Garden Of Blog

Those who would like to suppress speech always end up disseminating that same speech by their pointing to it and screaming “inappropriate!”.  We never would have heard about this benign high school joke if the principal hadn’t taken offense.  Now we all get to laugh at it.

CNN.com - High court to get ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’ case? - Aug 29, 2006

It’s the same with Scholars for 9/11 Truth.  I wouldn’t even be thinking about the group this morning were it not for NH political whiners getting so ruffled over it.  Gee, maybe Bush DID let 9/11 happen!  Or maybe he planned it!

Aw, who the hell knows.  Everybody acts like they were personally involved in the forensic investigtion because they watched CNN, MSNBC or Fox ceaselessly for a month in 2001.  I’m not anxious to claim truth in any direction, on any topic, ever.  It’s okay not to know things for sure.

I’ve neglected the blog a tad lately.

Here’s an interesting way to display any RSS, RDF or Atom feed on a website. I’ll just do Garden of Blog to demonstrate it:

“Prelude to Failure/Rewind”, “Fade”, and “The Wreckage” by Almost Now.

I’m not sure why my favorite pieces in The Onion are the ones “by” normally speechless things (last time it was a goat), but here we go again:

When This Meth Thing Blows Over, You’ll Come Crawling Back | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

Only a few chapters into Saul Bellow’s Herzog, but I can already report: it is ridiculously good. My favorite writers are the ones who make me want to write myself. If I could could be a fifth as slick as Bellow, I’d be satisfied.

Herzog’s children in the novel are named June and Marco, coincidentally the names of my paternal grandparents. And the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and the Berkshires in general, entertain a part of the story. That is where my maternal grandparents birthed my mother and her two sisters and where I lived until the age of ten.

The suffering character of Herzog. Wow. It is already clear that Bellow will be one of my literary heroes, maybe even in the running for #1. I’ll have to finish this and see to what extent my enthusiasm is tied to some imagined arc of plot and character transformation, and if my expectations are met. They are mostly subconscious anticipations and I could hardly articulate them beyond saying that I don’t care if the character comes to a bad end, as long as it as poetic as the beginning of his crash. Sock it to me, Saul; it’s exquisite torture.

bellow.jpg (JPEG Image, 200×250 pixels)

Let’s say you create a rollover image using Dreamweaver, which is a great way to do it because Dreamweaver gives you the backward-compatible Javascript to degrade nicely with older browsers.  Everything works fine.

Then you decide to change the image(s) (but not the filenames), and you change the size of them.  Oops!  Dreamweaver had explicitly declared image height and width in the <img> tag, so the new images are distorted.

Not a problem… just adjust the height and width attributes in the HTML to match the new images.  Or if you’re lazy like me, and don’t want to look up the new image size, just clear out the height and width attributes, right?  Height and width are optional attributes that only aid in the pre-rendering of the HTML layout before all the images download, right?

Not if you want it to work in Internet Explorer 6.  The rollover disappeared entirely in IE, though it looked perfect in Safari, Firefox and so on.

The moral is: declare height and width for rollover images if you want to see them in IE 6.  Microsoft sucks it again.

Those of you who purchased tickets for Mindfest should have all received notes today regarding your refunds.  If anyone has been neglected, please let me know.

Said “goodbye” to the kids. Drove to Wakefield, MA and checked in at the Sheraton. Ordered dual turkey and bacon sandwiches, room service. Partied. Watched Showtime’s bear-all reality show “Sexual Healing” after Jessica fell asleep. Kind of entertaining.

Woke up, had bad hotel coffee. Showered, ordered the “Bread Basket”, room service again. Croissants with whipped butter. Drove to Salem, MA. Walked around. Had an awesome “Frostichino” at a Salem cafe. Saw a liquor store called “Bunghole Bottles”, joked about it all day. Hung (hanged?) with pirates and witches. Bought a tarot deck. Back to the hotel room. Room serviced a well done burger, bleu cheese. Jessica had a chicken sandwich. Both preferred the turkey and bacon, but still not bad. Watched a geurilla chef show starring an Aussie hunk who cooked with chicks whose boyfriends weren’t home yet. Ordered “X-Men: The Last Stand” and loved it. Partied. Watched Showtime boxing after Jessica fell asleep; man that’s fun to watch now that I am in touch with my anger.

Woke up, room serviced the “Bread Basket” again, almost got charged for pancakes that went to room 108. Demanded my whipped butter. Watched “Trading Spaces” on Lifetime. Showered, checked out, fixing movie overcharge.

It was a great weekend!

Doves resist every urge to say “I told you so” regarding Iraq, presumably because once we’ve fucked up it’s only politically proper to deal with the horrible problem at hand, not to point out how problems can be avoided wholesale. This ensures that we never learn from history. We chronically fail, but prefer to do so in a united, forward-looking fashion. Nice.

The semantics of Fucking Up Big Time start to get ridiculous. There is now conjecture over whether Iraq could possibly fall into civil war. To start off, war ain’t civil, but that’s been remarked on before. The real joke is to assert that Iraq isn’t in a civil war already. There is no metric on “how many casualties per day” from national in-fighting defines a civil war. And if there was such a metric, Iraq would likely gallop through the qualifying round by more than a length.

Still:

Civil war in Iraq possible, generals say - Politics - MSNBC.com

Admitting civil war would look bad. It would look terrible in fact, since our Big Bad Army has been in there to save the day for years now. Wait, check that: there was no day to save before our invasion. There was no war, civil or otherwise, nor was there any WMD stockpile.

Much doubt surfaced worldwide over the wisdom of invading Iraq. In the case of war and loads of people dying, hawks, when in doubt, leave it out. We told you so.