browser arousal
OK, so thanks to everyone who pointed out yesterday that the durn site was illegible in Netscape 4.x. Special thanks to those who took a charitable view and thought I was doing something avant-garde with the colors, but no, I just fucked up. "You develop in Netscape and test in IE," says Lyse. "Everyone knows that." This is what I get having a professional web developer for a girlfriend. It should be fixed now, but Slashdot's goons are probably still en route to break my kneecaps. Forget Barthes; cross-browser compatibility is the best argument yet for relativism of discourse. La mort du web developer.
Via robotwisdom: a semi-scholarly article pointing out parallels between Ulysses and American Beauty. It's convincing until they admit that American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball has never read Ulysses. Without resorting to Jung (as they do), it seems plausible to say that since both Lester Burnham and Leopold Bloom are meant to be sympathetic everymen, it's only natural that each has some unusual but harmless prurience in his basically decent character. Though I loved their explanation for why these parallels have hitherto gone unnoticed:
Possibly because the book, which is the most universally owned novel by the reading public and thus, arguably, one of the most--if not the most--popular book in Western culture, is also the least read. As Joyce scholar Tom O'Shea pointed out at a recent James Joyce Conference, ownership of Ulysses is part of a syndrome which includes the buyer's pledge to read the book "eventually," "some day," "honest," followed by one or two abandoned attempts. The unread Ulysses on the shelf functions as an icon, a status symbol, and a future project.
Genetically modified cancer-fighting chickens.
Vaca points out the Pornolizer, which will foul the URL of your choice not only in English, but in any of the Dano-Norweigan languages. According to their stats, microsoft.com is the most popular entry.
British people will amuse me 'til I die.
