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Mudville
Ken had his day brightened this weekend when I called him seeking wise commentary on the spectacle of tag-team wrestling in the context of a major league baseball playoff. He cleared any number of things up for me, ranging from the designated hitter rule to the flinging 72-year-old crazy men to the turf rule, and hung up happy as a clam, having shared his copious knowledge and obscurantist jargon with me until his li’l heart sang, sang, SANG with joy.
Fast forward.
Tuesday night, I’m tenderly simmering the machine-masticated turkey bit that will shortly form the basis of a truly fine spaghetti sauce, gently tipping the sliced mushrooms into the garlic, basil, and fennel-scented meat, carameled with countless slivers of finely-pressed and olive-oil browned garlic, when the phone rings.
It’s Ken. he strongly encourages me to turn the game on, as an overzealous Cubs fan has just knocked an easy pop-fly out of the glove of a Cubs player, leaving the game tied with the bases loaded in the top of the eighth (I’ve had K-Donk review this for usage and accuracy).
As he talks to me on the phone, the score changes to 8-3 Florida.
Then, the phone went dead.
Frantically I attempted to get word to Chicago, to no avail. Several messages left for my pal Dave yielded no return call, and certainly not before the end of the game. It’s clear to me that had Dave been doing his job, Ken wouldn’t have had to call me as he did.
Shall We Drink from The Broken Cup?
Jason Webley – Something will fly…: November 1, Town Hall.
Jason’s billing this as his ‘last show,’ who knows what that means. Town Hall holds 900 people, which is just about the number of folks that turned up for last year’s event at the late lamented Paradox. He’s selling advance tix online, so buy now!
My day began with an interview with the boy, who sounded good and in good spirits, but I’ll draw a modest curtain over the content ’til it’s appropriate. I will still be running the rest of the gigantor springtime interview here as promised previously.
Retrocrush
the Worst Halloween Costumes of All Time at Retrocrush (tossed off by the fab-u-lous April Winchell – tossed off, get it? ah, ha ha I kill me) led me to the horrific pipe-cleaner man (Not safe for children of uptight parents, but no actual nudity or dead people). Pipe cleaner man, got that?
The best part is that the website author found it amidst his dead relatives’ material, foreshadowing the dilemma more and more of us will face with the passage of time: what to do with the porn?
Baretta with the damn bird appliqued to his freakin’ “leather jacket” sums up everything that is wrong, WRONG WRONG with corpocratic merchandising!
Salam's Back
Where is Raed ? resumes publication after a book tour. I regret missing his bit on Fresh Air.
This weekend we were in Barnes and Noble for a minute on our way to the movie and I saw Salam’s book, in paperback, on the new arrival table upstairs. I can’t describe the surreal feeling of picking up a book, opening it to a page at random, and knowing
a) where you were when you first read the sentence you flipped to
b) where the author was when he wrote the sentence and
c) where you were when the event described by the author was happening.
It was like picking up a book that consisted of pages that were mirrors reflecting specific temporally-bound memories into my head. Very Phil Dick, you know?
MT Blacklist out now
MT-Blacklist is out now.
Have at it!
spamarama
Over in the discussion at hyperorg that waqs referenced by El Stein-F David ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined’ Weinberger notes that tips two and three (rename mt-comments.cgi, hide comments links) didn’t work.
Did Jay release yet? Not as of noon, apparently.
D. Barnes, back again
Thurs, Oct 16
DANNY BARNES – CD release show
featuring some very, very special guests!
8:30 * $10 adv/$12 dos
From Barnes’ website, regarding the new release, Dirt on the Angel:
Dirt on the Angel.
AVAILABLE NOW
At long last. Two years in the making, Dirt on the Angel. The All Music Guide calls this cd “visionary.”Big new hot steaming batch of original compositions from Barnes, with covers of Beck’s Loser, Stringbean/Uncle Dave Macon’s Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy, and Ronnie Lane/Ronnie Wood’s Ooh La La.
Performers include Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell, American composer and jazz guitar legend Bill Frisell, bluegrass/jazz/classical violinist Darol Anger, and Master of American music Dirk Powell.
Produced by Barnes. Recorded in Seattle WA and Macon GA.
A compendium of American forms, taking poetic inspiration from the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, harmonies and rhythms from prerecorded American music, up to and including modern cut and paste techniques. A knowledgeable music fan’s delight. Hear Dirt on the Angel on quality radio stations, and read about it in magazines that have an interest in music.
Barnes + Frisell under Barnes’ direction = happy, happy me, as the equation running the other direction is also highly rewarding.
Comment spam
Killing Comment Spam Dead – Jay Allen begins to tackle the comment spambots that have cropped up targeting MT blogs with great frequency over the past few days.
However, thank god, he notes wait until Monday to tackle this, as he’ll be releasing a plugin.
James Seng has released a captcha plugin, which I will implement, I think.
(UPDATE: be warned, this is a VERY hackish plugin, to the point I’m not sure it should really be considered a plugin as such. You’ll need to have libgd installed, which I accomplished via these instructions, using fink.)
(UPDATE II: fiddlesticks, a combination of outdated instructions and having to try to adapt CPAN to look for fink-based instals makes this into an overly-involved install, so I’m aborting. Man – GD, ImageMagick, netpbm – can’t we all just get along?)
Another approach is to hack the default names of the comments scripts, and replace them with a spambot trap that automagically adds any IP address to an .htaccess file when the trap CGI is hit by the bot. The drawback here is that old Google links to a given comment would lead to the trap; and eventually, Google would re-spider the good links; it seems the blogspammers are also scraping for strings based on default configs as well and so might well be able to identify foo.cgi as a renamed comments CGI.
Here are some links and discussions on the topic:
Yoz Grahame: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog. Summary: rename your commenst script, hack to include a “delete” link in the notification email,
add some misdirection to the form code. Much of this is included in the upcoming MTBlacklist.
Mentalized: Movable Type: Easier edit/removal of new comments. Summary: add a link in the notification email to take you to the edit page for that comment.
Adam Kalsey: Comment spam. Summary: comment throttling, back-end tokenized authentication (I like that!), but does not favor captcha, becasue it violates accessiblity guidelines in its’ simplest deployable form. Adam is also not in favor of content filtering, which is the heart of the MTBlacklist approach.
It is the end times
The Illuminated Donkey missed the Martinez/Zimmer senior-citizen/mixed age qualification boxing match yesterday, it seems. Concurrently, as AZ has noted, the Cubs appear to be headed for the World Series.
(She also noted, a few days ago, a pleasant fall aspect of life in Indiana.)
Surely I don’t need to point out that a leader has arisen in the east, now, do I?
Despite the unmistakable evidence of the imminent eschaton, I called Dr. K-Donk to clear up any miscomprehensions I might have had concerning these events, and now I have a better understanding of at least the ball-base events of yesterday.