Cicada

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CicadaOne of the infamous Brood X Cicadas flew into the office yesterday, crashed into a wall, and settled to the floor behind my desk. These babies are strong; when I tried to pick him up by the wings, he clamped a leg onto the carpet and another onto the nearest CAT-5 cable, and would not let go no matter how I tugged (gently, of course). Unwilling to tear off his wings in the struggle, I instead eased a napkin under him, gently carried him to the window, and let him out. He perched on the ledge for a bit, before deciding to fly off rather than try and get back into the office.

Gorgeous creatures, these cicadas, with those delicate gold wing filaments and glossy membranes and bright red eyes. But be careful, they are EVIL and DEADLY!

(See also Cicada Watch.)

Exercise in Cynicism

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As expected, Philippine elections last May 10th were an exercise in cynicism, with dubious incumbent GMA pulling the lead over movie star and Erap puppet FPJ, to the noisy, rancorous music of election fraud accusations. It’s greater evil versus lesser evil, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide who is which. Either way: Doom!

(Sorry for being such a pessimist. I told you it was an exercise in cynicism.)

Amidst the accusations of cheating, Philstar has an excellent editorial about Nene Pimentel getting it right: “File the Charges” (Google cached in case Philstar screws up archiving as usual). Contrast Pimentel, going through proper legal channels to combat fraud, to the opposition’s attempts to invoke Edsa-2-esque rationale by calling for riots and disturbance.

But I have no patience for learning the details of Exit Polls, Quick Counts, and Congressional Canvassing. I’ll leave that to the political junkies, and read their output. Meanwhile, the Filipino politics-entertainment crossover continues, with such congressional farces as this: “SHUT UP! SHUT UP SHUT UP!”

Washingtonniene

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Update: My mistake, it’s spelled “Washingtonienne.” But this misspelled title gets tons of hits, so it’s all good.

Most recent scandal rocking the government’s not-so-hallowed halls is that of Jessica Cutler, better known as “Washingtonniene”, a low level Hill staffer (um, ex-staffer) who posted accounts of her many, varied, and profitable sexual exploits to a public weblog (archived somewhere, but I’m not linking it). From what I hear on the Hill, sexually overactive interns and staffers are nothing new; apparently Ms. Cutler was cited for using office equipment to post her sordid wittiness to Blogger. Getting fired did wonders for her notoriety: an interview and a night on the town with DC-gossip blogger Wonkette, plus reports of book deals, Playboy offers, and of course the requisite fifteen minutes of media-induced fame.

More on those fifteen minutes. (Caveat: UPI writer.)

I’m not normally one to agree with Michelle Malkin, but she’s spot on with this one: “This vulgar little episode reflects a larger, disturbing media trend toward normalizing and glamorizing sexual promiscuity among young working women. It harms those trying to succeed on their merits in the professional arena. And it also harms our own daughters, who will be forced to fight harder to protect their dignity and credibility in a “Girls Gone Wild” culture.” Also note the sentence on Spaghetti-O’s. (Caveat: Michelle Malkin)

(Update: Excellent SkankBack from Wonkette. I love it. Love it.)

Poor Mike DeWine (Senator, R-Ohio). Until this scandal broke, I had never heard of him, and neither, I imagine, had many other Americans. Now, (or at least for the next fifteen minutes) his name in the media is inevitably connected to “Washingtonniene’s boss.” A dubious distinction, to be certain.

The scandal, the media frenzy, the pictures, the proud candor; you don’t even need to invoke Sodom and Gomorrah for this one. The sad part is that I’m disappointed that I’m not shocked because I’m so jaded.

And for those of you still bugging my referrals with google searches for Washingtonniene pictures: here, here, here, here, and here, okay? (Caveat: non-wholesome links on the last one.) Happy? Huh? Huh?

UPDATE, 09/01/2004: Those of you searching for nude Playboy photos of Ms. Cutler out on the web, please go here.

“Default Banner”

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On this NYT story about Blogger (link via shellen), I saw a very large purple animated banner to the right, with some kind of weird, pixelated, black shape swirling in the middle of it. Odd advertisement, right? It looked HTML-resized, so I tried going to the img src URL. Heh.

Amtrak and Orbitz in Style

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Joining the ranks of travel sites using CSS, we have Orbitz and Amtrak Guest Rewards. Great work on both, with just a few knots and kinks:

Orbitz, my own favored travel site, has done an excellent job cleaning up their tabs-and-curves look, simplifying front page elements to just the essentials, but the arrangement of some of those fields is broken in Opera 7.50, most notably the “To / City name and airport code” detail, and the dropdowns for Travelers, which should be in an unbroken row. Unfortunately, the tabs still seem to be images in a div named “top-tabs” rather than in a styled unordered navigation list, but I suppose that is forgivable.

Amtrak Guest Rewards has also cleaned up the look, but I get a bit lost at first between the horizontal navigation bar and the sidebar menu. They appear to have made more important account management links appear in the horizontal bar, while leaving the sidebar for other program and promotional info. The navigation bar is a plain string of pipe-separated menu options, while the sidebar is a set of styled unordered lists. Another source of confusion: when I click on “Account Activity” or “My Profile” to get to my account info, I’m greeted with a huge blue-and-white arrow pointing right at “Q&A” in the navigation bar. It takes a few seconds to realize that the arrow is pointing beyond the navbar to the upper-right login form. Best fix for that would be a duplicate login form in a prominent place in the main div.

Very nice. Maybe neither site validates perfectly, but I’d say the revolution is definitely under way, and has been for some time now.

Blogger DeIndexing Archives?

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If I’m reading the Note at the bottom of this Blogger support page correctly, Blogger no longer plans to support an archive index file. Not good. An archive index is the necessary focal point of a weblog archive, whence stem all links to past archive pages. While including a full archive index on your front page may give more immediate access to weblog archives, the larger archive list of a longtime weblog can take up precious resources, slowing down page loading, increasing bandwidth usage, and lengthening sidebars. I hope Blogger reconsiders on this; I wouldn’t want to be tied down to an archive list that couldn’t stand on its own.

DeCaffing

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I’ve cut caffeine from my diet. For most of the past year, my coffee/soda habit has been one each a day, though I’ve been gradually cutting down on the soda out of concern for my teeth. Nowadays I average about three cans of soda a week, and until early this month, an 8 oz. cup of coffee every morning, weekends included. After reading some of the comments in the 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine thread on Metafilter, I wondered just how addicted I was, and how it would affect me to quit coffee altogether.

Iconomy’s comment is right on. I went cold turkey two weeks ago, on Friday. Through the following weekend I was slightly surly and off-kilter, with some mind-fog and a mild, throbbing headache. The following Monday, the headache was gone, and my mood evened out. Since then, my sleeping habits have improved, I’ve been able to focus better at work all day, and I haven’t been needing a cup in the morning to “get me going.” What little coffee I’ve had since then has been decaf, and I’ll enjoy a real cup of coffee or mocha for taste, perhaps once a week or so, if that.

My new preferred morning beverage is 2% milk.