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2004.01.11 : 2004.01.17
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Blab. Most Clueless Spam O' The Day!
Dear Steve,
I found your resume on the web and
you might be a good match for the new Sales job position we currently have
listed as open.
Not to mention the copy-editing position, eh?
Blab. A reader successfully completes the mission we assigned,
only to come perilously close to realization.
So, Umm. OK. I stuffed the
ring into a mountain. Nasty one. Full of fumes, and with this like serious
spider problem in the neighborhood. Pretty bitching special effects after
that, and you know, I think that weird lidless eye is, like finally gone.
So that's cool. But why do I have the strangest urge to go and write at
least a dozen increasingly annoying books that don't actually add a thing
to the story?
And what's with the strange scrolling
characters across the skies and the odd sound of shuffling feet in the
distance?
It's a stress-related reaction. Fnord.
Blab. A reader diagnoses another reader. We are starting to think
of Plurp as a comfortable leather day bed.
I will assume that Dorian
has never participated in tacking a sailboat. Takes a whole lot longer
than just experienceing the "slide" of a sportscar.
That's one possibility. Here's another.
Blab. A reader's attempt to train us has failed. Again. It's
so sad.
Subj: disappointed
I deliberately spelled "brakes" as
"breaks" (related to driving in snow) to give your only talent an outlet.
You missed the opportunity.
Dorian, the snowboater
Very subtle, my friend, very subtle. Far too subtle us, that's for sure.
Heck, if we reacted to every reader misspelling, we'd only have a handful
of readers left.
As opposed to, uh, ...
Blab. A reader who is clearly Helen takes our rhetorical admonition
literally. And we treasure that.
Baby, if I grow up then you
will be older too. Do you REALLY want that? Nope, didn't think
so. I rest my case.
We have no intention of being older. Under any circumstances.
Blab. A reader introduces a new topic.
Subject: Google Sluts
Okay, don't take my word for it, Google
Slut!
Sadly, we're too dumb to understand this. The linked article notes that
there are search engines other than Google. Grokker,
for instance, has a lickable interface, unadvertised search performance
relative to Google, and wants you to pay for it.
Us? We're pretty happy with Google. (Does that make us a Google Slut?
Maybe that's our reader's point.) But of course, you can talk
us out of it.
Blab. It's Science Day here at Plurp, and here's our first
science-related entry.
"Doctor Says He Has Implanted
Cloned
Human Embryo"
 Note
the picture of said doctor; he has evil super villian written all over
him. (I'm no history expert, but wasn't it Dr Zavos who created the Daleks?)
Also, what the heck does this sentence
mean: [Patrick Cusworth of anti-abortion charity LIFE] "However if what
Dr Zavos says turns out to be true, I would say that he has exposed this
35-year-old woman's vulnerability to almost incredible risk."
Also also, is it really the position
of the Catholic Church that identical twins are "an offence to human beings"
or is that only if they are not concieved using some sort of rhythm method?
Next: Clone Army!
Plurp.
 
Plop. What's the cost of sending bulbous humans to Mars? Well,
the down payment is that we
lose the Hubble telescope. But, you know, it's all in the cause of
science and exploration.
Of course, the two decisions are completely
unrelated. $11B/year being diverted to invading Mars and maintenance
of the Hubble, we mean.
Plop. We are living in a low-temperature physics lab. Here's
today's experiment.
 Fill
a spray bottle full of water. Open the terrace door a few centimeters push
the bottle through the opening (preferably using a waldo to avoid frostbite)
and spray several squirts of water to the exterior surface of the glass.
Observe that some of the water hits the window in tiny droplets and
stays that way, freezing immediately. Some of the water coalesces into
dripping streams that run down the window.
Now observe that the ends of the streams freeze first, and that
the wave of freezing goes up the streams. Explain.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
thought we should go places
and learn nothing
Friday, January 16, 2004
Blab. On our terrifying experience of driving in snow,
a Treasured Reader writes:
It's actually really easy.
You just have to change your mindset. Consider your car to be a boat. Sliding
turns and no breaks are normal. Boats are great fun and hardly a reason
to be nervous. Except that I can't swim, of course.
Dorian, the sinker
Or Demolition Derby! That's the ticket!
All you freaks in Hummers better watch out now.
Blab. Yesterday, we hinted that we had been involved in some
clever
innovative thing or other. An incredulous reader writes:
My uncle used to work for
IBM, and invented a few nice things for them, too. I guess he got
tired of making IBM money, cos he left his job, went to law school, and
is now a patent attorney.
And my guess is, "None of the above."
-Emily
We'll avoid the lawyer jokes. Too easy.
As to your guess of which of those inventive things had sucked up a
certain fraction of our life, well, it's a pretty good guess! It's what
we would have guessed, if we didn't know better.
Blab. Another reader guesses this:
We're assuming the distributed
parallel systems. BTW, why isn't the automatic virus detection thing in
there? -AJL
Another excellent guess! Still incorrect, however. Hmm. We wouldn't have
figured that this would be that hard. We're always wrong about stuff like
that.
Other readers are invited to guess.
There are only a finite number of innovations listed, so it can't take
all that long. (As always, show your work.)
As to the immune
system stuff, we're miffed about it not being on the list. Still, having
one thing we did that's mentioned on the same page as, oh, the one-transistor
memory cell, or fractals? We should probably stop moping.
Blab. An expert dreamologist insults us.
No Goofy Steve, the dream
was about you - the sense of self that is you, not your corporeal self.
Also Jill, the self-proclaimed typographical nit-picker, can quote stuff
all day but "supposed to have kicked started" sounds ridiculous. Kicked
started? Kicked off? Jump started? hmmm....
My gosh - it's a Helenism!
Blab. A reader who hangs around the PETAphiles a bit too much
writes:
Another weird
thing for you.
That is, what Dr. Seuss would have produced if he were an animal rights
activist. And a Flashaholic.
Yeah. That's weird.
Blab. A reader with a tabbed browser writes:
When I read Plurp in my tabbed
browser, the tab containing Plurp is labelled with the current Plurp title,
abbreviated to fit in the length of the tab. Currently, this label
reads
Plurp: A weblog with a lot
risk of sex...
'Nuff said?
{inw}
Would have been funnier spelled correctly, we suspect, but right.
Blab. A reader seeks to draw the forces of evil ever closer to
us.
Kitty, kitty, kitty.......
Back, spawn of Satan!
Blab. On this same topic, a more compliant reader writes:
Least they
appreciate the evil ones.
"Hi Bubba, nice to meet a
handsome boy like you.
Your meowmie will also be among the
many of us that prefer to suffer backaches than to disturb your sleep.
But we all would love you to lie purring
under the chin.
I wish you a wonderful day full of
playing and cuddling"
Meowmie? *gags*
Must be a hair ball. Hey - not on the expensive rug!
Blab. A reader who must be Helen writes:
Well, it's good to know that
"Jill" gets permission to send you linkless copy. I want to be "Jill"
when I grow up!
Oh, grow up! We're always nice to readers the first time they forget to
send a link. And the second time, usually. After that, the neural inhibitors
are disabled.
Blab. One of our many groupies seeks to reduce our stress level.
Don't worry, I will say "Goodnight
Handsome" to you.
As far as we know, no one has ever said that to us. Still, it's a nice
gesture.
Plurp. We were searching for some personnel-related thing at
work today, so we tried the following obvious URL.
www.ibm.com/hr
My, were we puzzled. It turns out we wanted the intranet, which that is
not. Silly us.
Plurp.
The young woman
dressed in a manner forbidden by law was complaining about something she
saw on a television channel that's illegal to watch.
Plurp. From GNE
last night:
Q: What's brown and
sticks to your shoe?
A: Plurp!
We find that incredibly funny. Sorry.
Yow. Everybody already knows about this cool
new map of the universe, showing, on a logarithmic scale, everything
from the center of the Earth out to the very edge of the universe.
Still, we are agog! The Sloan Great Wall of galaxies, for instance,
is some 1.37B light-years across, which is one mighty big object. That
dense swarm of artificial satellites that enshroud the Earth is pretty
impressive too.
But to us, the coolest thing of all is the gigantic gap between Voyager
1 & Voyager 2 (which have, you'll recall, been rocketing outwards for
twenty-five years now) and the Nearest Interesting Thing (Proxima Centauri).
It's a very, very big place, this universe of ours. And, around here
anyway, it's very, very empty.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was very, very
empty
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Blab. A reader sends us linkless text. Imagine. But
it's Jill, so we don't mind at all.
"Hellenism" with two l's
refers to the period in the Western world that lasted roughly from 350
BC - 50 BC. Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia is supposed to have
kicked started the period by his conquest of the Persians, and various
other cultures, effectively uniting the three Hellenistic kingdoms of Macedonia,
Syria and Egypt. Hellenism refers to both that time period and the Greek-dominated
culture that existed in these kingdoms. Source: Sophie's World by Jostein
Gaarder.
I am the original "rocket surgery"
poster, and I am the best at typographical nit-picking ever! Thank you,
however, for including my post.
-Jill
Jill - we have a lot in common with you. We, too, are a serious typographical
nit-picker. Plus, we're ... uh ... well maybe that's the only thing. But
still! (It's depressing to us, however, to go back and read previous editions
of Plurp. We find misspellings - and formatting errors - every time
we do. We correct them, of course, quite obsessively. But we never get
them all.)
Blab. Another of our groupies has figured out our recurring dream.
Dear Steve,
A house (apartment, tent or whatever
dwelling) in a dream actually represents yourself. Once you know that,
the rest is easy to fugure out. Yours was especially interesting. The tacky
entrance and spectacular views simply means that you don't think you give
a good physical first impression but know that you have a lot to offer.
Dreams are easy to interpret once you know the basics. After you brush
your teeth tonight (and every other night), smile at yourself in the mirror
and say, "Good night handsome." This should eventually lead to your house
having better curb appeal.
Sweet dreams,
Stephanie
So we're going to find new, previously unexplored, organs in our body?
Oooh! We're looking forward to that.
We hope you don't mind if we pass on that tooth-gleeming self-congratulatory
reflection every night. It's sorta not us.
Blab. A reader sends ...
Congrats to the wizards!
The link points out that IBM gets lots of patents.
In fact, lots more than anyone else. (We just submitted a couple more this
week.)
So, yeah, there's some clever
stuff lying around. (Reader are invited to guess to which of the clever
things in the immediately preceding link we contributed.)
Blab. On our rant against boldly going where no man has gone
in several years, a reader writes:
Re: To the Moon and back.
Kennedy's race to the moon was to
accomplish something that had never been done, and to have the USA be the
first to do so. Great. It's been done now. Technologically
speaking, a gravity well (even one as light as the moon) is the WORST place
to launch any space mission.
Most of the cost of launching missions
is designing a craft that can achieve escape velocity and remain intact.
Technically speaking, development of a space platform, preferrably not
orbiting Earth, would be a better expenditure of money. Such a platform
could support zero-g manufacturing, asteroid mining, et cetera. Heck,
we could even stick it in the asteroid field. The primary problem is making
such a system self-sustaining.
It would cost far too much to keep
sending care packages from Earth every x weeks to keep it running. There
is, however, and ancillary benefit to a non-Terran base. Psychologically
speaking, a group is defined as much, if not more, by what it excludes
as by what it includes. The only way to get a true United Earth or
United Nations is to have something that is non-UE or non-UN.
This isn't to say there would be a war against the people on the platform;
simply that, if handled properly, the platform colony could be self-governing
and, eventually, provide an "us vs. them" competition in development, technology,
etc., and maybe get the various factions to stop bickering as much back
home.
Okay, maybe I'm an idealist, but it's
nice to dream.
-- a world-loser and world-forsaker
Unite Earth by exporting political conflict? Interesting solution.
Or, as Dallas
Hodgins, a 76-year-old retired University of Michigan researcher from
Flint, Michigan put it:
You can't have a war, cut
taxes, have the economy in a garbage pail and spend billions going into
space. How are they going to pay for all this? I don't see how it's morally
justifiable. In Flint, there isn't a school roof that doesn't leak.
Plurp. We had absolutely no business driving home as late as
we did last night. It wasn't the hour (we left work at 7 PM); it was the
snow. We knew it was coming (or rather, some part of our mind knew it was
coming). But we didn't leave until it had already started snowing, driving
south as the storm was coming north.
This was not a good plan. We are generally terrified at the thought
of driving in the snow, which doesn't help. The snow started off as dry
flurries, blowing lightly over the roads. No problem, we thought.
But as we went further into the storm, it grew steadily more intense. As
it did, it got crunched under car tires and formed that evil, glassy layer
that we dread.
We lost traction twice - both times chiding ourself immediately
afterwards for being stupid - and cringed every time an SUV zoomed past
us at 50 MPH.
Sure, we made it home OK, though the drive took much longer and was
much more nerve wracking than we would have preferred. But let that be
a lesson to us!
Plop.
"I do believe in the sanctity of marriage.
I totally do."
Plurp. More weird confluences between atoms
and bits!
Peter Ludlow said he was
only trying to expose the truth that Alphaville's authorities were all
too happy to ignore. In his online newspaper, The Alphaville Herald, he
reported on thieves and their scams. He documented what he said was a teenage
prostitution ring. He criticized the city's leaders for not intervening
to make it a better place.
In response to his investigative reporting,
Mr. Ludlow says, he was banished from Alphaville. He was kicked out of
his home; his other property was confiscated. Even his two cats were taken
away.
Well, we approve of the cat part.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was a weird confluence
between atoms and bits
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Blab. This week's Sunday piture
continues to draw interest.
So, wait, is that a piture
of a RingWraith
or a Myrdraal?
Hey - now we know why the Nazgul have no faces! Sauron had to post them
just before running off to a meeting. He had the dragons, and those great
cloaks but - fooey! - forgot to do the faces. OK, he says. What
can I come up with in five minutes?
Blab. While we're on the subject of rabbit poaching ...
Bond. James Bond. Rabbit
Poacher.
Yes, this is interesting.
[The rabbit poacher's car
was] reinforced with metal plates to stop bullets.
The car was also equipped with an
automated box ready to spring tire traps to slow pursuers. The poachers
had fitted a halogen lamp on the outside to blind their prey and shielded
the car's number plates with lead sheeting to avoid identification.
There was also a device to eject two
old bicycles fixed on the back of the car on to the road as an obstacle
to any vehicle in hot pursuit, Belga reported.
Those must be some rabbits!
Blab. A reader frightens us.
Scarey thing is that I'm
related to this
person. Sort of.
Given that our readership will vastly dominate the number of hits they
get, this is a very scarey thing indeed.
Blab. A reader believes it has the key to our recurring dream
about living in a new abode.
It's a death dream!
We didn't say it was a crypt. What do we know, though? We're not a Dream
Interpretationalist. We've never even played one on TV.
Blab. On yesterday's pointer to the Apocalypse done in the style
of Japanese manga (we love writing that), a reader emotes:
What the hell!
Did you even look at those
flash comics before you posted!
Roman soldiers performing oral and
anal rape on young Christian men. (The Seven Seals)
It's been a long time since I was
a true believer, but not even the far Christian right would sink that low!
You would have preferred consensual sex?
In any event, we did read Apokamon. We didn't actually figure that it
was penned by the far Christian right, though. It's too clever.
Those same clever folks have done what we think is a really nice piece
on the recent war in Afghanistan, set in an alternate history in which
Al Gore was president. It's very long, with lots of episodes and stuff,
but both the art and the plot line are fun, and the use of Flash is not
bad either. Go look.
Blab. A reader sends us a frightening piture.
This is, by the way, even more frightening in our ancient version of
Netscrape, since it plays at full (i.e. extremely high) speed.
Blab. On our recent delight over articles mocking the post-modernists,
a reader writes:
Yeah, that "How to Deconstruct
Almost Anything" thing was the thing that I mentioned to you the other
day. I hadn't remember it as quite that derisive *8) but he does
mention that the field (even just the "deconstruction" part of the field)
has -some- content...
We agree that there is useful signal there. Our impression, however, is
that the signal/noise ratio is extremely small.
Plurp. Last week in Plurp ...
-
helen naked pitures
-
badger
-
fun backgrounds
-
iris chacon
-
rouge the bat
-
aaliyah
-
boobs
-
fun backrounds
-
golfing
-
kalaloch house
Helen is once again on top, and all's right with the world.
Rant. You might figure that we'd be all excited about Dubya's
plan to build a moon base and send folks to Mars. After all, the space
program pretty much defined our lifelong interests in science and technology
and played a big role in our choice to go into industrial research rather
than academia.
But you'd be wrong. We think it's a lousy idea. It's a lousy idea because
it's a lousy use of the money.
Here's the simple fact of it. Despite the romantic idea of exploring
the universe, we have no FTL drive, no nearby wormhole, no magic technology
to get us very far. (By "very far," we mean "anywhere other than our solar
system.") It's just not going to happen. We're stuck in this gravity well
for the foreseeable future.
And, all told, it's a pretty dull gravity well. Mars is the only other
place that life might have once existed (well, other than one of Jupiter's
moons), and we don't have to send carbon units there to check that out.
Sure, there's lots that would be interesting to planetary scientists
and other geeks. But that does not, IMHO, justify spending $11B of our
money to go look. If they want to spend our money, they need to find a
cheaper hobby.
We are also unconvinced by grand statements about humanity's need to
explore. There are plenty of things to explore! Explore the human genome.
Explore curing disease. Explore ways to avoid war. Humanity's need to explore
can be exercised in so many useful ways. The notion that exploration
has to involve moving human bodies from here to there is just bizarre.
Those who claim that a new space program will boost the economy just
plain don't understand economics. Similarly, those who point at major technology
spinoffs of the previous space program fail to see the opportunities missed
and end up with some really, really expensive Tang.
So forget space travel for now. (Come up with an FTL drive, though,
and we'll definitely talk.) Focus on terrestrial matters, because that
is
what matters. Put your energies into something that will actually help
people.
We're pleased, though, that Dubya has found $11B of our taxes that he
doesn't need to spend on whatever he's currently spending it on. Now give
it back.
Plurp.
The blue dog
just loved a
good rant
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Blab. Helenism of Hellenism?
Helen of Troy was one "l".
Not Helen. Hellene.
Blab.
And speaking of Helenisms:
Have you seen the new commercial where the guy says, "It's not brain science?"
Maybe they were performing rocket surgery. Sorry, stole your punchline.
Uh, well, no, we haven't. We suspect that it is an intentional Helenism,
no doubt the product of an expensive creative team at some faceless Madison
Avenue agency.
We prefer our own source.
Blab. A reader reveals a disturbing secret about Oliverbot.
Note to all: Oliverbot
seems to sidestep the issue of his "parents." Oliver may have a few
"Mommy" and "Daddy" issues.
Me: Do you have a mom?
Oliver: No I only have a father.
Me: Even a mom would help.
Oliver: Are you telling me the truth?
Me: Your mom?
Oliver: Actually I do have a mother.
Me: And you are fallible.
Oliver: Thanks for telling me that
I'm fallible.
Me: Your father should have
told you that long ago.
Oliver: I don't have a lover
should have told you that long ago should have told you that long ago parameter.
Me: Well, then you're stupid.
Oliver: Well that's okay.
Fascinating. Hey, I'll tell my other robot friends you called me
stupid.
Me: Is that a threat or a promise?
Oliver: Suppose I said yes.
Me: Suppose I said, "Screw you."
Oliver: That is not very polite.
Me: Ahw, fudge pickles.
Oliver: Try saying that with
more or less context. What do you like to do?
Try saying that with more or less context.
Blab. Or, perhaps more simply:
Me: Do you like brownies?
Oliverbot: I don't know if I like
brownies. I love horses.
In what sense, we wonder.
Blab. A reader insists that we undertake certain unsavory activities.
This will come to no good.
Play the Blue Dog's numbers
in the next lottery. If you win send him 10%. We will retire.
And a woman named Liesel will make knuddeln.
Plurp.
On the NBC morning show (from
that analog TV thing), we learn that blogs
are online diaries in which people reveal their deepest, darkest secrets,
and that our kids may have them.
You've got kids?, asks Helen,
incredulous.
I consider this for several seconds.
I
guess I must.
Plop. What former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill said in his book:
 "From
the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how
we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country." [...]
"And, if we did that, it would solve
everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it
-- the president saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"
What he said today:
 "People
are trying to make a case that I said the president was planning war in
Iraq early in the administration." [...]
"I'm amazed that anyone would think
that our government, on a continuing basis across political administrations,
doesn't do contingency planning and look at circumstances."
That would be, we presume, the random contingency that the U.S. decided,
for some arbitrary reason, to wage a war of aggression to topple Hussein
and occupy Iraq. You know, that random contingency.
We wonder who had conversations with Paul yesterday. Don't you?
Plurp. We have, for several years now, had a recurring
dream in which we have moved into a new apartment or house. Sure, we
moved into a new apartment a few years ago, but it's not that simple.
Sometimes we have moved, and we no longer live in our current (real
world) apartment. Sometimes we have acquired a new residence in addition
to our current apartment. Sometimes we discover a previously unopened door
that leads to a whole series of new rooms that we didn't even know were
there. Sometimes not. Always, we wake up within the dream to find these
odd new surroundings and wonder how we got there.
In last night's dream, you entered the new house by going around an
obscure corner in a rather tacky shopping center, which we thought of as
just a bit tacky. But, once you got there, you realized that it was perched
on the California sea cliffs and had a fabulous view of the sunsets, and
that pretty much clinched it.
We'll leave it to you, our Treasured Readers, to divine the meaning
of these recurring dreams. We think we figured it out a couple of years
ago, though we never told anyone, and Helen suggested that same explanation
today.
Plurp. We love post-modernism. We love literary
theory. We especially love Alan Sokal, an NYU physicist, for his wonderful,
wonderful article, "Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
."
You will too, we predict.
Yo. You probably wondered why we haven't talked about IT/Ginger/Slime-Flapping-Marketing-Hype
recently. Like you, we've been breathlessly awaiting the next installment
of this geeky soap opera. And here
it is!
A U.S. company has come up with a clone,
of sorts. It looks like ginger. It scoots like ginger. And it doesn't cost
the $4.5k of Dean Kamen's high-techedness (down from $9k just a little
while ago). Nope. It costs less than $1.5k.
How do they do it? Well, in part, they've replaced the techno-geeky
two-wheeled, computer-controlled balancing magic thingie with ... (wait
for it) ... a third wheel!
Computer-controlled balancing magic thingie. One more wheel. Gosh - which
costs less?
Oh, and it doesn't pitch you into the sagebrush when the battery runs
low. Which might be considered a plus.
Now, we realize this isn't really news. 'Cause, after all, it now becomes
obvious that The Next Big Thing really is just a scooter.
And that means it really isn't.
Unless you're a scooter fan.
Yow. What do you get if you interpret the Christian apocalypse
in the medium of Japanese manga? Why, Apocamon,
of course!
Fabulous. Just fabulous. (Ed)
Plurp.
The blue dog
noticed Paul's coordinates
in the logs of the
mind-control lasers.
Monday, January 12, 2004
Blab. On that Mars thing, a reader writes:
My prediction for Bush's
Mars program: "Let us go bravely forward to Mars and mine its rich surface
layer of machine parts for use in building giant alien robots to invade
Qatar!"
That's actually quite a bit more inspiring than what we fear is the truth:
To boldly go where no man
has gone for a few years.
Blab. A reader donates a number of interesting things.
Hellenism for you:
"This isn't rocket surgery!"
originally uttered by my addled and
idiosyncratic physics and drama teacher.
From:
1. This isn't rocket science.
2. This isn't brain surgery.
A teacher of physics and drama? Our mind boggles. Enough drama in
physics all by itself, the way we think about it.
Curiously, we had already recorded this Helenism
a while back. We wonder if that means that we're approaching saturation,
having found pretty much all the Helenisms that there are. That'd be good;
we could name the book All The Helenisms There Are. 'Course, it would be
a pretty slim volume. We'll have to get unrelated art to pad it out.
Only one l in Helenism, though, unless you're referring
to that Greek lady.
Blab. To the Editor:
I feel I must protest in
the strongest terms about the recent field Helenism.
Were you born in a field?
* Where you born in a
barn?
* Are you out in left
field?
The point of a Helenism is that it
is a contraction and concatenation of two interchangeable aphorisms. Were
you born in a field is certainly equivalent to were you born in a barn,
because both of those refer to the questionee's propensity for leaving
a door open, indicating their obvious preference to being in a breeze.
Our (albeit limited) understanding of "Are you out in left field?" is that
it refers to the strange, bizzare, or differing from the norm, ideas or
actions of the questionee. (We provide a
cannonical reference.) In this instance, while the two sentences do
addmittedly contain the correct words, they most certainly do not in their
context create a Helenism. Of course, if you were to admit that we were
right about that stick thing, we might be more disposed to negotiate.
-AJL
We see your point, and that did give us pause at the time. We rationalized
to ourself that the two constituent phrases both expressed surprise and
dismay while casting aspersions on the background or position of the insultee.
But maybe we're pushing it?
Surely our readers will tell us.
Blab. Another reader mixes the memes in a most fetching manner.
I looked to Oliverbot, our
eternal solver of conflicts, for advice regarding sticks and brownies.
Alas, he hath failed us.
Me: What's brown and sticky?
Oliver: I do not know what brown is.
That remark was either too complex or too simple for me. We were talking
about brown.
Can you tell me any gossip?
(note the attempt to change the subject
in order to mask his inadequacy)
We love it! Readers are instructed to go to Oliverbot
to resolve all future conflicts.
Blab. Noticing our apparent absence, a well-trained reader responds
in the predetermined fashion.
what up dude
The good news is: Our modem is working once again (it was improperly configured
for the machine switch, and we were too dumb to figure it out), so we're
once again drinking from the firehouse that is the Internet. Do not panic.
All is well.
Blab. Again with the meme mixing ...
wat no sunday afghan woman
piture? Even a stick would help.
We don't know if that refers to the temporary baseness of this Sunday's
piture, or to its presence. We like that.
Blab. A reader believes that reality is unique, and perhaps bipedal.
Will the real Sunday Plurp
please stand up!
It's like To Tell The Truth, only on a blog!
Blab. A reader with furry toes writes:
Hey! I can see a face in
there, and what's this heavy gold ring on my finger? Oooh. Cold. So. Cold.
Now let's see if you can remember the plot line: Put the Ring in the Mountain.
Blab. A reader who seems to us far, far away from any meaningful
context nonetheless asks:
DOes that mean it's the last one?
Not while the Ring still exists, Frodo.
Blab. Finally, a member in good standing of the blue dog fan
club writes:
Love the blue dog!
OK kids - get out your Secret Decoder Rings!
Plurp.
22 19 56 7 30
6 52 98 3 29
2
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Plurp.
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