Black Dog Blog

Archive for October, 2008

We have a film crew in Manchester at the moment for one of the new Sherlock Holmes films.

(Apologies, as ever, for patronising presenter and pointless vox pops and general lack of information.)

I can exclusively reveal lie that that giant doll in the background is going to be the scene of the final showdown.

If I can, I might head along to the Northern Quarter and see if I can see anything cool.

Loving Wordpress's scheduled posts. Here's one I did way back halfway through the month, but it seemed too sad to post it then.

Vespers, Charly, Snog, *shotgunpump* we will have words. I like erasers, so Charlie is off the hook.

Clara Meadmore is Britain's oldest virgin at the age of 106. She says she has no regrets and says staying single is the key to a long life. Why not, I say? Good on her.

Hear an interview with Clara and discussion with some other people on Radio 4 Woman's Hour.

HighLOLights of the discussion section:
5:35–5:50 (I don't hate men! One of my best friends is a man!)
7:04 "my friend who's single" (rofl patronising much)

While we're here, though, let's draw a distinction between lifestyle celibates and asexuals.

The benefits they mention do still apply to asexes, of course, but for us it's less-and-more than a lifestyle choice. Some humans just don't feel any urge to boink. We're them.

Gregory I, Letter to Abbot Mellitus, 1215

I like the twisted piety of the reasoning. It's rather impressive.

Acer raises eyes
turning lovely blushing cheek
to follow the geese

Invented off-the-cuff last night for a roleplay board, although I used a slightly altered first line on the board to make the meaning more obvious.

All Instarrian politicians answer straight questions (such as "where can I get a boat to Colony Five") with this sort of thing.

(YES, haha, I managed to tear myself away from trochees in the last line. I think my Western brain is comfortable with rhythm and doesn't see why sie should change.)

Awesome animal photography in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 competition.

Peru's shamans send US election vibes.

I don't want the US to get "the president it deserves". I want it to get the president that will do the rest of us the least harm.

'No God' campaign raises £140,000

Me and my swastika

Richard Dawkins embarrassed after death and subsequent resurrection. <3 Dawkins.

And finally, the terrific Snopes.com does Dracula.

I saw Red Dragon (2002) over the weekend because it was on TV. It's a horror/thriller with investigative aspects and I found it surprisingly good plot-wise.

I don't know why, but because I'd vaguely heard it was a prequel I was expecting something different from Silence of the Lambs. It wasn't, though; very similar format, which was a good thing in this case because SotL was excellent.

There was just one detail at the end that I didn't understand and needed to have explained to me. It concerned a substitution deception that wasn't very well explained; or maybe it was the noisy people eating pizza, talking and texting in between me and the screen.

And there was a reference to William Blake's Woman Clothed with the Sun, which I was able to explain to my brother just before it actually became plot-significant. Which was cool.

The film comes with a content warning for people with hangups similar to Suitov's: Dolarhyde goes to the Brooklyn Museum, beats a museum secretary unconscious, and eats the original Blake watercolor of The Red Dragon. (from Wikipedia)

Fans of tattoos will like it.

Riddle 2008:2

A-standing on my tippy-toes,
As sentry I am thorough:
And if a whiff should meet my nose
My pointy face will furrow,
I'll bark to rouse you out your doze
And scamper for my burrow.

I know, I know, requires American pronunciation. (For English, spell it furro' and burro'.) And a bit of "bad English for the sake of meter" that needs fixing. No prizes for answering this correctly, but don't look in the comments until you've worked it out if you don't want spoilers.

Written this morning for a mate's birthday.

Riddle 2008:1, 25 Oct 2008

Shiny and brown in the face,
Headstrong and tough in our cups,
Heavily falling from grace—
Found among apples and cats,
Fattening piglings and bears,
Squirreled away 'til we hatch.

I know, I know, imperfect rhyme. No prizes for answering this correctly, but don't look in the comments until you've worked it out if you don't want spoilers.

Written last week for a roleplay board.

We have a neat new section called Introduction to Ethics. I hope the title is self-explanatory.

To a layman (i.e. me), at least, it's dead good.

There's also an updated version of the Sunni and Shi'a Muslims (what's the difference?) article.

Aww no! Audrey II has died.

If I wasn't doing so already, I'd sing Little Shop songs all week in memoriam.

Glasses Dog says "these pictures are concomitant with my interests"

Pedigree drops Crufts sponsorship

'Worrying' stray Staffie terriers trend

Parents in the US rent retired sniffer dogs to venture into their teenagers' bedrooms

edit: Oh, and I made a NetVibes page for a larf. I don't know what, if anything, I'm going to do with it. I read most feeds through Thunderbird.

Free Mothman comic book if you're interested in that kind of thing, and I've no idea why WordPress chose to wipe the text of this entry earlier.

…would we be arguing about the word "caecilian" and whether it's worth breaking spelling rules for.

J: "Sicilian? Well, that's a country name, it's diff—"
H: "No, caecilian, c-a-e-c-ilian."
S: "What the hell is that?"
H: "A legless amphibian!"
S: "Dot dot dot?"
J: "Well, that's obviously Latin, probably from 'Caesar'…"
H: "Nah, probably from the caecum isn't it?"
J: "By the time they know about caecilians they'll be beyond needing remedial reading help. Anyway…"

(Incidentally, looks like I'm right and 'caecum' is closer. All related to blindness.)

Language is fun.

(Hope this clip works outside the UK…) Lanca-shire horse retires from delivery job

Look at that big thing bounce! I'm absolutely terrified. :D

edit: One for Ree!

And more here that are pretty stunning, some of them.

Today, probably vaguely spurred on by having read a few reports of people getting ink, at which I generally roll my eyes, I asked myself what I'd get as a tattoo if I absolutely had to get one. Rolling my eyes at myself, I proceeded to apply logic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wefty-post with some religious detail, beware spoilers for Roofrats.

Here I've played him straight for once, not aiming for sympathy, for laughs or to make him obviously wrong. I actually enjoy doing this, and should do so more often.

It is, of course, my own fault for making a character that's so easy to abuse thus. When you're portraying someone illogical to a readership that has a critical mind (and surprising attention to detail, some of them), it's easy to flag up the insanity of his worldview while hardly trying.

I'm also reasonably satisfied that I managed to portray the other character in this scene pretty much as I imagine him. Well, at least courteous and not bamboozled. I'll probably get better at him in future, of course, which is just as well. We haven't seen the last of him.

This wasn't intended to be a "pat my own back" post, more of an equitably self-critical one. Argh.

Sneaking microformats into here. And testing them until they work with Google Maps.

To see and use microformats in Firefox you currently need a suitable extension. If they get wide uptake, though, expect that to change.

(It's such fun updating this old site. Once you get used to the tables and can skim through them blindly, at least.)

An hCard microformat worked example

Firstly, refer to a vcard syntax glossary like this one. There is also a hcard microformat creator, which works best with a little common sense added.

Both of those were less than 100% helpful in marking up some of the addresses I was doing today, though, so here's an example of a fully marked-up company name and address with some tricky bits.

(This address is available freely on the web and was the first example I had to hand, unsurprisingly.)

In this example the address needs to show up as "BBC Media Management Scotland, Zone 1.02, Pacific Quay, Glasgow".

With microformats you can't put information in attributes (so you can't do <span class="org" address="1 Balloon Street">Company</span> or similar). All the text you want to mark up has to be there, displayed on the page.

That's a problem. There is no post code here.

Well, I found an incomplete post code for Pacific Quay, Glasgow on the web. G51—that's enough to help your mapping software out, at least. How to include it without making it visible? I just cheated and told the browser to hide it: <span class="postal-code" style="display:none">G51</span>

Similarly to the post code, the country (Scotland) is not shown separately. This time it's because the page is only aimed at people in Scotland, so it would look patronising and possibly US-centric at worst, merely bloated at best. So much for the site visitors, but mapping sites are almost all American and will assume the country is America unless told differently. Well, I could add another hidden span here, but wait a second. What was that organisation name again? BBC Media Management Scotland. There's a usage of the word that already exists, ready for me to throw my class="country-name" around.

The full organisation name, then. There isn't actually a company called called "BBC Media Management Scotland". "Media Management Scotland" is a subdivision of "BBC". A human reader will grok that, and with microformats we can get the computer to grok it too. <span class="fn org"><span class="organization-name">BBC</span> <span class="organization-unit">Media Management Scotland</span></span>

Or with the extra country-name: <span class="fn org"><span class="organization-name">BBC</span> <span class="organization-unit">Media Management <span class="country-name">Scotland</span></span></span>

And yes, you need to add both fn and org for it to understand that this is the name of an organisation. hcards were set up for people and org really refers to the company at which the named person works.

The address is fairly straightforward except for that "Zone 1.02". Experimenting with Google Maps, I found that "Zone 1.02, Pacific Quay" turned up no results, even with the country name and partial post code included. "Pacific Quay" on its own does turn up the correct result. I could just not mark up Zone 1.02, leaving Pacific Quay as the full street address. But that's changing reality to please Google or Multimap, which is dumb, and besides would be unhelpful to your readers if they want to export the full address, say to print some labels.

Luckily hcard microformats have a class called extended-address, I discovered after some digging. The examples I found used it for things like room or flat numbers in a building. That'll do. <span class="extended-address">Zone 1.02</span>, <span class="street-address">Pacific Quay</span>

I think that's all the tricky stuff in this example.

Full thing:

<span class="vcard">
  <span class="fn org">
    <span class="organization-name">BBC</span>
    <span class="organization-unit">Media Management Scotland</span>
  </span>,
  <span class="adr">
    <span class="extended-address">Zone 1.02<span>, <span class="street-address">Pacific Quay</span>,
    <span class="locality">Glasgow</span> <span class="postal-code" style="display:none">G51</span>
  </span>
</span>

Naturally, you'd want to remove the whitespace to get it to display inline without unsightly gaps around the commas. And you could replace the outermost span with a div to make it block-level.

Example on the web