Plurp: Wicked Absurdity

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2004.02.01 : 2004.02.07

Saturday, February 7, 2004
Blab. A reader illustrates why we just plain love the Web.
Make sure your next patent application (they fire you from IBM if you don't file one a week, right?) is written in "in the truth language".
Applying algebra to language will ensure there are no misunderstandings by people who read things backwards. I'm sure IBM's patent lawyers will appreciate your efforts.
Also make sure you fill out a "claim of the life" so you can be a citizen of the Unity-States of our World.
Just don't expect the shepherds of "America" ("America is pronounced like this ? A-meri-ca - Now lets break down the meaning: A = Prefix meaning NO. Meri = Latin meaning mercy. Ca = Scottish meaning heard sheep. America = No mercy for the sheep") to appreciate it as much.
(So... who would win in a fight: Gene Ray or :David-Wynn: Miller, King of Hawaii?)
Ooh! Tough one!
The language the group uses is incomprehensible to most. It includes spoken punctuation, overuses prepositions and has references to maritime law. Its founder, David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee, who also claims to be the King of Hawaii, says the language is based on mathematics. Miller was in court for Gould's hearing Friday.
You know, we think the balance tips in favor of :David-Wynn: Miller, King of Hawaii, if only for the explicit pronunciation of punctuation. Gene Ray never seemed to think of that.
Though that time cube was awfully clever. Maybe it's a draw?
Anyway, how can you not love this?

Blab. Once again, a reader pries into our personal life.
Do you eat Chinese? What do they taste like?
We eat Japanese. Tastes like sushi.

Blab. A reader (prolly that same reader, we're sorry to say) abandons its chosen profession, eschewing friends and loved ones to accomplish - merely - this.
The penguin was pummeled - 574.9
As we said, some of our scores have been positive.

Blab. A reader writes, without context:
560.1
We recognize this as a positive number.

Blab. A reader faces us with a difficult arithmetic problem.
Penguin batting score 578.7 -AJL
Readers are invited to solve for the value of AJL.

Blab. A reader claims that ...

The word of the day is: quoin.
Vats and vats and vats of it.

Blab. A reader delights us with spiders, flies and sviluppisi.
You've mentioned Fun with Babelfish; I wondered if you'd seen this site, which runs on Babelfish, but works faster.   It's most fun when you include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
"Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,"
becomes,
"Of him, come next the part from the life to speak for you, of whom the average is here to her with sviluppisi of the difficulty and the interior."
(Sviluppisi seems to be a remnant from the Italian translation.)
We still love the classic pizza, translated to and from French several times.

Blab. A reader demonstrates that we are only as good as our reader contributions.
Plurp, dear boy, you're getting stale!
Pour milk over me and make me into pudding.

Plurp. From a (quite dubbed) network showing of Die Hard II tonight.
It's time to kick heads!

It's time to kick ass!

It's time to knock heads!

Thank you, network censors.

Plurp. Kafkaesque complains both about getting old and about folks calling him up to contribute to his alma mater. We empathize. Big time.
Our own alma mater (the undergraduate one) keeps soliciting our generous contributions. Or someone's, anyway. You see, they can't seem to get our name right. In fact, they can't seem to get either our first name or our middle name right.
We're thinking of giving them a zillion dollars. Well, not them, but a college with some other name.

Plurp.
The blue dog
loved being
translated into French
and back,
again and again and again

Friday, February 6, 2004
Blab. A reader rejoices:
100.19 high!
Yeah, but then it closed under 99 yesterday. :-(

Blab. A reader warns us about ...
dodecaphonic
Yes, it's a conspiracy.

Blab. A yeti writes:
Best penguin pummeled - 545.5
Any better scores out there?
We had several scores that were positive.

Blab. A reader writes:

The word of the day is: shibboleth.
Great Black Goat of the Woods, I Call Thee forth !

Blab. Similarly ...
"The word of the day is: peasant."
When I Google for Peasant Bread I get all kinds of recipes for items alleged to be peasant bread, but not one of them has instructions which begin "Grind up 2 peasants very finely..." or the like. I don't think the recipes I found are really peasant bread.
And don't get me started on so-called "Girl Scout" cookies.
Recent interaction at the lunch counter:

Steve: Is the Country Gentleman Sandwich made with real country gentlemen?

Counter Person: Yes.

Steve: I'll have the soup.

Blab. A reader keeps us informed. Which is a good thing, as they don't let us out much. Except for meetings. We like meetings. All that light and space, and sometimes there are distant, blurry images of people passing by.
My latest spoonerism (me, the proponent of taking the diroute rect) was on Sunday. As we watched an HGTV special on "Homes that made Hollywood" or somesuch, I said, "Oh look it's marcho Grouxe's house!"
We wonder if you try to orbit your conversations around Spooner invariants, like Bugs Bunny. Or Plurp.

Plurp. Our Meeting in a Far Away Place is good for one thing.
Let's put a stake on the table.

Let's put a stake in the ground.

Let's put our cards on the table.

They don't give you the second time of day.

They don't give you a second chance.

They don't give you the time of day.

We don't want to be up in the weeds

We don't want to be up in the clouds

We don't want to be down in the weeds

Yay!

Plurp.
The blue dog
got started on
"Girl Scout" cookies

Thursday, February 5, 2004
Blab. A reader writes:
The word of the day is: peasant.
Isn't that nice?
We think so.

Blab. A reader indulges us by providing further pointers.
Mia is there -> PlurpMail@stevewhite.org   (shes hiding in an attachment)
Indeed! Another reader receives this mail from Mia. We can only hope that it's not our Mia. Has it really come to that?

Yow. Good news from the South.
Georgia's school superintendent Thursday dropped plans to remove the word "evolution" from the state's high school science curriculum. [...]
Cox said she originally wanted to replace "evolution" with the phrase "biological changes over time" to avoid controversy. [...]
The proposal drew widespread criticism. Former President Carter said it exposed the state to nationwide ridicule.
We've also heard that the words gravity and air will be restored to textbooks in 2005 and 2006, respectively.

Plop. Machines take the next step in their unstoppable plot to subjugate humanity.

Tamagotchi, the popular digital pet from the 90s, is coming back, and this time it will be able to date, fall in love, and even have babies.
Fear them. Feed them. Love them. Die.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was part of an unstoppable
plot to subjugate
bits

Wednesday, February 4, 2004
Blab. A complex reader writes:
Add this to your collection, if you like. I got it from a friend of mine.
"We're sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please hang up, rotate your phone ninety degrees, and try again."
I fooled a couple of people with it myself. If you can make yourself sound like an operator, it works even better.
So added! We'd prolly have to use this at work, though. We doubt that the telesales folks who call us at home would get it. Then again, maybe that makes it better.

Blab. A reader writes:
The word of the day is: stercoraceous.

Blab. Some other reader (we suspect) writes:
2/4/4 isn't quite as cool.
Ah! This brings meaning to the reader contribution that we didn't post yesterday:
2/3/4
We like it when readers bring us meaning. So often it's just the opposite.

Blab. An equally improbably reader writes:
A Helenism from the mouth of the one and only Al Sharpton (he of the doomed presidential campaign and the large and equally improbable hair):
'... an outstanding boost in the arm for ...'
   * 'shot in the arm'
   * 'boost'
{inw}
Outstanding!

Blab. A reader pleads for help, and can clearly use it.
would u please help me find if a chicken with two yolks is both ethicist and economist? please help me Buddy....
When we were but a sprout, we delighted in the serendipity of finding that the egg we were to have for breakfast was double-yolked. (We also spent countless hours looking for four-leafed clovers.) Year after year, we were enchanted whenever this happened.
It was only much later that my mother confessed that they were actually two eggs that she cooked together. She felt a bit bad fibbing to us, but it did get us - picky diner that we were at that age - to eat our eggs.

Blab. A Treasured Reader wants us to ...
check your email plurp man, mia has returned
Has she? Perhaps. But perhaps in a form too subtle and obscure (or too slyly self-referential) for us to understand. So perhaps our Treasured Reader will provide us with further clues.

Blab. A reminiscent reader writes:
That particular feces is superior to at least 10 insestuous maternal fornicators!
Curiously, that appeared on this hallowed page a while ago. We still don't know what it means.

Plurp. Last week you were smoking cigarettes and searching for ...
captain kangaroo
helen naked pitures
imani
santa maria
iris chacon
nun
thermobaric
angelina jolie
backstage
chihuly
We notice a certain gender bias.

Plurp. Here we are again in a Far Off Place. We're not even sure exactly where we are. We know the name of the place, but we don't really know where it is. We do know that there isn't any snow on the ground, and that sitting out on the balcony typing at 11:00 PM doesn't require a down jacket, and that seems like a good thing.

Yo. Oh, and we got here on Song Airlines, the no-frills (and very inexpensive) part of Delta Airlines. "No frills" seems to mean leather seats, more legroom than any other coach class we've been on and awfully friendly staff. Yes, you do have to pay a whole four dollars for the fruit-and-cheese tray, but it includes more food than you can eat, so even that seems like an awfully good deal. Plus we got a whole row to ourself.
What are we missing here?

Plurp.
The blue dog
theorized that all
eggs were
double-yolked.

Tuesday, February 3, 2004
Blab. One of our readers is a famous person!
Sir,
I would like to apologize for the President's recent "the word of the day is..." comments. Annoying as they might be, I find it does keep him busy for an hour or two if he can just sit with his "One word a day"-calender his mother gave him for Christmas (with the best intentions), find the date and the word and read it aloud again and again. The President has grown so very fond of his calendar and all the new words he has learned.
Since I cannot keep my eyes on him all the time but must leave my office from time to time to run the country, the President must have sneaked in my office and discovered my PC, which I often leave running with Plurp open. Wanting to share his newly acquired knowledge with the rest of the world, he must have typed the word of the day in your Blab box. I must ask you to be lenient with him, he means well, although these contributions must be quite annoying for you. I would be thankful if you could comment on how interesting and valuable you find these words in Plurp from time to time. That would make the President very happy.
Sincerely,
C. Rice
Isn't that sweet? And, having heard the circumstances, how can we be anything less than gracious to Ms. Rice?

Blab. A Mr. George Bush from Fort Lee, New Jersey, writes:
The word of the day is: bathyscaphe.
You know, we find such information both interesting and valuable. From time to time.
Still, we're pretty sure that the word of the day is "Ouch."

Blab. A reader with a skin disease hopes that we catch it.
I got a warm fuzzy when I finally got to log onto Plurp tonight. May He Who Kneads His Paws On Your Lap get accidentally locked into a closet for a day so you can experience a similar joy.
Still, it might be worth it.

Blab. A reader wonders if we might be up for ...
A little winter fun?
It's not what you think. No, this is innocent fun. Well, innocent in the sense that a yeti pummeling penguins is innocent. That kind of innocent.
We're also guessing that they got the physics wrong, but then we've never actually tried it.
But it is fun! Scary fun fun.

Blab. A reader actually clicked on one of our links. Go figure!
From the dragon site, I find myself almost immediately at this site, which is really funny!
We love Evilution sites. This one's especially nice, as it doesn't restrict its Order => God argument to mere evolution. Heck no! It extends to Newtonian physics too. Here, for instance, yon author demonstrates the foolishness of those who think the solar system was just formed by accident.
Earth expells a smaller ball which happens to find the unique perfect orbit, balanced between gravitational & centrifugal forces that keeps it from flying away into space, or crashing back onto Earth, and our moon stays like that for "billions of years!"
Who could believe such a thing? (Love the "irony quotes.")

Blab. It's either an amazing coincidence that a two readers clicked on that link, or there was an intelligent force guiding their actions.
If you want to accept intelligent design, you'd damn well better account for the numerous examples of failed species.... There have been 23 elephant-like animals in history, and yet only two survive today (and we add, they're not doing very well). Clearly, this is the mark of an all-powerful creator who is stuck on the same stupid idea and can't figure out why the hell they keep dying off. Hmm, perhaps it's because giant, big-eared mammals with huge, prehensile noses are ridiculous? I mean, WTF? A giant, powerful, grasping... nose? It looks like something a preschooler would make up.
This is a very funny site!
[D]id you know whales have hip bones? That's like if a human engineer put an outboard boat motor on a city bus. I think it's clear God never went to college, and I'm thinking it's sketchy he even has his GED. They guys in middle school shop class made more function and professional looking projects that half of God's motley menagerie.
Good stuff.

Blab. A reader, mistaking us for a spiritualist, asks us to read the mind of a dead person.
How did George Orwell know this was going to happen?
Dunno, but our favorite Chinese restaurant already knows our address. It's all part of the conspiracy.

Plop. Somehow, weirdly, this does not appear to be a joke.
After sending thousands of soldiers to war and failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Mr Bush and Mr Blair have been put forward to receive the Nobel peace prize.
But, later in the article, we gain some insight.
Other nominees are varied and include: [...] former Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler; [...] former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic; [...].
So maybe that's not so weird after all. It's like Jimmy Swaggart being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Oh, but that didn't happen, did it? (Dave)

Yow. Well, we finally found the future. Here it is. Curiously, it looks a whole lot like the future we predicted around the lab about ten years ago, and that HP predicted five years or so ago.
Never in motion, the future is. (Mike)

Yow. OK. OK. This is pretty funny. (/usr/bin/girl)
I do not want your bread and jam.
I’m busy being mad at Sam.
He likes to sneak. He likes to spy.
I’ll grind him up for hobbit pie!

Plurp.
The blue dog
noticed that the universe
was getting stranger and
stranger

Monday, February 2, 2004
Blab. On our heartfelt request to our readers to explain to us why we should care about one of our other reader's word of the day series, this reader accuses us of having been on the acerbic side.
The word of the day is: acidulated.
No! We were quite serious.

Blab. A reader threatens us with certain death. Or words.
If you don't care about your Treasured Reader's alleged daily words, then the words of the day might end up being: logomaniacal killing spree
It's not that we don't care. We were asking why we should.

Blab. A fan of iced candies writes:

Maybe someone gave that person a word of the day calendar and they have no one to share it with. My "word" of the day is:
"YouweredrivingmecrazywiththeHughJackmanthingbut-
Irealizedyouweredoingitonpurposeandhadanicechuckle."
Chuckles are also good hot.
Reader are asked to use this twice today in casual conversation.
We appreciate our readers' tolerance. We had observed that our readers' legs were getting a bit on the short side, and stepped up to our civic duty to help correct the situation.
You'll thank us later.

Blab. It's Mysterious Site Day here in Plurp. Our first entrant follows.
Steve, Have you seen this?
It's hard to know what to make of this. It's a site dedicated to ethanol - the physics, chemistry, business and (mainly, we surmise) consumption of it.
Ethanol is drinkable solution. I love this liquid. Please do not tell me to stop my drinking.
We'd never do that.

Blab. On Him Who Barfs Behind the Rows, a reader confidently predicts:
First He wants a cat bed, next He'll be wanting dolls.
That's where we draw the line. If he wants his own dolls, he has to get his own job.

Blab. Today's last entry (or, at least, we think it's the last) in Mysterious Site Day is (arguably) the most mysterious.
EVOLUTION IS FINISHED OFF! LONG LIVE THE DRAGON!
So, look. If you're a wacko who really thinks dragons exist, and that their existence is being covered up by clandestine institutions, fine. Pretty much everybody believes that. But it is not doing your cause any good to include stuff like this on your site.

It's just not.

Blab. Another visitor from another planet writes:
*       *
|       |
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ '.` /      Der gruene Hund von Mars, just found
|`---'|a book in a wormhole: "Karl Rove: How
|   +----+   we duped the taxpayer for fun and
|`__|~~~~|profit."
/|   | ~~ |   (On the Empire of Texas' bestseller
##   |    |   list for 10 weeks!)
     +----+
We haven't actually been following this particular issue, but we note that this here site seems awfully informative. And awfully pink. We don't think there's a correlation.

Blab. A domestic specimen informs us:
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ ´.` /
|`---´|    Der blaue Hund just piddled in a super
|     |   bowl.
|`___´|\_
/|     |\
##     ##
We were watching the news last night, on which they were reporting about the folks that were accidentally trampled at the Haj in Saudi Arabia, while attending a stoning ritual. These are customs which are very foreign to most Americans, intoned the commentator, broadly implying that we should think them strange.
This was at about the same time as a curious incident close to home.
Thousands of New England Patriots fans swarmed into the streets after the team's white-knuckle Super Bowl win, and some turned rowdy, flipping over cars and lighting small fires. One person was killed when an SUV backed into a group of revelers.
We wonder what the Saudis think.

Blab. A reader chides us for our well-known cultural ignorance. It's what we get for using Classics Illustrated as our only source of such learning.
Silly! Those weren't the Elizabeth Taylor/Paul Newman roles -- they were the Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara roles -- you could look it up!
Well lookee there! We didn't even think to consider that there was a stage version before there was a movie version, but of course there had to be. And we had no idea there was an Internet Broadway Database.
Cool!

Blab. Finally, a reader sends us something that we choose arbitrarily to be a comment on this week's Sunday Piture.
Beware of those fad diets!
Yeah, like war.

Plurp. Welcome to all you South Park fans who came here because Google now points you at the current edition of our stupid blog rather than the old one that actually had the picture you're looking for.
We were wondering why our usage stats had been increasing. We hope you're not too disappointed. (Actually, it's OK with us if you're a little disappointed. We'd probably be disappointed if you weren't. After all.)

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered who believed
all that wacky stuff on
the Web

Sunday, February 1, 2004
Plurp.

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