yep i agree

I’m chuckling at the “turtle is protected” posts because it reminded me of a story I heard growing up in Oklahoma.

This woodpecker was just hammering away at the side of this guys house. He spent days trying to spray it away with the hose, sicking the cat on it, etc., all with no luck.

One morning he was fed up. It was 6am and the woodpecker was making a huge racket.

As he walked outside a neighbor watering the lawn said “you can’t shoot that bird, it’s protected!”

He grabbed the shotgun, walked outside and chambered a round. He then took careful aim and atomized the bird with one shot.

To which the guy replied “ain’t nothin protecting that bird…”

(1) The pragmatic reason is that you can’t: HTML and professional DTP software won’t let you. Trying to get around it causes more problems (like the spaces at the beginning of lines in Phil’s postings when the break occurs after the first space. (2) Read the history of this at the link posted above. (3) Forget what you were taught and forget logic and just look at the page; squint: you can see holes in the text, not good. (4) Since type designers and layout software designers assume people will not be double-spacing, font designs, kerning data, and software spacing algorithms are designed to get good results with single spaces (and remember, a “space” doesn’t have a particular fixed width; it’s what remains after all the computations are done for justification, kerning, etc.).

So, why is double-spacing after a period bad? It’s what I’ve always been taught

As of 2:20 pm 4/1/04, gmail seems like less of a hoax than it did at 8:00 am. I even put in for an account.

For as long as I can remember, Oklahoma has seemed like one of those, ‘Y’all ain’t from around here, BOY!’ kinda places and I have never felt very comfortable there. I did spend a night there on a cross-country trip, sept 9, 2001. I spent a lot of time thinking about the federal building and the nut-cases that felt oblidged to blow it up, I even drove past it (in my u-haul, no less) on the way out of town. It occupied my mind for the next thousand miles. Two days later it seemed like a distant memory.

As far as shooting critters and all goes, my great-grandfather and grandfather always carried some sort of rifle, just in case they had to shoot some critter or human that they felt particularly threatened by. I feel that things are way too civilised these days to even consider it. I suppose that not everybody is on the same page on this concept.

Phil, hope you get to continue west, there are some interesting sites in az such as the Pima county air and space museum (with a sr-71 and a pregant guppy) and the tucson titan II silo museum. These goodies make carrying a rifle for self protection look like baby toys.

Oklahoma is blessed with a large number of airports. Just about every town of any significance (pop 2,000 +) has an airport. Quite a few were former military fields including the monster at the Clinton-Sherman Airport at Burns Flat. 13503 ft x 150 ft. I beleive that it is the third longest runway in the US. I couldn’t find any quick way to confirm this.

Next time you come out this way, you should fly into the airport at Weatherford, Ok and check out the Tom Stafford Air and Space Museum.

–Stephen
in W’ford

What are people’s thoughts on “gMail” from google? I heard it was a hoax. 1 GB: Wow! I’ve got email going back years and it’s only like 20% of that, including attachments. Real or hoax?

Re. “French spacing”, shouldn’t that be “Freedom spacing” now? I must say it sounds so much cooler. It might even come back into fashion.

By the way, since we’re comparing atrocities PatrickG, it seems fair enough to mention all those Native Americans, approximately 12 million just happened to get in the way of the progress of the settlers. I studied this in high school here in Oklahoma. “felling Indians and trees with equal equanimity”, to roughly quote Tocqueville.

Speaking of frontier justice, it may even be plausible to include the victims of those other settlers in the tally, because the U.S.provides Israel with decisive diplomatic support for the continued, illegal occupation of palestine. Roughly 9 billion in total aid (approximately half of all U.S. foreign aid goes to this single country with no oversight mechanism. By comparison the staff for Turkey is about 100 people accounting for every dollar.)

Mr.Greenspun, glad you enjoyed the Oklahoma hospitality enough to pass along anecdote implying that the German tourists bore some culpability for the Holocaust. Kind of makes you wonder…

Ah yes, us simple Americans once more getting criticized by those superior Europeans.

Europe in the 20th Century: 20 million dead Ukrainians, 6 million dead Jews, Gypsies, and other inconvenient folks, millions dead in WWI and WWII.

We Americans may be a simple lot, but we haven’t killed any Mexicans or Canadians in great numbers since the 1800s. Aside from murderers, rapists, and horse thieves.