John Gruber tells it like it is about standards compliance:
If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.
A magificent, detailed and comprehensive stripping of the ghastly Left Behind books – every Friday at slacktivist. via MeFi
Good line from a Christopher Brookmyre book Jane is reading:
“And there it was, the line he’d known would be along soon enough: ‘Political correctness gone mad.’ [He] had referred to it in a column recently as ‘ the distress cry of the thwarted bigot.’ Any time he heard it, he felt he ought to rejoice, because somewhere, something must be being done right. In that respect it was the opposite of ‘a victory for common sense’, which invariably hailed some act or decision that satisfied the base and brutal instincts human civilisation had spent the last ten thousand years evolving away from.”
Christopher Brookmyre, Be My Enemy
Sussex Police are going to use Beethoven and Vivaldi to scare off teenagers hanging around a bandstand in Worthing. Sad, isn’t it?
Orwell on Tolstoy’s hostility to Shakespeare:
“[As a puritan, Tolstoy] could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. “Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can’t you sit still like I do?” In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could.”
and
“One docs not necessarily get rid of [a violent] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one’s native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.”
The Washington Post reports on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’s rebuffal of Michael Jackson’s advances in the ’80s.
Not from this trip, but from Frommer’s Budget Travel.
Described, acidly, by MeFi
Animated, gruesomely, in Flash at Newgrounds.
A wonderful evening with Jane in Paris this evening, while Liz sat the kids back at the hotel. Since 2003, every August, Paris has set up a beach environment on the right bank of the Seine, called Paris Plage. It’s a wonderful idea, particularly for this city, which half depopulates on 1 August, and Jane and I had a good beer in a beach cafe overlooking the Île de la Cité, before wandering on to the Pont des Arts. It was full of picnicking couples and families – not sure whether they’d been drawn there by Paris Plage – and we bought a couple of cold beers from a passing beer seller, and enjoyed the view down the river.
Finally, we headed for a glass of extraordinarily expensive, but wonderful, wine in the brasserie Le Pré aux Clercs at 30 Rue Bonaparte in the 6e, and the evening was rounded off with a crêpe complet at the stand outside the St. Germain des Prés metro stop.
