Friday, February 27, 2004
Plop.
She
said Republican leaders were "racist" in their policies toward the Caribbean
nation, which is almost entirely black, and called the president's representatives
"a bunch of white men." [...]
Hispanics and whites "all look alike
to me," [she said.]
Plurp. In what should have been an article in the Onion,
we discover a woman who squirted out six
babies in one minute.
"The speed at which the babies
came out was overwhelming. It was like a popcorn popper," the baby's grinning
father, Keith Hanselman, told reporters.
She was later fined for littering.
Plop. Shoot
us now. (Kafkaesque)
Plurp. Then shoot the folks who hired this
guy.
James Joseph Minder, chairman
of handgun maker Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., resigned after a published
report revealed he'd spent as much as 15 years in prison decades ago for
armed robberies and a bank heist. [...]
Minder maintains he had never tried
to cover up his past, and that the reason he failed to disclose his criminal
past to Smith & Wesson earlier was because nobody had asked the question.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Plurp.
Plurp. Today, in an idle moment, we played the game that we often
played many years ago: what would we wish for if we could wish for anything?
We
would be rich of course, rich beyond our ability to spend (which would
be prodigious; we could be very creative in that respect). We would have
a dozen houses in various nice places - Manhattan, San Francisco, Tokyo,
London, Paris, Florence - and we would have them built by spectacular architects.
We would have a house built just for that Barnet Newman, and another for
the Rothko.
We
would be attractive, in a way that we never have been in this life. A magnet
to the opposite gender, a winning smile to our compatriots. To be used
... well, whenever.
We would be famous, but only to the extent that it was convenient. We
could be on the covers of magazines when we wished to be, and avoid the
media when we wished to be invisible.
We would be envied. That's not really critical, but what the heck.
We would be brilliant. Not like Stephen Wolfram. More like Feynman -
brilliant, world-changing and a little eccentric, just for spice.
And immortal. Sorry - that was actually our first wish.
Then it hit us. If we could wish for anything, we would wish to be Paris
Hilton. Well, except for the brilliant part. And the immortality.
Even so, that frightened us.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Rant.
Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
What part of that did you not
understand? Did one of those words have too
many syllables?
Plurp. So here's our own radical proposal. Get the frickin' government
out of the business of defining the word "marriage" or anything like it.
Eliminate the word "marriage" from legislative lingo. Governments (in all
their bitter flavors) may speak about "civil union" as a contractual issue,
if they wish, and that's fine. But "marriage" is fundamentally a religious
concept, and should not be defined, or imposed, or even discussed, by a
secular government.
And, in case you were sleeping it off in class that day, Mr. Bush, the
U.S. has a secular government.
So give us a call if you're still confused. We'd be happy to explain
it to you. In small words.
Plurp. Dave
laments the
passing of book stores. We remember book stores. We think. Lots of
information impressed on collections of paper, right? And no links?
Yeah. Interesting idea. We looked at a book once, recently, when we
were trying to derive a good model for thermal flow in a data center. We
borrowed an old textbook on the physics of fluid flow from a colleague.
It's still sitting on our desk, not having answered our question.
Instead, we poked around a bit and decided that the Navier-Stokes
equation satisfied our needs.
So we do remember bookstores. We even recall liking
them, as a musty physical institution. Like door-to-door encyclopedia
salesmen. But, you know, life moves on.
And we like that.
Plurp. Physics as understood by journalists.
Polar-bear hairs usually
appear white because they reflect the light around them.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Blab. Returning now to our vital role in the universe,
we answer a reader's question.
Did I remember to eat dinner?
Yes. You did.
Plurp. It occurred to us the other day that everybody thinks
their life is normal. We're pretty sure Einstein didn't get up in the morning
and think, Gosh, I'm smart! No, it's more likely that he got up
in the morning and thought, I wonder if these socks are clean.
You know?
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Plurp. Today we went shoe shopping in Soho, an activity
(shoe shopping, that is, independent of location) in which we engage so
seldom that we cannot recall the last time we did. This was precipitated
by our (very dirty white) tennis shoes having nearly disintegrated. Since
these were pretty much the only shoes we owned (other than the one pair
of Chinese-foot-torture formal shoes), we have been on the verge of going
to work barefoot for months.
The expedition was quite a success. We came home with a lovely Asian
bowl, Chinese-style chopsticks (for which we had searched for years), porcelain
Chinese soup spoons, cocktail napkins, cocktail picks, international power
plugs and (herein unnamed) presents for the next Midwinter Festival.
Oh - and shoes. We were looking for tennis shoes, which we did find.
But Helen wanted us to buy "adult shoes," and pointed out a pair, in the
window of the Ecco store, that she thought looked good. Oddly, we did too.
So we went in.
Those are women's shoes, said the sales guy, trying to be helpful.
How
can you tell?, we asked. They are, he insisted.
But we persevered, and discovered The Terrible Secret That Women Have
Known All These Years. There is a large class of casual shoes that, while
they are marketed as women's shoes, are entirely gender-neutral. And, because
they are marketed as women's shoes, they are made better, look better,
and are priced better than men's shoes.
So today we bought our first pair of women's shoes. They look great,
and they feel better than any pair of shoes we've ever owned.
We might be on to something here.
