DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

It’s funny, except that it’s sad:
Doonesbury on Bush’s invasion of Iraq

If you’ve ever been to Four Corners or the Continental Divide, you won’t be surprised to learn that the South Pole bears a monument and a sign. But you might be surprised to learn that a new monument is installed every January, because the pole moves about 33 feet per year.

More specifically, the pole doesn’t move, but the sheet of ice that covers it does. The true Pole is on the ground, under 2 km of ice that’s slowly migrating north. (Of course it’s migrating north — this is the South Pole!)

There’s a permanent marker at the “ceremonial” South Pole. It’s called “permanent” because it doesn’t move — or, rather, in spite of the fact that it’s moving about 1 inch/day.

Then there’s the temporary marker, reset every January 1, which is not called “permanent” because it moves every year — or, rather, in spite of the fact that (at least once per year) it accurately indicates the actual static position of the pole underneath.

Here is a picture of the 2004 South Pole Marker. Here are pictures of the 1998 South Pole Marker.

Previous markers are collected and displayed, except for the ones that get stolen.

I made the mistake of watching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen last night. It’s the sort of film that’s so bad I want to ask the filmmakers for my money back. Or better yet, for my time. Maybe I could get Stephen Norrington to come mow my lawn for 110 minutes.

The DVD contains an interview with Sean Connery, who is one of the strong points of this otherwise forgettable film (but only because he’s so fun to watch — he could make a film about programming interesting, so long as he raises his eyebrows at the camera from time to time and mutters something about “passing by reference” or “initializing variables” in that great Scottish brogue).

He said something that makes me wonder what might have been. I bet he’s wondering too, along the lines of “where did I go wrong?!”

According to Connery, he was offered a part in The Matrix, but he didn’t take it because he didn’t understand the script. Later he was offered a part in Lord of the Rings, but again didn’t take it because he didn’t understand the script. Both these film series became huge hits (e.g. 11 Academy Awards for Return of the King.)

Connery admitted that he didn’t understand the LXG script either, but accepted anyway. The unspoken reasoning: this could be the next huge special-effects-laden science fiction blockbuster. Oops.

Let’s take a look at viewer scores for these movies, as tallied by IMDB:

• Fellowship of the Ring: 8.7/10
• The Matrix: 8.5/10
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one of whom is a white Hulk with a tumor: 5.5/10

About 30 hours of development work separate MonauralJerk 0.5a3 from 0.5a2… five bugfixes, 10 miscellaneous improvements, and six new features. (See the changelog for details.)

One of the features is the RSS 2.0 syndication feed.

The other major new feature is also related to syndication: the aggregator-pinging function is now much more robust than before.

I’ll run this here for a few days to iron out any lingering bugs, and push out a public release by midweek.

Update: MonauralJerk 0.5a3 was released on March 16.

I remarked to a friend that I’m feeling old. She has a few years on me, yet was surprisingly sympathetic.

I say “surprisingly” because few things make a person feel older than having someone younger gripe about his or her age. I mean, come on.

Anyway, she gave me a fresh perspective on the matter. “You can grow old,” she said. “Or you can die young. Which one do you want?”

Well, now that you put it that way…