A recent story from the Times of London, on line, about a social study in the Journal of Religion and Society attempting to correlate religious practice with other social events. The Journal looks like a serious journal. The article in question, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies by Gregory Paul, is on line in full here. Also of possible interest, Christian Theology in the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
Month: September 2005
Dictionary
The Nation published an essay by Nicholas von Hoffman called A Devil’s Dictionary of Business which seems to be based on his book by the same name.
The original Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a classic of political satire. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg. Bierce was cynical and skeptical, and he made few friends when he stripped away pretensions and popped the ballooned egos of the comfortable and the powerful.
I mentioned John Ralston Saul’s Doubter’s Companion in an entry in July. It fits into the tradition of satirical dictionaries.
Pizza Topping Trick
This may not be a great discovery, but it worked for me. I haven’t had good results with making my own pizza on a pre-made pizza shell. The topping usually doesn’t taste right. I don’t like frozen pizza because they use a lot some synthetic flavourings including a garlic oil on the crust, but I keep a few in the freezer for those days when I am too tired to cook anything else.
Last week I tried to make a pizza from scratch using a frozen shell, plain canned tomato sauce, and tuna, black olives, capers and grated parmesan cheese. I spread the sauce on the pizza shell and then sprinkled marjoram, oregan, and dried powdered garlic on the sauce. Then I put the flaked tuna on. Then I took a fork and stirred the topping before adding the other ingredients. It turned out much better than my past efforts. I think in my past efforts, I just sprinkled the herbs onto the sauce, and they dried out. Stirring the herbs into the sauce makes a difference. I am not sure, but other times I have used Italian seasoning which is a blend including marjoram, basil, thyme, savory, sage, oregano and other spices. I think basil tends to be overdone in many factory sauces and it may be overdone, at least for my tastes, in Italian seasoning. This pizza came out very nicely.
Elementary Particles
The Elementary Particles is a novel in French by Michel Houellebecq, published in 1998. The English translation by Frank Wynne was published in 2000 and released in the UK as Atomised, elsewhere as The Elementary Particles, and is regarded as a brilliant literary and intellectual novel. Houellebecq was awarded the prestigious French literary award, the Prix Novembre and the 2002 Impac Dublin literary award. The reviewer for the NY Times called it “a deeply repugnant read” for its nihilism and anti-humanistic vision. Others have criticized its obsessive and graphic depiction of sexuality. It supporters praise its flamboyant deconstruction of modern beliefs about love and sexual liberation as pretensions and delusions in a culture of selfishness.
Birthday
N. is 18 today, and it has been more than two years since he ran away. I stopped writing about him in February. I stopped bargaining with him. I stopped responding to his demands and requests. I stopped trying to give him advice.
Dynamic Publishing
Another change, after some reading and experimentation. I installed partial dynamic publishing for archive posts this weekend. I had to run at it twice. It involves creating an .htaccess file and installing it on the server, and customizing some lines in it, creating a new directory on the server and changing some settings MT. The first time I omitted some slashes in some path names in the .htaccess. Once again, the MT documentation was right – just not clear.
The article about the benefits and drawbacks of dynamic publishing at Learning Movable Type may be out of date. It warn that plugins often involve Perlscripts (and I still can’t use the word Perl.) which may not run in the dynamic environment. One plugin generated a Smarty error – so I removed it. The important ones, like Spamlookup, are written for php and run under Dynamic publishing. I didn’t have a lot of plugins and the one that didn’t work has been superceded by newer MT tags, so I am not worried about it.
It makes rebuilding of the blog so much faster, which is convenient when I get into design changes, changing category names and all the other changes that show up on the published page. Rebuilding all the individual entries took a couple of minutes, and it was just annoying.
More blog changes
Over the last few days I fixed the template for the page (Individual Entry Archives) with the Comment Entry fields to fix Typekey Login for commenters. I also experimented with some MT plugins – Stylecatcher, MTProtect, and CCode/TCode. I also spent some time redesigning and editing my web pages.
Whitespace
After trying out different font families, I kept getting the same result as I mentioned in my last entry. Putting two spaces after the period (.) at the end of a sentence did not make a difference. After some research, I realized that this is a function of HTML, my font settings and my justification settings.The entry editing screen is a text editor. When the text is published in HTML, extra spaces are not counted. There is an HTML tag that will insert extra “non-breaking” spaces, and there are ways of automating that in external text editors, perhaps also by MT plugins. Many authorities favour using a proportionally spaced font and letting HTML sort it out. There are some reasons not to use two spaces, because in some applications, the extra whitespace can cause problems. It doesn’t seem to matter in an HTML page display in a browser window.
Many claim that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence started with typing teachers, not grammarians or printers. It was useful to add the extra space in typing with a typewrite, in a monospaced face, and that was considered as good practice. It may still be useful in processing text for output in a monospaced font-face. Adding the extra space in a text processor for HTML output requires special characters. Typing the spaces in the text processor has no impact.
Site Tuning
Upon installing MT 3.2, I took the plunge and refreshed the templates, which brought me to the MT default Vicksburg Style. I spend some time with the Site Styles sheet, changing colours to get my old scheme back, and then in the Main Index and Individual Entry Index. I was still writing CSS by trial and error, so I invested in an O’Reilly book and spent some time on a few Web sites.
Into the Fall
Mike and I rode Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and Friday afternoon last week. We noticed that the sun sets around 8:00 and that it is pretty well dark by 8:30. The weather was good though, still shirt-sleeve warm. I used my urban bike – a Giant Yukon, hardframe with wide, treaded tires. I put some miles on the new saddle, hoping to retrain my right hip after riding on a canted saddle most of the summer.
On Sunday, Mike Steve and I rode to St. Adolphe, about a 70 k ride. It was a warm day, with the forecast for 30 degrees. We rode into a south wind, and back with the wind at our back. We were able to ride at about 25 into the wind except for some open spots where we got hit hard, and slowed down to 20, 15 on gravel. I used the Giant and was getting a bit tired by the end. I had been leary of switching back to my road bike after last Sunday, and I hadn’t wanted to ride it on gravel. I still managed to wipe out in soft gravel on the inside of curve near the bridge to St. Adolphe (minor rash, right elbow). We had a strong thunderstorm last night – broken branches, power lines down, some old elm trees knocked down. It had cleared by morning, and Mike and I rode to St. Francois Xavier. It was a pretty nice morning, light winds, which started to pick up near noon. We could really notice the variations in the storm’s impact as we rode, from the number and size of the broken branches on the road. The storm seems to have struck hard across parts of River Heights, Wolseley and the West End, with less impact further west, past Omand’s Creek. I rode my road bike today, and I didn’t have any more of that unpleasant tingling in my leg and side. I had raised the seat before the ride and raised it a touch more a few k into the ride, for a smoother feeling on the downstroke. I am pleased to say that I have managed to ride 70 k on each of two consecutive days. Mike was trying out aero bars on his bike. He rides in an upright position and has been pounded by winds. It seemed to let him tuck and ride much more efficiently into the wind.
We have a plan, involving a visit to my sister Joyce, in Portage la Prairie, in a couple of weeks. Portage la Prairie is 90 k from my house, riding straight out of Winnipeg on Portage Avenue to Headingley, and then switching to Highway 26 at the White Horse near St. Francois. We ride, there, have dinner, visit, sleep over, and ride back. We haven’t been sure how centuries on consecutive days will work. I am getting more confident.