With a canvas like that why not go for the Mahābhārata?

/

And while we’re in the neighborhood, you can stop saying “double-u, double-u, double-u, dot” in front of all your websites. They all work without it except for five or six in the whole world which justly deserve to lose the traffic for having webmasters about as bright as you.

Update, 13 April 2010–

I don’t think there’s a man, woman, or child in America who doesn’t know how much I support the gay community. Which is why I’m proud to say I’m glad Senator Craig is gonna skate on his attempted Grand Stall Tryst charge. No longer a felony in most states.

In fact, I’m so much in favor of gay rights that I won’t rest until it becomes safe for a homosexual senator to drive right off a bridge into a pond where his younger companion in the passenger seat drowns. Only then will we have true equality.

What? Are you fucking kidding me? Am I the only person in the world who gets religious symbolism and omens? Of course it’s Pope John Paul II signaling from the grave. I believe the message he’s trying to send is, “Pack for hot weather.”

I can learn 50 keyboard shortcuts in a couple hours. Enough to use most of what’s behind any given application. I can forget them in a day too. Because of this I can play Medal of Honor for two weeks straight and then pick up Syphon Filter 2 and readjust to the different controller layout by the time I’m taking out the two snipers in the snow.

Right now, on some mail server far, far away is lodged an unread email I sent. It will sit there until the morning when it is POP’d or IMAP’d down. Right now it just sits there. I’m the only one in the world who knows what it says; who knows why my blood pressure—never varying in the ten years I’ve been checking it—is forty-five mmHg over systolic and twenty-three mmHg over diastolic.

I looked at my alias file from Amazon.com a couple years back for a piece. Of the several hundred commands my fingers could run through in two minutes flat I only remember two. One was “F6.” It was the shortcut key for sending an email via Emacs. It was so easy to press. Before you’d thought things through. Before you realized you shouldn’t be pissed-off. Before you remembered to spell check it. Before you considered the implications of a response. So easy to press. So impossible to retrieve that email.

I post this now to muddy the waters. Yes it is October 14 but only I know what time it is. Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I wrote a nice little JavaScript kilometer/mile converter awhile back. I tried to be pretty explicit in the code to do everything step by step and all in JS. 31 lines of code. Not too bad for a calculator and shorter than if we didn’t use ternary logic.

I have been using jQuery a little for quite awhile now. I wish I had time to use it more. Every single time I revisit it I learn something new and see it is even better than I remembered. I rewrote the converter with it as an experiment. 9 or 10 lines of JS now.

The new code

<script id="kilo_mile" type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
// Remember! The jQuery lib must be loaded already for this to run.
$('<form><fieldset><legend>kilometer/mile converter</legend>' +
  '<input id="kilo" type="text"/>' +
  '<input id="mile" type="text"/>' +
  '</fieldset></form>').insertAfter("#kilo_mile");
$("#kilo, #mile").keyup(function(evt) {
         var update = evt.target.id == "mile" ? "#kilo" : "#mile";
     var conversion = evt.target.id == "mile" ? 1.609 : 0.6214;
            var val = new Number( $(evt.target).val() * conversion );
        $(update).val( isNaN(val) ? "Numbers only!" : val );
                        });
//]]></script>

The demo

[Update, realized the one I posted already appears in a comment, so replacing it.]

There's a word for a pacifist who is unable or unwilling to defend himself. Victim.

Stare at this picture for one minute without blinking. Now, quickly look at a white wall while you shoot yourself in the head for electing them.

Thank you for making NyQuil completely useless. No, really thanks a lot.

It was great, great of you. So few people understand how intertwined terrorism and tweakers are. I commend you for your courage to stand up for what’s right—to slip your riders in—no matter how ineffective it renders the only cold medicine that was once worth taking.

From an increasingly shoddy 60 Minutes we learn this week that the terribly benighted, undervalued, underutilized Interpol aided 4,500 arrests last year. They farm out arrests, not having much in the way of an executive arm, so you can think of their arrests as RBI. With a staff of around 600 this means that the dedicated members of Interpol can each boast nearly 8 arrests a year. If only regular police officers in plain old countries could each make half as many arrests!

Ron Noble, the secretary general since 1999, informs us that his struggle is to make the world understand that Interpol is up against a billion dollar problem with million dollar budgets. My struggle is to make Ron understand that all the money in the world can’t stop a reasonably intelligent individual bent on killing a few hundred people from tossing a Molotov cocktail into a nightclub with bad exits. Because the simplified—and not coincidentally more accurate—version of the puzzle is we’re up against a hundred dollar problem with a billion dollars worth of beggars and cowards in the way.

Wisconsin deputy sheriff kills 6

Well, thank God only cops and soldiers will eventually have access to guns so we’ll all be safe from being shot by some random maniac. Good thing regular folk won’t be armed. They might shoot a deputy or something.

I’m fuming. Wrathful. Gnashing my teeth. Shaking with the fury. Why? Because now you won’t believe me.

I do a little creek work as well our younger readers know when they are straight and writing college applications with the help of Google, a spell-checker, and a couple of purchases at CollegeApps.com.

There are often little safe areas at the tops of the local creeks. Almost like mini-estuaries. Places where the mellower animals like the Pacific chorus frogs and certain benthic macroinvertebrates can keep their hearth and remain safe in inclement weather.

Staring at the gastrointestinal chart at the pedeiatrician’s a few months ago I noticed how similar the appendix is. It’s at the confluence of minor and major “water” ways. It’s a small, safe eddy, out of the unpredictable currents. I knew that was the answer. It’s where the beneficial gut flora and fauna can hide to return quickly after a bout of Norwalk or a big dose of quinine or whatever. I told a couple people my theory but I didn’t post it here because I wanted to come up with a clinical procedure—probably just do it checking historical medical records of the snipped and the whole—to prove it. I was sure I was right and I wanted to show off the fact that I solved this without the benefit of medical school.

I didn’t, so now you’ll take me for a liar but I do have something to add so you can watch documentaries and talk to a physician with a bit more discernment.

It’s expensive to drag physical parts around. To grow them, to support them, to continue to produce them when they can even cause fatal problems now and then. Of course the appendix has a use. Anyone who ever tells you something in nature is superfluous should get out of the biology game and get into theology where his talents and gift of insight firmly seat him.

If, in the course of an investigation, after arresting or detaining someone innocent, the words, “Sorry about that,” actually have a chance of meaning a fucking thing.

It’s been out of the news for awhile and it never even should have been in the news because like most carny sideshows, it’s a fake, but Rasputin’s cock is the stuff of legends even if the original turned out to be a dried sea cucumber and the one in the photo might not be human at all and if it is, it’s not even his. The Rotten.com summary of Rasputin’s days is a good primer for the old pump. Witness how hard some souls are attached to their bags of meat. Further consider that it is invariably those who enjoy the meat for the sake of meat and not for the soul which refuses to vacate the premises even under frenzied, concerted urging.

The only thing I really wanted to say is that my penis is of no historical importance¹. I wanted to title this piece, “My secret sorrow, #16” but like they say in Sunday school, “Don’t bury your lede.”

What?

Dedicated to my butcher, IOZ. Stick that in my Tennessee!

1. You’ll live about 10 years longer. Won’t that be fun.
2. You’ll be able to understand and empathize better with your family. Won’t that be fun.
3. You’ll be able to remember every stupid thing you said at the party when you were totally uncomfortable being the only sober one there. Won’t that be fun.

No reason to rub it in any further I hope. Vodka is hardest to smell on your breath and, generally, the more expensive the alcohol, the more gently the morning after goes.

For those of you thinking about moving to Seattle, I want to clarify. This is an awesome town. But you’ve heard that before. The clarification being this picture is representative of Seattle mornings and afternoons every single day from September through March. See also–

Seattle

1. Jet City—hereafter minus jets.

2. Seatown—neither a town nor on the sea.

3. the Emerald City, take 2—somewhere between rain drenched poppy fields, androids, and electric sheep.

4. eight months of winter rain and unemployment dying to teach your sorry Midwestern ass that Seasonal Affective Disorder is all that stands between you and meeting Kurt Cobain in person.

Risk is part of life. Where there is risk there cannot be total security. There is no force or amount of preparation which can entirely mitigate risk in the natural world. Therefore you can never be entirely secure.

Being safe is part of being secure. If you can be hurt, and you can be, you are not safe. Therefore you are not secure.

If you are prohibited from taking risks, you are not free. If you are prohibited from doing, what in the eyes of the democratic majority constitutes, harm to yourself, you are not free.

If you want security, you can’t have freedom. It’s as simple and irrefutable as basic addition. The quest for total security is the quest to eradicate freedom and only the latter has any chance of succeeding.

Let’s stop all this talk of how we are defending freedom with the ventures and the rules and the renditions and the pouring out of contact lens solution. You can at least appreciate ruthlessness, stupidity, and cowardice when it is tinged with honesty.

1. Given that approximately 20,000 priests (2-‌4% of priests) have sexually abused church goers, especially male children, in the last 50 years: Have you ever molested or raped a parishioner?
2. Have you ever known about another priest doing so and helped cover it up?
3. Have you ever used church resources to give aid to a criminal? Or to commit a crime?
4. How many violent crimes have been confessed to you? How many of the confessers were you able to convince to turn themselves in? How many times did you try?
5. Who confirmed the Virgin remained one? Did Mary’s hymen somehow remain intact even after delivering the Christ? Why again does the Bible say Jesus had brothers and sisters?
6. Given that Joseph spent his life married to a woman he never touched: Was Joseph maybe homosexual?
7. Why aren’t Jews, Moslems, and pagans tortured to death by the Church anymore?
8. Given the heavy-‌handed stance against condoms: How responsible is the Church for the AIDS epidemic in Africa? Millions of the dead? Hundreds of thousands? None?
9. How could there have been 40 Popes who were never Pope?
10. Have you got answers for any of these: Ten Questions to Ask Your Pastor, Reverend, Minister, or Priest?

Three numbers are available with customizable display options. E.g.–

Which adds up to –

Put this in your page

<p>
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js">
</script>
</p>

Get this

Only want the number?

<p style="text-align:center">
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js?text=off">
</script>
</p>

Get this

And that, as they say, is that.

The data comes from iCasualties.org. The default display is the sum of their Iraq and Afghanistan numbers. You can set it to return just one or the other. The numbers link back to them, as they should. Those folks work hard on their site and getting it right. Here is their donations page; they broke it and don’t have one you can link directly anymore so…

The numbers displayed by the JavaScript are updated from them often. No guarantees but unless you are checking all day, our version is much more likely to reflect the current values at iCasualties than what you saw the last time you looked.

API, CSS, and placement

The (X)HTML it generates looks something like this (whitespace added)–

<span id="USmilBodyCount">
US military deaths in war on terror:
<b><a title="Iraq + Afghanistan casualties"
 href="http://icasualties.org/">[number]</a></b>
</span>

Text in a span with an id (in bold above) you can hook with your own style sheet if you choose. The generated (X)HTML is appended to the nodes of whatever parent it sits in. That means it might jump down somewhere you don’t expect or want. If that happens, just wrap it in <p>[script here]</p> to anchor it as a child, the only one, of that paragraph tag.

Content served as application/xhtml+xml will not be placed correctly. The script self-identification technique used only works if the script can see the DOM as it is loaded; streamlike. In application/xhtml+xml, as other XML, the DOM is only available, atomically, after it has all been loaded.

Allowed arguments in src querystring

no, the number of fatalities for which country

no=full, the default, shows both combined

no=a, for Afghanistan’s number only

no=i, for Iraq’s number only

text

text=on, the default

text=off, to only show the number

sep, the separator of the text and number; using it implies you want the text on

sep=:, the default, for a colon

sep=n, for an en-dash with whitespace

sep=m, for an em-dash without whitespace

sep=br, for an (X)HTML line break, <br/>

Two more examples

<p>
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js?sep=n;no=a">
</script>
</p>

<p style="text-align:center">
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js?text=off;no=i">
</script>
</p>

NB

There is no branding (Sedition·com) on it right now. If you want it to stay that way, make sure to mention us if you use it.

Now for some SEO missing above

US military fatalities, troops killed.