…in Japan. Not precisely safe for work…

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When you mark a bug “closed as a duplicate of bug X”, it would be nice if I were able to actually see bug X. Apparently, if I want to know the status of a fix, I have to send email saying “I reported Y, can you tell me if there’s been any action on X?”.

In this case, X has ID 5647954 and Y is 6770720, suggesting that X has been gathering dust for quite a while, and is unlikely to be fixed in an upcoming release. Japanese keyboard support in general seems to be pretty dusty, and I doubt you’ll get them working with Boot Camp any time soon, either.

[yes, this is because XP and Vista are stupid about keyboard layouts, and it affects VMware, too, but so what? You wrote the drivers for Boot Camp, and tout it as a feature, and it doesn’t work with some of your keyboards.]

…is that he never made one. In all the outraged coverage of the incident, you think someone would have bothered to mention that little nugget of information.

I watched the clip everyone’s linking to. He made a joke that implied that a player for the Yankees (who is good-looking, quite successful, and has been caught fooling around in the past) left the field in the middle of the game and had sex with Sarah Palin’s daughter. The exact words were “her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez”. Not a single word about rape, and, in fact, one could easily reverse the outrage by pointing out that these people are insisting that sex between a light-skinned female and a dark-skinned male must be rape.

Letterman and his writers obviously thought they were talking about Palin’s adult daughter, an unwed mother who was knocked up by an athlete. They’re guilty of being too lazy to check which daughter attended the game, or perhaps of not even knowing that there was another daughter. But that’s all.

If you happened to know (as Letterman and his equally-clueless writers obviously did not) that the daughter at the game was 14 years old, you could interpret it as a statutory rape joke, but I haven’t seen anyone say that. Unless something’s been edited out of the clip (and I got it from a site that was feeling the rage), there’s just no rape in this “rape joke”.

Why does Mail.app keep segfaulting in this method call:

[MetadataManager getAllCalendarStoreData]

I’ve turned off data detectors, rebuilt my iCal database, rebuilt my Mail indexes, and pretty much everything else I can think of, and it still crashes anywhere between 2 minutes and one hour after I start it up.

Mind you, I have no idea why your email client is importing all of my calendars in the first place…

[Update: various forum posts suggest that this is tied to Leopard’s merger of iCal to-do list functionality into Mail, which works by syncing your local to-do lists up with your IMAP server. Except that I don’t use iCal for to-do lists, and wouldn’t want them on my mail servers if I did. So, a feature I’ve never used that does something I don’t want has inexplicably started causing my email to crash at random intervals, and since the bug has been around since at least 10.5.2, it’s unlikely to be fixed deliberately. One can only hope that there’s enough mail-related cleanup in Snow Leopard that it starts working there…]

So, in a story about a well-placed State Department official on trial for spending the last 30 years spying for Cuba, what sort of direct quote do they lead off with?

"We were all appalled by the Bush years"

Because, y’know, that puts everything in perspective. If proven guilty, what we have here is someone who turned traitor because he started hating America during the Carter administration, but somehow, it’s still all about Bush. Fits the established narrative better, y’see.

Every once in a while, I’d visit the old Radioactive Panda site and see if there was any word on Eric Johnson’s next comic. The answer was always no (in the form of deafening silence, unless you visited the forums), but he has now returned with an official update, revaling a new start date and the reason for his three-year absence: respectively, “August 2009” and “World of Warcraft”.

Yeah, I can see that.

I saw something at Daiso a while back that I thought would make an amusing gift for my sister. On the back was found this label:

Now, what’s the product?

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When we got down to my house after seeing Spamalot, Nellie wanted to see Holy Grail. As I dug through the DVDs piled on my shelves, she was alternately amused and surprised by the contents of my collection, until I reached the one that turned out to be right above Holy Grail. I showed it to her, and got the reaction I expected: IT MUST BE MINE! (for a brief loan, at least).

When I told the story to Dave at lunch today, his blank stare reminded me how crucial a few years can be when it comes to pop culture. It had simply never occurred to me that someone in my usual circle of friends would never have heard of this:

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