Posted by robert maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t on 02/16/07 17:41

> From: "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4...@centralva.net>
> You seem to go round and round on this like a June Bug on a string.

I'm not familiar with the term "June Bug". I checked Google, and
one reference claims that's a mis-use of the word "bug" because
it's really a beetle, not a true bug. Is that what you're referring
to?

When I was visiting Houston, there were these flying arthropods
(maybe insects, maybe not) which engaged in sexual intercourse
while hovering in the air. The locals called them "do-it bugs". Is
that what you're referring to?

For completeness, I also looked up the exact phrase "June Bug on a
string", and I see it's a music title:
<http://cdbaby.com/cd/balch>
June Bug on a String (Balch, 1995) was inspired by a feisty June bug
that entertained the music contest judges at Uncle Dave Macon Days. A
thread was tied to his leg, and he flew in circles above us as we
listened to the music. ...

Maybe this is closer to what you meant:
<http://www.iit.edu/~smart/acadyear/miscwaves.htm>
wings in the air. Porter mentioned that, in our rural past, children
could get virtually endless and totally free enjoyment by putting a
June bug on a string! For a detailed description see the June Bugs
website: http://www.cmstory.org/exhibit/plum/june.htm.
So did you do that sort of thing when you were a kid??

Anyway, it's quite unlikely I'd behave like a June beetle if
somebody tried to tie a string to my leg, and I definitely have't
been behaving in that way in this thread.

On the other hand I do feel like that man with the donkey on his back.
(I wish I could find a Web page that contained the full story.
Google doesn't have any such indexed, at least not that I could find
with the obvious keywords. Maybe somebody else can find it for me,
if there's a copy online at all.?)

As for children torturing June beetles like that: Where I lived
AFAIK we never had anything like that. The only "bugs" I remember
specially were
- "play bugs" (what the kids called them, how I first learned of
them, but our parents insisted the correct name was "sow bugs",
but now on the InterNet I see the correct name is "pill bugs")
- "ladybugs" (what the kids called them, but adults said they were
more properly called "ladybird beetles", which agrees with
InterNet)
- aphids (no disagreement about name)
- earthworms
- ants (red ants bite/sting, black ants don't)

All in Sylmar (northernmost part of Los Angeles, which became
famous in 1971 when a earthquake in the hills near there caused one
wing of a hospital to break off and turn sideways and partly upside
down, killing lots of patients and staff, but a few years later the
name of the earthquake was changed because hardly anybody knew
where Sylmar was located, so they had to change the name to some
*other* town nearby where the quake *wasn't* just so people would
at least get the general area right; That pisses me off!).
<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sylmar+earthquake+1971&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oi=scholart>
(still has the correct name)
<http://www.data.scec.org/chrono_index/sanfer.html>
(has newspeak name, but mentions correct name "also called")
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_San_Fernando_earthquake>
(has newspeak name, but explains that *neither* name is really correct,
should probably be called the Iron Canyon earthquake, oh well)
(Oh well, at least there's no disagreement about the name or
epicenter of the "Loma Prieta" earthquake of 1989.)

Communication was made difficult by disruption of telephone, water,
and electrical service.
Hmm, that WikiPedia article claims that disruption of **water**
service contributed to communication difficulty?? Howso???

<http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1307810>
The Sylmar/San Fernando Earthquake caused the earth to move 2 feet.

The whole earth moved two feet? I don't believe that for a moment!

> Look if your document in *new* Use DocType:

IMO That doesn't parse. Is it possible that contains a typo? Did
you really mean to say "is" instead of "in"? Or are you using some
slang idiom I just don't understand?

> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

What should the corresponding meta be? Is it OK if I keep it
as-is:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=us-ascii">

> And do *not* use XHTML's single tag element syntax

Are you referring to <emptytag/> or <emptytag /> or both or something else?
Should I instead, for non-container (empty) tags, say: <tag></tag> ?

> <br /> <hr /> <img /> <link />

That's in a separate paragraph as you posted it. Is it supposed to
be linked to the previous paragraph?

By the way, there's a feature in some programming language, maybe
perl, whereby you start a string with a keyword label, then have
multi lines of quoted stuff not containing that label, then finally
that label on a line by itself to terminate the long string. That
seems to be a reasonable hack to allow quoting strings that have
lots of special characters in them without having to individually
quote each individual special character, as well as a way to quote
long sections in a way that is clearly marked for humans to see at
a glance. The NET crock in SGML seems to be a gross mis-design of
that otherwise useful idea.

> Do not use XHTML unless you have a compelling reason to do so.

Shall I over-interpret that to also mean I shouldn't even *try* to
write code that is transitional between HTML and XHTML? Just give
up the whole idea of doing that which the class instructor insisted
we do for the class, backtrack a ways from that goal?

> the most popular browser does not handle XHTML when served
> properly is another reason not to use it.

If you're talking about MicroSuck Internet Exploiter, I don't much care.
What about Mozilla what'sitsname?
What about lynx?

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