What she said. Also what she said in this post about Alton Brown's cookbook, I'm Just Here For the Food. I'd also add that The Best Recipe, which is the flagship cookbook for Cooks Illustrated, is hands down the best cookbook I own (it's a compendium of recipes from several years of the magazine).

This quote from this NY Times story, White House Says It Expects Deficit to Hit $165 Billion amuses me:

The Bush administration said today that the federal government would run a deficit of $165 billion this year...Administration officials said the main reason for the swing from a $127 billion surplus in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30 to the projected red ink for the current fiscal year was a steep falloff in tax revenues from capital gains and other receipts associated with the stock market.

Let me see if I have this straight. The government is in deficit because capital gains taxes are down. But aren't the Republicans the party that for the past 8 years repeatedly attempted to completely eliminate capital gains taxes? Where would we be today had Clinton and the Democrats not stood up to them on this issue?

In the hope that this saves somebody a few gray hairs (it's too late for me): If you're trying to run Perl CGIs on OS X and you get an error message about "Premature end of script headers," the answer is to change the line endings from Mac to UNIX. I've been wracking my brain about how two (I thought) identical scripts could result in one working and one not. Searching on the Web led me to think that it was an ownership or permission problem, so that's what I've been staring at for, well, it feels like forever. It's just the line endings--sheesh!

Via Derek, keep an eye out for WHEDONesque: Joss Whedon Weblog ("Your one stop shop for news and discussion about Joss Whedon's creations"), which opens on Monday. Coool.

We're bursting with pride to announce the recent publication of our book, JavaScript Visual QuickStart Guide, 4th Edition, in its Urdu translation. Really. Mubaarak baad! (That's congratulations, I think.)

Sorry about confusing people with the Notifications signup to the right. I thought that it was a cool feature that MT had, but it turns out that it didn't work anything like they way I thought it did (here's how it works). Sending notifications aren't tied to posting blog entries at all. To make it work would require me to separately send out an email every time either of us makes an entry, which (1) has always been possible and (2) is a pain in the butt, so I'll be removing this field shortly. Once again, sorry for the confusion; this is a learning experience for me, too.

The lessons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are applied to the problem of US domestic security and the struggle against terror in this apparently serious report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a neoconservative think tank. It's actually a pretty interesting piece. The descriptions of the "Buffy paradigm" and the "Buffy syndrome" are well done.

For those people who hated the head image (the only designery thing on this whole page!), there's now a checkbox to your right to turn it off. It's not yet hooked up to a cookie (as the font buttons are), but will be eventually. Does this work for y'all? Anything else you'd like to see change? Speak now, or else!

Just a reminder to you all, as a service of Backup Brain: tomorrow (7-11) is free Slurpee day at your local 7-11. Me, I gotta get myself one of those Mountain Dew Slurpees!

And they called Willie slick is a good Molly Ivins column on Bush and the current corporate crime flap. It has a very concise account of what Bush's former company, Harken Petroleum, did, and how Bush profited from what looks to be a crime. It's ironic that Harken appears to be an instance of actual crime (after all, the SEC made the company restate its financials after they were caught), but has gotten a pass up to now, whereas the US spent upwards of $70 million investigating the Whitewater "scandal", which found no criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons. By the way, did you know that the SEC "regulator" that chose not to prosecute Dubya was Bush's former personal attorney? A guy who had been appointed by the first President Bush (this all happened during the first Bush administration)? Can you spell conflict of interest?

You know, I like Maureen Dowd a lot more now that she's attacking Bush. Curious, that. "How can Mr. Bush crack the whip on Big Business when he's a wholly owned subsidiary of it?"

Via Instapundit, here's some amazing photos that I hadn't seen in years: the Rapatronic Photographs, which are pictures of nuclear detonations taken within milliseconds of the explosion. Surreal and weirdly beautiful.

It's almost that time of year again, so I'll be in NYC from July 13 through 20. My schedule's pretty light (Monday: visit Winnie-the-Pooh, Tuesday: teach an all-day workshop), so if you're there and want to get together, let me know!

For possibly just one brief shining moment in time:

Tileable lunchmeat backgrounds: for those times when nothing but head cheese will do.

One inexpensive HTML editor to add to the list: skti's skHTML v2.0. Sorry to be way behind on updates, but working on moving over to MT kicked my butt.

Declan McCullagh tangled with a spammer and consequently ran into some of the same spam blacklist problems I did. As the guy who runs the well-known Politech list, he got reports from readers of similar problems that they'd run into. Ban first and ask questions later blackhole lists (like SpamCop) are a lawsuit waiting to happen, imo.

Notice anything a little different around here? If this post is successful, it means that we've moved over to Movable Type (and done a little bit of redesigning). If you have any problems with the new site, let me know. I think everything's done except for search capabilities and bringing some of the oldest archives up to date, but I'm sure y'all will find plenty of things that I missed.