I know I already complained once today, but…

The above is what Xanga Themes looks like. This is under Firefox on a Mac. Forget about using Safari. It should be smart enough to tell you, “Hey, you’ve got Safari, it won’t work.” But some of the controls sort of work, and some don’t, so you wonder what you’re doing wrong. Other than, oh, I dunno… USING SAFARI.

Anyway. As you can see, there’s no way to change whatever it is that’s down under the ‘Position’ setting. And that’s because the text ‘Image Background’ is too long for the space it’s in, and wraps around, causing it to take up two lines instead of one. Which means that it pushes other stuff out of visibility.

Which is fine, if there’s a scroll bar, but there’s no scroll bar.

Now, what’s frustrating about this is that someone has obviously gone to great lengths to make sure this all looks perfect and works just right. But their most basic assumption is the biggest problem: They assumed that the phrase ‘Image Background’ would always be the same size no matter what. And that’s just not very Web 2.0 at all, is it?

The drag and drop and all the rest of it is really cool. But I can’t change that one setting, even though Xanga is doing its darndest to show it to me. I don’t even know what that setting is.

Now, the image above is pretty tiny. I did that on purpose to frustrate you. Because you know what’s frustrating? You’ll click through and find that the image is too large for your window. You can try to resize the window to get more real estate for the image to show, but it won’t; it just stays truncated.

The only way to view the whole thing (for me, anyway) is to right-click on it and open just the image in a new window.

hairlessmunkee links through to the NYTimes archive of the new document dump from the NYPD. The NYPD and the RNC coordinated to surveil and counter-monkey-wrench protests of the RNC convention in New York City before the 2004 elections.

But what really puts it through the roof for me in terms of absurdity is that there are two documents about Ted Rall. Ted Rall is a political cartoonist, and he has a web site to promote his work. But according to the NYPD, he’s an online activist who’s calling for violence against the RNC. Which is, of course, absurd.

But for some reason he bears mentioning in two different reports. I mean, did someone’s nephew get paid $10 an hour to read his web site or something?

And speaking of Rall: Did someone mention ‘Peace walls?’

Fixed the fuel line I thought was crushed. It turns out I had just not clamped it tight enough. Doh.

Tested the line for pressure, hooked it all back up, and voila.

Bled the coolant system. Which is annoying, by the way. First you have to let it warm up enough that the thermostat is open, then you have to keep the engine revved to 2k+ RPM (I jammed a chunk of rubber hose in the throttle mechanism). And while it’s revving and being noisy and generally annoying, you have to keep the little coolant reservoir filled. And when you’ve done that, with the engine still revved, you have to go to the radiator and open its bleed valve until the coolant comes out, and then close it and immediately run back to make sure the coolant reservoir isn’t dry.

And then, whatever you do, you don’t forget to put the cap back on the reservoir before you take the chunk of rubber out of the throttle.

(Which I didn’t, because I’ve made that mistake before.)

Runs much better. It’s amazing to me how much difference a thermostat can make.

OK, this might be nitpicking, or it might be helpful, but I’m annoyed.

I’m also available as a usability consultant.

There are search boxes like both of those all over the site, so the fact that you’re at the blogring page doesn’t add any context to either search box. And the fact that there are two means you have at least a 50/50 chance of searching in the wrong place, assuming either of them actually searches blogrings in the first place.

I’d put the blogring search box under the ‘Blogrings’ tab, and above the list of categories, with a label: “Search for a Blogring: _________”

But that’s just me.

Like I mentioned, last night I didn’t get much sleep. I woke up from a strange dream to what must have been snoring. I spent a while in that not-quite-awake state where the whole world is transformed into what could be a dream. The shapes of coats on coat-hooks become who knows what. The reflections of tiny LEDs in the window become… You get the picture.

So I sat and stared out the window in a state of almost-paranoia, the kind of paranoia you can enjoy because you know it’ll be over once your brain gets used to being awake. Watching shapes and shadows in the backyard become all kinds of things. And then it was obvious I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I got up, went to the bathroom, and wrote that entry.

And then surfed around the web some, and then played a really bad game of Dice Wars, and then, eventually, a few hours later, fell back asleep.

Three hours later, the tree surgeon was at work at the neighbors. They had a big truck that they kept running for some reason, and a guy up a tree with a gas-powered chainsaw. Guys yelling to each other, the neighbor talking to them, then they’d start the chainsaw, and then the neighbor would yell something and they’d power it down and talk to her, and then start it up again and start cutting… ad infinitum.

I fell back into some kind of semi-sleep, but I heard a limb fall, and the chainsaw stopped, and some guy said, “Oh well. That won’t last long down there. Something will come and eat it.” I thought he was talking about his lunch.

These limbs were over a creek that runs through our backyard. It’s a nice little wooded area, the kind that raises property values and makes people happy. So the guy dropped his sandwich and some raccoons will come and get it or something. I drift off to sleep. Sort of.

Just a little while ago, though, there was a raucous clash of maybe six crows and four gallant Steller’s jays. Usually this kind of corvid-on-corvid gang fight doesn’t occur in nice neighborhoods like ours… Actually, they don’t really fight much at all. They avoid each other. But these corvids were livid. Diving at each other in the tops of trees, divebombing each other on the ground. Clawing at each other… All back in the back by the creek in the little ravine, back where the guy dropped his sandwich.

I went to investigate. Not a sandwich. These jays were guarding the corpse of their offspring from the crows.

I buried it, away from the creek because that’s important, and also because they’ll continue to fight over it until another one dies. In fact, they’re still fighting over it now. There might be another body that I didn’t see.

Tree surgeons have a job to do. So do crows. And so do jays. And so do I.

Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts and Republican Presidential candidate, said, during a debate, that he wanted terrorism suspects to be held outside US legal jurisdiction so that they don’t have access to lawyers, and wants to ‘double Guantanamo.’

Romney has just broken new ground: He’s the Gulag Candidate. I’m glad the Republicans could find someone with ‘electability’ to say such things, because that’s where we are. And how do I know it’s where we are?

The audience applauded. They didn’t gasp, they didn’t mourn the sorry state of our nation. They weren’t outraged by the blatant disregard for US and international law. No, they APPLAUDED. At USC, no less.

This is how fascism happens. View it and weep for your lost nation:

Note that of the other candidates, McCain’s answer is the sanest, but that’s not saying much. They’re all posturing as if they should be proud that the United States of America has a system of gulags in which Jack Bauer can get his work done.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never snored, but I’m 40 and I’ve just started. And it wakes me up.

I’ll be dreaming, and the dream will go on pause because there’s the sound of some large animal growling. So I wake up and it was me, snoring.

For instance, just a little while ago I was having this very intricately-structured dream about driving a beautiful woman to a city in China with a stop off at the motel where my relatives are staying and there’s a big courtyard and it’s night time and I’m talking to my parents, only now it’s a little bit like ‘Kung Fu Hustle’ where the old couple have super kung fu powers, but something is keeping dad asleep, and there’s something in the next room and it sounds like an animal, but…. No. It’s me snoring.

And now I can’t get back to sleep.

Like it says in the title.

And in other randomness, this makes me happy (via):

And Tinky Winky is not gay:

I grew up in the 1980s. I was an insomniac and horribly depressed for most of that decade, so I’d spend a lot of time watching TV in the middle of the night.

What that meant was that I’d be watching late-night movies and TV evangelists. This was back before infomercials… Did you know there was a time before infomercials?

It’s ironic that Ronald Reagan’s gutting of the FCC, in the form of deregulation which allowed for infomercials, also cut into the TV evangelism racket. TV stations could now air hour-long commercials for actual products, rather than hour-long commercials for God (or some facsimile thereof).

That’s when Jerry Falwell was making a move to take over Jim Bakker’s PTL Club. Remember the PTL Club? Most people don’t, or they’re vaguely aware there was some kind of religion-based excess on late-night TV during the ’80s…

I would watch PTL, because it was truly horrific. It was like watching an endless loop of ‘A Boy And His Dog,’ except you were the boy, and the dog was telling you to get the hell out of there and watch something else. But such was my depression and insomnia that I could not turn away… Tammy Faye’s makeup hypnotized me like a cobra stunning its prey.

The PTL organization had a TV show, a ‘church,’ a resort hotel, and a theme park (called ‘Heritage USA’). The whole thing was based on a flimsy ‘prosperity theology,’ where if you tithe, your faith will send you back abundance. An abundance of what was never specified.

Now, if you go to Las Vegas, you see these huge towering casino-hotels. You see glittering wonders, like a miniature Eiffel Tower, a giant fantasy castle, an obsidian-glass pyramid. You see a pirate ship sink twice hourly. You see a volcano that goes off every fifteen minutes. All this excess, however wonderful, tells only one tale: Gambling against the house is a losing proposition.

And similarly, watching PTL, with it’s American-style cartoon horror of a reclaimed Heritage featuring a water park and resort condos, is a sure tell that ‘prosperity theology’ was (and still is) a scam.

So it really came as no surprise when Jim Bakker, head of the PTL organization (and by the way, ‘PTL’ stands for ‘People That Love’), got caught with his pants down paying off a woman to keep silent her charges of rape. And guess who jumped in to denounce Bakker?

Jerry Falwell. He wanted PTL. He really, really wanted it. He wanted to buy it. He wanted to steal it. He wanted that sweet, sweet scam all for himself. He could make it look a little more legitimate, perhaps give it a better sense of ‘Heritage,’ rather than the veneer of silliness Bakker had created… And then run the same scam.

Eventually, however, it didn’t work out that way. It turned out differently.

And when I heard today that Jerry Falwell died, that’s all I could think about: His rapacious greed that so entertained me during my dark decade.