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| Monday, June 29th, 2009 | | 3:54 pm |
Blast from the Past: An Internet posting I made 24 years ago
I have no memory of this, though I remember reading the book back then. But this is sure funny. Found it on Google Groups:  <input ... > <input ... > <input ... > <input ... > Newsgroups: net.jokes From: m...@husky.uucp (Mark A. Johnson)Date: Fri, 26-Jul-85 07:55:26 EDT Local: Fri, Jul 26 1985 7:55 am Subject: heifers <CHOMP> "'Minds me of a story they tell about Willy Feeley when he
was a young fella. Willy was bashful, awful bashful.
Well, one day he takes a heifer over to Graves' bull.
Ever'body was out but Elsie Graves, and Elsie wasn't
bashful at all. Willy, he stood there turnin' red an' he
couldn't even talk. Elsie says, 'I know what you come
for; the bull's out back a the barn.' Well, they took
the heifer out there an' Willy an' Elsie sat on the fence
to watch. Purty soon Willy got feelin' purty fly. Elsie
looks over an' says, like she don't know, 'What's a
matter, Willy?' Willy's so randy, he can't hardly set
still. 'By God,' he says, 'by God, I wisht I was a-doin
that!' Elsie says, 'Why not, Willy? It's your heifer.' "
--- John Steinbeck in THE GRAPES OF WRATH
(co. 1939 by John Steinbeck; Penguin Books Edition, pp. 74-75.)
Read the book! ---------------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----
Mark A. Johnson -- Eastman Kodak Company -- Information Products
UUCP:...allegra!rochester!ritcv!husky!mj W:(716) 726-9953 H:(716) 227-2356
(The Name Says It All)
"Lived here all your life?" "Not yet." Current Mood:  amused | | Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | | 9:51 pm |
| | Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | | 3:40 pm |
| | Friday, June 5th, 2009 | | 5:13 pm |
Just say "more"
 Here's why in a portlet containing a list of things, the anchor text for the rest of the items in the list should be just the word "more", instead of "more whatever": Look at the image to the right. What's in that box? A list of things, right? Find the link that would show you more items in that list. Found it? Good. Do you read Chinese? Probably not. (If you do, pretend the text is Devanagari or Naskh or Klingon or something.) Did it take you more than a second to find that link, or did you even have the slightest doubt about what it means? Again, probably not. Want to guess what "更多" means? (Hint: it means "more".) The take-home here is: it doesn't matter what's in the anchor text if the design communicates it for you. You probably can't even read that anchor text, yet you know what it is for. In this case, the old rules about complete sentences, adverb-object, and so on don't apply. Adding stuff to the anchor text in an attempt to be precise can only introduce confusion. The interface is effective without the words, so drop the extra words. The anchor text doesn't matter because it's not a label. It's an affordance. It's just "the thing you click", right where you expect it. Anyone who wants to see the other items in the list, and has two neurons to rub together, is going to find that link and click it. Even if the link says just "更多" instead of being completely explicit or grammatical and saying " 更多的宇航员穿着口红" or whatever. (That makes my point about only introducing confusion: it still makes sense *unless* you know what the text means. So, again, minimize the text.) If the user doesn't already understand "more what?", the problem is that the content or the context isn't clear. Adding words to the "more" link will not fix that problem, and isn't the place to try. On the web, less is more. Just Say "more". | | Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | | 11:12 am |
Do bacteria have noses?
Back in March when Zoe had her forehead injury, she had an interesting question for me. "Daddy, do bacteria have noses?" "What?" "Bacteria, do bacteria have noses?" "No, honey, why would you ask that?" "Mommy said that bacteria eat the medicine and so they die. But if they don't have noses how do they find the medicine so they eat it?" "Oh... no, honey, they're covered with the medicine. It just goes inside them and kills them. They don't have to find it." I could just imagine what she was imagining: little bugs sniffing around, looking for tiny pills to eat, and then dying because the pills have medicine. --- Last night Z&I were at the video store looking for a movie I thought she and Kayla would like. (We ended up with "A Bug's Life"--now she wants to play Bug's Life and be a bug.) At one point she suggested "Meet The Robinsons", which looked like it had maybe a bit too much action for a 5-year-old. So I said, "But I think that one looks a little bit scary." "That's OK, Daddy, I will sit with you." | | Monday, June 1st, 2009 | | 4:44 pm |
Is this a dead chicken?
 I'm home sick again today--day eight and counting--and Zoe's out of school now. So I took her to Pollo Campero for lunch. She waved a piece of chicken at me. "Is this a dead chicken?" "Yes, honey." "How did it die?" "I don't know exactly." True enough. I don't know exactly how they, you know, "do it"."Is this chicken?" "Yes." "Why is it brown and wrinkled on the outside?" "Oh, that's a kind of bread they put on the chicken before they cook it." "And this part inside, this part's the chicken?" "Yeah." "I think they have a long thing, like a kind of knife thing, and they take the chicken and WHACK!" "And then what happens to the chicken?" "They die. And then they take them to a special place, and they put that stuff on them that you told me about, and then we eat 'em." "Yeah, I think that's pretty much it." "Daddy, is the beak in there?" "What?" "Where's the beak? If this is chicken, there should be a beak." "They take that out, honey." "Why are you laughing?" "Pretty much nobody wants to eat the beak." "What about the feathers?" "They take those off, too. Nobody wants to eat feathers." "YUCK!" Current Mood: amused | | Friday, May 29th, 2009 | | 10:31 pm |
Somebody's trying to tell me something
- Last week, Marina said Zoe told her that her daddy was getting old, because he was losing his hair. "But that's OK," she said. "He can get a wig."
- Friday night, I took Zoe and Charlotte to Manoli Cannoli for pizza. At one point Charlotte looked at me and said, in her consistent high-pitched yell), "You got a big belly."
- Sunday at Elaine and Michael's, a four-year-old was walking around saying, "I'm the mommy." She looked at me and said, "You're the grandpa."
- Zoe is fascinated with her Susan doll. She pointed to it yesterday and said, "Daddy, look, she has boobies just like you!"
I told this to Maria Fernanda, when she was here this week, and she laughed and said, "Entonces, gordo, viejo, y chichudo!" After I get over this flu or whatever I have, it's time for some changes! Current Mood:  sick | | 10:15 pm |
My Great Dad
Zoe today gave me a paper she did at school entitled, "My Great Dad". It's a questionnaire that the teacher helped her fill out. Here it is, with Zoe's answers underlined, as they are on the page: My Great Dad- My Dad is 6 years old.
- My Dad is 5 feet tall.
- His hair is gray and his eyes are blue .
- My Dad likes to relax by sleeping .
- He likes to cook patai . (The teacher didn't recognize pad thai.)
- My Dad fixes his own things around our house.
- He likes to watch grownup shows on TV.
- When my Dad shops, we likes to buy stuff we don't have .
- My Dad always tells me I love you, Zoe!
- I love it when my Dad takes care of me!
My Dad is the best!And she signed it herself. :-) Current Mood: grateful | | Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | | 11:00 pm |
In case there's any doubt...
Damn, I'm even sicker tonight. I think I'm worse than Carolina got. Or maybe she's just less of a whiner.
If there was any doubt about how sick I am, check out the peepers:
The throat pain is worse than tonsillectomy. Really. Viruses SUCK.
Current Mood: sick | | 9:00 am |
OMG I'm sick
No wonder Carolina has been so miserable the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately now Dona Mari has it, too. About a month ago, I was getting Zoe ready for bed, and pulled what looked like a little piece of string away from her eye. It was a thread of mucus. Later she complained that her eye was bothering her. By morning she had bad conjuncitivitis: the eye was swollen almost shut. Some drops from the pediatrician cleared that right up within a day or two. A few days later, C got conjuncitivitis in both eyes, and has had bad throat pain, especially at night, that has only gradually improved. Until last weekend, I seemed to have escaped getting sick. Well. Sunday morning I was snipping some lavendar in the garden, and got the ball of my thumb in the way. The end of the pruning shears snipped 1 cm-long slit in my hand. It was pretty bloody. C helped me get cleaned up. I could see her medical training in how she did it--she scrubbed my whole arm, which was very dirty from gardening, before scrubbing the hand and then the wound. It was a pretty deep cut, and gets sore if I don't keep it covered with antibiotic. Anyway, since the morning, I had a slight sore throat, and thought I was probably coming down with something. We went to Elaine and Michael's yard party at around 6:00. I had an 8:20 pm doctor's appointment at Nighttime Pediatrics for a tetanus booster. I had a great time at the party, especially once I got started talking to Ira, Elaine's dad. She keeps accusing me of being him; we're so alike. As I was driving to the doc's, I started feeling worse, and by the time the doctor arrived, I was feeling pretty awful. He told me he thought I was getting a cold, but a strep swab was negative. I got the shot, and started getting chills as I waited to pay. I felt so cold that I turned on the heater in the car, even though it was in the mid- to upper 70's outside. When I got home, getting out of the warm car, I had chills so violent I almost couldn't talk. C thought I was having a reaction to the vaccine, but Tylenol took care of it. Within a half hour the fever and chills had subsided. But while Carolina was complaining that it was too hot in the house, I was wearing sweats and a fleece, and still felt cold. It was weird. The past three nights my throat has been so sore that it's hard to sleep. It reminds me of post-op tonsillectomy pain. Tylenol reduces the pain to just discomfort, but swallowing is still annoying. Yesterday I thought I was getting better, but this morning I awoke with both laryngitis and that damn pinkeye that Carolina and Zoe both had. So now I'm going to the doctor at three today. Carolina has had a sore throat and symptoms, including slight conjunctivitis, coming and going for three weeks. I'm going to look into supplements and alternative immune system support to see if I can avoid being sick that long. Damn this sucks. I've been googling pharyngitis conjunctivitis laryngitis and it seems we have an adenovirus. So immune support, whatever that may mean, seems to be the only option. Meanwhile I'm trying to get some work done. The good news is, all this time at home has given me space to reinstall windows on my home machine. What a relief--it's like having a new computer. I'll probably install Ubuntu today if I feel up to it. Installations don't require much attention, just time. | | Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | | 3:30 pm |
| | Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | | 11:45 pm |
Favorite short album reviews
I don't know who this was, but one rock critic (several in the Intertubes think it may be JD Considine), I think it was in Rolling Stone (some say it was Musician, used to revel in micro-reviews: Cher, "Love Hurts" [Review: "Not this much."] David Lee Roth, "A Little Ain't Enough" [Review: "Wanna bet?"] GTR, "GTR" [Review: "SHT"] Iron Maiden, "A Real Dead One" [Review: "No argument here."] Bad English, "?" [Review: "Grammar is the least of their problems."] Current Mood: amused | | Monday, May 18th, 2009 | | 1:45 pm |
Newt Gingrich, cynical prick
Want to know further who poisoned the well in Congress? Look no further. Newt Gingrich does not deserve to call himself an American.
On the first day after the 1998 election I called Newt Gingrich to talk about some business; when the conversation got around to the election, he was very generous, saying that as a historian and "the quarterback for the other team," he wanted to congratulate me. Later in November, Erskine Bowles had a very different conversation: Newt told Erskine that they were going to go forward with the impeachment despite the election results and the fact that many moderate Republicans didn't want to vote for it. When Erskine asked Newt why they would proceed with impeachment instead of other possible remedies such as censure or reprimand, the Speaker replied, "Because we can." The right-wing Republicans who controlled the House believed that they had now paid for impeachment so they should just go on and do it before the new Congress came in. The right-wingers in the House caucus were seething over their defeat. Now they were going to seize back control of the Republican agenda through impeachment. My Life, by Bill Clinton, p.824-825 Jun 21, 2004
| | 12:39 pm |
Larry Axel Quote
"While most of the world looked on--as did, presumably, any divine beings that exist--Hitler and his Nazi force operated killing centers that gassed children by the hundreds of thousands... With perhaps unprecedented magnitude and clarity, Auschwitz brings theologians and philosophers face to face with the facts of suffering on an incredibly mass scale, with issues poignantly raised concerning the absence of divine intervention or the inadequacies of divine power or benevolence; and we are led eventually to what theologians and philosophers call the Problem of Evil or the issue of theodicy. For theists, terrible dilemmas are raised. Irving Greenburg and others have insisted that in a post-Shoah world, no theological utterance should be affirmed today that is not cerdible in the presence of the burning children of Auschwitz. Anyone who wsheds to take evidence and experience seriously, to be "empirical," must recoginze in evil (both so-called moral evil and so-called natural evil) a substantive threat to traditional forms of theism that posit a God of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and control. Not only have many people concluded that there is an absence of substantive evidence for traditional theism, but also that there may be evidence--in the widespread presence of natural and moral evil in the world-- against theism. There are certain things that cannot be ignored by a theological vocabulary. We can legitimately ask: should anyone who wishes to take experience seriously and who does not seek refuge in some kind of dualistic fideism, assert a theistic position after Auschwitz?" --Larry Axel, Religious Creaturalism and a New Agenda for Theology, in God, Values and Empiricism, 1998. | | Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | | 5:43 pm |
| | Monday, April 6th, 2009 | | 9:26 am |
Hard being four
"Daddy, when I was a little girl, I used to chew on my hair." "Zoe, you still chew on your hair. I have to tell you to stop several times a day." Pause. "Daddy, it's hard being four." "Why?" "Because you don't always know what you're not supposed to do." "And maybe it's hard to remember the things you do know, right?" Pause. "But it's not hard being five?" "No? Why not?" "Because five is a big girl. It's not hard to be a big girl." Current Mood: charmed | | Sunday, April 5th, 2009 | | 11:02 pm |
| | 11:27 am |
| | Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | | 2:02 pm |
| | Friday, March 27th, 2009 | | 9:54 pm |
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