Seen this yet?

Skyscrapers from every city in which I’ve either lived for longer than a year or gotten married:

• New York City
• St. Louis
• San Diego
• Asheville

Just so I have something on the front page of my new MoveableType weblog:

Baseball players agreed to a two-year experiment Thursday to give home-field advantage in the World Series to the league that wins the All-Star Game. …

“I disagree with it, completely and totally,” said Los Angeles pitcher Kevin Brown a five-time All-Star. “I think it just takes away from the whole idea of what the All-Star game is about, which is letting the fans vote and letting it be an exhibition game. Now they’re trying to make it into something that it never has been.” …

The team hosting Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 of the World Series has won 15 of the last 17 titles.

This guy is going after a problem that drove me nuts a couple of years ago when I was working on my online Bible: the non-overlapability (my word) of XML tags. For example, I wanted to be able to do markup like this:

… <verse>xxxx xxx xxxxx</paragraph> <paragraph> xx xxxxx xx.</verse> …

Ray Kurzweil: Reflections on Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science.

Poor Sysadmin’s Guide to Remote Linux Administration.

Two-stage recursive algorithms in XSLT:

This article presents several examples of two-stage recursive XSLT algorithms. In each of them the first stage is implemented as DVC (divide and conquer) recursive template, and the second stage as simple recursive template. The examples show that such a combination results in better performance than other solutions, including classic DVC-only algorithms.

Funny anecdote I hadn’t heard before (from this Slate article):

[Neil] Young put Graham Nash in a rowboat, rowed the two of them to the middle of his lake, and played the Harvest album for him for the first time. Young’s house was wired up as the left speaker, and his entire barn as the right speaker. When somebody on shore asked Young how he liked the sound, he hollered, “MORE BARN!”

Attempting (again) to blog this from work using my Hotmail account, so here’s hoping it doesn’t mangle the HTML tags (I won’t be able to fix any problems until I get home tonite).

A Theologian for These Times?:

If there is a single ambition running through Hauerwas’s books, essays, sermons, and occasional writings, it is this: to undo the Constantinian synthesis between the church and the world. The church must reclaim the proclamation that scandalized the ancient world, that the “people who bear the cross,” not the sword, are “working with the grain of the universe.” (The phrase is borrowed from the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.) Hauerwas wants to free the American church from its bondage to idolatrous self-constructions—otherwise known as civil religion—and restore to its mission the countercultural practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, hospitality to strangers, and nonviolence, as well as nonresistance to death and suffering brought on by forces of evil.

I posted a review of Eric’s website on the new Amazon/Alexa web search thingie. My review is based on this fawning review of Jerry Maguire. Here are several adapted movie reviews that didn’t make the cut:

Eric Costello’s glish.com is a lot like its creator: slick, stylish and committed. In this case, it’s committed to the tricky, compelling idea of how society has the penchant for telling us what to do, how we should behave, and then invariably punishes us when we follow orders. Although its plot is about a smarmy young web programmer who both redeems and destroys himself by becoming honest, you can read between its lines and apply it to just about any of our societal ills.

Very much in keeping with Eric Costello’s previous website projects, glish.com is another sweet website wrapped around a jagged emotional core — one of those tempting sugar confections you devour halfway through before recognizing the strange new taste sensations at the center.

A FABLE OF love enduring under the most horrific of circumstances, glish.com is a risky enterprise that succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its writer and programmer, the Italian-American computer geek Eric Costello. The website handles a profoundly serious subject with a light touch, devoid of the sanctimonious or saccharine. In the battle against barbarism, Costello is saying, there are also the weapons of joy and imagination.

That first two are based on reviews of Jerry Maguire, but how about that last one? Can you guess which movie is being praised by the original author?