use Perl

Dear Log,

«CSS, contrary to a common misconception, has been designed to work with generic XML as well as HTML.»

--"Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL"

Iiiinteresting.

That means that this (styling RSS with CSS) is not just some hack. (As opposed to fancier XSL-based styling like this.)

Try this advice to turn your manpage browsing from rundown to ravishing: Install man2html and then install this GreaseMonkey script and wham, you've changed ugh to zuh to yum! Kpowza!

I have just uploaded a new GreaseMonkey script, UsePerlOrg_simplifier.user.js. It simplifies the design of use.perl.org pages in a few minor ways.

Here's what it does:

• Fixes titles of journal entry pages to actually contain the entry's title.
• Restyles post-numbered permalinks (like "#34234") to just the permalink icon (§)
• Restyles username links to drop the useless user number (i.e., a link to "TorgoX (1933)" becomes "TorgoX")
• Hides a bunch of interface elements that I find to be, well, not simple.

I wrote it originally just for myself, but I welcome everyone to try it out and/or modify it as desired.

And if or when you don't like what it does, turn it off.

Today's zhoornawl is brought to you by the Sinhalese letters ඥ (taaluja sanyooga naaksikyaya) and ඹ (amba bayanna)!

Remember kids, these letters are NOT TOYS! Do not attempt to use them unless there's an adult there to help. They are VERY SHARP.

So it looks like Russia and Turkey, tired of being SASSED by the E.U., might go and form their own little group and maybe they can call it SPECIAL PEOPLES CLUB and meet in an old refrigerator box in the front yard and TOTALLY NOT let the E.U. come in EVEN FOR A MINUTE and there will be comic books and pop and it'll be so cool and it'll be a RULE that nobody gets to talk about those stupid Kurds or Chechens or anything!!!

So, uh, good luck with that.

Inhale.

Exhale.

PREPARE.

☛☛     New     York     DOLLS!     ☚☚

Dear Log,

«I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself-- its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled.»

--HL Mencken

Dear Log,

«This is something that nationalists fail to understand, she says. "It is always us versus them, this or that. Nationalists cannot understand that one can be multilingual, multicultural, cosmopolitan ... without feeling obliged to make a choice between them once and for all."[...]

"On the one hand there are the ones who want Turkey to join the EU, democratise further and become an open society," says Shafak, but on the other "are the ones who want to keep Turkey as an insular, xenophobic, nationalistic, enclosed society. And precisely because things are changing in the opposite direction, the panic and backlash produced by the latter group is becoming more visible and audible."»

--"In Istanbul, a writer awaits her day in court:" Bestselling novelist Elif Shafak is the latest writer to face trial for "insulting Turkishness".

In English at least, there are two very different ways to parse the noun phrase "insulting Turkishness".

Dear Log,

«I can't even imagine how awesome things will be in another thousand years, but I bet the remote controls will have at least two more buttons.»

--Something Awful: "The Science Of Fiction"