Baggage

OK, It’s been five days since I returned from the USA. I’ve been sleeping well, not drunk any alcohol, and yet still have enormous bags under my eyes. Looking tired is a facet of modern life.
Fixed the CSS so it now works in standards compliant mode. Not that anyone will notice, so I’m not really sure why I bothered.
One more thing: the cartoons of Jolly Jack a.k.a. Pipingrad are hilarious!

Quirky

Ah, how puzzling: that {?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?} statement at the start of my (x)html throws IE6 into quirks mode. However, it turns out that the layout I’m using only works in quirks, not standards compliant, mode. I can’t see why not, as this layout from BlueRobot works fine (although he’s using pixels to define the box sizes, not my font-size-changing-friendly ems). Time for some hackery…

“Ass is the new Pussy”

So reads the only graffiti in the men’s loos of the Thirsty Scholar, New York City. It’s as if there were once other scrawlings on the wall, but something stopped the owners painting over this shining truth. I wonder if assisthenewpussy.com has gone yet… actually I’m not sure I’d want to register that.
Yes, Kyla and I went to New York for the weekend. Other stops on our tour included dog rape park, on Avenue A, Alphabet City, a park with space set aside for dogs to play (with each other’s arses usually, maintaining the theme); ordering Swamp Water in Brother Jimmy’s, a concoction that’s sweeter than a car full of kittens and is normally served with a plastic crocodile (though they’d run out when we were there, chah); and worshipping with the monks of beer in Burp Castle. The trip was rounded off by a hell-for-leather taxi journey to the airport as Kyla and I hadn’t checked the time of our flight properly and so ended up with 60 minutes to make it from the Upper West Side to JFK airport. No, our PhDs aren’t in common sense.
The site is pretty much back up and running again, so now it’s time to generate some content. Though as I always say, an up-to-date website indicates an empty life. At some point I’ll work out how to shift this blog over to my other hosting, but it’s not a pressing concern. More weirdly, if I remove the {?xml version= encoding= ?} declaration from the top of the html, IE6.0 will ditch the right-hand menu. Weirderosa.

Pseudoscience, hosting…

Idly surfed to Steve Dutch’s Pseudoscience page, one geologist professor’s dissection of pseudoscience (creationism, UFOs, etc.) Interesting reading, but one part that particularly amused me was on this page, which has this to say on a subject dear to my heart (or rather my driving license):

A common complaint is that people with Ph.D.’s call themselves “doctor,” but they aren’t real doctors.
If you buy this, you just demonstrated your total lack of qualification to deal with experts in anything. The word “doctor” comes from the Latin verb docere, meaning to teach. Doctor in Latin means “teacher,” and was applied in the Middle Ages to anyone who had mastered a subject well enough to teach it at a University. It wasn’t until rather late that medicine was even added to the University curriculum at all. As for surgeons, they were regarded as tradesmen and manual workers until nearly 1800.
So “real doctors” take their title from university professors, not the other way round.

So hah!

In other news, I’ve shifted the funkysimon.com domain to point at a new host, so the site’s a bit borked at the mo (and is having a subtle redesign to boot).