While we were there, Tammy found a bottle of wine that she wanted. It was tall and curving, with beautiful lines, but most of all it was made of lovely blue glass. She has a thing for blue glass, and so she wanted the bottle. Just the bottle. She didn’t care about the wine in it, because she doesn’t drink at all. I don’t drink wine, though I do cook with it; I also have an occasional beer or mixed drink. And by “occasional” I mean I have one drink every two months or so. That makes me pretty much a non-drinker.

Anyway, I get up to the counter to pay for our items when it hits me: Dang. It’s Sunday. I can’t buy this bottle of wine because Jesus might blush! That’s right; I was a victim of Georgia’s absurd, antiquated Blue Laws. In Georgia, as in several other states, it is illegal to buy or sell alcohol in most cases on Sundays. Some counties/cities allow restaurants to sell alcohol on Sundays (after noon, of course; you can’t serve it while you should be in church!), but it’s always a fight with certain obstinate residents when it comes up. The city council of the city next to mine has been trying to legalize Sunday alcohol sales for years, because no new restaurant will open in the city without a liquor license, and the few restaurants that are there are leaving for friendlier areas. Yet there those few stubborn residents are, pining for “the town I used to know” and suchlike. Recently the city county finally passed Sunday drink sales and began issuing permits to several restaurants before eight residents filed a lawsuit to stop it. They found a judge who issued an injunction against further permits until a hearing could be convened. That hearing is coming up soon, but for now, no more permits are being issued. The few restaurants who obtained permits before the residents’ anti-alcohol jihad are happily selling on Sunday, though if the suit is successful, they will be stripped of their permits.

Now, I have no problem with people who don’t like alcohol. I may think they are a little backward, but I bear them no ill will. Don’t like alcohol? Fine. Don’t drink it. Don’t patronize establishments that sell it. Vote with your pocketbooks. But when you try to use the power of the state to keep me from getting a drink, that’s when I have a problem. And no matter how much some of these people try to disguise their motives, it all comes down to one thing: religion. They want to “protect” Sunday, because that day is special to their religion. I’m a Christian, so Sunday is special to me, too, but having a drink on Sunday is not a sin.

Alcohol is a legal product. Not allowing sales of it on Sunday is nothing more than favoring Christianity over the rights of citizens to buy the products of their choice on the day of their choice. The really amusing thing in all of this, if there is one, is that according to John,  Jesus’ very first miracle was the conversion of water into wine at the wedding at Cana. And not just wine, but good wine. It was so good, in fact, that the steward asked the host why he had saved the best for last, when everyone was already drunk. I’ve actually brought this up with teetotalers and have been met with cries of “Oh, fie! It wasn’t really wine; it was merely grape juice.” Yeah. OK. Whatever.

(As an aside, the Greek in this case says τὸν καλὸν οἶνον. καλόν comes from καλός, which has these as possible translations “beautiful, handsome, excellent, eminent, choice, surpassing, precious, useful, suitable, commendable, admirable”. That was some good wine.)

So what do I want? I want overzealous religious folk (of any stripe) to mind their own business and stop trying to force their religion down my throat. These people would also do well to think about how they will feel if, at some point in the future, a different religion than theirs has the reins. How will they feel then, as followers of that religion start enacting laws forcing residents to respect their customs? Something tells me they would feel quite a bit different.

By placing non-alphanumeric characters in a password, I am making it much harder to guess or crack. Yet there is a corps of web developers out there who force me to choose less secure passwords, because they won’t let me put punctuation in them. Why they do this, I can’t say. There is not a single compelling reason to exclude punctuation from passwords. Not one. I challenge any of you to give me a good reason for this restriction. In fact, it’s more work for the developers to check for these “offending” characters and scold the user for daring to use them! I’ve been stewing about this for a while, but this morning when I tried to setup an account at podiobooks.com and was told my password was not good enough for them, it sent me over the edge.

So, tech managers, here are your marching orders: Look at your site(s). If you have a restriction on what characters can go in a password, figure out which of your developers wrote that code, and fire them. Then, have someone else rewrite that bit of code the right way.

It happened again yesterday. I saw an excellent cover on Endgame by Kristine Smith, so I picked it up. I read the back cover and it sounded interesting. So I bought it. Later in the day, I looked it up on Amazon, just to see what people were saying about it. That’s when I found out that it’s actually the fifth book in a series. I picked the book up and read every single word on both covers and the spine and there is absolutely no indication that this book is part of a series. I’ve still got the receipt, so I’m going to take the book back and see if I can swap it for something else. There’s a chance I might swap it for the first book in the series, but more than likely I’ll go for the 19th Aubrey-Maturin book.

Note to publishers: I don’t like feeling tricked. I don’t know if this was an oversight or an attempt at deception, but it’s certainly cost you this sale, and it may have soured me against the entire series. Be honest with book buyers about when a book is part of a series. You know if it’s part of a series or not, so how about let us know before we buy. You’ll get more sales in the end.

Remote host said: 554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content [BODY]

What that means is that someone (not me) sent an email containing a virus to one of the lists. The list then tried to deliver it to me, but my mail server rejected it. And Yahoo’s list manager then interpreted that bounce as indicating that my email address won’t accept email, and turned off all delivery to me. Does this make sense to you? Someone else sends a virus and my email gets turned off.

I actually think that both Yahoo Groups and my mail server share blame in this case. My mail server shouldn’t bounce a virus-laden email, it should just quietly throw it away. It’s not like anyone who intentionally sends a virus really needs to see the bounce message; they know what they’re doing. And Yahoo Groups’ server is too stupid to interpret the bounce message and quietly ignore it. Instead, it penalizes me. But what, exactly, is my mail server?

That question is interesting because I can’t be sure whose mail server is the culprit. The reason is that there are three mail servers involved in sending me email. GoDaddy is my domain registrar, and therefore they maintain my MX records, and all my mail is first sent to them. I also have a SpamCop account. I have a forwarding address setup with GoDaddy that sends all email for me to SpamCop. SpamCop, once the email has been checked for spam, then forwards the email to my Gmail account. Since the bounce message that I’m allowed to see doesn’t include any details, I don’t know which server sent actually did the bouncing. Two days ago I stopped using my SpamCop account, so now I’m down to just GoDaddy’s and Gmail’s servers, and I’m hoping that the troublesome server belonged to SpamCop. If I get turned off again, I guess I’ll know it wasn’t.

It’s very frustrating to get turned off like this, over and over, because of someone else’s nefarious acts.

If you haven’t heard about this, you should have. A British teacher working in Sudan (why on Earth, I don’t know) has been imprisoned for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.” That’s right, she’s in jail for naming a stuffed bear Mohammed. But that’s not enough for our bloodthirsty “friends” the Muslims. No, lots and lots of them (apparently) want her dead for “insulting the prophet.”

I’ve had it with Muslims and their demands. I have had it with the PC phrase “Islam is a religion of peace.” It’s not. It’s a stone age death cult with its adherents doing everything they can to bring everyone in the world under its domination.

Here are some choice quotes from the article: (emphasis mine)

Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.”

The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pickup trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation. She avoided the more serious punishment of 40 lashes.

They called for Gibbons’ execution, saying, “No tolerance: Execution,” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

I suppose, in fairness, I should say that it’s nice that they were willing to go with a firing squad instead of sawing her head off. That’s a nice touch.

Many protesters carried clubs, knives and axes…

A Muslim cleric at Khartoum’s main Martyrs Mosque denounced Gibbons during one sermon, saying she intentionally insulted Islam. He did not call for protests, however.

“Imprisoning this lady does not satisfy the thirst of Muslims in Sudan. But we welcome imprisonment and expulsion,” the cleric, Abdul-Jalil Nazeer al-Karouri, a well-known hard-liner, told worshippers.

Yep, that “thirst” for blood is a hard one to quench.

Based on further bits in the story, it does appear that the further away from that backwards area of the world you get, the response of Muslims is a bit more fair. But many of them still believe that she should be punished for “insulting the prophet;” they just feel that her sentence was too harsh. They still think she should still be punished for it.

We’ve been to two restaurants since Thursday night: the Big Joy Chinese place in Stone Mountain, GA and the local Red Robin and both served up crappy meals.

The first was the Big Joy. No joy there for us. While the restaurant itself was lovely on the inside and the staff was friendly and courteous, the food was awful. The egg rolls came out wallowing around in brown grease, and each contained enough grease to fill a fryer. The allegedly spicy beef dish that I got was bland and uninspired. The Mongolian beef my wife got was stringy, horse-like and also singularly uninspired. The steamed rice was OK, I guess.

The second was today at the Red Robin. Now, this place bills itself as “gourmet” hamburgers. I’ve been there a few times, and to be honest, I don’t know why I keep going back. These “gourmet” burgers are nothing more than frozen beef patties like what you could get in the frozen section of any grocery store. In other words, I could go buy some Bubba Burgers, toss them on my grill and have burgers as good as (if not better than) those at Red Robin. What I want in a burger is like what you get at Chili’s or LongHorn Steakhouse; real hamburgers, hand-made by a human. If I wanted frozen burgers, I’d go to Kroger and save myself some money. The only thing “gourmet” about the burgers at Red Robin is the price. The standard “gourmet” burger is $8.50. It isn’t worth $4.

But the real problem at Red Robin today was what my wife ordered. Based on the description, the “Gourmet Mac & Cheese with Chicken” sounded great. Here’s what the menu says about it

A tasty new take on macaroni and cheese. Made with a masterful culinary combination of Cheddar, American and Goat cheeses, topped with juicy chicken breast, diced hickory-smoked bacon, crushed croutons and parsley. It’s good to be a kid again.

It’s $11.50. Let me say that again. It was $11.50. For Mac & Cheese. She didn’t want the chicken, so that brought it down to $9.50. When it came out, it was a pitifully small bowl of spiral noodles with what looked like melted Velveeta on them. We both looked at it and said, “That’s $10 worth of Mac & Cheese?” We were not happy. We got a manager over who looked at it and said, “I don’t think I’d eat it, either,” which was a good sign, but then she said, “What do you want me to do about it?” Wrong thing to say. As a manager, you should already have a plan for what to do about it. My wife tried to eat some of it, but it was crap. We ended up paying part of the price, but not the whole thing. Regardless, what we paid was still far more than what it was worth.

I can say with 100% certainty that I won’t be going back to the Big Joy again. We might end up at the Red Robin again because my boy likes the “endless” fries, but it won’t be for a while.

I swear I keep wondering to myself why I bother to read bOING bOING because they are nothing but a bunch of intellectually small, whiny liberals. Occasionally they post something cool, but most of the time they just whine about the war, the President and/or capitalism. Sometimes simultaneously.

Today they have a story bemoaning the fact that Melbourne, Australia is getting tough on graffiti “artists.” They use code words like “street art” to mask the fact that graffiti is, at its core, vandalism. Yes, that’s right, vandalism. Unless the “artist” in question owns the wall that is being used as the “canvas” it is vandalism, plain and simple. Yet they use phrases like “Melbourne’s graffiti scene killed,” “until now one of the world’s epicentres of street art” and “the government has adopted a Giuliani-esque zero-tolerance policy to sanitise the city” to make you think that something of value is being “lost.” I have to say that if Melbourne has become known as an epicenter of “street art” then the government there has been extremely lax in enforcing vandalism laws, and this “Giuliani-esque” policy is long overdue.

If graffiti “artists” want to express their “talent” let them pay for a building and then paint whatever they feel like on its walls. Until then, they are nothing more than common vandals and should be prosecuted as such. Now that I think of it, a fitting punishment, if the “artist” is caught and convicted should be to remove their own “work” using a sand blaster, whitewash, etc, as appropriate. That would be beautiful.

1. Start moving the crane to make him fall.
2. Send up a cop to push him off.
3. Shoot him (rubber bullets or lead, or tranquilizer darts, I don’t care)

Whichever method they chose, this ridiculous event would be over and the people and businesses in Buckhead could get back to business.