The playoffs are still on? It's June people, June!

Well, it will be June 1 tomorrow anyway, but when it's over 30 degrees outside it doesn't make any sense to be playing hockey still.

I thought the Stanley Cup was over weeks or months ago. What up wit dat?

It's hot and sticky. This is what a rain forest in Costa Rica must feel like.

There are a lot of grass clippings on the sidewalk. They must have been put there to feed any stray cattle who decide to roam the streets. There can be no other explanation.

Natural gas supply lines hiss rather loudly.

Those big black signs with the bright neon yellow lettering are visually obnoxious.

No matter how large the SUV, it never contains more than one passenger.

Random clanging sounds eminating from deep inside ominous-looking industrial buildings.

I'm hungry and could go for a doughnut. Mmmmm, doughnut.

How many satellite dishes does a single building really need on its rooftop?

Painting the brake calipers red on your little red sports car looks hella cool.

Birds chirping everywhere. I hear them but I don't see them. Oh wait, there's one.

As freedom-loving members of a liberal society, we should give everyone free personalized licence plates. Also free chocolate eclairs.

New shoes make my feet hurt.

Former U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen died today at the age of 85.

He was Michael Dukakis's running mate during the 1998 U.S. presidential election. I remember watching Bentsen and Dan Quayle during the vice-presidential debate in 1988. I was 15 years old and it was the first time I had taken any interest in U.S. politics. It was an eye-opening experience. Bentsen impressed me as an intelligent person with moderate views who would put the United States's needs ahead of his own political ambition. I was disappointed that he and Dukakis went on to lose the election.

This was the view from my hotel room on Monday night, about half an hour after sunset.


I love the night views in San Francisco. I have some more San Francisco pictures posted here. I posted those several years ago but the view is still the same.

Last night I went out to dinner with Janet and Ryan. This was a treat, because Ryan doesn't like to sit still for long, so going out to eat is not something that we do very often.

We went to Boston Pizza in Kitchener, which was the location featured a couple months ago on CBC's Venture, when a waitress switched jobs with their CEO for a week; hilarity ensued.

We sat down and a few minutes later, another family sat at the table next to us. There was a woman about our age with two little girls, maybe 7 or 8 years old. I mention this because it figures prominently in the punchline of this story.

Ryan discovered the crayons, so he had little interest in his bug-shaped noodles and tomato sauce. At 21 months, he is still learning the difference between scribbling and nibbling.

The conversation between Janet and me went something like this:



I blurted out this last word rather LOUDLY.

Now remember the two little girls at the table next to us?

Their mother looked over and shot me the Look Of Death.

You know, the how-dare-you-say-that-word-in-front-of-my-precious-kids-you-social-reject look.

I get that a lot.

I realize now that I was wrong. I should have said "compulsive sex addict" instead.

---

The "-holic" suffix is an example of a cran-morph.

Why is it called a "cran-morph"? Think "cran-apple juice" instead of "cranberry and apple juice." This is made-up because on its own, cran is not a word; it is meaningless. Cranberry is not a compound word, unlike blueberry which is "blue" + "berry" which are both actual words.

Another example of a cran-morph is the word lukewarm. It looks like "luke" + "warm" but luke is not itself a word; in fact, in English it only appears as part of lukewarm

I find these words to be fascinating markers in the evolution of our language.

When I was in elementary school, we had the M-S Read-a-thon every year. (We read books and collected pledges to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada.) And there is a fundraising event every year on TV called the Jerry Lewis Telethon. Both readathon and telethon use the "-thon" ending from the word "marathon" which is a 26-mile endurance race. This might all make sense if mara meant "to run" and thon meant "a lot," but the words "mara" and "thon" are meaningless on their own. Marathon is the name of a town in Greece.

In 1972, a break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate Hotel eventually led to President Nixon's impeachment. The name of the hotel came to symbolize the scandal itself, so that "Watergate" is popularly known to mean the break-in, rather than the hotel. Today, we add "-gate" to indicate a scandal or cover-up. A Google search on plamegate returns 1,210,000 hits; there are also thousands of hits on such terms as enrongate, iraqgate, bushgate, and many others.

You can go into any fast food restaurant today and order a chicken burger and they will know exactly what you mean: a chicken sandwich that looks like a hamburger. But the word hamburger doesn't mean a burger made from ham. It is a German word meaning from Hamburg, the city where the food originated.

One of my favourite word formations is the use of "-tacular" (from spectacular) to indicate something amazing or wonderful. I actually use these words all the time. (This car is fastacular! This chocolate is sweetacular! This web site is blogtacular!)

However, because the words are actually intended to suggest spectacularity and do not pretend that spectacular is "spec" + "tacular," these are not true cran-morphs, but portmanteaux.

The difference between a portmanteau and a cran-morph is that a portmeanteau combines the meanings of two different words (cyborg from "cybernetic" and "organism"). It does not suggest that "cyb" or "org" are words on their own.

Even Ryan already has a favourite portmanteau, although he can't pronounce it yet. It's the tangelo, which is an orange-like fruit. It's a hybrid of a tangerine and a pomelo.

Other portmanteaux in popular use include ebonics ("ebony" + "phonics"), avionics ("aviation" + "electronics"), infomercial ("information" + "commercial"), and the KFC spork ("spoon" + "fork").

Speaking of The Simpsons earlier, that show has also given us many portmanteaux, including sacrilicious, velocitator, tomacco, poindextrose, Viagrogaine, and Presbylutheran. Mmmmm, tomacco...

At work, I often use the words prosumer ("professional" + "consumer"), alphanumeric ("alphabetical" + "numeric"), pixel ("picture" + "element"), and transceiver ("transmitter" + "receiver").

Then you have your geographical portmanteaux, such as Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) and Mexicali (the capital of Baja California, in Mexico).

These words are all around us. Embrace them! Better yet, huggle them!

WRTV Indianapolis reports that a Shell gas station in Plainfield, Indiana accidentally set the price on their pumps to $0.002/gallon, allowing several drivers to fill up their gas tanks for just a few pennies.

One guy even came back with all his truck-driving buddies to take advantage of the unexpected bargain. Them trucks got big tanks, and since they were paying at the pump with a credit card, nobody working at the station noticed the unusually low price.

Until some goody two-shoes customer decided to go inside and tell the cashier exactly what was going on. This is the real story here! I mean what half-assed moron would actually draw the gas station's attention to the error?

You know that kid in seventh grade who'd jump up and down, hand in the air, exclaiming, "Teacher! Teacher! Peter is drawing a crude picture of you and Nancy is passing notes around! Over here! Teacher!!!"

This was her, all growed up now. She must be so proud of herself.

Come on. This isn't the case of handing a cashier a $10 bill, getting change back for $20, noticing the error, and handing her back the difference so it doesn't come out of her minimum-wage pay cheque. This is a gas station. They're fair game. Remember when gas stations raised prices to over $5.00/gallon after Hurricane Katrina, remember?

Ever watch My Name Is Earl? That's karma, baby.

Worse than that, in this particular case it was a Shell station. Shell is responsible for environmental devastation in southeast Nigeria; paying the police and military to raid villages where protestors rallied against the destruction of farmland to build pipelines (the police killed 80 and the military killed 2000); and for bribing witnesses to testify against outspoken activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed.

(You do know you are implicitly supporting these activities every time you fill up at a Shell gas station, don't you?)

(Not that other oil companies fare much better in their environmental and human rights records.)

(I am not in the least bit suggesting that getting a bargain on gas prices somehow makes up for murdering thousands of innocent people. My point is trying to understand why somebody would want to help a company like that.)

The mistake was "blamed on a computer glitch" which is a common cop-out for human error. Computer programmers, manufactures, and operators (all humans) can make mistakes; but computers never do, because they are not sentient beings, and are therefore incapable of doing anything other than what they are designed, built, and instructed to do.

Blame the people, not the computers.

Anyway, it serves them right. Gas stations have been taking advantage of consumers for so long, they deserve to get bit back once in a while.

I'm a third of a century today! (That's 33 1/3 years.)

I guess it's all downhill from here.

Thanks Janet for noticing this!

The New York Times reports that for the first time since 1979, communication has taken place between the leaders of Iran and the United States.

The contents of the letter from the Iranian president to the American president have not yet been made public, but our crack team of investigative journalists here at Sassan Sanei, The Blog of have managed to intercept the letter as it passed through the Swiss embassy in Tehran.

The contents are reproduced below, verbatim:


Bush will have to respond carefully, but the conciliatory tone seen in this letter could be the first step toward mending Iranian-American relations.

I'm not very good at making small talk.

This might come as a surprise to anyone who has met me. I'm guessing that most people would describe me as a friendly person.

Put me in a room with an ambassador, or a former U.S. president, or the chairman of the FCC, and I'll be just fine because we'll have something specific to talk about. Where there is a purpose or agenda, I'm totally in my element. I can immerse myself into the conversation and there isn't a hint of shyness.

But chances are that when I get home from work and pull into my driveway and see my neighbour, with whom I have had a casual acquaintance for close to 7 years and is the nicest person you'll ever meet, I'll just babble incoherently because I really have nothing interesting to say.

Like yesterday, when I got home, my son Ryan (age 21 months) was standing on the front porch. He saw me pull into the driveway and figured out how to open the front door. My neighbour, who was tending to his garden, called over to me: "He's getting big!"

"I know!" I replied.

"I remember John when he was that age." John is his son, and he's maybe 25 years old.

"Long time ago!" I replied.

"Sure was," he said. "They grow so fast."

"I know! Ryan can open the door now! We have to keep a close eye on him!"

"Oh, he'll get into all sorts of trouble, you just wait!" he said.

"I know!" I replied. "Did you hear about those two kids in Listowel a few months ago?"

He gave me a quizzical look.

"Two little boys, they were both only two years old," I continued. "It was in the middle of the afternoon and their parents fell asleep, or passed out drunk, who knows, and the two boys got out of the house and got into their neighbour's house, and just destroyed it! I mean they completely trashed it! Holes in the wall, paint spilled everywhere, all the dishes broken on the floor, plants dug up, carpet and wallpaper torn, it was terrible! Apparently they were at it for over two hours before the neighbour got home and stopped them. They just demolished the poor guy's house!"

At this point my neighbour is staring at me incredulously, and I realize what I'm saying.

"But don't worry," I hasten to add. "He--" I point to Ryan "--would NEVER do that to YOUR house."

This comment did not help.

I continue with a nervous laugh. "And uh, we don't get drunk in the afternoon and pass out on the couch." I quicken my pace, talking and walking. "Unless they were just taking a nap. Not drunk. Don't know. Wasn't there." I'm practically running toward my front door now. "Well I'd better get going, okay, see you later!!!" sprinting the last few steps to my house. I whisk Ryan up in my arms and go inside.

I don't know why I babble like that. I know it's embarrassing but I don't do it on purpose.

In hindsight, I could have just commented on the nice weather we've been having.

Or if the weather wasn't nice, tell a good fart joke.

I wish I had an infinitely golden lariat of truth extraction.

I would use it only for good. (I would not use it for evil.) I would sneak up on a malevolent person, lasso it around them, pull the knot tight, and extract the truth from them.



They could not break free and they would have no choice but to comply, because they would be ensnared in my infinitely golden lariat of truth extraction.

First, I would ask the people in charge of KFC to tell me where they breed their headless chickens. Then I would set all the chickens free.

Then, I would visit Parliament Hill ask Stephen Harper whether he really eats babies. He would have to tell me the truth, because he would be lassoed in my infinitely golden lariat of truth extraction. If I determine that he has eaten babies, I would punish him for it.

Afterward, I would visit the set of The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, and lasso Bill O'Reilly. This would force him to conduct an entire newscast without spewing a single lie. Normally that would be impossible for him to do, but with my infinitely golden lariat of truth extraction, I could make it happen. While at Fox News, I would also make them admit to the bovine growth hormone cover-up and the 2000 election fraud.

I hope along the way to answer that age-old question, the one I have been wondering about since childhood: who took the cookie from the cookie jar? (Who me?) (Yes you.) (Couldn't be.) (Then who?)

Finally, I would track down Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef and find out whether the $40,000 worth of truffles that he will use on this Sunday's Battle Truffles episode are really truffles, or just button mushrooms painted with black squid ink to look like truffles. I suspect they may be real truffles, but I can only verify this with absolute certainty by using the infinitely golden lariat of truth extraction.

There are a few other things that I would do with my infinitely golden lariat of truth extraction, but I won't admit to them in a public forum like my blog. But I assure you that they would all serve the public good, or at least my own.

1. John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s plane crashed because of DRUGS, according to air traffic controller who finally speaks out, and who presumably managed to obtain a urine sample from the pilot moments before the ill-fated plane plunged into the sea.

2. JonBenet Ramsey case finally solved, no really this time, at last, honest (exclusive details revealed inside).

3. There are 36 things I don't know about Tim McGraw, which may be an underestimate.

4. By learning these 25 fun, hot, try-it-now ideas, I can have great sex RIGHT NOW, in the grocery checkout line.

5. How to match a sexy hairstyle to the perfect bikini for my body; said hairstyle presumably refers to the hair on my gorilla-like midriff.

6. Oprah Winfrey's weight has changed by a dramatic 100 pounds, from the time of the printing of this weekly magazine to the time of her most recent nationally televised appearance which was at approximately 4:00 pm today.

7. I CAN redecorate a room myself, without paying an expensive professional to do it.

8. How to bake the perfect cookie in 9 easy steps.

9. Nostradamus made a bunch of predictions that were so vague they could be applied to virtually any world event past, present, and future, with startling accuracy.

10. Halls cough drops come in many more flavours than might actually be necessary.

11. The guy in line behind me could be described as impatient, if by impatient you mean in a psychotic hurry.

12. That little container of blueberries cost $3.99?!

I'm not saying he does, and I'm not saying he doesn't. I'm just saying you have to weigh the evidence for and against, and draw your own conclusion.

Well, I guess this settles it then!


Perhaps I was wrong when I made this claim that "Stephen Harper will boil your children alive and eat them for dinner."

Apparently though, he does have a taste for cormorants:


But they will live to fly another day.

Okay, the clip about the birds was irrelevant, but the wording on the caption was just a little too startling/funny not to post here.

I clicked on a Google AdSense ad for a web site called HTML-Protector (www.html-protector.com), which claims to prevent the HTML code for your web site from being "stolen" for the low low price of only $14.95. It purports to "completely secure any Web site" and "Completely HIDE ALL your HTML."

I knew immediately that this claim had to be false, because a web browser would still need to receive the HTML, somehow, in order to display the page. And if a browser could get it, any program could get it.

So I was curious to learn how it worked. According to the FAQ on their web site, "HTML-Protector 2006 works by taking your existing Web pages and hiding your HTML using a high-security JavaScript encryption algorithm. (...) But if your users look at the HTML, all they EVER see is random characters!"

Now I'm thoroughly intrigued. A "high-security JavaScript encryption algorithm"? That doesn't make sense. JavaScript files are written in plain text. How could the encryption algorithm be passed to a browser without being readable by a human? I can't think of any way for that to be possible.

They provide a sample page on their site. Although the referring page tells you that the password is "test" (so that you can see what it looks like for yourself), I decided to see what would happen if a visitor did not know the password. Could I still view the page?

I was prompted for the password, so instead of entering "test" I hit the Esc key. This took me to a blank page. Now I know I had to be prompted for the password somehow, so I checked my browser history and found the previous entry to be http://www.html-protector.com/encrypt/sample.htm.

Although they claim to "Completely HIDE ALL your HTML" it was a trivial matter to view the page source. I used Quick Macros to download the page into a string variable and display it.

This was my code:

IntGetFile("http://www.html-protector.com/encrypt/sample.htm" &str's)
out s

This was the result:



OH. MY. GOD. That's their "high-security JavaScript encryption algorithm"?! All they've done is replaced every character in the HTML file with its ASCII value in hexadecimal. (That means A becomes %41, B becomes %42, C becomes %43, etc.) The JavaScript unescape command converts them back to plain text.

Here is the result:



I have several objections to this approach:

1. Contrary to their claim, it was ridiculously easy to view the HTML source of the page.

2. Contrary to their claim, the user does not see "random" characters, but the ASCII representation of each character. There is nothing "random" about these characters because every three-character sequence correlates directly to the original character.

3. A search engine might not decode the ASCII representation because it is embedded within JavaScript, so that the site would not be found when a user enters a relevant search term. Since many web sites depend on traffic from search engine, this could be an enormous blow to any commercial site that implements this software.

4. The file size grows to 3 times its original size. The unencoded HTML file is 16,550 bytes while the encoded file is 48,760  bytes. This is because every character has been replaced by three characters.

5. The password is visible in the HTML file! The problem with this approach is that it gives away the password, which may unlock other areas of the web site as well. The JavaScript that handles the password is:

p=prompt('Enter Password:','');if(p==null||p!='test')window.location='about:blank';

What's worse, the site owner could put all kinds of private information into the HTML file, thinking that it is secure because of the password protection.

It would be much better to implement password protection at the server level, so that the contents of the page are never sent down until the correct password is entered. Sending the contents of the page in a crudely encoded format and then asking for a password is just an invitation to decode the page.

This, by the way, is the Quick Macros code I wrote to decode the page. All it does is change %41 back to A, %42 back to B, and so on.

IntGetFile("http://www.html-protector.com/encrypt/sample.htm" &str's)
s.escape(8)
out s

It took me less than 10 seconds to write that!

One final objection. They claim in their AdSense ad to have been featured on CNN, and on their web site quote a review on internet.com, but I was unable to find either of these references on those sites. I'm not saying that they're lying, just that they are making claims that I was unable to independently verify, which did not earn them any credibility points with me.

Conclusion

The HTML Protector software offers only superficial protection against viewing your web page's source. The casual visitor might be deterred and not bother to spend any more time trying after clicking View Source, but it offers no real protection against someone with even a basic understanding of how browsers work.

They might be forgiven for that, except for the bold claims on their web site that the "brand new HTML-Protector 2006 software will completely secure any Web site" and "You've locked the thieves out for good." As demonstrated above, these statements simply aren't true.

My suggestion is to save your $14.95, and spend more time with your family and less time worrying about the bands of marauding "thieves" who apparently roam the Internet in search of their fruitful bounty: your HTML.