We'll Be Seeing More and More of This

Landlord finds mummified tenant.

If you were to automate enough of your routine financial responsibilities with a service like CheckFree, had a mail slot that opened to a foyer, and didn't have much physical contact with the outside world, your assumed presence as a utilities customer could easily continue on 'autopilot' for several years after you expired, and nobody would notice. Kinda reminds me of that old Ray Bradbury story about the house.

Weird.

A Letter to Congress from Michael Corleone

Dear Members of Congress,

It is with deepest respect that I, Michael Corleone, extend the sincere appreciation of both my own Family and that of my esteemed colleagues.

As you might expect, the rise of the online gambling industry has put a serious dent in our betting operations over the past five years. Between the clear audit trail left by electronic transactions and the tendency of online betters to wager smaller amounts than they would at back room poker games or speakeasy casinos, we had begun to fear that this lucrative industry might slip forever from our grasp.

And so it was with great surprise and pleasure that we discovered, this past Saturday, that you had chosen to pass control of this cash cow back to organized crime in the form of Prohibition.

As you know, the Prohibition of vice is our lifeblood. Without it, narcotics, prostitution and gambling would be doors that were closed to us. If we had to survive solely on extortion and other forms of naked violence, this society would hardly tolerate our presence. We would have little or no place left to thrive in America. But as long as you allow us to be the preferred suppliers of commodities that will always have significant demand, by virtue of human nature, then you guarantee our ongoing prosperity.

So once again, the heads of the Five Families extend their deepest respect and a heartfelt "grazie molto".


Sincerely,

Michael Corleone


P.S. Kudos on your recent work in Afghanistan. The supply of high-quality smack hasn't been this good in years!

Cross-posted to Bring It On.

Using GFM with Blogger Comments

Alrighty, kids. This is a really, really fugly hack to demonstrate appending randomized text to comments, but it works.

I started with a blank Blogger template, applied Browserfulsel's Custom Blogger Comments hack, and added the functions that I've been calling 'GFM' into the header.

I modified the function cFrmPost slightly. After it trims the postBody.value, the modified version calls a function called AppendText. AppendText returns a set of three randomized phrases. These get tacked onto the end of the original comment just before it's posted.

The result of this is that when you add a comment to any post on this blog, it appends a block of text detailing your secret plans to blow up the world, piss in the watering hole, or put big hickeys on all the fair damsels.