the Daily Whale - my new favorites

Here tower my grandest accomplishments among the modern Whales written since 1998. Putting this list together was a humbling experience. How can I ever be as great as myself?

Jay Scott : Daily Whale : archive : new favorites

31 May 1998 Romeo and Juliet Condensed
No chickens here, but still it's out of the frying pan, in with the Friar.

11 August 1998 Look how the rosy-fingered dawn,
The morn in russet mantle clad,
Bleeds her life out on the lawn.
Isn't that too bad!
Classical dawn goes down to day,
One more shelf of books to learn,
While the Pierian Prudhoe Bay
Serves up drink to burn.

30 August 1998 How choosy are you about who you'll date?
A. I require perfection. Please present your certificate for inspection.
B. Well, uh, I'm holding out for a lover who's sort of OK, you know?
C. I'm no stickler, but I'd prefer someone with a heartbeat.
D. Heck, in a pinch I'd settle for the President of the United States.

7 December 1998 Reagan administration: Mistakes were made.
Bush administration: Maid taxes were missed.
Clinton administration: Made misses were taken.

5 January 1999 A lot of strange things make sense once you reason them out logically. All those year-end wrap-up stories in the newspaper must be for people who missed the year and need to catch up. You know: coma patients, time travellers, the House of Lords.

14 February 1999 The roses are dead.
The violets are, too.
And it's better unsaid
What I think of you.

Headless Saint Valentine,
Buried in clover,
Don't you dare tempt me to
Do it all over!

11 March 1999 M.I.D.A.S. G.O.L.D.
Dear Privacy Advocates,
Your concerns about Intel's Pentium III hardware serial numbers and the far more ubiquitous Microsoft Windows 98 software serial numbers are totally unfounded. The Microsoft-Intel Design for Absolute Supremacy is nothing more than Good Old Love of the Dollar, a venerable business tradition. Please withdraw your erroneous allegations, or your friends will no longer speak to you and you may notice unusual charges on your credit card bill.
Sincerely, Uncle Bill and Cousin Andy

18 May 1999 Welcome to planet Earth. I'm Qxzyz and I'll be your guide today. I know you're all eager to get on to the main attraction, so I'll run quickly through just a few sights. Notice the interesting shifts in atmospheric chemistry due to primitive autochthonous industries. These animals are called frogs. This population is dying out from chytrid fungus infection. Indigenous tribes are engaged in numerous military and economic conflicts, and here is one of the more charming--observe the curious mass execution ritual. And now, on to the big event! Does everybody have their costume on? Good. Remember, by local custom we must stand in line before we see the Star Wars movie.

27 February 2000 Jam Echelon Day
Spamming Echelon will (North Korean weapons-grade plutonium) never work. These guys are too (untraceable Semtex plastic explosive) sophisticated to fall for a crude trick like dropping extraneous (Osama bin Laden has set the attack date) keywords into your messages. But heck, it won't (Airbus project code name Smokescreen Barrage) hurt.

31 March 2000 Omnipotence Has Drawbacks
God used to answer heartfelt prayers. Then one night an atheist prayed, "Please, God, don't exist."

20 April 2000 I Grew Cotton, Harvested It, Spun It, Wove It Into Cloth, And Sewed It Together, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.

7 November 2000 Look At It How You Like, Every Angle Is Terrible
Some of you people, through no fault of your own, are Americans of voting age. Try this thought experiment: A Rilkean angel with a heart of starfire and eternal hurricane wings bursts like an expanding universe in your living room. You're about to perish from its stronger existence, when it thunders in a Mount Rushmore voice, "Vote for...!" Yes? Which candidate does the angel suggest, Ralph Nader or Dave Barry?

4 March 2001 More on the Uselessness of Advice
All human knowledge is less than what the average teenager finds too frustrating to explain.

24 May 2001 Once upon a time there lived a fellow named Rainyday. He was a thoughtful man who loved puzzles, but often went hungry because he didn't feel like weeding the garden. One day a friendly shopkeeper offered, "I'll give you a sweet potato if you can solve the problem of existence by Kantian analytic a priori methods involving the unity of the plurality of the totality of the axioms of intuition. Are you up to it?"
Of course Rainyday took up the challenge, but he found it difficult to demonstrate the necessity of the reality of the totality of what is. Every day he sat under a three-limbed tree, thinking.
Finally his patient mother protested. "Rainyday, why aren't you in the garden? The slugs are bigger than the cabbages! What do you do all day under that tree?" Explained Rainyday, "I think there for a yam."

3 June 2001 Money is no object; most of it is a bunch of numbers in computers. When you take your nickels and dimes to the bank, the bank measures them with a Nicholson Dymometer and--ZAP!--virtualizes them in the Material Girl Currency Dematerializer, changing your change into ones and zeros, or as they say in England, oughts and ought nots.
The bottom line is that the root of all evil has grown with imperceptible slowness into the beating heart of human endeavor, and we should have used more fertilizer.

13 October 2001 Two Coins with a Single Side
Are insight and outlook secretly the same thing, or secretly different?

7 February 2002 July 2001
Dear Kenny Lay,
As one of 10,000,000 satisfied readers of How to Get Rich by Lying About Numbers, I thought you might be interested in my new title, Bailing Out Before the Crash. Priced at only $249,000 a copy, Bailing Out includes four fact-packed pages of indispensable financial wisdom.
Additional copies of How to Get Rich (666 pages) are still available for one dollar each, plus postage and handling.
Sincerely mine,
The Ponz

6 March 2002 deliberate, methodical, systematic, orderly, judicious, comprehensive, disciplined, controlled, meticulous, detail-oriented, realistic, steadfast, discreet, thoroughgoing, patient, diligent, far-sighted, prudent, resolute, firm, unwavering, consistent, planned, synchronized, dynamic, forward-looking, vigorous, aggressive, innovative, rapid
-- bureaucratic words meaning "slow"

20 August 2002 The Gods Must Have Decreed It
I haven't read the research on beliefs, but in my opinion, one of life's chief mysteries is this: Why do people have opinions about matters they know they don't understand?

26 October 2002 I control my own accuracy. When I want to be right more often, I talk more. When I want to be wrong less often, I shut up.

15 March 2003 1% insipience and 99% impercipience
Bush: War is 1% installation--
speech coach: Instigation.
Bush: Integration, and 99% perforation.
speech coach: Perduration. Try again.
Bush: Right. 1% perspicacity and 99% incapacity.
speech coach: Uh, closer. One more time.
Bush: War is 1% incantation and 99% peroration.
speech coach: I give up! I give up! You can't talk at all! Rrrrg, no wonder you always want to bypass diplomacy.
Bush: I have call-in power to do that for me.
speech coach: Colin Powell! I quit! Goodbye!
Bush: Coral powder, right. Now, where was I? War is 1% insinuation and 99% perseveration, that's it.

19 June 2003 Nobody's Perfect
I've tried making mistakes, but I just can't do it right.

23 June 2003 Living Joyously In The Surveillance Society
1. Ask if you are on the List, so that They put you on the List for mild surveillance.
2. Send a dictionary to a few friends by e-mail. Seeing all the keywords, They bump you up to intense surveillance.
3. Use a program to sign your e-mails with random sentences that resemble code phrases. They conclude that you are a ringleader sending coded orders to the cells under your command.
4. Install a security camera in your clothes closet.
5. Put several large files of random bytes on your computer.
6. When They sneak-search your house for code books, They will also surreptitiously copy your hard drive. They will waste weeks of supercomputer time trying to decrypt the random files.
7. On your web site, publish photos of Their agents in your closet, and complain that the police are not protecting your home.

16 October 2003 Be SWIFTER And SMARTER In The HEAD!
* Gain up to nearly 30-50 IQ points or even much more!
* Your brain will grow 3-5 inches longer (bigger)!
* No more premature conclusions!
* Works without books or ideas!
* Totally safe! You will never fall for another scam like this again!

12 January 2004 "Open-ended fighting--check. Bold space policy--check. Korean missile crisis--coming soon. My plot to become JFK is developing nicely. It's about time to start planning the assassination attempt."
-- George W. Bush's private thoughts

25 January 2004 And a darkness descended across the land, and the darkness was called night: And those who hated the darkness watched prime-time television and went to bed, while those who loved the darkness stayed up late to learn Its secrets: And by the former is the world run, and by the latter is the world remade ever and anon, and each time vaster: So let those who love the darkness seek It on near globes or far, and let those who hate It read always of celebrity gossip and offer no distraction. Amen.

7 March 2004 I have constructed a mathematical model of all possible mistakes, but it's one of them.

7 June 2004 The principal principle is that principal is worth more than principle.

14 March 2005 Why do people have so much trouble looking ahead and grasping the long-term consequences of their actions? Consider the positive effects of censorship: Mass entertainment consists of wishful thinking, only without the thinking. Censor it, and the wishes are lost too, leaving nothing. The people would have to invent their own entertainment. Grass roots would show up the tarnish on the cheap old tinsel, and with the sudden boom in quality fun, global industrial production would collapse. Result: Environmental utopia. If only people would look ahead!

2 May 2005 If you're afraid of the right things, courage is a mistake.

10 November 2005 Cease and Decease, or, Explicative Deleted
In this devil-make-hair world, the English language is, for all intensive purposes, held together with duck tape. I have finally come to turns with it; I am no longer uphauled by you creative sages--in poignant fact, I heartily batter an eyelid at "antidotal evidence". It may be deformation of character, but it is also free rain to exercise the ghost of giving short shift to the goal standard of a bonified honing pigeon. All hale the whole-scale old wise tail!

8 December 2005 Planning for the future is necessary. Predicting the future is impossible. It averages out.

30 August 2006 Long-Term View
Surely it is immoral to waste time working out the details of your personal moral philosophy when you could be building your political power base to impose it.

31 August 2006 Dear Posterity,
I've written and written. I've sent you letters, and faxes, and novels, and artworks, and great philosophical movements, and pet rocks. I have buried time capsules and carved stones for you. I have given you vast archives and the dazzling scientific theories of geniuses--and I have never heard a whisper of reply. I don't think you're even listening. Is a phone call too much to ask? Well, that's enough! I've had it! From now on, all you're getting from me is debt!

10 September 2006 Endurance Vile
A sufficiently big project is like a cage, and you're locked in the cage with this monstrous project, because it's also a monster, and you and the monster are locked in a marathon struggle to run a marathon, and you have to drag it across the finish line because it's locked to you like a ball and chain, and all you can do is keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going because you're tide-locked like a moon and can only face toward the ball, which is also a planet. One day, at last, you unlock it and set it free, like a genetically engineered weed, and it becomes a tail and wags you.

14 September 2006 Stuck in the Mammalian Bottleneck
When mammals first evolved, during the Cold War, it was important for survival to see everything in black and white and red all over, and to have sharp ears to catch the whisper of policy disagreement--I mean, of commie subversion. Since then some lineages, notably primates, have developed nuanced vision and sophisticated intelligence assets. Those freaks. Good thing we're not related.

the Daily Whale

31 May 1998	Romeo and Juliet Condensed No chickens here, but still it's out of the frying pan, in with the Friar.
11 August 1998	Look how the rosy-fingered dawn, The morn in russet mantle clad, Bleeds her life out on the lawn. Isn't that too bad! Classical dawn goes down to day, One more shelf of books to learn, While the Pierian Prudhoe Bay Serves up drink to burn.
30 August 1998	How choosy are you about who you'll date? A. I require perfection. Please present your certificate for inspection. B. Well, uh, I'm holding out for a lover who's sort of OK, you know? C. I'm no stickler, but I'd prefer someone with a heartbeat. D. Heck, in a pinch I'd settle for the President of the United States.
7 December 1998	Reagan administration: Mistakes were made. Bush administration: Maid taxes were missed. Clinton administration: Made misses were taken.
5 January 1999	A lot of strange things make sense once you reason them out logically. All those year-end wrap-up stories in the newspaper must be for people who missed the year and need to catch up. You know: coma patients, time travellers, the House of Lords.
14 February 1999	The roses are dead. The violets are, too. And it's better unsaid What I think of you. Headless Saint Valentine, Buried in clover, Don't you dare tempt me to Do it all over!
11 March 1999	M.I.D.A.S. G.O.L.D. Dear Privacy Advocates, Your concerns about Intel's Pentium III hardware serial numbers and the far more ubiquitous Microsoft Windows 98 software serial numbers are totally unfounded. The Microsoft-Intel Design for Absolute Supremacy is nothing more than Good Old Love of the Dollar, a venerable business tradition. Please withdraw your erroneous allegations, or your friends will no longer speak to you and you may notice unusual charges on your credit card bill. Sincerely, Uncle Bill and Cousin Andy
18 May 1999	Welcome to planet Earth. I'm Qxzyz and I'll be your guide today. I know you're all eager to get on to the main attraction, so I'll run quickly through just a few sights. Notice the interesting shifts in atmospheric chemistry due to primitive autochthonous industries. These animals are called frogs. This population is dying out from chytrid fungus infection. Indigenous tribes are engaged in numerous military and economic conflicts, and here is one of the more charming--observe the curious mass execution ritual. And now, on to the big event! Does everybody have their costume on? Good. Remember, by local custom we must stand in line before we see the Star Wars movie.
27 February 2000	Jam Echelon Day Spamming Echelon will (North Korean weapons-grade plutonium) never work. These guys are too (untraceable Semtex plastic explosive) sophisticated to fall for a crude trick like dropping extraneous (Osama bin Laden has set the attack date) keywords into your messages. But heck, it won't (Airbus project code name Smokescreen Barrage) hurt.
31 March 2000	Omnipotence Has Drawbacks God used to answer heartfelt prayers. Then one night an atheist prayed, "Please, God, don't exist."
20 April 2000	I Grew Cotton, Harvested It, Spun It, Wove It Into Cloth, And Sewed It Together, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
7 November 2000	Look At It How You Like, Every Angle Is Terrible Some of you people, through no fault of your own, are Americans of voting age. Try this thought experiment: A Rilkean angel with a heart of starfire and eternal hurricane wings bursts like an expanding universe in your living room. You're about to perish from its stronger existence, when it thunders in a Mount Rushmore voice, "Vote for...!" Yes? Which candidate does the angel suggest, Ralph Nader or Dave Barry?
4 March 2001	More on the Uselessness of Advice All human knowledge is less than what the average teenager finds too frustrating to explain.
24 May 2001	Once upon a time there lived a fellow named Rainyday. He was a thoughtful man who loved puzzles, but often went hungry because he didn't feel like weeding the garden. One day a friendly shopkeeper offered, "I'll give you a sweet potato if you can solve the problem of existence by Kantian analytic a priori methods involving the unity of the plurality of the totality of the axioms of intuition. Are you up to it?" Of course Rainyday took up the challenge, but he found it difficult to demonstrate the necessity of the reality of the totality of what is. Every day he sat under a three-limbed tree, thinking. Finally his patient mother protested. "Rainyday, why aren't you in the garden? The slugs are bigger than the cabbages! What do you do all day under that tree?" Explained Rainyday, "I think there for a yam."
3 June 2001	Money is no object; most of it is a bunch of numbers in computers. When you take your nickels and dimes to the bank, the bank measures them with a Nicholson Dymometer and--ZAP!--virtualizes them in the Material Girl Currency Dematerializer, changing your change into ones and zeros, or as they say in England, oughts and ought nots. The bottom line is that the root of all evil has grown with imperceptible slowness into the beating heart of human endeavor, and we should have used more fertilizer.
13 October 2001	Two Coins with a Single Side Are insight and outlook secretly the same thing, or secretly different?
7 February 2002	July 2001 Dear Kenny Lay, As one of 10,000,000 satisfied readers of How to Get Rich by Lying About Numbers, I thought you might be interested in my new title, Bailing Out Before the Crash. Priced at only $249,000 a copy, Bailing Out includes four fact-packed pages of indispensable financial wisdom. Additional copies of How to Get Rich (666 pages) are still available for one dollar each, plus postage and handling. Sincerely mine, The Ponz
6 March 2002	deliberate, methodical, systematic, orderly, judicious, comprehensive, disciplined, controlled, meticulous, detail-oriented, realistic, steadfast, discreet, thoroughgoing, patient, diligent, far-sighted, prudent, resolute, firm, unwavering, consistent, planned, synchronized, dynamic, forward-looking, vigorous, aggressive, innovative, rapid -- bureaucratic words meaning "slow"
20 August 2002	The Gods Must Have Decreed It I haven't read the research on beliefs, but in my opinion, one of life's chief mysteries is this: Why do people have opinions about matters they know they don't understand?
26 October 2002	I control my own accuracy. When I want to be right more often, I talk more. When I want to be wrong less often, I shut up.
15 March 2003	1% insipience and 99% impercipience Bush: War is 1% installation-- speech coach: Instigation. Bush: Integration, and 99% perforation. speech coach: Perduration. Try again. Bush: Right. 1% perspicacity and 99% incapacity. speech coach: Uh, closer. One more time. Bush: War is 1% incantation and 99% peroration. speech coach: I give up! I give up! You can't talk at all! Rrrrg, no wonder you always want to bypass diplomacy. Bush: I have call-in power to do that for me. speech coach: Colin Powell! I quit! Goodbye! Bush: Coral powder, right. Now, where was I? War is 1% insinuation and 99% perseveration, that's it.
19 June 2003	Nobody's Perfect I've tried making mistakes, but I just can't do it right.
23 June 2003	Living Joyously In The Surveillance Society 1. Ask if you are on the List, so that They put you on the List for mild surveillance. 2. Send a dictionary to a few friends by e-mail. Seeing all the keywords, They bump you up to intense surveillance. 3. Use a program to sign your e-mails with random sentences that resemble code phrases. They conclude that you are a ringleader sending coded orders to the cells under your command. 4. Install a security camera in your clothes closet. 5. Put several large files of random bytes on your computer. 6. When They sneak-search your house for code books, They will also surreptitiously copy your hard drive. They will waste weeks of supercomputer time trying to decrypt the random files. 7. On your web site, publish photos of Their agents in your closet, and complain that the police are not protecting your home.
16 October 2003	Be SWIFTER And SMARTER In The HEAD! * Gain up to nearly 30-50 IQ points or even much more! * Your brain will grow 3-5 inches longer (bigger)! * No more premature conclusions! * Works without books or ideas! * Totally safe! You will never fall for another scam like this again!
12 January 2004	"Open-ended fighting--check. Bold space policy--check. Korean missile crisis--coming soon. My plot to become JFK is developing nicely. It's about time to start planning the assassination attempt." -- George W. Bush's private thoughts
25 January 2004	And a darkness descended across the land, and the darkness was called night: And those who hated the darkness watched prime-time television and went to bed, while those who loved the darkness stayed up late to learn Its secrets: And by the former is the world run, and by the latter is the world remade ever and anon, and each time vaster: So let those who love the darkness seek It on near globes or far, and let those who hate It read always of celebrity gossip and offer no distraction. Amen.
7 March 2004	I have constructed a mathematical model of all possible mistakes, but it's one of them.
7 June 2004	The principal principle is that principal is worth more than principle.
14 March 2005	Why do people have so much trouble looking ahead and grasping the long-term consequences of their actions? Consider the positive effects of censorship: Mass entertainment consists of wishful thinking, only without the thinking. Censor it, and the wishes are lost too, leaving nothing. The people would have to invent their own entertainment. Grass roots would show up the tarnish on the cheap old tinsel, and with the sudden boom in quality fun, global industrial production would collapse. Result: Environmental utopia. If only people would look ahead!
2 May 2005	If you're afraid of the right things, courage is a mistake.
10 November 2005	Cease and Decease, or, Explicative Deleted In this devil-make-hair world, the English language is, for all intensive purposes, held together with duck tape. I have finally come to turns with it; I am no longer uphauled by you creative sages--in poignant fact, I heartily batter an eyelid at "antidotal evidence". It may be deformation of character, but it is also free rain to exercise the ghost of giving short shift to the goal standard of a bonified honing pigeon. All hale the whole-scale old wise tail!
8 December 2005	Planning for the future is necessary. Predicting the future is impossible. It averages out.
30 August 2006	Long-Term View Surely it is immoral to waste time working out the details of your personal moral philosophy when you could be building your political power base to impose it.
31 August 2006	Dear Posterity, I've written and written. I've sent you letters, and faxes, and novels, and artworks, and great philosophical movements, and pet rocks. I have buried time capsules and carved stones for you. I have given you vast archives and the dazzling scientific theories of geniuses--and I have never heard a whisper of reply. I don't think you're even listening. Is a phone call too much to ask? Well, that's enough! I've had it! From now on, all you're getting from me is debt!
10 September 2006	Endurance Vile A sufficiently big project is like a cage, and you're locked in the cage with this monstrous project, because it's also a monster, and you and the monster are locked in a marathon struggle to run a marathon, and you have to drag it across the finish line because it's locked to you like a ball and chain, and all you can do is keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going because you're tide-locked like a moon and can only face toward the ball, which is also a planet. One day, at last, you unlock it and set it free, like a genetically engineered weed, and it becomes a tail and wags you.
14 September 2006	Stuck in the Mammalian Bottleneck When mammals first evolved, during the Cold War, it was important for survival to see everything in black and white and red all over, and to have sharp ears to catch the whisper of policy disagreement--I mean, of commie subversion. Since then some lineages, notably primates, have developed nuanced vision and sophisticated intelligence assets. Those freaks. Good thing we're not related.