“Wait until France gets a hard shot in the nose. Wait until France reacts with some nasty work. They’ll get a golf-clap from the chattering class over here and a you-go-girl from Red America. France could nuke an Algerian terrorist camp and the rest of the world would tut-tut for a day, then ask if the missiles France used were for sale. And of course the answer would be oui.”
— James LileksYoutube link, because Sony doesn’t like embedding.
Also, new slogan: “Stand up for Hillary! She can’t do it alone!”.
In the following pictures, you see an elderly gentleman whose angry
ranting about the destruction of his dock has suddenly been washed
away by the sight of a 12-year-old 10-year-old girl. What is he
saying?


The correct answer is 2: 「おお〜、8年後が楽しみじゃ」
The cane is a nice touch, don’t you think?
[Update: now on CPAN]
There are multiple competing algorithms for converting latitude/longitude locations into something easier for humans to work with. Some of them are proprietary, which makes them pretty useless offline or after that company goes out of business.
Google came up with a plausible rationale for inventing their own Open Location Code rather than adopting geohash or something similar. It’s Open Source up on Github, and they supply APIs for several common languages.
But not Perl. Naturally, I had to fix that, so here’s Geo::OLC (compressed tarball). It has a full test suite, a simple command-line tool, and a CGI script that generates a dynamic labeled grid for Google Earth. I think I’ve about got it cleaned up enough to put it on CPAN.
For amusement, the sample location I use in the POD documentation, 8Q6QMG93+742, is Tenka Gyoza in Osaka, which is exactly the sort of place that you’d have trouble finding with standard addressing methods. Actually, you’d have trouble finding it with Google Maps on your phone, as my sister learned.
I tried not to go overboard with Perlisms, but the code still ended up fairly compact, largely because most of the existing APIs were written while the formatting was still in flux, so they’re more generic than necessary.
[Update: turns out someone did write one, but it never made it to CPAN: Geo::OpenLocationCode. Looks like he converted one of the other APIs instead of writing it from scratch, so he inherited the same bug in recover_nearest.]
Once upon a time, there was a third-string idol group called Gal♥Doll. As you might expect from the name, it was a trio of pretty girls uglied up in Gal makeup and fashion. I found a few videos, which I won’t link because they’re terrible, but the only reason I know they exist in the first place is that AV actress Miharu Usa is promoted as a “former idol”. Very little digging (as in “reading to the bottom of the article”) was necessary to discover that Miharu was the “ace” of Gal♥Doll, Ryouka Nishinaga (center).

Honestly, if I’d seen this picture first, I wouldn’t have been interested enough to follow up on her, and the stills from her AV work are typically unappealing. Instead, what caught my eye was this (NSFW):
The Soberanes Fire is still going strong, with 95,716 acres burned, and still only 60% contained. Almost all of the active fire area is deep in heavily forested mountains, and for extra fun, there’s apparently a heck of a lot of poison oak in that area, which is affecting firefighters despite their precautions.
Still no word on catching the clowns whose illegal campfire started it.
Air quality is good in my area; I think everything that’s still burning is on the other side of the mountains now, and the winds are pushing the smoke and ash southeast.