<p> It&#39;s really quite scary <a href="http://brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=166054">how well this little scene is done</a></p>

<p> <a href="http://www.diacenter.org/km/index.html">Paintings designed by committee</a>. No, really. Admire their unrepentant badness.</p>

<p> Well, &#34;Wow&#34; for a start, I suppose. &#34;Huh?&#34; follows along sharply thereafter.</p> <p> Microsoft is using recordings of Robert Fripp in one of their Windows Vista sound themes, <a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=151853">and they&#39;ve got the video to prove it</a>.</p> <p> Now, Linux-head that I am, I&#39;m not really all that anti-Microsoft, I just don&#39;t see why people put up with it. Maybe this is a good reason. :)</p> <p> Oh, I lied, I <strong>do</strong> know what to say. Fripp uses a Mac.</p>

<p> Under the guise of collecting signatures to change Massachusetts blue laws to allow grocery stores to carry beer and wine (the lack of which I don&#39;t remember from when we lived there, but we came from AL, where it&#39;s similarly not allowed), some people have been fraudulently gathering signatures for <a href="http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2006/01/index.html#008790">a petition to ban same-sex marriage</a>.</p> <p> This is the first bit of news I&#39;ve read in a while that has made me want to go be violently ill. All I can say is that these people have given up their souls if they&#39;re willing to go to such lengths to forbid people to do something that, as the saying goes, neither picks their pocket nor breaks their legs. Some day I hope to be enlightened enough to be sad for them, but right now all I can manage is revulsion.</p>

<p> You should <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Warrenelliscom?m=1661">read the whole thing</a> (don&#39;t worry, it&#39;s quick), but the part that made me laugh the most was the last line:</p> <blockquote> <p>I suspect Patrick wouldn&#39;t go as far as me. But he is essentially Small-Time, and I am Internet Jesus.</p> </blockquote>

<p> Well, yeah, at least two people who might read this do know, but for the rest of you, <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3833078/">witness the lovely protectionism of mid-to-late-60&#39;s America</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>In 1966 the American Federation of Musicians, convinced that British bands were getting a disproportionate share of musicians income, had the Kinks banned from touring in the United States. The organization finally relented in October 1969.</p> </blockquote> <p> Presumably the AFM pressured the government to deny them work visas. The part that seems so frigging weird to me is, well…/The Kinks/? I mean, were they worried that if they banned the Beatles or the Stones there would be riots (not that weren&#39;t anyway :), so they picked on someone who was arguably less-popular but still better known than most of their contemporaries?</p>

<p> The Denial Twist by the White Stripes is the siren song–it will lure you onto the rocks, yes indeed. Save yourselves, I am lost!</p> <p> My God, It&#39;s <strong>Perfect</strong>.</p> <blockquote> <p>If you think that a kiss is all in the lips<br> C&#39;mon, you got it all wrong, man.</p> </blockquote>

<p> So, over the last couple of years I&#39;ve developed a taste for spiced tea, but haven&#39;t ever found one pre-made option that I have favored unequivocally–the ones that had as much ginger as I liked were too sweet or what have you. So I decided to try making my own.</p> <p> I don&#39;t remember the original source for this recipe, but I&#39;ve mucked about with it a bit so I don&#39;t know that I&#39;d be doing any favors if I credited them. :)</p>

<p> So, I&#39;m actually doing this here because it&#39;s the easiest way to make this available to the people in the yoga immersion, many of whom have asked for the recipe (some in more amusing circumstances than others).</p> <p> The original recipe is from Martha Stewart. It called for heavy cream and sixteen pans (OK, maybe just three) and other things with which we (mostly Anne, who first did the recipe) did not wish to bother. Plus we wanted to make it vegan, for maximum acceptance. As with the prior entry, blame us, not her, if it ends up unsatisfying.</p>

<p> But I did some googling around as part of a conversation I was having with someone on YM, and came across <a href="http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~spaf/Yucks/V4/msg00015.html">a transcription of the Harper&#39;s article</a> that I&#39;m fairly certain is where I first read about it.</p> <p> It seems pertinent that the conversation was of the &#34;Why are men so damn stupid?&#34; variety.</p> <p> Incidentally, I did not piss my pants re-reading it, but I came awful close.</p>

<p> I don&#39;t know that there&#39;s any more obvious lead in to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a movie I heard described as &#34;beautiful people shooting at one another&#34;. That does pretty much sum it up, but I think Roger Ebert is right when, <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20050609%2FREVIEWS%2F50524003%2F1023">in his review</a>, he says:</p> <blockquote> <p>None of this matters at all. What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they&#39;re able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments. There are many ways that John and Jane Smith could have been played awkwardly, or out of synch, but the actors understand the material and hold themselves at just the right distance from it; we understand this is not really an action picture, but a movie star romance in which the action picture serves as a location.</p>

<p> That long before he was Dumbledore Mk. II, <a href="http://imdb.com/name/nm0002091/">Michael Gambon</a> was the thief in <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0097108/">The Cook, The Thief, His Wife &amp; Her Lover</a>.</p> <p> That should creep out anyone who&#39;s taking their kids to those Harry Potter movies.</p>

<p> And someone comes on the line and tries to tell me I owe someone $2K+. I asked what it was about, they said, &#34;A card with citibank that was in default.&#34; I told them they had the wrong guy, never had a card with them. The guy said, &#34;I have a social, last four digits XXXX&#34;. Nope, not me. Sorry. :)</p> <p> I must admit I had to get the guy to read the number off twice because the first time my head was so full of voices shouting &#34;Identity Theft&#34; I couldn&#39;t concentrate on what he was saying.</p>

<p> then you would surely not understand why there would have to be <a href="http://kebawe.com/wallpapers/maiden/SpongeEd.shtml">an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with Spongebob Squarepants inserted into them?</a></p> <p> But rest assured, there must be such a thing.</p>

<p> So, at least <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_day">according to Wikipedia</a>. <strong>no one knows why it&#39;s named Boxing Day</strong>. It&#39;s silly, but in a wonderful sort of way–it&#39;s apparently centuries old, but no one knows why the hell it&#39;s called Boxing Day.</p>

<p> Not because it&#39;s not as funny as it used to be (&#39;cause really, it is), but because it&#39;s just harder to get me to laugh now–I look around and sometimes think things have truly come off the rails.</p> <p> But <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/long-jolly-slog-i-hear-they-got.html">their bit of commentary on the attacks on Christmas</a> is great. I especially liked:</p> <blockquote> <p>&#34;On Secularmas, they do not exchange presents,&#34; says Giblets. &#34;They exchange identical cardboard boxes filled with rocks and mold and broken childhood dreams and nothing!&#34;</p>

<p> The default theme that RockBox uses is much less pretty than that of the default iRiver firmware, but as you might have guessed from the way I said that, RockBox is themeable, and the non-default themes are at least as pretty as the iRiver firmware.</p> <p> In other words, RockBox, err, rocks, in every conceivable way.</p>

<p> So, today I installed <a href="http://www.rockbox.org/">RockBox</a> on my <a href="http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IriverPort">iRiver IHP-140</a>.</p> <p> It&#39;s not as pretty as the original firmware (which, incidentally, I can still get to because, well, the RockBox guys are pretty smart), but it has two feature that I always wished for that the original firmware never had–1) the ability to use .m3u playlists that also work under <a href="http://musicpd.org/">mpd</a> (that is, ones that use forward slashes, as $DEITY intended), and 2) the ability to create playlists on the fly by queueing up tracks interactively.</p>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /></p> <p> You might then think that at this time more than any other, I would be able to make a distinction between those things that I think I might want want–largely because they&#39;re &#34;neat&#34;–and those things I need.</p> <p> But damn, it sure does feel like I need <a href="http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2005/Hughes-Kettner-Tube-Clock.html">a nixie tube clock that looks like an H&amp;amp;K amp head</a></p>

<p> John Goerzen is a Debian developer for whom I&#39;ve got a lot of respect. He has also recently been let in <a href="http://changelog.complete.org/node/428">on the secrets of underwear drawer rotation</a>.</p> <p> And his workplace just had a big fire, and <a href="http://changelog.complete.org/node/431">he&#39;s logged the thrills of working IS during times of crisis</a>.</p>

<p> I mean, some guy posts an insanely inane idea for a movie he thinks Pixar should do to Bruce Perens&#39; old email address at Pixar, and CC:&#39;s the debian-devel list. Really, I should have more compassion, and not post a link to his message for the purposes of ridiculing him in public.</p> <p> But I&#39;m not yet enlightened, and it&#39;s <strong>so</strong> excruciatingly bad. How bad? <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00566.html">Read it yourself</a>.</p> <p> Gaaah, I think I became stupider just reading it.</p>

<p> …insofar as I can only stomach about five seconds worth of cultural criticism at a time these days–since that&#39;s about how long it takes me to look at Anne, shrug my shoulders and say something about how the cultures on the skids or vice versa.</p> <p> I don&#39;t have the energy, and besides, what the fuck to do I have to be outraged about? I do stupid shit, you do stupid shit, &#34;they&#34; do stupid shit, this is the human condition. Laugh a little, or a lot, but calm down. You will be happier if you accept that stupid shit will be perpetrated for as long as the race is viable.</p>

<p> It&#39;s not that I care so much about the people who are trying to push products through telemarketing–I am on the do-not-call list and all–but it seems to me the people who are actually on the other end of the phone deserve some compassion.</p> <p> After all, I can&#39;t imagine that it&#39;s anything other than a job that combines mediocre pay and soul-crushing work. I suppose that in some cases it may be a specific choice someone makes because it leaves them free to do other things, but in most I expect it&#39;s what they do because it&#39;s all that&#39;s available.</p>

<p> So, <a href="http://www.unfogged.com/">Ogged</a> links to a Guardian column that has an <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1606559,00.html">amusingly incisive commentary</a> that reminds me of a line from The Stand which Stephen King quoted in his introduction to trade edition for Sandman: World&#39;s End collection, &#34;Country don&#39;t mean dumb.&#34;</p> <p> bq.. At university I once came across the following true story in a textbook. A young teacher from Leeds had accepted a temporary job teaching a class of four-year-olds out in one of the most isolated, rural parts of north Wales. One of her first lessons involved teaching the letter S so she held up a big colour photo of a sheep and said: &#34;Now, who can tell me what this is?&#34; No answer. Twenty blank and wordless faces looked back at her. &#34;Come on, who can tell me what this is?&#34; she exclaimed, tapping the photo determinedly, unable to believe that the children were quite so ignorant. The 20 faces became apprehensive and even fearful as she continued to question them with mounting frustration.</p>

<p> Earthlink has produced a <a href="http://www.research.earthlink.net/ipv6/">customized firmware image</a> for the Linksys WRT54G router that will allow you to get IPv6 addresses on their network. Many IPv6 addresses, apparently.</p> <p> I don&#39;t think it&#39;s going to displace the Sveasoft firmware I&#39;m using (though I might try to figure out how to get the IPv6 addresses using that), but it&#39;s awfully cool that Earthlink 1) took the time and 2) was able to hack the firmware like this and make it available to their customers.</p>

<p> …I don&#39;t see how you couldn&#39;t find Taylor Guitar&#39;s <a href="http://www.taylorguitars.com/video/factory-fridays/">Factory Fridays</a> anything but interesting. Take a look at how some awfully fine guitars are built.</p>

<p> I haven&#39;t really read it in years because, well, I haven&#39;t read the newspaper in years. But <a href="http://newsfromme.com/">Mark Evanier</a> mentioned that today is the strip&#39;s 35th anniversary, and he links to <a href="http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL099.htm">a decade-old essay he did on Trudeau</a> that&#39;s really quite a funny read.</p>

<p> So, I saw the original Batman once all the way through in the theaters. Every other time I&#39;ve tried to watch it, I&#39;ve gotten bored or fallen asleep (no, I&#39;m not kidding).</p> <p> I remember Batman Returns as much because I saw it with Anne and Dave McGhee just before he left town for another co-op stint that was going to keep him out of town beyond when I was planning to graduate (let&#39;s be honest about my level of certainty :) as anything else. It was certainly more interesting than the first, but kept a cartoonishness that I found a little off-putting.</p>

<p> Well, I expected watching this movie to be a bit of a chore, and it was. I guess you could argue that such expectations are self-fulfilling, but getting Keanu Reeves to play a character who was originally modelled on Sting–both in his blondness and his Britishness–was just stupid.</p> <p> That said, Rachel Weisz sold the absolute goddamn fuck out of her role. Shame it was in such an otherwise mediocre movie.</p>

<p> who <em>can</em> you laugh at?</p> <p> Which is to say, the linux-themed, despair.com-styled poster <a href="http://www.arouse.net/despair-linux/">you can find here</a> are really quite amusing. Especially the Mandrake and Ubuntu ones.</p>

<p> My big accomplishment today–it was an otherwise fairly busy day, still catching up from the last couple of weekends–was adding VERP handling to the AnteSpam daemon process.</p> <p> Those of you who don&#39;t hang out in email handling circles probably don&#39;t recognize the acronym<sup class="footnote-reference"><a id="footnote-reference-1" href="#footnote-1">1</a></sup>, but if you&#39;re subscribed to a mailing list these days, you&#39;ve probably seen it in action.</p> <p> What happens is that during the SMTP delivery process, when the mailing list server hands the message to whatever server hosts your mail, it is given a special address as the originator of the mail. This is often, but not always, of the form =bounce-mdorman=tendentious.org=bounce.antespam.com@–the important bit is that the address to which the mail is being delivered is included (albeit mangled) in the address from which the mail seems to be coming.</p>

<p> Because it&#39;s time.</p> <p> So, to stimulate those neurons of yours: <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/boxer">boxer</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/alabama">alabama</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/evolution">evolution</a>.</p>

<p> That, if you really want (or, alternatively, if your wife just feels like amusing herself), you can get <a href="http://shop.orangecountychoppers.com/nshop/product.php?dept=mens&amp;amp;category=&amp;amp;view=detail&amp;amp;productid=OC-3590C11&amp;amp;startColor=&amp;amp;groupName=Mboxers&amp;amp;page=">Orange County Chopper Boxer shorts</a>:</p> <figure> <img src="../ocboxers.jpg" alt="../ocboxers.jpg" title="../ocboxers.jpg" /><figcaption> American Chopper often amused me </figcaption> </figure>

<p> The IE 7 team is calling for people to stop using hacks to <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/10/12/480242.aspx">work around issues with IE</a>.</p> <p> It seems to me that the problem is that people with actual websites they want to behave have to use the hacks until IE 7 actually, you know, <em>ships</em>. Even on this site, the overwhelming majority of browser-based hits are still for a version of IE that has all these defects.</p>

<p> The <a href="http://www.venganza.org/">Flying Spaghetti Monster</a> can now ride <a href="http://www.rof.com/Plaque_FSM.htm">on the back of your car</a>:</p> <figure> <img src="../fsmplaque.jpg" alt="../fsmplaque.jpg" title="../fsmplaque.jpg" /><figcaption> Who needs a Jesus-fish? </figcaption> </figure>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /> because of the <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar">Mieville Seminar</a> (or perhaps more accurately, the knowledge of its existence). Enough interesting stuff was said in the bits I read that I figured it couldn&#39;t be a bad book.</p> <p> And, indeed, it&#39;s not. Neither, though, is it a great book. I&#39;m hard pressed to articulate the things I didn&#39;t like about it. I think it&#39;s the prose. It&#39;s not that the prose is bad, it&#39;s just…too much. There&#39;s so much going on, and sometimes the prose gets in the way of the story–not by clanging and making one cringe, but just by being a little too self-obsessed.</p>

<p> Well, 34 started off pretty horribly, really–the last half of October was a blur of work and yoga, with maybe some sleeping in there, leading into disaster on November 2, for which I had a sleep-deprived ringside seat. I basically came home and hibernated for two months, without even the comfort of some good yoga classes–while I had been gone, our yoga teacher started teaching at a new studio with whose proprietor we had some problems, and I ended up putting the ten pounds I had lost in DC back on. On the upside, <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/life/051124engaged.html--I">Chet and Erin got engaged that month</a> knew about it, say, four hours before Erin did.</p>

<p> Back from a cousin&#39;s wedding in Birmingham. It was, as our travel down to Alabama often is, a whirlwind of seeing everyone we could, if only fleetingly.</p> <p> The bride was beautiful–the prerogative of all brides, but Corley was especially so–the groom, in his Navy whites, was handsome, and the ceremony was faster than I&#39;ve ever seen before–something about which the bride privately expressed satisfaction–while also being attended by more people than I&#39;ve ever seen at a wedding.</p>

<p> Chet and Erin&#39;s wedding had, without a doubt, the best food of any wedding I&#39;ve ever been to. I mean, even though I think my wife took to feeding me cake to stop me from talking to other women, I didn&#39;t really mind.</p>

<blockquote> <p>I&#39;ve been to hell. I spell it…I spell it DMV.<br> Anyone that&#39;s been there knows precisely what I mean.<br> Stood there and I&#39;ve waited, and choked back the urge to scream.<br> And if I had my druthers, I&#39;d screw a chimpanzee.</p> </blockquote> <p> Well, OK, really, it wasn&#39;t that bad. I got my license renewed in about 20 minutes from start to finish.</p> <p> Really, the only bad bit was the realization that the next time I get my license renewed I&#39;ll be <strong>40</strong>.</p>

<blockquote> <p>This is a post I started writing several months ago, but never quite finished. <a href="http://missourilovescompany.blogspot.com/2005/09/google-stalking-patrick-mcghee.html">A recent post of Patrick&#39;s</a>, plus the occasion of seeing people I literally hadn&#39;t seen in a decade at Chet&#39;s wedding made me think to give it a quick brush-off and shove it out the door.</p> </blockquote> <p> Someone stole the name of an old friend of mine.</p> <p> At least that&#39;s how it feels. Occasionally, over the last decade, someone would occasionally post a message to one of the numerous Debian GNU/Linux mailing lists I read under the name Damon Buckwalter.</p>

<p> I guess at a certain level, I&#39;m only noting this in sort of a thumbing-my-nose-at-MySQL way, but the sale to Oracle of the company that creates the only transaction-safe storage back-end with referential integrity available for MySQL <a href="http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2005/10/11/oracle-vs-mysql-ab/">has some real implications for MySQL</a>. I, of course, am largely unaffected because, well, I don&#39;t use MySQL.</p>

<p> Some might have decided against having their family photos done as human pyramids, but Chet and Erin were going to have no ordinary wedding.</p> <p> Some might have shied from having jugglers hide the happy couple from the sight of onlookers behind a wall of flaming chainsaws during their kiss, but Chet and Erin were going to have no ordinary wedding.</p> <p> Some might have refrained from having Mark Twain deliver a homily (or perhaps a jeremiad) preceeding the wedding regarding the dangers inherent in heterosexual behavior (viz. sex and death), but Chet and Erin were going to have no ordinary wedding.</p>

<p> Just a couple of days after Wallace &amp; Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit goes number 1, Aardman Animation lose their warehouse with props and historical material. Brutal.</p> <p> We actually went to see the movie on Saturday, with <a href="http://missourilovescompany.blogspot.com/">Patrick</a> and Diane. It was enjoyable enough, although I would have to agree with <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/index/roeper.html">Richard Roeper</a> that it moves along just a little too slowly.</p>

<p> I promise a painful reconstruction of Chet&#39;s wedding.</p> <p> It is painful, of course, because of all the alcohol that was liberally applied during various stages in the process. Self-inflicted pain being the best sort, of course.</p> <p> Other than that, it was great. As I said, more tomorrow.</p>

<p> That I knew exacty who was being referred to <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/10/the-far-side/">in this rather amusing post</a>.</p>

<p> In honor of Chet and Erin&#39;s wedding in Houston, I present to you <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/houston/">Houston</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/wedding/">wedding</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/erin/">Erin</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chet/">Chet</a>.</p>

<p> It never would have occurred to me to wish for an instrumental Daniel Lanois album, even though the music, rather than the lyrics have often been what attracted me most.</p> <p> And yet, here it is, an instrumental Daniel Lanois album, Belladonna, and it is amazing and beautiful.</p>

<p> Seen on linux-kernel:</p> <p> bq.. From: Ahmad Reza Cheraghi<br> Subject: Why no XML in the Kernel?<br> To: linux-kernel<br> Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 02:41:42 -0700 (PDT)</p> <p> Can somebody tell me why the Kernel-Development dont<br> wanne have XML is being used in the Kernel??</p> <p> Regards</p> <p> Ahmad Reza Cheraghi</p>

<p> Zowie.</p> <p> I Luv Halloween is a most violent, disgusting and hilarious book.</p> <p> I mean, how else can you describe a comic in which a group of children, disgusted with the apples given them by an old lady, put razor blades in one and give it to a cop?</p> <p> Or this little exchange at the end of the night:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Pig pig</strong> Y&#39;know that whole zombie thing you were talking about earlier?<br> <strong>Finch</strong> Did a <strong>lot</strong> of zombie talking earlier.<br> <strong>Pig pig</strong> About coming back as zombie slaves?<br> <strong>Devil Lad</strong> You hoping this lot&#39;ll come back as your zombie slaves?<br> <strong>Finch</strong> I think you have to have a direct hand in killing them.<br> <strong>Pig pig</strong> Oh.<br> <strong>Devil Lad</strong> There&#39;s still Nips.<br> <strong>Pig Pig</strong> Nah…she used to babysit me &#39;n&#39; all, y&#39;know?<br> <strong>Devil Lad</strong> All the more reason to want her dead.</p>