Modern Humorist, a very funny site, ran a feature called Holy Tango of Poetry subtitled "If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names".

One of the poets featured is William Carlos Williams, a founder of the Imagist movement, who is best known (by far) for his poem "The Red Wheelbarrow".  If you have anything even remotely resembling a poetry anthology this is sure to be included because

1.  It is very good
2.  It is historically important
3.  It only takes up about three column inches

It is also notable because

4.  It leads a large number of college freshmen (who do not know the historical context) to decide that the chickens mentioned in the poem could successfully write modern poetry

Here is the poem (I'm sure a number of readers would be able to recite this by heart):

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Here is Modern Humorist's Holy Tango poem for William Carlos Williams:

I Will Alarm Islamic Owls

I will be alarming
the Islamic owls
that are in
the barn

and which
you warned me
are very jittery
and susceptible to loud noises

Forgive me
they see so well in the dark
so feathery
and so dedicated to Allah

This warning applies if you use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

There is a new Windows virus, called Badtrans.B, spreading rapidly through email (I have been hit three times in the past 24 hours.)  The email subject of the infected message will be simply "Re:".  The email body will be blank but the message will contain an attachment with a double extension: filenames will resemble Pics.zip.pif and Humor.mp3.scr.  When the message is opened, Outlook will launch the Internet Explorer (IE) parser to render the message.  IE versions 5.01 and 5.5 (but not 5.01SP2) contain an exploitable MIME bug allowing arbitrary code to be executed without prompting the user; this is the route of infection.

The virus has two main effects.  First, it will email infected messages, using its own MAPI code, to email addresses found in cached web pages.  Second (and more seriously) it will install a Trojan horse keystroke logger; the logger will be in effect when the title of the foreground window begins with 'LOG', 'PAS', 'REM', 'CON', 'TER', or 'NET' (for 'logon', 'password', 'remote', 'connection', 'terminal', 'network', etc.) and the keystroke log will be mailed to one of the creator's (or creators') email addresses.  The keystroke logging code is contained in %System%\Kdll.dll.

• More info on Badtrans.B from Symantec
• More info on the IE MIME exploit

For fans of Google Holiday Logos, the creative variations upon the logo of the Google search engine to celebrate particular events, note that Google maintains an archive page of all previously used holiday logos.

The Guerilla News Network has a very well produced < 5 minute video on its site called "Countdown".  Check it out.

The Public DNS at granitecanyon.com, who provide primary and secondary DNS for mcgees.org, joshuamcgee.com, ScotchFinder, and davidjmcgee.com, among others, seem to have all their servers down.

If you can read this page, and if you did not type in a numeric URL to get here, their servers are up again.

(This is a potentially unpleasant post, so skip it if you would like.)

Gatorade goes bad.  Logically there is no reason why it shouldn't, eventually; it just had never occurred to me before that it would.  I keep a bottle of Gatorade in my car for when I get thirsty.  Last night I reached over, unscrewed the cap, and had swallowed three times before I could stop myself.  It was the consistency of mucilage or phlegm.  It did not taste hyper-revolting, which is a good sign, but it was certainly off.  When I got out of the car I held it under the light: it was a petri dish.  Black colonies were floating throughout the semi-liquid.  I was afraid last night that I would be taken ill; as of this morning nothing unpleasant has happened, and I count myself very fortunate.

Please keep this in mind regarding storage of Gatorade.

I visited the guitar again and copied down its vitals.  It is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom, ebony finish, gold hardware.  You can see a picture here.  I love this guitar.

Four excellent food products that you are unlikely to know about already:

1. Maine Coast Sea Vegetables Alaria: "Similar to wakame biologically and nutritionally, with a black or dark-green color. A more wild, yet delicate taste...."  This is delicious to eat raw, straight out of the bag; it may also be cooked for soups, salads, or boiled as greens.  The bag, by the way, is resealable and has "PLEASE RE-USE THIS BAG" printed on the front.  Kudos to them.
   
   
2. Whole Foods 365 Cola: Whole Foods have reformulated this beverage to use cane syrup as a sweetener; this imparts a delicious flavor reminiscent of the "microbrew" birch beers (birch beers are soft drinks, like root beers are.)  This product does not contain caffeine.
   
   
3. Kettle Chips Habañero Chili with Ginger Potato Chips: I think the name says it all: a creative flavor, and it is a well executed one as well.  The heat is present but not calibrated to blow your head off.  The ginger is restrained and adds a great undercurrent of flavor.
   
   
4. Health Valley Lentil with Couscous Soup: Presented as a Cup-o'-Noodles-style single-serving container, this is great to keep in a desk drawer at work for late nights.  It is far tastier and more nutritive than the cheap ramen cups; the seasoning emphasizes curry that fills the room with a delicious exotic aroma.
   
   

I just had the pleasure of watching the skateboarding vert finals of the 2001 Gravity Games.  What a great competition.  Rune Glifberg followed his second-run 92-plus score with an amazing and beautiful 96 point final run.  This truly has to be one of the most beautiful vert runs ever.  He stitched together five back-to-back technical tricks (including two 540s), he threw down a gorgeous full-extension Madonna, he pulled off a textbook-perfect tailgrab so flawless that it floored me to see it in the middle of a competition run.

The pleasure was not just the beautiful, technical and creative riding.  It was heartwarming to see, yet again, this community of sportsmen who are genuinely happy and congratulatory when a co-competitor beats them.  There is a tangible atmosphere of personal respect and nobility; the community feeling reminds me of Seattle musicians who consider sales to be after-thoughts and spend entire interviews endorsing other bands rather than talking about their own work.  If you are a skeptic please take some time and watch part (or all) of the next pro skateboarding competition: the level of skill and sportsmanship is sure to surprise and impress you.

Saturday evening I visited Instrumental Music here in Thousand Oaks to pick up a new set of guitar strings.  After I picked them out, Jenn was very patient and waited while I played around like a kid in a toyshop.  My gaze had fixed on a gorgeous black Les Paul, and I pulled it down and plugged it in.  When I first started picking through a chord I heard one of the worst mis-tunings I have ever encountered, made worse by the (intentional) distortion on the amp.  I'm going to see if I can give this explanation in a few sentences rather than my normal multi-paragraphs.  A guitar, as you may know, is usually tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, low to high.  This means that on a tempered scale the dashes in the previous list represent 5, 5, 5, 4, and 5 half steps, respectively.  Someone, presumably a beginner shopping at the store, had tuned the guitar with 5, 5, 5, 5, and 5 half steps, leaving the final tuning E-A-D-G-C-F.  This makes an E Major-shaped chord resolve as E-B-E-G#-C-F, giving us E-F dissonance (twice) as well as B-C dissonance, and generating what is surely one of the most revolting sounds known to man.  After I fixed the tuning it out sounded great.

I'm still thinking about it; this guitar is a beauty.  It lists for $1K, the shop carried it for $800, and I am now waiting on Guitar Center's next "blowout sale".  If I can get the price under $500 I can probably rationalize the purchase (Jenn, who will eventually read this post, might not agree that $500 is rationalizable.)

I have been surfing around reading more about these guitars, including a return visit to the indispensable Pearl Jam Rumor Pit, a site that is far more than its name would suggest.  Part of its role is apparently to give patronizing and dismissive non-answers to banal questions, as well as to questions that, while not banal, seem to suggest sarcastic answers.  Thus this rather amusing exchange from 3 August 1997:

Q: What type of strings does Stone [Gossard] use on his Les Paul?
A: Metal ones

While I'm on the topic, I want to share this passage from Ed's gear page:

Q: I'm curious about Ed's guitar setup and was wondering if you would mind assisting me.  It's widely reported that Ed doesn't use effects pedals.  How does he switch between clean and dirty tones in songs like "Not For You" and "Corduroy"? ...

A: You are correct that Ed typically does not use guitar effect pedals ... At times [he] has experimented with using various distortion pedals, but one has never stuck - either because he wasn't happy with the distortion, or because he doesn't want to fuss with a foot pedal by his microphone stand.  On top of that, Ed's really interested in guitars with distortion and/or effects built on-board the guitar, such as in the vintage, Italian-made Vox guitars that he owns.  With those guitars he can turn the distortion, and/or other effects, on and off at the flip of a switch right on the guitar itself.  It's a pretty neat concept, but whereas the Vox guitars naturally sound O.K., they don't sound great.  So far though, Ed's never taken one of the Vox's out on tour with him....

So if he uses no effect pedals live, and no Vox guitars live, then how does he get his distortion??  Well, it's actually a little bit purer approach.  First of all, most of the time Ed plays his guitars using only the front (neck) pickup.  This pickup typically has a thicker, muddier tone due to its position along the length of the string.  And so with the positioning of that pickup, it's a little easier to "overdrive" your amp with your strumming/picking technique.  Second, Ed sets his amp tone by first dialing in a loud, clean, full tone.  (Clean being the important word there.)  He adjusts his input gain right to the point where the "clean" tone is on the verge of distorting slightly.  Once this is set, his sound (clean or dirty) is controlled purely with his hands, changing with the intensity he chooses to strum the strings with.  If he picks more delicately, he can achieve a cleaner tone.  If he picks harder and more aggressively, he can achieve a distorted tone.  Cool, huh?

[Edited 04 Jan 2002] I am removing this post.  It dealt with my very angry feelings towards the website of a group of big-game hunters whom I had called "sadistic" and "murdering", but it unnecessarily adds unpleasantness to the site.  If you are interested in the URL I was referencing, let me know by email.

There are games in which an element of chance is decisive, such as roulette or Snakes and Ladders: these games are appropriate only for children (if they are complicated) or for gamblers (if they are simple).

                  - J. Mark Thompson, "Defining the Abstract"

I am upgrading the Perl installation on a Linux machine.  The installation script is interactive, beautifully written, and sometimes very funny. It just scrolled the following:

(Looks like you have stdio.h from Linux.)
Checking how std your stdio is...
Your stdio acts pretty std.

Anyway, I thought it was very funny.

I just saw the new Yahoo!/Pizza Hut advertisement using JavaScript animation.  If the ad is not showing on Yahoo! right now (you cannot miss it) I have cached a copy.  While I am loathe to admit liking something that could easily become a highly invasive advertising trick, this new ad works.  As long as the animations are under five seconds and the graphics under about 200x200 pixels, this is in my opinion preferable to pop-ups/pop-unders, at least until the novelty wears off.

I have written some fun software to solve Boggle games (this is the game in which six-sided dice labeled with letters are shaken in a plastic container to form an N x N array; the object of the game, in short, is to find paths through adjacent letters to form valid English words, subject to minimum length rules and a prohibition against using one die twice in a single word.)  The searches are very fast, even on this 266 MHz machine.  I just shook the game to get an array, as follows:

JFDER
GDARD
MWOTE	
PTUCP
HILAH

A few seconds glancing gives me adder, water, actor, and rear/reared. 

I plugged the grid into the Boggle program, which found 363 matches in about one second, including the four I mention above.  Other notables that the program found include acuter, alcoate, capered, chaptered, outpaced, readout, rerouted, retouch, ulcered, and watered.  I might touch up the program a bit and release it as freeware, perhaps open-sourced under the GNU GPL.  Let's see if there is any interest.

Here is a screenshot: