A Michigan appellate court in Howard v. Family Independence Agency has ruled that a state agency did not violate a social worker's First Amendment rights when it fired her for trying to perform an exorcism instead of calling 911 after a client had a seizure. While visiting a client, the client had a seizure, which Michelle Howard, a religious woman, decided was "demonic in nature." She prayed over the client and anointed her with water. The court ruled that she "was not terminated for merely praying at the office," but for violating agency rules.
"Demonic in nature."
dust
"Wednesday, April 27, 2005 shows a dust storm across the western desert of Iraq on Tuesday April 26, 2005. The storm spawned near the border of Syria and Jordan, leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. (AP Photo/US Army, Sgt Shannon Arledge)"
Chocolate Facial
I have no joke here, I just like saying "Chocolate Facial". "Chocolate facial: A patron at '32 Montorgueil' rests after receiving a Phytochoc facial, a chocolate-based beauty treatment to smooth away early wrinkles. (AFP/Joel Robine)"
Yahoo News, part 2
Wow.
When I made that post yesterday about how the new Yahoo News Photos had broken middle-clicking, my hope was to get an answer like,
"Use some-other-news-site.com instead, it does pretty much the same thing as what Yahoo News Photos does, but it has real URLs."
Because, you know, that's what I thought I asked.
Apparently, though, I somehow used the wrong words, because that post turned into my biggest inadvertent idiot magnet in a long while. Apparently the Fanboy Contingent read my request for an alternate web site as a request for them to tell me how cool they think it is to write Javascript that rewrites other peoples' broken web pages.
But you know what else I didn't expect?
I didn't expect Yahoo to actually fix it the next day!
That, right there, is pretty awesome. Thank you very much, gecampbell! Yahoo News Photos works great now!
Yahoo Shark Jumpage
Today is the day when Yahoo News Photos finally jumped the shark. They changed it so that clicking on any thumbnail opens a popup window via JavaScript instead of being a "real" link; this means you can't use middle-click to queue a bunch of images to load in the background in their own window or a tab. Also, the JS code re-uses the same window every time, so even if you left-click on a bunch of thumbs, it only ends up showing you the last one you clicked.
So basically it's utterly useless now.
What other "current news photos" sites are there that I should be using instead?
(Google News is totally no good for this, since its photos are incidental to the articles. I want something photo-oriented, not article-oriented. You know, like Yahoo News Photos used to be before they fucked it up.)
Hint to idiots who think that using <A HREF="javascript:..."> is a good idea:
- It's not.
But if you insist on going down that dark road, do it like this instead:
<A HREF="http://real-url..." OnClick="thingy(); return false">. That makes left-click do your JS BS, but lets middle-click do something sane, and also lets your page continue to function if JS is turned off. And spiders work, and bookmarks work, and basically you avoid ass-fucking the web. Ok? Thanks.
Update:
- Wow, they fixed it! Thanks, gecampbell!
Gronk 1.9
I just released a new version of Gronk. Do any of you besides waider actually use it?
The main difference in 1.9 version is that now it uses "id3tag" instead of "mp3info", making its files much more interoperable with iTunes. (But 1.8, which I released last month, had a whole bunch of performance improvements.)
Raising Nancies
Tags: comics, parts, perversions
Current Music: Justin Sullivan -- Navigating by the Stars ♬
God is Great, by which I mean, Very Very Large
I've been thinking about transubstantiation, the belief of many branches of Christianity that when you take communion, the bread and wine transform physically into the flesh and blood of Christ. According to the Catholic Church as late as 1965, this is literally true, not just symbolism: the flesh is present, the bread is gone.
So let's run some numbers....
Occam's Razor
I have a theory. My theory is that there are no such things as cellphones. In fact, what's going on is that there's been an epidemic outbreak of schizophrenia, and we're all just walking around mumbling to ourselves. It's the FLUORIDE.
