My “About Jerry Seeger” page is now a long, rambling muddle, as befits the rest of the blog. Let me know what you think! Any mysterious incidents from the past I neglected to distort mention?
Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas
Words and pictures and stuff
I had to chuckle when I read, “Jerry led a normal childhood, fed on a steady diet of peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, back issues of Astounding Science Fiction, and very few vegetables.”
As I recall, Jerry would eat nothing, and I mean absolutely NOTHING, green. After a great deal of persuasion, when he was, say, about 8, the parents got him to eat green Jell=O and iceberg lettuce (which is so pale it doesn’t count as green, or so the obstetrician told me when I was pregnant with Gerald and was supposed to eat a huge quantity of green vegetables every day in order to get sufficient folic acid).
Oh, and he didn’t eat meat either. Nowadays, the world is full of vegetarians, and even vegans, but back then, every family had dinner that centered around some form of animal protein and some form of starch (potatoes in our dad’s family, rice in our mom’s). Hence all the peanut butter and macaroni and cheese. At least Mom’s mac & cheese far surpassed the commercial convenience foods (she called them “macaroni and library paste”).
I assume you’ve given your sweetie Mom’s mac & cheese recipe, BTW.
My sweetie’s well-deserved renown for culinary prowess extends to a most excellent mac and cheese, which she makes when she really wants to spoil me (as opposed to the ongoing spoiling that happens every day).
Actually it was Jerry who asked if green Jell-o counted as a green vegetable. And he was younger that 8 at that time.
And who is that guy that pops up and asks to “picture yourself on a boat in a river”?
That’s Captain Kirk, as rendered for the Star Trek Saturday morning cartoon (adapted by Jose). The voice is an excerpt from William Shatner’s version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Truly a work of genuis.
I’m really going to have to search through the settings menus on Firefox to find out what’s preventing the duck and Shatner from making their appearance. I’ve already looked in the obvious places, but maybe it’s somewhere obscure.
When I look under Tools, I find that my Java Console is disabled (I think I did download a Java update about the time things disappeared). I did tell Firefox to enable pop-ups for this website only, in case that was the problem.
Meanwhile, I noticed a teeny-tiny smilie (about two millimeters across) to the right of the top line of your sidebar. It doesn’t seem to do anything, but the cursor turns into a text cursor when pulled over it. Is this a “hidden treasure” like the pies and firecrackers that show up in the “Bizarro” comic strip, or is this a consolation prize to make up for not getting Shatner?
The little smilie is put there by the built-in statistics package. I keep forgetting to hide the damn thing when I have the hood up.
As for a Firefox setting, I don’t know what it would be. The things are not in a popup window – they’re made with a combination of Flash and Javascript that works on a block of the main page to move it around. If there was a setting that was causing the trouble it would likely be a security issue where your browser or (more likely) Flash Player was disallowing the loading of the external movies. That would still be a little odd, as your flash player is downloading external resources for the poetry images.
I’m assuming that you don’t see and don’t hear anything.
One thing to try is emptying your cache while on another page and coming back – you may have gotten an broken version while I was testing and Firefox is hanging on to that. Which would also be odd, but in general when something’s not working right, emptying the cache is a good first step.
Went home, emptied the cache, came back. Will now stick around a while to see whether Shatner and the duck show up.
I actually thought that smilie might have been a cute and extremely subtle authentication method, like an artist’s hallmark, or maybe like a smilie that an elementary-school teacher might put on a student’s paper, to give me a warm feeling about using the right browser. It might be cool to keep it so that people in the know could look for it — but make it so it doesn’t show up on nonstandard browsers.
Oh, yeah, when I went to my Tools menu, I saw that my Java console was theoretically active, but I clicked on it and nothing happened, and when I went back to the Tools menu, the Java console had changed to being inactive. I’m thinking there might have been something screwy about the most recent Java “upgrade” that I downloaded.
But then, I’m not terribly conversant with Java anyway.
Been around a while, still no sign of Shatner or the duck. Methinks there be a problem with me Java.
The Javascript console is a tool that you can use to see if javascript reported any errors. Java is a different thing (whose name was borrowed by the Javascript folks) which is not used by the duck. Enabled or disabled, Java or Javascript, the console won’t affect the duck.