Yes, this weekend’s tiki party moblog posts didn’t take. Evidently my script here on the site thought it did its job adequately, but it just totally didn’t get the pictures down from Sprint’s site.

That script does what’s called “screen scraping”. It takes a nicely formatted HTML document and hunts through it for clues about where the important bits of data are–the title of the post, the URL of the image on Sprint’s site, etc. It’s clever, but brittle. I haven’t really delved into it yet, but probably, Sprint changed the format of those mails and broke my script. I know a couple weeks ago they started wrapping the title text in a preformatted-text tag, which is what gives it

this look right here

.

I’ll mess with it at some point pretty soon here. RSS readers, please forgive a few test posts that may sneak through. I’ll try and have them be posts of interesting things–like the drink I drank out of a hollow pineapple this weekend!

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Overnight, Hurricane Katrina pretty much nailed New Orleans. Nobody’s on the street reporting about it, it seems. From what I can find, all the worst-case predictions about NO’s ability to withstand a direct hit from a Cat 5 storm appear to be coming true. Experts estimated that 60% to 80% of the city would be wiped out by wind alone, even before the storm surge hit. They expected the French Quarter to be 20 feet underwater.

It sounds from the reports like most everyone evacuated okay. I’m sure it was pandemonium, but at least the stories aren’t about how many people didn’t make it out of the city. There are lots of people holed up in the Superdome (which evidently lost roof sections early this morning). MSNBC reports that the storm may leave up to a million people homeless.

We’ve got a lot, in this big ol’ world-leading country of ours. But all our technology and political power and military might just doesn’t mean much when something like this happens. Whoever we think we are, we’re just a flyspeck.

It’s not smart to push nature around, “improve” things with levees and elaborate drainage systems. One thing you can be sure about–Nature will push back eventually, and it’s way, way, WAY bigger than us.

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This is great. A compilation album that this guy’s band had a track on went plantinum, so he got the award. Then he got curious–would that thing play? If so, what was on it?

Platinum Record and Dove Awards

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We have the Ebay bug here at our house. Seems like hardly a day goes by without a vintage dress or a pair of bowling shoes showing up in the mail, and I’ve quit counting the number of PayPal charges on our credit card bill.

Here’s a nifty thing that showed up on Digg just now: this site aggregates Ebay auctions with less than an hour left, with selling prices under a dollar. Theoretically, there are bargains in there, and their interface gives you an easy (though slow–it’s heavily digged at the moment) way to sift through the garbage.

Happy bargain hunting!

Lastminute Auction - Bargain Hunter - Online Auctions

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Okay, so St. Urho…

Back in the olden days of Finland, they grew grapes there. There are no vinyards in Finland anymore, but back then it was all vinyards as far as the eye could see.

One year the vinyards were infested with grasshoppers. This Urho character drove them out, waving his pitchfork at them and saying, “Heinasirkka, heinasirkka, menetaalta hiiteen.” (”Grasshopper, grasshopper, go away!”) Evidently this worked.

Urho became to Finland as St. Patrick is to Ireland or St. Pied Piper is to Hamlet. The savior and driver-out of pestilence. Except not, because if you ask an actual Finn, they won’t know who the heck you’re talking about. Works out Urho is the creation of Finnish Americans who settled in central Minnesota.

This statue of St. Urho is the most prominent feature of Menahga, MN, Marcy’s home town. Every year Menahga has St. Urho Days, a celebration marked with parades, picknics, fireworks, and other festivities. Each year during the St. Urho Day Parade, that year’s Blueberry Queen rides a special float of honor, waving at the town plebians. My own Marcy Ray (nee Updike) was the Queen in Question one fine year (and I’m so dead for telling you that).

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And to make it a little more surreal, right now the music is a muzak “Sunrise Sunset”. Weird!

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