benison BEN-uh-suhn; -zuhn, noun:
Blessing; benediction.

Benison comes from Old French beneison, from Latin benedictio, from benedicere, “to bless,” from bene, “well” + dicere, “to say.”

Every moment spent with my love is a benison, exhilarating and heartwarming each step of the way.

The infamous “fast server cookie not sticking” bug is finally fixed. Basically, the history was like this:

— it worked
— moved code around and broke it
— fixed it in CVS
— fixed it manually on the site
— clobbered it on the site
— (still fixed in CVS)
— updated back from CVS, so it’s fixed again, for good.

Check that you’re hitting sheila or gerald. If not, go login again.

Superior! Quien es mas Macho? is a two-player card game
using an ordinary deck of playing cards. Although not necessary, it
is fun to think of the card game as being a wrestling match — the
cards are the various maneuvers each wrestler performs and the suits
represent “styles” of wrestling (Clubs= Martial Arts & Brawling,
Spades= Throws, Power Moves & Grappling, Diamonds= Acrobatics and
Jumping, Hearts= “Personality” moves such as appealing to the crows,
cheating, posing and posturing).

You know you want to play.

Basic cruelty by those in power seems to be an element of human design. (Fortunately I’ve encountered a few exceptions.)

In ‘The Glass Teat’ Harlan Ellison recounts a story he says he got from Mattel insiders involved in product testing. A doll was made that upped the ante on the usual wetting and crying, making the reactions a bit more interactive. When rocked gently or given a bottle it would gurgle and coo, but when treated roughly or spanked it would cry.

The test children quickly learned which stimulus would provide which reaction, and also quickly decided which was more fun. Soon the only response coming from the dolls were cries as the children found new ways to trigger them.

Apocryphal, I know, but consistent with what I’ve seen.

Yes, you don’t often see little girls torturing their dollies, but those dollies don’t cry. There’s something about a victim begging for mercy that seems to throw some malignant switch in homo sapiens.

It reminds me a little of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A good overview with pictures and some short video is here.

Briefly, in order to study some aspects of prisons volunteers agreed to play guards and prisoners for at $15 a day for 1-2 weeks. A hallway and some small rooms in the Psych building were made into a “prison” with CCTV monitoring. The students were arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners.

“Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.”

I dreamed of being in a caravan travelling a great wilderness trail, down a tree-covered mountain pass. As we continued our descent, the sky opened up again, brisk and autumnal, almost seeming more broad than the horizon could hold…

The plain below, compared to the mountains, seemed level as a lake.

The wind made strokes across it, as if drawing poems in a calligraphy of curves and lines on a vast canvas of green…

No wildlife on the ground was visible at this distance, but I could feel the area was vibrant with activity just beyond the scope of my sight.

“And the prophet said: ‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day it was as one dead.’ ‘Old Arabian proverb.'”

What makes a man a killer?

Jake Valentine wasn’t sure he could rightly answer that, mainly because he didn’t really consider himself a killer. Mind you, the fact that at this very moment he was going to end the lives of two people was beside the point.
Continue reading A QUICK SQUEEZE OF THE TRIGGER →

Who would turn you in?
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A German tourist who pleaded guilty to having oral sex in Zambia was sentenced on Thursday to six years in jail with hard labor, court officials said.

Today in history

Dreams last night.

For some reason the Jeffersons were the first family. (Not Thomas, the TV couple, George and Weezy.) I worked as a special attache to them, and I dealt with it ok, even though the President kept calling me “Honky Hippie”, and “Jive Turkey”. It was a good job, regardless, because Mrs Jefferson was constantly bringing me homemade cookies and making fun of George. I woke up actually smelling tollhouse. So… who wants to give me a cushy gov’t job with baked goods as a perq?

I hired a bunch of people I know as assistants….my sweetie as webmaster, as the press conference guy. It sort of felt like an episode of spin city. I do remember that I wasn’t obliged to wear a collar and tie, which was quite nice, too.

redoubtable rih-DOW-tuh-buhl, adjective:
1. Arousing fear or alarm; formidable.

2. Illustrious; eminent; worthy of respect or honor.

Redoubtable derives from Old French redouter, “to dread,” from Medieval Latin redubitare, “to fear,” literally “to doubt back at,” from Latin re- + dubitare, “to doubt.”

waspish (WOS-pish) adjective

1. Like a wasp, in behavior (stinging) or in form (slender build).

2. Easily annoyed; irascible; petulant.

[From wasp, from Middle English waspe, from Old English waesp, from waeps.]

How to irritate web-folk with taste or talent:

Warning, Non-compliant CSS browsers won’t be terribly impressed.

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Same As it Ever Was
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An Internet archive offering snapshots of the web’s past goes live. You can type in a URL and see what the page looked like all the way back to 1996. The archive features five times as much text as the Library of Congress (web.archive.org).

Scary – you can see the evolution (or lack thereof) of my website A neat feature is that you can look at your friends list way off in the past. 🙂 My friends list from long ago… I link to many different people now.

also….

Slowpoke!
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Alta Vista searchers may be getting results that look like archive finds as the former search leader hasn’t updated listings since July.