Steaming Turd

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I’m a big fan of Papa John’s pizza, but they’ve been doing some mystifying specials in recent weeks. First off, they removed my beloved three large one-toppings for $22 deal that they ran online for many moons. I could eat for a long time on those three pizzas

Second is this offer, made amusing by its contradictory fine print:

This isn’t even a bending of English semantics - it’s outright wrong, since “unlimited” means there’s no limit, but the limit here is obviously five toppings per pizza. I have it on good authority that you also can’t add a topping to a pizza more than twice (e.g., you can do “extra pepperoni” but not “extra extra pepperoni”), so it’s even more limited than the fine print indicates.

Third is this deal I got in an e-mail:

This seems like a decent deal (though not as good as my three larges for $22) unless you’ve seen their webpage, where they make this offer:

Makes one wonder if somebody in marketing accidentally brought in the “special” oregano…

I was just watching TV a bit ago, and on MSNBC, Tucker Carlson was on with Pat Buchanan and, er, a liberal syndicated radio talk show host whose name I can’t remember. They were discussing the recent decision by the Nevada Democratic Party to drop their Presidential debate that was to be held on Fox News, after Fox News head Roger Ailes’s open-foot-insert-mouth comment:

And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, “Why can’t we catch this guy?”

Now, analysis of this joke aside (is it a bash on Obama, or a bash on Bush?), the liberal blogosphere was already pressuring John Edwards to drop out of this debate because it was being held on Fox News, with Brit Hume moderating it. They then used Ailes’s bad joke as a scapegoat to apply further pressure to convince the Nevada Dems to drop the debate from Fox News entirely (remember, they were already applying this pressure before Ailes’s remark).

The analysis on Tucker Carlson’s show was that this was a bonehead maneuver on the part of the liberal bloggers: what better trial by fire is there for a Democrat, than to face off against the juggernaught that many liberals view as a Republican Party apparatchik? They agreed (and I agree with them) that there is a “sour grapes” attitude among many lefties that it is better somehow to spite conservatives to one’s own detriment than to let them become involved in the political debate. They also agreed that control of the Democratic Party is shifting far to the left, with MoveOn.org and other hardcore liberal activists directing what the party does, much as the Religious Right movement gained steam in the 1990s.

So, to my very few readers, what do you think? Is the activist wing of the Democratic Party right to boycott Fox News on principle? Or does this simply distance them from independents, possibly costing them control of Congress and the White House in 2008 or beyond?

I awoke this morning with the intention of going through and resetting the clocks on all my computers manually to avoid the hassle of patching them. My two Windows boxen (desktop and laptop) still were in Standard Time, so I advanced them an hour, planning to undo the automatic change when DST would have been going to have arrived in three weeks.

Then I logged into my two Linux boxen, only to find that they had taken care of it themselves. Holy carp, how did that happen?

Then it hit me. The change to the DST boundaries happened in 2005. Surely I’ve updated something on them in the past year and a half or so, yes? Beats me as to when, but apt under Debian updates everything but the kitchen sink if you don’t configure it otherwise, so somewhere along the way, I probably updated some minor package and inadvertently downloaded the patch. Woot.

Inspired by my accidental greatness, I then decided to look into patching my Windows machines, which was a lot easier than it could have been. On XP, you can download the patch, although it unfortunately requires validation. I hate ActiveX and IE, so I used the standalone validator and downloaded it.

On Win2k, though, you have to go the manual route. Fortunately, MS has made available tzedit to manually update the time zone settings, including DST boundaries. They also provide a handy guide for using it (including the correct time zone settings).

The toughest update for me was to fix the DST settings on the company palmtop computer. I had to update to ActiveSync 4.5, install the patch, and then sync the palmtop. Who knows what extra stuff the ActiveSync patch installed, which is why usually I shy away from patching unless necessary. Still, it’s done, and I guess I won’t have to worry about it until the next time the gubment gets the genius idea to extend DST a little bit instead of just making it DST year-round.