinically diagnosed until I was 18. I've also tested
on the Stanford-Binet at over 170.
I love information; that's information
in the cybernetic sense - data that cannot be predicted. I've taught
myself to read Chinese because I wanted to read the Tao Te Ching first-hand,
and not interpreted by someone else. I taught myself matrix theory
because it looked interesting. I've memorized whole plays and
books because the language, to me, carried a sense of something beyond
the words that were written, beyond even the intentions of the author.
Every day, I read the NYTimes online,
LATimes online, Wired Magazine, scientificjournal, slashdot, msnbc, cnn,
washingtonpost, fark, and plurp.
I read most of them to get a balanced
view of news around the world, some to get specific technical information
useful to my job or interests, and a few - like plurp - because I value
the insights and analyses of the people who write them.
I also read a few - like plurp - because
when you've known the difference between fission and fusion since kindergarten,
learned to program before you learned to tie your shoes, taken for granted
that people know when they look UP they're really looking OUT, and never
really had the kind of innocent, care-free childhood most people don't
realize they appreciate - when you can say these or similar things, you
realize that life is far too important to take seriously and a little humor,
a little sarcasm, and a lot of random, simple truth makes the world a lot
better.
Thank you for opening yourself to
all the doubt, hatred, hope, and comfort by writing this blog and posting
it on the web. If nothing else, it's nice to know one isn't the only
insane person on the planet.
--A Reader
Gawrsh! That's way too complimentary. But you forgot to tell us
how you got to Plurp in the first place.
Anyhow, we still haven't learned to tie our shoes.
The truth? I was bored
and that's that.
That's what? We figure you're still bored, and we're still unenlightened
as to how you got here.
I'm looking for some monkeys.
You've come to the right place.
There IS only 4 of us. We
cooperate to manipulate your reality. Don't tell them I told you or they'll
injure me.
It'll be our little secret.
Suicide? Do you need an intervention?
Lonesomeness and neglect? Damn, that's too bad. Perhaps people are
too embarassed to talk about the tramatic course of events that led them
here. I know I should be.
We had an intervention once. A 1958 Intervention Sedan, two-toned (red
and white). Built like a tank.
if the deadline passed, then
why is there still one of those typey box thingies here? Is this one for
another reader participation thingy?
No, it is to cause you to type in exactly what you typed in. As it turns
out.
Blab. Finally, we have that most terrifying category of all:
Beets.
I work for the Beet Cartel
and am keeping tabs on potential anti-beet agitators.
Are you the guys in the unmarked white van outside of our apartment?
I can't even remember how
I found Plurp. But it helps me through school so thank the beets.
Thank them yourself. They're in the white van.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was searching for a recipe
for the SW Asian aphrodisiac dish
called
Treasured Reader
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Plurp.
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