Who knew that George W. Bush was an even better poet than he is leader and policy-maker?
I heard about these language removal people on NPR earlier this week. The Language Removal Service has produced audio tapes of speech by leading candidates in the California gubernatorial election…with all the words removed. All that’s left is breathing noises, “um’s”, “ah’s” and the like. They played some of their tapes on the radio, and you can hear them at their website. I found it deeply weird, especially given the utterly dead-pan way in which the guy describing it kept calling it a ‘service to the public’ as if the results were revelatory of something essential about the speaker’s character. He was very good—it was hard to tell if he was a prankster, a Dadaist, or a new species of loon.
I deeply pray that no one ever does one of those to my lectures.
I’ve made a few blog enhancements by tweaking the Movable Type template. The most significant controls the way that the extended text is handled. I didn’t like the way that long posts take up too much space, but nor did I like it when clicking on the extension took you to another document. Now I have one of those cute pop-in pop-out Javascript extensions. You can test it on the following line.
I’ve tweaked the comment and trackback links so that they say different things depending how many comments and trackbacks I’ve received. So far, most of them are stuck on “Acquiescence (0) | Solitude (0)” but if you look through the blog entries below you can see some of the others.
I’ve also put RSS feeds from ICANNWatch and Slashodot in the left margin. This is an experiment, and I may take one or both of them off — especially if I don’t figure out how to make mt-rebuild work so that I can make RSS updating a cron job. Currently the script is unhappy with
use vars qw( $VERSION ); $VERSION = '0.2';
Instead of doing something, when I test it it reports,
bash: use: command not found
bash: use: command not found
bash: mt-rebuild.pl: line 11: syntax error near unexpected token `qw('
bash: mt-rebuild.pl: line 11: `use vars qw( $VERSION );'Suggestions for other site tweaks (and bug reports) always welcome.
Addendum: I had to change the category name “;>” to something alphanumeric as it was messing up the archives and the xml at least. So it’s “completely different” now.