Get out the map, get out the map, and put your finger anywhere down...

Crown subject John Derbyshire, who has had as much occasion to say idiotic things as I have, recently wrote a short article about how Americans are unhappy with meritocracies even while they live in the most meritocratic society on the planet.

Derb's essay is full of painful moments: he cites The Bell Curve, among other things, and repeats the far-right canard that if any member of an "oppressed minority" shows strong signs of talent and ability, the system will rush to that person's aid and guarantee a place in the highest rungs of our meritocracy, if only to assuage liberal guilt about all the rest that can't be saved.

But Derb does give one little point which may, or may not, be as silly as the rest. He writes down the four "kinds" into which he divides Americans, quadrants of lefts, rights, theists, and non-theists:

• Left Believer: Sinful human nature blinding us to the social justice ethic implicit in the Law, the Gospel, or the Koran, depending on your precise confession.
• Right Believer: Social pathologies — illegitimacy, easy divorce, feminism, a corrupt popular culture — arising from ignorance of, or wanton defiance of, the divine plan.
• Left Unbeliever: Oppression by the various types of human malignity that inevitably arise in capitalist society: sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc.
• Right Unbeliever: Insufficiently rigorous education policy, insufficiently family-friendly tax and health-insurance policies, excessive regulation stifling enterprise, etc.

And yet, I can't find myself anywhere in this description. About the closest I can come to is right believer, with a smug secular assurance that it's not "divine plan," but the common foundational morality that is an emergent property of our evolving need to survive one another and the harsh natural world.

There's no punishment in the afterlife for failure, as the right believer would have; there's only the pain of failure in this life, which can be pretty harsh as it is.

Brains: The Stupid, It Burns!

Heresy in the Hood!

( An Explosion Of Witchcraft! )

82 Year Old Woman banned from taking photographs of an empty swimming pool.

( Because she 'might be a paedophile.' )

"Exotic Forms of Sexual Expression In Our Military!"

( Quick, she's frothing! )

New Age Ideas and Mass Murder!

( Karadzic took up altie medicine because he liked killing people! )

Open Mic Follies: Bush on the Wall Street Meltdown

( Man has depth, like a rainpuddle! )

McCain continues to lie about the surge.

( Don't disagree with Mr. McCain. That's treason, son. )

The evil mastermind behind it all is...

( Alberto Gonzalez? )

Playboy Bloopers [NSFW]

( Human after all. )

Oh, mightly LJ minds, vast, cool, and unsympathetic!

Calling all SQL Geeks! I have a strange SELECT statement need. I have a table, the rows of which may be sorted in any number of ways. Regardless of the way it's sorted, I want to find the row where, say, event.date = "2008-07-05", and find the next and previous rows. The dates will not be contiguous; they may be seperated by weeks or even months, nor will the request necessarily be sorted by date.

Right now I'm creating a prev/cur/next queue and iterating through the result rows until I hit the entry I'm looking for, then iterating one more time to get the "next" entry. That hardly seems satisfactory. It seems natural to me that SQL would have something like this.

I've looked at the SELECT documentation from MySQL and there doesn't seem to be much there that would help me.

Pendorwright 2008, Beta Launch Announcement (with new stories!)

After almost of month of work, I'm happy to announce that I've launched Pendorwright 2008, an all-new look and feel for my writing blog. Everything there is my own design: the header, the photography, the style sheets, and so forth.

I started with a couple of different things I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted my photo on the header, I wanted the right sidebar to be big and to be mostly about my stories, so most of the blogging administrivia of other websites belonged more in the footer than anywhere else. The blog should be on the home page; the old view was wimpy.

I took my inspiration from a lot of different places. An old site about yachting that's no longer around provided the template for what the header should look like, but I did my own textures and colors. The orange and blue came from the uniforms of the "soldiers of the future" in the video game Lost Odyssey. The photograph work was all my own. The torn and stressed paper background came from CG Textures, as did the leather texture I used in the header.

The PHP layout started life as Elements of SEO and quickly warped, with contributions from PersonalMag and Hemingway adding ideas for column control and footer design, although I wimped out and didn't do the hard-core PHP stuff found in Hemingway, but instead wrote it simple.

But the big deal is the right-hand column. It contains hand-coded SQL for an entirely different database: The stories database. What does this buy me? Just about everything: the power to add series whenever I want, the ability to put stories up at will and have them show up on schedule, without my having to hand-control them. As long as the HTML document contains a comment field with the right metadata (which is stripped out before deployment, so you'll never even see it), a little script entitled 'add story' will automagically create an entry in the database, and all the SQL in the system will automagically make those stories show up in the correct series's index when their time comes (bwahahahah!). Or at least the pubdate is now or earlier. All of the indices are driven off one MySQL table.

The price of this was, sadly, having to wrap all my story deployments in an executable. It's not as non-performant as I feared, and it seems to work pretty well. It would have been nice if I could have wrapped all of them into a single executable, but sadly that was not to be: the index engines for all of them are slightly different. Aimee and Bloody Beth are the same, but The Journal Entries are "special" (damn that date format!) and the Other Tales section has its own needs.

In the past week I have learned more than I ever thought I'd know about Ruby (but not Rails), PHP, the insides of Wordpress, the Gimp and using my Wacom pad, MySQL, configuring Apache's RewriteEngine... holy moly, that was a lot of work. And my wrists are killing me.

There's still some work to be done. I want to fix a few graphical 'tics' inside the Pendorwright Theme, add an "available in paperback" section, a proper RSS feed for the stories index and so forth. Then I want to add to the stories sections themselves with some graphical work and fix those sidebars so they're universal and look more like the one used by front page, which is why this is labeled 'beta'. But it worked. Lessons to come.