Plurp: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Bigger!

2003.10.26 : 2003.11.01

Saturday, November 1, 2003
Blab. A reader keeps us up on current events. That's really nice, as it allows us to spend more of our time preparing recipes for the body parts of our neighbors.
Fox nearly sued itself over 'Simpsons' parody: Matt Groening's "Do Democrats Cause Cancer?"
We would like to have seem them bankrupt themselves.
By the way, do they?

Blab. A reader has handy homeowner's advice for us.
Anything on opendemocracy is good only for wiping one's ass. Although you'd need to print it out first.
Seems like a lot of work.

Blab. A reader sends us another in what seems to be a never-ending series.

Your new Lord

Others have noticed the amazing photo ops afforded by our new Lord.
Coincidence? Some may think so.

Blab. A reader elaborates on that dear article to which we linked the other day - the one on marrying your pets.
Subj: A propos of marrying pets...
Nice piece on Pubic (sic) Radio yesterday about unmixed marriages, otherwise known as same sex marriages. Ancient Jewish grandfather, 60-70s mother come to terms with granddaughter-daughter wanting to marry her love, another woman. Not easily assimilated by the grandpa, rather more easily by the mom, and in the end a lovely ceremony on the lawn with canopy and glass breaking, the whole schmeer. After the nice piece, the Pubic Radio people spoke with opposing view people. An Oxford educated person and partner (one of those traditional heterosexual gigs) goes on about how the foregoing was against the divine plan (I don't think a permit was ever filed by the divine, by the way) because marriage was a tri-partite institution: 1. ordained by natural law to between opposites, 2. pro-creation was a necessity, fruitfulness, or get, and 3. a public contract. So there you go, all you fruitless married people. You ain't!
If we changed the noun from marriage to frolicking, would that fix the problem?

Plurp. Today, famous feline poopologist Dr. Poopsalata Kittifecus makes a rare appearance here in Plurp.

Plurp: Welcome back, doctor.

Dr. K: It's good to be back.

Plurp: Dr. K, our cat seems to be geographically dyslexic.

Dr. K: In what way?

Plurp: He can't seem to quite hit his catbox when ... uh ... defecating.

Dr. K: Ah. A common situation. He's not actually dyslexic at all. Rather, he's asking for attention.

Plurp: Attention?

Dr. K: Yes, like having his box changed, or having the newspapers moved from his favorite chair. Or being served a midnight snack of tuna.

Plurp: Or being hung by the tail from the shower head while the bathroom is filled with choking steam?

Dr. K: Well, that's not ...

Plurp: We'll be right back.

Yow. Did you know that you can now find books on Amazon by searching their contents, as well as stuff like their title and author? And, if you're a registered user, your search takes you to the text of the page?
It's true. And it's pretty cool! It doesn't work for all of the books in their catalog, but it does work for over 120k of them, which is a lot.
Try it! Go search for Plurp. :-)

Plurp. You are now required to tell us what you did for Hallowe'en. Be honest.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered why the bathroom door
was closed

Friday, October 31, 2003
Blab. In other news, we are challenged thusly.

"I'll thumb wrestle any of you! Come on! Are you a bunch of wusses?"
For our part, we are certainly a bunch of wusses.
Meanwhile, there's speculation that Dumsfeld is losing his mojo.
"Have you lost your mojo?" CNN's Jamie McIntyre asked Rumsfeld during a Pentagon briefing. [...]
[Rumsfeld replied,] "I don't know enough about mojo to know."

Blab. What about all those missing gnomes, you ask? And well you should.
Adopt a gnome from the French police... or the gnomes will have to be euthanized!
And after they are euthanized, their gnomic blood will be replaced with plasticine, their bodies soaked in formaldehyde, and their lifeless forms donated to elementary school biology classes for dissection as a lesson to other budding gnomes.

Blab. Our latest media whoring (requires icky registration; sorry) comes out just in time.
MIT Technology Review arrived just in time for Halloween. Boo!
Yes, we really are that scary.

Blab. Bush.
An interesting paragraph from Open Democracy:
"It seems the Asian tour, however sheltered and shuttled it may have been, left an impression on Bush. Minutes after exiting a meeting with moderate Islamic leaders in Bali, Bush is reported to have turned to his staff "with something of a puzzled look on his face" and said, "Do they really believe we think all Muslims are terrorists?" Apparently, he was also "distressed" to learn that the US is considered pro-Israeli at the expense of the Palestinian cause."
One trillian dollars a year spent on a dozen intelligence services and the head of the US guvmnt is "surprised" by the fact that the world thinks the US is pro-Israeli and anti-Muslim.
Dorian
We long ago stopped being surprised at the lack of intelligence in government.

Blab. A hacker d00d criticizes one of the world's best protocols.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice TCP/IP.
sh4k3sp34r3
So. Two points. (1) It doesn't rhyme. (2) You're right.

Yow. Automated reply to some email we sent today.
I will be out of the office starting September 3, 2003 and will not return until September 8, 3003.
i will NEVER be returning your msgs
Gotta get us summa dat.

Plop. Marry Your Pet. Can this be real? What's disturbing is that we're not sure. (Mike)

Yo. German building swallowed my immense alien creature. Film at 11. (Caterina)

Yo. Biblical plague snow globes. The perfect Solstice present! (Caterina)

Plurp.
The blue dog
was about to turn into a
kumquat.

Thursday, October 30, 2003
Blab. A reader invokes the gods. Well, one of them.
By jove! It's more...PERCY AND JUSTIN!
Umkay. We're sure it means something, if only to this particular Treasured Reader. And the gods, of course. These things always mean something to the gods.

Blab. A reader wants things.
I want one!
It's important to want things.
Enjoy the horror of the holidays with twenty-five of your favorite seasonal songs infused with an insane dose of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Happy, happy!

Blab. What's this?
[link]
It's news from the previous millennium. That's what.
[H]ere, for the first time, is the unedited NASA film from the triumphant Apollo 11 mission.
Caution: Audio track contains words of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Blab. A biblical scholar writes:
"And wait, here's a discrepancy: I am the Lord your God....and I'm a jealous God. God is Love. Love is never jealous or boastful."
There's plenty of discrepancies in the Bible, but that's not one of them. It doesn't say that God is Love.
Quite so. We understand that it was actually in Aramaic.

Blab. A Treasured Reader checks in on why music is discrete in both time and frequency.
One nice thing about music is harmony. A reliable way of producing harmony is making sure overtones of notes are in certain simple relations to each other. This is easy to achieve if notes have a specific basic frequency, easier than when tones slide all over the scale and have unpredictable overtones, as in natural noises.
Western musical notation reflects the practice of aiming for notesystems with the biggest versatility/transposability combined with the smallest possible dissonance.
(see e.g. [link] and [link] for quick overview.)
So the theory here is that harmony is important. This raises the obvious question: Why? There is no harmony in natural sound. Why would the human auditory system perceive harmony as pleasant (if, indeed, that is the case)? Is there an evolutionary advantage? Is it a side-effect of something else? If so, what?
Now that we have computers (well, we do - you might not), it's relatively easy to make sounds that preserve harmony, even as they slide nondiscretely up and down in tone. Does this presage a new era of nonquantized music? We suspect not. But why not?
We appreciate the links to various musical systems and notations. Sadly, they are Wiki links that don't really tell us how any of them work.
Real links are gratefully solicited.

Blab. A reader finds itself unable.
I can't not send you this. I find the rest of that blog funny haha too.
Perhaps you even meant, more generally, this?
Beets: Not quite is loathsome as turnips.
Zackly.

Yow. And we were all smug and happy about our pumpkin-carving abilities this year?

We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

Plurp.
Something
swallowed
Thursday

Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Blab. So what are we doing today? Oh yeah! There's an Unsolicited Reader Contributed Enigmatic Image Requiring (Other) Reader Explication.

Frankly, I wish that you had not published this picture, as I peruse this site late at night and now am afraid of what dreams may come.
We kinda liked that movie, but we missed the whole coulrophobia theme at the time. Thanks for pointing that out.
The Lord doth love the clowns, verily as much as He doth love the mimes.
http://www.kkmime.com/
http://www.mimeboyz.com/
http://www.mimeistry.org/
http://www.mime4him.com/
The Lord must love clowns. What else could account for there being so darn many of them?
This is the best clown-training manual I've come across! But, how does one "begat" something? And what's the deal with throwing palm branches at a dude riding an ass? And where's my damned apocrypha?! Oh, and where can I get some of that stuff that John was smoking?
And wait, here's a discrepancy: I am the Lord your God....and I'm a jealous God. God is Love. Love is never jealous or boastful.
No wonder many people are confused about faith. But it's close enough for clowns!
Must be some seriously studious clowns.
This thing seems to read like Sir Francis Bacon, doesn't it Andy?
"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the councel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful..."
But I'm not a man! I'm Raggedy Ann!
But Ann, inclusive language was not a concept back in the day of King James.
King who?
You know, the genetically-engeneered pink hairless ape who ordered that the Greek translation of the Hebrew version, be translated into the Queens English with slanted wording to justisfy the genetically-engeneered pink hairless ape's throne.
Oh, that guy.
We love it when dolls talk.

Blab. A surrogate blogger sends us some ...
Surrogate blogging: The 14-year rule.
Hmm!
As every grocer knows, many products have sell-by dates. Bread lasts a day or two, milk maybe a week. Well, presidential aspirants have a sell-by date, too. They last 14 years.
Any way we can reduce that time?

Blab. A reader writes:
CD- are god
... then ...
sorry about that, that was an accident!
The CDs? The gods? Both?

Blab. A reader wonders about broken jokes. So do we.
Can a joke be broken if it's unfinished?
No, both those are really funny!
Something about pigs being treated for burns by being given skin grafts made of streaky bacon.
See?

Blab. A reader informs us that ...
It's about the pumpic thingy, Ya dig?
Groovy, daddy-o.

Blab. A reader submits more evidence of widespread madness.

He's cuter than Jesus. Don't know if he vomits, though.
So they dressed their dog up as a pumpkin so that ... uh ...

Blab. A reader keeps us up on the latest in mil tech.
peek-a-boo! I shoot you!
... with a gun that can (literally) shoot around corners. You know, in just a few years, warfare is going to get even scarier. Hard to believe.

Blab. A reader attempts to explain why music is quantized.
Music is inherently "quantitized." Sound is a mechanical vibration that fits within the Newtonian laws...
I do however understand where you're coming from with the sounds of the ocean and the flapping of birds' wings. It's similar to jazz improvisation, except it's nature's improv.
Music doesn't require notes, but it does require an ear (although later in life Beethoven had an imaginary ear). Notes or musical scores are helpful when one wants to duplicate exactly what was performed previously.
I think I understand your liking for Beethoven. The name must subliminally jump out to you as "Beet hoven". Your blog is obsessed with beets, therefore you must like the name Beethoven. His compositions are incredibly fantastic, as well.
Those are good Beetnics!
The need to represent music in written form does not require it to be quantized. Quite the opposite. We would claim that quantized notation evolved simply to represent the quantized nature of the music itself. So we're still puzzled.
And lay off that beet - Beethoven thing. That's just nasty.

Blab. A reader sends us something really nasty.
It's self explanatory...
.. And I love her new face; it gives me a craving for cat food... lovely
Go look. If you dare.

Plurp. This week in Plurp.

helen naked pitures

iris chacon

chihuly

iowa wright

aiml

cooking the books

imani

jack holgroth

ko

mia

We called the dog Iowa.

Plurp. Oh. My God. Those young lovelies doing the American Gothic thing last week? It's a reality TV show. Featuring spoiled rich people who are forced to live on farms. Including rich but worthless Paris Hilton.
You may now gag us with a silver spoon.

Yak. A California firefighter on the news tonight.
We're dead dog tired.

We're dead tired.

We're dog tired.

Thank you, California, and good night.

Yow. Beethoven last night, Eric Idle tonight. Just barely.
All Things Dull and Ugly
Eric Idle
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
Amen.

Plurp.
Something about a
dog
with no nose.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Blab. A reader wants to know ...
was the blue dog out peeing on boxes o plurp?
While we have no information about the whereabouts of the blue dog during the recent absence, the distinct lack (so far) of any Boxes O' Plurp at all suggests that peeing on them was not involved.

Blab. A reader mistakes his pumpkin for a meatloaf.
Is that an open-faced meatloaf dish? It's not, I know. It's the expression on one's face when confronted with a genetically engineered, pink hairless ape with a knife, in late october. Ya dig?
You're young, you're in bed, you have knives. Stuff happens.

Blab. A reader elicits a response from its hindbrain to an unknown stimulus.
If I were to tediously search for a meaning to "that thing" using a fine-combed tooth, the response would be something like, "Gee, your palm smells all fresh and flowery. Please shove it in my mouth deaper! My flesh awaits the trauma with sentient glee."
Gosh, we are just dying to know what that's about. Really we are.

Blab. A reader send us this puzzling bunch o' bits.

We have no idea.
So, naturally, we'll make this our Unsolicited Reader Contributed Enigmatic Image Requiring (Other) Reader Explication.
You know how this works. You provide provocative prose explaining, or at least justifying, this rather odd image. We publish your prose. Magically, it becomes funny. We know; it's incredible.
So. You know. Explain.

Blab. A reader suffers a psychotic break.

Jesus O' Lantern (perhaps this is the reason the other pumpkins are vomiting)
What would Jesus do?

Blab. A reader attempts to solve the mystery of the back foot.
"Labour's on the back foot."
*really* wants to be "knocked back on [his] heels"
Do they have heels in the Mother Country?
An amateur Commonwealthian (USian recently transplanted to Canadia)
We will make no snotty remark about "Canada." No, not one.

Blab. A reader of unknown origin makes a pilgrimage to the Source of All Knowledge.
"On the back foot" seems to be British not Helenish. Google gives 33,000 hits for it, the top ones all from British media or cricket-related sites.
The oracle sayeth thus.

Blab. Finally, a reader who is clearly English confirms our worst suspicions.
"On the back foot" is a standard British idiom (meaning "to be on the defensive") derived from the ancient and noble game of cricket, hoorah!
(We know this reader is English because of the implied understanding of cricket, which we all know to be utterly incomprehensible to those not weaned with it.)

Blab. A reader answers the question posed in this week's header bar.
SPONGE BOB SQUARE PANTS!!!!!
Nice casage.
This forces us to observe, however, the change in cartoon mythos since we were a tot. What is a pineapple doing under the sea in the first place? Why doesn't in rot? Why is a sea sponge the shape, consistency and color of a kitchen sponge? Why does it wear Western garb?
As far as we can tell, there is no attempt at explanation.
When we were a kidlet, we were enmeshed in the Superman mythos. The Superman mythos always tried to explain its unusual features.
Why can Superman fly? He comes from a planet with much higher gravity. X-ray vision? It's the yellow sun.
OK, so the explanations are pretty shallow, and don't make a lot of sense. But hey - at least they tried!

Blab. Another reader mixes the memes, displaying way too much knowledge in at least two subject areas.
Pirate: Are you ready, conservatives?
Conservatives: Aye, aye captain!
Pirate: I can't hear you!
Conservatives: Aye, aye captain!
Pirate: Oh... Who lives in a pineapple under D.C.?
Conservatives: SPONGEBOB ANN COULTER!
Pirate: Abrasive and blonde and porous is she!
Conservatives: SPONGEBOB ANN COULTER!
Pirate: If political nonsense is something you wish,
Conservatives: SPONGEBOB ANN COULTER!
Pirate: Then drop a few bucks on this slanderous dish!
Conservatives: SPONGEBOB ANN COULTER!
Pirate: Ready?
All together: SpongeBob Ann Coulter, SpongeBob Ann Coulter, SpongeBob Ann Coulter, SpongeBob... Ann Coulter!
Pirate: Haha!
Ann Coulter with kazoo: Liberals hate America!
We like the kazoo. Nice touch.

Blab. A magnetic reader writes:
I've got a few magnetic letters on my refrigerator. I try to use every letter and form some phrases.
Example:
DR JONZTON MCLAPSEXY IS A BIG FOTHER MUCK
Is this not magnetic poetry?
Are we not men?

Blab. At the bottom of today's Nigerian spam is this curious line.
Charle con sus amigos online usando CHAT 123 http://www.123.com/sp/chat/section.php?id_section=329
How very strange! It does seem to be on a lot of Nigerian spam, though.

Blab. A reader sends us an inspirational quote.
A man desires praise that he may be reassured, that he may be quit of his doubting of himself; he is indifferent to applause when he is confident of success."
-Alec Waugh

Hooray!
Did you say something?

Blab. A reader sends us a smoke-obscured ...
[link]
... to an incredible satellite photo of the California fires, which are all over Southern California at the moment: Simi Valley, LA, San Bernardino and San Diego. (More great photos from this same source are here.) There sure seem to be a lot of them, and all at once. (Look here and here.)
Should we chalk these conflagrations up to coincidence, lots of dry brush and warm weather and such? After all, there's at least one fire in that area pretty much every summer.
Or is there any reason to believe that it's deliberate?

Yow. Today's candidate for Headline of the Year.
Eccentric millionaire can't recall details of cutting up friend
Priceless.

Plurp. Sources which we may not reveal lead us to Land Mail Art Objects, which might be related to those enigmatic Boxes O' Plurp.
But, then again, maybe not.

Plurp. Our Advertising Line O' The Day.
GNE. That's no game.

Yow. The inestimable Paul Ford (of Ftrain) tells us how he hosted what will surely be the last flash mob ever. Go read it before the site is shut down forever.

Plurp. You remember television, right? Well, you'll be amazed to know that (a) it's still around (we wonder why), and (b) the U.S. government is obsessed with forcing people to make it digital. By the year 2007.
Won't that be neat? Digital television. We wonder if anyone will notice.

Plurp. An incredible experience tonight. Or, rather, three of them. Beethoven's Symphony No. 4, which we don't think we had ever heard in concert. Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring a twenty-four year old kid whose technique was so fluid that the keyboard itself seemed to become liquid. Then Symphony No. 5, which may very well be the most perfect piece of music ever written.
Which brings us to today's question: Why are there notes? In virtually all music, both Western and otherwise, music is composed and played in discrete, quantized units.
This is not the way of most sound in nature: the wind in the trees, waves on the shore, a flock of geese taking off. They are not discrete, not metered, not quantized.
Yet music almost always is. Many instruments are inherently digital in this way: the piano, flutes, almost all brass, guitars. Even instruments which are more inherently variable (violins, trombones) are not played that way most of the time (if we don't count glissando or tremolo, which are ear candy, not the main meal). And theremins? They never did catch on.
Heck, musical notation practically demands quantization, and we hardly have any way to express more fluid sounds.
So why is that?

Plurp. We keep checking Snopes to see if they've debunked the story that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor elect of California. But they haven't posted it yet.

Plurp.
The blue dog
made a pilgrimage to
the Source of All Knowledge.

Monday, October 27, 2003
Blab. A reader wants to know the power source of something that doesn't, and indeed shouldn't, exist.
Would Sponge Bob Ann Coulter use a water-powered fuel cell instead of batteries?
L.
Or tidal turbines. Tidal turbines would be good.

Blab. A reader notices certain absences.
Hey, did the blue dog get banished for making too many expensive analog phone calls??
We are not aware that the blue dog uses a telephone. In addition, we are not at all clear on why the blue dog has been absent for the last few days. It happens on occasion.

Blab. Heh.
Well, I hope Mel Gibson finally gets the message... God doesn't like people standing on hills holding umbrellas!
A New Testament chapter in the Dickensian style: I Am Struck by Lightning.
Actor Jim Caviezel, who plays Jesus in Mel Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of Christ" was struck by lightning during shooting.
Caviezel was uninjured, but a producer described how he saw smoke coming from the actor's ear.
We expect merchandising tie-ins with the ear candling folks.

Blab. That recent request for customized magnetic poetry seems to have stirred the readership to, you know, type things.
Frankly, having gone thru my poetry period in college I found that it had many qualities (lousy, weepy, insipid, banal,...) but was never described as magnetic. Hypnotic, in the sense of "sleep inducing", maybe, but never magnetic. In fact I remember a former girlfriend's plea: Do you have magnetic poetry? Even magnetic poetry would help.
Dorian, the bard of the magnetic domain
We can only wonder what problem your former girlfriend was trying to solve.

Blab. And from the Great State of Minnesota comes this reassuring message.
Hi Captain Plurp,
The Minnesota magnetic poetry set does indeed capture much of the color of the local dialect. The addition of: jello, betcha, spam (the food), mall (the noun), aboat (Canadian influence), and couldabeen (as in "couldabeen worse") would just about complete the set.
Your Midwest Correspondent
We are frightened by any sentence that includes both the word jello and the word spam.

Blab. News from Sacramento: new dress code.

Governer-elect Schwarzenegger meets with his new Energy Secretary at a nuclear energy summit. (It's funny because it's plausible!)
Personally, we find its plausibility terrifying. But that's just us.

Blab. A reader claims to have a new ...
Helenism
Heard on BBC news
"Labour's on the back foot."
-on the back burner
and .....?!?!?!
So, a question and a comment. Is this a common and meaningful expression in the UK? And what's the second constituent phrase of the Helenism? Something about a foot?

Blab. An Oreo fetishist sends us ...
Audio erotica!
That's Caterina, of course. But you knew that.

Blab. Like us, a reader is plagued with the disease of thinking its own, sad humor is funny.
"Plurp: Tired of bein' compared / to damn' Britney Spears". Hahahahahahaha!
That is funny, though. In a strange sort of way.

Blab. A reader takes us up on our offer to provide you, our Treasured Readers, with a free Box O' Plurp. Sort of.
Well, the dog pee has rather put us off that last idea.
So, in accordance with your wish of exposing the naked obsession with plurp of your treasured readership, we have placed each of the letters and numbers of our name and address (and indeed all our personal information in excruciating detail) in random locations around the web and sent a message via the OMCL network.
-AJL
This gives us an opportunity to clear something up. Several of you wrote to us, asking if we're serious about sending you a free Box O' Plurp^TM. Of course we are! We've never been more serious about anything in our life. Well, almost never.
So, please, send us a note today with your name and (physical, mailing) address, along with a message saying, "Send me a Box O' Plurp^TM." You never know what you might get.
Heck, we don't even know what you'll get.

Yo. It was a Pawling pumpkin picking day on Saturday, as we made the long trek into the Northern Hinterlands to visit Ian and the mysterious C., whereupon we went to a big field of pumpkins and picked some up. It wasn't pumpkin picking, per se, in the sense that the pumpkins were already of their vines (by some unknown mechanism or agency). So it really was pumpkin picking up.
Anyhow, this adventure was followed by an Attack of the Magnetic Monsters, resulting in Helen's head magnets malfunctioning in a most unfortunate way. We got lost in Westchester, then again in the Bronx, then nearly again in Harlem before sanity returned and we found our way home. It did require three hours of grueling driving, though.
Upon arriving home, we collapsed and didn't stir again until late the next morning. Which may be related to the time warp that swallowed Saturday until some time Sunday, but we're not sure. We did find time, over the subsequent couple of days, to eviscerate the pumpkins in a most fetching manner.

Barfing Pumpkin and Friends

Then this morning, the little motor that (formerly) raised and lowered the radio antenna on our car stopped working (though it does make dangerous-sounding noises), no doubt a residual effect of the Magnetic Monsters.

Plop. Hundreds of naked women. In Grand Central. And we missed it.
Phooey.

Plop. Back now from our trip to a Faraway Place, we find that we lost our comb (easily replaced), our reading glasses (major hassle), and maybe our brand-new umbrella (still checking on that one).
We are unhappy.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was
mum about the whole
not-being-here
thing

Sunday, October 26, 2003
Plurp.

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