It was 1969...

It was 1969, and I was on The Muppet Show. I was Dr. Teeth, sitting in my finest white tux jacket trimmed with gold ribbon. Kermit came out onto the stage and introduced us, "And now, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band will play the Thelonious Monk song Straight, no Chaser. Yaaaaaayy!!"

We played. I was on fire. My hands flew across the keyboard, I tossed my head, the band backed me up with the kind of reliability they don't make in Detroit anymore. The music flowed out of us and into a maybe appreciative, maybe dumbfounded audience.

When it was over, I put my head down on the keyboard and started crying. Tears trickled down onto the ivories, and Ralph, who also plays the piano, came over and said, "Teeth, Teeth! What's wrong?"

I picked up my fuzzy head, blinked and said, "I just love playing me some Monk, man."

And then I woke up.

I am having the strangest dreams these days.

An insight into some... thing... conservative. Maybe.

Kitsap County is the county immediately to the west of where I live. It's a short drive or ferry ride to get there, and it truly is a wild country. Although it's getting more and more urbanized every year, it's still one of the last great wooded rural zones in the United States. Adele Ferguson lives there, and writes a column for the Kitsap Business Journal. Over the years, she's given us a precious material from which to pick. Her latest includes the Snopes-refuted claim that President Obama will ban all sport fishing, but I have to admire her comment on Sonya Sotomayor. Convinced that Obama would have chosen to fill the nomination "with a black," she wrote:

I was wrong. I still don’t understand who President Obama was pleasing when he picked a white Jewish woman instead. He didn’t know her. Somebody had to press her case. I’d give anything to know who and the identities of his inner circle.

Sonya Sotomayor is one of The Tribe? Oy gevalt!

But Ms. Ferguson really loves "the blacks." After all:

Remember Ronald Reagan’s story about the kid who had to shovel a huge pile of manure? He went about it with such joy he was asked why and said, "With all that manure, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere." The pony hidden in slavery is the fact that it was the ticket to America for black people. I have long urged blacks to consider their presence here as the work of God, who wanted to bring them to this raw, new country and used slavery to achieve it.

Apparently, that one took so much heat it's no longer is Ms. Ferguson's archive.

Oh, and add this: Ms. Ferguson believes that, if you're poor, you're not taxed enough.

America is such a weird place.

[Hat Tip: Jesus' General]

A love letter to my garden weasel.

I really do love the garden weasel.

You know, they're sold on late-night television shows and you're really never sure what they're for. Weird Al mocked them in his song about infomercials. But this weekend, I discovered that the garden weasel is the indepensible tool for recovering a failing, moss-addled lawn. It's not fast-- about 20 square feet an hour-- but it's a hell of a lot faster than the moss rake. (You still need a moss rake to rake out the moss, but it's easier to do after the weasel has loosened its grip on the soil.)

I also mowed the lawn, which needed it in some places and didn't need it at all in others. The kids, the moss, and the dandelions have really beaten the hell out of my back yard.

Omaha weeded the front flower bed, and Lisakit took the back garden bed. Slowly but surely, the house is shaping up for spring.

Daimonji changes hands.

Change is hard, especially when one of your favorite restaurants changes hands.

Daimonji is a Boeing institution, the sushi joint closest to the Seattle Georgtown manufacturing plant. It has been one of Omaha's and my favorite places for a long time. Omaha especially enjoys the donburi eel, while I've always bought the Boeing Special Sushi Plate.

There is no Boeing Sushi Special anymore, just as single sushi dinner. Edamame and miso used to be gratis parts of the meal, but now edamame is an add-on, tacked to the end, and delivered hot to your plate-- which is odd to me, because all the other sushi places I've been to serve it at room temperature.

The rice on Omaha's bento was prepared sushi rice, not traditional short-grain, and the vinegar flavor was off-putting. My sushi was excessively spicy; the sushi chef was highly apologetic (apparently, my reporter's notebook unnerved him) about the spicy mayonnaise mix he blended himself.

Omaha's favorite bento had also been taken off the menu.

The waitress who took care of us was highly defensive about the edamame when we expressed surprise. Later, Omaha put down her credit card, and when the waitress came back with it she handed it to me. I guess she assumed it was mine, which was highly unprofessional.

Sadly, this means that Daimonji has gone from being a great sushi restaurant to being an ordinary one, with little to recommend it. Like Miyabi's descent from a great place to eat sushi with the kids to yet another mall-rat oriented beer-and-sushi joint.

Props to the Digg developers…

I was looking at the Digg source code the other day and, I’ve gotta say, mega-props to the developer of their javascript. The traditional rule in web development has become, “Put your Javascript at the end of your page.”  That way, all of the DOM objects you might refer to are guaranteed to be present when you start referring to them.  This had been a chronic problem in web development, associated with much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. The more modern way is to load your scripts up front, but use jQuery’s $(document).ready(...) method to ensure that nothing would run until your DOM tree was loaded. You might still have to wait on media assets (you used to be able to say “images”, but with HTML5 media assets include sound and video), but the DOM will be there and ready. You’ll be free to set up onload events to the media assets. The $(document).ready(...) technique ensures that your javascript will run correctly but it still has one classic problem: download delay. If you want an anchor to do something more than just be a link when you click on it, you’ll have to live with the chance that the user will click on it before the javascript has run and it will just be a link. Digg doesn’t live with that. Instead of using $(document).ready(), they do something much more clever. In the header of their HTML document, they create unique event names that signal when some part of the page has been handed to the browser. You can do this with jQuery, which lets anything at all be an event. Let’s say you have an anchor that you want to do something funky when you click on it, something Ajaxy. First, in a javascript library that you load in the header, you define the function:

function dosomethingfunky() { /* ... do something funky with $(this) ... */ }

Then you bind it (note the completely custom event name):

$(document).bind('somethingfunky_ready', dosomethingfunky);

And finally, in the body, when the anchor has been loaded into the DOM, you trigger the set-up right there:

<a href="http://someexampleurl.com" id="somethingfunky">Funk Me!</a>
<script type="text/javascript">$(document).trigger('somethingfunky_ready');</script>

Now that’s cool.  Your race condition window is down to milliseconds; the event handler is probably set up even before the browser has a chance to render the object.  Yes, there’s a price: your page is littered with triggers and unobtrusiveness is a thing of the past.  But if you need this kind of set-up and performance, this is how it’s done, aesthetics be damned.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

The deepest, darkest corner of the Birther universe.

Wow. Although Ms. Ferguson may best be descibed as confused, Sharon Rondeau has to be considered merely deluded. If only she were a little more outright insane, she would be the next Orly Taitz. Consider her reaction to a Kenyan parliamentarian's recent and ill-informed comment that Barack Obama was "a son of Kenya:"

With numerous sources reporting that Obama was born in a foreign country to a foreign father and only one person in the entire world stating that Obama was born in Hawaii, with no corroborating evidence offered in violation of Hawaii law, where is the U.S. military? What are they doing taking the orders of an apparently illegitimate Commander-in-Chief? Is there only a small group of men and women out of a force of 2,000,000 with enough patriotism to stand up and demand that the putative president prove himself?

And her commentors are right there with her: "Obama dodged the press pool on Sunday to watch his daughter play soccer. Oh really? My guess is he was at the Kenyan embassy and it was related to the 'born in Kenya' document."

Her co-conspirator at the site, John Charlton, adds:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff should be worried of the dire punishment they will face, when they are one day convicted of treason against the United States of America for siding with the enemy and giving him aide and comfort.

They have supported a man who is clearly a usurper, as if he were the President of the United States This fact is manifest and notorious.

Wow, just... wow. That's so out there it's not even cute.