The first larynx transplant, performed three years ago, was today announced to be a success. The patient had his throat crushed in a motorcycle accident and wasn't able to speak for the next twenty years. He's heard tapes of the larynx's donor and says they don't sound anything alike.(interesting!) I read this in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette but can't seem to find it online anywhere...
Here we go: Transplant Surgery Successful, from 1998; Larynx Transplant Candidates Wanted, from a few weeks ago; and (thank Google!) Larynx Transplant Patient Doing Well, from today's news. They did find the candidate they wanted, by the way - he had his larynx removed due to cancer.
Yesterday was my first day interning at the (national) aviary. Tomorros I'm going back, and on my way home I'm ging to pick up a tiny little iguana. Finally!
"They've eliminated the middle man. The corporations don't have to lobby the government any more. They ARE the government." (from CamWorld)
Now here's a new feature for you: skins for Loxosceles. If you hate the current design, or just miss one of its previous incarnations, you're in luck. We have the black-and-amber, monochrome terminal-inspired original design (what was I thinking?!); the grey one with the gargoyle; and last month's flavor-of-the-month, which you may recall was black and tan and frankly my favorite so far (ditched largely for its incompatibility with most or all browsers) I've also thrown in a text version with no bells and no whistles, at all, not even cute little ascii-art ones, for those using speech readers or anything of the sort.
I was playing with a speech reader myself, having just discovered festival. And when festival began to read this page, it started in the logical place - the beginning of that big ol' ascii-art spider. I thought it was entertaining but I wouldn't want to listen to it all the time.
My dad was so proud of himself today. He accompanied my aunt (who is having a prefab house put on a section of land on my grandpap's farm - they brought in the house already but she's responsible for her own flooring) to a place that sells tile, and while they were there he saw a fishtank with, as he put it, "very clear water and brightly colored fish". He had seen such a tank once before and I (and Becky, who was there) explained to him that saltwater tanks are deceptively clear, and that fluorescent colored fish are characteristic of saltwater. He continued: "So I asked, 'Is that saltwater?' and they said 'yes'!" and with that he gave a little hop of glee and walked away. :-)
With all the hype about micropayments, you'd think it would occur to someone to allow micropurchases. Today, at a physical store, I bought a bottle of Kashmiri Chai of the Honest Tea brand (which has a very beautiful, if frames-ridden, website). And I was telling my boyfriend about it, since we both love chai but in our experience, despite always being labeled as a tea, it tastes nothing like tea. It tastes more like hot chocolate where you've put in so much vanilla and cinnamon that you can't taste the chocolate anymore. Furthermore, chai has a long and storied past, which is always narrated on the back of the label. Sometimes it is a secret recipe that only nobility were permitted to drink; sometimes it is a beverage once sold in clay cups to weary pilgrims. Its origin is usually somewhere in Asia. In any case, this bottle of chai that I bought was an actual bottle of tea; it is clear rather than creamy, and there are only 34 calories in the whole bottle, thereby attesting that it is mostly water rather than mostly milk and corn syrup. Chai tea, I tell my incredulous boyfriend, that is actually tea! (and the narrative on the back is confined to one modest and perhaps even accurate sentence: "The people of Kashmir have mixed spices into their chai for generations.")
Now, this tea isn't particularly good - it's an OK tea but its value (to myself and Chris) lies in its mere existence. Chris is, at present, approximately 250 miles away from me (and 107 degrees from magnetic north ... but I digress). So I wander over to honesttea.com, and they do sell their tea online. Maybe I can order a bottle or two for him! But it turns out that not only does it cost more per bottle than it would to buy in the store - and they don't have the Kashmiri Chai flavor - I would have to spend a minimum of $28 to get any tea at all out of them. why, oh why, can I not buy $2 worth of tea? Listen up, businesspeople: let me buy small amounts of stuff, and I'll buy a whole lot more off the internet.
One more thing about beveragesdirect.com (the place Honest Tea sells their beverages through): I really, really, really appreciate not having to click through a half-dozen pages and come within a hair's breadth of buying the stuff just to find out the cost of shipping.
Now that I'm back home in Pittsburgh (as usual, having the spent the school year up at Alfred), let me tell you a little bit about this place. Actually, no, let me tell you a little about the ballpark that nobody asked for.
Once upon a time, the Pirates played in Forbes Field, which was eventually deemed too old-fashioned, so Three Rivers Stadium was then built sometime in the '70s. In the '90s, with Three Rivers not even paid off yet, the stadium was deemed not old-fashioned enough (who decides these things, I don't know) and so we ended up with a new ballpark.
This article from the Post-Gazette tells most of the story about how the dreaded PNC Park was foisted upon a city full of people who didn't want it:
The city alone couldn't afford such a project, and Republican county Commissioners Larry Dunn and Bob Cranmer were staunch opponents, so the idea was hatched to ask voters in 11 counties if they would raise their sales tax burden to build a new ballpark, football stadium and an enlarged convention center. Despite the most expensive local campaign in history, and even though Cranmer broke ranks to ally himself with Murphy and Democratic county Commissioner Mike Dawida, the referendum bombed.
To this day, you can hear people saying they thought they had said 'no.' But a backdoor strategy -- a generic Plan B -- had been readied before the 1997 referendum. The key was tapping into the existing 1 percent sales tax surcharge in Allegheny County without having to ask the voters.
But even that took some tinkering with the Regional Assets District board that controlled the surcharge revenue. Plan B was one vote short of passage until Cranmer replaced an appointee who opposed the idea. The local share for the project -- $143 million -- was approved by the bare minimum majority in July 1998.
The Pirates' share, $44 million, came in part from the sale of the stadium's naming rights to PNC Bank, which paid $30 million for 20 years. The announcement that the new park would be named after a bank was booed at a Pirates game; some suggested it ought to be named Jammed Down The Taxpayers Throat Park.
A pretty sweet deal, for the Pirates - a new stadium for only $14 million. At the time, I wished I was old enough to vote so that I could vote down the referendum. Turns out it wouldn't have mattered.
While I was away at school, construction began on both new stadiums (the other is for the Steelers, our football team) and the contents of Three Rivers were auctioned off amidst controversy - in part because only a few hundred seats (and other items) were auctioned off at prices too high for the average fan, while thousands of seats were either taken by the demolition company or went down with the stadium. In the meantime, the demolition was being financed by ticket sales from a raffle in which tickets cost $10 and the lucky winner got to push the plunger (a strictly ceremonial plunger, mind you, with the actual detonation controlled by someone else) that blew up the stadium. Ticket sales didn't come close to covering the cost - not enough people hated the old stadium that much. Or, perhaps, not enough people cared about the stadium(s) at all.
Plenty of interesting stadium-related things happened while the whole story was unfolding, some of which I've forgotten and some of which, being out of town, I never heard about. One of the interesting tidbits is that a drunk woman managed to somehow accidentally drive through a construction ramp onto the field one night - that story made it into News of the Weird just this week. Controversy abounded throughout the project as the taxpayers-with-a-grudge accused the various officials involved of acting out of greed. In many cases, I suspect, they were right.
So this is PNC Park's first season. and the latest controversy is raging: in contrast to the old policies at Three Rivers (which were supposed to be upheld), the PNC Park rules disallow nearly all food and drink from entering the park, though plenty of it is sold within. The reasoning is ostensibly that fans may bring alcoholic beverages (nevermind that beer is sold inside the park). The Post-Gazette was filled with the outrage of columnists, editors, and letter-writers over the policies, so the owner of the Pirates finally agreed to allow small bottles of water:
"I am doing this becuase I have heard from the fans," McClatchy said at a news converence at PNC Park. "The fans have made it clear. I'm not doing this for any elected officials, and I'm not doing this for the media. I'm doing this because the fans have spoken. I've heard them. They want to bring bottled water in."
This was from a Post-Gazette article yesterday. (Have I mentioned how hard it is to find anything on the P-G's website?) It goes on:
[City Councilman Dan Cohen] said the Pirates have banned fans from bringing in plastic bottles of beverages for only one reason -- to earn greater revenue from drink sales.
McClatchy conceded the point. He said he needs the revenue from such food and drink sales to help him compete with other ballclubs.
I don't think I need to mention how stupid it is that they ban any food or drink items at all, or how disappointing that the best Cohen is asking for is for all bottled nonalcoholic drinks be allowed (what's wrong with alcoholic drinks, huh, if they're allowed inside?), or how aggravating that any establishment increases their sales of beverages by artificially increasing the demand ... but how many ballclubs do you have to compete with? "Hey, instead of going to the Pirates game this weekend, let's go watch whoever's playing at the Cleveland stadium. I hear they have slightly cheaper hot dogs!"
There's a cheap perl conference called YAPC going on in Quebec next month. Looks like I might get to go!
If I were a cat, I would be an ocicat.
I'd always considered picking locks to be a skill I didn't have the time or patience to learn - and then I saw my dad pick a lock today. It took him all of about 30 seconds (though he said it was an eaiser lock than most, and explained why.) I've got to learn now.
My ISP isn't all that reliable, which may be a feature inherent to all dialup connections, or it might just be that it's run by the worst phone company in the world (I think). In any case, the connection will sometimes drop out completely. This is annoying when you're just surfing around, with probably a page downloading and a few ssh connections open and maybe some chats going over IM ... but especially bad when you decide you need a 30-meg file and will download it while you sleep, and you wake up the next morning to find out the connection died after the first ten minutes. So, since pppd (the ppp daemon) didn't seem to want to take care of the redialing, Chris gave me a line of perl which I saved in a little script and ran in a little shell loop. Without further ado, here are the script and the loop for those of you who'd like to try it.
[I run on linux. I do much of my work in "terminal windows" which are kinda like what you get on windows if you ask for the DOS prompt. I do the command in a terminal window, which I then minimize.]
The command:
pon; echo "Connecting on"; date; sleep 20; while true; do download.pl; sleep 20; done
And here is the 'download.pl' that it runs:
#! /usr/bin/perl
$up = /sbin/ifconfig ppp0 2>&1;
if($up =~ /Device not found/) {
print "Dammit. Gotta reconnect again.";
$date = date;
chomp $date;
print " ($date)\n";
system("/usr/bin/pon");
}
![[pic of the clear tank]](/log_pix/fishclear.jpg)
And the fishtank has recovered. This shot is from before I put the fish back in. Crystal clear now ... ahh.
![[pic of the cloudy fishtank]](/log_pix/fishsmall.jpg "in an early stage of the cloudiness")
Ever since I brought it home on Saturday, my fishtank was looking cloudy. Cloudy white. No big deal, thought I, fishtanks do that sometimes. And it got a little cloudier and I said, no big deal, I'll just put the filter in like I've been meaning to do. And it got cloudier and I put the filter in and it didn't work. And it got cloudier while I asked Chris (whose filter it was) if he knew why it wasn't working or what I could do about it. And it got cloudier while I had my dad diagnose the problem (he pronounced it DOA and refused to provide treatment). And by this time it was so cloudy I could barely see the fish.
Well, I thought, I've been meaning to switch to an undergravel anyway. So I spent a few hours today taking down the tank, housing the fish elsewhere, discarding all of the water and salvaging all of the gravel (with its colony of nitrifying bacteria, the helpful little critters that turn fish pee into plant food). I set it back up all nice and pretty, with an undergravel filter and with 5 new extra pounds of gravel and hopefully without any snails (I removed them from all the plants, or so I hope). I even threw in some P-Clear for good measure. These fish - who are staying in a spare 10-gallon till this whole thing blows over - better appreciate all this.
" French authorities report that youth gangs in depressed city suburbs who've lost their fighting dogs are using attack monkeys to intimidate their rivals."
via lgf.
![[this is squiffy]](/log_pix/small_trans_squiffy.gif)
Happy Birthday, Mom. (she doesn't read this) Anyway, I'd like all of you to meet Squiffy the Pifflicated Snowman, a character in search of a cult following. I'm thinking I'll make a squiffy website with images of the Original Squiffy from the 50s or the 30s or whatever ... sell squiffy merchandise, maybe. Squiffy the Pifflicated Snowman is a completely fictitious character (what other kind is there?) who began as a doodle in a notebook a few years ago and desperately needs a saturday morning cartoon show or something. Oh Squiffy, what am I going to do with you?
how to make form widgets look nothing like form widgets
Telepresence Bi-Autoerotic Intercourse. This is a how-to guide.
Well, there's now a red Mountain Dew. And here is a rather articulate description of it, which is hardly better than MountainDew.com's version of promoting it: having some sort of dumb game that 1) maximizes the browser window (a minor annoyance); 2) removes all the chrome from said window, so I have no way of telling where I am nor whether anything happens as the slow slow page begins to load (but then again, everything's slow for me on my dialup connection); and 3) uses some silly javascript to verify that you have indeed entered your initials and are ready to play the game - silly javascript that seems to not work at all in Mozilla.
And, by the way, it pretty much tastes like Generic Carbonated Beverage, bland but with a faygo-cherry aftertaste.
Pardon the enthusiasm, but I think this is the best logo ever.
Iguanas are great. And the amount of information about them on the internet is also wonderful. One can chat about iguanas or watch them swim or look at the plans for an iguana cage I drew up today.
![[banner mentioning a healthy
reptile but picturing a frog]](/log_pix/healthy_reptile.gif)
Petsmart really should know the difference between a reptile and an amphibian.
Graduation day, for my boyfriend though not for me. I'm up late packing. It's really hard to keep from procrastinating when you have a task as daunting as packing up everything in your home, even when your home is a tiny closet-sized dorm room.
My reading list for this summer includes:
I'm participating, for the third time, in the Annual Ritual of Throwing Things Out. We euphemistically call it "packing", but so far everything I've packed into a box has gone into storage.
After storing things today I accompanied Chris to the bookstore to ship some of his stuff home via UPS (I'll probably be doing the same thing tomorrow), and I sold some of my textbooks back to the bookstore, and I returned my library books. Since last night I've thrown out over three garbage bags' worth of crap - some of it actual trash, like empty bottles, some of it subjective trash, such as a bag of apples (still good) or some candles I barely used.
At this time of year very little looks valuable. And, as you pull things out of dusty corners, very little looks like it can be trusted. If you were sorting things into a pile to keep and a pile to trash, and you came across a spoon that you hadn't seen in several months and was covered in jam and dirt?
Sometimes when I'm bored I wander all over the web - sometimes starting from familiar corners and sometimes from doorways to the truly bizarre, like memepool or Portal of Evil - not looking for anything in particular, but knowing that I'll know it when I see it. Well, one day I was doing just that and found Leisuretown. If you haven't seen leisuretown before, it's a bunch of comics made from brightly-colored photos of brightly-colored bendy toys. Beautiful pictures and fascinating stories, even if they are, as their author puts it, "the world's most expensive and complicated dick jokes."
Because today when I was surfing around, I found (via peterme) an interview with Tristan A. Farnon (no, not that Tristan Farnon), the creator of the Leisuretown comics. It's a great interview. He mentions checking his comic in a whole bunch of browsers and resolutions. The comics actually do take as much time and effort to produce as they look like they do (all the figures are individually posed!). And then there were the parts where he was talking about his dumb pranks from high school:
Xeroxing awful photos of staff members from the yearbook into oversize proportions, and postering them around campus in groups of nine or ten. I would make large grids on different colored paper. They looked like Andy Warhol's silk-screened Marilyn Monroes, only with the P.E. teacher.
Now, if only he'd come out with the new Leisuretown soon.
It's against the [mostly unofficial] rules to keep a pet in Alfred dorms that cannot spend 10 minutes underwater. Or 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, depending on who you ask. Anyway, I was figuring I'd have to hide the iguana I plan to keep next year. It turns out that I don't have to. Especially great is this photo.
Jane magazine, which I just discovered the other day (despite having known all along that it existed, now that I think of it), is a really bizarre phenomenon. It has more ads than content, and plenty of celebrity-worship and makeup-whoring, and yet it features a fake relationship quiz ("5 to 9 [points]: You're so freaking normal. has there ever been anyone in the history of these stupid quizzes that has scored outside the middle category? ...") and they give someone a makeunder, reducing the number of beauty products she uses daily as well as the time it takes to apply them all. I'm so confused.
And, speaking of Jane, their website is similarly paradoxical. It's all done in Flash but THERE'S NOT A SINGLE FRIGGIN' THING ON THERE THAT MAKES USE OF IT! Yeah, the links on the front page slide in and there are some cool little mouseovers for them, but I hardly think that justifies kicking people out who don't have the plugin. Not to mention that the bottom half of the page is a blank field of red and that on pages with content, that content is squished into a tiny scrolling box with a nonstandard flash-constructed scrollbar - I can't use my scroll mouse, I can't drag the little scrollbar itself (because there is none!), all I can do is click repeatedly on the little arrows, with my mouse pointer which has become a hand, I guess to show me that it's clickable. Does nobody care that scrollbars are manipulated with an arrow pointer, and that linux users like myself don't have the same graphic of a hand that you mac and windows users do.
And, descending further into my ranting state, have you guys seen the official Tae-Bo website? Without going into the reasons that brought me there in the first place, taebo.com is a Flash site that makes absolutely no use of Flash. There are no animations, no fancy zooming effects, no nothing. It's just a static page that should have been done in HTML.
Yay, we made it! This site has changed servers and names. If you're using loxosceles.com or playground.alfred.edu/~bethnewt to get here, you'll still get here, but I'm going to shut off those redirects after a while. Please note that we're now loxosceles.org.
Which brings me to an important point: I have attempted to purchase domains from two different companies now, and (so far) I can say that NameZero sucks a lot and is a crooked place run by name-stealing bastards, whereas enom is a very nice registrar (so far) and supports a lot of nice DNS-related stuff via its friendly little control panel.
We're not the only website named after an impossible-to-spell genus name: there's also xiph.org, short for Xiphophorus. I noticed the name in the output from cdparanoia (software that Xiphophorus makes) and said "hey, isn't that the swordtail and platy genus?" It turns out that 1) yes, it is (see the link); and 2) there are probably very few people who would realize that. FYI, X. helleri, the swordtail, is the fish that Xiph is named after. X. variatus is the more common of the two platy species, X. maculatus being the other.
Hey, guess what we're getting soon? loxosceles.org! This also means that those of you who have been linking to loxosceles.com - which I never wanted anybody to use in the first place, by the way, and you've had plenty of warning on that - should prepare to update your links. I'm going through enom, who so far appear to be a great registrar. They let you do CNAMEs and everything, DNS hosting, and a few of the little bonuses like email forwarding that I suppose some people enjoy.
ooh, bad typography puns. I can hear the groaning already...
Jack Chick - who, by the way, maintains that homosexuality is the worst possible sin, likes to draw big buff men. His two main characters (the Crusaders) will often change their shirts for no good reason as they discuss plot points. This gem is from Broken Cross.
this background image is gorgeous.
It seems Florida has outlawed punch-card voting. This is not, by itself, a good thing. Everyone will think the problem's been solved, while no problem has even come close to being solved. The sticky point in the last presidential election was that the difference in the number of votes was smaller than the margin of error inherent in the system. If they want to keep this from happening again, they have to do more than just outlaw punchcards. Useful measures would be to come up with a standard voting system, test it repeatedly to make sure it's the best (most accurate and secure) we can do, and then teach it to everybody. I'm having a hard time not appending "Duh!" after all of that.
Finals week is drawing to a close, so I should soon be back to offering bizarre links and whatever else you come here for. Lately my procrastination has been more of the sort of making T-shirts (on my inkjet printer) and hanging out with friends who have lots of extra time - finals week is like that. They don't give you anything other than finals to do, so it seems like a free week and you end up goofing off the whole time. Same for the 'quiet day' before finals week begins: people schedule end-of-year picnics on just the day when we're supposed to be studying.
Oh, and I found that Amy spends much of her procrastination time reading this very webpage. In fact, she's my #5 fan, making 174 requests from her computer this month (pretty soon now, I'm going to check on who my top ten fans are, maybe give them little "Least Productive Procrastination" awards).
Here's some advice for us procrastinators on how to take advantage of our procrastinatory nature.
How do you like the new look? and please note that this page has no tables, no unneccessary blockquote tags, and no background graphics. I'm rather proud of myself. And very very soon (after finals week) you'll see a greymatter-style "comments" feature and some friendly permalinks. I promise.
This is crazy: I write one little paper that mentions, in passing, phrases like "hacking" and "playboy cyber club" and here's what I get (from my server logs):
3: hacking msn chatrooms
6: playboy cyber club password
4: cache:playground.alfred.edu/papers/first.shtml ubb full crack windows
17: cache:playground.alfred.edu/papers/first.shtml playboy cyber club password
The first time I got a hit from one of those (and the above are only in my top ten for the last two months; I've had others, before), I figured it was somebody who realized it was not what they were looking for, and who subsequently left. But look at the third and fourth lines there: they came back. They came back 16 times when looking for a password (or, I believe, a password cracker or some such) for the playboy cyber club.
Maybe I should go see who they were and track them down and ask them. I can do that, you know. It's amazing what you can find from an IP address.
