Scenes from IANA's growing magician problem

I was unaware that the Unicode Consortium is the standards body with authority over Astrology and the Zodiac.

Objects orbiting the Sun outside the orbit of Neptune are named after mythological figures, particularly those associated with creation. But the subset that orbit in a two-to-three resonance with Neptune -- the so-called "plutinos", such as Pluto and Orcus -- are named after figures associated with the underworld. In this case, the five TNOs, ordered by distance from the sun, are named:

  • Orcus: the Etruscan and Roman god of the underworld.
  • Haumea: the Hawaiian goddess of fertility; the telescope used to discover this object is located on Hawaiʻi.
  • Quaoar: an important mythological figure of the Tongva, the indigenous people who originally occupied the land where CalTech is located.
  • Makemake: the creator god of the Rapanui of Easter Island.
  • Gonggong: a destructive Chinese water god.

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jwzlyrics 1.20

jwzlyrics works again. I retooled it to scrape Genius, now that LyricsWiki is gone forever.

Who knows how long this will continue to work, before they change something in their generated HTML. Such are the indignities of This Modern World. If there are better options, I don't know of them.

LyricsWiki had an actual API. It was annoying but stable. Genius technically has an API, but using it would require each user of this program to create an account there, which is far too onerous.

I also applied some countermeasures to their weird steganography!

It's amazing to me the the music conglomerates have basically conceded that all music is available everywhere for a dollar a month and nobody's ever going to get paid, but they are still treating the lyrics like those are the most precious thing they own.


The source also includes "itunesxml", a command line utility that generates an XML file nearly identical to the file that iTunes used to keep up-to-date in "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml", that last existed in macOS 10.14. This means that tools that need to access the iTunes database, e.g. the Mac::iTunes::Library::XML Perl module, can continue to work.

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