13 Sep 2006
Does Everybody Who Comments Here Use a Mozilla based Browser?

Or Opera? Because there was a major flaw in the writeback section, stemming from my use of the <pre> tag, with every other browser on the planet.

It seems as though there's a documented "anomaly" in some browsers, including IE 5+ for Windows, Konqueror for Linux/KDE and Safari for the Mac (which is based on Konqueror code) that forces the width of the entire page to match the longest single line enclosed in the preformatting tag. Moronic doesn't begin to describe that little bit of nonsense - the tag has a "width" attribute, which these browsers cheerfully ignore.

It's fixed now - I went with a textarea [ugly!] and got rid of the offending, yet standard HTML <pre> tag altogether. Should be functionally identical, except for the scroll bars, of course, but ... well, let me know if you see any weirdness, will ya?

21:40 /Home | 7 comments | permanent link

Grieving wife sliced off willy

Some stories have to be read in their entirety to be believed...

A wife aged 65 chopped off her dead husband’s willy in hospital — so she could keep it in a pickling jar as a souvenir.

Uta Schneider used a butcher’s knife to hack off the “treasured” manhood. She wrapped it in foil and put it in a lunchbox — next to gherkins.
But she was spotted by a nurse and arrested in Stuttgart, Germany. She is accused of mutilation.

Uta was wed to Heinrich, 68, for 35 years. She told police: “It was his best asset and gave me so much pleasure.

"I wanted to pickle it for eternity — he would have wanted it. We called it his joystick. I wanted it to remember him by."

(link) [The Sun (UK)]

18:48 /Humor | 2 comments | permanent link

Modified Foods to Die For

Pretty funny, but she gets persimmons all wrong. No need to genetically modify them: they taste great if picked and prepared correctly. I suspect that she's been eating Asian persimmons, the really large (fist sized) variety that you run across on the produce counter in upscale grocery stores. If that's the case, I'd agree with her, although I'd suggest the modification be simply to stop buying them!

American PersimmonTo the left is an American Persimmon - about two or three inches in diameter (max) and very common from Virginia through Tennessee, Kentucky and southern Indiana. And delicious. There are whole festivals in this area of the country devoted to the lowly persimmon.

American Persimmons are an astringent type, and cannot be eaten until becoming custard-soft by an after-ripening of exposure to light and frost for a few days. Hence the rule: you can't pick persimmons until after Jack Frost's first visit. And picking isn't really the right word - most of the fruit will have fallen to the ground by this time, and it's perfectly OK to harvest them. Before being used the persimmons are pulped - the skin and seeds are removed by straining through a sieve or colander. You end up with an orange goo the consistency of sour cream.

You can then use the pulp to create the most delicious pudding imaginable:

Auntie's Persimmon Pudding

2 cups persimmon pulp        2 cups sugar
2 eggs, well beaten          1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 1/4 cups evaporated milk   1 tsp soda
1 3/4 cups flour             2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon               1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup cooking oil            pinch of salt

preheat oven to 325 degrees
combine pulp, sugar and eggs in a large mixing bowl
stir soda into buttermilk and add to mixture
all all other ingredients, saving cooking oil for last
mix well
bake in a buttered 9x13 pan for 1 hour

If you can find real persimmons you owe it to yourself to try this during the coming holiday season. It's a tradition around here to make a batch for Thanksgiving and another for Yule. It just wouldn't be the holidays without persimmon pudding.

GMOs deserve a makeover -- If we're going to be tinkering with the very building blocks of life, I expect to be seriously entertained. Here are my suggestions for modified foods that would make it worth playing God. Commentary by Lore Sjöberg.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

17:54 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Poisoned pigeons disrupt city festival

What a bunch of morons:

"The death of these pigeons was more than an unfortunate accident," local CapitalOne Bank President Lacy McMillen said in Tuesday's online edition of Texarkana Gazette. "It was not the intention of the bank to harm any of these birds."

If you don't want to harm birds, don't feed them poison! As for the exterminators who actually placed the stuff, well:

Anti-Pest Co. Inc. of Shreveport, Louisiana, said its goal with the treated corn was to sicken pigeons, so they would leave the rooftop. Death was sometimes an unfortunate side effect.

Making pigeons sick won't make them leave, because sick and disoriented birds can't fly. If they try it, they generally end up in a nose dive. As the good folks of Texarkana found out.

If the bank is this idiotic about handling a pest problem, you gotta wonder how they handle their investments... if I were in Texarkana I'd be searching for a new bank to manage my money.

Poisoned pigeons began nose-diving into pavement and dying on downtown sidewalks, marring the city's annual festival. Authorities cleaned up more than 25 sick or dead birds that apparently had eaten poisoned corn from the roof of a nearby bank branch.

(link) [CNN.com]

17:52 /Agriculture | 2 comments | permanent link