WiseAndFoolish

If I had a reader or two, they’d have noticed that WiseAndFoolish appeared to have vanished a week or three ago.

It didn’t go anywhere, really; all posts were available for viewing . . . by direct URL or RSS. If you came to W&F honestly, however, you’d see a blank screen.

I was using an older version of Wordpress . . . one which permitted some putz to award himself admin control over W&F. Removing him from the user database was sufficient to delouse W&F, but I somehow managed to blank the site’s home page.

I actually managed to damage the site’s theme, thus no pretty pictures, no HTML, nada.

During the perceived downtime, no-one mentioned anything. I intended to let W&F stay as-is ’til somebody did. But then, we’d still be waiting . . .

Despite all that, something good came of it (in addition to my upgrading to the latest Wordpress version): No spam.

No kidding. No spam for however long the site’s main page was blank.

As earlier mentioned, all of W&F was up and accessible during this time, indicating spammers’ scripts use home page links to do their dirty work, but aren’t ’smart’ enough to recover from a ‘where the hell did the links at this URL go’ error.

I’ve been thinking of changing the home page here to something more cartoonist-y. We’ll see.

It’s been a few months (about half a year or so) since I last posted here.

In that timeframe, some decent people passed away, greedy American mortgage lenders managed to collapse the world’s economies, I was laid off, and a black man became the President of the United States.

You’d think I’d have mentioned a few of these.  I didn’t, though — mostly because I couldn’t think of anything to say that millions of others didn’t.  And the laid-off thing?  Cry me a river; things’re tough all over.

The good news?  George Bush is out of office.  The bad?  America will never recover from his legacy:

(the list below was compiled at Reddit, a site of some interest)

• Misleading us, saying Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”
• Breaking the Geneva Conventions by using torture
• Telling the 45 million uninsured Americans to just go to the emergency room
• Repeated implying a connection between Saddam and 9/11, ignoring clear contrary evidence
• Failing to respond to Hurricane Katrina
• Launching a war that’s killed 4,150 Americans and wounded more than 30, 000
• Challenging Iraqi insurgents to attack U.S. troops: “Bring ‘em on”
• Granting no-bid contracts to Halliburton in Iraq
• Hiring an unqualified crony to run FEMA
• Praising crony’s performance: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”
• Neglecting reconstruction of New Orleans’ homes and levees Promising American troops would be greeted as liberators
• Declaring “Mission Accomplished” and later blaming the banner on troops
• Cherry-picking facts about WMDs in Iraq, then blaming the CIA
• Promising the Iraq war would lower gas prices
• Claiming the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” in 2005
• Allowing Osama Bin Laden to escape
• Launching a war that’s killed countless Iraqi civilians
• Using Terri Schiavo for political gain
• Attempting to alter Constitution to allow discrimination against gay people
• Wiretapping our phones without court order
• Stealing the 2000 election (remember Katherine Harris, voter purges, and the Supreme Court?)
• Ignoring, then concealing the pre-9/11 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
• Enforcing abstinence-only programs in public schools
• Rejecting the Kyoto Treaty to stop climate change
• Giving tax cuts to the rich while spending record amounts
• Failing seniors with the costly Medicare prescription drug benefit
• Swiftboating John Kerry
• Outing CIA agent Valerie Plame to retaliate for truth about Iraq’s WMDs
• Spending $341 million a day in Iraq (Iraq has a budget surplus)
• Neglecting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center
• Allowing Afghanistan to fall into chaos, with the Taliban and al Qaeda regaining control
• Holding prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay
• Covering up torture at Abu Ghraib
• Turning a budget surplus into massive budget deficit
• Letting more than a million homes go into foreclosure—the highest rate ever recorded
• Holding secret meetings with Exxon Mobil, Conoco, Shell, and BP to set energy policy
• Letting gas prices double while resisting fuel efficiency and clean energy
• Setting the record for most days on vacation (1020 days, or more than one-third of his entire eight years!) by any president in U.S. history

---

Please feel free to copy any or all of the above and spread it around. [Source: Reddit]

 

Both Bozo the Clown (Larry Harmon) and Jesse Helms died this week. 

Some more-flattering Helms quotes may be seen in a 2001 New York Times article by Kevin Sack.   Less-flattering quotes here.  My opinion of the gentleman may be seen in this cartoon (“One Trick Pony”).

I imagine you’re aware that the year changed. Famously, this is noted by whack-jobs in New York City looking in abject glee at a big lighted ball crawling down a pole in Times Square. As they’ve been doing it for a century (judging by Dick Clark, alone), much of North America is content to watch along with ‘em. I don’t see the attraction, but there must be something thrilling about it all — throw me a note or comment if you have a reasonable explanation for all the hoo-haw.

Speaking of comments, WiseandFoolish gets about 150 or so spam ‘comments’ daily. Happily, I typically don’t have to deal with them; Akismet, a life-saving WordPress plug-in, just shovels the digital feces into a ‘Caught Spam’ section, which can be viewed (if necessary) and trashed in a second. Highly recommended.

After poring over W&F’s 2007 logs, I’ve come to the realization that no-one’s reading this. I’m not completely convinced of this, but I do suspect most — if not all — of this site’s ‘hits’ are spambots. There are advantages to this . . . I could run a contest, for instance, and keep the prize. ‘Bots have been known to enter contests, however, and I don’t want to have to ship a prize to a dark alley in China’s Hunan province.

I think instead over the next few months I’ll scan and post some of my published work from the 1980s and ’90s.

That’ll fix ‘em.

Saith Mr Brain’s Faggot Family,

“The great British faggot is full of flavour and a great belly warmer at this time of year.” — BBC

. . .

. . .

Steve Olson decries a once brave and sure people well en-route to becoming a surveillance state.

. . .

Would you believe . . . a Cane toad with five legs?

It’s 2007, now, and it’s therefore clearly time to take mindless Internet quizzes. This particular bunch hail from GoToQuiz.
Typically, the quizzes’ results are shown with a bar graph; the CSS therein doesn’t work with the WiseAndFoolish WordPress theme.

Click the links to take ‘em yourself. You know you want to.

Quiz, the First: What American Accent do you have?
(I thought this one would be a hoot ’cause I’m Canadian. Turns out there’s no foolin’ ‘em, though)

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central “North Central” is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw “Fargo” you probably didn’t think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
The Midland
The West
Boston
The Inland North
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Quiz, the Second: Do you deserve your high school diploma?

You paid attention during 97% of high school! 85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don’t get scores that high! Good show, old chap! Do you deserve your high school diploma? Create a Quiz

Quiz, the Third: Are You Gooder at Grammar?
(It brought out the editor in me)

Your Language Arts Grade: 100% Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know “no” from “know.” Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes). Are You Gooder at Grammar? Make a Quiz

Remember William Shatner’s classic remake of Rocket Man?

Well, Tom Baker — arguably the best Doctor Who ever* — has been mixed with the Kinks’ You Really Got Me to interesting effect. The purpose behind this is a Christmas drive for UK charities Shelter and Focus Ireland.

A teaser may be heard at British Telecom’s TextAid site, wherein lucky British subscribers can send text-to-voice messages to UK landlines in Tom Baker’s voice. Two pence from each message goes to the aforementioned charities, and BT reports the £100,000 target may well be met by Christmas.
. . .

* Recently, according to the BBC, Doctor Who Magazine reported that — after reader votes were tallied — Tom Baker was replaced by David Tennant as the best Doctor Who. A vote widget on the BBC News website, however, begs to differ . . . as do I.

Last Friday was the 13th, and — while I don’t typically believe in such things as a specific date being intrinsically ‘bad’ — I have to concur that Friday, October 13th was pretty awful at work; I spent the entire day on a conference call with a bunch of other folks who were having an equally unpleasant day. 7-1/2 hours of conference call. Not recommended.

This Friday, alles ist guet. Go figure.

On the other hand, the news is fascinating.

1. The scales fall off George Bush’s eyes, and he sees the parallel ‘twixt Iraq and Viet Nam.

Oh. So that’s what everyone meant.

It was four years in coming. And what, pray, does the leader of the free world intend to do now that he can see clearly?

More of the same, ‘course. When you have a winning strategy, you stick to it, right?

Why he’d want to replicate America’s failure in SE Asia and concomitantly turn the US into pre-1939 Germany escapes rational analysis. Why he hasn’t been impeached escapes me. Given what prompted impeachment procedings for Mr Clinton, one can only assume Mr Bush has America’s blessing.

2. A lovesick teenaged girl decides to end it all by driving Daddy’s Mercedes into an oncoming car, killing the driver and injuring the occupant . . . the driver’s 6-year-old daughter. 16-year-old Louise Brunstad has — not surprisingly — been charged with murder; as she turned into oncoming traffic, she was texting a countdown to her anticipated death to the girl who’d rejected her.

That she’s gay is immaterial . . . that she killed someone in an effort to kill herself is unconscionable.

3. California’s women exhibitionists — and there’s at least one of ‘em — no doubt hailed Superior Court Judge Robert Armstrong’s ruling that gender-specific text within the law means only male public nudity can be defined as indecent exposure. Subsequently, 40-year-old Alexis Garcia’s full frontal display before a 14-year-old boy (she had an issue with the noise his playing basketball made) didn’t break the law.

- – -

(Source: AP)

A 24-year-old Israeli woman’s breast implants prevented rocket shrapnel from killing her, says a hospital spokesperson.  (Reuters via MSNBC)

Do you find your parents and grandparents to be extraordinarily screwed up?  Every generation embraces weird in its own way.  In mid-century, people dealt with strangeness by eating it.

The Gallery of Regrettable Food, a selection (with intelligent commentary) of unfortunate foods from the 1950s and ’60s. Not just Spam in Jell-o . . . darned frightening things that people actually prepared and ate in those decades long gone.

See if you can find the boxed, frozen rabbit (or the boxed ‘mature’ half-rabbit), the rabbit bits . . . and be certain to click the link when you see it. Brr.

The LILEKS (James) Gallery of Regrettable Food.  Buy the book, gnaw on the filtration organs.