(Link thanks to Radley Balko 2004/10/27 and LRC Blog 2004/10/26.)

If you thought that comparing George Bush to Aragorn and his assault on Iraq to the War of the Rings was not quite enough for you, then you might be the sort of person who appreciates the latest Freeper Flash movie classic, When the Man Comes Around, set to Johnny Cash’s song by the same name. The Man coming around in the movie is our brave leader, George W. Bush; the movie is a slideshow of war propaganda, with big Bush press photos set in time to the refrain … when the man comes around. It would be a bit of a mistake to describe it as the latest entry in the genre of Hawk Hagiography: if you’re not familiar with the song, it’s describing the Second Coming and the Man in question is Jesus Christ. Hagiographies are about the saints; putting George Bush in the place of the Lord and Savior needs a different word entirely.

My suggestion is blasphemy. Here’s what the Bible had to say about this sort of thing:

¹ And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

² And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

³ And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

⁴ And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

⁵ And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

— Revelation, chapter 13

Further reading

• GT 2004/10/12: Humor for Hawks
• GT 2004/06/17: A Cheap Shot

I’ve been set back a bit on my posting schedule, thanks to a delightful combination of factors: I was going to try to integrate TypeKey identification into my comments sections in order to help control spam; but first I found out that I’d have the joy of having to reformat my hard drive and get back up to speed from a clean install and, thank God, up-to-the-minute full backups. (It’s a tale of woe, but also a boring one. Don’t ask.)

TypeKey is, I think, close to completed. Immediate effects you may notice: (1) you can now sign in using your TypeKey identity when posting comments on individual entries; (2) if you don’t sign in using a TypeKey identity, your comments will be held up momentarily for moderation. It’s not that I don’t love you all, it’s just that spammers run amok here as elsewhere, and I’ve had to deal with one no-conscience asshole too many lately. If you do comment pretty frequently here, and you don’t have one already, it may speed things a bit for you if you sign up for a TypeKey identity (all you need is a valid e-mail address). If you don’t, that’s fine too–your comments will just go up as soon as I have the chance to screen them.

Let me know what you think about the changes; and forgive me if things are a little dusty in the comments department for the rest of the night. Actual content should be resuming within (I hope!) the next day.

You may or may not have noticed that Geekery Today uses the SimpleComments plugin by Adam Kalsey to combine TrackBack pings and comments into a single list (because, as Adam puts it, TrackBacks are comments–they’re not comments on your site, but they’re comments nevertheless). Recently, though, I upgraded to MovableType 3.1–I’ve had persistent problems with the amount of time that it takes large category indexes to rebuild when I create new posts, and so I wanted to take advantage of MovableType’s new dynamic publishing engine. At which point I ran into a big, fat problem: none of my plugins work on dynamically built templates. It turns out that MT‘s dynamic publishing engine does allow for plugins, but they need to be written in PHP, whereas all the MovableType plugins that you have used heretofore on your static pages have been written in Perl. Oops!

Well, I think that this was kind of a boneheaded design decision on the part of Six Apart, and if I were sticking to my ideological guns I’d just refuse to use dynamic publishing until the problem is fixed. But I don’t run MovableType for ideological purposes; I run it to generate a weblog. So I held my nose, cracked open the source code for Kalsey’s SimpleComments, and wrote my own port in PHP. If you use SimpleComments with MovableType 3.1 or later, then all you need to do is download the zip file, upload each of the PHP scripts therein to the php/plugins directory of your MovableType installation, and voil?@c3;a0;! you can switch templates from static to dynamic and back again without any change in your ability to use SimpleComments tags.

The current version of PHP SimpleComments is 1.31–so called because it mirrors the functionality of Kalsey’s SimpleComments 1.31. All of the tags and attributes are implemented–I think. You can download everything you need from the project page; let me know if it works for you, or if there are any lurking problems that need to be fixed.

Enjoy!

This isn’t a meme, damn it. It’s something worth mentioning, though, because it’s fun and remarkably accurate. Which OS Are You?

Which OS are You?

(Link thanks to Clancy at CultureCat 2004/10/15, who has the distinction of being Debian Linux.) Read the rest of Nerd Games …

Dear Porn-spamming Morons:

Just so you know, you are wasting your time.

Posting the URI of your website in the comments sections of my weblog does not increase your Google ratings, for even a split-second. My weblog software routes all links in the comments section through a redirection script; since search engines don’t see the address of your site anywhere on my pages, you get no Google-bombing benefit from it. If your aim is to boost the search engine ratings of your silly little wank sites, you are wasting your time.

Spam comments are usually deleted from my website within a matter of minutes. Your spam disappears and your IP address is banned from posting again. If your aim is to drive people who happen upon my website to your silly little wank sites, you are still wasting your time.

I won’t tell you to stop. It’s a little bit of annoyance for me to zap your comments as they come in, but I think that the pornography you are peddling is misogynist, pernicious, and ultimately very sad stuff. So I’m glad to put up with a little bit of annoyance, when I have the minor satisfaction of knowing that you are wasting your time, and your sponsors’ money, posting empty spam comments that spend 15 minutes or so doing nothing on a pedantic anarcha-feminist boy’s website before they are deleted. If you want to continue wasting your time, by all means do so.

But you are wasting your time. Just so you know.