Rixosous

Weirdly Hairless Acrobats Entertain Pope, Nuns

Someone explain this video to me. Seriously. Because my thoughts on four tanned and sexy acrobats making a human tower for a religious audience including the soon-to-be-ex-Pope Benedict are, briefly:

1. Those four men have NO BODY HAIR. Like Ken dolls.
2. Slow, coordinated half-striptease. The Pope is riveted.
3. What is Emma Peel doing acting as wardrobe assistant for this act?
4. Tight white pants and video closeups nicely display acrobats' assets. Pope still riveted. Cameraman seems to have a similar problem.
5. Straps holding pants perfectly in place while upside down.
6. But still no hair!  Plastic people, very disturbing.
7. Pope: thousand-yard stare while he thinks of holy things, or just trying to keep his tongue in his mouth?
8. Most people are staying seated and applauding politely, but a gang of nuns are on their feet waving handkerchiefs. Do they like this as much as the Pope?
9. WHERE IS THEIR BODY HAIR?

I mean, I recognize the talent and strength on display here, but somehow they are not the first thing one notices.

On Yellow Ribbons

Everyone my age and up remembers yellow ribbons.  We learned the song "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree" back in the early 1970s and we lived through the first big adoption of them as a symbol during the Iranian hostage crisis from 1979-1981, when we saw actual ribbons tied on trees everywhere while we were counting the days and weeks and months of the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran and watching it play out as a political issue in the Carter-Reagan presidential race in 1980 (an issue that is much on the minds of people with long memories right now in light of last week's helicopter raid into hostile territory that succeeded where Carter's famously failed...) 

There was also a 1971 article in the New York Post by Pete Hamill telling the returning-convict story, which the Post has kindly republished here.  I never knew about that article before today, but the song was one of my childhood favorites even before the hostage crisis.   I love songs that tell a story, and this one is so simple yet so moving that it still makes me tear up.

Nowadays, the yellow ribbons have been reduced to those little magnetic stick-on things attached to cars, lost among a rainbow of other symbolic ribbons and now associated with supporting military men and women deployed overseas.  It had never before occurred to me to wonder about the yellow ribbon's history; I just assumed it started with the song.  That turns out to be wrong.  Very wrong.  And now I can document just how wrong it is. 

But before I get to my own little contribution to the historiography of the yellow ribbon, some background: 

The Terrifying Toes of John the Baptist

I took a meander through some of the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a friend recently after seeing the amazing Alexander McQueen exhibit and somehow found myself in the gallery of Spanish art from 1500-1700.  There I came across a pair of rather peculiar feet attached to a relief of John the Baptist (left; click to enlarge).  While I'm all in favor of prehensile toes -- during my misspent youth, I taught myself to solve a "Rubik's Pyramid" with mine -- these toes seemed somewhat overlong and a little bit disturbing.  Especially the second toe on the left foot.  I spent some time studying my own toes, and they are not overly-long or uncanny-looking at all.  Am I just imagining that there is something a little off about these feet?  Is this something common in men's feet?  Did the artist copy his own toes?  Do saints have mutant feet?

Alternate Westminster

The New York Times has created a slideshow of 102 best in breed champions from the Westminster Dog Show, which takes place in New York City every winter.  Aside from being an astonishing lesson in the possible genetic variety within a species, this also offers the chance for amateurs to take a look at the dogs and offer their own opinions.  This isn't quite up there with the Super Bowl or the NCAA brackets, but some of the dogs have great possibilities.  I'm not going to link to the picture of each winner, but you can see the whole slideshow here.  (Left: a dog.  No, really, it's a dog.  Seriously.)

Here are my selections.

Not evil? Just sexist.

Oh, Google.  Banning dating sites aimed at older women/younger men from its content network, but not ones aimed at older men/younger women?

Google continues to allow similar advertising for the many sites that match older men and younger women, like DateAMillionaire.com, which assures its clients they can meet “sugar babies.”

So cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.

Cougars are "nonfamily safe" but sugar daddies and sugar babies -- a polite set of euphemisms for johns and prostitutes -- are A-okay?  Really?

Is there any way to spin this as anything other than blatant sexism?

Windows for Illiterates

What does the print advertising for Windows 7 say to me?

It may take fewer clicks (than what? Vista?), but I bet using a Mac is still less hassle overall.

 I don't know; how do you feel about being Windows users being portrayed as semi-literate?

Riddles at my fingertips

I touch-type in a rather eccentric way which involves only three fingers and one thumb.^*  This occasionally produces really awful results if I'm not correctly oriented on the keyboard when I start.  Despite this flawed technique, I regularly type 80+ WPM and can do 100+ for short bursts if I'm on a friendly keyboard.  (Yes, I've done some professional transcription.  No, I do not want to do yours, though I'll reconsider if you want to pay me ridiculously high hourly rates or if you're as witty as Joss Whedon.)

So today I horribly mistyped a search request as:

bpstpm imoversoty

Google actually parsed this and brought up a page of results pertinent to what I'd meant to type.  It also helpfully asked me whether I really meant to search for

bpstpm imoversotu

Just on a whim, I agreed that I had and clicked on it.  I got a similar list of results in a slightly better order: my desired website was the top result rather than second this time.  I was rather impressed.

I tested the same two searches on Yahoo and Bing, and they baffled both of them: no results at all.

I can't help wondering whether this sort of thing could be used somehow in "captcha" testing to sort out humans from, um, Yahoo and Microsoft.  So here's the riddle: is what I was searching for as obvious to you as it is to Google?  Can anyone reading this translate the search request into regular English?  Yes, you could cheat and run the search to get the answer.  But that would be, y'know, cheating, and you would know deep inside yourself that you are not a sporting sort of person and would be shunned by polite society if they really knew what you were like.  I trust that no one here wants to have to bear up under this bit of sad self-knowledge.

(Why yes, I do get in trouble for trusting people.  How did you know?)

But how's this: for extra credit, explain exactly what I did to produce that little bit of gibberish.

Please rot13 answers in the comments.  I'll flag correct ones.

*They tried to teach me proper typing technique in school when I was twelve, but it was already too late then to undo my ingrained bad habits.

TypePad Off Its Meds Again

2:42pm EDITED TO ADD: The problems seem to be fixed now.  Feel free to experiment with limited html in the comments here to test.

Yes, I've noticed that in-comment html is not functioning.

Yes, I've noticed that direct links to comments are broken again.

I didn't do it, I promise.  I don't mess around with the coding here.  I'm still on the Blogging For Dummies platform that doesn't let me.  So it's TypePad, not me.

I've sent in complaints to TypePad support.  One of the tech people apologizes; he was doing some stuff with the comments and seems to have broken things.  Three other people have replied that they are addressing things.  I have sent in more complaints.  I will keep complaining.  Feel free to post more complaints and sympathy here.

If it doesn't get fixed quickly, I'll post the CEO's email address for more efficient complaining.  I'm not waiting months for them to fix it again.  You may also address the company directly via GetSatisfaction (registration required); you may find my complaint thread here.

In the meantime, temporary links to the ends of long threads that have current commenting:

Iron Man
Repo! The Genetic Opera
Wolverine

I'll try to update these periodically.  Let me know if there are other threads you want end-linked.

And you know what's freaky?  Those are links to SPECIFIC COMMENTS.  And they're WORKING.  Hello, TypePad tech?  The entire system isn't broken, just whatever process codes the Recent Comments list.