Testing, testing
Seeing if this fixes the STUPID pagination problem on STINKY OLD Internet Explorer.
Update: No, it doesn’t. What the hell is this bug? It just appears out of nowhere, shoves the main page below the right-hand sidebar for a few hours, then disappears again. I have IE at work, and it looked fine before I left. Meh.
On a related note…twenty two years of brain dead software: screen caps of all the Windows versions beginning with 1.01. I’m not sure if that’s where I came in, but we had a 1985 Windows machine. It drove our camera, I think.
Update: got it. Or it went away by itself. I put an
overflow:hidden;
tag in the CSS for the right sidebar just as it vanished, so maybe that did it. Good thing; I was just going to take up strong drink. As a last resort, that fixes everything. Now I can celebrate with a dram of spirits.
June 12, 2007 — 4:26 pm
Comments: 12
Like a bison
O.E. weosule, wesle “weasel,” from P.Gmc. *wisulon (cf. O.N. visla, M.Du. wesel, Du. wezel, O.H.G. wisula, Ger. Wiesel), probably related to P.Gmc. *wisand- “bison” (see bison), with a base sense of “stinking animal,” because both animals have a foul, musky smell (cf. L. vissio “stench”). The verb “to deprive (a word or phrase) of its meaning” is first attested 1900, so used because the weasel sucks out the contents of eggs, leaving the shell intact; the sense of “extricate oneself (from a difficult place) like a weasel” is first recorded 1925; that of “to evade and equivocate” is from 1956. A John Wesilheued (“John Weaselhead”) turns up on the Lincolnshire Assize Rolls for 1384,
but the name seems not to have endured, for some reason.
— 2:05 pm
Comments: 4
Tribes
Primates are tribal. Drop a bunch of us on the savannah, and we promptly coagulate into angry screaming monkeyclumps and start a war.
It’s been fun watching this play out online. I’ve been here since the mid eighties, from local bulletin boards, Fidonet and PCPursuit, to Prodigy, GEnie, Compu$erve and Arbornet, from USENET to IRC to online games to Web bulletin boards to blogs. I sat down a decade ago and started to write down all the groups I’d been a part of and handles I’d posted under and I got well over 50 of the one and 100 of the other before I lost interest in the question.
The internet is particularly well suited to tribal warfare. It is a slippery place; only a “place” at all in the most metaphorical way. It’s a suitable place for anonymity, intrigue and imposture. It’s a billion timbreless voices whispering to each other in the dark.
The thing I most loved to read on USENET was the sputtering indignation of a newbie who suddenly realizes that, yes, that other guy damn well can talk to you that way and no, there’s not a thing you can do about it. But, of course, this is why internet arguments never die: they don’t have to. There is no mechanism to declare a winner and go home.
Except when there is. And moderated groups and bulletin boards tend to generate the hardest feelings of all. Moderation is a job almost impossible to do gracefully. Most places it’s like romping through a toe factory with a hammer.
I have hung out in happy places and cranky places and contributed as lavishly as I was able to the happiness and the crankiness thereof, if not always the right way around. I’ve been so busy identifying and supporting my online tribe, it totally snuck up on me, that point where I came to identify more with the online tribe than the meat tribe.
Oh, I trim my hedges and say hi to my neighbors. I vote. I shop. If the Redcoats ever come back, I’ll run to the barricades with my carbine (getting tired of keeping up my marksmanship skill in preparation for that glorious day, in fact). But if you ask me where I live, work and play, the answer to all three is on the computer. And, pretty much, online. I blame broadband. What’s satellite wifi going to do?
Leave a mark on the genome, is my guess.
— 1:52 pm
Comments: 14
Nervous? I nearly shat m’self
Okay, about those goats. I was wrong. Nervous goats (AKA fainting goats, Tennessee goats, stiff-leg goats, wooden-leg goats, Tennessee scare goats) are not epileptic and they weren’t developed at Vanderbilt.
But we really did have a small herd of them when I was a wee slip of a weasel. And I know ours came from Vanderbilt, where my parents were alums (well, my dad was. My mother dropped out when morning sickness made her upchuck on patients, a thing generally frowned upon in nursing school). The goats worked out a lot better than those experimental lab rats he brought home, that’s for sure.
The proper word for their condition is “myotonia.” They have two mutations on a gene that controls chloride ions in the skeletal muscles, whatever the fuck those are. It means their muscles lock up when they’re startled. Lasts about ten seconds.
They fall down, which really doesn’t give a sense of the thing at all. It’s like the ordinary physics of gravity do not apply. They fall down like cartoon characters fall down. They land with their legs stuck straight up in the air and slowly waving about (see the pictures above). And, because this mostly affects their legs and doesn’t affect their brains at all, they go down with a look on their faces like, “Dammit! What the hell?”
Sometimes the older ones are able to stay upright and drag themselves along, or wobble back and forth like rocking horses. And it’s instantaneous. Like BANG–thud.
See, I’m trying to explain why this was fun and not hateful and cruel. Oh, here. Here’s a YouTube video that might help.
See what I mean? Could you resist knocking ’em down like bowling pins?
Anyhow, if it makes you feel better — as I said in whatever thread I first mentioned these things — the senior billygoat got me up against the barn one day when I was nine and whaled the living shit out of me. Turns out a nine-year-old is not startling enough to flatten an enraged billygoat.
June 11, 2007 — 4:42 pm
Comments: 6
Almost enough to buy the book
Fun website flogging a book of short stories. I almost hit the button on it, then I realized, “hey, wait…I don’t read any more.”
Anyhow, it’s sounds quirky and eccentric. I’m getting tired of quirky and eccentric. I don’t think quirky and eccentric should be the gold standard of meritorious fiction. More straight cowboys and moms who knit colorful hats, I say. And pirate stories. And bacon. I could really go for some bacon and eggs this morning.
Found at Aphra Behn.
— 9:34 am
Comments: 12
ewwww…Weasel’s shorts
are not the droids you are looking for.
I’m trying to add a class to my CSS and, for some reason, changes in the style sheet don’t “take” right away in the preview mode, so I have to publish to tinker with it. Whatever.
June 10, 2007 — 9:16 am
Comments: 20
Friday, June 8
Yeah, I had a proper Friday post in mind, but I spent my blogging time today discussing theology with my imaginary playmates.
Okay, okay…the truth? The dog ate it. And that was pretty traumatic for me because my dog died 30 years ago.
Stupid Puppydog Heaven.
June 8, 2007 — 5:09 pm
Comments: 16
For posterity: the taxonomy of crystal-sucking twats
Religion. It’s one of the things I started this blog to vent about. Then it turns out my thoughts on the topic are conflicted. And boring. And — this is a little brain-hurty for an obnoxious atheist such as moi — more often than not I find myself sticking up for religious people online. There are so many excellent reasons to criticize a religion (starting with the core beliefs) that it gets up my nose when the religious are criticized for bogus reasons (the MSM’s shock and disappointment every time an actual Catholic is elected Pope, for example).
I have no such mixed feelings about the religions of the New Age. It’s one thing to believe the junk you were raised with; it’s lazy, but they get to you when you’re young and especially vulnerable to fantastical shit. It’s quite another thing to turn your back on the faith of your fathers in adulthood and embrace some wild-ass foreign cult or, worse, a bunch of stupid hippie crap made up in the 20th Century by a clown-carful of be-toga’d con artists.
Today — I forget why — I was looking for my favorite Usenet post, ever, and I was shocked to discover a Google search of “crystal-sucking twats” didn’t turn it up. Instead, it turned up me, stealing the phrase without attribution in a lowly blog comment. That ain’t right, so I went to Google Groups (formerly Deja News) and scared it up. Reproduced here for posterity.
This is an exchange between Matthew M Mckeon, who originated the phrase, and Ian Sturrock, who expounds upon it at some length. The newsgroup is alt.gothic.
Subject: Re: Praying Students Killed By Classmate From: a...@califia.sub-rosa.com Newsgroups: alt.gothic Matthew M Mckeon <m...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes <snip some interesting points> > There are also hordes of fluff-brained, emotionally unstable > crystal-sucking twats who involve themselves in paganism > in the hopes that they can learn spells to hurt their enemies > and that they will get ritual sex. Just to correct you on this one- the fluff-brained, emotionally unstable crystal-sucking twats are unlikely to want to hurt their enemies & get ritual sex. Rather, they want to 'heal' their enemies with 'glowing dolphin lurve energy' or something, and have meaningful tantric experiences. The ones who want to *hurt* their enemies are more commonly malice- brained emotionally unstable inverted-pentacle-sucking twats. The ones that want ritual sex are the cock-brained emotionally unstable middle-aged science fiction fan twats for the most part. These distinctions are very important if, like me, you have chosen to work in an occult bookshop-cafe & must know precisely which kind of emotionally unstable twat your customer is. So please get your facts straight in future. I did get to overhear the tail end of a fascinating discussion in the cafe recently between a bloke who thinks he's Satan (aging heavy metaller with bad tattoos & a penchant for hiring the plastic vampire cape from the fancy dress shop across the road) and a bloke who claims he's a Navaho Indian Shaman- from Ontario (geographically-challenged terminal bullshitter who was a martial arts expert last week- I guess he'll have graduated to Traditional Witch status by next week). -- Deadly Ernest
June 7, 2007 — 1:55 pm
Comments: 54
Bringing brown to the masses
The HP Foods that brings you Omelette ‘n’ Chips is most famous in the UK for HP Sauce, the empire’s leading brand of brown sauce. You’re at least as likely to find a bottle of HP Sauce as a bottle of ketchup on your table in the local cafe. I’m not sure what people put it on. I’ve never seen anyone eat it.
It tastes…brown.
Oh, so very brown. Like steak sauce, but without the kick. It’s made out of vinegar and dates and…brown.
Meat sauces and chutneys were popular in England in the 19th Century. Making them was time-consuming and required exotic ingredients, so they were out of the reach of most households.
In the 1890s, grocer Frederick Gibson Garton hawked his own sauces from a hand cart. He registered the name HP in 1896, after he heard a rumor his sauce was served in the dining room of the Houses of Parliament. He sold the name and the recipe to vinegar mogul Edwin Samson Moore, who brought brown to the people in 1903. The launch was delayed in deference to the death of Queen Victoria.
You couldn’t get more British than that if you tattoo’d the Union Jack on your arse while whistling Rule Britannia.
Sadly, HP Sauce has fallen in with Johnny Foreigner in latter days. First the French (Danone) and then the Americans (Heinz). Under Heinz’s’z ownership, production was moved to the Netherlands. Enraged Brits (ha ha! Just kidding. Somewhat shirty Brits) tried to organize a boycott in response, but, thanks to their supine neighbors, HP still accounts for more than 70% of the brown market.
Brown trivia
· At one time, a motorway cut through the middle of the Aston factory, necessitating a vinegar pipeline over the highway
· HP Sauce was known as “Wilson’s Gravy” during the tenure of Labour PM Harold Wilson, after his wife told the Times “If Harold has a fault, it is that he will drown everything with HP Sauce”
· Wilson later admitted it was Worcestershire sauce he slathered on everything
· Which makes much more sense
· Who came up with the slogan “what can brown do for you?”? Seriously, is UPS retarded?
· Between HP Sauce, Daddies Favorite and Heinz 57, the Heinz Corporation has a perilous stranglehold on the British brown trade
· Heinz also makes the most popular and ubiquitous British baked beans
· On their web site, they infuriatingly spell it “baked beanz”
· Ohmigod! I just phoned Britain and got a bean check. They spell it “baked beanz” on the cans, too! How the hell could I have missed that all these years?!
· By never drawing a sober breath in Britain, that’s how
June 6, 2007 — 4:56 am
Comments: 12
Omelette ‘n’ Chips
A client came into my cube today and was frightened by this object. Take a close look. Do you know what this is? It’s scrambled eggs, french fries and baked beans.
In a can.
He paled. “What sort of people would eat something like that?”
“English people.” I said, “over toast.”
This thing reaffirms by belief that foods with ‘n’ in them are not fit for human consumption. Also my belief that god is, at best, indifferent to human suffering.
It sits on top of my filing cabinet. I tucked it away out of the sight of visitors once, but Mike from the other side of Cubicle Row said, “you can’t do that! It’s kind of our…department mascot.”
So there you have it. A living reminder that not everything invented by WASPs has been a boon to mankind.
June 5, 2007 — 4:41 pm
Comments: 15