This probably wasn’t what They Might Be Giants meant.

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When I moved into my townhouse, the front featured an enormous, Day-of-the-Triffids quality vine-thing that was, frankly, taking over. I managed to kill it, but never removed the dead remnants from the faux-balcony on the front of the house. I sorta liked it, and I’m also sorta lazy.

Yesterday, we realized that a bird’s nest was in the thick of this vine-snarl. This morning, we realized it’s full of tiny baby birds, so small they have no feathers. Since it’s right next to a big picture window, we can see the birds very clearly from inside the house.

Neat. Pix forthcoming.

Dept. of In-No-Way-Posed Photographs

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So we’re minding our own business in our own living room, watching some damn thing on TV, and The Girl nudges me.

“Look at the cat.”

I did. There she was, under the ladder.

Fortunately, we don’t hold with that superstition foolishness. I mean, if we did, we’d probably have been far too freaked-out to work the camera.

(And never-you-mind why the ladder’s in the middle of the living room. It’s closely related to why we had the camera within arm’s reach. Trust us.)

Politicizing 9/11

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Bush is awful busy wrapping himself in the “leadership” he showed following 9/11, and doing his level best to make it look like his administration was caught flat-footed by the ineptness of the Clinton folks.

Trouble is, it’s just not true:

Richard Clarke was Director of Counter-Terrorism in the National Security Council [under Clinton]. He has since left. Clarke urgently tried to draw the attention of the Bush administration to the threat of al Qaeda. Richard Clarke was panicked about the alarms he was hearing regarding potential attacks. Clarke is at the center of what has since become a burning controversy: What happened on August 6, 2001? It was on this day that George W. Bush received his last, and one of the few, briefings on terrorism. According to reports, the briefing stated bluntly that Osama bin Laden intended to attack America soon, and contained the word “hijacking.” Bush responded to the warning by heading to Texas for a month-long vacation. It is this briefing that the Bush administration has refused to divulge to the committee investigating the attacks. There was not a single Republican member of Congress who ever raised a single question or put a query to the Clinton National Security Council about its efforts against terrorism before the attacks. When the Clinton team left office, their National Security group conducted three extensive briefings of the incoming Bush people. The attitude of the Bush people was, essentially, dismissive, that it was a “Clinton thing.” Condoleezza Rice has admitted that the massive file on al Qaeda and bin Laden left for her by outgoing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger went completely unread until the attacks had taken place. This happened despite the fact that Berger told her during one such briefing, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.”

Now, I’d like to see the source for the August 6 anecdote, but the balance — that the outgoing terrorism czar warned Bush’s people in January, and that warning went unheeded — isn’t even contested by Bush’s own administration. THAT is what Kerry should be saying to Rove’s ads about Bush’s 9/11 “leadership.”

(Via Tbogg.)

Why we think all Hollywood execs are going to hell.

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No, it’s got nothing to do with bloody Gibsonian sadoJesus, nor with the essentially vapid nature of just about everything produced there. It’s all about what they’ve done to the Exorcist prequel.

You see, despite appearances, the idea of a new Exorcist film predating the 1973 original actually turns out to be a pretty interesting notion. The original was and remains a masterpiece of psychological horror, and this new installment was to be helmed by Paul Schrader (he of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) and had always-dependable Stellan Skarsgard as an earlier version of the Max von Sydow character.

In fact, the whole thing’s been shot. It’s in the can. It’ll just never see the light of day, as the studio decided they wanted a more “fast-based, flashy” film instead of the cerebral piece Schrader turned in, so they’re reshooting with a hack of a director (Reny Harlin (who gave us “Cutthroat Island,” and whose primary claim to work seems to have been nailing Laura Dern and Geena Davis (HDANCN?)) and a new cast.

In which we become at least somewhat shameless

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It’s my birthday, one I share with a few other people, as previously documented. For those too lazy to click, the list inclues Adam Clayton and William H. Macy, but also Bill Casey (former evil CIA director) and pseudoreligion founder & charlatan L. Ron Hubbard.

Last night, in honor of said birthday, The Girl managed to surprise me AGAIN (three years running) with a dinner with friends at our new favorite restaurant, wherein I ate entirely too much. She’s the best, she is.

Erin’s gonna love this

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The complete Catalog of TV Tropes, Idioms, and Devices. Plus, it’s a Wiki.

Example:

Jones the Cat Any utterly helpless or powerless victim whose primary purpose is to allow the audience to empathize while providing the opportunity for the hero to overcome their own fears and ultimately risk their life on that character’s behalf. Prominent in science fiction, and stereotyped by the Alien collection of films (Alien – The original feline Jones, Aliens – Newt, Alien Resurrection – Winona Ryder.) Willow fulfilled this role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer until she outgrew it (via forays into TeenGenius) and passed the mantle onto Dawn, the Buffyverse’s very own CousinOliver.

Dept. of Weird Physical Memory

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When I first started programming in a real language — as opposed to the BASIC (line numbers and all) that came with my TRS-80 — I was in college. In the late eighties, Borland ruled the development world with their Turbo line of products, so I used Turbo Pascal, and, later, Turbo C and C++.

These tools combined an editor and compiler into a single program, and made the whole linking/compiling/running/testing process a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Because they came on the scene before the rise of Windows, they also had their own interface, primarily cribbed from the keystrokes of (wait for it) WORDSTAR, a by-now-forgotten former giant of the word processing market. I coded enough to know those keystrokes by heart back then, 15 years or so ago.

My coding life was pretty short, though; I quickly moved from jobs where I actually made things work into jobs where I talked about ways to make things work, and pretty much lost any real coding skill. About a year ago, though, I started a project where I ended up contributing no small amount of code, and it felt good and fun, and I remembered what I liked about programming.

Until a couple months ago, I did all this new coding in a fancy modern editor that I still use for plenty of things, but since then I’ve realized I needed to assimilate another powerful editor for use on remote machines, via command lines.

It’s using this tool that brought me to the realization that my fingers, in a control-key-based, non-GUI program, still remember some of those old Wordstar keystrokes, and will resort to using them without telling me. I keep hitting Control-Y to delete lines, which iis most definitely NOT delete-line in emacs. It was, of course, delete-line back in Turbo Pascal and Wordstar. Weird.

We’re pretty sure this is bullshit

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We just got this bit of no-doubt virus-laden mail. I wonder how many folks will fall for it?

From:         noreply@nogators.com
Subject:      Important notify about your e-mail account.
Date:         March 3, 2004 1:28:50 PM CST

Dear user of Nogators.com gateway e-mail server,

Our antivirus  software has detected a large  ammount  of viruses outgoing 
from  your email account,  you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up
your computer software.

For details see the attached file.

Attached file  protected  with the password  for security reasons. Password is 21570.

Have a good day,
The Nogators.com  team                               http://www.nogators.com

Cheeky, they are. Who wants to guess what’s in the payload?

We just wish to note that, while we don’t currently feel well, we’re still wearing pants

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You just can’t make this shit up.

Precis: a woman, charged with vehicular manslaughter, insists she’s innocent since she could not have been driving as she was blowing the driver, who was indeed thrown free of the car on impact and was found with his pants in the lowered position.

It gets better:

Assistant State’s Attorney Maureen Platt said the defense is flawed. “His pants could have been down because he was mooning a car he was drag racing,” Platt said. “His pants could have been down because he was urinating out of a window. His pants could have been down because he wasn’t feeling well.”

Maybe that’s what Ms. Platt does when she’s not feeling well. No, we refuse to speculate on whose pants she lowers at such times.

In Which We Discuss The Evil That Code Generators Do

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So I help out a local nonprofit here and there. They’re very cool people and they do very cool work. Since web stuff is what I do, I’m also rebuilding their site to avoid the abomination that is Frames, and since I’m doing that, it occurred to Ms. Intrepid Managing Director to call me this morning when they couldn’t get their PayPal buttons to work right on their gala ticket sales page.

Apparently, PayPal has a very nice, friendly tool for creating these buttons. You hand the PayPal site the appropriate information, and it spits out a lump of code you stick into your HTML file and bammo! You’re done!

Well, you would be if Dreamweaver weren’t in the picture. Apparently, by default ol’ DW will change form variable names for you when you paste in code if it senses name duplication. Since each button is its own form in the PayPal paradigm, this meant that the meaningful variables (“cmd” and “encrypted”) occurred six times on the page — so each one we given a number suffix. This is utterly absurd, since each variable was in its own form, and therefore its own namespace; no collision was happening. PalPal’s script, to which the form posts, knew nothing of these new names, nor should it have. Consequently, the buttons didn’t work. So, as I said, Ms. Intrepid Managing Director called me, and I called PayPal.

The bright side of this is that PayPal’s tech person was extremely helpful, but the bad news is that the help she gave would have been almost useless to a non-programmer. Their tool assumes the user will cut and paste the code as if it were an incantation to be recited but not comprehended. That’s fine; I’ve done the same thing, and it’s very common on the web for things like buttons, logos, and the like. The problem is that DW decided to “help,” and in doing so created a situation from which the inexperienced cannot easily recover. I’m told that this behavior is an option that a user can disable, but that’s pretty cold comfort — I mean, under what circumstances would it be okay for any development tool to unilaterally change variable names for you?

Now: if you’re a pro, (1) this never would have happened to you because (2) you write HTML in a plain text editor to avoid the kinds of pitfalls that generated code creates. So we’re left with amateurs who are less able to troubleshoot their situation than geeks like us — so why, again, is DW doing this? Are they taking lessons from Redmond about destructive and absurd defaults?

Lines We Wish We’d Written, No. 1

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Tbogg has this to say:

According to Amazon, the soundtrack from Mel Gibson’s The Passion: Smack My Savior Up is number two with only wanton whore of Babylon Norah Jones’ (who still doesn’t know why she didn’t come) Feels Like Home keeping it from the top spot.

Heh. (Yes, we’re stealing a feature from TMFTML.)

We, of course, are pretty happy with the regular kind

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Anti-gay bigots love to quote Paul Cameron, a rather odd bird who nevertheless has some impressive hard-right credentials, not the least of which may be his expulsion from the American Psychological Association. Of course, he’s also infamous for this:

“Untrammeled homosexuality can take over and destroy a social system,” says Cameron. “If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one’s own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get- and that is what homosexuality seems to be-then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm.” So powerful is the allure of gays, Cameron believes, that if society approves that gay people, more and more heterosexuals will be inexorably drawn into homosexuality. “I’m convinced that lesbians are particularly good seducers,” says Cameron. “People in homosexuality are incredibly evangelical,” he adds, sounding evangelical himself. “It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they’ll take enormous risks, do anything.” He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. “Martial sex tends toward the boring end,” he points out. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does” So, Cameron believes, within a few generations homosexuality would be come the dominant form of sexual behavior. Quote from Tbogg via Atrios

Er, right. That’s the ticket. Can you say “closet case?”

We’re pretty sure they’re two Beatles short of a band, if you know what we mean

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You know all those times we’ve posted something about crazy people? Real nutbirds? Well, these guys take the cake: they purport to host the Official Website from the Afterlife for John Lennon and George Harrison, complete with illustrations, descriptions of concerts, etc.

One thing of note is that John and George recently appeared as Jesus and Judas in a concert performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar” with Queenie as Mary and Al Jolson as Pilate, plus members of the Angelic Choir and Orchestra. It was a huge success and, as it turns out, the Man Himself was pleased with John’s performance.

Wow. That’s really nuts.