It's the Shroud of Turin Mall Tour!

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO -- For centuries, a piece of linen cloth bearing the image of a crucified man, called the "Shroud of Turin", is continuously revered by the faithful believing it was the actual burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

The shroud is said to be locked away in a cathedral in Turin, Italy and only displayed three or four times in a century.

However, shoppers at SM City Pampanga will be given the rare opportunity to view the replica of the world's most studied archaeological artifact of all time, which will be unveiled at SM City Pampanga on July 20.

...

An Adoration Chapel is also on hand for visitors who wish to spend some moments in quiet solace and prayer, while a special of the exhibition is also set aside for special events like seminars and workshops, hosted by religious groups.

"The last part of the tour serves to reach out to our visitors on a personal level," said Lloren. "The area allows them to relive their experience, to reflect on the shroud and what it means to their faith, and to carry out the message of the Shroud in their activities," she also said. (Sun Star Pampanga)

Call me old-school Vulcan but does anybody else find the concept of god in a temple of mammon jarring, to say the least?

I know that I'm the last person to tell people how they should worship, considering that I'm the sort who's agnostic on a good day and atheist the rest. Faith, in itself (or the lack thereof), is a non-issue with me. But I also believe that a great deal of evil in the world today is due to ignorance. The solace of ignorance is the belief that everything is written down already.

When you think that everything's written down already, you might as well roll over and die. Or place your existence in the hands of some higher being and her/his/its self-proclaimed earthly representatives. You can have a president who says that she/he/it has a direct line to god. In this set-up, to question the validity of such a statement would make you a godless person and just plain wrong, end of discussion.

It puts me in mind of kids having to learn from those awful textbooks. A lot of people--even profs at my university--think that if something's in print, then it must be true. (I once had a very nice prof who--bless her innocent heart--mentioned a Chromosome Z. In humans. I later found the textbook, written by a committee of PhD's, that she "learned" it from.) I'm not a huge fan of the educational system, obviously, because I have a horror of studying for grades or diplomas or even a job. (It's actually more dangerous than it sounds because I don't have go-getter tendencies to make up for my aversion. I'm sure that there's a parallel universe where I'm selling blood right now.)

The current textbook brouhaha valiantly instigated by Antonio Go is absolutely called for, if only to disturb the complacency of the bureaucrats in charge. But, as I see it, the problem with the educational system goes beyond textbooks. In Go's statement, he mentioned the current Secretary of Education painting classroom chairs for a photo-op. This is relatively harmless vanity. What I find more indicative of misguidedness is that the Shroud of Turin Mall Tour is endorsed by the Department of Education and the Commission on Higher Education.

Now, I couldn't care less who the guy on the shroud is, whether it's Jesus or Barabbas or Jacques de Molay. (I do fancy the Molay Theory, though, because it would make the story Umberto Eco fanfic-ish.) But the point is, of all the things that the DepED and CHED can do to show that they are worth their salt, it has to be something unconstitutional. Nowhere, I believe, do government officials so brazenly violate their sworn oath to serve and protect all citizens regardless of religion. This includes, but is not limited to, showing no favor. It makes me wonder: Are they even aware of the separation of Church and State?

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The Philippine Exhibition of The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin opens on July 20 at SM City Pampanga. It will then be taken to SM Mall of Asia from September 8 to December 9; SM City Davao from January 18 to February 3; and SM City Cebu from April 4-27, 2008.

Work

I ought to be used to it by now, but long translation work--from ten single-spaced pages up--still manages to give me a migraine despite my tried and tested 7-step program:

1. Read the original through.
2. Split screen and make a rough translation, skipping tough words/phrases for later. Take note of key and recurring terms.
3. Go over the skipped words/phrases. (This usually takes just as long as Step 2.)
4. Read the first draft with language structure in mind. Move things around.
5. Proofread.
6. Proofread.
7. Proofread.

I could keep proofreading indefinitely but, by Step 6, the migraine usually kicks in and, by the start of Step 7...well, just imagine me scowling fiercely at the screen. After sending them off, I spend the next 48 hours, at least, torturing myself with things I missed. Because there always are--especially in "Look, Ma, no spellcheck!" Filipino where a word four syllables long is short.

The hardest ones to translate are academic papers where almost all sentences are compound and it's raining qualifiers. I always find myself editing the original inside my head. (If you know about the ulcer-inducing agonies I went through with a certain book, yep, I'm always like that.) Whenever there's an error in sense like, say, a mixed metaphor, I fix it in the translation. It's actually possible to make a translation that's better, in terms of clarity, than the original. And then there are special cases where I can tell that I'm translating a translation. For those, I also have to imagine what the original might have been like.

The easiest for me are poetry and narratives (fic and non-fic). Maybe because writers write with an eye to being translated? Har har. But whatever I translate, I am constantly reminded of how important it is to have a good ear for how people use words. A big part of translation is actually mimicry.

So, I'm all done with work but with a blistering headache and wishing that I had more time to make them perfect. It's probably the closest thing to regret that I permit myself. And the punchline is...this is work I love doing.

Not that they die

The Leaden-eyed

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

~ Vachel Lindsay

Class-conflicted BS

I take it back. This descent into barbarism is not some metaphysical pataphysical absurdist drama. It's about a few people using the fascist state apparatus to protect their ill-gotten gains and vested interests.* It makes sense--perfectly bad sense.

The longer it takes, the more I worry about our country's future. There's at least one generation that grew up on ersatz milk, instant noodles, noontime shows, and bad textbooks. And they're the lucky ones. What do they dream? What does anybody dream these days?

I see dirty and naked children in the streets all the time, and what do I do? I steel myself against pity. And I know that every single instance of this will come back to me because we are all connected. These are evil times, indeed, when we have to give up chunks of our humanity just to stay sane. For what?

Years ago, somebody told me that maybe there's nothing for it but to Aufhebung. I'm fine with this but it doesn't make it all right [mp3].

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*This is an over-simplification for practical purposes. Their thick-skinned swaggering powers were vested in them not by the people but by their masters. The context is imperialism, always.

Human(sic) Security Act

"Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness."

Liebe Ludwig, would that senselessness kept to the realm of philosophy.

The Well-tempered Caviler

As proof that I have not entirely lost it, I will tell you my three favorite jokes of all time.

Joke #1Q: How many shrinks does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Just one. But the lightbulb really has to want to change.

Joke #2Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: That's not funny!!!

And for my favoritest, drumroll, please...

Favoritest Joke of All TimeQ: Why is the door knob?
A: Because the house.

But there's more! Next, I'm going to tell you one of my favorite anecdotes that I read somewhere I can't remember.

So, there was this kid--let's put him at 6yo--who was perfectly happy and healthy except that he didn't talk. This worried his parents, of course, but because they were loving and caring folk and there was nothing else the matter with the kid, anyway, they just went on loving and caring for him. One night, over dinner, the kid suddenly asked them to pass the salt (or something). Upon recovering from the shock, his parents asked him why he hadn't spoken before. And the kid said: Because I never wanted anything before.

I hope you liked my jokes and the anecdote. And now I'm going to bonk you over the head with something really serious. Kidding!

In an earlier post, I rambled about losing speech last. Now, speech has many functions but probably the most important is negotiation. (Even when we're just talking--or writing, like this--to ourselves, there's negotiation involved. We are "sorting things out.") There are non-verbal ways of negotiating, of course, but they all involve a certain degree of physical violence and/or passive-aggressive subterfuge. This is why speech is so essential and enshrined (last time I looked) as an inalienable human right. Unfortunately, there are too many real-life situations where speech is prostituted for ends that violate its very nature. (Lacan would call this "empty speech" but let's not go there.¹)

What's worse is when speech pimps presume to dictate who gets to speak and who doesn't. The shit doesn't get much deeper than that.

There's a "poetic writer and good conversationalist" (*insert gagging sounds here*) whom I will never speak to again--as in try to communicate anything of worth--because I know that it would be just like throwing myself down a waterless well or casting pearls before swine. As for politics and a bunch of blighted...blighters who are not worthy to outlaw my shorts, it just triggers the Tourette's and so it's not something I like getting started on.²

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¹I'm quite aware of the fact that every time I say something "serious," I'm usually paraphrasing a bunch of DWMs. We can play find the not-so-hidden Bakhtin or whatever, if you like. Can't help it, sorry.

²Which is why I totally admire people like Antonio Calipjo Go who risk popping a blood vessel tilting at blighted windmills. Just a tiny bone to pick, though. He started his statement with three quotes: one each from Dickens, Condorcet, and Borat. Victoriana happens to be my specialty and so I have to say that the Dickens quote is rather off.

"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else… This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts, Sir!"

It was a big mean utilitarian baddie in Hard Times who said that.

The reign of (idiotic) terror

In the news: Reds target of terror law

The Department of Justice will ask the courts to outlaw the Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People's Army and the Abu Sayyaf once the Human Security Act of 2007 takes effect on July 15, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez said Tuesday.

WTF. And all this time, I thought the CPP, the NPA, et al were already illegal.

If you ask me, I'd say that the reason behind the belated asking is to make extra-judicial killings more "right," legal even. I swear, when I fucking go to fucking hell, I'm going to fucking ask for a fucking discount on the fucking accommodations. I fucking deserve it. We all do.

It's enough to make anyone head for the hills just to get away from these murdering morons.

The Meaning of Life and Everything*

Selon de cette "chart" à gauche (en fait, une affiche pour un film assez bon; cliquez sur l'image pour big, s.v.p.), j'ai la généreuse, la discrète, et l'assassine. En général, je suis en accord avec tout ça. Mais, j'ai un petit problème avec le grain sur l'oeil: la passionnée. C'est vrai que je suis passionnée mais, in other cultures, ang may nunal sa mata ay nakakakita raw ng multo. Har har.

In fact, I have three moles on my right eye: two small ones, and a big one like a solar flare at the edge of my cornea. Now, my brother has seen ghosts a few times and that is the only reason why I can entertain the possibility of their existence. Sometimes, I even try to scare myself into seeing ghosts but my so-called "powers" just don't work. One possible explanation is that ghosts are more afraid of me than I am of them. I wouldn't be surprised.

An absolute lack of superstitious belief can be rather impoverishing.

This morning, however, I read a friend's post mentioning that the past few weeks (from June 16 to July 10) have been Mercury in retrograde. If I have a sneaking fondness for a "superstition," it would be for astrology. It's just so literary--even more than stichomancy (which is too literal and begging for self-fulfillment). What made me do a double-take, though, is the coincidentality. The first day of my total shutdown was June 16 and yesterday--a day of two birthdays--found me cheerful enough to think of an actual date for coming out of my cave.

[Nous sommes en Jour 6 de La Grande Expérience.]

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*Cheer up, Mike. :)

It's Proust Day!

His nocturnal, bedridden, disorderly work habits seem heroic. In his private life he mixed low-grade hedonism with deliberate psychological and moral experiment. What looks degraded to some of us may be edifying to others. This man of shrewd medical insight mercilessly punished his frail body and refused proper advice, even from his brother. He followed what...was his "only rule": "to yield to one's demon, to one's thought, to write on everything to the point of exhaustion." (Shattuck, The Work and its Author)

Dear Marcel, I know you don't like girls. But I love you, anyway. XOXO Sophie

Game-show life

Sometimes I still wonder how things would've been different if I'd done the usual teenage things like dissect frogs, have crushes, or angst over acne and prom dresses. I don't even know if that's what high school's about so correct me if I've got it all wrong.

At the time, however, I didn't mind because I hated school from day one (which was also when I started having asthma attacks). By the time I was 10, it was all fear, loathing, and unutterable boredom. It was almost inevitable that, after a few half-hearted attempts--one of them lasting for just one day--I would end up a high school drop-out at 14. It's really quite defining and, even now, I can still be as foot-shootingly mulish as I was back then.

And so, for years, I just stayed home and read. Later, I took out memberships at Alliance Française, Goethe Institut, and the British Council. Alliance was still at Pasong Tamo and the last two were at the New Manila area. They've all moved since. My favorite library was the Institut's and I pretty much read everything from Never-ending Story to Kristin Lavransdatter to Freud to books with titles like Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder.* (I also remember being taken there as a little kid to watch movies like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, hence the extra affection.) The picture up there is from the last time I went.

Funny how things turn out.

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*Why? Because it's short and shitty.

Puzzles

The game is here.

I must say that I'm not wired for puzzles like this. I'm shockingly bad at planning moves--I forget the very second after I make them--and the only way that I can solve a Rubik's cube is with a hammer. I don't think it's from a lack of patience, though. It's probably because I don't see the point of doing something when the outcome is so obviously a given. Of course, I can always say that puzzles are more interesting jumbled up, anyway. There can't possibly be a moral judgment attached to an "unsolved" Rubik's cube (or the puzzle above) as opposed to a "solved" one, can there?

The puzzle also reminds me of my room which is full of plastic men with detachable parts. Seriously, cleaning my room is just like trying to solve the puzzle involving a chicken, a cat, a pig, and a horse. (I'm not too sure about these animals but they'll do.) I can't leave the chicken with the cat, the cat and chicken with the pig, etc... It's terrible.

C'est l'anniversaire de Chagall!

Il y a 120 ans aujourd'hui.

Mon cirque se joue dans le ciel. ~ Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Quelle dommage qu'il n'y a pas de chat dans cette toile. Mais ça ne fait rien. Chagall est toujours le peintre des amants.

Des autres citations:

• My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.
• We all know that a good person can be a bad artist. But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.
• Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love. (Wikipedia)

A la recherche du temps perdu

"The writer, long before he knew he was going to be one, habitually avoided looking at all sorts of things other people noticed... [while] ordering his eyes and ears to retain forever what to others seemed puerile... 'Fashionable society mattered to him...but in the manner that flowers matter to a botanist, not in the way that flowers matter to a man who buys a bouquet.'" (Davenport-Hines, Proust at the Majestic)

Dead Proust (Man Ray, 1922)

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Shoes I never wear like posing with books they never read.

Growing up, Proust was my favorite recluse and asthmatic.

What if all we are is our favorite pretenses? It is the favorite pretense of those who dislike pretense to dislike pretense. Most acts of cruelty come from a lack of reflection that, precisely because of this vacuum-like lack, sucks everything into an infinite regress.

Whoever says that self-awareness will save your soul is lying.

Usability

From: Mingle² - Online Dating

This rating was based on my having used the word "gay" three times, "kill" twice, and "pain" once. "Shit," which appears at least twice, doesn't count. Neither do the words "love" and "revolution." Funny rating system. I wonder if it works on polysyllabics--say, if I used "decimate" instead.

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Earlier, I stumbled upon yet another usability list. Usability is one of the things that fascinates me the most about websites, as something peculiar if not intrinsic to the medium. (It's not paper anymore, Toto.) I already posted about usability guru Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes in another blague and so I won't repeat myself (which I do all the time, nevertheless). Anyway, Item #1 of 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid is:

The user must know what the site is about in seconds: attention is one the most valuable currencies on the Internet. If a visitor can not figure what your site is about in a couple of seconds, he will probably just go somewhere else. Your site must communicate why I should spend my time there, and FAST!

Now that's a tall order for most sites like this one (i.e., non-commercial, personal) and so I won't assume that I am the target audience for all 43 recommendations. But it does bother me a little because even though I do try to avoid the lj tone and grilled cheese sandwiches, I can't for the life of me tell exactly what this site is "about" or give a reason why anybody should read it. Usability is something I can achieve, easy, but USEFULNESS is something else entirely.

Being inconsequentially conscientious sucks. Maybe I should stick to cat posts?

The colour revolution is danceable

COLOURlovers is a lovely site, one that I can gape at for hours. It's just like my beads and string collection, but better. The things that you can do with color (and beads and string) boggle the mind.

I know that I've been given to wearing black lately but it wasn't always the case. I'm really the kind of jologs (so dated now, the term) person who can wear a pink shirt and green pants outside of a clown convention. Although I still think that it would take a great deal to justify a brown bag with black shoes, I believe that there are no "unsafe" color combinations and that it's all about proportion. Maybe everything is.

For websites, though--especially journals--I'm not an adventurous colorist. I've had pretty pink sites and yellow but they go "off" when the pink or yellow feeling ends. But there are colors that always work for me. I love white space that's never passive, black that's stark and cuts into the surface, and dark red because it's the color I am (like cats for animals). This is my standard palette that I usually just build around on:



But don't be surprised to find me playing around with new color sets. Oh, and here's a user-submitted palette of the original L.H.O.O.Q.

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P.S.: I miss you too, Mike. Tomorrow will be 28 days later. Days are strange but I think that I'll be better soon, one Friday soon. Tsup.

Twitter of a death foretold, anyone?

And so the latest tool for howling in the internet wilderness, Twitter, was down almost all day. Can you imagine all the pent-up twitters that must be bombarding the system right now?

Twitter's nice for those stray bits that don't really merit their own post or, at least, can be said in 140 characters or less, although I think its real purpose is to serve as a kind of real-time and more-or-less mobile message board. I'm not likely to be using it out of the web, though, because it's a bit odd, don't you think, to be informing so many people of what you're doing (besides twittering about it) at the exact time you're doing it? "Informing" is the operative term here because, unless explicitly demanded, no action need be taken by the informees.

I'm currently using it as a kind of sideblog. (I wonder where all the proper sideblog services went. The ones I had disappeared long ago, along with the ephemera.) At first, I wanted more than one twitter to show and found some code for that--there's a too-cute but not very customizable one over at Widgetbox--but, on second thought, one twitter's enough twittering.

What I'm thinking now is if this is where blogging might be headed. I mean, lots of blogs (and anti-blagues) are really just lengthy twitterings, anyway. We would be doing everyone a favor by being the soul of wit and keeping our existentialist musings down to soundbite length. If we're lucky, this might be the dawn of a new literary form: the epistolary twitter.

-----

I just remembered a phoneblogging service offered by Pinoy Exchange in late 2001. A friend of mine signed up for the service and would post things like running to the premiere screening of Lord of the Rings and how he felt dizzy during the train ride. Stuff like that. And I told him that it's just like sending SMS but without expecting a reply. Or SMS-ing yourself. (Why?) But the service was bland with no networking capability to speak of. (This was pre-FOAF apps.) Needless to say, the service didn't really take off and it's gone now.

[Crosspost]

The Vulcan mind-meld

In a new study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the drug propranolol is used along with therapy to "dampen" memories of trauma victims. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, while others were given a placebo.

A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma.

New Drug Deletes Bad Memories
Amnesia Drugs: Bad Memories Blocked: Science Fiction in the News

WHAT-THE?!? We always have propranolol in the house!

Looking up Wikipedia...

• Propanolol is often used by musicians and other performers to prevent stage fright.
• Propranolol is currently being investigated as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

WHOA! A bit further down...

Propranolol is contraindicated in patients with:

• Reversible airways disease, particularly asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

SHIT. Thinking...

Don't try this at home, kids!

Castaway

I loved that movie. I'm not a big fan of Tom Hanks--Castaway and Toy Story 1 are his only movies I really liked--but it more than made up for the buffoonery of Forrest Gump. (For the last time: A box of chocolate contains chocolate. If you dip into the box and get something other than chocolate, then it wouldn't be a box of chocolate, would it?) Too bad he unredeemed himself recently with the even more pernicious buffoonery of The Da Vinci Code (vide infra).

What's left when everything is taken away? has always been a big question (for me, at least). If you were all alone with no hope of human company for an indefinite period of time, away from "civilization"--this includes internet--what things would stay that would be enough for you to still call yourself human? Would we be like cats, still finicky even when nobody's watching? How long would it take before we lose our "social" voices and start grunting or howling? (I imagine my voice would be the last accessory to go. One morning, I'll wake up to find it strange and, soon after, the rest of my grubby grub-grubbing days will be spent in grim silence.) If I were finally found, dirty, howling, and as pettable as a komodo dragon, by what ethics would I still be considered as human as my finders?

[Digression: Given that humans are natural-born accessorizers and that it's apparently okay to make accessories of chihuahuas and non-white orphans, how can we tell when we are making accessories of other people? How can we tell when we are making accessories of ourselves? A (female) lifestyle columnist once wrote that the best accessory is a (male) gay friend. (A sentiment at which my gay friends would take great umbrage, by the way.) I suppose the converse would hold true as well: that a (male) gay person's best accessory is a (female) lifestyle columnist. Gays and lifestyle columnists aside, it's cynical but truer than we'd like to admit. I can understand the urge to be alpha but it always surprises me how many people want to be accessories for looking at, their faces arranged just so.]

Hmmm. I find that this post has gotten more serious (and parenthetical) than I had intended.

As I was saying... I was thinking about the if-you-were-stranded-on-an-island-and-could-bring-only-one-author meme. The first names that came to mind were Umberto Eco and Oliver Sacks. Umberto is the more obvious choice, considering he's my boyfriend except that he doesn't know it yet. As for Oliver, having a doctor on an island is always good. Plus, he wouldn't get shocked if I started mistaking my wife for a hat.

What? Just the books, not the authors? Never mind. I'll just sit here and wait for Wilson, then.

Bruxistic

Hello, previous posts! Did you have a good night? Did you sleep well?

Sophie's Maxim for Today: The thinking that one knows people is inversely proportional to really knowing them.

It's true because the mere presumption of thinking that you know someone is bound to get in the way of fair and objective assessment (from the Latin ad sedere, meaning "to sit down beside"; I still think it's funny that I had to take Latin in school but, yes, it has its non-trivial uses). When you think you "know" someone, you create a whole set of expectations--more reflective of yourself than anything--that the object under consideration might or might not meet, depending on ability, principle, or poached when they wanted fried. Too many interpersonal relationships are actually transferences in disguise, with both sides wanting the couch. Let us agree, therefore, to be strangers of good albeit impersonal will. There can be no greater mark of respect.*

Salut!

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*Obviously, I have yet to reconcile myself to 20th-century mores. My maternal grandmother (BHS!) who took care of me until I was 10 taught me that combing one's hair in public is a sure sign of ill-breeding. I have been going around with bad hair ever since.

No tricks; just mods

Why can't life just be virtual? Real life is too messy and illogical. You knock yourself out trying but the codes never work. People kiss and kill for no reason at all, then blithely cite free will before the blood is even dry. It's enough to drive a Vulcan mad. I'm all for grading people like eggs now. I mean, if we're all going to kill each other, then we might as well have a proper duel, right? None of this training for years to be a knight just to be shot down by some yokel with a musket.

Hush now. Must think happy thoughts. (I just remembered: Julie Andrews scares the shit out of me.)

This Friday will make a whole month that I haven't stepped out of the house. And the longer I stay, the less I feel like going out. I'm thinking of another layout. Probably not a blog. I'm done mucking about with proprietary code for now. Maybe paint my nails black and cut my hair tomorrow. But why?

If tags were fleas...

I'm the monkey for them.

I can't be sure but I hope the Mac overlap's fixed. Still haven't been able to solve the Opera problem, though. Ugh.

But I did find some comfort from the fact that even Standardzilla can get an Opera bug:

"...and your website does not work in Opera 9.10"

It was a large error in Opera 9.10 I must admit, but I thought it was the Mac users who held the title of loud minority users who got to be the squeaky wheel? Since when was this handed over to the Opera crowd?
...
But nothing works in [Opera]! Why do you endure the pain?

As well as find Mac users rather stern taskmasters. :)

Anyway, since it's really bad form to be constantly warning people (as if it were their fault that I couldn't get the thing to work properly), I rearranged the pages.

Which defeats the point of warning Opera users. Yeah, the algorithm's shot.

On a brighter but unrelated note: Enetation's still alive! For those of you who don't remember a time before lj, back in the days of "guestbooks," enetation was how you got to have comments on your blog. It's quite superfluous now since it seems that everything has commenting but they're still hanging in there without even a site redesign since 2002, at least.

On a very sad and totally unrelated note: Beck is a Scientologist. And now I think I'll go cry myself to sleep.