Saturday - December 06, 2008

Help me out here please

----- Original Message -----
From: XXXXX
To: drew458@barking-moonbat.com
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2008 12:10 PM
Subject: Problem with website

Dear Sir:
Could you please do something about the photos overlaying the text on the Barking Moonbat website? I thought it might be just my stupid Vista operating system, but I checked my wife’s XP computer and it does the same thing. Usually there is empty space where the photo should be, and the photo is actually down about four or five lines in the text. But only on some of the photos. A few of them are OK. Thank You,

C

*****************************

Dear C:

I get emails like this from time to time. What browser are you using? It seems that some of them don’t properly execute some of the spacing commands in html. On the other hand it may be a Vista problem.

Graphics at BMEWS are either posted on a line all by themselves, or when they are intertwined with text they get displayed using the hspace and vspace attributes of the IMG command. In simple terms, there should always be a little bit of space around the pictures; in the worst case the text will abut the pictures, but in no case should the pictures overlap the text. I know that under XP, the IE browser displays the proper spacing, but Firefox does not; the text runs up to, but not under, the pictures.

Drew458

This blog is powered by Expression Engine v1.5.2. As far as I know, that means it supports HTML and XHTML. Does xhtml get priority over html? Does support for xhtml mean that the IMG attributes HSPACE and VSPACE are no longer recognized, since they were deprecated in html 4.01 and in xhtml? Hmmph. But the ALIGN attribute works fine!

I know that, under XP, Firefox does not pick up on the spacing around images, but IE does. Is it an XP thing or a Vista thing? I honestly don’t know. (This is why I sent you those books Peiper. You could become a web guru!)

Let’s try XHTML’s padding attribute and see if that works. Hang on, I’ll be right back; I just have to change the BMEWS universe by modifying one of the templates.

Ok, I added some default padding to the IMG command. Let’s see if I can find some worthless fill text wonderful writing you can ignore to use as a backdrop ... found some. Ok, now if all goes according to plan, you should see some spacing around the pictures embedded in the text below. PLEASE let me know if it works or not, what browser and operating system you are using, and what your screen resolution is set to. Thanks!!



This Friday, the movie Frost/Nixon — directed by Ron Howard and adapted from a play by Peter Morgan — opens in “selected theaters.” In case you’ve somehow missed all the hype, it’s about the British talk-show host David Frost’s series of interviews with Richard Nixon, which were shown on American television in May 1977. To quote from the film’s website:

More than 45 million viewers hungry for a glimpse into the mind of their disgraced former commander in chief — and anxious for him to acknowledge the abuses of power that led to his resignation — sat transfixed as Nixon and Frost sparred in a riveting verbal boxing match over the course of four evenings. Two men with everything to prove knew only one could come out a winner. Their legendary confrontation would revolutionize the art of the confessional interview, change the face of politics and capture an admission from the former president that startled people all over the world . . . possible even including Nixon himself

All this comes as a surprise to those of us who remember watching the original broadcast of the interviews. In return for his $600,000 appearance fee, Nixon “admitted” what had already been proven; dodged or rationalized inconvenient facts; acknowledged errors but denied committing any crimes; and ended with a show of contrition and a play for sympathy. Little or no new information was uncovered, and nobody who had followed Nixon’s career was surprised in the least by his manipulations and evasions. The consensus was that the whole thing wound up an overblown bore. To someone who was around back then, the idea of making a major motion picture about such a notorious fizzle seems bizarre; you might as well write an opera about “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault.” Is this just a case of memory being deceptive? Were the interviews really a landmark of a milestone of a watershed, as the publicists assert? To test this, I looked back at the reception they got in the media of the time. The show’s producers secured lavish advance coverage by giving virtually everyone with a press card some sort of “leak”: transcripts, unedited video, production notes, briefing materials, correspondence. The week of the broadcast, Nixon was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, in that long-vanished era when those publications were considered influential. In the days leading up to the broadcast, the Washington Post ran several solid pages of Watergate transcripts and analysis, flashing back to the glory days of 1973.  After the airing of the first interview — the only one anybody cared about, since it contained all the Watergate material — there was far less hoopla. The Post’s Bob Woodward, Nixon’s erstwhile tormentor, called it “a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal.” Elsewhere in the Post, Haynes Johnson’s analysis dripped with disappointment: “[The former president] proceeded, for the next 90 minutes, to give us all the familiar Nixon responses we have all seen for more than a generation. Those advance reports about Nixon being broken — or shattered — or even shaken by the withering interrogation of David Frost are in error. Nixon is in control throughout. He offers little that is new, and less that is of substance.” Johnson continued: “Last night’s program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he’s swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match.” The New York Times, in a brief, unsigned “Week in Review” item a few days later, echoed the been-there, done-that theme: “The spectacle was a familiar one . . . he portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview.”

Ok, it looks like I need even more text. So here’s a fat paste of Planet Gore (no, not Rogues of Gore, that was a different sci-fi book altogether!) from NRO:
We Need More “Recession Boosts Economy” Stories?  [Chris Horner]

On Friday, the U.K.’s Guardian publicized the learned opinion that the recent, ongoing cooling is “not evidence that global warming is slowing.” Pause.

Well. The good news, then, is that the current recession is not evidence that the economy is slowing, either. These interesting notions of logic and semantics would also suggest that your weight loss is not evidence that your obesity is slowing — or better news, what with the holidays coming up and all, that your weight gain will not mean that you’ve stopped slimming down! Of course, perhaps such logical and semantic gymnastics are allowed only in the realm of climate science — but if so, wouldn’t it be equally valid to conclude that our recent warming is not proof that our longer-term cooling trend has slowed? Of course, this requires examining evidence that falls outside the time period that the Guardian prefers for its presentation, which helpfully begins as the Little Ice Age was breaking.
Meanwhile, the New York Times joins some brow-furrowing academics concerned that the drop in media coverage of warming could be a manifestation of something larger — even terrifying: diminished public pressure to impose their shared agenda. It is left to Times readers to suggest that the reduction in coverage of warming is related to that same pesky cooling (which they must do in the Comments section — as Tom Nelson has noted — since the Times neglected to consider the possibility in their typically balanced treatment of the topic). Also left to the readers to research is the fact that the Times’s principal source, Maxwell Boykoff, is a bit of a media scold — he finds the press insufficiently, dogmatically alarmist, having co-authored with his brother Jules a paper entitled “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press.” While certainly bizarre, such clouded thinking is not unexpected in coverage of a public-policy issue about which there is only one item that may be permissibly noted in polite company as being a costly and dangerous extravagance: free and open discourse.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/06/2008 at 01:10 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
• Comments (9) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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