Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.
What breed of dog are you?
Tobin Keller: I stay awake.
I should not drink coffee before going to bed.
Sean Penn tells Nicole Kidman: “You think that not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth.”
At least I have chicken. I stopped at the Mediterranean Cafe on my way home from the department and had lunch—chicken apricot pie, with a side of rice and Greek salad. I was reading a book on paradox (Sainsbury, R.M., Paradoxes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) and was then tapped on the shoulder; it was Roger from Der Vogelkopp. We chatted for a bit. I tried a little tea—minty, strong, sweet ... I cannot believe I had not tried it there before.
I left and encountered Di and Felecia; they recommended wheatgrass juice.
The following script is a sloppy bit of code, and there are more elegant ways to solve the problem, but it does the intended job. It was designed to take a directory of JPG images, create a separate directory of thumbnails, and then spit out HTML that one can paste into a webpage.
#/bin/bash
echo "First we check to see whether there is already a thumbnails directory."
sleep 2
if test -d "thumbnails"
then
echo -n "There is a thumbnails directory already. "
echo "For the security of your data, "
echo "this script will exit now."
exit 0
else
echo "There is no thumbnails directory yet."
echo "We will make one."
mkdir thumbnails
fi
sleep 2
echo " "
echo "Now we will produce thumbnails in the \"thumbnails\" directory."
echo "They will be 100 pixels on the longest side."
echo "This can take some time."
for i in *.jpg
do
convert -resize 100x100 "$i" "thumbnails/tn_$i"
done
echo "The thumbnails have been created in the \"thumbnails\" directory."
echo " "
echo "We will now produce HTML code that you can copy and past into a file."
echo "It will be put into a file caled \"html.txt\"."
sleep 3
for i in thumbnails/*.jpg
do
geometry=`identify $i | awk '{print $3}'`
width=`echo "$geometry" | sed 's/[^0-9]/ /g' | awk '{print $1}'`
height=`echo "$geometry" | sed 's/[^0-9]/ /g' | awk '{print $2}'`
echo "<a href=\"${i#thumbnails/tn_}\"><img src=\"$i\" width=\"$width\" height=\"$height\" /></a>" | cat >> html.txt
echo " "
echo "We have produced a thumbnails directory, thumbnails, and the HTML "
echo "necessary to create a photo gallery."
This only provides a list of links and images tags, not an actual working webpage. It furthermore does not provide an alt attribute for each image, but that could be added. It could take commandline options or be made interactive, perhaps producing the actual HTML file (merging a header and footer, for example), but it is a start.
A few ways in which the U.S. is a very screwed up society / set-of-cultures are as follows:
- Regarding the Alabama girl who went missing in Aruba a while back: would anyone care about her if she were not white and wealthy? I did not think so. Until Columbine we did not care about school violence—that is, until it hit a middle class, white school. We fetishize kidnapped white girls—see Elizabeth Smart and Jean Benet Ramsey, for example.
- Teen pushes change in youth sex offender laws: I respect Amie Zyla (Wisconsin) for overcoming what she has had to deal with and for speaking out and trying to make a difference. That having been said, one thing that disturbs me is how problematic sex and sex-related issues (education, crimes, sexuality in [popular] culture) are in this country. Sex sells in movies, as long as it is in comedies (and can be dealt with in a trivialized, adolescent manner), but serious movies do not do well; we stigmatize both the victims and perpetrators of sex crimes in a way that we do not do with other violent crimes; and with regard to both we think of it as something that happens out there (even though most perpetrators are friends, or members or close to the family, not strangers; and we still think of other peoples’ kids as the ones having sex, getting pregnant, etc., not ours, or it is that external popular culture intruding, not what we do as parents or family).
- The left and the center in this county has allowed the right to appropriate the cultural and political discourse and define themselves as the norm. Take, for example, the discussion of homosexuality. Even though in music, movies, TV, and even business the world is becoming more gay-friendly (even homophobia in baseball and football might someday be conquered ... or not), when it comes to language and discourse, the fundies and similar coservatives have situated themselves in the center. Mr. Johnson (in the linked article) says, for example: “We needed to present a counter or Christian perspective”—not a Christian perspective, but a particular and warped perspective that he claims speaks for all Christians. He has the gall to claim that “We're concerned about the effort to capture youth through indoctrination into the homosexual lifestyle.” Perhaps the undercurrent of growing tolerance in television, etc., will eventually overwhelm political rhetoric, but I am not convinced. In any case, the disconnect between so-called popular culture and the realm of political discourse is disturbing.
—June 9 2005