Posts from 2004

This morning, as I pulled records for my show, the host before me asked if I had a special theme in mind.  “Nope,” said I; “the next thematic show won’t be until October 20th, which is Jelly Roll Morton’s birthday.  Nothin’ better than two hours of Jelly Roll.”

And then the double entendre hit me.

See, “jelly roll” was once upon a time a slang term for, to put it politely, female genitalia.  This was the case when he took on the moniker, in fact.  It’s sort of the circa-1900 equivalent of “Pussy Galore”.

There’s a tendency to think of earlier eras as being more innocent, more pure in some way.  They weren’t.  Not even close.  If you’re looking for a time when salacious puns and obvious, racy double entendres didn’t exist, you’re going to have to go back to the time before humans invented language, if not further.

Consider for a moment the first two verses and chorus of “They Got It Fixed Right On”, recorded by Georgia Tom Dorsey in 1930:

A girl with a Ford and a guy named Jim
He liked her and she liked him
Ford broke down in a quiet park
Didn’t get home ’till after dark But they got it fixed, ain’t no doubt
Nobody knows what it’s all about
Too bad that the news got out
But they got it fixed right on Well, Peg Leg Sam had a girl named Sue
She broke his peg leg half in two
Only way to fix the leg
Was to have his gal take a whole lot of peg

It starts out relatively tame, of course, but the second verse doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, now does it?  I’m not even sure it qualifies as a double entendre, which I usually think of as being at least somewhat coy.  And remember, this is from 1930.  It isn’t quite as direct as “gonna have you naked by the end of this song”, nor as crude as “I wanna f— you like an animal”— but it isn’t exactly “Tea For Two”, either.

I’m not about to claim that this is the only example of saucy songwriting from the era, either.  Cliff Edwards, better known as Ukelele Ike and the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, made a career of racy songs like “I’m A Bear In A Ladies’ Boudoir” and “I’m Going To Give It To Mary With Love”.  That was also the time when Mae West was saying things like “Let’s forget about the six feet and talk about the seven inches” in her movies.

Back to Georgia Tom, though.  A later verse keeps up the laciviousness levels:

A girl went into the butcher’s shop
Grabbed the butcher’s big ham hock
Butcher knocked her off her feet
She missed his bone but she got his meat

I’ve played this song on my show a few times.  One of those times, a fellow programmer came into the studio and said, “Are you sure the FCC will let us air this?”  It seemed unlikely at the time that they’d fine or otherwise penalize us for a song recorded in 1930, but now I’m not so sure.  After all, if Janet Jackson’s nipple can cost CBS approximately $1.1 million per second, who knows?

I know a girl in a pastry shop
Selling those doughnuts and lollipops
Preacher came down to save her soul
She asked him to fix her jelly roll

There’s that jelly roll again, and being offered to a preacher, no less.  If only the kids today behaved more properly and showed some respect for public decency, just like their forebears did, eh?

It’s long been the case that one of the things I love about my show is that I don’t have to worry about previewing the songs.  After all, how much trouble could I get into for playing Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong?  Plenty, as it turns out.  The original recording of “My Sweet Hunk o’ Trash”, a duet between those two, is included on a Billie Holiday collection we have at the station.  In this version, as Billie sings one of the verses, Louis intersperses comments between her lines (a common practice).  One of his responses is “F— ’em, baby”.  This was in 1944, and Decca records planned to release the song.  Only public complaints from Walter Winchell prompted them to change the line to “How come, baby” in the released song.  The compilation has the original.

So there’s one song I can’t actually air, despite it being recorded half a century ago.  That’s pretty clear.  Although, last I checked, classic rock stations could still get away with airing The Who’s “Who Are You?”, which features the very same ‘naughty word’.  But never mind that now; double standards are, like double entendres, very much par for the human course.  What worries me is the songs that flirt with the line between indecency and obscenity, like “They Got It Fixed Right On”.  Or, for that matter, the 1947 Dinah Washington number “Long John Blues”.

I’ve got a dentist who’s over seven feet tall
Yes I’ve got a dentist who’s over seven feet tall
Long John they call him, and he answers every call Well I went to Long John’s office and told him the pain was killin’
Yes I went to Long John’s office and told him the pain was killin’
He told me not to worry, that my cavity just needed fillin’ He said “when I start drillin’, I’ll have to give you novocaine”
He said, “Yes, when I start drillin’, I’ll have to give you novocaine
Cause ev’ry woman just can’t stand the pain” He took out his trusted drill
And he told me to open wide
He said he wouldn’t hurt me
But he’d fill my hole inside
Long John, Long John, you’ve got that golden touch
You thrill me when you drill me, and I need you very much When he got through, he said “Baby that will cost you ten”
Yes when he got through, he said “Baby that will cost you ten
Six months from now, come back and see me again” Say you’re supposed to see your dentist
‘Bout twice a year, that’s right
But I think I feel it bobbin’
Yes I’ll go back there tonight
Long John, Long John, don’t ever move away
Say I hope I keep on achin’ so I can see you every day.

These days, it’s hard to know what can get you in trouble; even a spot of dental work, we discover, just isn’t safe.  And twice in this entry, I’ve sanitized a certain word beginning with the letter “F” because I know many readers come here from work machines, and I don’t want to be responsible for getting them in trouble with their content filter administrator, let alone their boss.  Some people, upon tripping the content filter, have to fill out paperwork explaining the nature of the site they visited, why it had a Bad Word(tm) on it, and why they shouldn’t be reprimanded or fired as a result.

You’d think we’d have grown up a little more by now.

• They Got It Fixed Right On was published on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

Last night meyerweb passed a milestone of sorts: comment number one thousand was posted to the site.  The millenial comment, which was made on the post “Photo Hunt“, was:

Simon! Spell my name right! Have some respect for us poor muggles!

Congratulations to Min Jung Kim—who, in filling out the comment form for that very same comment, mistyped the URL of her own site.  Love the irony!  Love it!

• A Millenial Mark was published on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

This is kind of awkward, but here’s the deal: for an article that’s being written about me, we need to include some pictures of me in action, as it were.  I’m going to take some shots of me spinning records on my show tomorrow morning, but what I’d really like to get is good pictures of me presenting.  For these purposes, the ‘livelier’ the shot, the better.  Also good would be any amusing pictures from a conference hallway, or really in any social situation.  If I happen to look a bit goofy in the picture, so much the better; I really wish I had a picture like this one of Scott, but that’s a bit much to hope for.  We’re aiming for shots that capture my personality, not ones that make me look suave.  (Which would probably require some major Photoshop work anyway.)  Thus we’re trying to stay away from posed shots, in general.

So if you happen to have anything along those lines, please either post a URL in the comments or e-mail me directly.  This is for an online article, so the pictures don’t have to be super-high resolution, especially if you’re going to mail the pictures to me as attachments.  If the picture is used, I can’t guarantee that photo credit will be given, but I’ll push very hard to make sure that it is.

Thanks for anything people can contribute!

• Photo Hunt was published on Tuesday, September 21st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been fourteen replies.

Having talked about how to completely rip away all brower default styles in Firefox, let’s consider the bare minimum of styles we’d need to make the Web at least moderately readable.  As it turns out, the primary factor in document mangling caused by taking out the browser’s default styles is the loss of any display information.  In the absence of information regarding what kind of box an element should generate, they’re all made to generate inline boxes.  This is roughly equivalent to saying:

* {display: inline !important;}

Speaking of which, feel free to try that some time on a test document, or as an entry in a browser’s user style sheet.  The result should remind you of the no-defaults trick.

So let’s say we back up the browser’s default style sheets (you don’t want to lose them completely, unless you plan to re-install the browser) and then erase everything in html.css.  Having done that, we can restore a great deal of sanity to the Web by placing the following rules into html.css.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
  /* set default namespace to HTML */

html, body, p, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6,
ul, ol, dl, dt, dd, blockquote, address, pre,
listing, plaintext, xmp, menu, dir, isindex, hr, map,
multicol, center, frameset, marquee {display: block;}

li {display: list-item;}

area, base, basefont, head, meta, script, style, title,
noembed, noscript, param, noframes {display: none;}

table {display: table;}
caption {display: table-caption;}
tr {display: table-row;}
col {display: table-column;}
colgroup {display: table-column-group;}
tbody {display: table-row-group;}
thead {display: table-header-group;}
tfoot {display: table-footer-group;}
td {display: table-cell;}
th {display: table-cell;}

That rule set will not only cause block-level elements to start generating block boxes again, but it also lets list items be list items, hides the elements we’d like to have vanish, and restores table behavior to table markup.  With those few rules in place, browsing around will be much easier.  It might not be pretty, but it will avoid the extreme wreckage of removing all default styles.

There will still be some notable differences.  For example, paragraphs may now generate a block box, but they aren’t being given margins, so on most sites paragraphs will suddenly not have a “blank line” of separation.  Similarly, heading margins are gone.  Lists don’t have any predefined indentation.  Table cells don’t have default padding, and the “gutter” around page contents has vanished.  Of course, you might see some or all of those things on a site.  If you do, it means that information has been provided by the site’s styles.

In a quick browse of the Web, I found that CNN‘s site was still kind of scrambled by these styles, though certainly not as badly as before.  As an example, a lot of the article sidebars and pictures weren’t floated, which means the float behavior is markup-driven, not CSS-driven.  Why does it matter?  Because in Firefox, align="right" is just a markup hook on which the default style float: right; gets hung.  If that declaration doesn’t appear in the default styles, the markup will have no visible effect.  In other words, no floating.

The home page of The Mozilla Foundation, on the other hand, hung together pretty well, which indicates all of their layout is driven by CSS instead of presentational markup.  This didn’t come as much of a surprise, but it was nice to see.  I was pleased to find that meyerweb’s home page also stayed in decent shape.

So should you add these rules to your style sheets?  Not unless you’re feeling extra-super-mega-paranoid.  The percentage of visitors displaying your site with the default style sheets removed can be safely estimated to very closely approach zero, maybe even touching it.  Besides which, if someone does drop by with all default styles removed, they’ve probably done it on purpose.  If they then send you snarky e-mail about they broke your site that way, feel free to answer them with a polite acknowledgment that they did, indeed, successfully cut their own throat.  It’s not like that’s your problem, any more than you should be bothered that someone “broke” your site with an anarchic user style sheet that suppresses display of lists and paragraphs, or sets all non-replaced elements to use white text on a white background, or whatever.

A more interesting question is whether you should set up a browser to use just those rules as defaults.  I’m giving serious thought to maintaining two copies of Firefox: a normal install, and a development install that’s been hacked to use just the styles I listed before.  It could prove valuable in checking the design assumptions of a work-in-progress, and thus to identify possible weak points in the author styles.  As an example, if I loaded a new design into the development browser and found that lists were completely non-indented, then I’d know I was leaving the list indentation distance up to browser defaults.  At that point, I could decide whether or not that was a good idea.  In some designs, it might be fine, but in others it could be a problem.  Either way, I’d have the chance to consider that question directly, and reach a decision, instead of sailing blindly on, never having thought about it either way.

• Fractionally Restoring html.css was published on Monday, September 20th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been ten replies.

Every now and again, I feel good about our city’s main paper, The Plain Dealer.  Today was one of those days; they published a Spinsanity-like piece that dissected the distortions coming from both U.S. presidential candidates.  I was going to lnkblog it, but it turned out they’d split the piece in two on the Web, so I’ll link to them here.

• Whom Do You Believe?  Bush?
• Whom Do You Believe?  Kerry?

I’d have linked to the printer-friendly versions, except they contained a window.print call, and I wasn’t sure if they’d force a print in some browsers or not.  At the least, they’d call up a print dialog, which is kind of annoying.

The views I expressed in Partied Out are just deepened by this sort of thing.  I know, it’s nothing new.  That doesn’t make it any less depressing.

• Do I Have To Pick One? was published on Saturday, September 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Just in case anyone cares, I’ve finally brought the Media Is Funny and CNN Is Funny pages out of dormancy.  They’re now caught up to this morning.  On a related note, I saw something this morning that didn’t really qualify for either page, but was worth sharing nonetheless.  The ad server at The Weather Channel coughed up a filler image today, and lucky me, I caught it.

So if you were ever curious about how much screen real estate that ad was chewing up… now you know.

• A Few Spots of Fun was published on Saturday, September 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

I was just recently asked if attribute selectors must use quotes around the value.  In other words, are both the following two selectors legal?

a[href="http://www.meyerweb.com"] {font-weight: bold;}
a[href=http://www.complexspiral.com] {font-style: italic;}

“No, they’re optional,” I said with assurance.  And then the doubts started to gnaw at me.  What if they actually weren’t, which might make sense given that you can require the exact match of a space-separated list of attribute values? By this, I mean that if you declare:

div[class="this is a test"] {color: orange;}

…then the selector will match any div element whose class attribute is exactly this is a test, in that order, and with nothing else in the attribute value.  Or so I’ve always been given to understand.  In that case, if you left off the quotes, couldn’t that somehow be confusing to the browser?  Maybe not, but it still bothered me.

So I went digging through CSS2.1, Appendix G and found the grammatical definition of an attribute selector.

attrib
  : '[' S* IDENT S* [ [ '=' | INCLUDES | DASHMATCH ] S*
    [ IDENT | STRING ] S* ]? ']'
  ;

You all understood that, right?  Uh-huh.  Me either.  (This is one of those hostile-to-outsiders posts I mentioned a while back.)

I never liked grammar in school, and I still don’t, but it is sometimes sadly necessary.  So here goes.  When you run down the definitions of the all-caps words (I think those are tokens) you find that IDENT is an identifier, which is sort of a catch-all bin for things like selectors, property names, values, and such.  Fine.  STRING, on the other hand, is a collection of symbols and other fun stuff, again including the non-ASCII range but not the ASCII range.  But then it includes the entirety of Unicode.  I’m not sure how much sense that makes, but whatever.

So the whole point of this is: if quotes around an IDENT are optional, wouldn’t it have made more sense to say this?

attrib
  : '[' S* IDENT S* [ [ '=' | INCLUDES | DASHMATCH ] S*
    [ STRING? IDENT STRING? ] S* ]? ']'
  ;

Or even:

attrib
  : '[' S* IDENT S* [ [ '=' | INCLUDES | DASHMATCH ] S*
    [ '"'? IDENT '"'? ] S* ]? ']'
  ;

It’s the [ IDENT | STRING ] from the original definition that has me befuddled.  It seems like it’s saying you can include an IDENT or a STRING but not both, and since IDENT doesn’t include quotes, that implies that you can either drop in an identifier, or a string with quotes.  Why is this a good idea?  Does it mean that any identifier has to be unquoted?  Does it mean that there’s no practical distinction between a STRING and an IDENT in this situation?  Does it mean that quotes prevent the inclusion of anything useful?  Somebody let me know.

• Grammar Question was published on Saturday, September 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been sixteen replies.

Since a few people asked for it, I’ve created a test file that reproduces the Internet Explorer freeze reported yesterday.  You can find it with the title “Internet Explorer Freezes — BEWARE!“.  If you follow that link with a non-IE browser, you should see a static copy of the “Ten Things To Do…” post, with two differences:

1. I stripped off the theme stylesheet so the masthead graphic isn’t shown.
2. I inserted a warning/explanatory comment near the top of the document.

Under the hood, the main difference is that the style sheets are all embedded in the document, so if you’re so inclined you can download that single page to your hard drive and fiddle with it to your heart’s content.  If anyone can narrow down this problem to a very minimal test case, I’d love to see it.  Refer back to “When Browsers Attack!” for notes on what I discovered.  There may well be more to the story, but if so, I didn’t find it.

I’ll reiterate the warning, in case it somehow wasn’t clear enough: iif you load this document in IE/Win, the odds are very, very, very high that it will freeze Internet Explorer, necessitating a force-quit of the application.  It may also crash Windows.  If you don’t want those sorts of things to happen to you, then don’t load the document.  Clear?  Good.

• Freezer Case was published on Friday, September 17th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and CSS categories.
• There have been twenty-three replies.