Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

SpaceWeather notes that Halloween is a cross-quarter date, one of the days that falls exactly between an equinox and a solstice. The other three are Groundhog Day (Candlemas or Imbolg), May Day (Beltane), and August 1st (Lammas).

The cross-quarter days establish offset seasons, sometimes called the solar seasons. Solar Winter starts today and ends, hog willing, on Groundhog Day, with the solstice in the middle. But in my experience, August 1st is still high summer. Halloween, while a chilly, wet day, is unlikely to produce snow, while the groundhog is frequently snowed in in his burrow come Groundhog Day. I’ll stick to the modern seasons.

I came across Jumsoft’s Process in the Apple downloads RSS feed. Process claims to be a “fresh face in the tired throng of outlining applications,” but I’m not tired of OmniOutliner yet, and as an outliner Process is mostly PR.

Process does look like a great organizer, though. If you want to organize a project and you have $25 to blow, Process may be for you. The 7-day shareware evaluation period wasn’t nearly long enough for me to take a chance on Process, not when I already have an OmniOutliner file set up for NaNoWriMo. I’d recommend that Jumsoft extend the evaluation period to the standard 30 days, and start advertising Process for what it is.

Via Boston Common: a bubbleheaded beach bunny at the LA Times thinks Bostonians are ugly.

We haven’t seen much of Boston in the World Series the last 80 years or so, so it’s shocking to see so many ugly people in one place.

The place is Fenway Park.

Some fans wore hats or scarves to cover their faces, I presume so they wouldn’t scare the children.

No, that would be because of something we call “autumn,” the season immediately preceding “winter.”

I’m the first to admit that I’m not beautiful enough to live in LA. I know because I’ve lived in Southern California and in Boston. Everyone but the Mexicans is gorgeous down there, but you can’t get a decent donut to save your life. The beautiful people don’t have to do any actual work, like, say, mowing their own lawns, growing their own food, or washing their own dishes, because they have their imported illegal underclass to do that. Nor do they need to be smart or sane or sober enough to come in out of the cold, since it never gets cold. You get the pretty faces, with about as much in the brainpan as Homo floresiensis.

If there were a Californian team that actually won anything, you wouldn’t find Bostonians writing articles about the Botoxed, wheat-grass chomping, silicon-enhanced stupidity of Californian fans. Despite the coastal location we’re normal people with a grasp of common human decency, not malicious plastic freaks who wouldn’t know a donut from a Cheerio.

I’ll take the ugly people and a Boston Creme any day of the week.

Via GNXP: hobbits have been unearthed on the island of Flores. Here are some links about them.

• Cave dig unearths world of the ‘Hobbit’ [Telegraph UK]
• A stranger from Flores [Nature]
• Little lady of Flores forces rethink of human evolution [Nature]
• The Flores find [Nature]

Update: There’s plenty of hobbit fun and puns on slashdot.

…for the inconvenience. I don’t know where the site has been for the past 24 hours. There’s a lunar eclipse going on, but I doubt that explains it.

The Red Sox are about to win the World Series for the first time since 1918. Priceless… I don’t know if I’m ready. The city has more cops than ever out on patrol, since we lost a college student over the pennant.

There’s a new Stargate story on the fic page as well as a few stray quotes and various unmarked updates to the Repository. Note the new LiveJournal icons page if you missed it earlier.

I’ve been suffering from the latest epidemic of WordPress comment spam. Most of the spam was stopped for moderation, but it’s still annoying to have to go in and reject them all. I decided to skip most of the usual advice and move directly to
renaminng the wp-comment-post.php file.

Once the file is renamed, you just need to go in and replace the old filename with the new one in a few other WP files. The files I edited were:

wp-comments.php
wp-comments-popup.php
wp-comments-reply.php

I apologize in advance if anything breaks

Update: Well, it worked for one spammer, but now I seem to have picked up a new spammer, though this one isn’t quite as active.

Update: I’m also trying this hack to mass-delete comments, while I wait for the new, more spam-proof version of WordPress to come out.

I suppose it could have been worse… Veronica is responsible for our seeing this remake. I thought the slow revelation of the mystery surrounding the cursed house was interesting, though the monster/poltergeist/thing was sorely lacking in magic rules. Magic rules are what make supernatural or magical things believable. This thing could do whatever it wanted; the poor stupid people never had a chance.

I did appreciate the Japanese “we’re all going to die anyway so quit your whining, white girl” passivity. Only the setting made the movie as bearable as it was.

Update: SciFi.com has a review that claims Japanese audiences don’t mind the gaping plot holes the way Americans do.

The Fung Wah bus has moved to South Station, along with Lucky Star. It happened back in August but I missed the news. They’re way in the back at lucky gate #13. Apparently the new digs are costing them, because the one-way price has gone up to $15. For comparison, that’s about what it costs to get home to the residential areas of Boston from South Station by taxi after the T has stopped running.

There’s a drabble and an icon in the LiveJournal. That’s all you’re getting today (Thursday), since I’ll be out of town.