One of my readers says that the sidebar element overlaps the main text when this page is viewed in Safari, although not in Mozilla for Mac. Any other Mac users there noticing anything funny? Anyone have any idea why this should be happening? Does it depend on the type size at which you view the page? This might make certain elements too wide to fit within the contraints of the sidebar but I don’t understand why it would overlay the entire sidebar on the main text area. If I blow up the type size in Mozilla under Windows, the browser I use, I can get certain lines in the sidebar, such as the “How to get here: gelwan.com/followme.html” line, to extrude themselves, for example.

Is it something to do with the most-recently added graphic in the sidebar, the “Don’t Tread on Others” item? Is there some CSS element I’m using that Safari doesn’t like? Is this Safari’s problem or mine? (You don’t have to answer that one; I know, I know…).

Am I a standout in the ineptitude of my attempt at CSS-based layout? It is hard to imagine other people’s pages don’t have similar difficulty, but maybe I’m a real outlier. Maybe you can’t really do this stuff yourself unless you’re a web design professional. Me, I just stay up to all hours of the night tinkering with the design of the page, essentially by trial and error (lots of both…), after a day of seeing patients and putting my children to bed.

Sorry for the frustrated outburst. I just want to keep reading FmH a pleasurable, easy experience for all of you out there regardless of platform. We just went around last month on the issue of the page’s slow load time (which I hope is improved now) and now this. Any suggestions would be appreciated (except returning to table-based layout).

The fractured and stately English spoken by top Indians: “Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour.” The Spectator/UK

I have a different take on ‘Hinglish’. As an extensive traveller on the Indian subcontinent in years past, I consider it to be a tortured tongue, painful not so much to listen to — it is indeed elegantly and whimsically spoken — but (since I believe that our language shapes, constrains and facilitates what we can think, or at least think easily) because I have found the circumlocutions of Hinglish to be indicative of a cultural thought disorder, a cultural schizophrenia, the keenest manifestation of the torment of an entire civilization from having English colonial morés grafted over them. I cannot help wondering why it is not as embarrassing and painful to contemporary Indians as as Stepin Fetchit is to modern African American sensibilities. And whether The Spectator finding it so endearing is not a residue of the cultural-imperialist attitude.

Although the White House has already issued denials, The Washington Post is reporting that “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, have signaled to the White House that they intend to step down even if President Bush is reelected, setting the stage for a substantial reshaping of the administration’s national security team that has remained unchanged through the September 2001 terrorist attacks, two wars and numerous other crises.”

Of course, it is to spend more quality time with their families, rather than because of any compunctions about how they are being used by the Administration for morally repugnant foreign policy ends. The debate about whether Powell in fact has any such compunctions (I am of the persuasion that he does, compromising his good soldiering and getting him in trouble with the Wolfowitz clique from early on; the only thing that saved him this long is that we’ve been at war and he takes his obligation to his commander-in-thief too seriously to sow more open seeds of discord in wartime) may be settled if he accepts the enormous advances he’ll undoubtedly be offered to write his “kiss-and-tell” memoirs soon after his departure rather than continuing to protect BushCo’s vested interests by waiting.

In any case, can you envision what foreign policy will be like under Condoleeza Rice, such a handmaiden of America’s most important interests that she has a supertanker named after her? On the other hand, Paul Wolfowitz is the other leading contender according to Beltway buzz, and Newt Gingrich is interpreted by some to be actively campaigning for the job as well. Thank heaven Bush’s reelection no longer looks like a shoo-in. Now go do something about it.

“A National Academy of Sciences study validates long-held doubts about the reliability of polygraphs. So why does the government still rely on them to screen applicants for jobs?” Boston Globe Magazine

“Psychiatrists agree now on a point that was long debated: Suicide can run in families. They do not know, however, how this risk is transferred from one family member to another — whether it is ”learned” behavior, passed on through a grim emotional ripple effect, or a genetic inheritance, as some scientists theorize. But new research published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry prepares ground for a genetic search, suggesting that the trait that links high-suicide families is not simply mental illness, but mental illness combined with a more specific tendency to ”impulsive aggressiveness.”” Boston Globe It appears obvious to me it is not simply a matter of biology or upbringing; we’re supposed to be way beyond that sort of dichotomous thinking by now. I have seen multi-suicide families where it seems a matter of unconscious identification or even conscious emulation, others where the biological depression-plus-impulsive-aggressive-proneness model makes the most sense, but usually it appears they work in tandem — some balance between being genetically vulnerable and having your thoughts shaped by the belief that it is your destiny to die by your own hand.

“After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.” Boston Globe

Aroma-added packaging aims to allure you: “What smells good, sells. This well-known fact is pushing marketers – and the military – to inject scents into its food containers.” Christian Science Monitor If you consider with revulsion every such insidious advance in big business’ ability to take manipulation of your hearts and minds to unprecedented heights, consider the possibilities for ‘culture-jamming’ aromatic packaging. Easily, powerfully, unforgettably.

“Washington hopes to ease foreign-policy woes in the Middle East by wooing hearts and minds with a new Arabic-language radio network, satellite TV channel and glossy monthly magazine. It’s the funky side of the war on terror… (Toni) Braxton is in a new kind of army, standing at attention with Celine Dion, Eric Clapton, Ace of Base and the rapper Coolio, making up a Trojan-horse brigade drafted to seduce young Arab adults into admiring the United States.” The Globe and Mail Offensive indeed!

The solar system has come down to earth among the potato fields of northern Maine

So now this town of fewer than 10,000 souls, tucked into the far reaches of way northern Maine, really is located on the far side of the moon.

To be precise, it stands 1 mile north of planet Earth. This, of course, assumes you are calculating via the Maine Solar System Model, which places Earth and its moon next to Percy’s Auto Sales down along Route 1.

The Maine Solar System Model?

Absolutely. A community endeavor four years in the making before its completion in June, the MSSM is a three-dimensional roadside scale model of the solar system, stretching from the Northern Maine Museum of Science in Presque Isle 40 miles southward to the hamlet of Houlton. The scale is 93 million to 1; the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, so here the model of the Earth is 1 mile from the sun. A wooden arch and wall painting at the museum, almost 50 feet in diameter, represents the sun, while Pluto, which takes some finding at the Houlton Information Center, is a 1-inch sphere. The other eight planets in this no-budget, grass-roots creation sit atop poles strung out along sparsely populated Route 1. Mercury is an accurately painted billiard ball at Burrelle’s Information Services. Saturn is a sphere with 10-foot-wide rings custom-made of steel, foam, and fiberglass that rises majestically across the highway from Carol Reeves’s house. And so it goes through five communities, a line of heavenly bodies standing tall among the gently rolling potato fields. Boston Globe

Here’s an interactive model diagramming the superimposition of the solar system on the map of that part of Maine.

And here’s a solar system model meta-page. (“Making scale models of the solar system is a useful way to learn about it. Here are various related pages.”)

A History of Teeth: “Psychically, metaphorically, evolutionarily, teeth go way down and way back and carry multiple, paradoxical meanings. The tale of teeth is the ultimate oral history, and if it is only by coincidence that tooth rhymes with truth, the words still make a pretty good team.” NY Times

Two Views: “In this two part series, Ian Williams argues that progressives should not allow Bush’s misappropriation of humanitarian intervention to force them to abandon a principle that is both moral and urgently required. John R. MacArthur counters that liberals have long been lobbying for interventions that would override international law.” AlterNet

Wanna Bet? “Outraged by the Pentagon’s plan to create a futures market for terrorist attacks, a group of academics is setting up a futures market for predicting what the White House is up to.” Wired

Leaning on media outlets not to carry Democratic-sponsored ad on the WMD deception:

“Apparently the Bushites think that ‘Irony’ is the name of a far off planet, for they never seem able to see it in their own work.

Irony is George W standing adamantly against affirmative action, oblivious to the obvioius fact that he’s the privileged poster-child of America’s aggressive affirmative action program for the rich.

But one of the latest actions by the Bushites proves that they couldn’t find irony if we let them use the Hubble Telescope. It came in the form of a threatening letter sent to Wisconsin TV stations by the Republican Party’s top lawyer, Caroline Hunter. It seems that these stations were airing an ad produced by the Democratic Party, that calls for a bipartisan independent investigation of the false information used by Bush and the White House to mislead the American people about the supposed ‘imminent threat’ posed by weapons of mass destruction they claimed were in Iraq.

The lawyer’s letter to the TV stations demanded that they not air this ad because – get this – she blithely says that stations have ‘no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.'” — Jim Hightower

Related: UNC catches flak from right-wing for asking incoming freshmen to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

“Founded in 1996, the Terrorism Research Center, Inc. (TRC) is an independent institute dedicated to the research of terrorism, information warfare and security, critical infrastructure protection, homeland security, and other issues of low-intensity political violence and gray-area phenomena. The TRC represents a new generation of terrorism and security analysis, combining expertise with technology to maximize the scope, depth and impact of our research for practical implementation.

This site is the on-line portal to our terrorism knowledgebase, a dynamic relational database of public domain and proprietary content. Navigate the site by either selecting the area of interest from the navigation bar or by searching for specific keywords.”

“After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised ‘no-fly’ list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.” Independent/UK