1120 fucking days

1120 fucking days.

Facts you didn't know or knew but didn't take seriously or knew and took seriously but had to listen to again in this post

Lemmings don't actually perform mass suicide off cliffs. Basically, the Walt Disney company decided that their documentary White Wilderness wasn't exciting enough, so they forced some lemmings off a cliff and videotaped it.

The world was not widely believed to be flat back in Columbus' time. It's a myth that originated from an 1828 fantasy by Washington Irving called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus which was incorrectly repeated as fact and somehow became popular. The debate over Columbus' voyage was not over whether or not the Earth was round, but over the circumference of the Earth. Columbus made some calculations that were much smaller than the widely accepted circumference, and he based his voyage on that. It turned out that Columbus' calculations were very wrong. And by the way, Europeans already knew there was a large land mass to the West. They just hadn't really taken the time to accurately map it out before.

The typical supermarket banana, called the Cavendish banana, doesn't appear in nature. It was genetically engineered to be better suited for consumption than wild bananas. Wild bananas are blotchy green and brown when ripe, they're hard to open, they're filled with huge seeds, and they don't taste that good. Cavendish bananas were designed to be, among other things, seedless. Unfortunately, this means they don't have any genetic mutations that survive longer than a single "generation" and so there's no genetic diversity (they're all basically clones of each other). What this means is that a single virus can easily wipe out all members of the species and none will be immune. This actually happened in the 1950s when the main kind of banana was the Gros Michel which got wiped out by Panama disease. The Cavendish was developed as the replacement, although it wasn't quite the same in terms of size and flavor. A new variant of Panama disease has appeared in recent years, wiping out crops of Cavendish bananas, and scientists are working to develop a new replacement.

The cartoon series Captain Planet has some rather dark roots. In 1931, American playwright David Belasco, who had recently begun suffering mental illness, was found suffocated by his own pillow. In his latest journal entry, which was mostly nonsensical rambling, there was the sentence, "Through all of your being, I'm the captain of this planet." This was adapted into Captain Planet's catch phrase, "By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!" Ted Turner also roughly translated the fact that Belasco was known for his naturalism (the ability to capture the essence of daily life) into "environmental awareness". Furthermore, he decided to give Captain Planet a blue face as sort of a sick jab at the way Belasco died.

Ostriches aren't able to chew their food, so instead they swallow small stones that roll around in their stomachs and help digest the food.

One of the above actually isn't true.

Global Warming

Contributing factors to global warming:

• Carbon emissions from vehicles.
• Cow farts.
• Disco (disco is dead, but the damage has been done).
• Greenhouses.
• Katie Price Jordan.
• Declining global pirate population (software pirates don't count unless they're dressed in full pirate garb and using wifi on genuine pirate ships).
• Walking to the grocery store.
• Steorn's free energy creation machine (See a demo).
• God's infinite and unfocused rage against people using their body parts for pleasure instead of their original core purpose (I'm talking about you, gum chewers; swallow or spit it out!)
• Firefox.
• The invisible Dyson sphere around our solar system, whose existence NASA has conspired to cover up.
• Terrorists.
• You. (See: Terrorists)
• The increasing amount of buildings and paved roads which retain more heat than dirt and plants. Hey, who knows?
• The melting polar caps. I always see ice melting when it gets hot, so the melting probably causes the heat.
• Al Gore's plane trips.
• Bears.

Google, as explained by emoticons

^_^ ^_^ ^_^ >_> ^_^ ^_^

King of web standards

If I were the king of web standaaaaaaards
Not queen, not duke, not prince

My magic hat of web standaaaaaaards
Would be fluffy, not hard, not tense

I'd write everything in XHTML
With a /> and a /> and text/html

As I'd post my spiel, all the readers would kneel
And the critics rave, and the Web is save!
And BusinessWeek would siiiiing
If I, if I were kiiiiiing!

Each author would show respect to me
The browsers all connect to me
With an extra slash, I would earn my cash
From every underling!
If I, if I were kiiiiiing!
Just kiiiiiing!

This song is dedicated to Jeffrey Zeldman, protector of the internets and omniscient XHTML knower-everything-abouter.

Good thing XHTML is properly parsed with an XML parser or this perfectly normal XML construct would totally screw up the sidebar.

Clutches of the sea

Once upon a moonlit voyage at the crest of a golden wave, a tale that began three score before descended to a salty grave.

Buck pushed him.

Essay on standards bodies

My professor asked me to write a 10,000-character essay on international standards bodies. Here was my submission:

T9998e

Resurrection

I've died and come back as a blog post. My life is meaningless.