From MSNBC…
A Staten Island jeweler has gotten her 3-carat diamond earrings back after she, her husband and city sanitation employees sorted through a smelly heap of garbage. The studs were in a small jar of cleaning solution, which a worker at the couple’s jewelry store had accidentally thrown away.
The earrings were recovered Thursday at the former Fresh Kills landfill, where trash is compacted and shipped out of state.
Wanna get someone frustrated?
Just show that story to this guy.
…if you’re reading this.
Blogger friend Phil brought it to our attention that Internet Explorer is crashing when the front page to House of Eratosthenes is being loaded. Adding to the concern, for us, is that Cassy Fiano’s page, where we’re guest-blogging this week, also wouldn’t load in IE. And other blogs do.
Hmmmmmmm….
Well, the first thing we did was save an off-line copy of the front page, and then go in with a text editor and hack away at the HTML code line by line, until enough code was missing that the problem would stop happening. And this narrowed it down to the sidebar, specifically, the Sitemeter widget. The problem was confirmed when I loaded up yet another blog, one in which I don’t have these blogging responsibilities, and it crashed IE just as reliably — also through the Sitemeter widget.
I found three entries in the Sitemeter support/announcements blog that might relate to this…
Visit or Page View Counter Display, July 31: For those of you who currently use the SiteMeter Icon that displays the total visitors to your site we wanted to let you know about some forthcoming changes to this feature…
Scheduled Outage August 3, 2008 (SM1, S17, S21, S26, S36, S37, S38, S39, S40, S41, S46 and S47), July 29th: Greetings, Our hosting provider has scheduled an outage on August 3, 2008 from 12:01 AM - 05:00 AM to consolidate their network into a single autonomous system. The following servers will be affected…
Sitemeter Icons Vanishing, July 17th: For the next 30 - 45 days we will be testing our servers and databases in preparation for the launch of our new SiteMeter platform…
There. Now you know everything I know.
Unless you’re using IE, in which case you’re not reading this.
Cross-posted, out of necessity, at House of Eratosthenes to help reduce confusion for us all.
Update 8/2/08: Here’s your reading material. Thanks to Gerard for letting us know this morning it was starting to pop up.
Wired: Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer
The Inquisitr: Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure
Which you’re about to see in other places — I’m quite sure. AP, via FARK:
A suspected thief trying to steal $10 worth of copper got himself into a stinky situation when he was trapped under a trash bin at a county landfill for 12 hours, sheriff’s deputies said.
Deputies said Gibson Cook, 56, broke into the landfill, then got stuck as he tried to crawl under the large container. Landfill workers found him about 12 hours later with his legs sticking out from under the bin. Emergency workers had to inflate air bags so they could lift the bin to free him.
Via Ragnar Danneskjold at The Jawa Report:
To review, a drug smuggler got shot in the butt after attacking two border patrol agents. The drug smuggler got immunity from prosecution and the two border patrol agents got 10+ years in prison each. They received their draconian sentences owing to a provision in federal law requiring mandatory minimum prison sentences for use of a firearm in connection with a federal crime. This prosecutor, Johnny Sutton, decided it would be a good idea to use this law, which was intended for career criminals and hardened thugs, to seek enhanced sentences against men and women in law enforcement.
Every time I hear some kool-aid drinker wax poetically about what a “good” and “decent” and “truly great” man George W. Bush is, I’m reminded of these two good men rotting in prison under the heel of the Bush Administration. Bush could free them with a phone call or a stroke of a pen, but he prefers instead to let them rot. This thought makes me ill.
The man has some explaining to do, no question.
Source, Michelle Malkin’s place, here. Decision here. Quoting from Congressman Dana Rohrabacher:
This makes President Bush’s role in this miscarriage of justice even worse. Affirming U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton’s decision to give the benefit of the doubt to an illegal alien drug smuggler in order to win at all costs and destroy the lives of our brave border agents simply magnifies the horrible travesty this really is.
I had made a comment in my intro over on Cassy’s blog (from which, some of you are reading this for the first time since this is a cross-posting; hang with me, m’kay?) that I don’t go to church anymore. And that my reason for not going has to do with my distaste for the decisions people make in groups. Fact is, the decision people make in groups can turn out to be wonderful, and I still don’t like it because of how it was made. I find it to be unaccountable. The very meeting-in-groups, itself, over time has come to impress me as a way of scrubbing accountability clean. This all turns to crap — who takes the body blows for it? If it’s “Joe Says We Should Do This” the answer is crystal clear. If we all sat around a conference table and “it was agreed that we should…” then the idea itself takes on a flavoring of legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, even if it’s right. If it turns out to be wrong, and now we have a cleanup we need to do, we’ll probably proceed from that point with the same mindset that got us into trouble in the first place.
And then there is the notion of “everyone.” The older I get, the more jaundiced a look I cast in the direction of that horrible, horrible word. No, I don’t like the word “everyone” anymore. It has come to be an insidiously insincere word. Just keep your ears peeled next time you hear it –
“All” does not mean “all.” “Everyone” doesn’t mean “everyone.” I remember being summoned for a parent-teacher conference and the lady on the phone explained why I had to miss three hours of work with this lame cliche: “This turned out to be the only time that would work for everyone.” And I retorted “well yeah, but I’m part of ‘everyone,’ aren’t I?”
The answer is no. “Everyone” means “me, and people who agree with me.”
So this video Rick put up, speaks to me on all kinds of profound levels. It makes me think of a bunch of conversations I’ve had with my Dad about his frustrations with church, how it’s being taken over by those goddamn long-haired hippies with their guitars. People like him are facing the same problem with church that I faced with the teachers, you see — that music ensemble just worked for “everyone.”
What comes next seems so patently obvious I feel a little foolish for jotting it down: Church isn’t supposed to be about us. And yet, there’s a dilemma here, because a man’s relationship with The Almighty is a personal thing; if the format of the group worship isn’t to your liking you’re not going to be happy. That means you’re not going to go. And so churches bend over and take it, and they end up being parodies of themselves.
A situation which apparently inspires this darkly humorous clip embedded by Rick:
Could there be some common ground? Seems to me, the answer might involve a “least common denominator.” I’ve always held a little bit more sympathy to those who attend group worship, and object to some new embedded cultural flavoring therein, than to those who likewise attend group worship and insist on inserting one. I mean, what is the objective here? To share in the experience of communicating with The Lord, with dozens of others in your flock — or to have things customized to your personal tastes? If you need to have things customized to your personal tastes, well, that’s when you need to learn to sustain a relationship with your Creator as an individual.
And I can’t help but think, for folks who’ve worked themselves into that kind of a fix, maybe that’s the answer. Maybe they’re not the kind of people who should be attending church either.
Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.
A few days ago, Maureen Dowd wrote a surprisingly good column on love and marriage, featuring advice given by a priest. Feministing, predictably, automatically discounted this advice because it came from a priest, who apparently knows nothing on the subject of marriage and love because he’s celibate. Mature:
Dowd has stooped to a new low. Paraphrasing a priest on advice on what to look for in a husband. I guess I can see on some level, since marriage is frequently a religious thing, but in general, this gets a no. And by the way, apparently we should be looking for man-robots that have never experienced any trauma or disruption in their life.
A priest typically knows a lot about love, considering they’re pretty knowledgeable about He who gives us the greatest love of all. But we shouldn’t listen to his relationship advice, no matter how good it may be, because he’s celibate. Samhita admits it’s good advice, but we shouldn’t listen because they’ve supposedly don’t have any “relationship experience”.
News flash, Samhita: many priests had lives before entering the priesthood. Some have been married and are widowed. Many had girlfriends. I’ve heard of priests who led awful, horrible lives filled with drug usage and promiscuity before they reformed themselves and found their calling. Even those who joined the priesthood at a young age, like a priest in my church, usually have had some very difficult experiences. The priest I mention at my church was actually an Army chaplain during WWII, something he says was very hard for him to recover from.
Being a priest does not make you a mindless robot with no experience in anything whatsoever. It makes me wonder if this Samhita has ever even met a priest. It’s sad that the priesthood is looked down upon so often in our country, when these are men called to a lifestyle of selfless service. But I guess when you’re a feminist, thinking of one other than yourself just doesn’t come naturally.
