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2003.11.02 : 2003.11.08
Saturday, November 8, 2003
Blab. Flat Stanley writes:
Somebody searched for me
here??? LOL, I'm going to start using this as an alternative url :D
Feel free!
Blab. A reader tells us more than we needed to know.
Loli smells like melons &
sweet grass. What does Steve Balmer smell like?
We hate to think.
Blab. A reader explains those cat-induced brain parasites. Or
something.
That interesting study from
yesterday, which claimed that a cat parasite causes British women to become
sexier, was interesting. But of far more interest, when one fully
investigated the studies, is the revelation of the shocking finding that
all Neo-Cons are suffering from pitbull parasites in the brain, making
them all highly suseptable to following the rabid commands from their masters
at War-Mongers, Inc. who have taken over America with CBN financing.
It was also disclosed that the odd pasty miss-shapen face of David Limbaugh,
(seen of late hawking his sad tome: "Persecution"), is due to an unfortunate
familial deformation caused by reptilian parasitic infiltration of brain
and bowels in the long made-pure-by-inbreeding Limbaugh line.
Ever scientifically yours, until science
is outlawed by the 700 Club,
Lené Wangmo
Yes, but how do you really feel about it?
Blab. An infected reader writes:
Well now you just made me
paranoid. Where can I get tested to see if I ma infeceted by the parasites?
Do you think it was an alien plant to make the 'play' more interesting?
If you have to ask, it's too late. Sorry.
As to the origin of your brain parasites, we're torn between the alien
overlords and cats. Though maybe they're the same?
Blab. A reader predicts:
This month's top search item:
Helen
in Catwoman suit.
No wonder you're always commenting
about the cat and the bed.
Dorian, the cat lover
No comment.
Blab. A reader with brain worms writes:
Tell Helen she looks aces
in the cat suit.
Will do. We hope you won't mind if we do that in our own particular ...
uh
... idiom.
Blab. A reader hints at the dark events leading up to the Cataclysm.
Breaking news from the BBC:
Giant sea monsters attack! Divers in peril! Beachcombers succumb to crustacean
terror!
Watch for the icthian eyes of the children.
Blab. A reader corrects us, rather abruptly.
The line is "We don't have
a chance in hell."
More properly ...
I respectfully submit that
you have misidentified one of the constituent phrases in Friday's Helenism:
hope
in hell 10,900
chance
in hell 46,200
Who are we to dispute Google? More to the point, who are we to dispute
our Treasured Readers? Nobody,
that's who!
Blab. A reader asks, and quite properly, we must say ...
Do you have a can of mother's
milk? Even a can of mother's milk would help.
Good reader! Have a biscuit!
Blab. From the back of the room, a reader rises and says ...
I am a bookaholic. Failure
to sell me another book will cause me to steal one. Which would mean I'd
become a kleptomaniac. Perhaps kleptomania has a cure. Bookaholism certainly
doesn't. I went to the Bookaholics meeting and they gave me two books:
a bible and a book about their 12 step program. I left happy if not cured.
Dorian, the bookworm
You should definitely stay in hotels. Or dumpsters. Your choice.
Blab. A reader informs us that ...
the
Brits continue to entertain us
... which is always true. In this case, Prince Charles is the target of
unprintable rumors. At least, they're unprintable in the U.K., where various
newspapers are under court injunction not to carry the many stories that
are circulating. Which is to say, everyone's heard the stories, but no
one is allowed to report on them.
What stories? Well, it seems that the Bonnie Prince may have gotten
a bit close to one of his aides. One of his male
aides.
Fawcett, 40, was the "indispensable"
royal aide said to have regularly squeezed the Prince of Wales's toothpaste.
We'll bet he did.
But we must now leave you to wonder: So what? It's not like Charles
is the first British royal to be gay. Maybe he's just the first to have
such awful taste in architecture. And be unable to dance.
Blab. A reader reminds us to stay out of jail.
Remember kids: the chronic
isn't just bad for you, it's
illegal...
just like skipping
school...
or being a
passenger in a car!
Or kissing
in the subway.
Plop. The good news is that diet seems to correlate well with
long life.
The bad news is that the main advice for living longer is: eat
significantly less than you would like to. At least, it's bad news
for those of us who actually like food.
Yo. We recently chided Bruce Sterling for including too-saccharine
Mood indicators on his new blog
site. Bruce has now removed them.
How do we feel about this?
Mood: 
mischievous
Plurp. We're a lifelong epopt.
Are you?
Plurp. Which
biological molecule are you? We are starch.
You are starch. You are rigid,
opinionated, hard-willed and not too friendly about it. You keep people
out of places, or you keep them in, and without you a lot of things would
collapse. hopefully you'll never have the authority to burn people at the
stake. Sir. Ma'am.
Finally. A polite test. 'Bout time.
Plurp. Are you a young, beautiful (digitally synthesized) woman?
Then no doubt you will be interested in entering the Miss
Digital World contest.
But beware those who think
beauty need only be screen-deep. The virtual world has its ethical rules
too.
"They should not have taken part --
not even as extras or cameos -- in pornographic films, shows or plays nor
have made statements...in any way out of tune with the moral spirit of
the competition," organizers said.
There is no talent competition in the contest. Those of you who are disqualified
on moral grounds are encouraged to contact us directly.
Plurp.
Plurp. Don't blame us for that Baptist thing. It's all Kafkaesque's
fault.
Yow. Did you know that Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is
up
for auction at Sotheby's? And that, for $4.5-6M, you can own this miracle
of minimalism? Sure, it's a summer house that you can't actually use in
the summer because the Illinois bugs will eat you alive.
But still!
 Readers
who would like to donate $4.5-6M to us are encourage to do so. We might
use it to buy the Farnsworth House.
Of course, we're equally likely to buy a warehouse full of computer
games involving peacock tongues and the concept of self-immolating monks
who never existed.
But surely you expected that.
Yow. From the Sunday NYT letters
to the editor. (We get it on Saturday, since we live here.)
To the Editor:
Re: "Growing Up: Britney Did It Again"
by Neil Strauss [Nov. 2]:
You're like, "Here's another article
about Britney Spears," and I'm like, "I don't care, O.K.?" and you're like,
"But she's growing up," and I'm like, "Join the club," and you're like,
"But isn't it scandalous and tittilating that this young woman is acting
all sexy?" and I'm like, "What is this, the New York Times or Tiger Beat?"
Tom Ruegger
Calabasas, Calif.
Plurp. News from the art front.
We picked up our newly-framed Salinas
today, and it is very, very cool.  We'll
take a break from work tomorrow (lots of work-work to do!) and hang
it in the bedroom.
The Rubio that we thought we had bought turns out to have been sold
at some indeterminate time in the past, which has us quite bummed, but
oh well.
Yow. Last week, during our interminable conference, someone on
GNE
chat asked us what we liked about living in NYC.
We popped over to Beethoven's 8th & 9th symphonies tonight at Lincoln
Center. Magnificent. Which is to say, pretty good for a home-town band.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
was amazed at
how active Saturday
was
Friday, November 7, 2003
Blab. A reader was all set to roast its camel. Then
this.
your thanksgiving recipe
left out the metrix ton of beets.
chef Dorian
We figured the camel itself provided enough disincentive. But maybe not
for everyone.
Blab. On that
lovely Ballmer/iPod remix, a reader, who (for reasons that we really
don't want to go into) knows what Steve Ballmer smells like, writes:
WOW!! That even looks
and sounds and SMELLS like Steve Balmer. I am so impressed!
So thanks for the treat. Wild.
You can thank whatever anonymously Treasured Reader sent it to us. We love
our readers. Oh yes we do.
And we especially love that remix. The use of I ... love ... this
... company is especially wonderful.
Blab. A reader seeks to justify its malaprop.
Oh a Tidal Turbine might
do, but it would never help.
Do you have a properly formed meme? Even a properly formed meme would help.
 Blab.
A reader responds well to our request to send a pithy summary of yesterday's
reported study that British women are made sexier by a parasite they get
from their cats.
Summary: Women in cat suits
are sexy. Especially when they purr.
While this is a bit outside our experience, we are willing to stipulate
to this point.
The real question is: Are women with brain parasites sexy? That odd
little Czechoslovakian study seems to imply that they are. At least, in
Britain.
Blab. A reader presumes that its experience is shared.
I suppose many people will
let you know that the blue dog was on Oprah today. He was introduced to
Oprah by Harry Connick Jr. It was a classic moment and I thought of you
although I guess I actually just thought of your site, because I don't
know you.
I don't know what all the quotations
were about but it made me think of Mary Pickford's "You may have a fresh
start any moment you choose, for this thing we call 'failure' is not the
falling down, but the staying down." Applying it to sports, I decided it
was somewhat true for ice skating, but am not sure it holds up for football,
baseball, or basketball. The possibilities are endless here. What about
a high wire act - with no net?
Actually, no one else told us that. Does that make you wonder if it really
happened?
We do think that, without a net, a high wirist who falls down is pretty
much guaranteed to stay down.
We hope that helps.
Blab. A reader wonders what would happen if Bush were pitted
against Iraq.
Hmmm...
While we would never claim that the Giant Battle Monsters computers were
in error, we note the following interesting descriptions:
Bush is a Giant Moth that
breathes Poisonous Gas, Fears Nothing, is Cold-Blooded and Easily Confused,
and rides around in a Metal Tripod.
Iraq is a Giant Robot that shoots
Electricity from its Eyes, and fires Rockets.
Didn't they get those reversed?
Meanwhile, Ahhnold attacks us and
loses!
Similarly, a reader provides another blind ...
[link].
From this, we learn that Plurp is a Porridge-Eating Psycho Monkey.
We've always said that.
Blab. A reader is following Flat
Stanley carefully. Someone has to.
Flat Stanley joined the Senior
Staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room, where he "substituted" for National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
What does Bush spend all of your tax dollars on? Well, lots of things.
Intelligence is apparently not one of them. But having meetings
with inanimate objects apparently is.
Plurp. A gem
from our all-week meeting
We don't have a prayer in
hell.
-
We don't have a prayer.
-
We don't have a hope in hell.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a gigantic metal
action figure of Harry Connick, Jr.
that infected catwomen
and attacked Steve Ballmer
with tidal turbines.
Thursday, November 6, 2003
Blab. A reader sends us astounding news from the world
of biology, which is located just to the left of Bizarro World.
No, it wasn't the dog...
it was the herring, and it's trying to say something.
We're not going to attempt to summarize this. You have to read it. Let's
just say it has to do with herring. And ... well ... bubbles.
Blab. A reader guesses why last week's search results (from yesterday)
were really, really weird.
no helen naked pitures
Zackly! What's more ...
Hey, no-one searched for
Naked pitures last week! How strange...
Yeah. It creeps us out.
Blab. A reader writes:
Do you have a Tidal Turbine?
Even a Tidal Turbine would do...
Would help. Would help.
You people!
Blab. A reader sends us information on that interesting study
from yesterday, which claimed that a cat parasite causes British women
to become sexier.
The relevant Toxo links (from
the signalplusnoise site) are:
http://www.natur.cuni.cz/~flegr/toxo94.htm
http://www.natur.cuni.cz/~flegr/toxo95.htm
http://www.natur.cuni.cz/~flegr/Tehul3.htm
.../MANUSCRI/toxozeny/biolpsych.pdf
.../MANUSCRI/reakc/reacttimes.pdf
.../MANUSCRI/havarky/accidents.pdf
Ah. We see what went wrong. You thought we (a) wanted to read all this
cruft ourself and (b) couldn't find the links. Actually, we're expecting
you
to read it all for us and give us a pithy, educated summary.
So ...
Blab. A reader sends us the latest Ballmer remix.
Monkey Boy Balmer recast
as an
iPod advert
Oh dear, that's completely fabulous! (Note the underarms. Nice touch.)
Blab. A Freaking Treasured Reader writes:
"It is better to keep your
mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt."
Freaking Sam Twain
"It is only in folk tales, children's
stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely
and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons,
and it takes wilful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
Freaking Gnome Chomsky
So either Gnome should have shut up or Sam is lying. Is that the idea?
Blab. A reader writes:
If all the world's a stage,
where's the audience come from?
We found this on a UK site entitled Jokes
About Boys. Perhaps we can recommend this to our reader.
But the true explanation should be obvious. If the entire Earth is a
stage, the audience must come from elsewhere.
Be more afraid than usual.
That seems like good advice!
Plop. Don't do this
for Thanksgiving.
1 whole camel, medium size
1 whole lamb, large size
20 whole chickens, medium size
60 eggs
12 kilos rice
2 kilos pine nuts
2 kilos almonds
1 kilo pistachio nuts
110 gallons water
5 pounds black pepper
Salt to taste
Really.
Plurp. An interesting, if now ancient, New
Yorker article on Ultima Online. In case there's anybody out there
who, like us, has never played it. The social effects are really interesting!
Are there more recent articles that talk about the social effects?
Plurp. Oops.
An Israeli television channel
has been able to record unencrypted pictures of a secret missile test.
The secret launch was broadcast for
two days
Israel is a country which guards
its secrets closely, its military secrets in particular.
But now a television engineer using
a standard household satellite dish has been able to watch the secret testing
of a long-range artillery shell.
Some of the pictures he recorded have
now been broadcast on Israeli television.
Important safety tip, kids: if you want to keep a secret, don't broadcast
it.
D'oh.
Plop. If you're a
failing software company with no future, and you decide to sue other,
more solvent companies in the hopes of pumping up the paper value of your
company so that you look like an attractive acquisition target, how do
you give incentives to your lawyers to do a really good job of inflating
your stock price?
Lawyers for software company
SCO Group could wind up with 20 percent of the proceeds if the company
were to be sold or reach a legal settlement, according to a recent document
filed with regulators.
If the software company were sold
for an amount equal to its current stock market value -- $247 million --
its legal counsel would walk away with about $49 million, under the terms
of a deal that are still being finalized.
SCO did not name the law firm in the
regulatory filing, but it is known that the company is being represented
by the firm of David Boies, a former government prosecutor who led the
anti-trust case against Microsoft Corp..
Yak. From our week-long internal conference.
We need to look at the underbelly
of the architecture.
Choice.
Plurp. You've already seen it. Or have you? The
Meatrix. Just as preachy as the original!
Plop. The Patriot Act, our very favorite step onto the slippery
slope, is now being used to investigate
a strip club that is not even alleged to be connected to terrorism.
"The law was intended for
activities related to terrorism and not to naked women."
But what the heck, right? They passed the law, so we may as well use it
to persecute prosecute pretty much anything we don't like.
Plurp.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a Giant Man-Eating Plant that
left a Trail of Goo,
fired Rockets, and had a Single Giant
Eye,
Huge, Sharp Claws and a Metal Jaw.
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Blab. A reader hints at the possibility that it actually
clicked on one of our links yesterday. Color us incredulous!
From the Sterling link...
Weeeeeee!
Well that's modestly cool, given the icky limitations of Flash and all.
You can draw stuff that has physical properties (well, toon physics anyway)
and make it move in predetermined ways. The things you make interact (again
via toon physics).
Very amusing!
Blab. A reader feels the imaginary pain of its procrastination.
Crud, I didn't make it in
time. Oh well...for halloween I went to my brother's wedding rehearsal.
We were supposed to come dressed in a costume, so naturally, we didn't.
Heh
We're so glad you let us know. We encourage our readers to respond to our
questions, no matter how long ago we asked them.
We find that it's good training.
Blab. A reader makes a wish.
More Mary Louis Parker imagery
please, boss.
Your wish is granted.
Blab. On yesterday's revelation of those disturbing alien symbols
found on clothing, a reader writes:
Wow! So that's what
those symbols on your shorts mean! I was wondering.
Yes, it's true. The aliens can eat my shorts.
 
Blab. A reader discovers one of Helen's little hobbies.
Helen
is so multitalented! She is a hero of mine :)
And to all of us concerned with pork pies, dear reader. To all of us.
Blab. A reader whose motives are likely more lascivious than
scientific writes:
"[Infected] women ... appear
to exhibit the sex
kitten effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun-loving
and possibly more promiscuous. ... [They] spent more money on clothes and
were consistently rated as more attractive."
Um, yeah, well. We saw that article in the (scurrilous London) Sunday
Times. The claim is that toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by almost
all British cats, and which has infected the brains of half the British
population, is responsible for the above personality changes.
Forgive us if we appear skeptical to the point of using the Times to
line our kitty's litter box. Let's just say we'd be happy to see a corroborative
study.
Blab. A reader's mouse is roaring.
An Austrian may have won
the election in the Freistaat Californien, but we Swiss 0wn the world.
Be afraid. Very afraid!
We are always very afraid.
Plurp. It was an unusual week here in Plurpville. See
if you can guess why.
-
iris chacon
-
oliverbot
-
titkut follies
-
britney
-
halloween
-
hearts
-
loli
-
quorn
-
technology review
-
arnie
Did you guess?
(Oh, and it's Titicut
Follies, which we still haven't seen.)
Plurp. Here's a
conundrum for you.
A Canadian citizen who was
detained last year at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York
as a suspected terrorist said Tuesday he was secretly deported to Syria
and endured 10 months of torture in a Syrian prison. [...]
He said he was flying home to Montreal
via New York on Sept. 26, 2002, from a family visit to Tunisia.
"This is when my nightmare began,"
he said. "I was pulled aside by immigration and taken [away]. The police
came and searched my bags. I asked to make a phone call and they would
not let me." He said an FBI agent and a New York City police officer questioned
him. "I was so scared," he said. "They told me I had no right to a lawyer
because I was not an American citizen."
Arar said he was shackled, placed
on a small jet and flown to Washington, where "a new team of people got
on the plane" and took him to Amman, the capital of Jordan. Arar said U.S.
officials handed him over to Jordanian authorities, who "blindfolded and
chained me and put me in a van. . . . They made me bend my head down in
the back seat. Then these men started beating me. Every time I tried to
talk, they beat me." [...]
A senior U.S. intelligence official
discussed the case in terms of the secret rendition policy. There have
been "a lot of rendition activities" since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks in the United States, the official said. "We are doing a number
of them, and they have been very productive."
It's hard to know what's true here, of course. The interesting thing to
us is that this is happening a lot, and apparently happening to citizens
of countries that are on good terms with the U.S.
We're sure that this is very productive. No doubt the U.S. government
could learn a great deal by imprisoning and torturing all of its own citizens
as well.
But is that a good idea?
Yo. Yet another Largest
Solar Flare Ever. (Go watch the terrifying
movies of it.)
Tuesday's flare went off
the scale; researchers say it was "well above X20". A precise description
is difficult because some monitoring satellites were briefly blinded the
scale of the event.
Just a few more weeks until the whole solar systems gets fried. Act now!
Yo. You all remember Guy Fawkes, the anarchist who plotted to
blow up the English Parliament in 1605. But did you know that, had he succeeded
in setting off his explosives, it would have been a
really big boom?
Had the gunpowder plot succeeded,
Guy Fawkes would not only have destroyed the old palace of Westminster
but would have caused chaos and devastation across central London, destroying
Westminster Hall, the Abbey and the streets immediately surrounding them
with structural damage being caused to buildings as far away as Whitehall.
Physicists have worked out for the
first time the true extent of the damage Guy Fawkes would have caused if
the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded on 5th November 1605. Streets up to one
third of a mile from the centre of the palace of Westminster would have
suffered severe structural damage and windows would have shattered up to
a kilometre away from the centre.
Plurp. Would you open up a store named Kleptomaniac?
Plurp. Now this.
A new reality TV show asks
the question: "Can YOU Be a Pornstar?"
Mary Carey, the porn actress who ran
for California governor in the recent recall election, is among the hosts,
joining fellow adult-film stars Tabitha Stevens and Ginger Lynn. [...]
A group of 28 women will compete for
a one-year contract with a major adult video distributor and a cash prize
of $100,000.
We can only imagine the tryouts.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was in charge of
secret rendition policy
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
Blab. A reader informs us of the insidious, unnoticed
spread of the alien menace.
Re: German building swallowed
my immense alien creature - film at 11
I'm terribly sorry to have to inform
you that there are signs that the geographical dyslexia your cat has seems
to be contagious. Graz (the place where the alien creature is currently
being digested) is no longer in Germany, but has actually moved back to
Austria in the last century. Graz's short trip to Germany (from 1939 to
1945) was due to its visiting an Austrian friend named Alois Schicklgruber
who had managed to become elected Reichskanzler there.
Expecting reports about your first-hand
experiences with the therapy against geographical dyslexia. You may want
to strengthen your shower head somewhat.
By the way, didn't some Austrian win
an election in California?
Regards,
very smart S.
It's true. Not only are buildings
in Germany being consumed by immense alien creatures, but buildings
in nearby Austria (which is, indeed, at least as of late, a separate country)
are being consumed as well!
You're next! You're next!
Blab. Along these same lines, a reader alerts us to a terrifying
revelation.
Alient
laundry symbols
No doubt it was our reader's fearful, quivering fingers that typed Alient
for Alien as this new, dangerous knowledge seeped into its consciousness.
Unlike the well-known alien
food symbols, which are unitary symbols designating which alien race
may derive sustenance from the many packaged food products on Earth, these
alien symbols are an entire vocabulary, which communicate complex, and
no doubt disgusting, things that the various alien races may do with our
clothing!
Examples of this cryptic, universal language are shown here.
   
Arralians should not consume
this garment whole as it will anger the Overlords.
  
Tychthu'zhans should dissolve
human hands in their solvent packets before consuming this garment from
closets.
This opens up a whole new area of investigation.
Blab. A reader who watches our posting time far too closely
writes:
Must be another fascinating
conference. Plurp posted early!
Cynic!
Blab. A Mary Louise Parker fetishist writes:
Ummm, Mary Louise Parker!
'Scuse me whilst I drool, and think thoughts like "if only I wasn't (a)
embarrassingly happily engaged; (b) unsuitably unattractive; and (c) a
software engineer at IBM Research; then I'd be thinking 'she will be mine;
oh yes, she will be mine.'"
Ummmm....
We can only hope that your starry-eyed fiancé doesn't notice
the drooling.
Blab. Somehow getting the misimpression that our humble blog
is, instead, a mailing list for hormone-leaking teens, a reader writes:
Someone suggested that "Molly"
would be a good movie to rent. It apparently stars Elizabeth Shoe,
naked (I can imagine the google hits on that one).
Is it really a good idea to rent this?
Anyone?
No, it is not really a good idea to rent this.
Blab. Yesterday, a reader wondered if Richard Armitage was human,
or an evil gnome in robotic human suit. We admit that we were stumped.
Fortunately, our readers weren't!
Richard Armitage......photos.......hmmmm.
Definately a robotic gnome practicing
to be an evil human. He's not fooling anyone though. Me thinks
he has an abdominal displexia.
And then, in a subsequent submission:
OOOPSS, it's spelled dysplexia.
We're pretty sure it's not. But we never know!
Blab. A reader advances a theory of which we had not previously
heard.
The photos of Armitage linked
on Plurp, the Heil Bush shot, many other rabid repubs, and recent neocon
fakenews shows broadcasting the talking head of David Limbaugh pushing
his evangelical ignorance "book," are images that make me wonder if the
neocons are perhaps the spawn of polygamy snakehandling tribes. There
seems to be about them that simpleton mishapen aura of inbreeding.
Ever yours, with a Kiss blown to the
Blue Dog,
Lené Wangmo
Hmm. Inbreeding with snakes? We always figured it was toads.
That kiss thing, though? Stop that. It leads directly to inbreeding.
Plurp. Today, at our conference in a Far Away Place, there are
50 people in the audience. Of these, 45 have laptops open, wireless connection,
and something not directly related to the speaker's topic on their screens.
Maybe we need presentation software that is much, much more interesting
and attention-grabbing. Or give up on the quaint idea that people at conferences
actually pay attention to the speaker.
Plurp. Ecopsychology?
Ecopsychology?
Ecopsychology.
Yo. Japan-A-Radio.
The Best in Japanese Anime & Japanese Pop Music!
Weird.
Yo. Similarly, there's this extremely curious thingie.
Wants pawn term, dare worsted
ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer
lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck
wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten
Hut.
We cannot make any sense out of it when we read it. But it's perfectly
obvious when we listen
to it. (More hints here.)
Isn't that weird?
And gosh that must have taken a long time to do. (Caterina)
Plurp. Bruce Sterling is back with a
new blog. This one has the same short-short entries that his
previous blog had. But this one has all-new blog iconography.
Like this:
Mood: 
incredulous
Now Playing: Gilberto Gil, popstar
and Brazilian Minister of Culture
We despair.
Plurp. You've heard about the draft Afghan constitution, right?
But have you read
it? There's some pretty interesting stuff in there. One of the interesting
things is that it's really long, at least compared to the U.S. Constitution.
Considering its length, and the controversy surrounding it, it's amazing
that it took so little time to put together.
We like source material.
Plop. Ah heck. We completely missed Protection
from Pornography Week. Dagnabbit! Now what are we going to do?
(flutterby)
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a product of
all-new blog iconography
Monday, November 3, 2003
Blab. What did you do for Hallowe'en?
For halloween I escorted
my 3-year-old daughter trick-or-treating to exactly 5 houses before she
decided that she had enough and wanted to go home and eat candy. So we
did.
Yikes. Kids have become a lot lazier since our own tothood. We'd scavenge
the entire neighborhood, which consisted of (easily) a hundred houses.
It wasn't fatigue but the sheer weight of our bags that caused us, finally,
to drag ourselves home.
We turned the porchlight
off and crawled into bed early (like 8 pm early). I read to the wife
for an hour and half, and then we went to sleep. That last part actually
took a half an hour, as our dogs were having so much fun barking at the
kids going by, it took them a while to calm down and come back to bed....
- Felis Lynx
We wonder if the dogs were doing more than barking at the kids. But that's
just us.
For Halloween I ate lots
of fun-sized Snickers and had a nap.
Curious. We would have thought that eating lots of fun-sized Snickers would
have resulted in you staying up all night. That's how it always worked
for us.
Finally, a reader warms our black heart.
For Hallowe'en I hid in a
cupboard, covered by an old dressing gown, making spooky noises until my
three-year-old son started crying.
That's our kind of reader!
One Hallowe'en, when we were in our teens, we set up a tape recorder
(remember those?) with a speaker near the door to which the little tikes
would come to beg for sugar. We recorded spooky sounds with echo effects
- chains, howling, ghost stuff, clunking. When the tots were just about
to knock on the door (but before they could), we hit them with the spooky
sounds.
The older kids would stop, look around, then continue with their greedy
tasks. The younger ones, though, and our reader's son would have been among
these, stopped, wide-eyed and either ran in fear or stood there, frozen
in terror and started crying. We cannot imagine how many young minds we
scarred that night.
It was great.
Blab. A reader suggests how we should be spending our time.
With a little effort, Steve,
maybe you could one day be a grand
world champion.
The thing that frightens us about this is not the activity, per se.
Nor is it that our reader wants us to participate in it, though that is
pretty scary.
No, it is the long, bright red stripe of hair that seems to cascade
down this gentleman's chest. What the heck is that?
Blab. A reader suggests public policy. For some reason, the reader
does this here.
Let's replace that unfinished
Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota with this.
Good idea! All we need is a gigantic fool and a suit. And there are plenty
of those around!
Blab. A reader presents us with a puzzle.
Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage: Human or evil
gnome in robotic
human suit?
You decide!
 Blab.This
Sunday's entry seems to have stimulated latent thoughts in our readership.
Not many, but some.
Mary Louise Parker?
Ooh! Good guess! Not right, but a good guess.
Another reader suggests this.
Subj: sunday's picture
Helen polishes up real good. -- Dorian
Ain't she a cutie?
Blab. A reader believes it has successful completed a model of
our mind. That's astonishing.
Sounds like something
I would see on the blog.
Even more astonishing is what this points to.
In a surprise announcement
with far-reaching theological implications, Jesus Christ The Nazarene,
founder of Christianity and spiritual leader of nearly two billion people,
revealed Monday that He has converted to "the one true religion" of Islam.
That will certainly simplify things. Or maybe not.
Yow. In an event that is likely to have far-reaching implications,
the Episcopal church has consecrated an
openly gay bishop.
Robinson's selection to be
bishop set off anger among church conservatives, who believe that gay and
lesbian relationships violate Christian teaching.
In a statement, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Rev. Rowan Williams, warned that divisions created by Robinson's
consecration would have "very serious consequences for the cohesion of
the Anglican Communion."
So strong are the feelings on this topic that it may end up rending the
Episcopal (and hence the Anglican) church in two. We think it is useful
to splinter religions, religions being one of the primary sources of war
and suffering on Earth, both historically and in modern day.
The modern Episcopalians are not, we suspect, the primary exemplars
of this principle. In fact, they seem pretty innocuous.
We'd rather see other, more dangerous religions splintered into insignificance
first. We have a list.
Plurp. Here we are again at another week-long conference in another
Far Away Place. It's not actually so far away as the crow flies, but it
is infinitely far away from home culturally; it is as close to the Edge
of Nowhere as we've been recently.
We arrived yesterday evening around 8:00 PM. It was late enough that
that streets had been zipped up for several hours and all the shops were
closed. We suppose that people were all at home, huddled around their wood
stoves and doing whatever such people do when sundown is an economic curfew.
Directions to our conference venue were particularly interesting. Exit
at Rt. 52 or 55 east or west, they said. Now, we can conceive of a
road topology where this might work. But only in Bizarro World. No wonder
so many people showed up late this morning. We figure that the others are
still looping through the dark forests.
Maybe they'll stop and ask directions of the people who are huddled
around their wood stoves.
Plop. Well, the stats
are in and October brought the largest ever number of visitors to our
humble Web site. The bad news is that more people came looking for this
stupid South Park picture than came for the blog.
We even put a self-serving pointer at the
head of that South Parkish week, hoping to deflect wanderers to the blog.
But that doesn't seem to be working.
Once again, we are impressed (and depressed) by how easy it is for people
looking for random
pictures on Google to far overrun the people who actually read our
stupid blog.
Sigh.
Yow. Suggesting that there may yet be sanity in the world, the
U.S. Supreme Court declined
to review the ruling that it's unconstitutional to put a monument of
the Ten Commandments in an Alabama government building.
The court quietly rejected
appeals from suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who had argued
that the monument properly acknowledges "God as the source of the community
morality so essential to a self-governing society."
Lordy. It's the Twenty-First Century. By now, even folks in Alabama
should understand the First Amendment. We would think.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was either human
or an evil gnome in a robotic human
suit
Sunday, November 2, 2003
Plurp.
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