Purely Random

Picking up stuff around the house, looking for places to put what’s not trashed. At Target and see a seven drawer thing that looks promising. Needs assembly. No problem. Electric screwdriver at home. Have a 10% off coupon for Target, but it’s also at home. Buy anyway. Home with the drawer thing and go to workbench. No electric screwdriver. Look everywhere, and then everywhere else, twice, at least. Gone. Who knows? Last night noticed first fireflies of season swimming in the air. Yes, Kansas summer (i.e. humidity) is finally here. Rented 50 First Dates. Better than expected. Barrymore/Sandler chasing Ryan/Hanks as cutest screen couple. Who’s gonna mow the yard this time? Maybe nobody. Like I said, Kansas summer… The new Iraqi Prime Minister comes across damn good. Saw him on Sunday morning talk show. Was thinking how much better he presents than Bush or Rumsfeld. How does Rumsfeld even still have his job? He’s one reason I thought I might have to abandon Bush and vote for the other guy. Then I heard Kerry was considering Gephart for Veep. Well, back to Bush. Or, hey, there’s Nader. Pretty sad when the criteria is to vote for the one I can feel the least dirty about giving a vote to. Roddick and Federer, on the other hand, put on a class act, both during the match and after. Best post-match interviews I’ve seen in ages. “I threw everything I had at him, including the kitchen sink, but he went in the bathroom and came out with the tub.” Come on, he had that prepared ahead of time, right? Either way, pretty good improv, under the circumstances. No smoking in Lawrence since July 1, except outside, your home, or your motel room. No fireworks, either, although there are die-hards. And, we’re having witnesses in drug cases getting shot at in the streets in broad daylight. No kidding. They rammed her car head on and jumped out blasting away. She escaped. As I have often said, you just can’t get quality work in Lawrence.

:gangster:

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Back during Napster’s golden age I got hooked on finding as many versions as possible of certain old songs. One was Ghost Riders. Another was The Lion Sleeps Tonight, which I discovered was actually an old South African song that became the pop hit I listened to on AM Radio when rock’n’roll (and I) was young. So it was interesting to run across an article in Bag and Baggage about Solomon Linda, the Zulu migrant worker who composed the song Mbube (lion) in Johannesburg in 1939 and recorded it with a group called the Evening Birds; and about how folk singer Pete Seeger came across the song in 1949 and performed it, calling it Wimoweh, from the Zulu “uyiMbube” meaning “he is a lion”; then done by the Tokens (the version I listened to as a youth) in 1961, who added the lyrics “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”. After all these years, Linda’s heirs are suing Disney for royalties on account of using the song in Lion King.

What’s Up With RSS?

I thought RSS would be complicated. Turns out it’s simple. It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s true. So, some three months after starting the blog I finally added the RSS links. Actually, I restored them. Originally, I commented them out, thinking I was going to have to learn XML and figure out what Blogdex was and how to ping a register that alerts everybody there’s a new article. Well, I guess bloggers that are really into their “blogrolls” do all that pinging and blogdexing and whatnot, but it’s certainly not necessary. And it turns out that WordPress automatically creates the XML for the RSS feeds for articles as well as comments.

RSS may become the main way people surf the www before too long. In a way, it’s like bookmarks. But, instead of opening up the web page, the RSS aggregator shows a list of, say, the 10 most recent items on a web page or site, with a short summary or sometimes the first sentence or two. If it looks interesting you can click the title and get the whole thing in your browser. In other words, it’s a quick way to scan what’s new and pick what’s of interest. Check out dozens of websites without actually having to visit and browse through them. It’s especially useful for news websites, financial websites and, of course, blogs.

I’m still new to it. The aggregator I use is a free extension to Mozilla Firefox, called Sage. By the way, everybody should use Firefox; although, as I was paying credit cards online earlier today one of the websites wouldn’t work with Firefox. This is pretty rare. I mostly only use IE when I want to open myself up to risky surfing. There are many available aggregators, some free, some cost, some standalone, some browser add-ons. If anybody has a list of websites they regularly check, I recommend checking out RSS. If anybody has a list of blogs they regularly check, it’s the only way to go.