Category: Hey y’all, watch this!

News about CF specifically, or about Mike or Joe. Another catchall category, really

GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

Kilt a-borning

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Dammit, Amazon delivered my nice new Thunderbolt cable this afternoon and it turns out it’s the wrong blasted one, I can’t use it. Consequently, my file transfer/monitor swap project is dead in the water until further notice.

Not Amazon’s fault in any way, mind; my dumb ass ordered the wrong one all unawares. After a bit of educational research into the whole T-bolt contretemps, I discovered that everything after Thunderbolt 3 (it’s up to v5 now, yet another thing I didn’t know) is basically just a beefier, higher speed-capable cord with male USB C jacks, whereas the ports on both the iMac and the MacBook, being older models, are strictly and exclusively the practically extinct, tragically unhip, and embarrassingly passé Thunderlizard 2.

Somewhat surprising that Apple, notorious for being zealously protective of the uniqueness, backwards-incompatability, and fits-specified-Macs-ONLY-ness of their proprietary parts, pieces, and accessories, would turn to bog-standard USB-C for its more recent Thunderbolt iterations. Where’s the money in that, man? Only way Jobs woulda ever shot himself in his bank balance’s foot, so to speak, via a gratuitously profit-shrinking move like this was if Bill Gates was holding a pistol to his head.

After wading through page after depressingly Tbolt 2-bereft page on Amazon, the WalMart app on my phone, and eBay* desperately seeking Thunderbolt 2 cables that weren’t chest-clutchingly overpriced, I was dismayed to find the barest handful of them, the cheapest of which was on eBay: out of Cullifornya, price  just above 35 smackeroos with an additional seven bucks tacked on for shipping courtesy of USPS, estimated delivery in about 2 or 3 weeks, as opposed to the two days’ wait with which Amazon has spoiled me absolutely rotten.

The rest of the T-bolt 2’s on offer ranged anywhere from sixty fucking dollars all the way up to a hundred and a half (!)—this, mind, when garden variety USB-C cables can be had all day long for under ten bucks most anywhere, either online or at a brick ’n’ mortar Best Buy outlet near you, assuming it hasn’t gone belly up as of yet. There were Thunderbolt 2 hubs for sale as well, at the low, low fire sale price of just 300 to 400 US dollars. Don’t delay, folks; with prices slashed this low, these little beauties aren’t going to be around for long, they’re just flying off the shelves. Stock is limited, so better hurry on out right away and take advantage of these once in a lifetime bargains before it’s too late!

Jeez O Pete, what a crazy world. Somebody oughta sell tickets.

* Years back a great little website yclept Small Dog Electronics was my first stop for stuff like this. The prices were reasonable, the shipping times were fast, and having spoken to them on the phone multiple times regarding certain memory chips I was thinking about buying and installing, I know firsthand that the customer service was friendly, knowledgeable, and altogether helpful. Need to check and see if they’re still extant, I sure hope so

Update! Well howzabout that: Small Dog IS still around, bless their solid-gold hearts. That just restored a little luster to what hadn’t been much of a day up till now. Although it looks like T-bolt 2 cables are mighty thin on the ground over there too, alas.

Infuriating update! God DAMMIT, the above Raising Arizona embed is supposed to start at precisely 1:43. After a great deal of bootless mucking about trying to get things set properly, fucking YewToob STILL absitively, posolutely refuses to cooperate for some incomprehensible reason. If the vid jacks you around by starting either way before or way after 1:43, I hereby advise you to hoist a middle digit at YT by clicking in the progress bar at the specified time-stamp your own bad self. You must grab the bull by the horns, step up to the plate, seize the day, and boldly take control of your own destiny, Glasshoppah.

Well, unless you want to scope the entire riotous clip. Which, if you’ve never seen the Cohen Brothers’ masterpiece all the way through before, you really want to do anyhow. Myself, I’ve seen the movie so many times I can reel off almost every word of dialogue from memory. Yet even so, sorting through clip after clip trying to find the above one (took some doing, actually; the others either didn’t include the lines I wanted at all or cut Glenn off just before the “Someone oughta sell tickets,” exchange with Hi, which is the very thing I was looking for in the first place) gave me a yen to watch the whole thing beginning to end again.

RA is one of a handful of movies I simply can’t get enough of. It never gets old, it never lets me down or fails to hold my interest. Each and every time I’ve watched it I’ve picked up on some little something that had gotten by me before, seems like. Top-notch cinematography, lighting, direction, and editing; fast pace; perfect casting; talented performers with the skills, experience, and self-assurance to make best possible use of the brilliant dialogue; unusual, haunting, and unforgettable music; engaging characters who come off as real, complex human beings; an unconventional story told in an unconventional way: every person of intelligence, discernment, and a functioning sense of humor in the civilized world agrees it’s one of the finest movies ever made, and there’s a reason for that.

Raising Arizona, along with just about every other Cohen Bros production, is a 24k showpiece, an object lesson in not just how a great film is made, but in how great a film can be. It’s not in any way overstating the case to call this extraordinary movie no less than one of the verymost outstanding examples of the cinematic art ever, really and truly.

ANOTHER Publick Announcemente

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Look for posting pickin’s around this hogwallow to be rather slim the next cpl-three days. As it happens, an old and dear friend of mine gave me a new-in-the-box MacBook Pro last weekend. Over an illustrious 20 year-plus career as resident setup, troubleshooting, maintenance, and repair guru in the IT shop of a certain media firm we all know and loathe, my boy pack-ratted the surplusage of miscellaneous ‘pooter detritus currently cluttering up his closet (most of it Winbloze junk, his personal preference) for reasons best left undiscussed at this juncture, to include the laptop he graciously threw my way.

So tomorrow I’m scheduled to receive from Amazon a 2.5 foot Thunderbolt cable so’s I can link up said virginal MacBook’s much snappier, fresher, just flat-out better processor and HD with my trusty iMac’s much larger, brighter, more aged eyes-friendly screen. I already networked the dynamic duo via WiFi, which enables simple file-sharing betwixt the siblings but nothing more. To use the iMac as the MacBook’s monitor demands a hard-wired connection; the felicitous conjugation just can’t be accomplished by lesser means.

Twinning the Macs for big-screen purposes also bumps me up from OS Catalina to Big Sur, a promotion that makes me one very happy camper indeed. Thing is, I am entirely unfamiliar with Big Sur, and from what I’ve seen so far there’s a lot to learn about the ways, workings, and weirdnesses of my spiffy new OS before I’ll be even halfway competent at running the thing, let alone good at it.

Understand, now: from my earliest days as a shavetail compooter wrangler, I’ve looked forward to each and every fresh Mac OS release date with a rapturous excitement akin to the way a child waits on tenterhooks through the endless, dreary weeks of December for Christmas morn to finally dawn, going back before the advent of balky, brittle old OS9 (known far and wide amongst greybeard Mac freaks as OS Crash, and rightly so). I enjoyed diving into every operating system upgrade, and jumped on board quick as a snake when each iteration dropped. It pained me no end to learn that my late-2012 iMac maxed out with Catalina, it hurt my heart beyond describing.

I mean, Catalina came out a LONG time ago, man. That sucker’s old, old as dirt.

The Mac operating system’s deserved rep for user-friendliness, reliability, and superb design notwithstanding, it takes time for even as salty an old Apple-loving dog as moi to get fully up to speed on a new OS, no way around it. It’s sorta like a brand-new pair of engineer boots: irrespective of how high-priced they were, there’ll be a lengthy break-in period before you can slip into the things and walk around comfortably. No shortcuts, no workarounds, no give anywhere to be found; it’s a slow, hard slog that nobody but NOBODY gets a pass on.

Seeing as how this project will require transferring a great big ol’ buttload of files, settings, software applications, and other such needful bric-a-brack over to the laptop—a deadly-dull evolution bound to involve unforeseen hassles of every type, description, and magnitude—I expect it to soak up the rest of my weekend at least, if past experience is any guide. Which, in turn, is sure to elbow posting-time aside until it’s done.

Then again, maybe I’ll get lucky this time around and the process will go smooth, fast, and trouble-free. Lord knows my luck is due for a change. We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

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Publick Announcement

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Sorry ‘bout giving Memezapoppin’ a miss this week, gang, but after receiving a whole slew of truly toothsome T-day-related memes this past week via a private arch-con email list I’m a proud member of—which boasts a solid line-up of some of the most trusted names in ReichWingNaziDeathBeast© blogdom—I thought I’d use some of ‘em for my regularly-scheduled Friday Substack thang,  which will be up in a trice.

Don’t hate me ‘cause I’m beautiful, y’all.

Update! As diligent CF watchers have no doubt gathered already from the Donnybrook update above, she’s up and running as promised.

Publick Notice

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This being not only Thanksgiving but the last week in November to boot, it’s high time for me to get cracking on the annual Yuletide visitation from dear old Scrooge Picard, methinks. If things go a bit wonky for ya here and there, Dear Readers, now you know the reason for it. No, Ye Aulde Blogge Hoste is NOT drunk, stoned, or stark raving mad, I take my oath. Not anymoreso than usual, at any rate.

Update! Well, that certainly went much quicker and easier than it usually does. The Donorbox header-bg and button color I ain’t gonna fiddle with, clash violently with our holiday color scheme though that innocuous middlin’ blue admittedly does. To be perfectly honest, I’ve been considering just dumping the DB subscription contraption altogether anyhoo; the entire time it’s been up only one (1) person has ever made use of it, and after the poor schlub’s first payment processed without incident the follow-on monthly installments all kicked back as NFS. Finally, DB sent me an email advising me that fuck it, they were giving the annoying goat-rope up as a bad job. All in all, it seems to me the big, clunky thing is basically just taking up sidebar space which I require for other purposes, as Bertie Wooster used to say.

As regards the annual CF Christmas makeover, hopefully I didn’t forget something, leave something out, overlook something, break something inadvertently, etc etc. We shall see, I suppose.

Updated update! Overbearing Donorbox doohickey now duly dumped, as threatened. Tidies all that superfluous sidebar clutter up very handsomely, if I do say so myself. Which, y’know, I do. Establishes a nice, relaxing holiday mood around this h’yar dump, too. Festive, but not raucous, rowdy. or loud; friendly, without being overly insistent or aggressive. Soothing but never dull; laid back but never complacent; casual but never sloppy or slovenly. We could all use a little more of that sort of thing, I figger.

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“Unity”? With THESE asstards?

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Erik emailed a request that I repost this oldie but moldie from all the way back in November of 2004, which request I am only too happy to fulfill. Thanks for asking, Erik.

Whatcha gonna do
The Loony Left by Mike

Okay, is anybody but me sick yet of the Left’s floundering and flailing about, trying to find any way they possibly can to blame somebody else for their failure to espouse a message remotely palatable to the majority of eligible American voters? Is anybody but me wishing right about now that somebody would clong them upside the head with a shovel and say, “Look, morons, here’s the deal….”?

Well, let’s try this then. Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that everything the Left claims to fear about the Bush admin and mainstream red-state America is true.

Yep, that’s right, you commie bastiches, we’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time now until you hear that late-night knock on the door you’ve been dreading all along. Our jack-booted gendarmerie is going to be working overtime rounding up every non-white and non-rich subject of our fascist regime, and we’re going to be baking every last one of you into pies that we’ll then refuse to share with the poor and hungry. We’ll be baking those pies in coal-fired ovens, and those ovens will be devoid of any sort of exhaust-scrubber whatever, because we want to release all the toxic gases and chemicals we can into the atmosphere.

We’ll be spiking the rivers with DDT, alar, thalidomide, and whatever other chemical bugaboos we can think of so as to pollute the drinking water, too. We’ll cram the landfills (which will be more numerous than ever) with deadly silicon breast implants, and we’re going to wipe our asses with copies of the Kyoto Treaty, after which we’ll staple the soiled pages to your foreheads. Halliburton will be sending you the bill for that, too; we’ll call it “cosmetic surgery” and charge a rate tied to the market price for the harvested, tanned, and cured pelts of starving homeless Americans, whose numbers will be rocketing even higher than those for the aforementioned landfills, which is where said homeless will be forced to live while we hunt them down for sport.

We’re going to subjugate the entire world through violence and capitalist exploitation. We’ll be sending our duped, mindless killerbot soldiers to the remotest corners of the Earth to deny freedom to every little brown person currently enjoying an idyllic, bucolic existence in harmony with unspoiled nature, every racial, religious, and cultural minority who has thus far lived relatively free of the sting of our rapacious lash. We’re all going to get rich from it, and we’re going to make the poor noble Bob Cratchets and Tiny Tims of the world pay for our sumptuous lives of piggish, rankly self-indulgent consumerism, and then we’re going to kill them when we’ve bled them completely dry.

Yep, it’s all true, every bit of it; the New Gulags, which we Nazified Tolkien geeks like to refer to as Barad Ashcroft, or just Shrubthanc, have been under construction since early 2001 and are almost ready to open for business. The ultra-right-wing corporate media establishment has known all along, and have been helping us cover it all up, and now it’s too late; there’s nothing you can do to stop us. You all are going to be fed into the ovens by the millions, and we’re going to destroy the environment and nuke the Third World, and it’s all going to be done because Jesus told us to, and that’s the only reason we’re ever going to need. Because hey, we’re stupid.

Michael Moore? Dead soon, at our hands, as punishment for daring to dissent. Karen Finley? Ditto. Hillary Clinton? She’ll be crawling around our (segregated) private club on all fours in a Playboy Bunny costume, forced to beg for the privilege of bringing us drinks, dropping grapes into our mouths, and mopping the floors with her hair — just to remind any of you other strong, uppity women who might get ideas about overturning the established patriarchal order who’s really in charge here. Other younger, more attractive women will be forced into sexual slavery, and abortion will absolutely not be an option for dealing with the inevitable unwanted pregnancies that will result. Rusty coathangers will be available at the door, although using them will be punishable by electrocution — electricity provided by the nuke plants that will be on every corner and completely unregulated and unsafe. But it’s just as well that they are our slaves, because there ain’t gonna be no welfare to help them out, and they’re not going to be allowed to work at anything other than pleasing their oppressors.

We’ll be burning the UN HQ in New York down, of course, and we’ll be locking all the delegates inside the building before we set it alight. Then we’ll be invading France, just to teach ‘em a lesson about how we Texas cowboys do bidness. The world’s oil, of course, is ours, and we’ll be boiling tons of it and pouring it over the heads of those who refuse to acknowledge our Xtian God. There’ll be no stem cell research, there’ll be no health care at all for the poor (whose numbers we will be increasing by every means we can think of), and if you dare to complain about life in the New Conservative Amerikkka, we’re going to kill you for it.

All of that: so stipulated. Now, the question for you moonbat Lefty baglappers: what the hell are you going to do about it?

I mean, seriously; if you truly believe that all this is now in the process of happening right before your very eyes, doesn’t it become incumbent upon you, as the most basic imaginable of moral obligations, to do something to prevent it, or overturn it? I mean, obviously, you tried peaceful means of stopping us, but that didn’t work — because us right-wingnuts rigged the election and disenfranchised everybody. And you can’t go to the courts because they’re in the Bushitler’s pocket too, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which you’ve been saying for four years now illegally handed him the White House after the tainted 2000 “election.” So your last legal, nonviolent means of resistance has been taken away from you, and you can’t even count on the media to publicize the reality of what’s going on because of their right-wing slant, their fondness for the status quo, and of course the fact that they’re really nothing but money-grubbing corporations themselves whose only concern is the bottom line.

So what’s left, Lefties? Where do you go from here? What are you gonna do about it?

I’ll tell you what you’re going to do about it: you’re not going to do one damned thing but continue with your whining, that’s what, and it’s not because deep down you’re all cowards either. It’s because deep down, you know you’re full of shit. You don’t even believe half the stuff you’re currently crying about yourselves.

Because if you did, you wouldn’t be talking about it. You wouldn’t be writing whiny letters to the editor; you wouldn’t be fearfully mincing down to the Canadian Consulate to half-seriously inquire about moving; you wouldn’t be sitting in coffee houses denouncing the moronic inhabitants of Jesusland with your fellow smug, self-satisfied pseudo-hip doofuses. You’d be gearing up and arming yourselves for the fight of your lives. And much to your surprise, you’d have a lot of us over here on the right offering to help load mags.

And that’s why you’re going to keep right on losing elections. If even one third of what you say was true, you’d have Americans of every political stripe rushing to your side to man the barricades. But it isn’t anything like true, and we all know it, and we’ve all known it ever since you tried to claim that proposed reductions in the annual rate of increase of various federal budget items during the Reagan years were actually heartless “slashing” of the budget by people who wanted poor people to die. We’ve known it ever since you railed during the Clinton years about how the welfare reform forced on him by the evil Gingrich Repubs amounted to cultural and economic genocide, and then watched as hordes of welfare cheats — who you always claimed didn’t exist — were quietly expunged from the rolls and went back to work.

In other words, you’re all hype and no hump. Your party has become the Chicken Little Party, weeping and wailing about disaster, catastrophe, and the end of the world as we know it every time a new idea for running the government gets put forth by someone who isn’t a card-carrying liberal.

And the proof is in the pudding. Your delirious ideas don’t even inspire your like-minded cohorts — those who really do believe the sky is falling — to get out and fight to save their very lives; you certainly aren’t going to inspire a majority of Americans to rally to your banner if you can’t even get your own true believers off their asses and into the streets. That’s the problem with what you people used to like to call “false consciousness,” which is exactly what you’re now reduced to peddling. Your hysteria is based on plain and simple untruths, and nobody is willing to go out there and risk injury or death for something they know in their hearts is a lie. There ain’t gonna be any Revolution, televised or otherwise, because too many of us know that none is really called for, and the more you try to promote an addle-pated apocalyptic vision of a theocratic MegaMurrika the more the rest of us just sit back and wonder what the hell you’re talking about, as we watch life gradually improve for more and more of us despite your doomsaying.

Afghanis just voted, in the first real free election they’ve ever had; they didn’t vote in any Lefty flamethrower, and they didn’t vote in any Islamist terrorist either. And this occurred only a couple of years after we all watched you people wax apoplectic about the coming disastrous “quagmire.” Well, if that’s a quagmire, most of us figure the world could do with a few more of ‘em. It didn’t come cheap, and it didn’t come easy, but it came anyway, and no thanks to any of you, either.

And the same thing is going to happen in Iraq soon; the ordinary people you claim to be concerned about will see how their lives have improved since Saddam’s removal, and, despite all your supposed “concern” for their welfare, they’re also going to remember who it was who bitched and whined about the only recent President who was willing to lift a finger and take a political risk to help make it so.

And you smarmily call yourselves the “reality-based community.” What a laugh that is.

And that’s what it all comes down to, really. Those of us who do have some adult grasp of reality are sitting back and laughing at you and your dipsomaniacal ravings. You don’t inspire trust and confidence in your ability to run the world’s only remaining superpower, because you can’t resist the adolescent urge to hyperbolize every last little thing. Just as a small example, look at your pals in the liberal MSM. There are no mere “problems”; instead, we’re deluged with one “crisis” after another in their newspapers and on TV. You’re like little kids whose experience of the world is so limited as to define the boundaries of your intellect far too narrowly to ever be trusted with the responsibility of governing a nation.

Grow up, Chicken Little. Lead, follow, or get out of the friggin’ way. Or, at the very least, you can stop trying to get the rest of us to guzzle a bunch of Kool-Aid that you can’t even swallow yourselves.

Update! Brian mentioned in the comments that I had a somewhat egregiously mangled metaphor above, which got me to looking at the piece again, which got me to thinking I should change a couple of things. So I did. Not that it makes much difference, really.

And there you have it—just as relevant and applicable today as it was back then. It really is true that some things never change, I guess.

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I’M MELTING!

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What a world, what a world.

Heh. I slay me. Original image swiped from Ace. Remember, kids, this is what downing a fifth of rotgut vodka—straight shots, no chaser—before lunchtime every day can do to a person. Admittedly, it does make advancing one’s career via blowing one’s boss a bit more, umm, palatable, shall we say. But still.

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Publick announcement

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Expect posting to continue to be as spotty as my damned internet connection has been the last several days. No clue why that is; best guess is the shitty ISP company here sustained some damage in the recent bout of high winds, torrential rain, and plagues of transgender locusts, so they’re in the process of fixing things. But who knows. At any rate, apologies for that, it’ll be back to the ol’ grindstone pour moi whenever things finally settle down around here. In the meantime, I commend your attention to tonight’s Eyrie post, which I did manage to get together and published just now.

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Publick Announceminke

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Looks like the Memezapoppin’ post is gonna be delayed tonight, along with everything else, due to some bewildering server issues I’ve already contacted tech support about helping me get sorted out. Until such time as etc, I’m kinda stuck here; the WP posting interface seems to work okay–the two (2) posts below this one I did using the WP dealio–but y’all know how I feel about that shinola. My beloved MarsEdit, the FTP client I use (Cyberduck, by name)–ie, all the finer things that make a blogger’s life truly worth the living, are fully and firmly hosed, alas.

More as and when, as always, and my humble thanks for your patience.

Update! Just put up a brand new post with the native WP editor, just to check a few things out. No way am I gonna attempt to use the accursed thing for the Memezapoppin’ post, though; that would be a YUUUUGE pain in Ye Aulde CF Keester, although the MarsEdit version is all done and ready to go. To my astonishment, ME was able to upload the images with nary a hiccup. Sadly, publishing the post itself via ME remains a no-go as of right this minute. Weird, no?

Publick Notice

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Been out running errands all day, so posting is getting off to something of a late start this evening. Got I don’t even know how many long-open blogfodder tabs screaming at me for attention, still got a buttload of updates for Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle to attend to, I ain’t had dinner yet, I’m dirty, sweaty, and smelly from riding all over Hell and half of Georgia in a Loser Cruiser whose A/C remains down for a reason I haven’t been able to figure out as of yet. I DID manage to get the four-legged chums fed before I headed out earlier, so I got that going for me at least. The Memezapoppin’ feature will be delayed accordingly, but I’ll git ‘er done yet, by Gad, you just watch and see if I don’t.

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Fundraisers, forsooth!

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Having shifted my brother’s ongoing flatbed-trailer begathon over to the right sidebar for the nonce, permit me now to introduce CF Lifers to a follow-on fundie, namely…well, I’ll just chop off the relevant section from tonight’s nonpareil Eyrie offering and append it herewards:

IMPORTANT NOTE! A boon, playgoers, a benison: My lovely daughter Madeleine, who is to my eternal astonishment a high-schooler as of two (2) weeks ago, requests that I commend to the attention of you Eyrirregulars the marching-band fundraiser she is participating in, to wit:

Any of you fine folks who are flush with cash are hereby beseeched to toss a few simoleons into the pot for my young ‘un: popcorn in a staggering variety of flavors, candy, and other miscellaneous comestibles are available at the above link for discriminating consumers of such items. Thanks so very, very much!

Comments for this particular post have been opened to all irrespective of subscriber status, because reasons.

And there you have it, gang.

Publick notice

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As I mentioned last week, posting was disrupted by my fiddle-farting around with plugins and other such behind-the-scenes jiggery et pokery, affecting both Ye Aulde Colde Furye Blogge and the Eyrie. That being the case, Friday night’s Eyrie post was finished yesterday and went up just now, with the regular Screamin’ meemie Monday post to follow shortly.

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The return of Recent Comments…?

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Okay, here’s the scoop so far. Installed and activated the WP plugin yclept Better Recent Comments, inserted the short-code calling the plug’s functiionality up at the end of a couple of posts on which there are comments, and learned to my annoyance that

  1. The plug only displays an excerpt of the recent comments, for which the default setting is ten (10) words
  2. The default setting for how many recent comments are displayed is five (5); both this and the above setting can be changed, but the procedure is a big, fat pain in the ass
  3. Most annoying of all, the post shows the latest comments irrespective of which post they’re appended to, which stymies my attempt to use the short-code at the bottom of each individual post, thereby dashing my hopes for restoring inline comments pretty thoroughly. This setting too can be customized, but it’s an even bigger PITA than the aforementioned two, requiring me to determine each individual post’s ID number and insert that into the WP function.php code as and when

So shit, man, I dunno. Overall, the plugin seems to work quite well at what it does, it’s just that what it does ain’t in line with what I WANT the thing to do. Worse, I really dislike the idea of putting the plugin’s accompanying widget in the left sidebar, seeing as how that real estate is already full-up with indispensable items; the last thing I need in there, seems to me, is line after line of more schtuff piled atop the poor blogroll list, which common courtesy betwixt Persons Of Blogge I hope people make use of and don’t wish to obscure in any fashion. The only option I can descry for alleviating this piss-poor situation is to either abbreviate the “Comments Policy” section or excise it altogether, which I figger can only lead to misunderstanding, insult, and woe.

Ah well, that’s the sit-rep as things currently stand. I’m thinking I might try deploying “Recent comments” at the bottom of the Donnybrook post rather than in the sidebar someplace. That’s gonna bring on the unwelcome side-effect of displacing the day’s posting further down the index page, and it ain’t as if it isn’t further down than I’d prefer already. Exacerbating that problem is the addendum I intend to add to the Flatbed Fundie post, necessitate by reasons I shan’t go into here.

Another item to which I need to attend soon is de-activating, then re-activating ALL the CF plugins to determine which of them, or which combination of them, is causing the agonizingly slow page-load times we’ve been suffering of late. Another damnable nuisance, time-consuming for sure but thankfully not too difficult a chore. Best of all, it won’t involve any mucking about with short-codes, C&P embeds, or PHP scripts.

I probably shouldn’t oughta bring it up lest I jinx myself, but another tragically deprecated WP plugin I much mourn the passing of was the “Recent posts” doohickey that attached a brief excerpt under the blogroll link whence it came. That was a good and useful function, I thought. If I’m not mistaken, I believe the execrable Blogger platform offers that appealing feature, one of the very few things that shitlib stinkhole has going for it.

I say again: man, I dunno. With all this housekeeping and maintenance shite heaped on my plate, staring me down imperiously—waiting, just…WAITING—it’s an everlovin’ blue-eyed wonder I ever get any actual writing work done around here at all. Le sigh…

Then again, though, I think back twenty-some-odd years to the Paleolithic blogging epoch, the primordial days of my OG Blogger infancy. Back then—in addition to being forced to walk fourteen miles to school in a blizzard, uphill each way—the primary blogware choice was between Greymatter and Movable Type, neither of which offered more than the most minuscule fraction of the customization options, reliability, ease of use, and wondrous capabilities of the almighty WordPress and MarsEdit combine. Such reminiscences call to mind a hoary old bit of bawdy doggerel.

In days of old
when knights were bold
and condoms not invented

We tied a sock
around our cock
and babies were prevented!

There are several variants of that ripping gag floating about in the untracked wilds of the Innarnutz, all of them funny as all hell.

Update! Okely dokely: Tacked on BRC at the fag-end of the Donnybrook, which I think looks pretty good and is gonna do us up nicely. Still displays just five comments, which I’m mulling bumping up to eight, perhaps ten. Sound off in the comments and let me know what you think.

Updated update! Now displaying eight (8) comments, excerpt length is twenty (20) words. Still not too gross an impingement on main page posts, I don’t think.

Publick Notice

Posted on      by     

Jeez O PETE, but the bogus-user-registration tsunami shows no sign of abating, Lord knows how come. That being so, I’m denying and/or deleting like a fiend over here; any aspiring for-real registrant caught up unjustly in my feverish struggle to cope with the onslaught—I summarily dumped well over a hundred (!!) of the damnable nuisances yesterday alone—is hereby advised to shoot me an email at the addy in the right-hand sidebar so’s I can get ya straight.

After many placid months with nary a peep out of ‘em—nigh on a year, if I remember right—I can’t suss out the reason behind this out-of-the-blue and most unwelcome influx, nor what the reg-spammers might stand to gain from this shite in the first place. Perhaps nowadays they’re paid not per successful registration as seemed to be the case before, but per attempt, regardless of success or failure.

What I’m starting to wonder is whether the very act of denying/deleting the filthy shitweasels promptly might actually be incentivizing them, indirectly confirming the existence of an operational blog at this URL or some such. Maybe it would be best to just ignore the rat-bastards for the nonce: sit back and let the spurious registration attempts pile one atop another until the shit-storm has finally passed, then dispose of them all in one fell swoop afterward. Who the hell knows, I surely don’t.

Update! Annnnd of COURSE there’s a plugin for that, duly installed and activated as of now. Hopefully it’ll do the job for us without slowing down page-load times too atrociously.

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Flatbed fundraiser

Posted on      by     

This ‘un ain’t for me, broke as a joke though I am and shall almost certainly remain, but for my brother Jeff. To wit:

Jeff’s Flatbed Fund!
The photo is of my brother Jeff Hendrix. I’m writing this and putting this fundraiser together for him because he’s not the most web-savvy guy in the world, while I’ve been designing, building, and adminning websites for many years, in addition to driving trucks between web-design jobs.

The truck-driving gig is something Jeff and I have had in common for a long, long time—going all the way back to 1981, in fact, when I got my first freight-hauling job with Emery Air Freight, the pioneering air-freight pickup and delivery/logistics/freight forwarding company started by US Navy veteran John C Emery, Sr right after the end of WW2, in 1946. Two years after I was hired there, I put a word in with my boss and helped Jeff get on with Emery, driving cargo vans and straight-trucks like I’d been doing.

From there, both Jeff and myself went on to long stints at Emery competitor Airborne Express, working for two different sub-drayage contractors. Next, it was a stretch at Bax Global, where Jeff trained for and got his Class-A license and moved on up to the big leagues: eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rigs pulling 53-foot enclosed trailers, the final step in the truck-driver’s evolution.

After Bax went the way of the dodo, Jeff took his hard won rig jockey skills to Phoenix Metals, hauling a flatbed trailer loaded with sheet steel. He worked for Phoenix for 7 years, then decided to take the owner-operator plunge and buy his own tractor—a used 2000 Freightliner Classic XL in well-above-average condition—to haul containers from the Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA seaports as an independent B-drayage contractor for Horizon Freight.

After eight years at Horizon pulling in the most money he’d ever earned in his trucking career, the utter economic disaster that IS the Biden economy has put paid to all that, as the container-hauling business came to a screeching, smoking halt in January 2021. Jeff says that the collapse was almost immediate and quite noticeable, much like a Semi crashing into a brick wall. HIGHLY EXPERIENCED drivers who had worked the container runs for twenty, even thirty years, found themselves desperately looking for other trucking work. To hear him talk about it with his fellow Horizon drivers (which I have, several times), “disaster” is too mild a word for it; “apocalyptic” might be more apt.

Which, as we all know only too well, is in no way an overstatement. You can read the rest over at the fundraiser page linked above. In the event that any of y’all fellow Biden Economic MIRACLE!© victims have a spare nickle or three, please do consider throwing it his way so’s he can get on back to work again. I have a YUUUGE vested interest in the success of this hail-Mary venture myself, seeing as how I rent my living space from him and have no more desire to find a nice bridge to sleep under than he does. Thanks in advance either way for your kindly attention. This post will remain stuck to the top of this page; new CF ravings will appear below.

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Access: DENIED

Posted on      by     

Jeezum H CROW, we’re experiencing a sudden raging torrent of attempted user-registration spam here at Ye Aulde CF Muthashippe which, thanks to the total awesomeness of WPExpertsio’s New User Approve plugin, I’m able to cope with properly. Although it IS still a bit of a nuisance, I must say. Once again, a goodly percentage of the spurious registration attempts have a dot-RU email addy, the rotten sonsabitches. MSG ENDS, over and out.

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Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

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