A fine example from Strongbad’s Email.
Monthly Archives: March 2004
Because, you know, who’s got time for the whole thing?
A 30-second, all-bunny version of The Exorcist.
Erin will love this, too…
…but there’s just no way on God’s green earth we’re doing this to Bob.
Erin’s gonna love this
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.
Maybe God’s trying to tell them something
Those nutbirds over at the American Family Association — with whom I have the misfortune to share a home state — didn’t like it very much when their gay marriage poll turned in numbers contrary to their stated position, so I doubt very much they’re happy with the results of their Presidential Poll. Heh.
Is it too late to hint for our birthday?
Who know there was such a thing as magnetic silly putty?
Read this before you vote for a single Republican
That the religious right holds terrible sway over the GOP isn’t news. The extent of this influence, though, is pretty damn scary, so before you consider voting for one of these people, make sure you understand what they actually support, and what they think of notions like Constitutional privacy.
Somehow, it manages to be both Extreme and Banal
HouseGymnastics, poised to sweep the nation.
Sometimes, we post things just because of the headline
From Salon: N.Y. City Man Forced to Give Up Monkeys.
Dept. of Weird Physical Memory
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 were all impressed with that Kirst fella until we heard about this guy
You reckon Joy would’ve married him if his proposal went like this?
We haven’t seen it, but we suspect they’re right
This review of Gibson’s Peckinpah Gospel is thoughtful, but also sort of depressing (i.e., given the box office the film’s gathered so far).
In Which We Think About What We Really Wanted For Lunch
For some of you, this is just gonna make you sad. And hungry.
Road trip?
Well, we’re glad to get this cleared up
The Official Rules of Calvinball are now online for reference.
We here at Miscellaneous Heathen are staunch supporters
May 7th is No Pants Day.
If only Gorey had worked in Flash
If he had, then we might’ve had something like the cartoons at Making Fiends.
We’re pretty sure this is bullshit
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
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
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?
We know everyone else is posting it, but dammit, it’s cool
The Top Ten IKONOS Satellite Images of 2003. They’re 1-meter resolution, and can be zoomed. Very, very cool. Don’t skip the one of Victoria Falls.
Lines We Wish We’d Written, No. 1
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
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?”
Because cherry-picking from Leviticus is just wrong
Granted, it’s a little like non-alcoholic beer, but still
Finally, porn that’s safe for work. No, really.
If we made this up, you wouldn’t believe us
Apparently, a “fictionalized” TV series based on the adventures of two Department of Homeland Security employees is on the way for next fall. It will, of course, feature a solidly pro-Bush slant, since it’s got the Administration’s approval.
We’re pretty sure they’re two Beatles short of a band, if you know what we mean
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.
Them’s some ugly-ass critters you got there, boy.
Tony points us to this compendium of photo-graphs of extremely odd fish.
Why We Didn’t Do This On Saturday, We’ll Never Know
Matchstick Rockets: Eye-scalding Fun!
Here at Heathen, We Don’t Do This Ourselves, But We’re Pretty Sure We’ve Seen It Done
Dept. of Unsurprising Developments
I was pleased to see this editorial supporting gay marriage run in the Baylor student paper. Of course, it goes without saying that the authors may now face disciplinary action for disagreeing with university policy.
In Which We Point Out, For The Amusement Of Others, The Peculiar Choices Of Midtown Thieves
Someone has stolen the cover to my grill. The grill itself is intact.
Dept. of Corrections
The cat thing now works. Mea culpa.
Dept. of Fine, Fine Rants
This is long, but read it anyway. The folks over at Mykeru.com have a great rant today about Bush, the proposed Amendment, and the non-answers of Scott “At least Ari was occasionally funny” McClellan. They wrap up with this:
The Bush “Defense of Marriage Amendment” is nothing more than the use of force of law and co-opting of the Constitution in order to force a religious doctrine on people who, for one reason or another, don’t share that particular religious mindset. It’s a restriction on the rights of people to do as they see fit provided that they do no harm, that makes previous acts of unholy self-righteousness, such as Prohibition, seem positively secular in comparison. It’s the Blue Law from Hell.