Time And The Tradesman

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

Once Time as he prowled the world, his hair grey not with weakness but with dust of the ruin of cities, came to a furniture shop and entered the Antique department. And there he saw a man darkening the wood of a chair with dye and beating it with chains and making imitation wormholes in it.

And when Time saw another doing his work he stood by him awhile and looked on critically.

And at last he said: "That is not how I work," and he turned the man's hair white and bent his back and put some furrows in his little cunning face; then turned and strode away, for a mighty city that was weary and sick and too long had troubled the fields was sore in need of him.

Good News, Everyone! I've Taught The Toaster To Feel Love!

So, uh, what was up with the test entry the other day?  Well, to put it simply, I've been fiddling around with MovableType plugins, and I needed somewhere to test some of my new tags and filters out.  The API isn't too bad, except for the fact that a lot of things depend on grabbing data stored in MT::Template::Context objects, and while the documentation tells you how to get at the data (->stash('key')), it fails to list which keys are used in which context.  So, lots of trial and error ensued.  (And I still haven't figured out everything I wanted.)

Moving on, I've spent the time when I haven't been busy during the past week reading.  So, here're brief reviews of the various books I've finished:

• Conan, by Robert E. Howard (with contributions by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter):  Classic pulp-goodness.  The stories range for quite good (most of the Howard ones), to just OK (the de Camp and Carter ones).  Not even close to how bad most people would probably assume a Conan book would be.  Well, once you get past some of the mildly-offputting racial descriptions, that is.  Howard was very much a product of his environment (early 20th century Texas).
• Foundation's Edge, by Isaac Asimov.  The fourth Foundation novel, it's not nearly as good as the original trilogy.  Part of the reason is that it stems from the period when Asimov began linking his two major series, Foundation and the Robots books, together, and (in my opinion), it suffers because of this.  (Well, that and the fact that it just doesn't feel like a Foundation novel.)
• Against the Fall of Night, by Arthur C. Clarke:  Later re-written as The City and the Stars, and also re-released with a sequel by Gregory Benford as Beyond the Fall of Night.  One of Clarke's first novels, it tells the tale of a boy named Alvin, who yearns to escape from what is believed to be the last city on Earth, to which humans were driven in a war against the Invaders.  It's a short, easy read, and probably one of Clarke's best novels.  I only have one major complaint about it:  the ending is far too abrupt.  It's progressing nicely, and as you start getting near the end a character suddenly appears, who then proceeds to produce several chapters of exposition that explains all the questions from early in the novel, and that's it.  While it wasn't as bad an ending as other authors, whom I shan't name, it was a tad disappointing.
• Finally, The Master & Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.  This novel is just, quite simply, wow.  Written from 1928 up until Bulgakov's death in 1940 (and never completely finished), it's been called one of the masterpieces of Soviet literature.
  To summarise:  the novel has two stories in it.  In the first, which is  inspired by Goethe's Faust, the devil, called Woland, arrives in 1920's Moscow and, along with his companions (Korovyov, a retired choirmaster, the demon Azazello, and Behemoth, a giant, talking black cat), proceeds to wreak havoc on a population that believes in neither God, nor the devil.  The purpose of their visit, though, is to track down Margarita, who is in love with a man known only as the Master—a writer who was publicly ridiculed for daring to write a novel about Pilate.
  The second storyline is the Master's novel, which tells the story of the crucifixtion from Pilate's view.  (Although, that said, the characters in these sections bare very little resemblence to their Biblical counterparts.)
  In short: the novel is satire.  The Moscow sections are heavily Biblical in influence, while the Jerusalem sections feature events and characters that have strong parallels to Stalinist Russia.  It's an amazing novel, and I have to thank Dmitrii and Sasha for recommending Bulgakov to me.
  The only recommendation I have, for anyone who might want to track down a copy, is to watch what translation you get.  The novel wasn't published until 26 years after Bulgakov's death (1966), and even then it was only available in a censored format until the early 70s.  The first two English translations (by Ginsburg and Glenny, respectively), are based off of the censored Russian version, and should be avoided for this reason.

Finally, a pair of links:

The first one comes courtesy of Shan, and has already been seen by some people.  I won't describe it, as the sheer creepiness and wrongness factor would only be mitigated by doing so.  Don't worry, it's entirely safe for work.  (Click here!)

The second one comes to me via my brother, and deserves viewing if only for the hilarity of the video footage that accompanies it.  Basically, a bunch of scientists took a video camera and chased octopuses around with it.  What they found was that the octopuses will attempt to camouflage themselves, and then will run away using two of their tentacles as legs.  Go have a look, and remember to click on the two links in the article.  The videos are probably the funniest thing I've seen all week.

One final note:  this ad showed up at the side of the above New Scientist article when I visited it.  Strangest ad I've seen in a while…

The Prayer Of The Flowers

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

It was the voice of the flowers on the West wind, the lovable, the old, the lazy West wind, blowing ceaselessly, blowing sleepily, going Greecewards.

"The woods have gone away, they have fallen and left us; men love us no longer, we are lonely by moonlight. Great engines rush over the beautiful fields, their ways lie hard and terrible up and down the land.

"The cancrous cities spread over the grass, they clatter in their lairs continually, they glitter about us blemishing the night.

"The woods are gone, O Pan, the woods, the woods. And thou art far, O Pan, and far away."

I was standing by night between two railway embankments on the edge of a Midland city. On one of them I saw the trains go by, once in every two minutes, and on the other, the trains went by twice in every five.

Quite close were the glaring factories, and the sky above them wore the fearful look that it wears in dreams of fever.

The flowers were right in the stride of that advancing city, and thence I heard them sending up their cry. And then I heard, beating musically up wind, the voice of Pan reproving them from Arcady—"Be patient a little, these things are not for long."

We Work Hard. We Play Hard.

Whilst reading a Globe & Mail article on the Californian judge who recently declared that banning gays and lesbians from getting marriage licenses was discrimination, I came across the following quote:

"The two groups opposed to gay marriage rights — The Campaign for California Families and the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund — argued that California has a legitimate interest in restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples as a way of encouraging procreation."

Now, without getting into an actual debate over whether or not gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry, I have to state that I'm having trouble figuring out the logic of their argument.  The judge himself addresses the obvious flaw: "One does not have to be married in order to procreate, nor does one have to procreate in order to be married," but that's not the part that I'm talking about.  Rather, I fail to see how it encourages procreation, in that, regardless of whether they are able to get married, a gay couple can't procreate.^*  And it's not like a gay couple is going to wake up one morning and say "Well, we still can't get married, so let's become heterosexual and have lots of ankle-biters."

Again, in the effort of avoiding flaming, I'm not addressing their position (although my opinion on the issue should be fairly obvious);  I'm merely saying that perhaps they might want to rethink their argument.

*  Yes, I'm aware of lesbian couples that have children via a surrogate father; that's not the point here.

Death And The Orange

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

Two dark young men in a foreign southern land sat at a restaurant table with one woman.

And on the woman's plate was a small orange which had an evil laughter in its heart.

And both of the men would be looking at the woman all the time, and they ate little and they drank much.

And the woman was smiling equally at each.

Then the small orange that had the laughter in its heart rolled slowly off the plate on to the floor. And the dark young men both sought for it at once, and they met suddenly beneath the table, and soon they were speaking swift words to one another, and a horror and an impotence came over the Reason of each as she sat helpless at the back of the mind, and the heart of the orange laughed and the woman went on smiling; and Death, who was sitting at another table, tête-à-tête with an old man, rose and came over to listen to the quarrel.

Javascript Required

Having disabled the MT-DSBL plugin after it blocked valid comments, I've since decided to try another plugin to lower the amount of spam that even gets to the blacklist.  As such, I have installed MT-Keystroke, a plugin that is supposed to detect actual interaction with the form, and then prevent the comment from being posted unless there was the aforementioned interaction.

Admittedly, it's not a particularly well-conceived hack, as I'm pretty sure I can already figure out how to get around it.  (Explanation:  it's based on the idea of a hidden field, however it uses Javascript to change the hidden field from its default value only after there has been actual interaction.)  While I'm sure the code to the actual plugin is nice, the fact that it's essentially just another hidden field hack doesn't make it terribly secure in the long run.  But until it becomes enough of a bother to spammers, it probably will work.  The one downside to this is that Javascript is now required for commenting.  Since I'm probably the only one who ever commented from a non-JS browser, that shouldn't be a problem unless some people who occasionally post comments have turned of JS.  If that's going to be a problem, then email me.  (You can get my email by doing a whois lookup for leftblank.org over on Sam Spade.)

Finally: moving up to a higher position on 'the list' than blog spammers, we find people who operate stealth web-spiders.  The server actually went down today, giving off 503 status codes.  The cause?  A spider, which attempted to cloak itself as MSIE and which therefore ignored my robots.txt, was hitting every link on my website as quickly as it could.  The end result of that many comment scripts trying to run/open new DB connections was to bring the entire machine to a grinding halt.  (And, unfortunately, the requests were spaced out just enough, and with enough other pages thrown in, to prevent mod_dosevasive from kicking it.)

If There's A Steady Paycheck In It, I'll Believe Anything You Say

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the James Randi Educational Foundation's Million Dollar Challenge.  Basically, for the uninformed/too lazy to click on the link: the JREF has a prize of one million dollars available to "anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event."  Basically what this means is that a set of conditions is decided between the Foundation and the applicants, such that the claim can be tested in a way that no non-paranormal factors may affect the outcome.  Two successful tests, a preliminary one and a formal one, are required before the prize can be claimed.  So far no one has passed the preliminary stages.

To get to the point: the Randi Foundation has been in contact over the years with a martial arts group called the Yellow Bamboo.  The Yellow Bamboo claim that they can disable an attacker without the use of physical force.  (The exact method in which they claim to do this is a bit muddled.)  After several years of discussion, the two groups finally agreed on the terms, and preliminary testing was held in Australia on the 30th of January.  The results were videotaped, and I suggest that anyone looking for a quick laugh take a peek at them.  (The third video is a little hard to comprehend, as it's the only one where what's being said is important, and there appears to have been a lot of wind that day.)

Your Grandpa Takes The Funnies Pretty Seriously

As a "I really need to write an actual entry" entry, I present the list of webcomics I visit on a regular basis.

• Sluggy Freelance:  Ok, so I'll admit that 7+ years of archives isn't exactly the most welcoming (especially when current storylines reference previous storylines), but it is an important web comic.  (Ever wonder who to blame when a comic does a stick-figure vacation week by 'Shirt Guy ?om'?  That would Sluggy.)  (Updates daily)
• Errant Story:  By Poe, better known for the now defunct Exploitation Now (Warning: some art on that last link may not be SFW).  It's not as funny as the first half of EN (aka 'the part that didn't have a plot') was, but the ongoing story is more interesting than the second-half of EN.  (Updates MWF)
• Something Positive:  The author recently got some press after he dared his readers to pay his salary for a year so he could quit his job and concentrate on the comic.  (This was brought about by people complaining that the comic was always late.)  It's wordy at times, but I like it. (Updates often.  Not quite daily, but close to it.)
• Mac Hall: Great art, horrible update schedule.  Nothing more I can say.  (Updates WF…most of the time.)
• 8-bit Theatre: Ok, let's get the preliminaries out of the way: Yes, it's a sprite comic.  Yes, the characters are one-dimensional.  Yes, the jokes are often repeated in slightly modified form.  That said, it's probably still the only sprite-based comic that's even worth considering reading.  (Updates TThSat)
• VGCats:  The current comic isn't a good example but, for the most part, it's video-game 'parody' comics.  Not always for those who are easily offended, but I personally find it more consistently funny than the next comic in this list. (Updates M)
• Penny Arcade:  Natch.  (Updates MWF, but you already knew that.)
• Nodwick & Full Frontal Nerdity:  An acquired taste, perhaps, and even then they're not always that funny.  However, it does kill a bit of time when I really don't want to do work.  (Updates W, usually, but sometimes Th)

That's it.  Although I'm not sure that this counts as any more of an entry than posting someone else's writing does.

Posted by g026r at 23:50 | 2 comments | Most recent by g026r

Death And Odysseus

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was unsightly, and because She couldn't help it, and because he never did anything worth doing, and because She would.

And Death hated being laughed at, and used to brood apart thinking only of his wrongs and of what he could do to end this intolerable treatment.

But one day Death appeared in the courts with an air and They all noticed it. "What are you up to now?" said Love. And Death with some solemnity said to Her: "I am going to frighten Odysseus"; and drawing about him his grey traveller's cloak went out through the windy door with his jowl turned earthwards.

And he came soon to Ithaca and the hall that Athene knew, and opened the door and saw there famous Odysseus, with his white locks bending close over the fire, trying to warm his hands.

And the wind through the open door blew bitterly on Odysseus.

And Death came up behind him, and suddenly shouted.

And Odysseus went on warming his pale hands.

Then Death came close and began to mouth at him. And after a while Odysseus turned and spoke. And "Well, old servant," he said, "have your masters been kind to you since I made you work for me round Ilion?"

And Death for some while stood mute, for he thought of the laughter of Love.

Then "Come now," said Odysseus, "lend me your shoulder," and he leaning heavily on that bony joint, they went together through the open door.