'Bred Crumbs

Arty Photos Are the New Cartoon Horses: 'Bred Crumbs v4.0

I was tired of white. Weren't you tired of white? I was tired of white.

And my face. Tired of seeing my face. Plus I wanted to restructure the code of the site, and try some new responses to coding challenges, and so on and on ...

And here it is, a new design of 'Bred Crumbs. And if you don't like what you see, change it. Up at the top of the page, along with the old buttons for changing font and link behavior, are some cryptic little squares that will turn on different skins for the site. And the last button of the bunch will pick one randomly, this time and every time you change pages or come back to the site.

Disclaimers: I think I fixed all the bugs we found upon publishing, but on the off chance this page doesn't look like it has everything on it (like, no pictures or frame colors), click one of the skin buttons. It's a one-time-only bug at most, and I think I fixed it, but it's hard to replicate, as they say in quality assurance and bad sci-fi movies. [Update 06.07.04: One more culprit found and eradicated. I'm more confident now that the problem has been solved.] Also, none of this has been tested yet in Mac land, though in theory it should all be fine. Mac users, give me a few days to check it out, or drop me a comment if you find something amiss. [Update 06.07.04: It's lookin' good in Safari, and except for the buttons being a little misaligned, even IEMac seems to get it.] Also, as always, clicking a button causes cookies, for those who care about such things.

And I guess I wasn't completely tired of white; it's still the bulk of your page, really, 'cause you can't beat black-on-white for readin'. Although one wacky twist does lurk in the skins.

Expect small tweaks and minor repairs in the next several days, no doubt. And maybe more skins down the road. For now, I'm out of horizontal images with stray or repeated things in them.

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Kneaded Release

Since I've been so complaint-prone lately (you: "Lately"?), it seems fair to write for once during a rare moment of ease, regardless of whether that moment intersects with anything worth saying.

Why the calm? It's not that a great crisis has passed, nor has a great reward occurred. I don't have any revelations about the problems that surround us; I haven't been whumped by any spiritual epiphanies.

I just had a massage. As I do every three months or so. And I'm talking real therapeutic massage here, not back-of-the-weekly-newspaper, extra-treat-at-the-end "massage."

I recommend it to everyone. I don't see why the government doesn't require – no, pay – each of us to get at least one massage a year. Not to get all holistic on you, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be a vastly efficient form of national health insurance.

The stress that piles up in my shoulders, inflicts rigor vitalis upon my neck, and even burrows its way deep into my thighs has been tugged, planed, and popped out of me, while I remembered how the whole breathing thing works, dozed gently, and oh-so-briefly forgot how to worry about things.

Here's how unnaturally relaxed I am. I fetched burritos for dinner afterward, but the taqueria was out of its meat de résistance, the grilled chicken. You see, a pet peeve of mine is restaurants that run out of food. Background: in college, a friend and I arrived at Hardee's (= Carl's Jr. for you West Coasters) one night after a movie, at 10:50. The store's sign said it closed at 11. You could tell the employees weren't pleased we walked in. We ordered fries, and they had to make a whole fresh lot. (Which they then gave us most of.) I felt a little bad for them – one poor guy had just finished cleaning the roast-beef slicer, but unfortunately for him I loved the Hardee's Big Roast Beef – but dammit, the sign said the place closed at 11, not 10:45.

I'm a hard-line bastard when it comes to unprepared or slacking restaurants. Don't even get me started about the time I pulled up at the drive-through – I mean, thru – at a KFC, and they were out of chicken.

So, back at the burrito ... a popular taqueria has run out of one of its several meats in the last hour before it closes? Sure, it's bound to happen. What's the big deal? Green-sauce pollo instead for me, steak for Robbie. 'Sall good to Spongey-Soft Tim.

Don't worry, I'm sure Pissy Tim will return soon enough, once the stupidities of the world and the insecurities of yours truly reconvene and begin pounding, twisting, and vapor-locking me. But for now, the spell of massage lingers, and it's the best medicine ever. Not to mention the most potent sermon.

The only thing I can't explain is why it makes me pretend I know other languages.

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Blue States, Red States, and Yellow States – the Drink Divide

Finally, some meaningful demographic research: the great rift tearing our nation apart – the "soda"/"coke"/"pop" controversy – has been mapped – county by county. For a more at-a-glance view, go to the "Pop Vs. Soda" home page. (Link via The Morning News, and also recently hit by Metafilter)

Well, it might be a stretch to call it "research"; it's all based on responses to the website's survey question. Still, this picture of what Americans call soft drinks maps broadly to perceived reality for me, except that the usage of "pop" is wider-spread than I thought, and I didn't realize the Northeast was also "soda" territory.

And if you don't think this simple question doesn't touch a nerve with some folks, check out some of the individual replies, which the site lists state by state. In California alone we find, beyond the naughty respondents and the Mardoc partisans, this unhelpful answer:

Thank you, this is an extremely important topic, and a concern of mine for many years!! This survey will clear up a lot of issues. I use either one depending on who I'm talking to. Soda, for some reason, seems more formal, pop seems like a slang term from where I grew up in Indiana. I think I started using Soda when I moved to Chicago. When our family lived in Hannibal Missouri, the other kids made fun of us when we said "pop". I said, what do you call it? "Sodie-pop or sodie", they would reply. Most people I met when I lived there seemed to confuse "a's" and "i's". For example, they would say Indiani and Missoura. I never quite understood that. ...

... So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. ... The writer goes on.

And then there's this case of refreshment rage:

If some retard wants a coke but asks me for a SODA in my restaurant, they'll get a SODA...as in soda water (i.e. scotch & soda). If you want a Coke, ask for a Coke!

Um, I'll just have water, thanks. Geez. If you dared ask this stressed individual for "pop," would his head start fizzing?

Besides, even though I've gradually retrained myself from "coke" (as in my birthland) to "soda" (as in my homeland), there's no way I'm going up to a bar and ordering a "rum and soda."

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Before You Check Engine, Check This

Mind-blowing stat of the day, from a Wired News article about efforts to require car companies to release their diagnostic codes to consumers:

[T]he computing power in the average Toyota Camry is 1,000 times more complex than the system that guided Apollo 11 to the moon.

As for the main point of the article, one reason car companies should let go their code is so that, when the damned and usually useless CHECK ENGINE light comes on, the driver can possibly find out what problem if any is there before spending big bucks. It would also become more likely that you could take the car somewhere other than the dealer to get it fixed. Typing as one who has been victimized by the CE scam twice and has now let his orange dashboard glow decoratively for more than a year with no sign of car trouble, I wholeheartedly approve of this push.

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