So can we take down the outdoor decorations now? You know the house I’m talking about, there’s one in every neighborhood - the overdone yard that causes traffic jams because every damm driver slows down or stops to gawk at the profusion of lights and statuary. I don’t care about indoor decorations. I didn’t bother with them this year, and if someone wants to keep their dying tree around until march, it’s not my problem. But please - get rid of the damm light up lawns.

And the music. No more christmas music. I am officially tired of it and will not want to hear any more of it until next november at the earliest. I am blocking out the third helping of “Felice Navidad” coming over the radio with my earphones firmly in place and Apoclypicta’s rendition of Sandman streaming into my brain.

The “switcher” commercials lied. I’m on a mac with OS10 at work and I can barely do anything useful with it. I can’t make it talk to the PC, I can’t re burn a CD-RW - the only damm thing I can do with it is connect to the internet. On a dial up. Bleah. Maybe I’m just used to doing things the hard way, but my PC just makes more *sense*. For me.

Ten of them, in fact. Nifty little article at SitePoint. Some I already knew about, but some were eye openers. Like, they really do ignore meta tags. Huh.

So the yearly holiday brouhaha is just about over. And we really did have a white christmas - which I had to drive through. Ick. Having once made the mistake of going into Paramus on the day after christmas, (Oh, the horror) I am staying happily inside today with my farscape S1 DVD set. (From Bill - and I am having so much fun with it.) Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll poke my head outside and see what the after christmas sales have wrought.

Anyone who’s been around this site for a month or more has probably picked up on my habit of re-skinning the place at the drop of a hat. Now there are some discussions taking place on CSS-D on a way to let any user re-skin a chosen site. Kinda interesting. Maybe I’ll try it when I’ve got a spare day or two. (Insert hysterical laughter at the idea of me having any spare time before spring here.)

Seriously, it’s a neat idea, and not reliant on scripting like every style switcher I’ve seen. Far as I can tell, it *is* reliant on having a very next generation browser that understands all the vaguries of descendant selectors and will allow user specified style sheets and will let you set up an id on the body tag. Advanced Mozilla only? Then again, mozilla users (and I am one) are the only ones I’ve seen who can use/give a fig about user stylesheets. Though I could be wrong.

Or code, or page source. Or keeping people from downloading your images, or scripts. The Lemur has some thoughts on this.

I tried not to, but I still got sucked into the trap of not feeling like I’d done enough in the gift buying department this year. It’s hard not to feel inadquate, especially when driving through Paramus and seeing all the big chain stores with their huge marketing campaigns. They all seem to say, “If you love your family, you’ll buy them stuff. Lots of stuff.” Corporate greed playing on the insecurity of holiday shoppers.

And it doesn’t help to *know* that you’re being manipulated by some guy with a marketing degree - especially when I usually angst over what I get people anyway. It’s like knowing the fashion world is seriously warped and out of touch, but still comparing myself with impossibly perfect models. (and coming up short) You know it’s a ridiculous trap, but you fall into it anyway.

Specifically, Tolkien. Over the last year, there have been dozens of articles and op-ed pieces about the role of women in Tolkien’s work. Or rather, the lack of role. I don’t care. I love the books, I love the movies, I love the artwork (well, some of the artwork. The Hildebrant brothers don’t do much for me, but Alan Lee rocks) As for the female characters and how they aren’t there - so what? Is every author supposed to anticipate shifting social values fifty years post publication and cast his/her novels accordingly?

This meme is more annoying than the usual “well, the author really means this/that/some other thing” kind of lit crit that I grew to know and abhor in school. How the hell does some academic crawl into the head of a (possibly deceased) author and figure out that they were thinking at the exact moment they put pen to paper? Who cares? Can’t a great story just *be* a really great story?

Oh, wait. We’re dealing with Art and Literature and lots of other pretentiously capitalized concepts that will leads us to Higher Meaning and… yes! Even world peace!

Here’s what I think. Art is not philosophy. Nor is it religon. Even if it was either of them, it still wouldn’t be something you could peer into and discover the deep, musty scerets of the soul because people have been trying that with religon and philosophy and, by and large, they haven’t gotten too far with them either. At best, art, philosophy, and religon are starting points for finding truth and The Meaning Of Life inside oneself. None of the big answers will come from a book, no matter how good it is.

So back to Tolkien. Who, when you get down to it, was just a guy. Shaped by his time and his world (which was very different from the one we know today) and writing because he loved it. He wasn’t trying to create a world that would be gender-politically acceptable to future generations even if such a feat would have been possible. He was just doing what artists have always done. He created something. It was not an allegory, it was not a political tract, it was not a philosophical guide to enlightment. It was a story. A really good one.

Suddenly Mozilla isn’t supporting min-height? Huh? I thought the upgrades were supposed to add *more* css compliance, not take it away. The upside? I get to loose a line of code in the css file. (Yay, slightly smaller files. Hoo and woo.)

I’d like to be grumpy and full of vitrol tonight, but the most I can muster is a deep desire to curl up somewhere with no stress, some warm milk, and a book.

In this place, there are no cgi-bins that *will not* behave, no evil tollbooths that refuse to register that I’ve already thrown in my change and *no*, I can’t toss in a second helping, ’cause then I won’t be able to get home, blast it all. (Not that I could pause long enough to do a second thrown anyway - NJ drivers get downright murderous if you pause longer than ten seconds at the change hopper.) Nor are there snowstorms of doom, radio stations with inaccurate weather reports (possible freezing rain this evening my ass - I was driving through it in the *morning*. That was no vague possibility out there making the road all slick and causing the four wheel owning, SUV driving yuppie horde to careen about like a prom date after the second shot of spiked punch), and most importantly, in this fantasy land of mine, there is something on the radio news OTHER than the impending end of the world.

So many people want a war so very badly that there’s no way we’re not going to get one soon. That doesn’t mean I want to hear about it for two hours every day. (I have no CD player in my car and a limited tolerance for top 40 anytime before 10:00 AM, so I really am NPR’s captive audience) I would like to continue with the business of living my life and I’m trying fairly hard not to think about the possibility of my friends and loved ones getting shoved off to die in some remote corner of the globe for no better reason than some world leaders are feeling the need to play the annual game of who has the biggest wrinklies.