Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Just on the off chance that anyone visits my site tonight (the evening of Sep. 9th, possibly into the morning of Sep. 10th), no, the site normally doesn’t look quite this wonky. I’m working on adjusting my font stylesheet to be a bit more what I’ve got in mind — but things may be a bit odd in the meantime.
Deal with it.
;)
Update: All done now — now things look the way I wanted them to. And, of course, I’m playing with a few more tricks…
Well, it’s official — the Webloggers Webring is dead. Not a big surprise, really (some sort of crash had wiped out the linking system a few months ago, and it had been in limbo as to whether or not it could be recovered), but still something of a shame. Better remove those links from the sidebar….
I took a little time last night to get Kung-Tunes back up and running again — as before, there’s now a ‘Music of the Moment’ box displaying whatever .mp3 I’m listening to, updated every 30 seconds so that it’s always current.
Technical details follow…
Thinking about the upcoming one year anniversary of Sept. 11th, Dave had this to say:
A common theme — what kind of God lets this happen. I answer that with another question. What kind of a country is so selfish that it doesn’t see that 9-11 was [the] tiniest big tragedy viewed from a global perspective. What about famine in Africa? What about AIDS? They wonder at the spiritual vision of a person who jumps from the World Trade Center to certain death, but don’t wonder about the millions of people who do the same thing with tobacco? It’s out of balance. We’re out of balance. 9-11 was, IMHO, a small upheaval in getting to some kind of equilibrium in how the U.S. participates in the world, both from the U.S. perspective, and the world’s perspective. That we got so much sympathy says how big the human heart is. That there wasn’t more celebrating in the streets of world capitals says that they forgive us for our selfish attitude, which is back in force as if 9-11 never happened.
So what was the lesson of 9-11 that the U.S. has failed to learn? I think it’s that God doesn’t think we’re as important as we do. The concept of national security is obsolete. We can’t close our borders. We live on this planet with everyone else. Global warming, AIDS, terrorism, all penetrate all borders. New York is a world city. The last gasps of isolationism will be snuffed out by more humiliation, until we get the truth, we aren’t above the rest of the world, but we are part of it.
Amen.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the Universe. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do…we were born to make manifest the Universe that is within us. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
— Marianne Williamson, Return to Love (via Unamerican)
Here’s an interesting little piece of editorializing on Yahoo! — a picture of Ground Zero in New York captioned “Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as ‘ground zero’ in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. ‘war on terror’ since September 11.”
I went ahead and grabbed a screen capure of the page, since I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it gets re-edited sometime soon. It may have been just an editorial mistake, as pointed out in the MeFi thread…even so, it’s certainly an interesting editorial gaffe.
Okay, sure, so I’ll freely admit that i’ve been curious about seeing Deep Throat for a long time. Somehow, I never thought that my first chance would be through the magic of ASCII animation! Curiously engrossing, I’ve got to admit.
Also of note: asciipr0n.com, a collection of ASCII-generated pinups, nudes, and artwork. I remember being at mom’s office years and years ago, discovering, and printing out some of these on the office computer system — it gave me no end of amusement, though I’m not sure what either she or her coworkers thought of me stumbling across them…!
Overview of Changes to Legal Rights
By The Associated Press | September 5, 2002, 11:44 AM EDT
Some of the fundamental changes to Americans’ legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act following the terror attacks:
- FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigation.
- FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests.
- FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
- RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
- FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
- RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
- RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
I just found this image (along with a ton of other [often barcode-based] very cool desktop images) at some site that I can’t read because it’s all in Cryllic (oh, well, would’ja look at that — there’s an English version too…who’da thunk?) — but it’s very cool stuff.
If I was a better artist, I’d want to do similar tricks with the ISSN barcode for this weblog (which I don’t have posted anywhere at the moment, thanks to the verschluggin crash that I’m working on recovering from). Maybe I’ll go ahead and give it a shot eventually…who knows?
One of the stumbling blocks I discovered today about enabling Trackback is that it breaks the W3C Validator — even though I make sure to use valid XHTML 1.0 in my pages, the validator chokes on the RDF code needed for Trackback to work correctly.
Luckily enough, this evening I stumbled across a discussion of this very problem on philringnalda.com. Brad was kind enough to post a (theoretically) simple PHP trick to hide the RDF code from the validator — unfortunately, for some reason it’s just not working for me. Harrumph. Guess I’ll just go with hiding the RDF data inside HTML comment tags for the moment — it’s a little kludgy, but it should work until something better comes along.
End result — the validator likes me again.