lookin

Hmm. AdamSmith is not here yet. . .. Oh, my! The Conference is starting already. What's the title of his paper? . . . 'Economic Removal of Twinks From The Web'

Fresh from Rio, Tomcal makes a beeline for Mezziniu The Cousins and a few close friends follow right behind

All this recent news got me interested in visiting Crimea, home of the Yalta Dacha (for the alta caca). Timing couldn't be worse, of course. Apparently, it's long been considered the crown jewel of the Russian (ex-) Empire. Can't see any of this this ending well. Russia's not just going to walk (or float) away.

Perhaps MsGuy's Black AMEX came through.

I was thinking less of dollars and more of 'opportunity cost' in terms of things Congress doesn't get around to. Of course, that assumes that they have other things they could be working on. OK, never mind.

Once you've learned how to use one bracketed HTML function, you've learned how to use them all. (Well, nearly.) Center/uncenter works just like quote/unquote. So does left/unleft and right/unright. My one suggestion for learning new tricks is to do so only when there's a piece of meat waiting for you; i. e,.some kind of payoff. In my opinion, learning for learning's sake is highly overrated. Exactly so. Once you've clicked all the 'multi quote' boxes for the posts you want to quote, there's one final undocumented trick you need to know. There will be a black box at the bottom of the screen that says something like 'Reply to 2 quoted post(s)'. You have to actually click that black box in order for the quotes to show up in your post window. Then you're ready to respond to them. PS: Not to intrude on OZ's busy schedule, but it used to be possible to use the edit menu to click on an image, and then click on the 'center' icon to center it. No more. The 'center' icon is greyed out and unavailable for centering images. That's why I've been forced to use brute-force HTML tags to center an image. I'm not complaining, as the workaround is not tedious, but the edit menu is definitely in need of some fixin' if its functionality is to be restored. PPS: For reasons beyond my ken, it's possible to use the multi-quote function to quote from separate posts, but not multiple quotes from the same post. That's why you've had to learn the quote/unquote trick. There's no reason the edit menu couldn't be set up to allow multiple quotes from within a single post. It just hasn't been programmed to do so. The edit menu has been through at least a million revisions since I've been infesting the site and each revision results in behaviors that weren't there before, and the loss of some that were. It would be nice if the programmers would take the time to test the edit menu before releasing it to the masses, but no doubt that would only delay OZ's next project.

It sure seems complicated, relative to a single-payer health care system. I guess most folks know that the insurance companies have been scooping 30% off the top, but I think that's on its way down to 25%. Still, it's a health care expense that most other countries just don't have. And we're not going to get things in balance until it gets down to 5%. Like Canada. Like Medicare. For example. Gotta admit, though, the insurance companies have done a masterful job of lobbying. They're tying up an incredible amount of legislative and administrative bandwidth in order to keep their margins intact.

I'm pretty sure the link function was hinky during that time, so you may have been doing everything correctly without bringing home the bacon. I know I was doing links the same way I always did, but couldn't get a hot link to anything but a BoyToy site page. Seems to be working OK now, though. My guess is that, when you copied the text from my post, the HTML color tags got stripped off. So, rather than the light grey color I used for a please-feel-free-to-skip-this-as-it's-deadly-dull-final-thought, the regular black text showed up instead. In the user-friendly edit menu and box that OZ kindly provides, these HTML tags don't show up. You have to go behind the light switch to see them. So it's really hard to know whether you've copied them or not. I know it might seem odd for two grown men to be talking about HTML codes in a public forum, but the whole concept is really interesting, at least to me. With nothing but 0's and 1's flying through cyberspace, it's kind of amazing that someone thought to make up codes that would tell a browser to show the next snippet of text in bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, color, different font, different size, or almost any combination thereof. (Might be fun to flip the light switch and look at the underlying HTML code that was necessary to render the previous sentence with all its frippery.) Easy-to-use menus like the one we have here can take all the tedium out of formatting and linking and embedding and such but the browser still relies on the underlying HTML codes to display what's intended. It's fine when it all works perfectly, but miss even one little character and all hell can break 0110110001101111011011110111001101100101.

Looks like OZ's programmers fixed it, as I think your instructions are equivalent to the ones I posted and that have been working up until a week or so ago. I've been able to link successfully today, and didn't have to get anywhere near the 'light switch' to do it. As I understand it, the light switch doesn't generate any new or different code. It just exposes the underlying HTML code that the more user-friendly edit menu generates. If that menu-generated code is faulty, the underlying HTML code will be faulty too. It's just that seeing the HTML code in raw form (you should pardon the expression) might allow the cognoscenti to diagnose what's going on. There are still a few things that I can't get the user-friendly edit menu to do reliably and need to muck through the HTML code to fix, but only wearing galoshes and never sure of success. For example, in case anyone is still reading, I've been having trouble posting and centering images lately. It turns out that the user-friendly edit menu is generating a size tag rather than an image tag. So I can fix it with HTML code behind the light switch, but somewhere I think there's a glitch in the edit menu as the size tag is there where it shouldn't be and it didn't generate itself.

Chin up. It'll be June before you know it!

Perhaps as helpful are the businesses who are proudly displaying this sign in their windows.

Personally, I'd prefer if they packaged the azodicarbonamide separately and let me add it to taste.

When I click your 'agreed' link it takes me to the BoyToy home page. While I find much that is agreeable there, I don't notice anything that relates directly to your link. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Flipping the 'light switch' would probably be a good start to diagnosing what's going on, but trying to turn us all into HTML jockies might ruffle a few feathers.

Spring is sprung The grass is ris I wonder where the birdies is

Maybe you could create a little cosmetic damage for him to work on.

While I do think the death penalty should be done away with, it's not because I think the worst of these miscreants should live in freedom or even, necessarily, in comfort. It's entirely because of a strong belief that I am personally not entitled to decide that another human being should be killed. Simple as that. And I haven't yet met anyone else who convinced me that (s)he deserves that right either. Just because a judge or jury thinks they are entitled to kill another human doesn't mean that I agree with them. I don't. I'm open to hear from anyone who believes (s)he has the right to kill another person, but I'm gonna need some convincin'. Once a convicted killer is in prison, I don't spend a lot of time worrying whether or not he's fat and happy. If he's already killed someone, I think he's lost the right to move freely in the company of other potential victims. Whether he killed because he's mentally ill, feels threatened, or is just plain nasty, he still needs to be kept away from other potential victims. Just as we are able to keep a man-eating tiger in perpetual confinement, so we should be able to keep a human killer in perpetual confinement. In both cases, I don't feel the need to make their lives miserable, but I would also put a very high barrier on premature release. If it cannot be proved that they're no longer a danger, and if they never get out, that would be OK with me. It seems clear that figuring out how to protect society from dangerous animals, humans included, and how much rehabilitation is possible are worthwhile goals. And, as others have said, removing non-threatening inmates from our prison system would free up much-needed resources to work on these problems for the prisoners who remain. Not me, that's for sure. Up till a few months ago, the way to do it was to (1) highlight the word you wanted to be a hot link, (2) click the link icon in the toolbar, (3) paste the URL you wanted to link to in the box that popped up, and (4) click OK. You'd then have a hot link that would open the page you wanted it to. But, starting a few months ago with one of the regular site 'upgrades', that process started working only intermittently. Sometimes the hot link would take me to the URL I pasted into the pop-up box, and sometimes the hot link would only take me back to the page I was posting on. Fingers crossed this glitch will be addressed in the forthcoming Upgrade No. 269.xvii.bt.42x rev. 7c.

The garbage man is outside. Tell him we don't want any. I'd like-a to say goom-bye to your wife. Who wouldn't?

Algorithm! Ah got aisle seats! Ah got peanuts! Who could ask for anything more?

C'est possible, but I once ordered a something-or-other at a French restaurant where they put a half-dozen dots of a blueberry reduction on the plate. Like you, I thought they were just for decoration, but they turned out to be intensely flavorful bits of heaven. My own kitchen experience was with a chicken dish I was making that called for boiling half the water out of a cup of fresh orange juice and using it as a glaze. What with one thing and another, I lost track of it and twenty minutes later found little more than an orange paste at the bottom of the pan. I used it anyway and it was outrageously tasty! So my policy, on the rare occasions when I eat someplace fancy, is to at least sample everything on the plate.

No problem, I'll get right on it! Plus it looks like I might also have a week or two in April, so please do let me know if you'd like me to test out a nice fresh Marjolaine or something.

Way back in junior high, it occurred to me that I might be just a brain on a shelf hooked up to an experimenter's electrodes and playing out his scenario of a lifetime. What seemed like years to me could be just a few seconds in the lab. It was fun to think about, though I concluded I'd have no way of knowing. Hopefully, there wouldn't be any kind of a power outage.

I pooh-pooh'd nuclear energy for decades and then decided to give it another look about five years ago, when it seemed the only possible solution for providing the energy we currently consume. Then I came across an article that said there has never been a civilization that existed as long as would be necessary to store nuclear waste until it was no longer life-threatening. Perhaps it will be feasible one day to shoot it off to the moon. Assuming, of course, we don't need to go live there ourselves. I've long felt that Mother Nature would eventually take the decision out of our hands. If Earth can't sustain us now, when we number 7 billion, how will she sustain us when we double that number? I sure couldn't prove it, but I've also felt for a number of years that it's no coincidence that homosexuality is becoming more accepted as the number of humans increases. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing blow jobs become more popular than bassinets.

And I am proud to call them my friends. Seems to me that pedants will thrive independent of what they're being pedantic about. So long as it's something that doesn't matter all that much.

Perhaps they should send all us dumb folks to Guantanamo. Just as long as we could watch a little TV.