Tapirtype Blog

One thing that's fun about riding the T in Boston right now is that a lot of the trains have ads for Glacieau Vitamin Water featuring David Ortiz, the Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter also known as Big Papi. Some of the ads proclaim of Vitamin Water, "It works. For David Ortiz." And who can argue against evidence like that? Other ads ask "Who's your papi?" and some of them say "From underdog to big dog papi." This makes me extremely happy because it reminds me of my little cousin Jack, who is four. Last time I visited him, I started calling him Little Papi, to which he would respond with his voice cracking, "He-ey! Why you call me Papi?!?" He and his sister Lydia thought this routine was all kinds of hilarious, and while sitting at the dinner table, Lydia would whisper to Jack that he was Little Papi, and then Jack would whirl around to me and cackle, "YoucallmePapi!" So it makes me happy to see Big Papi on the T. This does not, however, change the fact that we must abolish the DH.

I just migrated the blog to php so that I can later take advantage of php inside our pages. This means that if, by some chance, someone out there has linked to a page here ending in ".html," they should now be going to the same page but ending in ".php" instead.

I wasn't really sure if I should write anything today. Overall I think too many people say too many things about 9/11 that they shouldn't. But I do feel that an important aspect of coming to terms with events (all evens whether traumatic or not) is to talk about them. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the people who have been talking about 9/11 have, for the most part, not been focusing on the right things.

I don't own a Windows machine or have access to one on a daily basis, so I took an opportunity to check out the blog from Microsoft Internet Explorer, and man, does it not render right! Of course, it also choked on the New York Times website, so we're not alone. Unfortunately I forgot to check what the version was (it isn't by any means guaranteed that the computer I was using was up to date), but it was under XP. Most of the main site was at least readable, but it couldn't handle the photo galleries at all. It didn't seem to get css widths right and it didn't even seem to be trying to display the pngs.

Anyway, I can't really bring myself to care. I develop this site on a mac and use Safari as my main browser, resorting to Firefox on the rare occasions that Safari can't handle. So I check the site in Firefox before I make anything really new and as long as it works there I'm happy. That said, if you are wondering why this site looks so broken, please do yourself a favor and use something other than Internet Explorer.

Update: Well, it looks like MSIE is back to being able to render the NYT website ok. Must have been a one day thing. The bottom line still applies, though, that imperfect as this site is, I'm going to use standards compliance and how it renders in Safari and Firefox as my target and not worry about whether that breaks things for MSIE (which I can't check easily anyway).

So about 45,000 of the opinions they have you read as a first year law student are by this judge named Learned Hand, who had a cousin - also an influential judge - named Augustus Noble Hand. Learned was also friends with J. D. Salinger, apparently, which I guess would make him about the one dude that Salinger would talk to.

I did read a decision for Property last night that wasn't by Learned Hand, though - it was by Proctor Hug, Jr. It's like a Care Bear mated with the cast of The Crucible. And it makes me happy.

I just came across an article in Salon titled “Why Johnny can't code” exploring the decline in availability of simple programming tools included with computers. It happens to be written by one of my faveorite Science Fiction authors, David Brin (a fact that I didn't realize until the mention of Startide Rising on the last page--bad me for not reading bylines). His basic thesis is that currently children (or students of any age) have no ready access to a simple programming language like the BASIC that used to be included with every computer, and that because of this, while computers are becoming more and more important, people have less and less of an inroad into understanding how they work.

I just wrote the previous post about programming in part as a distraction from writing about another Salon article. “Come as you are” by Lauren Sandler describes a mega church in Seattle where "hipster" culture mixes with religious fundamentalism and they preach a subservient role for women in order to have as many babies as possible in an attempt to repopulate Seattle with conservatives. I can't bring myself to write much about it because the whole subject horrifies me. Not because some people would find it an attractive way to live (I can actually kind of see the attraction and besides people can live as they want) but because of the brazenness and openness of the desire to make us all live as they do.

But it mostly just depresses me. First because, these evangelicals who can see their way through to worrying about corporate greed, and the Walmart-ization of the world will turn around and vote for Bush, of course, because he's so loudly a Christian who agrees with them about the things that impact only themselves like gender roles and marriage, instead of someone who might actually do something about those causes that impact other people. But even more than that, it bothers me to no end that religion and community so often go hand in hand with anti-intellectualism.

Yes, that is the sound--the only sound I can make in fact--of me watching the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Words cannot express how excited I am. Aaron Sorkin is back on TV! And he brought really, really good friends!

More reactions later. I'm too excited right now. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!