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The Mia Chronicles
Who is Mia, and why does she appear so mysteriously in various
Weblogs from time to time? You know, we don't know. We may never know.
And that is, in part, the fascination.
Mia simply appeared one day, as far as we know, in an anonymous reader
contribution to Plurp. We
don't know who wrote it, or why, or even what it means. (What does it all
mean?)
Since then, the meme seems to have spread, and Mia has taken on a life
of her own. The Mia Chronicles is devoted to slavishly recording
Mia's appearances, and references to her appearances, in Weblogs. If you
stumble across a Mia sighting that we have somehow missed, please let
us know.
2000.11.13:
Plurp
Blab. An anonymous correspondent asks us to consider
the following.
Jagle. Jackstraws.
Jilly-florist. My hat, her hand, the beezle and the President, all
on that ledge. In Virginia. The router. Mia. And
afterward, the police.
Poor Mia ! Everyone here at Plurp is on pins and needles, wondering
what will happen next.
2000.11.20:
Dave
The mysterious Mia:
Chirp! Chirp! What happened
to the chicken? On the ledge with Mia, I think, and a pity it is for them
both. There was postfix notation there that Mia couldn't read, and the
chicken ignored her insistent pleas for help. Compile, my friend, compile!
2000.11.22:
Plurp
Blab. Once again, and as mysteriously as ever, Mia
enters the conversation:
Cowled, the exhausted scion
of Mesopotemia drank lead from a nozzle. The bears whirled. There, in the
interstices of the frantic culture, a moment of rest. Mia and the
policemen exchange vows. Cats Bins are trhe same color as toast.
We wish them the best.
2000.11.28:
Ian
Catching up on old feedback, I find that the following alarming
chunk'o'text has been fed back:
"Mia!" he cried above the
schook-schook-schook of the thresher. "Mia!"
This is surprising not because thresher's don't go 'schook-schook-schook',
(if you must know, they go 'shonk-shonk-shonk', but this is a topic for
another day). It's surprising because Mia is a regular mystery guest over
in the feedback sections of Steve's
log. Spooky.
We are, I am sure, agog for the next installment of Mia's story.
2000.12.03:
Dave
He slept late, later than
he intended, tossing, his face contorted, muttering something about Mia.
And a very Hippy Hanksgiving to Mia and the Frog and the shade of the camel,
and everyone back at the Riptide Campus.
2000.12.13:
Plurp
Blab. Once again, on catfeet and sighs, and as mysteriously
as ever, Mia:
The starlings sang Mia awake.
Outside, no more bullrushes. It was time to go. Time
to collect the invoices. Time, finally, to forego excresence, to
coagulate, to build locomotive engines out of broken bottles, to aim, to
snoot, to acquire. Will eat lunch for food. Will require.
Will emit.
The wonderful thing about this is that I have no idea how the whole Mia
thing began, or who began it, or where it is going. She has already appeared
here,
on Dave's
blog, and on Ian's.
On others as well? Possibly. Mia, as we have seen, has a life of her own.
2000.12.15:
Plurp
Blab. A reader advances a thoughtful theory as to the
appearance of Mia on several blogs.
Re Mia: I think you and Dave
and Ian share a lot of readers. You often link to each other, and
the sort of things you write about are similar enough that someone who
enjoys one is likely to enjoy the other two as well (but not so similar
that it's just redundant to read all three).
Entirely possible! We will henceforth refer to this as the Rogue Reader
Theory of Mia.
2000.12.26:
Plurp
Blab. Whether afever with creativity or just sipping
a bit of the nog, a reader writes:
Oh, is that all? I
suppose you think these are the only ones in town? Heh! What about Mia,
eh? What about the REMAINDER???
There's Mia
again!
I keep reading that last word as "remaindeer", as if Santa actually
had twelve tiny sleigh-pullers, and these were the three that were left
behind.
Mia!
2001.01.08:
Plurp
Blab. Compounding the confusion, a reader writes:
I'm not Ian, either!
Ian's over there somewhere!
With Mia,
no doubt.
2001.01.11:
geekish
Alongside the abandoned highway,
where now only groundhogs scurry about at rush hour, in the shadow of an
old Chevy truck, Mia and the policeman.
» Anonymous » 01.11.2001
09:52 AM EST
2001.01.18:
Plurp
Blab. An erudite reader sends us scrambling through
recent issues of the Journal of Reconstructivist Analysis in this,
the most marvelously insightful missive ever to arrive at Plurp.
Doesn't it seem ironic to
you that, in a political climate where even the lowest climbers on the
pontifical rungs of media and the government can have their opinions channeled,
"Big Mac" style, into the McSenses of the ten-acre parking lot that has
overtaken, with only the slightest of whimpers, any pretense at the kind
of blustering "immunity from slander" that previous generations (or dreamed-of
previous generations, black-and-white Beaver Cleaver and the Oakridge Boys)
might have taken with them to their beds, reading "Fantastic Tales" by
flashlight under covers metaphorically covered with severed ears, the tailings
of toxic mrecury mines, stacks of tires burning by the side of the road
on the wrong side of the conurbation?
This is a new time, or not to much
new as rediscovered, taken from the edge of the trash-heap of history,
where Dan Rather, the Tidy-Bowl Man of the hallucinatory American Midwest,
thinks "Man, I can do this stuff in my sleep". And (without acknowledging
a debt to that aristocratic apparently drunken guy on the Washington talk
shows, or to Bedlam or the Graces, or anyone but Mia) provisionalism continues:
the social construction of reality is dominated, as indeed it always has
been, by a framework of interlinked dramaturges, scions of the patriarchy,
even Camille Paglia in her leather bustier and her hair spiked with mousse,
talking as though it were still the old Millennium, as though John Ashcroft
were just another fond bit of chocolate nougat ice-cream, another vat-grown
clone of Herbert Hoover or Harry Truman, as though, in fact, no one had
ever been able to tell the difference.
Is that fair?
Come to think of it, no, it's not! Certainly not to Mia, anyhow.
2001.01.23:
Plurp
Blab. The intellectual neighborhood here in Plurpdom
becomes substantially more brightly painted with the addition of this fascinating
response. Could it be from Camille Paglia herself?
To the editors,
Jackson "Scruffy" Wittfield's protean
missive in your January
18th number was, like the floating sense of despair and post-Jordian
acclamation that inspired it, flawed in numerous ways. The most obvious,
of course, visible even in the numinous light of lost erudition and "plonk",
the missing object for the innocent (Darbian) word "that". I suspect
that Mr. Wittfield (still the doyen of missing overcoats) meant to point
out the irony of the fact that, in a political climate where even the lowest
climbers on the pontifical rungs of media and the government can have their
opinions channeled and so on and so on, that _in_ this political climate
it is still possible for a man dressed entirely in lycra (the simalcrum
of a Son of Texas) to mount to the highest podium in the carefully-arranged
Bower of Democracy, and not once mention (effulgent that he is, not smug
but closer to oblivious, yours mine and ours, a cardboard dummy) the results
of his own polling numbers.
But that is neither here nor there.
The _true_ irony (Mr. Wittfield's plaints to the contrary notwithstanding)
must lie in the tangled expectations of the legitimate courtiers, the _enfranchised_
constructors of the social reality that surrounds us, and their hastily-gathered
hatboxes, collections of jewelery, and entrenched micromanaged electricity
markets; transforming as they will the anguished face of an earthquake-ravaged
village (stim-by-jowel with the third horseman itself) into a twenty-year-old
woman named Mia in a pink sports-bra on the jogging machine at the Get
Fit Center and Coffee Bar, flicking her hair out of her face, and wondering
vaguely if her SUV is bad for the environment.
_That_, Scruffy, is the true irony!
Respectfully,
Jeffy the Football, R.N.S.
Readers are invited to diagram these six enigmatic sentences in a vain
attempt to extract from them their geometric significance. Alternatively,
the bravest of our readers are encouraged to submit additional texts in
this genre, whatever that might be and, for extra credit, to set them to
music. The judges, whose decision will be finial, will be asked to differentiate
amongst these contributions on the basis of the number of references to
obscuriana from the contents of various weblogs whose names must not be
mentioned. Thank you.
2001.01.24:
Dave
Irony
and so on. Various noteworthy reader missives (some links mine):
...
Science
Friday came and went, the rains and the impotent buildings hammering
his consciousness like terrapins. Her tooth was loose, the aftermath of
a turbulent night mostly forgotten and thankfully so. Again, again, the
rains and the cold. Again, and again, the dreams came in the night, shaking
her awake. And, as she sat upright, sweat streaming down her face, her
chest, the policeman stirred. "Mia?"
he asked.
2001.01.29:
Ian
Finally, the continuing saga of Mia ... well ... continues.
Mia always manages the last word...
Resist triangulation! Create
websites darker than a fisherman's dream! Prosper, unite, perspire! Worship
Mia!
"Shit!" she cried, pounding her fists
on the keyboard. Her email had been down for two days and it left her feeling
powerless, disconnected, wondering what might be going on beyond her screen,
beyond her window, beyond her door. "Shit." She rose, stomping into the
bathroom and splashing two handfuls of cold water on her face. She regarded
the unfamiliar image in the mirror. Her hair had not always been short
but now it was, and blonde, and her shoulders felt suddenly naked and alien.
"OK," she said to the image, her hands in the air, still wet, "OK." Drying
her hands, bruskly, and returning to the desk, she tried again.
Sign-In Name: Mia1980
2001.02.06:
Plurp
Blab. The enigmatic Mia makes a non-appearance.
Tantivy, tantivy, tantivy.
And Irma (but not Mia, not this time. She's washing her hair.
Her "hair".).,;
We don't know what it all means, but it is increasing our vocabulary.
2001.02.26:
Plurp
Blab. A reader of a certain artistic temperament, a
tattered copy of Lorenzo's Delusions of Grandeur in his pocket,
taps us on the shoulder.
Excuse me, sir, you with
the clean white shirt. I will give you a quarter if you will lie
there on the street, on the rain-washed asphalt, under the barrel of my
giant "Creamer" steam-roller. I will take a photograph of you lying
there, and call it "Sic Semper Tyrannus", and the photograph will be hung
in a quiet gallery, and people will look at it and write about it in the
newspaper. And then Mia will have to notice me.
All right. This Mia stuff has gotten entirely out of hand. We are
thereby forced to open up a brand new set of twisty passages in our Stuff
section entitled, evocatively enough, The
Mia Chronicles. Readers are encourage to submit
Mia sightings for permanent public display.
2001.02.27:
Plurp
Blab. A reader with a possible interest in tautologies
writes:
Mia is MIA
... referring, no doubt, to a broken link to The
Mia Chronicles on yesterday's Plurp entry. Oops! It's fixed
now. Ironically, this self-referentially generates another entry in the
The
Mia Chronicles.
2001.02.28:
Dave
Doing the bicycle-thing at the
Club this morning, on one of the ones that has
a Web browser, and as I was following one of Steve's
Mia links, the browser crashed. Now the NetPulse interface is apparently
configured reasonably securely; a momentary blue screen announcing "application
error; windows will now restart" was followed by a BIOS boot sequence and
the whole Windows Startup Thing. I resisted clicking around with the touchscreen
during the most vulnerable moments; there's no keyboard, and hacking into
a machine with only the mouse would be sort of strange (if challenging).
But I was polite. Eventually the whole thing restarted and I was online
and peddling again. Funny things, computers.
2001.03.02:
Beth
Belated box o doom: Yes, I've been terribly lax in regurgitating
entries from the box o doom, but that's what happens to doomed input -
terrible, terrible things such as languishing in my inbox. Anyway, here's
what we've got at the moment:
...
-
Next:
The woman looked ruefully at the translucent plastic container in
the freezer. In it were the remnants of the meatloaf they had shared that
last night - was it just three weeks ago? - when some small annoyance spiralled
out of control, when their words became sharp and spiteful, when she shouted
things that she knew she should not, when he turned, wordless, scooping
up his coat and slamming the door behind him.
The woman dropped the container into the trash, not bothering even
to open it. And when it hit with a violent sound she stood there, breathing
shallowly for a moment. Then tears came unwanted to her eyes and she cried,
at first bracing herself against the counter and, when her arms shook and
her sobs turned to anguish, collapsing, her knees colliding hard with the
tiles, and her arms wrapping around herself as her body shook in hoarse
gasps for what seemed like forever.
From the front room came the sound of a key in the lock and the muffled
clack of a door opening. "Mia?"
The Infamous Mia's aura of mystery reveals a small glimpse...
Oddly, I've had a bit of a similar experience, though quite different.
I remember vividly early on when Spencer and I were dating, when we had
a big fight and afterwards I waited to put the passenger seat in my car
back to its full upright position, because I liked the laid-back way he
had left it. It was a small remembrance of him, and I didn't want to get
rid of it.
But then there was a decisive day when I realized we were probably going
to break up, and I decided "Screw it. It's over, then." and I reached over,
grabbed the handle, and put the seat back to its normal position.
But somehow, we didn't break up (well, not then, anyway). I guess we
had enough inertia built up by then - we just kept seeing each other. But
inertia won't carry you forever, you know - friction eventually saps your
kinetic energy, converting it to wasted heat.
Er. There's something there that I'm not ready to say outright, yet.
So just... read into it what you will. : /
2001.03.05:
Plurp
Blab. Apropos of a snowy day here in Plurpdom
...
The steps are soft, as soft
as silk on snow, and just one sound from the bundle of beetroot under his
arm might bring crashing down on their heads the entire army of the night.
But somewhere ahead, somewhere in the darkness: the infant. The begonia.
And, if all goes well, Mia.
Shhhh ...
2001.03.09:
Plurp
Blab. A reader kindly brings an upcoming movie to our
attention.
 Movie
Premise: "This is the story of Mia, a hip 16-year-old New Yorker, who is
surprised to discover that she is the sole heir of the crown of the small
European nation of Genovia... she's a princess. It seems her Mom had this
brief love affair with a member of the country's royal family, and kept
it a secret from Mia, until now, when Mia's expected to take lessons from
her newfound grandmother on how to be a princess. Can this big city girl
get used to the life of royalty and responsibility?"
Source: http://www.upcomingmovies.com/princessdiaries.html
Ah yes. From The
Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot. Coming to theaters in July. We'll
pencil
that in.
2001.03.15:
Plurp
Blab. A reader who is fond of dairy products contributes
this.
http://www.whymilk.com/famous/mia2.htm
Wrong Mia. Or ... ?
2001.05.11:
Plurp
Blab. It seems that the fourth in our continuing series
of vacation puzzlers
stimulated a few more neurons than usual in the Plurp readership,
with no fewer than three readers responding, each with a different strategy
and linguistic tradition.
You may recall that you were asked to find
the word that corresponds to each of five clues, and then to rearrange
designated letters in those words to solve the final puzzle.
The reader responses are summarized here.
| Clue |
Reader
1
|
Reader
2
|
Reader
3
|
| Blasphemous garments made from the
skin and hair of virgins |
SUITS |
COMFY |
TRPAS |
| A ritual in which the bones of small
children are replaced by kitchen utensils |
XMAS |
ICKY |
PCKI |
| The desire of women to swim with
fish |
PISCIA |
LONELY |
LITURA |
| A trio for two scalpels and an ice
pick |
LLA
("ya") |
RAD |
AER |
| A box made of twelve pieces of stone,
six springs and four blades, into which various body parts of holy men
are inserted |
TRUTH |
JAZZY |
MLASL |
| A woman who suckles a large insect is a ... |
CRIXIA |
MIA, ED! |
RUPPL |
Even more astonishing, all three readers submitted correct answers
within their own chosen genre:
Reader 1 in the category of using disturbingly mundane words when possible
(with a bonus for piscia and crixia, which not many people
know)
Reader 3 in the category of Latinate and Northern Indian linguistic traditions
Reader 2 specializing in colloquialisms leading to a surprising Mia
reference.
Congratulations to all of our winners!
2001.05.30:
Dave
Another reader writes, perhaps in reference to Mia:
Who knows what evil lurks
in the heart of Woman? In the shadows, the shadow, of the back alleys,
of the way back, back to the way it was supposed to be when we were children,
before we learned, or gave in to the belief that, the shadows were reality.
Once, her lips, the glisten of her eye, the abandoned truck in that field
of artichokes, once they meant something, presaged everything, became the
way we thought about the rest of our lives. But no more. Now they are just
images, just rusted hulks, and the fields now covered with tract housing,
SUV's chortling down the cul de sacs, obscures the memories of what was,
of what could have been. And you, where are you?
2001.06.14:
Leuschke
Someone writes:
It had begun as a joke, an unintended bit of silliness between
them. He had given her the rock as a present after she had said there was
nothing that she wanted for her birthday. The following Christmas she had
wrapped it in a Tiffany's box and given it back to him. And so on, and
so on, for the five years since then, the rock changing hands by ever more
absurd and devious means on every conceivable occasion. Then he left and,
as if the loser at Old Maid, she was stuck with the stone. So she devised
this ritual of closure for herself, rowing out on the lake on a glorious
June day to the very center of the green lake and, with little more than
a sigh, dropped the rock overboard.
And as she rowed back to shore, Mia noticed with some curiosity the
feeling that a weight had been lifted from her life.
Good gravy! I know what this is! It's a Mia
sighting! How very exciting. Kind of pretty, too.
This particular missive came as I was listening to Walk
Through The Bottomland, to which this Mia story bears a certain family
resemblance (aside from being a damn good song).
2001.06.20:
Beth
Cavalcade o doom: It's been awhile since I've shared
input from the box o doom, so here are some recent submissions, in no particular
order:
[...]
When she returned he was still asleep, snoring lightly in the canopy
bed. She smiled. Stepping softly into the kitchen, she selected an oxblood
lacquer tray and arranged the lemon-poppy bread artfully on it, along with
two small glasses of orange juice and a slender black vase that held a
single daffodil. Satisfied, she removed her clothes in the kitchen so as
not to wake him, and carried the tray into the bedroom, setting it down
on her side of the bed, beside him.
"My love," she whispered, her breath close to his peaceful face and
he stirred, his blue eyes opening slightly. "Mia."
Hmm, what a nice image. Tales of this mysterious
Mia lady appear occasionally through the input boxes of various blogs
(particularly Plurp and David Chess's).
2001.06.25:
Plurp
Blab. A reader's subconscious mixes the memes.
I saw "Miata" in boldface
and for a second thought you had created a new category for Mia sightings.
Ironically, this is itself a Mia
sighting. How very odd.
2001.07.02:
Leuschke
And, to round out this first full day back, someone writes:
Finally, we receive notification in the mail. A package most
would not expect. A plastic bag, and not just one, each with its own contents.
We smile, unwrapping them over the kitchen sink with the water running.
What would the neighbors think? What will Mia think?
They're thinking that I won't report this to the
authorities. Wrong wrong wrong.
2001.08.07:
Dave
I have been sadly neglecting these most notable reader responses
to Snappy phrase:
[...]
Cthulhu
cultist?
2001.08.08:
Plurp
Blab. A reader discovers an astonishing piece of the
larger puzzle.
A find-the-common-theme puzzle:
http://us.imdb.com/Plot?0105982
http://us.imdb.com/Plot?0282428
http://us.imdb.com/Plot?0247638
Mia!
2001.08.10:
Plurp
Blab. In our very first Blab contribution containing
submitted graphics, two readers write:
As promised
the film has been developed. There was a Mia sighting of sorts in
Arles. We saw this on July 24 and just couldn't stop ourselves from
snapping a picture of it.
M&G
We are very impressed with the resourcefulness of our readers, and we
thank them for their marvelous contribution. Let the
festivities
begin!
(Note the subtle reference to the policeman in the above picture.)
2001.08.22:
Plurp
Blab. Just when we thought it was over, this.
The raindrops skittered horizontally
across the window as the runway rose to meet them. He felt insulated, protected,
oblivious to the covert clicking-open of seatbelts. Perhaps it was the
swirling web of hopes and expectations, perhaps the thirty hours
without sleep, but he wasn't even aware he was murmuring her name, over
and over, "Mia".
She seems to be everyone's obsession.
2001.09.30:
Plurp
Plurp. According to Cosmopolitan,
which certainly ought to know, on the passion scale we are a:
Spirited Sister
Cheers for getting revved up without
going over the edge. "You have an appropriate amount of passion for certain
beliefs, people, and hobbies that you care about, and that kind of energy
makes your life more exciting. But you also have to exercise caution about
getting too wrapped up in one thing." For instance, you may throw yourself
into work, but if you see it has made you MIA from friends and had you
eating vending-machine garbage for dinner, you'll loosen up at the office
so you can get back in balance.
We suppose this goes along with our recent discovery that we are a lesbian.
2001.10.14:
Plurp
Blab. Gazing contemplatively at an old
issue of Plurp, a reader sends us the most obscure Mia
reference yet.
beetroot
2001.11.27:
Plurp
Blab. Putting the lie to the notion the drug use is
decreasing, a nonetheless talented reader writes:
Entertain us with muffins,
entertain us with wit (entertain us with pipes and with hope (threaten
our life with a railway share) and count on the ear of a dope), for that
matter. Entertain us by recounting your past. Entertain us with stories
about that slut Yolanda (Mia?). Juggle your most prized possessions (you
know you want to).
Take the train, here comes the train,
throttle the censorious impulse. (Don't count your earwigs before they're...
you know.) Here comes the train, it's the train, the train, the train,
train, train
rain
in
n
Mia! Woo, woo.
2001.12.28:
Plurp
Blab. Our Northwest
correspondent returns with this:
Glad to read that news travels
so fast as to have our engagement announcement made public so that devoted
readers such as Leuschke and Mia can remove me from their little black
books. I was bothered, however, that I only made fourth on your billing
for the 26th. I suppose Alien Food Labels has more importance than
engagement announcements. HMPFH !
-- Your Northwest Correspondent
That would be Alien Food Symbols, and that would be correct. It
turns out that our Alien Food Symbols
section, weirdly enough, is one of the most prevalent ways that people
find our humble Web site. But more about that some other time.
In the meantime, we can only offer our condolences to Leuschke
and Mia.
2002.01.12:
Leuschke
Represent
[...]
Update Oh, ack! I almost forgot to give propers to David
Chess, to whom I tried to explain
Serre's Intersection Dimension Theorem. Similarly deprived of respect
was Der Plurpificator,
to whom someone mentioned me in the same sentence as the fabled Mia, an
experience I'll never forget. Or at least not until the next time I eat
an egg-salad sandwich.
2002.01.12:
Leuschke
Someone indulges
Someone has a familiar voice:
She had eaten the entire
box of Godiva chocolates in a single day, a personal worst, she thought,
as she struggled to pull the jeans on. But who would know, who would care?
Years ago, she would never have dreamed of such excess, or have spent weeks
in the gym on the ablution machine. Or stuck three fingers down her throat
and lost herself in the plumbing. But now, what was the point? He was not
coming back. Not. Despite her hopeful friends, despite the posters she
had taped up wherever she went. There had been calls, calls that made her
skin itch, but nothing about him, nothing to give sustenance to her hungry
hope.
And, as she walked along the street
that now seemed surreal, a police car slowed, its window open, and she
heard a familiar voice say, "Mia?"
I've crossed my fingers and notified the
authorities. Here's hoping.
2002.03.28:
Dave
A reader reports a new Mia sighting!
The ambivalent winter had
brought two unusual events. The first was an unexplained mass migration
of beetles. The second was the arrival of a young woman with sad eyes named
Mia to the small town of Henders, where she set up shop selling pastel
colored tallow candles just before Easter. It was not known if these two
events were connected.
(It would be gauche, I suppose, to ask if both of her eyes were
named Mia, or just one.)
2002.03.29:
Plurp
Blab. A reader with hair, and DNA and stuff, writes:
It is impossible to find
me (no one can find me) because of the spikes in my hair (in the facticity
of the world's hair-consciousness, where it coincides with my selfness,
with the age of the cream-colored universe), and it is impossible for any
of us (because of the spikes in our hair, real or imagined, or only in
potentia) to find (to locate, and to locate is always to conceal) any of
the rest of us (as if there could be a "rest" of us at this point in the
development of the universal awareness of self; for we went beyond class
consciousness long ago, into a consciousness grounded in and transcending
DNA, information, particle suites and De Broglie's hypothesis, the unending
(if never begun) sonification of the wave function, even the wave function
of those tallow candles), and so we must always be alone.
Even Mia.
Even those sallow candles.
2002.04.09:
Dave
Here are the top phrases
searched:
- 3 for "mery"
- 1 for "chacon"
- 1 for "gizmonaut"
- 1 for "iris chacon"
- 1 for "mia"
2002.06.17:
Dave
A reader suggests an alternate universe in which e has made
a Mia sighting:
There was reasonably extensive
damage to the front of my car, including the front bumper, the hood, and
that bar thing protecting the radiator. The car behind me was a red sport
sedan, NY license -------; I did not get the make or model. The driver
was Mia ------, telephone number ------------. Her driver's license gave
her address as "------ ---, S-----, NY". Her car was insured by State Farm
Insurance, policy number --- ------------. The hood of that car was seriously
crumpled, and the grill and front bumper were damaged.
2002.07.02:
The Moon Rocket
A reader who I will henceforth
hire to script my wild nightmares (assuming that I actually sleep long
enough to have them) writes
"What is the situation?"
I asked.
"The situation is liquid," he
said. "We hold the south quarter and they hold the north quarter. The rest
is silence."
"And Kenneth?"
"That girl is not in love with
Kenneth," Block said frankly. "She is in love with his coat. When she is
not wearing it she is huddling under it. Once I caught it going down the
stairs by itself. I looked inside. Mia."
Once I caught Kenneth's coat going
down the stairs by itself but the coat was a trap and inside a Comanche
who made a thrust with his short, ugly knife at my leg which buckled and
tossed me over the balustrade through a window and into another situation.
We suspect :
a. William Burroughs
b. A Plurp
reader (because of the obscure reference to Mia)
c. A coat fetishist
d. A dead
person called Donald Barthelme
e. Sylvia's mother - changing names
to protect the innocent.
However, we wait with bated breath
(and bleeding leg) for the next installment, or further instructions.
-- posted by
AJL at 21:09 GMT
2002.07.07:
Plurp
Blab. A reader asks classic
questions.
Who is Mia? What is
she? (That all her swains commend her.)
Are you sadder than you were before?
2002.07.08:
Plurp
Blab. A reader inadvertently generates a Mia
sighting.
Mia generates 3.85
Million google hits (curiously the same as the number of missing worldcom
dollars). Plurp generates 1090
(curiously the same as the number of shares of stock I own). Perhaps it
would be more appropriate to ask if Mia knew who (in the anthropomorphic
web sense) Plurp is. If you find her ask her where she hid the worldcom
funds. The poor of this world need to know.
Actually, the WorldCom gaffe was $3.85
Billion. Google only ("only") indexes 2 billion Web pages these days,
so it'll be a while before we hit the WorldCom record.
We will certainly ask Mia about Plurp and WorldCom (and many
other things) should we find her ("her").
2002.07.09:
Plurp
Blab. A reader mixes the memes.
In Mia we trust
One Mia, in our blog, with liberty and
justice for all.
2002.07.10:
Plurp
Blab. Too obvious?
Strangely, Mia
was the only reader this week to suggest a herd of stampeding ibex.
A real missed opportunity for the rest of you, I must say.
2002.07.10:
Dave
Here are the top phrases
searched:
- 3 for "mia"
- 2 for "chainsaw"
- 2 for "naked helen pictures"
- 1 for "3 move"
- 1 for "3 moves ahead"
2002.08.10:
Plurp
Blab. A reader expands our horizons. Or shrinks them.
We're not sure.
Did you know that "MIA" is
slang for buliMIA?
This leads us to the truth about Mia.
An apparently
lovely person who has it / does it. An
article on folks who are pro-Ana
(pro-anorexia) and pro-Mia (pro-bulimia). An Ana-By-Choice
site. People who think anorexia
is just a diet. And less.
We can only hope that this isn't our Mia.
2002.08.30:
Plurp
Blab. A reader accuses Mia. In Latin.
Mia culpa! Mia maxima
culpa!
Is she? Is she really?
2002.09.16:
Plurp
Blab. After weeks of interrogation at an undisclosed
location, a reader finally blurts out this.
I want my naked pictures
of Simonya Popova!
The very next instant, a telepathic reader gives the interrogators the
key question.
Did you mean:"simony
popova"?
Thus checkmated, the detained reader confesses its real intent.
+Mia
+naked +pictures
Zackly. This terrorist reader will now be detained
indefinitely, and used to power the orbital mind control lasers.
2002.09.17:
Plurp
Blab. Of even greater concern is the discovery of a
gibbering reader in our Blab box.
Yog-Sothoth! N'gai! Ph-nglui
mglw'nafh Mia R'lyeh plurp wgah'nagl fhtagn!
A translation can be gleaned from various
arcane and forbidden
sources of ancient evils.
Yog-Sothoth! In the woods!
In her house in R'lyeh dead Mia waits dreaming of Plurp!!
We recoil in terror at the implications of these eldritch
syllables.
2002.09.18:
Plurp
 Blab.
Somehow, almost miraculously, a reader finds Mia.
Mia is kind young girl, with
healing powers. Every winter, Mia takes care of the northern town of Imil.
Mia is also part of the Mercury Clan, and protecter of the Mercury lighthouse.
Mia has the second most PP and second least HP.
Use
Mia wisely and you should have no problem at all defeating Saturos
and Menardi.
2003.01.17:
Plurp
Blab. The latest Mia
sighting, and it has been a while, comes from a very interesting place
indeed.
We dreamt of pineapples,
mia and dragons last night...we're worried
Don't worry. We had that same dream. Have some milk.
2003.02.09:
Plurp
Yow. We are forced to leave unexplained the mysterious
connection with recent Plurp entries represented by this.
2003.02.10:
Plurp
Blab. A reader attempts to entreat Mia.
Mia talk
to us
Clearly, this is the wrong Mia.
2003.02.13:
Plurp
Blab. A reader hurts our head with a ...
mia sighting at the bottom
of the page!
And indeed, it is quite a mysterious (and nostalgic) addition
to the mythos.
Plotting is the implausable
bit at the place, deformation of the Mia fairness excessively is easy,
but, all everything this is the family movie whose good moral is good to
the story
Fan. Tastic.
2003.02.13:
Plurp
Blab. A reader finds ...
pilot Mia
A different Mia, we think?
2003.02.16:
Plurp
Blab. The famous Sara Beard writes:
I haven't been to your blog
for a while and got a bit nervous when i saw that Marc had become a puzzle
(tried to follow the link back - but there is too much stuff on your site!).
Then I had to take the Mia story a bit further.
Mia is actually a good friend of ours
who is currently living in London. It is not a picture of her on
the postcard - but we thought she would get a laugh with her name being
used for a couple hundred marketing postcards for ElectricArtists.
She is quite googable - if you can
spell her name: Mia Quagliarello. She worked for MTV and writes reviews
for NME on the side. (She is also writing a review of Marc's sticker
photos for Urb magazine coming out next month - i think). She is
orignially from new york city.
See ya,
Sara
Indeed, Sara's Mia
is Googlable. Is her Mia our Mia?
It's so hard to know!
2003.02.18:
Tommy Black
Doom
Much reader response from the last week, most of it mundane:
we miss you
I'm sure I'd miss you too, if you'd stop referring to yourself in the plural.
posting anytime soon?
Well this was delivered sometime around Friday, so I believe the appropriate
response is "no".
none of these comments are
worthy of Doom
Nearly true! though the next one will belie that claim:
It had been a long time.
A long time, and not because they had lost interest. Quite the opposite;
their appetite had grown ravenous, to the point of not caring if it had
to do with her at all. It had become, she had become, a symbol, merely
a word, a triviality.
It had been a long time.
But now, she thought, she might be
ready. Ready to come out of the candle shop, ready to join (a part of)
the world [to be joined by (a part of) the world], to be somewhere other
than that small town, to be somewhere other than where she had been for
what seemed like forever.
But was she?
The phone rang, and she picked it
up, not really conscious of doing so, not saying anything as she put it
to her ear. There was a pause before a voice at the other end said, "Mia?"
Wow, a genuine Mia sighting, and not one of those random occurences of
the three-letter combination that's been popping up so much lately. If
only I knew who that random caller was... the policeman?
2003.06.02:
Plurp
Blab. Someone wonders this:
Oh, Mia. How _could_ you?
Since this is not an inverse link (as far as we
can discern), we will (until contradicted) consider this as the shortest
Mia
sighting ever. How _could_ she?
2003.09.22:
Plurp
Blab. Then there are those of you who got here because
someone disliked you enough to suggest that you come here. [...]
Oh, ok. Mia told us
(whilst we noshed on grenouilles at this crazy-good cafe in Lyon).
We didn't even know she
was a reader!
2003.11.17.5:
Plurp
Blab. Here's something completely inexplicable.
Aim a Toyota tatami mat at
a Toyota, Mia.
What are we do to with this? Add it to the pile of things
inexplicable, we figure.
Whatever could be next? We never know.
2004.01.23:
Leuschke
The scream
She’s back!
“Key provisions of the Patriot
Act are set to expire next year.” Mia watched, surprised, as the President
paused, and found herself applauding in spite of herself.
I find myself cheering in spite of myself.
2004.01.31:
Plurp
Blab. A reader sends us word.
Subject: mia is back
Is she? Has it come to this? At long last, has it come to this?
2005.02.21:
Dave
What's
on top?
The pile of papers on the
desk had been threatening to fall (or slip, or cascade) over onto the floor,
onto the chair, or perhaps into the wicker basket, for weeks now, and was
made even more unstable by the inclusion of several half-read paperback
books, some bent over backwards to mark their places with broken spines,
somewhere in the hidden middle of the pile. Dust had accumulated on the
bent edges of some of the papers, so long had it been since they received
attention, and on the top of the pile, stuck to an unread financial report,
was a small, yellow Post-It Note that read, simply, "Call Mia."
Call Mia.
2005.03.14:
Dave
From the mysterious "HTML o' the Day" that continues to arrive
in my email from I've forgotten where, our Quote o' the Day:
Mia Masten, community affairs
manager for Wal-Mart's eastern region, said she believed the Dunkirk site
would be the first time the Bentonville, Ark., company will build two side-by-side
stores in response to size restrictions. It is a strategy that Wal-Mart
is likely to consider in other areas, she said.
2005.07.24:
Dave
Incentive:
[...]
Hi, this is Mia. I'm not here right
now 'cause I'm on vacation in London! Leave a message after the beep and
I'll get back to you when I return.
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