It's the middle of the week and everything's reasonably okay. If all goes as planned the day will begin with an egg, seasoned with unreasonably hot cheese, and a piece of bacon with that perfect blend of pliability, not carbonized, not just a limp strip of fat. I have to admit that my enthusiasm for bacon has steadily waned over the years. Sausage delivers so much more, in so many ways. But I made the bacon for the weekend burgers, and this left me with unconsumed strips. I could crumble it, add it to the one-egg omelette, and have a sausage. That’s an idea. Also, I am reasonably sure that common dish soap is a perfectly good conducting gel for defibrillator paddles. It's mild on the skin, and has a lilting lemon scent.
Lunch will not be chicken. Lunch was chicken on Tuesday. Dinner was chicken on Monday. Chicken was dinner on Tuesday. But chicken will not be dinner on Wednesday.
Current plans call for turkey.
There will be major changes under the hood at the Bleat next week. Brand new code. It will look the same, but it will be responsive. It will adapt immediately to mobile. This means the end of the architecture of the site I’ve used for over 20 years. I’ve never been embarrassed by the code, but I’m well aware that using tables and spacer gifs and other archaic elements is like using a hand-crank to operate a radio station generator. (Sort of. Don’t think about it too much. Let the figures of speech flow over you like water over a skull. Or a rock! Yes. Definitely a rock. Don’t want to think about how that skull got in the stream. Except now I’m really curious how it got there. An a ancient burial site revealed by erosion? A murder victim flensed by nibbling fish? An anatomical model used for pedagogy, dumped in the creek by misbehaving med students on an end-of-semester bender?) I mean, really. Tables. TABLES. In 2025.
My insistence on image maps is one of those things that also marks my ancient skills. I’ll probably phase those out as well, but it breaks the whole navigation paradigm I’ve used for decades. Banner on top, picture and text below, then a navigation bar at the bottom. I was doing custom work with fancy period specific fonts when other sites had blue underlined hyperlinked text. I suppose in the end the site will stand as a testament to a particular time, before web design coalesced into samey-same styles.
So did I take a course? Learn some new skills? No. I had Grok rewrite it. Took 3.1 seconds.
Now if I could just get the Google Ads to work. I’ve tried everything, followed all the suggestions, made sure the code was correct, the files were in the right spot, and so on. I don’t see them. Do you? I get an overwhelming sense of weariness about the matter, trying to fix it, wondering what’s wrong. Then I start thinking again about the whole site getting outdated, and how some day someone’s just not going to pay the bill. And poof.
Soooo let us investigate archiving options, because this very important piece of internet history has to stick around for a while, no?
No? Okay NOTED, but it does ping my mind from time to time, particularly after meeting with Ms. Wilzentruss Esq. I thought saving everything in PDF would be good, but no, no, what you want is WARC format. Okay great, can I get a program that converts everything to WARC?
Sure! Here’s the GitHub repository. Download the RAR or maybe the TAR and then compile them using this command in a shell that’s emulating Linux and you’re good to go
I am sorry but I am but a simple man who is afraid of your magic and your power, and I have never been able to do these things. Might thou wave thine staff with the powerful diadem and bring the program to life that I might perform my humble work
NOPE
DOWNLOAD GZIP AND GET CRACKING
But - but how? There are three different files and I know not what they do
ONE IS A KERNEL, THE OTHER IS LZW ARCHIVE, THE OTHER IS JUST ISO CRUFT
Okay, never mind. I’ll just save everything as a pdf and upload the wad to internet archive.
THE WAD FILE FORMAT IS RESERVED FOR DOOM PC386 LEVELS
Oh, go away.
I was looking at a list of the longest-running blogs, just to check out the competition. Most of the ones with the best claims have scant updates. Once a month. Hah! Piker! There’s more on this page today than they had the entire month.
You may recall last week we discussed the loss of 100 lbs of chocolate in 1928. Right? When I searched for the address of the store that lost the choc, it returned a neighborhood torn apart by road rerouting. A few old buildings remained.
Is the pediment centered?
No. It is not.
Let's see who's responsible:
You might not be surprised to learn that he appears in the newspaper of the day. He built a stable, and he was a grocer, so either - or maybe both - were in this complex. But something else comes up: a rather terrifying incident.
The horse made its way home. The early days of self-driving cars, I guess.
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It’s 1917.
“Dedicated to the Interests of the Mountain People.”
If you’re not patriotically enthused for the war yet, perhaps this will help.
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Good news, boys! We’ve got the Huns on the run! Boy, I hope it’s not over before we get there!
The pivotal battle of St. Quentin Canal took place . . . in 1918. |
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By these solemn words we agree that this was an unsought war
Aren’t they always.
The story:
SS Aztec was an American,the northwest coast of France.
On 1 April 1917 she was torpedoed off the coast of Ushant in France by the German Uboat SM U-46. 28 passengers were killed, including 10 American crew members. News of her sinking was relayed to Washington by the American embassy in Paris on 2 April, followed by a secondary report on the sinking on 4 April. The news of the torpedoing of the Aztec was passed on to the United States Congress as deliberations were ongoing as to the declaration for war on Germany, as President Woodrow Wilson had asked congress to declare war on Germany on 2 April.
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Ha ha we all smack ‘em around, right, because that’s the only thing what puts them in their place |
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Build? How?
Patented Rollogely? No. Rollobelt.
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Have we alerted the national authorities, or do we need a few more details? |
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Published by the newspaper, as a statement of principles. Or to fill up space not taken by ads. Or both!
That will do. Back to the Fifties now: the Coffee Ads of 1951!
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