Man am I beat. Had a late night last night; I hung out at KJ German’s show after mine, just a tad longer than I wanted to. Did some good singing, and marveled at the deep end that KJ German has seriously gone off when putting together his rig. I swear, the damn thing has more lights, buttons, knobs and dials than the goddamn Space Shuttle.

For Crissakes, it’s just Karaoke.

I had to skip my show last week–Butterfly had just gotten released from the hospital last Thuraday after having her gallbladder removed, and I thought it prudent to stay home with my baby and take care of her.

So far, I’ve had no less then six people come up to my stand and tell me “Gee, [Corsair], we sure did miss you last week! We hope your wife is feeling better!”

That’s neat. It’s good to be missed. And my beautiful Butterfly is doing just fine, thanks sending along your wishes.

Shamelessly ganked from Spin the Cat…

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the good folks there decided to do an offset head-on crash test of a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu and a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air:

Wow. All I can say is wow.

If you didn’t stick around to the end of the video, it says: “The engineers at the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety determined that the driver of the Malibu might have sustained an injury to the left leg–the driver of the Bel Air would have been killed instantly.”

More information on this remarkable video can be found here, and here, in the form of two New York Times articles.

Oddly, I could find no information about this test on the IIHS website itself. Strange.

I’ve been battling insomnia off and on for years now. Sometimes I’m fine, and can get right to sleep. Other times, I just can’t.

Right now is one of those times where I can’t.

And I have to be up at 6:00am; Butterfly and I are going to Cheney Brothers Cash-n-Carry sale tomorrow morning and have to be there at 7:00am.

Sigh.

A couple of years ago I updated a Wikipedia article about Boca Raton to include a little historical information about IBM Boca Raton Main site (here’s my contribution to the Wikipedia article, which ends with just before the BlueGreen comment).

Out of sheer boredom, I was looking for more information on the rail spur that IBM had run alongside what used to be its manufacturing plant, wondering if it had ever been used. And as it happens, I found that the Wikipedia article on Boca Raton had been cut-and-pasted word-for-word on several websites, like this one, this one, and this one. The Wikipedia article was even lifted verbatim and put on Answers.com.

I have mixed feelings about this. It drove home the point how widespread plagerism is on the Inernet, but on the other hand, it is kind of an ego boost to see my writings out there beyond the walls of The Corsair Journal.

My poor Butterfly went under the knife on Wednesday afternoon to remove her gallbladder; She had a really bad gallbladder attack on Monday, sending her to the hospital, after which she wasted absolutely no time booking surgery to get it outta there. She’s pretty sore, naturally, but thank goodness they perform this type of surgery laparoscopically these days–back when I was a little kid, my mom had hers out and they had to fillet her open to do so. Butterfly will be out of commission for a day or so, while my mom was laid up for six weeks.

I’m at the hospital with her, coping with my massive hospital phobia focusing on the fact that I’m with my Butterfly. Fortunately, they have WiFi access here, so I’m making this post from her bedside.

…then you must really be a jackass.

President Obama calls Kanye West a jackass

Of course, I thought West was a fucking asshole long before Obama did.

I’ve already deleted a dozen introductions to this post–my meager attempts to introduce the video below pale in comparison to the beautiful words contained in it…

Sullivan Ballou so loved his country that he put it above everything, even his own life–as so many of our brave fighting men and women throughout our long and tumultuous history have done, making the ultimate sacrifice, to that this nation shall not perish from the earth.

Perhaps, when we squabble, politically, over petty, trivial things, we should be reminded of the soldiers like Ballou, and the thousands of others that have paid so dearly so that we can freely engage in such debate–and therefore, rather than use our precious, hard-won freedoms to tear one another down with petty bickering, rather we should try to build up and better our nation in tribute to these selfless men and women.

‘M*A*S*H’ writer, producer Larry Gelbart dies – CNN.com

In 1972, Gelbart helped create the Korean War comedy drama “M*A*S*H.” The show went on for another 11 years, although Gelbart only wrote and produced “M*A*S*H” for the first four seasons. “M*A*S*H” won 50 awards, including eight Golden Globes.

“M*A*S*H” was so popular it lasted much longer than the Korean War itself, and was seen as a commentary on American involvement in the Vietnam War. Gelbart also was involved in the short-lived sequel, “After MASH.”

For Gelbart, “M*A*S*H” mixed a bit of comedy with drama, allowing viewers to connect more with the story.

“I said once that the only way before ‘M*A*S*H’ you would get any feeling out of your television set is if you touched it while you were wet,” Gelbart said.

He added: “We gave the audience permission to feel bad. Because America was feeling pretty rotten then, we were at war in Vietnam. And once the war stopped we didn’t start feeling really terrific right away, if we ever will again about that situation.”

M*A*S*H is by far and away my all-time favorite television show.Once, a very long time ago–when the Usenet newsgroups were popular and still in use for stuff other than porn and piracy–Larry went by the handle Elsig on alt.tv.mash. He even answered a question of mine directly.

He was a legend and will be missed.

I sometimes give Conman a hard time because his journal, The Boston Diaries, has no discussion or commenting system. On the other hand I can’t really give him too much shit–Conman did write his journal software himself (he calls it Mod_Blog), and I ganked my journal’s software from WordPress, mostly because I’m not talented enough to write my own like Conman did.

One thing that Conman doesn’t ever have to worry about, because he doesn’t have any kind of commenting system, is Blog Spam. If you allow comments to be added to your journal, then robots can come along and post advertisements in your comments section. I’m not sure anybody ever buys anything after seeing a Blog Spam post, but they sure are obnoxious–especially when you have to go in and delete them.

I haven’t got enough regular readers to make all of them sign up for an account just so they can comment (although I could, if I wanted to). But then the bots would just sign up for accounts and then Spam anyway.

So I came up with a happy compromise.

WordPress has a plug-in for a pretty effective bot-deterrent called reCAPTCHA (CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Touring test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”), which lets me add a CAPTCHA challenge to the bottom of my comment form, like so:

So of you’re a human, feel free to comment to your heart’s content. If you’re a nasty Blog Spam bot, you can go pound sand, fucker.

EDIT: it should be noted that if you register for an account on The Corsair Journal, then you don’t have to answer a CAPTCHA challenge whenever you comment (but you do have to answer one to get an account. So there).