This is the personal weblog of Moss Collum, a programmer living in Healdsburg, CA. I mostly blog about tech stuff, linguistics, politics, and fun things I find on the web, but there's really no set topic.
If you've found this page through Google, I hope it helps. The search tool may help find the exact post you're looking for. If you want to see what I've posted lately, you can go to the front page of the blog.
If you're someone I know, you probably already know about this blog and come here regularly, but if not, please leave me a note: chances are I'd be delighted to hear from you.
If you want to contact me, you can email me at gmail (where my address is my first name dot my last name), or just leave a comment here.
Note that the "Bloglet" of my page title is the Perl script I use for my blogging, not the other, better known Bloglet.
A year and a half ago, one Dennis Paul Himes randomly commented on a week-old (at the time) song quotes meme. He was the first to correctly identify a damned good Bob Dylan song. Anyway, I just checked out his home page, and it's delightful.
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05:28:00 PM,
Wednesday 4 January 2006
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BLT was having problems reading LiveJournal feeds for the past few months. I've now fixed it, and also added in the LiveJournal of Dan Keys, who has needed a blog for some time, and finally has one.
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02:50:48 PM,
Tuesday 3 January 2006
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...and a happy New Year!
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03:21:36 AM,
Sunday 1 January 2005
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The flooding around here has evidently made the national news--at any rate, we heard about it while we were in Texas--so I just thought I should mention that we're quite all right. Our apartment, and the rest of downtown Healdsburg, is above water, the rain has stopped, and the water level is falling.
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09:04:04 PM,
Saturday 31 December 2005
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Out of Context Quote of the Day: "In Afghanistan they use a goat's head, but here we use cat balls."
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09:33:19 PM,
Saturday 24 December 2005
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The Grey Goose goes out into the wide world, where she and a discontented Sausage meet the Cock and the Fox.
(Story begins here.)
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08:57:20 PM,
Saturday 24 December 2005
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I've been convinced that I may not have given T.S. Eliot a fair shake, and should maybe look closer at some of his poetry. Does anyone have suggestions for particular poems I'd do well to read, or to avoid?
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03:17:01 PM,
Monday 19 December 2005
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For Martin.
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01:14:03 PM,
Wednesday 14 December 2005
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Overheard outside of the coffee shop on the way to work: “Well, we’re not outraged here, but guess where they’re outraged?”
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Arise, you prisoners of starvation!
Arise, you wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation:
A better world's in birth!
No more tradition's chains shall bind us,
Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations:
We have been naught, we shall be all!
'Tis the final conflict;
Let each stand in their place!
The international working class
Shall be the human race.
We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgment hall,
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all:
To make the thief disgorge his booty,
To free the spirit from its cell,
We must ourselves decide our duty,
We must decide and do it well.
'Tis the final conflict;
Let each stand in their place!
The international working class
Shall be the human race.
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05:59:28 PM,
Monday 12 December 2005
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Quote of the day: “Moss, even though he’s sick, is right.”
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Well, I think my Jane much abused. That is all I can say on the matter.
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12:58:19 AM,
Saturday 10 December 2005
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If Franz Ferdinand is dead, how come he keeps releasing albums?
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09:56:28 PM,
Friday 9 December 2005
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Fascinating Ask MetaFilter thread about how not to be followed home.
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01:44:46 AM,
Friday 9 December 2005
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This should probably be read.
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02:06:27 PM,
Tuesday 6 December 2005
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Home again!
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01:38:09 AM,
Sunday 4 December 2005
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Drove to France and back, and still not dead, or even damaged.
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05:04:40 PM,
Sunday 27 November 2005
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Julia and Ben discuss the driving situation I will face today, as presented in a news report:
“It’ll be okay. You can just drive slowly and carefully, and…”
“‘Snow Chaos’ were the exact words they used.”
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Off to Germany!
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10:01:06 AM,
Wednesday 23 November 2005
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On seeing a picture of the Corn Palace, and being told that it is made of (decorated with, actually) corn: "Wow. That's much more exciting than the Cow Palace. Which is not actually made of cows, thank God."
(Read more about The World's Only Corn Palace on Wikipedia or Everything 2. It also has a festival.)
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11:38:08 PM,
Tuesday 15 November 2005
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...and when they grab you with those metal claws you can't break free, because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.
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09:42:53 PM,
Monday 14 November 2005
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Even though there were a couple that I had supported, I'm proud of my state for voting down every proposition on the ballot. That's one election in which the damned things can't do any damage.
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01:50:06 PM,
Wednesday 9 November 2005
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Noted without comment: In the words of African Managing Director Eric Frank, ". . . we had to find what we called the Simple, Universal, Relevant Truth that would persuade a continent to adore Guinness. We expressed it this way: Inside me there's a powerful heroic assured person. I want to live my life as that person. When I drink Guinness I become more fully who I am."
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03:05:50 PM,
Tuesday 8 November 2005
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Things are now mostly back up. The very short version of what happened: the hosting company needed to move the server from one machine to another; they contacted me about it two weeks in advance, but because I am careless and was preoccupied with other stuff, I didn’t deal with it until the old machine was already gone; as a result, everything that had happened on hobbes (teasmoke, ninjavampire, infinity-bound, gallery.m14m, tracker.m14m) since October 17th was lost.
Hobbes is now running again, but infinity-bound.net still isn’t pointing to it—that should happen soon. If you use my blog tracker, it has forgotten what you’d read since the 17th.
By digging around in my browser caches, I was able to restore most of the missing posts on Neil’s, Tanya’s, Libby’s, and Kerne’s blogs. Kerne will be able to restore a few more from his RSS reader, including Katherine’s, Alex’s, and Alena’s. I also found a few comment threads in my cache, which I will paste back into place. Everything on ninjavampire since October 17th seems to be gone for good.
I’m terribly sorry about all this, especially to those who lost blog posts. I will try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again in the future. If there’s anything I can do to make it up to you, let me know.
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Hobbes is down. Working on it. Fear there may be some data loss. Apologies. Should be up again in a day or two. Ask questions here if you like.
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09:15:18 PM,
Monday 31 October 2005
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He shall prick that annual blister
Marriage with deceased wife's sister
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05:52:17 PM,
Tuesday 25 October 2005
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If ______ is wrong, I don't want to be right.
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02:45:20 PM,
Saturday 22 October 2005
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Sumana mentions “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long”, Weird Al’s parody of “Got My Mind Set On You”. The wonderful thing about “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” is that, even without ever having heard it, I already know the whole song. Unless it’s non-self-describing, that is.
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Senator Wayne Allard, CO
Senator Christopher Bond, MO
Senator Thomas Coburn, OK
Senator Thad Cochran, MS
Senator John Cornyn, TX
(Senator Jon Corzine, NJ)
Senator James Inhofe, OK
Senator Pat Roberts, KS
Senator Jefferson Sessions, AL
Senator Ted Stevens, AK
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I’ve seen a number of people linking to the news that the Catholic Church rejects a strictly literal interpretation of scripture as if it were a shocking new development (a few blog searches [2, 3, 4] give a fair representation of the general reaction), but isn’t it really just a restatement of well-established church doctrine? The document discussed in the source article is described as an explanation of Dei Verbum, which was published in 1965, and as far as I can tell, the basic principle goes much further back. It’s good to hear it repeated, certainly, but hardly the radical change many people are taking it as.
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08:00:36 PM,
Thursday 6 October 2005
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Let’s say you have some leftover chicken vindaloo in your fridge (and if you don’t, maybe you should consider it). And let’s say, further, that you don’t have any rice to go with it, but do have several flour tortillas and some cheese. You might suppose, in a whimsical sort of mood, that it would be a good idea to heat up one of the tortillas, melt some cheese on it, and form a sort of vindaloo burrito—a “vindabu“, if you will.
And you’d be right!
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I just received pharmaceutical spam from one “Eumelia Grumbles”.
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Earlier today, while reading a delightful interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon, I noticed a link to this old Time Magazine cover from 1966. It put me in mind of a story my father sometimes tells.
You see, at around that time, my father was working at a bookstore in a mall in Hollywood. The mall (for reasons of cost, I can only assume) was in the process of taking out all the real potted plants that had decorated the inside, and replacing them with fake plants. One day, while he and a coworker were looking out on this scene, his coworker turned to him and remarked “so, I see the new god is taking over”.
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Band name: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Syphilitic Whores
Julia: Would they sing songs about Nietzsche’s philosophy, or just random crap?
Moss: Just random crap.
Moss: Wait, how would you tell the difference between Nietzsche’s philosophy and random crap?
also, suggested Julia: Koosh and the Balls.
I: They could do covers of 80's punk rock and girlpop.
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03:58:34 AM,
Tuesday 27 September 2005
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Fig Newtons—the dinner of champions!
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Julia: A minute ago, did you just sing “by Grabthar’s hammer, you will be avenged” in a lounge voice?
Moss: Umm… yeah.
Julia: ...
Moss: ...
Julia: You’re special. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not special.
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