bump = B = buried treasure

burble v.

[from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] Like flame, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. "There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault." This is mainstream slang in some parts of England.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

  1. noun; A gurgling or bubbling sound, especially the sound of running water.
  2. verb; To bubble and gurgle. To make the sound of bubbling and gurgling.
  3. noun; A rapid, excited flow of speech. Synonym with 'babble'.
  4. verb; To speak quickly in an excited manner.
  5. noun; Turbulence in a flow (liquid or gas) against a streamlined body (techspeak; a separation in the boundary layer). Also, turbulence in an airplane resulting from this. Synonym with 'nibble'. 'Burble point' refers to the point in the increase of angle of attack in which turbulence first becomes evident.
  6. noun; In skydiving, the turbulent air just behind the diver's back (assuming that the diver is facing downwards). Synonym with 'wake'. Burbles can prevent parachutes from deploying if the diver does not know how to deal with them.
  7. verb, Scottish; Confuse, muddle.

Etymology: burble comes from the Middle English burblen, to bubble.


Sources:
Dictionary.com
Webster's Third New International Dictionary
http://www.makeithappen.com/spsj/burble.htm
http://www.petester.com/html/bachap02.html

A character in the non-award-winning1 online comic Fluble, written by Chris Mastrangelo. Burble is a Tomato-Like Being who consists of a red, squishy, tomato-shaped body with two large, extremely mobile eyes and an equally large mouth that appears and disappears at a moment's notice. He also has two equally furtive arms, two feet attached directly to his body without the aid of legs, and a strange bunch of greenish leaves on top of his head. Also, he has cartoonish floating eyebrows.

According to the cartoonist, Burble was born as a Godlike creature in the Universe of Louis, but was changed to his current Tomato-Like status after commiting an act of monstrous ineptitude. Acts of monstrous ineptitude, in fact, are rather common occurences for Burble; sometime during the First World War he obtained a position as a personal guard for the Czar, with results that are well-known to modern history.

In the comic strip, Burble tends to play the role of carefree lunatic, one which he performs well. Whether it's obsessing over Egyptian nose weasels, convincing a council of Hassidic Rabbis that he's invented kosher pork, or going on a psychotic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" style romp through Rhode Island while battling man-eating quiche-making French crabs, the U.S. Army, his assistant(an overly rational alien super-nerd), and the dreaded Mr. Olivia himself, Fluble always manages to inject a dose of hilarity and wackiness into the proceedings. Yes, friends, he's wacky. Wacky, wacky, wacky!

Of course, like all things in the dark Flublian cosmos, there is more to Burble than it might, at first, appear. Though he appears to be, and in fact is, a total headcase, loonie, yahoo, raving madman, etc., etc., and though he has, by definition, a completely meaningless existence2, he is also perhaps the single wisest character in the strip. When the chronically depressed main character Fluble is down in the dumps, it is always Burble who manages to cheer him up. "The universe is a flying space eggplant," he says, ridiculing those who find their lives dull and boring, or who are afraid of the vast darkness that is Existence. He is, in short, a mechanical marvel, and a gift from a dark future to an englightened past. Which is nonsense, of course, but so is Burble, so I guess I'm just getting into the spirit of things.

More Fun Facts about Burble!

1 Fluble hasn't won an Oscar, nor a Congressional Medal of Honor, nor a Grammy, nor an Iron Cross, nor a Nobel Prize in Economics, nor a Rhodes Scholarship...why, the list goes on and on! It's simply amazing how many awards Fluble hasn't won!

2 After discovering a help message written by the Meaning of His Existence hidden in the bottom of a bag of Cheez Doodles, Burble led a daring raid on the castle of the evil Count Osovos to rescue it, ultimately facing his arch-nemesis Sandwich-Man. He succeeded in doing so, but upon finding his Meaning, it promptly fled from him screaming "Woop woop woop!", and was never heard from again. See! Wacky, loveable fun!

3 The cartoonist's words, not mine.

Burble, Fluble, etc., etc., are all copyrighted by Chris Mastrangelo and can be found at http://www.fluble.com/

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