I've put some draconian new regular expressions on the comment blacklist. If you're here from, say, x-monkey.com, you're absolutely welcome to leave your URL, but you'll need to mail first so I can uglify my pretty little regex with a gigantic list of porn-ish terminology. Actually, this is the first time I've seriously sat down to work out this particular voodoo, so I apologize in advance for any other unintended censorship.

For other regex grasshoppers, try:

• A Tao of Regular Expressions in combination with
• a cheesy javascript regex tester

There's some things most people can do very easily, that I struggle with. I've given everything a good honest go, actually several good goes, but it just never works out. Not only am I not very good at these things, I've accumulated a ball of anxiousness from my failure to learn that makes me avoid them somewhat more than is strictly reasonable.

Sadly, though, I can't confess to my difficulties. Whenever I do, my confessor just smiles and says "Oh, but I know the trick to that, it's very easy, just let me tell you!" - and I smile and nod and express appropriate gratitude for such sage advice, but what I really want is some acknowledgment that it's okay to feel frustrated. We all have our mental blocks, after all, and most of the time we manage to muddle through life anyway.

Here's a partial list. Comments with "helpful" suggestions are NOT allowed on this post, but if you post your own unaccountable inabilities, I promise to be sympathetic and understanding.

1. Cooking a winter squash to the correct amount of doneness
2. Using Green's functions to solve partial differential equations
3. Rolling my Rs
4. Curling my tongue (it's apparently not genetic after all, but interestingly enough tongue-curling is associated in men with the ability to wiggle one's ears, which is something I can do, a little. Then again I'm not a man.)

The spoon is not a predator. Consider the following:

1. The spoon has a rounded head, reflecting a panoramic view of its surroundings. Predators, by contrast, have vision focused straight ahead.
2. How often, soup aside, do you eat meat with a spoon?

The spoon is a puddingvore, honed by years of evolution to subsist primarily on yogurt, tapioca, and applesauce. Spoons can survive on beef stew, but if we're going to insist that our spoons adopt a diet contrary to nature, we shouldn't be surprised if they are susceptible to illness. Proper care and feeding for your spoons can reduce the need for expensive large-scale antibiotic treatments in the silverware drawer.

The lovably zany California state goverment really needs to suck it up and raise taxes, but every so often someone proposes a spending cut I can actually support - or at least proposes to eliminate a mandate of indeterminate but non-negligible cost, which I assume will produce some spending cuts at some level. There's a million zillion things more important than food for feral dogs.

I hate it when people place animal welfare above human welfare. I sent the following note to my state legislators, and fellow California residents are hereby encouraged to do likewise.
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Although there are two supplements to the water post laying around in draft form, I can't allow so much seriousness on the front page at once. So, it's time to play the "find a list of ways in which you know you're from a place and mock it" game. AHEM.
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Dude dude dude dude dude! All you Britishes need to keep licensing your televisions, that's all I can say. That, and aaaaaah the ducks!

(via mefi and defective yeti, respectively)

Squid-head woman - did the squid eat her head first?

Kevin Drum points to a pointed editorial in the Washington Post - So Torture Is Legal? - which Anne Applebaum wraps up with a basic civics lesson:

Voters -- ultimately the most important source of pressure on democratic politicians -- can petition their congressmen, their senators and their president for more. If they don't, the elections will be held, the subject will change. Without a real national debate, without congressional approval, without much discussion of what torture actually means and why it has so long been illegal at home and abroad, a few secret committees will have changed the character of this country.

She's quite right. We need to be kicking and screaming and biting and scratching, and spitting in the face of administrative stonewalling. Declining to subpoena Justice Department torture memos is not particularly useful behavior here, and the Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee (it was a 10-9 party line vote) need to be bitten, scratched, kicked, and spat at until they improve. Iowans, this means you.

A discussion on Frogs and Ravens has morphed from earthquakes to water resources - which was at least partly my fault. Maybe mostly my fault. So, here I am with a steaming pile of blame ready to plop back down on my own blog.

This isn't the first time I've twigged onto a casual remark about how large, rapidly growing, arid megalopoles are sure-fire recipes for disaster. Having worked with the SoCal water supply for nearly a year now, I've been feeling like I should have a response, and what follows are some thoughts in that direction.
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Been a while since I've had anything about monkeys. In the news today, we learn that war is bad for monkeys, too, and some Indian monkeys are very ill.

On a brighter note, Florida law permits the use of monkeys as service animals for the handicapped. Or so claims some columnist; the only reference to monkeys in the searchable Florida statues is regarding the management of rhesus monkeys in former canal lands.