use Perl

«It is our mission to preserve the legacy of Abraham and Mary Lincoln, to honor their words and works, and walk in their footsteps. More than 300 Lincoln books have been distributed to our members. Twenty-four Lincolns have received awards for their noteworthy Lincoln work, and seven Lincolns have written books about the 16th President.;»

--The Association of Lincoln Presenters: rousing the Lincoln in all of us since 1990 (take THAT viagra!).

Incidently in the future United North America, money will be counted in "lincolns" rather than "dollars." Go Yankees!

This is a quick note to myself, but perhaps others tortured with javascript will appreciate it. It is possible to make HTTP requests in javascript (with modern browsers). This takes the form of the XMLHttpRequest object. How you get to that object is somewhat system-dependent.

Once you have that object, your Mozilla browser may restrict you in the URLs you can fetch. In particular, you can only open() URLs from the same host that you fetched the page making the request. So a page on geocities.yahoo.com isn't going to open "http://google.com" but instead emit an exception that will be reported in the js console.

Code hounds will enjoy this mess that reports the content of a page as a JS alert. The getURL() function expects to be passed in a URL (weird) and uses that crazy JS compiler directive voodoo that make IE happy.

function getURL(u) {
  // from http://jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html
  var xmlhttp=false;
  /*@cc_on @*/
  /*@if (@_jscript_version >= 5)
  // JScript gives us Conditional compilation, we can cope with old IE versions.
  // and security blocked creation of the objects.
  try {
    xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
  } catch (e) {
     try {
       xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
     } catch (e) {
       xmlhttp = false;
     }
  }
  @end @*/

  if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest!='undefined') {
    xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
  }

  alert("Opening " + u);
  try {
     xmlhttp.open("GET", u, true);
  } catch (e) {
     alert("Oops " + e);
     return false;
  }
  // prepare the call back (weird to do this after open)
  xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
                                          // page load done
                                          if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
                                              alert("Got: " + xmlhttp.responseText);
                                          }
                                        }
xmlhttp.send(null)

}

Perhaps it will become trendy to wear t-shirts with Frank Perdue's outsized head on it. That would be counterculturific!

Here comes that screamin' sound again! Crusification ain't no fiction in the Philippines. One gets that feeling that allusion and metaphor may be lost on folks such as these.

«The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has blamed the inability to gain permission to invade Iraq through Turkey for the power of the insurgency that the US now faces.

Mr Rumsfeld said in television appearances marking the second anniversary of the invasion that Iraqi military and intelligence forces in the north of the country melted away to form the insurgency that is now battling US and Iraqi troops.

At least 1520 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war, according to an Associated Press count. »

--US blames Turkey for Iraq chaos

Ok everybody! In the key of E, let's all sing it together:

Blame Turkey, man!
Blame Turkey, man!
With their shaky parliament
and their queer imprisonment

Blame Turkey, man!
Blame Turkey, man!
'Cause Ataturk was drunk.
the Republic almost sunk.

Blame Turkey, man!
Blame Turkey, man!
their coffee tastes too strong
and elections take too long

Blame Turkey, man!
Shame on Turkey, man!

In line they must fall
or the EU just might stall
and listen to the Kurds
who say the Turks are turds

We must blame them and cause a fuss
before someone thinks of blame us!

«The archbishop told Il Giornale: "The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true."»

--Church fights Da Vinci Code novel

For a minute there, I though he was talking about the Bible! Of course, he was talking about something much worse.