licentious radio

Wednesday, December 18, 2002
[9:11:49 PM]

Washington, DC (licentious) -- Trent Lott's appearance on BET was marred by technical snafus. The flashing lights to indicate when the audience should applaud and laugh were sometimes reversed. Thus when Lott insisted he is in favor of affirmative action, the audience broke into uproarious laughter, even though applause was actually intended.

During the Question/Answer period, a member of the audience suggested that George W. Bush should just "look into Lott's heart", and settle the whole matter. Lott replied that he wouldn't trust Bush further than he could throw Karl Rove. "I'm perfectly willing to have some look into my heart, but it needs to be a neutral party, not some lying dog out to end my career."

Lott pointed out that Bush was the host of the Thurmond celebration. "My daughter's videotape of the celebration shows that Georgie applauded my speech enthusiastically. Notice how many photo-ops Bush has had this week where he could pet little black children in front of cameras. Cynical. All the black children in the audience, please come down and I'll show you I'm just as good at petting black kids as Bush."

Back in Lott's hometown, Hank Stowe -- head of the local branch of the pro-segregation CCC -- said he was "very disappointed with Trent. But I don't think he really meant it. He was wearing the tie I gave him the last time he voted against civil rights." Stowe also insisted that the CCC is not a successor organization to the KKK.

[8:33:01 PM]
Bush and the Saudi princess [spectator.co.uk]: Bush's "cosying up to the Saudis is making a mockery of the war on terrorism."

[7:16:38 PM]
Follow-up on chronologically-ordered weblogs.... Here's a example of using client-side javascript and cookies to hide previously-viewed posts [new window].

Why are blogs in reverse order? Partly because we don't want the server to remember which items each viewer has already seen. We also don't want the server to do the work of delivering only unseen items for each user. That would get expensive, compared to Radio, that generates static pages.

The script uses client-side memory and processing power, which is scalable. That is, if a million people hit your weblog, the server doesn't have to do any extra work.

The example assumes the server doesn't help by providing variables like the ids of the first and last items on the page. Slightly cooperative weblog software would reduce the complexity of the Javascript code.

[2:15:40 PM]
One Bush-flunky Senator's family business was fine $1.7 BILLION for health care fraud. Wow. Will this man become Senate Majority Leader when Lotts' corpse is finally dragged away?

Lott to Frist? - Racism to Medical Fraud [nathannewman.org].

Amazing how fast information turns up on the internet.

[11:43:34 AM]
Re-ordering weblogs is easy. Give it a separate page. Maybe restrict it to a shorter timespan. Use Javascript and DOM:

1) use Javascript to write a cookie with the id of the last-viewed entry.

2) use Javascript to set "display: none" for the items that have already been read. This will work in fancy new browsers like IE5+, Mozilla, and NS6+. For old and primitive browsers, be sure to include a link to the (current) standard reverse-order page.

3) add a link to display the hidden items.

Not having done this yet, I presume the Javascript won't be entirely straightforward. Ideally, the weblog server software would give you access to variables for the last id, and the ids would have to be numerically ordered. Radio's ids will work.

Of course the server software would have to give you the option. I don't know if any do, but it certainly wouldn't be hard.

Dave Winer provoked this outburst by linking to Ken Hirsch.