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The World's
Fattest
Home Page
"Had I more time, I would have written less."
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These pages are made entirely from recycled electrons. |
Stuck in someone else's frames? Click here to
Break Out!
| With all due respect for the Kennedy and Bessette families, it speaks volumes about the current degenerative state of the press to see all this overblown coverage of the death of three private citizens in a plane crash while such other things as the murder of 10,000 Kosovars go largely ignored. |
 Why is this homely woman's face on so many banner ads? |
Why would anyone waste his time and rot his brain with any of these? Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, professional wrestling, Barney, Howard Stern, The Spice Girls, Martha Stewart, the Weekly World News... Well, maybe the WWN has some redeeming social value. |
Net Peeve
Why in the world
do people write paragraphs
like this,
all center justified in
oversized, bold print down
the middle of their
web pages?
Do they really think
that anyone is going to
subject himself to the eyestrain
that would be necessary
to read it?
It resembles that avant garde
poetry that was popular
in the 1940's;
and who reads that,
or ever did?
i GueSs ThaT it Is bETter tHan paGEs tHAt aRE wriTtEn LiKe tHis, tHOuGh! Or the wuns thet cain't seam to evir git iny of the spellin or grammer rite. When you think about it, it is really a sad commentary on the current state of education when not only can't anyone seem to spell, they can't even operate their spell checkers properly. |
Find out where your money has been
Where's George?
I found this notice on a web page while I was surfing: "NOTE : I made this site to be best viewed with MS IE 4+ so if you're using any other browser then you might not see the best of this site and also I wont responsible for the errors and warnings that will come while you're browsing this site.... if they do! I completely tested it with MS IE 4 and found no errors." The obvious question is, why would you design a web site that didn't work properly on the browsers used by 60% of the people who come to visit? It can't take more than a few minutes to check out each page in all common browsers (at the very least the two most common ones, Netscape and Microsoft) and to correct any discrepancies. Why go to all the trouble of putting together a web site if you intentionally exclude more than half the potential visitors because you are too lazy to do an extra few minutes work? It's sort of like building a store then excluding people who drive foreign cars from the parking lot. |
FOOTNOTE: A couple of people have emailed me to tell me that a higher percentage of people are using Microsoft Internet Explorer than I had indicated. One of them said that "everyone" uses Microsoft because Netscape is "obsolete." Well, personally I hardly think that it's obsolete - it's the one that I prefer and usually use. I think that it handles Java and JavaScript much better and faster (but, of course, it should; JavaScript was originally created for Netscape, and Java is a product of Netscape's sister company, Sun Microsystems). I like its default fonts and its clean, crisp visual presentation better too. It would be simple to design a web page that only worked with Netscape because of its support for many features that are unrecognized by Internet Explorer, but what would be the point? That would be just as stupid as the example I cited where the page was created solely for Microsoft. The purpose of a web site is to communicate; designing in a proprietary mode does nothing towards furthering that goal.Perhaps these people have a different mix of visitors to their web sites than I do to mine. I checked my SuperStats numbers and found the breakdown of browser use shown in the above graph for the 93 unique visitors to this page yesterday. I also checked several previous days, and yesterday was fairly typical, except that some of the previous days had a few WebTV, AOL and "other - unknown" entries scattered about. But for every day during the past week Microsoft use was between 39 and 43 percent and Netscape was between 45 and 54 percent. The third highest most days was Opera, at 3 to 7 percent. |
A statement from one of my ISP's (not this one)
I thought their service was pretty poor
but I never expected them to admit it.
"Research shows that many people have carpel tunnel syndrome and don't even know it." (italics mine) It can't be much of a disease when it has no symptoms or debilitating effects to alert its "victims" that they are sick. Could it be that there are too many doctors, just as there are too many lawyers, and they need some new patients to treat? They seem to be trying to liken it to diabetes or hypertension which often have no symptoms but do have debilitating effects. The debilitating effect of carpel tunnel syndrome is pain. If you don't have pain it is not harming you, whether or not you technically "have" it. It sounds like TMJ to me, which only became widespread when there was a glut of dentists on the market. |
CBS News did a piece about the non-labeling of genetically altered food. They correctly pointed out that the government has not required labeling that discloses the genetically altered nature of such food. Then they went on to imply that somehow this food might be dangerous to humans, citing as evidence a study that shows that some butterflies were killed by pollen from a strain of genetically altered corn, never mentioning that the seed had been engineered specifically to kill insects. The butterflies had been placed in the middle of a cornfield, not their normal habitat, and researchers noted a higher reaction among them to the altered pollen than to non-altered pollen. So what? Butterflies in their normal habitat, in the grass and brush next to the field, were unaffected It is a stretch to transfigure a possible butterfly allergy to pollen to some harmful effect on humans by the food. We eat genetically altered food every day without harmful effect, but the scaremongers are afraid that a "bad batch" may someday cause some problem. I would be more concerned about a "bad batch" of meat from the packing plant or a "bad batch" of lettuce contaminated with chemicals or feces; serious problems that occur on a regular, ongoing basis. If it were not for the present extensive use of genetically altered crops people would be starving to death in much of the world and our own food would be much more costly. The use of dangerous chemicals on crops has been dramatically reduced because of the use of these hardy strains that are resistant to insects and disease. I have no argument with those fighting for disclosure - I see no reason for the government to keep us in the dark about what we are eating - but neither does it seem that there is any evidence of danger in eating genetically altered food. Farmers have been genetically altering food through selective breeding for about 6000 years without ill effect. Now that it is being done in a laboratory instead of the barnyard does not suddenly make it a dangerous practice. I think that the Ludites are at it again. |
Why do so many web page authors (and ad copywriters and so-called television "journalists") feel that every noun requires an adjective and every verb an adverb, usually superlative and often exaggerated? Most don't. Words, if properly chosen, can stand on their own without modifiers. There are hundreds of thousands of English words - one of them will usually convey any idea. The hype just cheapens the writing, and the trend towards inserting superfluous words, taken en masse, is destroying the beauty and effectiveness of the English language. Wordiness is not a sign of intelligence or sophistication but, rather, sloppiness and laziness. Lots of useless adjectives don't make a web site "most unique." That also holds true for using long words that have the same meaning as shorter words, like "preventative" for "preventive." Such stupidity only serves to expose the writer's pompousness. |
Dog Dictionary
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Personal Irresponsibility
Read Dick's Political Prediction for the Millennium
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?
Facsimile of an actual bumper sticker spotted in Troy, NY
If it was true then it must still be true now. Ditto Elizabeth Dole, ditto George W. Bush...
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Write to Dick Casaly at 
rcasaly@albany.net