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Germany, France: We take it back! Save our asses in Iraq! Friday, September 5 2003
The glorious battle for Baghdad, won by Americans for Americans to make the world a safer place for cheap gasoline prices, culminated in a game of fighter-pilot dressup played by our president. I didn't think so, but apparently a good number of people thought he looked sharp in his fighter pilot costume. But even if the only history you know you learned from Iron Maiden songs, you had to have been put off by the blurring of military and civilian matters and the flagrant manipulation of naval timetables for transparently propagandistic purposes. The repulsive scene on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln was about as close as the 21st Century can get to the moment when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of whatever it was he was crowning himself emperor of. Here George W. Bush was, in all his inarticulate vacantness, glorious leader of the world's only superpower, having shrewdly avoided the United Nations debating society and the nattering naybobs of Old Europe, finally vanquishing the ghosts of Vietnam and showing the world the sort of metal/mettle we are made of.
Thus it comes as a delicious epilogue when gas prices climbed to $1.80/gallon (in this area) and Colin Powell went back to the United Nations trying to roust up some assistance from his irrelevant debating partners. Behind the scenes his plea was a diplomatic variant of, "Please come save our asses! We're in way over our heads in Iraq!"
This has given me an idea for a protest to be held anywhere there's even a token presence of foreign diplomatic personnel or media of any kind. Protestors should dress up like Brooks Brothers Rioteers, along with a few folks in combat fatigues, and hold signs saying, "UN: WE'RE BEGGING YOU! PLEASE HELP WITH IRAQ (BUT LET US STILL BE IN CHARGE!)" Or perhaps something with a rhyme, "GERMANY, FRANCE: WE TAKE IT BACK! SAVE OUR ASSES IN IRAQ!"
I've been hard at work redesigning the Catskill Animal Sanctuary website (which you can still compare to the original site). I've rebuilt it onto a system of PHP includes that centralize features needed on every page. In this way, its backend has become sort of a PHP version of Bathtubgirl.com, which was my first attempt to build a complex site from scratch using a centralized system of VBScript functions. (Those of you who refuse to read carefully please take note: I didn't just say that VBScript functions can be used in PHP.)
Some of the PHP functions I'm using are actually direct translations from time-honored functions I originally wrote in VBScript. I know I've already lost a few people, but here are two of my absolute favorite functions in their new PHP form:
function data($strIn,$intTypeIn, $intTypeOut, $strTranslate)
//using a double-delimited list $strTranslate of the form
//field1a|field2a|field3a-field1b|field2b|field3b-field1c...
//you can retrieve the field number $intTypeOut in the record
//containing the first match of $strIn to the field specified by
//$intTypeIn. if $intTypeIn is -1 then it returns a field from
//the record number specified by $strIn
//this serves as very nice bare-bones database retrieval system
{
$arrTranslate=split("-", $strTranslate);
$strOut="";
$bwlDone=1;
$strIn=$strIn+"";
$bwlDone=0;
for ($i=0; $i < count($arrTranslate) and $bwlDone==0; $i++)
{
$arrThis=split("\|",$arrTranslate[$i]);
if ($intTypeIn<count($arrThis) and $intTypeOut<count($arrThis))
{
if ($intTypeIn==-1)
{
if ($strIn==$i+'')
{
$strOut=$arrThis[$intTypeOut];
$bwlDone=1;
}
}
else
{
if ($arrThis[$intTypeIn]==$strIn)
{
$strOut=$arrThis[$intTypeOut];
$bwlDone=1;
}
}
}
}
return($strOut);
}
function nav()
{
//provides unified site navigation based on double-delimited strConfig
//having the form filename1|label1-filename2|label2...
$strfilename=thisfilename();
$strconfig="index.php|Home-meet.php|Meet the Animals-wish.php|
Wish List-sponsor.php|Sponsor an Animal-adopt.php|
Adopt an Animal-membership.php|Become a Member-shindig.php|
Sanctuary Shindig!-where.php|Driving Directions-feedback.php|Feedback";
$arrconfig=split("-",$strconfig);
$count=count($arrconfig);
$out="<p>";
for ($i=0; $i<$count; $i++)
{
$arrthis=split("\|", $arrconfig[$i]);
$strthisfile=$arrthis[0];
if ($strfilename!= $strthisfile)
{
$out=$out . "<nobr> <a class=\"nav\" href=\"";
$out=$out .$strthisfile . "\">" . $arrthis[1];
$out=$out ."</a></nobr><p>" . chr(13);
}
else
{
$out=$out . "<nobr><span class=\"navthere\" ";
$out=$out . >[" . $arrthis[1];
$out=$out . "]</span></nobr><p>" . chr(13);
}
}
$out= $out . randompicture("cas-images", 150, 0);
return($out);
}
a few odd links
The wonderful world we live in, where even the birds chirp MIDI tunes - My old college friend Alex G. steered me to this site maintained by David Icke, an avid conspiracy theorist (or, in this case, theoriologist). Icke seems to believe that everyone of even modest fame is a satanist, a pædophile, or a shape-shifting reptilian. That last one inspired Alex to make an interesting sign for a peace protest he attended in San Francisco.
Mozilla for Macs running OS 8-9 - I'm a relentless Mozilla enthusiast but some Mac people have written to complain that Mozilla.org stopped hosting versions for Macs not running OSX. This is where open source really shows its advantages. Someone took a copy of the freely-available source and managed to successfully compile a version of Mozilla 1.3 for Macs running OSes 8-9. The guy's not even a programmer.
Confidential Connections - I actually clicked on a link in a doofy smiley-ridden email claiming to come from a girl "who is new to the area." It took me to this site, which appears to be some sort of Ukrainian bride service. It really says something about a country when its two principle exports are white women and radiation.
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