In other German news today, Austria denounced Arnold Schwarzenegger for not granting clemency to Tookie Williams. What, like we should have patted him on the back and given him a Nobel Peace Prize?

A bad man died today, but a number of people whose movies I’ll no longer watch are still whining, “Why, he redeemed himself! He became a good Christian! He wrote children’s books! He became a spokesperson, speaking out against hatred! He doesn’t have hate in his heart! He’s all about Love and Compassion!”

Sorry, but I’ve heard this same spiggot of bullshit from or about the KKK, Adolph Hitler and Charles Manson. So why are so many people of the opinion that Tookie Williams didn’t deserve the Death Penalty?

Never mind that Tookie was one of the founders — more on that later — of the violent Crips street gang. Never mind that he was convicted, by a Jury of his peers, of murdering a 7-11 clerk. Never mind that he was convicted, by a Jury of his peers, of killing a Taiwanese family; yes, even their daughter. Never mind that he was convicted of two counts of robbery. Never mind that he was involved in multiple attacks on other inmates and guards while in prison.

No evidence? Never mind that the murder weapon was one he had purchased, legally, years earlier — or that it was found in his home after the murders. Never mind that Tookie bragged about having done these terrible things to many people — including friends, family, roommates and other Crips members. Never mind that others who were with him during the crimes turned on him, as well.

Never mind that this case has had a full twenty-five years of judicial and investigatory review supporting the fact that he is not only guilty, but deserves to die.

Never mind that this guy was not just a “deluded and confused young African-American” who was “in with a bad crowd;” in fact, Tookie, himself, claims that he was the bad crowd: a founding member of the Crips. Never mind that that being the case, we will probably never know all of the atrocious behaviors, that this man personally ordered or coerced, of many deluded and confused young African-Americans.

No, let’s ignore everything we know about Tookie! Let’s make another movie about him depicting him as a humble father who loved children and never hurt anyone!

In my book, being a Man is all about taking responsibility for your actions, and accepting the consequences thereof. It is that mentality that seperates the Men from the Boys.

Schwarzenegger said it right:

“…without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption.”

I don’t even want to hear why this so-called ‘man’ deserves to be exalted the the status of Nelson Mandela by offering him Nobel Peace Prize.

And if State-Sponsored execution does in fact upset Austria’s sensibilities and remind them of Hitler during World War II, so be it. That’s a sure sign that they need to start denouncing Hitler more and Schwarzenegger less.

After having a but too much of the Holiday Spirit (perhaps several of them) and getting too smashed to drive, it seems that a 31-year-old German Civil Servant added insult to injury by proving that he was also entirely too drunk to dial.

On his drive home from one round after another of alcoholic merriment, a 31-year-old German man was befallen by a blow-out. Rather than change the tyre himself, he decided to keep his hands clean and leave the dirty work to the breakdown services.

 

The jolly civil servant, who had a blood alcohol level seven times that of the legally allowed limit, had his license taken away eight years ago, and was driving a borrowed car, dialled what he believed to be the number of roadside assistance, and blurted out his tiddled tale.

 

“My car is broken and I need you to come and fix it,” he said. “And you’d better be quick because I’m really pretty drunk and I don’t have a licence so it wouldn’t be good if the cops drove past.”

 

It wasn’t until he was done with his inebriated rant that he realised he was not talking to a breakdown service at all, but to none other than the police from whom he was so keen to hide.

 

“He wanted us to come quickly, so we did,” said a police spokesman in the western town of Monheim.

Can you Say, “Dummkopf!” Boy and Girls?

I knew you could.

Man! While Monty’s on the subject of zealots (which, let’s be honest, is always a great topic), why am I getting so many e-mail complaints and comment spams dogging this site for nothing other than its lack of CSS?

Firstly, I simply don’t care if you’re running the latest piece of animal dung with a name stolen from a deplorable 1982 movie starring Clint Eastwood. You’re a 7% minority by our statistics.

Secondly, if you consider yourself a web designer and you can’t make a page that looks right in all browsers, you need to find another form of employment. Or maybe find a form of employment — the real world detests your kind of attitude.

Thirdly, we have no intention of validating with XHTML 4.01 Strict. Why bother, when what we’re doing works? The page you’re looking at looks exactly the same in every single browser that comes here save for Lynx.

Fourthly, if you have no other complaint about this site than its lack of CSS, then obviously we’re doing something right.

CSS has become the Whine of the Uberdork: “Technical people can be creative, too!”

Regardless of what an Uberdork can do making a Round CSS Layout, it still won’t give them any sense of design skill or color coordination. It expands their possibilities, yes, but for the most part, their sites are still going to be ugly. Form & Function will most always be at odds.

It’s a fact that the *vast* majority of sites carrying those “CSS Certified!” banners DO NOT conform the specification they’re carrying the banner for. I’m one of those freaks who clicks it on every site I see it on, and I rarely hit a single site that conforms with no errors — and I’ve only ever seen two sites at all that got no errors, and no warnings.

With the majority of the published Templates, Skins and Designs out there using CSS, at least 50% of them will not work in one browser or another. Commonly, those designs carry the banner, “Your browser sucks! Download TPFKAN Now!” Logic dictates that they should instead read:

“I don’t like your browser because I’m too much of a zealot to believe real-world statistics showing a super-high IE market share, and thus the entire market share is using an inferior product which does not conform to specifications, and even though 50% of the people in the world are using IE, the specification is what is standard and not what people are using. Therefore, you should go and download TPFKAN because I’m too much a lazy prick to fix my code which is most probably based on an RFC rather than an actual, certified standard.”

Thus far, the majority of the CSS styles you see out there are written by Technical Programmers who do it just so they can complain about the limitations of the most popular browser by far (kudos to Mr. Bill).

I have no problem with CSS, but some common sense needs to be used when designing pages with it. We do make use of CSS — a lot of it! We have a tabular structure, all decked out with CSS inside. It’s relatively tidy, and people seem to think it’s a decent design, aside from complaining that it’s not in such-and-such DTD.

As for TPFKAN, I hate it. The best way to screw up IE forever is to install TPFKAN. Actually, an even better way is to uninstall TPFKAN, which will take half of the settings and HKLMClasses with it, just like its mother product did.

People love to complain about how bad Netscape was, and forget that Firefox is just a new version of the same old junk.