It just struck me: the voiceover for the Ontario Tory campaign ads is done by the same person that does ads for DeVry.
Fitting, somehow.
Author:
Just wanna have lunch
After sitting on a shelf at Warner Brothers for over a year, Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch, the much anticipated sequel to Eric Idle’s 1978 mockumentary, will receive its world premiere in Los Angeles on August 16.
One presumes it will appear in more venues in the near future. It’s about time!
The DVD finally came out earlier this year. It’s not as good as the original… more like Eric Idle Rips Off Eric Idle.
Barenaked server
Well, the Barenaked Ladies weblog that looked so promising seems to be a bust:
This may not be a permanent issue; the text is a generic IIS/ASP error message, which could indicate that the site’s been hacked or is just down (like that’s never happened before). Seeing as there hadn’t been any updates since June it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if the BNLBlog has simply gone the way of the dodo. Whatever the cause, it’s a disappointing development.
Well, the site is back, but the content is still ancient. Sigh.
friends your Tell
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
Anonymous
…and all the regular boneheads
There’s all kinds of great news about… The Boneyard Man (mu-hu-hu-hu-ha-ha-haaaaaaa). The Boneheads (and I mean that lovingly, of course) are about to premiere special editions of their radio noir series on Rogers Television (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 10:30pm, Fridays at 4:00pm, and Sundays at 9:30pm), and they’re going to start the sixth season of the live theatre show on September 26th and 27th at the Spriet Theatre in Covent Garden Market. And not least, they have a new website. (I’m probably jumping the gun posting that last bit, because it seems in a bit of disarray at the moment, but what the heck… it’s still great news.) Now all they need is to get that mailing list working a little more reliably….
Chef Boyardee
Sometimes I worry that I go on too much about how much I enjoy Lenni Jabour‘s music. Then I read something like Scott Andrew LePera’s post about Edie Carey and realize I’m not the only one who gets really into this stuff called music: Here’s a sure danger sign: more than once I found myself complaining
and then what happened?
as the two-minute MP3 sample tracks ended abruptly in mid-verse. And then I played the samples again and again and again, until I finally stopped torturing myself and bought the record…. This is like finding a four-leaf clover pressed inside the child’s book you picked up at a yard sale on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.
Perspective
…the Web doesn’t really matter because we’re due to be subjugated by the barbarian hordes of Pluto in the next three years
Don’t miss the misses
Miss Lenni Jabour — and Miss Claire Jenkins — will be at C’est What this Friday. It’s Lenni’s first solo show in three years (in Toronto, anyway) and Claire’s second time opening for her. Lenni’s performances are just the thing to relieve stress and promote happiness.
My equally-addicted Lenni-friend Sara is somewhere out of the country on her own world tour these days, and I know she’ll be very disappointed to miss the festivities; I’m not sure if Greg (who discovered Lenni and Claire at the last gig) will be able to make it due to other recent events. So you folks who haven’t yet had the experience — recently-linked Scott and Donna (who need to get their Sirens CDs from me, hint hint), Dave, Amber, Sami and Laurie, Margaret, and the whole lot of the rest of you — need to get on your bikes and go to Toronto.
What are you doing still sitting there staring at your monitor? Get a move on!
Oops, I forgot Amber’s gig in Little Shop of Horrors at the Grand. Next time, maybe.
Cool
Subtleties of robots.txt
I recently discovered a subtlety of the /robots.txt file. (For those who don’t know, /robots.txt is a configuration file for web spiders that tells them what URLs not to retrieve from a website.) The issue is this: parsers will not fall back to a more general User-Agent setting if they’ve already matched a specific one. This is actually spelled out in A Standard for Robot Exclusion — If the [User-Agent] value is ‘*’, the record describes the default access policy for any robot that has not matched any of the other records
— but I’d forgotten it when I updated my /robots.txt recently to exclude certain additional URIs (removed from my site due to abuse) that Google seems to have such a fondness for that it won’t drop them from its index.
Here’s an excerpt from /robots.txt that shows the error:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /CBP/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /personal/Imagine my surprise when Googlebot started spidering /cgi-bin/show?user=Webmaster, my address-obfuscating contact form, and pages under /personal/ which poison the lists of e-mail addresses and URIs that address harvesters collect.
I’ve updated /robots.txt to include both sets of URIs for the Googlebot, but (unlike Inktomi’s Slurp) Google doesn’t retrieve /robots.txt after it’s started spidering a site. I may have to extend my .htaccess blocking for the current dance to prevent the big G from grabbing a bunch of (more) useless garbage from my site.
Moral of the story: even if you’ve read the documentation, read it again before making assumptions. As my friend John is fond of saying, when you assume you make an ass of u and Dave.