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It's pretty easy to choose between Ian Smith (recently slandered in his New York Times obituary) and Robert Mugabe, whose "Zimbabwe" is part of Jimmy Carter's shining legacy.
11:31 | link | | |
Or, Superman as the new Hercules: a fascinating detective story from Chris Knowles.
11:17 | link | | |
What to do when the kids need to make paper snowflakes.
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The clue I needed to fix the problem was at the bottom of this stretch
of config variables in /etc/a2ps.cfg:
################################################################# # 1) Definition of some media # # (Must be defined before --medium) # ################################################################# # Medium: name, width height [llx lly urx ury] Medium: A3 842 1190 Medium: A4 595 842 Medium: A5 420 595 Medium: B4 729 1032 Medium: B5 516 729 Medium: Letter 612 792 Medium: Legal 612 1008 Medium: Tabloid 792 1224 Medium: Ledger 1224 792 Medium: Statement 396 612 Medium: Executive 540 720 Medium: Folio 612 936 Medium: Quarto 610 780 Medium: 10x14 720 1008 # Desk Jet users: bigger margins Medium: A4dj 595 842 24 50 571 792 Medium: Letterdj 612 792 24 40 588 752
So, we need to set explicit margins for deskjet printers, but the
given margins didn't work for my HP 950C. So there's a job for
~/.a2ps/a2psrc with numbers I derived by trial, error,
and printing a dozen pages:
# Medium: name, width height [llx lly urx ury] Medium: hp950c 612 792 10 85 578 790
Here's a script to print emails 2-up from gnus:
~/bin/printmail
a2ps -=mail -2 -M hp950c
In gnus, put the cursor on the message in the summary buffer, type
`|' and tell it to run printmail.
Here's what I printed:
Subject: [cath_hs] Fwd: Zuppa Toscana we had this last night and it was VERY good. very spicy. we will make it next time, with half mild and half hot sausage. instead of fresh kale, i used frozen, dethawed and squeezed dry with my hands. also, i used only 3 carrots, not 5. diced the celery and carrots small, since that's the only way our fam will eat them. chopped my taters into bite size pieces. used light cream, but put a whole cup in to cut some of the spice. parmesan is just as fine for a garnish, instead of romano. 2 quarts is 8 cups of stock. :-) rachel ray would call this a "stoup". it's a thick and hearty soup. nice with biscuits. broth is flavorful and creamy. made a whole lotta soup. tons of leftovers for the two of us. i think someone emailed me the recipe, but i can't find the original email. thank you!! love mel Begin forwarded message: > Date: November 12, 2007 12:05:01 PM EST > Subject: Zuppa Toscana > > Zuppa Toscana (adapted from Olive Garden's) > > 2 lbs. hot Italian Sausage patties > 2 lg. onion, chopped > 3 stalks celery, sliced thinly > 5 carrots, sliced > 6 cloves garlic, minced > 2 qts. chicken stock > 3 lbs. russet potatoes, chopped coarsely > 1 bunch kale, leaves stripped of stem and chopped coarsely > 1/2 c. cream, whatever type you like > romano cheese to garnish > > Saute the sausage in dutch oven over medium heat until it is > cooked. (If you can't find the patties, use links, just squeeze out > the sausage before cooking.) Remove the sausage from pan, and pour > off most of the grease. Put onions, celery, and carrots into the pan > and saute until onions are translucent. Add garlic and cook 2 > mins. more, stirring frequently. Add stock. Bring to boil and add > potatoes. Cook until potatoes are done. Add kale leaves and cook 5 > mins. Remove from heat and add cream. It is now done! When serving, > garnish with romano (pecorino romano is the best for this). This soup > is even better the next day. If hot sausage is too much, mild italian > sausage can be substituted, but the flavor is not as "punchy".
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There was an earthquake today in Martinique. I fired up a kml file in Google Earth and the thing flew to an island off the coast of South America! Grenada is down there, too, along with Trinidad & Tobago, etc. All my life I thought those little islands were some vague where between Florida and Puerto Rico, kinda like the Bahamas.
By the way, check out the new "Terrain" button in Google Maps.
18:22 | link | | |
Here's something of an obituary of Ivan Illich from Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple.
10:12 | link | | |
Every homeschooling parent is tired of hearing that question. Folks seem to think it's good for children to spend all day with their age-peers. One of our standard replies is that we're aiming more for civilization than socialization.
In his February 2006 essay about Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison psychiatrist, described one of the common effects of g-school socialization:
And Mr. Burgess foresaw the importance that the youth culture would attach to sexual precocity and a kind of disabused knowingness. It would not have surprised Mr. Burgess that magazines for 10- or 11-year-old girls are now full of advice about how to make themselves sexually attractive, or that girls of 6 or 7 are dressed by their single mothers in costumes redolent of prostitution.
The precocity necessary to avoid humiliation by peers prevents young people from maturing further and leaves them in a state of petrified adolescence. Persuaded that they already know all that is necessary, they are disabused about everything, for fear of appearing naive.
With no deeper interests, they are prey to gusts of hysterical and childish enthusiasm; only increasingly extreme sensations can arouse them from their mental torpor. Hence the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has followed in the wake of the youth culture.
The world in which youth culture predominates and precocity is the highest achievement is one in which all tenderness is absent. When Alex and his gang attack the teacher, they find a letter in his pocket, which one of them reads out derisively: "My darling one ... I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night."
Such simple and heartfelt affection and concern for another person are extinct in the world of Alex and his droogs. Self-absorbed, Alex is self-pitying but has no pity for others. All relations with other human beings are instrumental means to a selfish, brutal, hedonistic end.
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This article from Bruce Fein in the Washington Times seems a bit overdone to me. It's the usual "we've done gone to Hell in a handbasket" bit that every generation comes up with as they look back to Washington and Jefferson and then look around at their own era's US Grant or Harry Truman or, God help us, Jimmy Carter.
Sure, things have gone downhill ever since we first headed east from Eden. Every generation looks at their youngsters and foretells disaster; forty years later those youngsters look at theirs and foretell the same. And yet it all works out somehow and we keep stumbling along.
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A rambling post for calendar geeks...
The other night Tom McGinnis kindly sent me a patch for cal-catholic, a program I wrote years ago in emacs lisp to calculate each day's liturgical information. For example, it says that today is "Wednesday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time". So this evening after I wrapped up a hairy thing for work (which makes me sound like one of those nature show guys) I took the rest of the night off and puttered around with calendar documentation.
Tom and I discussed the odd divergence of the Annunciation and St Joseph next year. In previous years when they fell during Holy Week and the octave of Easter, they would be transferred together to the Monday and Tuesday of the second week of Easter. That was the implemention I found in the 1951 Catholic Almanac, when St Joe fell on the Monday of Holy Week and the Annunciation a week later in the octave of Easter. IIRC we never found official documentation for the thing, so I coded that behavior based on past practice.
According to the September 2006 newletter of the USCCB's liturgy committee, that's what the US bishops were going to do next year when St Joe falls on the Wednesday of Holy Week and the Annunciation a week later. Then, apparently, someone read a past issue of Notitiae and found that some liturgy guy at the Vatican said that St Joe should be anticipated (moved back) to the Saturday before Palm Sunday while leaving Annunciation to be transferred (moved forward) to Monday of the second week of Easter. I dunno why - the bishops have only a partial translation in their newsletter and the article in Notitiae is probably in Italian or somesuch. If anyone can provide an original or a translation of the March-April, 2006 Notitiae piece (475-476, page 96), I'd be grateful.
ZOUNDS! Since I blog from emacs nowadays, I could incorporate cal-catholic into the blog somehow.
21:58 | link | | |
Here's an old Dalrymple article, "Ahead of Its Time", at the Dallas Morning News. Incipit:
When, as a medical student in England, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story's adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called "ultraviolence."
21:27 | link | | |
New Steyn, "Bold as Brass", is up at SteynOnline under "Steyn on Britain and Europe". The incipit:
The other week, in Wednesbury in the English Midlands, an unusual crime occurred. A thief passed down a residential street and methodically stole every single front door handle and house number. The victims discovered the burglary when they tried to leave their homes and found the door no longer opened. An Englishman's home may be his castle but if you can't let down the drawbridge it's indistinguishable from a dungeon.
21:24 | link | | |
That was the first bit of advice Joe Grohens gave me when I started working at Wolfram Research in 1996, and it's still the best programming maxim I know. I just rediscovered its value.
Five years ago Dave and I were editing some documentation source files when we found some old TeX macros that weren't used anymore. He left them in the code and defined them as no-ops, while I was leaning towards getting rid of them all. And there those macros sat doing nothing for half a decade til tonight when I suddenly needed the information they preserved.
Never throw away information.
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We have excellent but danged expensive insurance through Wolfram Research, so we investigated Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's "KidCare rebate" program. If you're approved, you get a monthly check from Governor Rod to help cover the cost of insurance premiums.
Nice, eh? Not so much. We don't make the $X.00 per month required to have our kids covered by the rebate program, and we don't make the $X.00 + $300.00 per month required to cover all of us.
Yes, we're too poor to receive help with our insurance premiums. It then became obvious what the governor is up to. Poor people like us shouldn't have medical insurance at all - we should be vassals of the all-powerful Democrats who run Illinois like a plantation and we should receive all care and treatment through them. The high thresholds for rebates are an incentive to leave insurance and enter the state system, which we can't bring ourselves to trust with our special-needs children.
A point to remember in the upcoming presidential campaign season: Illinois' health program is a testbed for HillaryCare's socialized medicine.
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In this radar image the line between mixed and frozen runs right over our little town.
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From Michael Yon via Glenn Reynolds:
GREAT COUNTERINSURGENCY, KID — don't get cocky: "I had the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with General Petraeus. Very interesting series of helicopter flights to several bases. Bottom line is that progress is clear and real, but there are tough days ahead and al Qaeda, for instance, is far from dead. The mood is of cautious optimism, with a concern that some of the very positive media lately might set expectations too high. (That’s right: many military leaders are concerned that the media lately might be too positive.)"
Now I see what the news outlets are up to. They'll start reporting the good news from Iraq and paint it as a paradise so any al-Quaeda breakouts that come along will make it seem worse than ever. When some Mohammad al-Asshat with a bomb blows up himself and the local dogcatcher, journalists will be able to report about the flagging surge, grim milestones, resurgent violence and whatnot just in time for the early primaries.
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Once in a while I consider buying a scratching post for the cats, but I'm glad I haven't. Harry has been using a stray piece of cardboard on the floor and it seems to be providing the same service as a scratching post (shedding the outer layers of his claws), for absolutely free. It makes a bit of a mess when he rips a piece off, but with 5 kids running around it's not even noticeable :-)
Casey doesn't need it since some sadist had her front claws amputated as a kitten, which has led her to develop her own kitty-fu fighting style: she lays on her side and strikes with her back claws.
Speaking of fighting styles, we haven't seen any Rumsfeld goodness in a while:
I miss the old guy.
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A good article from Jonathan Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe:
...we seem now to be watching the Great War crossing that threshold of about three generations whereafter it will be difficult for people to be attached to its memory any longer. It will join the other stuff that we study in the past, where relevance is not immediately apparent and has to be argued, or else can even, eventually, be disowned because popular attachment is now so weak that just interest is a more powerful justification, which puts you about where I was with the previous post in this series. And it will be our job as historians, is already some of our jobs, to try and bring stuff like that back as far as it can be brought back, and to try and tell what it was and what it was like, with imaginative reconstruction where necessary and steadfast adherence to the evidence where possible and so on.
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In its legal or constitutional essense it wasn't a war between the states, and it wasn't north versus south. It was the national government versus a breakaway sectional government. I haven't thought this through, of course, because I have code to write and diapers to change and cigarettes to smoke.
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One of the Russian guys at work emailed me this morning and asked if I'm related to the Illinois Secretary of State, Jesse White. It's not likely, but you never know in America.
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An 1873 London edition of the Advent homilies of St Thomas Aquinas at Google Books:
08:52 | link | | |
If your website starts playing music when I visit it, I'll immediately close the damn thing and not visit again.
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If you've forgotten your basic Constitutional principles, here's an introduction from a reliable source: James McClellan: Liberty, Order, and Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government (1989).
That's at the Online Liberty Library at the Liberty Fund; here's an obituary of James McClellan, who died in 2005.
22:24 | link | | |
Received on a homeschooling list today: an odd amalgam of Ben Stein's 2005 essay on Christmas and standard Protestant spam boilerplate.
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If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.
Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.
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I haven't thought this through, but this sort of Confederate apologetics sounds like a petulant spouse trying to justify divorce:
The Gettysburg Address was brilliant oratory, but it was also political subterfuge. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, it was the Southerners who were fighting for the consent of the governed and it was Lincoln's government that opposed them. They no longer consented to being governed by Washington, DC. Lincoln's admonition that government "of the people, by the people, for the people" would perish from the earth if the right of secession were sustained was equally absurd. The United States remained a democracy, and the Confederate States of America would have been a democratic country as well. Lincoln's notion that secession would "destroy" the government of the United States is also bizarre in light of the fact that after secession took place the US government fielded the largest and best-equipped army and navy in the history of the world up to that point for four long years.
From lewrockwell.com via the wikipedia entry for Paleoconservatism. I once leaned toward the 1980s pre-internet sort of paleoconservatism with its then-excellent magazine Chronicles and Pat Buchanan's autobiography. I left them when I discovered they're shot through with Jew-hatred.
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Today's blog roundup
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Just arrived today: Spiritual Friendship by St Aelred of Rievaulx. It's unfortunate that so many today take Aelred's "friendship" to mean "sodomy". As Eve Tushnet put it delicately, "apparently it... speaks to a wide range of people." Her quick review is there at the link, along with a mention of Alice von Hildebrand's essay on friendship. One blurb on the back of the book mentions Cicero's essay on friendship, so it's high atop Mt Toberead, too; just east of the pile of laundry, Mt Neverest.
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How does he do it? I forget which of the prolific Blossers runs the Ratzinger Fan club, but he sure makes it look easy when it's not.
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Two of my many great-uncles, John K Bragg and Osa Bragg, went to France in 1918. Uncle Osa kept a box of memorabilia from his tour through France and Germany that was given to me after he died. It's upstairs high atop a closet shelf to keep the kids away from it - I really need to get the material scanned and on the web, perhaps with the help of our two oldest.
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My previous pair was a cheap dusty set I found at the local Pamida. They broke once in the middle of the headband and I repaired them with a curtain rod and a bunch of duct tape. A couple of days ago the band broke just above the earpiece, so it was time for another pair.
The pair I bought today are made by Winchester (the product info is out in the car, maybe I'll post it later). They're larger, quieter and more comfortable than the fragile no-names.
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The old Soviet aircraft carrier Kiev is now an attraction at a Chinese theme park. Isn't their space shuttle Buran parked in a playground somewhere? google... no, the static test model is in Gorky Park; the Buran that flew was crushed when its hanger collapsed a few years ago.
Heh - here's what Soviet websites would have looked like if the Commies had made it another ten years to the internet age (link to buran.ru).
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Dang! The only thing better than a mention in Spanning the Globe is a mention immediately above it :-)
And about the dearth of ye olde archaick language:
"Didst" and "Thy" are, sadly, gone from today's Mass books. Reverence is out, casualness in, both in terms of what we wear to Mass and what we sing.
You might say we exchanged Thy's for thighs.
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1. Who is the last person you took a photograph of?
Caroline the new 3-year-old wearing a new dress during her birthday party yesterday afternoon.
2. What decade do you hold the most dear and why?
The 790s, the 1520s... wait, I should probably go with one that had electricity and such. The 2000s - the hectic decade in which our kids grew up.
3. Take the quiz: What mystical creature are you?
Oh good God.
4. What is your favorite alcoholic beverage?
Guinness, cheap wine.
5. What do you normally wear to bed?
Nothing but Brut, baby! Er, no. Flannel shirt & cut-off sweat pants.
6. What movie character do you most identify with?
Yosemite Sam.
05:27 | link | | |
Lisa's parents sent us off on a date last night while they stayed home and watched the kids. It was kinda strange at the Champaign Olive Garden - no one screamed, I didn't see any poop, no one walked on chairs or fought over sippy cups. A couple of cell phones rang, of course, but that's not as offensive as dirty diapers. Almost, but not quite.
We thoroughly enjoyed food we didn't have to cook and we polished off a whole damn bottle of the house blush, whatever it was - started with a 'P', then hit Toys-R-Us and Barnes & Noble for Christmas shopping. We got a shopping cart at the toy store but, realizing we could do it online without all this tedious walking and picking through prostitot clothes, we just bought a set of stacking cups for Caroline's Christmas.
At the bookstore Lisa checked out the kids' and education sections while I settled down with B16's Jesus of Nazareth. The introduction to that book is not the thing to read after a big meal. We finally bought some nicely printed and bound copies of Heidi, Swiss Family Robinson and something else for readaloud times, and a book about <something> for <a certain 9-year-old who might read this blog.>
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Here's a NYT article on Daniel Cassidy's work on American slang, much of which he traces to Gaelic words brought here by Irish immigrants. Also, here are a couple of articles on slang from Mr Cassidy in Counterpunch. He's the director of the Irish Studies program at the New College of California in San Francisco.
And here's a critique of Cassidy's work from lexicographer Grant Barrett.
UPDATE: Cassidy has taken a lot of heat in the lexicography blogosphere for his phonetic matching; here's a similar approach to video subtitling, courtesy of the matchless Buffalax.
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Or, a guide to the language spoken in Baltimore, Maryland.
UPDATE: here's the Lexicon of Bawlamarese or, How to co-moon-icate wiff the natives.
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Greg Popcack has a devastating takedown of Gary Will's recent screed in support of abortion. Hat tip: Amy Welborn.
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This looks interesting - free-reading.net, a mediawiki-based website for teachers:
Free-Reading is an "open source" instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it's open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It's designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical "core" or "basal" program.
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And the NER has a blog, The Iconoclast.
Hat tip: Kathy Shaidle.
Some excerps...
Who knew the ancient Romans were Anglicans?
Probably, but not certainly. Gibbon tells us that in Rome, religious observance, highly syncretic in nature, was adhered to by people who did not accept the truth of the beliefs that supposedly underlay their observance. They continued with their observance because of the social value of religion: in other words, truth was less important to them than social coherence. Before we denounce those Romans as hypocrites and liars, we should remember how often, for the sake of social ease and convenience, we say and do things that are neither true nor convenient to us personally. Show me a man who is sincere all the time, and I will show you an insufferable boor.
Which reminds me of a joke a friend used to use in his email signature: "there is no one, from Franco to Chairman Mao to the Dalai Lama, who can go to bed at night sure that he is not an Anglican."
On the lack of, say, Lutheran terrorists in Minnesota:
The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.
On the misguided religion-hatred of Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk:
Islamism is a worthy target, of course, but by now one that has been pretty well aimed at (though I recommend very strongly the forthcoming book from Encounter Books, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest). To suggest, however, that all forms of religion are equal, that they are all murderous and dangerous, is not to serve the cause of freedom and tolerance. It is to play into the hands of the very people we should most detest; it is to hand them the rhetorical tools with which they can tell the gullible that our freedoms are not genuine and that our tolerance is a masquerade. It is to do what I should previously have thought was impossible, namely in this respect to put them in the right.
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Gah! The best (and only?) drive-through Chinese restaurant in Chambana, the Hot Wok Express on University, is closed til the end of the month for remodeling. What am I going to do?
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Here's a website devoted to planets around other stars - the current count is 220.
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<shrug> - hat tip: Chris Weimer at Thoughts on Antiquity (a genius-level blog :-)
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This afternoon I challenged our 10-year-old train expert and master googler Christopher to find (in 2 minutes) a picture taken at the completion of the transcontinental railway at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. In 90 seconds he had found an entire website devoted to the area: the Golden Spike National Historical Site (complete with the old photos I was thinking of). Here's a history text written by National Park historians Robert M. Utley and Francis A. Ketterson, Jr.
14:49 | link | | |
A must-read: Mark Styen's essay Twenty years ago today. Hat tip: Eric Scheske.
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Mr Curley at Bethune Catholic runs Requiem Press, a Catholic publishing business. Over the weekend the bright bulbs at NaviSite, his webhosting company, messed up a relocation project and his company's website has been down since then. I suppose the lesson to learn from this is to keep your internet services as local as possible. UPDATE: he's back online at http://requiempress.blogspot.com/. UPDATE 2: his original website is up again at http://www.requiempress.com/
In an ironic twist of history, Karl Marx's dream has come true in modern-day America: workers can easily own the means of production. If you run an internet-based business, it may be worth the money and sysadmin hassle to run your own webserver (while still making remote backups).
It costs almost nothing to get a decent computer from a junkyard or a freecycle list and set up a webserver under Ubuntu. It can even run mediawiki (the software behind wikipedia), blogs and other content management systems, all downloadable for free.
The main costs are high-speed internet access, if it's available in your area, and the time it takes to learn how to secure the server.
10:01 | link | | |
Courtesy of local homeschooler Andrea Rice, here's a website devoted to the Federalist Papers, which makes a nice complement to the majestic Founders' Constitution website.
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My introduction to JS Bach's works for solo violin was a set of cassette recordings by Jascha Heifetz I found in the 1980s. That was all I knew and it was delicious stuff. I'd go to sleep with the cassette player at my bedside, J. Heifetz playing the most beautiful music I'd ever heard.
I recently listened to those Heifetz tapes and found them haggard, tired, sloppy, with an "I don't give a damn I'll make it mine" approach to the music. I've heard others tackle these works, and they've all been better: the best have a frightening energy confident enough to serve the music and powerful enough to keep up with Bach at his best.
Speaking of Bach, my first Bach Magnificat was another random tape from the 80s, and it's the best I've heard. The soprano who sings the first solo part, "Et exsultavit spiritus meus", can make or break the whole thing; this one supplied a sweetness and innocence with her technical ability. The worst come across as not much better than the odious Ethel Merman - fat brassy and overbearing.
Speaking of Ethel Merman, I get to overhear some of the websites our kids visit. The one I detest the most is John Tartaglia's Johnny and the Sprites - some kinda strange psychological dissociation in a petulant Ethel Merman voice. Blecch.
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This is the first post under the tag TheodoreDalrymple - a collection of writings from one of this generation's best essayists.
What the New Atheists Don't See: City Journal, Autumn 2007
Related links:
10:02 | link | | |
The mother-daughter team of Dorris W. Goodrich and Anne Goodrich Heck have put together a website devoted to the Annunciation.
The authors—mother and daughter—came to this subject independently of one another and from different paths. Each has been working on it for over fifteen years, collecting visual representations of the Annunciation scene, searching out amplifications of the story, and comparing the ways in which the image has been represented at different times in a variety of cultures. The mother is primarily interested in the history of its representation, while the daughter is concerned with how the spiritual meaning of the image is reflected in Christian art.
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I have plans for Bernard's sermons on the Missus Est; here's what else I turned up.
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There's a conflict between texinfo's install-info and the one distributed with Gutsy - if you install texinfo, its install-info will fail during Gutsy's auto updates. If you typically install software via apt-get and you don't need texinfo's install-info, just rename it to, say, install-info-texinfo. That will move it out of the way so Gutsy can find its own install-info. Then updates ahoy - all is well again.
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What do Planned Parenthood of East Central Illinois, the Illinois Disciples Foundation and Champaign County Health Care Consumers have in common? A commitment to continuing the sexual abuse of underage girls:
From 3 to 6 today Planned Parenthood will be giving away free emergency contraception at the Illinois Disciples Foundation at the corner of Springfield and Wright on campus.
EC is a special dose of ordinary birth control that can prevent pregnancy if taken within 5 days of unprotected sex, contraceptive failure, or sexual assault. EC prevents prevents pregnancy and has no effect if a woman is already pregnant. Getting EC ahead of time is a great way to back up your birth control just in case.
No age restrictions on free EC!
No money, No hassle - Just free EC!
Emergency Contraception provided by Planned Parenthood of East Central Illinois : (217) 359-8022
For more information:
Champaign County Health Care Consumers
(217) 352-6533 - allison@healthcareconsumers.org
www.healthcareconsumers.org
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I installed Wordpress today so Sarah the diarist can have a blog. After a hitting a spot of trouble I considered signing her up for a free public blog at wordpress.com but I quickly woke up and realized that's not an option. When she's an adult she can blog whatever whe wants wherever she wants; til then she can blog on our home intranet.
The catch: when we accessed the blog from another computer via http://billw-desktop/sarah/wordpress the address was translated to http://localhost/sarah/wordpress. Turns out I had her configuration slightly wrong: under wp-admin -> Options, I had used http://localhost/sarah/wordpress in "WordPress address (URL)" and "Blog address (URL)"; after changing localhost to the computer's router-assigned IP address, all was well - now she can blog from any computer in the house.
Here are a couple of samples of her writing. First, from her third-person wikipedia entry:
Caroline Margaret White is two-and-a-half years old. (All of Sarah's brothers and sisters are and-a-halfs, but not her.) The White family does not know her favorite thing to do, but she "sings" a lot in baby talk. Though she is almost three, she can't talk much.
And this from her first blog post, about our Halloween celebration yesterday:
After a while it was time for the scavenger hunt. We were supposed to find some candy. Daddy had made clues, and the first one was in Daddy's pocket. It said:
Go into the pink room, where ghosts blow through the air. Look at the hockey table, the one that blows air.
I forgot whether those are the exact words he used, but never mind... maybe he will tell them to me later.
The scavenger hunt was upstairs. Daddy came with us. He said he did it 'to protect us from ghosts and goblins.' There were no ghosts or goblins up there, but sometimes Daddy jumped out through the door of a room we were passing by, and roared like a monster. We laughed when he did that! Eventually we found the candy, on the top bunk of the bunk-beds in the blue room, in a basket that looked like a jack-o'-lantern.
20:28 | link | | |
This bit from Glenn Reynolds reminded me of something. On our last trip to Indiana it was strange to see Anglo-Saxon-style Hoosiers doing outdoors work. Here in Illinois Mexicans do that sort of work outside the smaller towns. Why the difference?
09:59 | link | | |
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey
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And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.—St John of Patmos
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