Plurp: All the meaning you're ever going to get

Bigger!

2003.11.09 : 2003.11.15

Saturday, November 15, 2003
Blab. On yesterday's Modest Proposal for peaceful coexistence between drivers of monstrous SUVs and drivers of automobiles, a reader (and this really surprises us) expresses agreement.
I have long advocated banning SUVs from New Yorks fine parkways. Recall that they are clearly labelled "passenger cars only" at every entrace. Surely it is unreasonable to permit SUVs to be classified as "passenger cars" for the purposes of using parkways, but as "light trucks" for emissions and other such matters?
It's a little scary, driving on the twisty turny Saw Mill River Parkway (one of my favourite Yank roads) next to a gigantic behemoth driven by a chap who's on the phone, swerving his vehicle from side to side, and apparently unaware that beside him is a small vehicle containing a concerned Me (my car is, after all, barely visible to him).
When I had my little accident the other day (I was hit from behind on a sliproad by some people who decided not to stop), my first thought was 'wow, it's a good job that car wasn't a light truck'. If it were, it would have surely have caused many times more damage than the 'almost none' that was actually caused.
We, and the above Treasured Reader, are trying to be nice to SUV owners here. Take advantage of our proposal before it's too late.

Blab. Best Spam O' The Day:
Hello,
I am creating a web directory and would like to include your website stevewhite.org under the "hockey" category. If you'd like to be added, please follow this url: [omitted].
We love the idea of having our Web site listed under the "hockey" category. It's just so fitting.

Plurp. Helen was unhappy with us yesterday for our brutal mistreatment of two of her recent donations to our Blab box.
You see, when we chastised her on Muesday for sending us huge tracts of text rather than a URL, we knew it was her. (The rest of you are well trained by now. Good readers. Have a biscuit.)
Then, on Thursday, when she did send a URL (Good Helen), she once again included huge tracts of text (No biscuit) and pretty much insisted that we comment on it when she would not (Bad Helen).
We, in our inimitable style, interpreted her instructions literally (I want to see what YOU consider relevant here) and excerpted the huge tracts, making a story about sodomized high school students into a story about aunts sexually abusing a Pennsylvania judge.
We thought it was pretty funny.
Helen did not. She said she wasn't going to contribute to Plurp for a long time to come.
When we asked her if we could restore domestic tranquility by commenting on the piece after all, she said that we also had to admit to our misbehavior and apologize.
So here we are, sinful and abject and full of contrition, resolved to respond to Helen's many future contributions without the mistreatment that we will henceforth reserve for our other Treasured Readers..
As to the story, it's this:
Three varsity football players from Long Island accused of sexually abusing freshman teammates will not be prosecuted as adults, a Pennsylvania judge ruled Wednesday evening, according to relatives of the victims. [...]

[If the two 16-year-old and one 17-year-old were] tried as adults could have faced 20 years in prison. As juveniles, punishments range anywhere from probation to detention until age 21.
The controversy, of course, is that friends and relatives of the victims wanted more severe punishment.
In another recent case, a 15-year-old suspected of plotting a shooting was tried as an adult and sentenced to four years in prison.
This nicely illustrates the apparent contradictions, or at least the surprising complexity, of the U.S. legal system.
We understand neither the legal requirements for trying juveniles as adults, nor the facts of these two cases. But then again, we rather suspect that the outraged relatives, and the breathless media, didn't either.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered if the blog
would ever be the same

Friday, November 14, 2003
Blab. A Treasured Reader indulges in a holy act of self-sacrifice.
First thing to say, Uru is damned beautiful. You move around in 3D and by-gum if it doesn't look almost as nice as the pre-rendered art from Riven or Exile.
That being said, I'm having hell getting the thing to run. First, the mouse was almost unusable; I had to set down the quality settings for the game and take a crash-course on which Windoze processes running in my Task Manager could actually be shut off (most of them, as it turned out). That helped solve the mouse problem.
Then, I found that I couldn't get more than five minutes into the thing before it crashed my system, once even giving me a really scary blue screen of death that normally doesn't crop up except for hardware errors.
Once I get home tonight, I have to reset my monitor so that the screen is actually a)rectangular and b)in proper 4:3 proportion. Don't ask.
I also have to attempt to navigate through Ubisoft's breathtakingly clumsy technical support website to send them the rest of the system specs to see if I can play this thing.
Ah, well. So it goes.
L.
We count seventeen strikes here, so we think Uru's out. Sad but true.
And thanks for suffering so that we don't have to!

Blab. Plurp's own necrophiliac defines today's Word O' The Day.
sarcasm: the orgasm last gasp experience by a terminal sars patient.
Dorian, the breathless.
We're not sure that's funny, but at least it's in good taste.

Blab. A reader insists that we do work. This never ends well.
Subj: You're a dwarf
Laying Down the Virtual Law is a must-read for you. It seems that if a troll has defamed you in front of everyone in a game you might be able to sue them in a real courtroom. Can you own, sell, or sue over virtual property? We don't know but you're still a dwarf and your breath smells of sushi. All your chicken are belong to us. We won them in court fair and square. Virtually speaking, of course :-)
Dorian, the troll
We find, to our everlasting horror, that there is now a conference to consider whether atom-world laws should be extended into online gaming worlds.
"The more closely your life is tied to the game, the more what happens can be construed as injury to yourself ... privacy, fraud, breach (of contract). Maybe you really did break a promise. Maybe you did defame me. Maybe you did defraud me, and maybe that does matter."
Yeah, and maybe the lawyers are looking for new blood to drain.

Blab. On last week's most popular search term here on Plurp, Loli writes:
Whoops! Better stop using this as an alternative URL!
Depends on why you're using it, we suppose.

Blab. There is reason to believe that Loli might be using it for bean-filled gourds.
Do you have bean-filled gourds?
No, but we have been told that even bean-filled gourds would help.

Blab. A reader names that tune in four memes.
I can mix in another meme!
Do you have the tackiest shot in the spread? Even the tackiest shot in the spread would help.
Very impressive. Nearly incomprehensible, of course, but that's the way we like it.

Blab. A reader sends us a blind ...
[link].
Ah. This is the standard scatter plot of countries on survival values : self-expression values and secular-rational values : traditional values axes, illustrating the ex-communist blob in the upper left quadrant and the U.S. in the lower right quadrant.
It is, we think, social science at its best. And we really, really mean that.

Blab. Yesterday's reader - the one who indulged us in that awfully nice prayer - now comes back to complain about the results.
Dangnabbit, I knew prayer wouldn't work too! Anyway, what do you mean "editor", notepad not good enough for ya?
-AJL (Who still can't believe Time REALLY did do that)
It's one of the things that always used to confuse us about the concept of prayer. If two righteous people pray for incompatible things, what does god do? It turns out that people usually rationalize not getting what they prayed for, not by deeming themselves ipso facto unrighteous, but rather by resorting to aphorisms such as god works in mysterious ways, or it's all in god's plan.
Prayer, we surmise, is a way to help you be satisfied with whatever actually happens in life, especially when you feel as if you have no control over it.
And no, Notepad is not a sensible HTML editor. Any more than it's a good Web browser.

Blab. On yesterday's suggestion for a Playboy layout on Women of Funeral Homes, a reader writes:
Now THAT's funny. My most recent X was (is) a funeral director. She'd make ya rethink the tackiness of the layout.
We're glad you're amused, but we're pretty sure we didn't interpret that as being about the employees of the funeral homes.

Plurp. Famous friend Ed recommends Bubba Ho-tep.
Bubba Ho-tep tells the “true” story of what really did become of Elvis.
We find the King as an elderly resident in an East Texas rest home, who switched identities with an Elvis impersonator years before his “death”, then missed his chance to switch back. Elvis teams up with Jack, a fellow nursing home resident who thinks that he is actually President John F. Kennedy, and the two valiant old codgers sally forth to battle an evil Egyptian entity who has chosen their long-term care facility as his happy hunting grounds.
But what we like about it is this detail. When the mummy shambles slowly towards its victims, its victims are unable to evade it because they're all feeble old folks in walkers.
That always bugs us about mummy movies. Criminey! The old creep can't move much faster than about 1 mph. How could anyone not get away? (The same criticism holds for Frankenstein, Jason, and most zombies. Though 28 Days Later at least insisted on the plot device that zombies were quick little buggers.)
We like it when absurdist fantasy movies get the physics right.

Plurp. Most puzzling subject line on spam today?
capita zot
We dunno.

Plurp. Most confused subject line on spam today?
Have trouble losing weight!
Hey, thanks a lot, creep. We have trouble enough.

Plurp. Scavenged from our whiteboard today.
The agreement between theory and theory.
We like that a lot. But maybe you had to be there.

Plurp. As we drove home tonight, narrowly avoiding crushing doom amidst the swerving onslaught of SUVs, we got to wondering how we can make peace with all you homicidal tank drivers.
And we figured it out! You'll like this.
Why do you drive these behemoths? (And they are intended to be behemoths, as demonstrated by their manufacturers naming them after 200k square mile territories - Dakota - or marketing them as vehicles designed to intimidate - the Humvee.)
Some of you say that you need to drive a huge, bone crunching machine because you live where there's snow. You neglect to mention that the wildest place you go is the nearly mall. Even so, snow does not require a juggernaut. It just requires snow tires. And maybe four-wheel drive. We recommend a nice Subaru Impreza.
Others of you say that you enjoy the god-like feeling you get from sitting above those of us in more vulnerable cars. We're happy for you. But, please, start a religion instead. Take psychedelic drugs. Whatever. But you're simply not allowed to come careening down the highway towards us in mindless, homicidal glee just to feel immortal.
Sorry.
Still others of you tell us that the most important thing in your life is being able to carry the entire Little League team in one vehicle, or providing the safest possible high-speed transportation for your little drooling Billy.
We think these are legitimate concerns, and we wish to accommodate you.
We think it would be good if we cut through all the marketing hype and called a spade a spade. Or, in this case, a truck, which any vehicle that large certainly is. We're sure you'll agree that it's reasonable to restrict ~~SUVs~~ trucks to truck lanes: keep them out of the left-hand lane on highways, and keep them entirely off of automobile-only stretches of freeways.
See? We're making progress!
On the safety of that little drooler, we applaud your family values. And we'd like to help you by tripling fines (and points on the licenses) of any SUV driver evil enough to violate traffic laws (e.g. speeding, or driving outside the truck lanes).
So there you are! Admit that SUV's are the trucks they are and make sure they are driven safely. We could live with that.
It's a modest proposal.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wasn't sure that was funny,
but at least it was in
good taste

Thursday, November 13, 2003
Blab. Aaaah. There's nothing like a Plurp Reader Contest (in which you were asked to name a Playboy pictorial more tacky than their recent Women of Wal-Mart) to cause the many fingers of our Treasured Readers to twitch spasmodically, as evidenced herein.
Playboy's next special layouts:
Sweatshop slaves
Denny's Restaurant Night Shift Waitresses
Women at the DMV
Bag Ladies of Venice Beach
Sees Candy Counter Clerks
We're pretty impressed by Bag Ladies of Venice Beach. That will be hard to beat!
And now for something completely different.
They should do "The Women of Walt Disney World Resorts" and have them all wearing those big fake heads of Snow White, Ariel, Cinderella, etc. (Stephanie the redhead)
Ooh! We like that. We imagine Snow White with the Seven Dwarves. Or Wendy with Peter (!) Pan. Or both.
Come to think of it, this violates all of our normative childhood beliefs, and we are deeply offended.
Women of Operation Iraqi Freedom? THAT would be pretty damn tacky -AJL
Of course you realize that Time magazine already did that.
But how about this?
How about 'Women of the Federal Government'? Or have I gone too far? I can never tell.
We're not sure that you've gone far enough. Though we can never tell either.
Another reader engages in multiple entry.
Alright, you requested it. Here some entries:
1) Playboy's Women of the Quilting Guild! Watch them poke and thread!
2) Playboy's Women of the Turf Industry! Watch them trim the bushes and mow the greens!
3) Playboy's Women of the Fast Food Services! They can serve the tossed salad!
4) Playboy's Women of PETA. They love the monkeys!
5) Playboy's Linda Tripp Lookalikes! Don't miss these! These beasts can sure stirr things up!
Ok, byebye now.
We resist the temptation to comment on (4). The immense temptation. Byebye.
A reader hits a triple.
Hm. I know! "Playboy's 'Sexiest Homeless Women of 2003'". Tasteless, or what? Oh, or wait, how about "Women of the Battered Spouses Shelter"? "Women of the Anorexia Ward"?
There you go! Unlikely candidates all. That battered spouses thing is particularly sick. We fear for your soul.
A necrophiliac who is most certainly going to hell writes:
Women of Funeral Homes
Women of the Sixth Level of Hell
- Felis Lynx
And that, Treasured Readers, really is the bottom of the barrel.
Congratulations (or condolences, as appropriate) to all our winners.

Blab. Or, as put so succinctly by this wise reader:
Iä!
Zackly.

Blab. A reader attempts to combine everything it can get its hands on. In our experience, this results in a disgusting purplish-brown liquid that smells like ketchup and grape juice.
Helenism meets Spoonerism meets Meme Mixing meets Improper Reader Contest Answer:
"She's not the tackiest shot in the spread."
As we said.

Blab. A canonically Treasured Reader writes:
Oh, and while we're half here - pray (hmm....idea!) could you (and we realise this approaches asking you to like, do stuff) use a title="...." in your img tags, as well as the alt="...." - those of us using non satanic software through which to receive our daily plurp   would then be able to read the witty comments when mousing over your images, without having to load a bloated pile of stuff called Mozilla.
Thanx - and while we're on it, that idea...(never know what prayer will acheive, though that godometer was pretty effective).
Our Doctor which art in NYC,
Steve White be thy name,
Thy kitten come,
The wishes of thy OMCL's be done,
On earth as they are in strange places inhabited by aliens,
Give us each day our daily Plurp,
and lead us not into temptation to send thee blind links,
but deliver us unto the jaws of Cthulhu,
for thine is the sushi, the blue dog and the pitures,
forever and ever
Aemn
-AJL (no, quite clearly, the drugs don't work)
Would we do a bunch of special editing that is not supported by our (admittedly archaic) Web page editor, so as to make your life easier because you choose to use something other than Mozilla or IE?
Of course not.
But thanks for asking. And so politely!

Blab. A reader writes:
Subj: from the Stephen King's orchard
So was that a lime with a grotesque tumor or what? I
am more disturbed by that image than by that of the
bible clowns.
You mean this?

Sadly, no. This is a brain-tick taking hold of your cerebellum. We obtained it from sources which we cannot, in good conscience, reveal. Let's just say that, well, we know what you're thinking.
And so do the bible clowns.

Blab. A reader pines for a world that never was.
"Folk songs as information technology sounds sort of attractive, on the other hand."
"You think so? Try doing a database join in plainsong."
Or alternately, try not doing a database join at all. That was sort of the point. But you're right; outside utopia, even the boring parts of technology are probably good for people. (And inside of a dog, it's too dark to see.)
The world is full of people who believe in first-order effects. We can have everything we like - abundant food, incredible riches, leisure time, antibiotics, manufacturing, books, symphonies, art - even if we abandon technology, or science, or economics.
Or dogs.

Blab. A reader finally owns up to its god-given obligations.
Here is the link and the article. I am completely unable to edit it down for you to print maintaining the full impact of the story. Sorry, complain about me on Plurp if you want but I want to see what YOU consider relevant here.
That's OK. We are completely able.
L.I. Athletes Are Said to Face Juvenile Trial
By [...] sexually abusing [...] a Pennsylvania judge [...] Aunts of the three freshmen [...] screamed and [...] ordered [...] the freshmen [...] to [...] give [...] up [...]. "I am not pleased with the [...] juveniles [...]. They're going to be laughing all the way home to Long Island."
We are shocked and appalled at these vicious old ladies.

Blab. A reader, quite properly, we must say, does our work for us.
Well, judging by the screen shots, Uru looks like an exciting game! Lots of virtual, 3D, multiplayer sitting around with your Dockered avatar while staring at spinning mandalas of vaguely exotic design.
Plus your avatar has lots of exciting moves like pointing at things!
Oh, and you get to visit strange, otherworldly gazebos which you can, no doubt, point at.
I know what Grandma will be asking for this Christmas!
Gazebos? Hey, we like gazebos.
Still, the screen shots look pretty much like any other 3d game. Maybe even not as good. And definitely not as convincing (even in their cheesy cut-scenesquery) as the Myst series.
So we're probably going to take it off of Grandma's Xmas list.

Blab. A reader instructs us on the meaning of joyriding.
Joyriding isn't just riding around joyfully, but rather stealing a vehicle for a short time and then returning it.
Apparently, much like drugs, you build up a tolerance to joyriding:
"Joyridiing is not wat every1 makes it out to be!! You get a buzz out of it for a couple of days and then you just get used to it!"
"But joyriding isn't really that fun. Except the first few times."
And remember kids, joyriding doesn't pay:
"i know a lot of joyriders so i do and there is no point in it at all most of them are in jail now or dead!!!"
We deeply appreciate learning this new word.
Tomorrow's word: sarcasm.

Blab. A fan of dictatorial comics writes:
Stalin vs. Hitler
Please don't steal too hard. It upsets the artist.

Blab. A spammist asks:
Wouldn't you kill to be bigger?
Heck no. We're overweight as it is.

Plurp.
The blue dog
would kill to be
gazebo

Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Blab. A reader (obviously an observant, long-time reader) writes:
hey waht gveis?
We dunno! Some strange rift in the very fabric of spacetime maybe. Or alien mind control. Yeah, prolly that.

Blab. A reader listens to itself. Always dangerous.
A candidate Helenism, spoken by myself in passing, knowing almost as soon as I said it that something was off:
"He's not the sharpest tack in the shed."
L.
Very nice! It's only in one other place on the Web, though we do find not the sharpest tack in the box (and others). Still, they're pretty rare, and they're probably Helenisms themselves.

Blab. We are not the only one to notice that Durst got away with it.
"The rich are different from you and me, Ernest."
"Yes, they are, Scott. They can shoot their neighbors in the face, dismember the bodies, dump the parts in the bay -- and get away with it."
"And they have more money."
"Shut up, Dorothy."
They do have more money, you know. We checked.

Blab. Stephanie writes:
Hey Steve,
Just wanted to let you know I am not the Stephanie
of the link you posted. I would never post my daily
musings, schedules, etc., as they mostly consist of
planning my next Vegas or New Orleans trip while
drinking beer. I think it would irritate a lot of
people - especially those who have to work.
On another note, thanks so much for the pachinko
information. I had searched, but not found that one.
Do you have a puppy? Even a puppy would yelp.
Thanks again, Stephanie (the redhead, not the blonde)
Hmph! We wonder why we thought that was you. There was some (very obscure, and obviously wrong) reason. The good news is that we had started reading the other Stephanie's blog, figuring we ought to keep up with at least one of our Treasured Readers.
Now we don't have to. It's a good thing.

Blab. The Law For Kids site continues to fascinate our readers.
Obviously the kids were pulled over because the driver was wearing his hat in an improper, backwards manner that could cause serious neck injury when slammed into the headrest in the event of a rear-end collision, thereby incompacitating the driver and keeping him from performing his civic duty not to run over pedestrians. The passenger gets in trouble for failure to notify an authority of this dangerous activity.
Remember kids: It's against the law not to report a crime (even if you did not know it was a crime, because even though it is impossible for any human to know all the laws, you're accountable for each and every one of them all the same.)
Darn tootin'! Bust 'em all; let Asscroft sort it out!

Blab. Similarly, a reader writes:
"they were pulled over simply for racial reasons": the title of the page is "joyriding". So apparently it's not illegal to drive with someone of a different race, unless you have a good time doing it.
Our interpretation is that it's illegal to have a good time. That's the way it usually works with governments, anyway.

Blab. On our recent rant about whether science is important, a reader writes:
Even animals as transportation was science, really. Folk songs as information technology sounds sort of attractive, on the other hand.
You think so? Try doing a database join in plainsong.

Blab. A reader who is in even more trouble than we are writes:
Nyah nyah! We made it to the seventh level of hell - you are just a Sinner Lite.
We recommend staying away from speeding buses.

Blab. A reader turns out to be very small indeed.
You are mRNA. You're brilliant, full of important, interesting information and you're a great friend to the people you care about. You may have sides to you that no one understands. But while you understand more than most people, you're only half-there most of the time.
Pretty much sums me up, though I suspect I'm half there less than half of the time, the other half of the time, I'm less than half there.
-AJL
We're just glad that, when you're half-there, you're half-here.

Blab. An undersea vent is steaming with life.
I keep getting that d****d spam telling me that my life would be better if I would just buy their frigging p***s enlarging product. How insulting is that? How do they know I'm a frigging dude and not a frigging chick! How do they know that the member in question would break them in frigging half.   Punk-a***s.
I'm tempted to hunt all them frigging punks down and show them that sending me that c**p is frigging unneccesary. But that would be vain, wouldn't it?
What these punks need is a real job. Or a frigging old-school beating.
When I try to click the link to remove me from their list, I get a frigging 403error! Frigging B*st**ds.
If email were'nt so frigging vital to my work, I'd ditch it in a friggin heart beat. Those punk-a***s are really p***g me off.
Thanks for allowing me to vent.
Peace.
You're very welcome. Both for that, and for our significant censoring of your frigging message.

Blab. A reader stumbles across what seems to be a brilliant invention.
Just came across this and while I'm masochistic enough to plunge into the paper (currently downloading) I'm not sure why this is anything special, other than the fact that they built it. It seems to just be a thingie that knows TCP and some higher level protocols and watches stuff that goes through,
peeking against a signature database.
- M
This one is from a Famous Center for Genius Technology.
The Washington University in Saint Louis (WUSL) announced that one of its computer science teams has developed a new technology to stop computer viruses and worms before they reach your system.
John Lockwood and his team didn't use software. Instead, they created an open platform that augments a network with reprogrammable hardware, called the Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX).
Sigh. Scanning for viruses (that is, looking for string that are contained in viruses) by scanning the IP packets as they fly by. It's an old idea. Known problem: what if the string spans two IP packets? Oops.
Oh, and what problem does this actually solve? On-the-fly virus scanning is done by every anti-virus product in the world, and hardly ever causes a noticeable delay.
We hope they have day jobs.

Plurp. As predicted, here are last week's most common searches from Plurp's mighty search engine.

naked pitures of loli

helen naked pitures

penguin trick

quorn naked pictures

1 f4

acts

arnie

arsenic poisoning pictures

bush

camoflage

Congratulations, Loli!

Plurp. A new low for the folks at Playboy.
Playboy.com's controversial "Women of Wal-Mart" feature went live Wednesday, showcasing six of Wal-Mart's "sexiest" female employees who dared to shed their uniforms for the online pictorial. [...]
Playboy [...] ran a similar-themed 'Women of Enron' last year and 'Women of Starbucks' photospreads in the magazine earlier this year.
Imagine all those dirty old men standing around Wal-Mart in succeeding weeks, fantasizing.
Smells like a Plurp Reader Contest to us! You are respectfully invited to submit suggestions for Playboy's next, even tackier pictorial. You just can't use Women of the Nunnery. That's our entry.

Yo. Hmm! Uru is out, from the Myst folks. Unlike Myst, it's got real-time 3d movement. (We always hated the cut-scene action from Myst.) Oh, and online multi-player mumblety-mumblety and continually updated new story lines.
So, is it any good?

Plurp.
The blue dog
found naked pitures of Loli
in Playboy's
Women of Washington University in Saint Louis.

Muesday, November 10.5, 2003
Blab. Our Treasure Reader, that reader who seems constitutionally incapable of sending us URLs, seeks once again to have us publish a long tract with no reference whatsoever.
Everest Conquered - In a Kilt
A local councillor from Perthshire has climbed to the summit of Mount Everest wearing a lightweight Macpherson tartan kilt to raise money for charity. [Your Loyal Editor edited the rest out. - Plurp]
We hope this is instructive. But, somehow, we doubt it.

Blab. The Earth goes around the sun once every year. Did you know that?
November 10 1871 - Journalist Henry M Stanley found the missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone with the classic "Dr Livingstone, I presume?"
November 12 - St Machar Day, patron saint of Aberdeen
November 12 1869 - Edinburgh University became the first in Britain to allow women to study medicine (though not graduate).

Blab. On the topic of whatever rumor it was for which Prince Charles was the subject, a reader makes a homonymic remark.
What? I thought all the British were gay? I mean, come on, they're ruled by a queen.
Are you saying it'll be Queen Charles? That's rude.

Blab. A reader takes the test.
Thanks for the fun test, Steve. I'm......
......a neurotransmitter. You believe in the good-naturedness of man's biology and soul. You're happy, everyone's happy, and no one will ever take that away from you. Or else you'll make them go insane.
Helen
We cannot comment here. Well, we can, but we'd really better not.

Blab. Those jackbooted thugs, the ones who follow our every move with high-tech equipment provided by clandestine government agencies, write:
Yes, though you forgot to add that after Beethoven we had a fashionably late dinner at Rosa Mexicano. UM! Wondeful.
From this, we learn that the jackbooted thugs were there as well. We will use this to help identify those involved.

Blab. A reader sends us evidence of another Lovecraftian horror.

From the dark heart of the orchard.

Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?

Blab. On the topic of women in cat suits, a reader writes:
All of a sudden I'm thinking maybe kittens are a good birthday/christmas present for prospective girlfriends. :-P
We recommend skipping the kitten part and going right to the leather cat suit.
It works for us.

Blab. Another reader, obsessed with that cat suit thing, writes:
"Well, I felt weird knowing about you and her. And all I could think about was that thing you told me about her dressing up in that cat costume."
We love the synchronicity of the universe. Don't you?

Blab. An unbelieving reader writes:
I can't believe I missed the Colossal Colon Tour!
And yet you did, Treasured Reader. You did. And there's no going back.

Blab. A reader actually read our Saturday entry. Which is astounding all by itself.
Okay, I can't decide if that "lawforkids" site is intentionally a parody, or only accidentally. I think my favorite is this one, apparently on the illegality of mixed-race driving.
Yes, we concluded the same thing. The cited cartoon does not imply any criminal behavior on the part of the two occupants of the car. We are forced to conclude that they were pulled over simply for racial reasons.
That's Law For Kids. We surmise.

Blab. A reader, possibly even Stephanie, presents us with a real challenge.
Dear Steve,
How do I get power to this old Pachinko game I bought? It's a Nishijin late 60's, or early 70's model. I stuck some wires in the wire things and touched them to a 9 volt battery, but nothing happened. I would really appreciate any help.
- Stephanie
We are amazed at your confidence in us, Stephanie. We can hardly pound a nail into the wall without significant risk of self-puncture. But we will try!
Googlization reveals this similar question, and an answer of dubious worth.
So there you go.
If you electrocute yourself, do let us know.

Blab. A new reader tells us a true story.
Hello Steve White,
I thought perhaps you would enjoy this TRUE STORY. You see, I have been using my magnetic fridge poetry as a ouija board to speak with my deceased sibling. (aside from this, I am utterly normal!) During these "conversations", I routinely receive remarkable advice. Anyway, I was given three words on the refrigerator, (languid, hot, and petal) and then I experienced a strong urge to go into my office and punch them into a search engine. Then....voila! Your websight popped up! It linked me directly to the fridge magnet page. Naturally, I assumed that your entire site was devoted to refrigerator magnet poetry. After some time, I realized that this was not so. I was a bit disappointed to find an outdated link on that poetry. Anyhow, could this be a coincidence? Or are supernatural forces at play on my refrigerator? Regardless, I think you are comic genius! I sure needed a few laughs! Thanks!
         -Joanna in Mill Valley CA
Hello Joanna! You know, yours is just the kind of slathering praise that we would like to encourage in all of our readers. (Meanwhile, we have fixed that rotted link.)
So, you know, have a biscuit.

Blab. An usufructive reader writes:
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "usufruct" (possibly the ugliest word in the English language) as an arrangement that grants one party the right to use and derive benefit from another's property "without altering the substance of the thing".
Isn't that interesting?

Blab. About our Sunday entry, a reader writes:
I know that computer said that the iris patterns match, but still -- I'm not sure if this is really the grown up version of the original Afgan girl.
It's so hard to tell, isn't it?

Blab. A reader sends seasonal greetings. After a fashion.

Naughty, nice... you're all gonna die!

Isn't that sweet?

Blab. A reader, a rude reader, sends us a blind ...
[link].
We would like to ignore this disrespectful contribution. What's the deal, anyway? You provide a URL and we do lots of work to establish its relevance to the world at large? Feh.
Still, it does point at a lovely example of generic literature (and more here, if you poke around). So, so ... that.

Blab. In nearly the same manner, a reader writes:
chess not dave
Didn't we Plurp that a few weeks ago? We think we did.

Blab. A reader wants us to ...
play here
Don't forget to check out Thomas the cat.

Plurp. Yesterday, on the word bank.
The body had stuck there, by a mossy log, in the backwater of the current of the brown creek by Highway 55. The woman judged that it had been there for a several days. There, or somewhere else.

Plurp. Should we die shortly, it turns out that we'll be going to the ...
Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis
You approach Satan's wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.
Hey - sounds like good old Doom! We're gonna have fun in the afterlife. That's such a relief! (Luz Bronson)

Plurp.
A Japanese company has invented the world's first wristwatch phone which works by transforming the user's finger into an earpiece.
According to the New Scientist which is publishing the story next week, the prototype gadget is called Finger Whisper.
What? We can't hear you. We have a banana in our ear.

Plurp. Samuel Beckett. During NaNoWriMo. On a slow day.

Plop. Sure he shot his neighbor in the face, killing him. Yes, he chopped up the body. Yeah, he threw the pieces in the bay to eliminate the evidence.
But, you know, it was an accident. So it's OK.

Plop. Is science important? Well, naturally, that's a stupid question.
At least, it's stupid if you don't want to live in a world of ravaging disease, animals as transportation, hunting and gathering as the pinnacle of economic activity and folk songs as information technology. Come to think of it, if that's what you're looking for, you're pretty stupid anyway.
It turns out that what the NYT really meant was, Do people care about it anymore? Sadly, that's a good question.
90 percent of adult Americans say they are very or moderately interested in science discoveries. Even so, only half the survey respondents knew that the Earth takes a year to go around the Sun.
Most people frighten us. A lot.
On the other hand, advocates of Big Science also worry us. Galileo did his most important work with nothing more expensive than a couple of balls. (No pun intended.) OK, Brahe had a whole observatory, which was pretty much just a stone circle, but whatever. Einstein had a pencil and some paper.
The number of physics papers published over the last 100 years has ballooned almost exponentially. How many people, on average, read one of these papers? Last time we looked, it was two.
The modern advocates of Big Science need supercolliders. They need billions of dollars of Stuff. And what do they produce? More papers.
It seems to us that the primary societal worth of Science is not the joy of discovery (though that is fun to the practitioners, and it sometimes populates the coffee tables of the people in Peoria). It is not Expanding the Grand Horizons of Mankind. (That's a theme that was invented to get government funding, as far as we can tell.)
The primary societal worth of Science is that it contributes to the well-being of, well, people. Which is to say, the primary worth of Science is, ultimately, technology. Science without technological impact may be lots of fun, and we may be willing to spend our own money on it for sheer entertainment, but it not the primary engine of Life On Earth.
Extend our lifetimes. Cure our diseases. Create fabulous new industries that make our lives better. That's useful.
Sure, it's hard to predict what's going to make the Big Difference. But we're pretty sure that exploration of Pluto isn't it. And it's a good bet that the next twenty papers on string theory aren't either.
There was a time when physics was the primary parent of technology. It is still important in semiconductor technology and related fields. But that's no reason to think that All Of Physics (and here we're thinking primarily about string theory and cosmology) is critical to Life As We Know It. At least, not in the next several lifetimes.
Sure, it's fun stuff. Think of it as wonderful art. But not hundred billion dollar art. Sorry.

Plurp.
Once again
the blue dog
pulled a loose thread
in the fabric of
spacetime

Sunday, November 9, 2003
Plurp.

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