I just happened to drift past the ol’ blog here and I couldn’t help but notice that the turkey photo looks much better against this new background than it did last year against the old dark version of Simple Tricks. All that 70s-style brown and gold seems really warm and inviting now, whereas I remember it being kind of sickly last year. Hmmmm… maybe there’s something to this whole change thing after all.
You may recall seeing this silly photo here last year, but it makes me smile so I’m going to post it again. I’m thinking it just may become a Simple Tricks and Nonsense Thanksgiving Tradition™…
I don’t think I’ll be getting back to the blog today, so Happy Mass-Consumption Day, drive safely to Grandma’s house, and I’ll see you all on the other side!
You don’t hear much about space exploration on the nightly television news these days, but if you do a little googling, you’ll find that there’s actually a lot of activity going on Out There. Between the various US organizations, the ESA (European Space Agency), and the Japanese, our species has placed its mechanical proxies all over the solar system, everywhere from the very edge of interstellar space back to Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way inward to the sun. But the missions that seem to draw the most public attention are the ones focused on Mars, especially the rock stars of robotic space probes, those two intrepid little rovers. The first rover to land on the Red Planet, Spirit, has just celebrated its first year there — its first Martian year, that is, which is actually equivalent to about two Earth years. Not bad for a machine that was only supposed to last 90 days. The official press release puts this milestone into some perspective:
During Spirit’s martian year, the seasons have changed from summer to winter and back again. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars has returned to where it was when the rover first landed. Having survived seven times its expected lifetime and traveling over 3 miles (about 5,000 meters), Spirit is still going strong.
If you have a minute, give that entire press release a look; it’s an interesting recap of Spirit’s various discoveries as well as its arduous climb up the Columbia Hills, with several pictures and a map of the rover’s wanderings. You might also want to check out the “special effects” photos prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to commemorate the anniversary. Basically, they’ve combined a Hollywood-style digital model of the rover with actual images sent back from Mars to give us an external view of how Spirit might look in the Martian environment. My personal favorite of is this one. I like the romantically bittersweet feeling of the little probe all alone in the coming night of an alien world…
Josh Marshall responds to an interesting question from one of his readers with a few more interesting questions of his own:
…[November 22] did used to be a date for which there was always some build up and moments of commemoration [for the assassination of President Kennedy]. But now nothing. Is it just some critical mass in the passage of years? Forty-two years and it’s just definitively part of the past? Or is it some political or cultural inflection point the country’s passed through post-9/11?
Okay, kids, here’s the scoop: since the upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 about twelve days ago, I’ve had very little spam activity, and the small amount of crap that did come in was handled quite efficiently by MT’s filtering protocol, which means I haven’t given the matter a lot of thought. This morning, however, the filter let me down, and I got hit with some 50 junk comments in a little under an hour. Rather than let it stack up and become totally unwieldy, I shut down the comments feature while I did some research on what I can do to stop this nuisance once and for all.
As I mentioned a while back, the most secure option would require anyone who comments here to register with an authentication service called TypeKey. This is a third-party organization with which you create an identity and prove yourself to be a human being (easier than you might think for us genuine humans, but bloody difficult for software masquerading as a person), and then you can use this identity to log in to blogs and other Websites that require this form of authentication.
TypeKey authentication would give me lots of control over what happens around here, but I fear it might also discourage some people from commenting, and I don’t want to do that. I know some of my readers aren’t especially tech-savvy or involved in the online world, and I can see how it could be off-putting to be forced into signing up for something that might have limited usefulness for you. My concern is that, if this is the only TypeKey-restricted blog you visit, you might choose to simply stop commenting here rather than register. Or you might stop visiting altogether. So before I do anything drastic, I’m going to ask anyone who regularly comments here — and even anyone who may be lurking out there but thinks they might commment someday — to give me some feedback now. What do you think about this TypeKey idea? Would it be a pain or make you uncomfortable to have to register for this service? Leave your thoughts below, please.
In the meantime, I’ve cranked up the sensitivity of the Movable Type spam filter and set the system to hold all comments for moderation before they publish. Maybe this will turn out to be enough anti-spam protection and I won’t have to go to the TypeKey option, but I’d still like to know what y’all think…
FYI, I’ve come under a major spam attack today, so I’ve shut down the comments feature until I have a chance to deal with things…
The news is over a week old now, but I’d still like to acknowledge the recent death of Moustapha Akkad. He was the producer of the Halloween movies, the man who made certain that “the boogeyman,” Michael Myers, kept coming back time and time again, long after the character’s creator had moved on to other projects and the series itself had become something of a joke. Some would say that’s nothing worthy of commemorating — heaven knows I’ve done plenty of my own grumbling about endless strings of sequels that diminish the strengths and reputations of their original films with each new entry in the series — but if it wasn’t for Akkad’s periodic trips back to Myers’ well, I very possibly would not have met one of my best friends.
One of the things I’m liking about the new edition of Movable Type is a little plug-in tool called StyleCatcher, which enables you to quickly swap out pre-existing stylesheets with the touch of a button instead of all the tedious cutting-and-pasting of code that used to be required. Basically, it makes it super-easy to play with the look of the ol’ blog, so it selecting a style feels like less of a major commitment.
This particular style is called “Powell Street.” I find this one pretty pleasing, except for the khaki-colored sidebar. I’m not sure about that. Anyone out there have any thoughts? Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, expressions of disgust, or whatever seems appropriate…
Here’s another interesting statement from Senator Hagel of Nebraska:
Terrorism is a real threat and a present danger that we must confront and defeat. But we must not sacrifice the strengths and ideals of America that the world has come to respect and trust, and that define us. That is why I co-sponsored Senator McCain’s amendment to prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment of any detainee under the custody of any branch of the U.S. Government. I strongly oppose any exception to this prohibition…
The recent media reports of a worldwide American system of secret, black-hole jails, run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and developed explicitly to circumvent our obligations under the Geneva Convention, sullies everything that America represents.
Both this quote and the one in the previous entry come from a speech the senator delivered yesterday to the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s a pretty interesting read as political speeches go, made even moreso by the fact that Hagel’s words seem to stand in direct opposition to much of what his party has championed — or at least tolerated — under the Bush White House. Oddly enough, he says many of the exact same things I myself have been muttering ever since 9/11. It’s a strange feeling to find myself nodding in agreement with a Republican. I really don’t know what to make of it…
“The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years. The Democrats have an obligation to challenge in a serious and responsible manner, offering solutions and alternatives to the Administration’s policies.
“Vietnam was a national tragedy partly because Members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the Administrations in power until it was too late. Some of us who went through that nightmare have an obligation to the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to not let that happen again. To question your government is not unpatriotic – to not question your government is unpatriotic. America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices.”
–Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska
[Ed. note: emphasis mine]