Fighting spam by putting a pricetag on e-mail
I’ve written before about this, and now other people are too.
This solution is elegant–I like the “reusable postage” concept.
Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash DX
Acting on a tip, I organized an expedition with Jenny, Drew, and Gwen to the new Alamo Drafthouse up in what I jokingly refer to as “Waco” to see Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash DX. This is one of those things that makes the Alamo great. A compilation running roughly 90 minutes of extremely strange snippets taped off of Japanese television. Before the show proper, they ran trailers of weird Japanese movies–mostly horror and ultraviolence movies–about one-third being made by Beat Takeshi (a one-man weirdness corps).
The weirdness came in three general flavors: tokusatsu (live-action superhero shows like Ultraman) and anime, advertising, and variety show sketches. Most of the clips were from the last category, and all (or nearly all) of them curiously featured the same actor (name unknown) unsuccessfully trying to avoid cracking up in every routine. These variety shows are, very approximately, on the order of the Carol Burnet Show, but in terms of scripts and execution, her show was like Masterpiece Theatre by comparison. This focus was a bit unfortunate–sure, the variety shows are fun, in an incredibly stupid and scatalogical way, but I love the five-second blipverts that are so weird they almost make your brain explode, and there weren’t many of these (I suppose it would be exhausting to sit through an hour of five-second ads). Tokusatsu shows would be worth more focus, because the villains are so incredibly bizarre. For that matter, they could have gotten pretty good mileage out of the many travel-and-eat shows that consist mostly of some pretty young thing oohing over the lapidarian culinary productions of some kitchen-sensei, and then, mouth full of said creation, grunting ã‚ã‚ã‚ã‚ã£!ãŠã„ã—ã„ã„〜!
Oh yes, Japan can be a strange place.
Arrrrrr!
Saw Pirates of the Carribean yesterday. Especially considering this is a movie based on a Disney ride, it is much, much better than it needs to be. Johnny Depp steals the show, boozily sashaying through every scene. Very camp. Lots of laughs. Good action. Some good CGI show-offery, especially where people constantly switch back and forth between normal and skeletal appearances. I recommend it.
PS: This is my 500th blog entry. Woohoo!
Nifty browser trick
I’ve only tried this in Safari, but imagine it would work in some other browsers.
Safari allows you to set a custom base CSS stylesheet. In fact, this is the only way to turn off link underlining in Safari. Since I prefer this, I had already set one up. Simply create a text file, call it “mystyles.css” (or whatever) and drop it in ~/Library/Safari. Put the appropriate CSS in the file, quit Safari, and restart. For example, to turn off underlined links, I used the following:
a:link { text-decoration: none; }
a:active { text-decoration: none; }
a:visited { text-decoration: none; }
a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
It occurred to me that I could use the often-ignored attribute-matching selector capability of CSS to create a primitive ad blocker. Banner ads are normally 468 x 60 pixels. Using CSS, it is possible to select images that have declared height and width values, and style them as invisible. Here’s how:
img[width="468"][height="60"] {visibility: hidden;}
You can add variations on this with different dimensions for the tall sidebar ads one occasionally sees, use it with different tags, etc. For example the New York Times hides gigantic sidebar ads inside an IFRAME, and use javascript to indirectly load an image (actually, I think it’s a flash animation). This makes it hard to block the image if you have javascript turned on, but you can just block the IFRAME instead
iframe[width="352"][height="852"] {visibility: hidden;}
I’d be eager to hear any other uses for this trick. It would be nice if CSS allowed partial matches, so that we could match on, say *[href="*doubleclick.net*"] As far as I know, this isn’t possible.
Rick Santorum on marriage
Marriage is not about affirming somebody’s love for somebody else. It’s about uniting together to be open to children, to further civilization in our society.
Santorum’s remarks (of which this is a comparatively inoffensive sample) are burning up the blogosphere. I’ve been married before–and will be again–without being “open” to kids. If we’re going to have “defense of marriage” laws (or, worse, a constitutional amendment), going by Santorum’s dubious logic, shouldn’t we restrict it to people who are fertile and plan on having children? Why not exclude straight people who are infertile (because of age, biology, or sterilization), or just don’t want kids?
Gwen wondered how Santorum’s wife might feel about his loveless theory of marriage. I suggested she probably reconciled herself to that a long time ago.
TypePad
I really like Movable Type, and have been a fairly active proponent of it. It certainly has its drawbacks, though, not the least of which is that it is very intimidating to set up. But hey, you can’t beat the price–it’s free.
Enter TypePad. This is a hosted Movable Type service, sort of (technically the back-end is a little different from MT). It looks very nice, and it seems clear that the Six Apart people have done a lot of polishing and tweaking to make the user interface and the default blog templates just that much better than what comes with the current version of MT (which are already good). So that solves the difficult set-up problem, but the trade-off is that you pay for it. They’re offering three tiers of service, and it is interesting that they are tying price to user sophistication. That is, the more control you want, the more you must pay.
This strikes me as a misstep, though a minor one. I don’t understand how the ability to manually edit a template (for instance) would actually raise costs, except perhaps for support (and I have no idea how that’ll work)–what should really matter would be storage space, bandwidth usage, things that really impose costs at the back end. I can imagine a non-technical user who wants to use TypePad as a photo album–which would require one of the more expensive accounts–but who would have no desire for the more extensive tweakability that came with it. By the same token, a more sophisticated user with modest server needs would pay for resources that would go unused.
Nevertheless, for people who are sick of Blogger.com (or don’t want to get started there) but don’t want to get their hands dirty with MT, TypePad looks very nice indeed. Some of the handsomest blogs (with the best markup) on the web right now were built using default TypePad templates.
Alleged entertainment
A trip to Fiesta is always entertaining. There’s just so much weird stuff there. On our most recent expedition, Gwen and I noticed a large display of various luck candles. Some with images of saints, some with images of Pancho Villa or other unidentifiable secular figures, but most explicitly promising some kind of specific effect, like JOB. I noticed one that read
ALLEGED SPELL BREAK
Leaving aside snarky observations of the ambiguous reference–is it the spell that is alleged, or the breaking of it–you’ve got to laugh at the legalistic ass-covering implied by that weasel-word. Seriously: is someone going to burn the candle and then sue the maker because whatever spell it was supposed to break had not been broken? I guess stranger things have happened.
When we got to the checkout line, we were behind a couple of young women buying some of these candles (along with various good-luck oils), apparently in earnest.
Fun with names
A fun pastime is inventing goofy names for bands–one of my favorite creations is “Jackal Overpass.”
Lately, Gwen and I have taken to coming up with silly names for drugs. A new competitor for Viagra? Rigiditrex, perhaps. Yesterday I saw an ad for some drug to relieve menstrual constipation. I can’t remember the actual name of the product, but we had a field day with that. My favorite: Period Colon Dash.
Tribe: another social network
Tribe.net is yet another social network, still in beta. Unlike Friendster or Ryze, this one seems to be an all-purpose site, for helping people find each other based on interest or proximity, for whatever purpose they want. Nice interface. I’m signed up, just for fun. Still too soon to say how it will evolve.
Legend of Suriyothai
Saw The Legend of Suriyothai last night. The first Thai movie I’ve ever seen, this tells a story, apparently out of Thai history, of Princess Suriyothai, who was somehow involved in the goings on during a turbulent period in the country’s history in the 1530s.
The movie is epic in scope and length, and may be guilty of biting off more than it can chew–at several points, I wished I had a scorecard. In a period of roughly 20 years, Siam burns through four kings, what with civil conflicts, civil strife, usurpers, and the permanent threat of invasion by a drag queen in Burma.
There is as much treachery and intrigue as you’ll find in any two Shakespeare tragedies put together, along with a character, Srisudachan, who makes Lady Macbeth look like a harmless biddy. For that matter, Srisudachan’s maid makes Lady Macbeth look like a harmless biddy.
The eponymous heroine, however, is a model of wisdom and selflessness, and the whole story strikes me as a Buddhist allegory–world of strife, self-sacrifice for the good of others, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.