Via DailyKos, the 25 Dumbest Quotes of 2005. Includes such gems as:

• 13) "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god… Anything specific I need to do or tweak? Do you know of anyone who dog-sits? … Can I quit now? Can I come home? … I'm trapped now, please rescue me." --Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown, in various emails to colleagues and friends in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
• 2) "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?" --House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 9, 2005

As the Twelve Days of Christmas approach, it's time once again to make fun of them. Strictly speaking, we can't start until December 25th, the first day of Christmas, but the Xmas season starts earlier every year.

My favorite has long been Frank Kelly's Christmas Countdown, which was a big hit in Ireland and Britain in the early 1980s. It's couched as twelve increasingly exasperated letters from Gobnait O'Lughnasa to his friend Nuala. Here's Day Six:

Nuala,

What are you trying to do to us ? It isn’t that we don’t appreciate your generosity but the six geese have not alone nearly murdered the calling birds but they laid their eggs on top of the vet’s head from the pear-tree and his bill was £68 in cash ! My mother is munching 60 grains of Valium a day and talking to herself in a most alarming way. You must keep your feelings for me in check.

Gobnait

The rest of the lyrics can be found on the Highland Shepherd site. An audio version of song can be found on the Mad Music Archive (around 00:30). And an explanation of the traditional lyrics can be found at Carols.org.uk.

Harold Pinter's speech on accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

Via del.icio.us/popular, it's dozens of Bunny Suicides! Very twisted.

Update: Apparently, these are pirated scans from The Book of Bunny Suicides.

My friend Raven knows far too much about prostates. She sent me this the other day.

Don't forget that conducting regular testicular self-exams (or getting someone else to do it for you :) is a very important part of keeping healthy. If detected early, testicular cancer is very curable:

http://tcrc.acor.org/tcexam.html

But you need to commit to doing it regularly, not to just doing it every once in a while, or when the mood strikes you.

Because as everyone knows, sometimes you like feeling nuts; sometimes, you don't.

And, on a not completely unrelated note, males with big testicles have smaller brains -- at least in the case of bats.

I cannot look at a 16-digit credit card number and tell whether I've mistyped it or not. And neither can anyone else. I can, however, easily examine four separate four-digit numbers and spot typos.

1341329913245890 or 1341 3299 1324 5890? The choice is obvious. Yet most websites will not accept anything but the 16-digit string. It's a trivial matter to strip the spaces and normalize the credit card number, and it speaks to the incompetence of many website developers that they don't do this. The cognitive burden should be pushed onto the programmer, not the user.

On a related note, Irish people write phone numbers as a seven-digit string. I can't parse 6274986 at a glance either, but I can parse the US-style form, 627-4986.

Via the Win Tech Off Topic mailing list, I learned about Pandora earlier today. It's an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project.

You create stations in Pandora by telling it an artist or song that you like. It starts playing music that it thinks you will like, based on its reasonably extensive database of carefully characterized music. You can tell it if you particularly like or dislike its selections, to guide its future offerings on that station. You can have up to 100 personalized stations.

So far, it's doing a good job.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Mon, 05 Dec 2005 05:23:26 GMT)

I've moved my blog again; this time to my own website. The new link is http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog/.

I was looking up the credits of Intermission on IMDB, then decided to look up my brother, David Reilly, the actor of the family. I found him.

I couldn't find any IMDB listing for my other brother, Mark Reilly, the filmmaker.

Then I looked up my own name. I wasn't there, of course, but I did find Der Spleen des George Riley, a German TV production of a Tom Stoppard play, Enter a Free Man.

I did quite a bit of work for Irish television in the mid-to-late Eighties, but it was all behind the scenes computer graphics work for such timeless gems as Murphy's Micro Quiz'M, Rapid Roulette, the Carroll's Irish Open, and the weather maps. The only thing that was of lasting value was Live Aid. The weather display software was still in use for most of the Nineties, so I can honestly say that my work has been widely seen by millions of people. I don't think my name ever appeared in the credits, though, just that of my then employer, Lendac.

Via DailyKos, Will Ferrell as Dubya making a Special Announcement on Global Warming.

Via Larry Osterman, Triumph the Comic Dog delivering the weather forecast in Hawai`i. Very apropos, after yesterday's snow in Seattle.

Via Emma.

I'm indifferent to most fantasy books, but I've been a fan of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, since I read the first book, A Game of Thrones, in 1997. I read the second book A Clash of Kings, in 1999. The third book A Storm of Swords came out five years ago, and I've been awaiting the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, ever since. After several postponements, it's finally out.

It's an epic tale of love, war, and intrigue. Five Kings are fighting for control, by sword, by guile, and sometimes by magic. Strange creatures are rising in the frozen North, beyond the Wall. Dragons are reappearing in the South. The young Starks, separated by fate and a cruel author, strive in vain to reunite. The Lannisters, mad and bad, seek to dominate.

I'm re-reading the series and rediscovering how good it is. The characters are clearly drawn, the plotting first rate, the writing excellent.

George R.R. Martin is on a book tour of the U.S. and appears at the University of Washington Bookstore on Monday, November 21st, at 7pm.

Bill Moyers speaking at the 50th anniversary of The Texas Observer:

McCarthyism was a raging plague in the 1950s and the virus rampaged across Texas like tumbleweeds in a wind storm. ... The low point, said Maverick, came when the state Senate passed a bill to remove all books from public libraries which “adversely” reflected on American and Texas history, the family and religion. Even the state teachers association endorsed the bill, in exchange for a pay raise. ...

That was the lay of the land in the 1950s. And Democrats were in charge, remember? That’s right: Texas was a one-party state; Republicans were as scarce in high office as Democrats are today. No matter the players, one-party government is a conspiracy in disguise.

...

Everything President George W. Bush knows, he learned here [in Texas], as the product of a system rigged to assure the political progeny needed to perpetuate itself with minimum interference from the nuisances of liberal democracy. ... With the election of 2000, he and his cohorts arrived in Washington like atheists taking over the Vatican; they had come to run a government they don’t believe in.

A year ago, I ran into a problem with Skype squatting on port 80, which I had long forgotten about. Today, I ran into one with Skype squatting on port 443.

I was trying to set up SSL on my Windows Server 2003 dev box. My ultimate goal is to experiment with client certs and server certs for SOAP, but that's a story for another time. I was running into all kinds of strange problems, exacerbated by the relatively strange IIS configuration on my machine.

I tried SslDiag. In hindsight, it pointed me towards the underlying problem, but I couldn't see it at the time. I did a lot of digging around on Google. Eventually, a newsgroup thread on ListenOnlyList gave me CurrPorts, which showed me that Skype was listening on port 443. I suppose netstat -anob, TcpView, or Port Reporter would have told me the same thing, though CurrPorts had the friendliest view. WFetch from the IIS 6 Resource Kit Tools was also useful in looking at raw requests and responses.

Last Wednesday night, Emma emailed a dozen of our friends, inviting them to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. One reply arrived the next morning. Then nothing.

By Sunday evening, I had grown exasperated enough to send out a snarky followup:

The courtesy of a belated reply would be appreciated. So far, we've got exactly one RSVP.

It served its purpose. Replies cascaded in. Most, alas, said "no"; they had other plans.

Would that this were an isolated incident. Time and again, I've issued invitations that were not responded to. A simple "yes" or "no" is ideal. A "maybe" is acceptable too, especially if you follow up with a "yes" or a "no".

RSVP is not a meaningless formality. It's a vital planning aid. I need to know ahead of time whether to expect three or thirteen for a dinner party. It's rude and thoughtless to leave me hanging in limbo. If I assume that everyone who's been invited will show up, and cater accordingly, and many of them don't come, I've gone to needless expense and effort. If I guess that only half those invited will turn up, and I underestimate, then I'm embarrassed by not being able to feed my guests properly.

It's almost as big a sin for you to say "yes", then fail to show, without a word of warning.

When the stakes are low, such as a large drinks party, the lack of RSVPs is a minor matter. For a major production, it's inconsiderate at best.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle strike again. This time, we're counterposing William Butler Yeats against Walt Whitman, the Dueling Poets. We're leading off the evening with some real dueling between fencers from the Academia della Spada.

Fri, Nov 18, 8pm
University of Washington Faculty Club

More details here.

See what Thunderbird 1.5 RC 1's spelling checker flags as misspelled words.

Seems to be a known bug.