Pick a prophet, any prophet

I'm working on Yet Another Bible Project^TM, for which we're extracting footnotes from the Quark page-layout files of an NIV study bible and converting them to HTML and thence to a proprietary pocket-PC markup. The Bible, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, is long—66 books in the standard Protestant version—and I spent most of the morning doing the HTML conversion for the seventeen prophetic books of the Old Testament, Isaiah through Malachi. And I was just about finished when I realized that whoever had extracted the text from Quark had wound up creating the exact same file for Zechariah and Zephaniah. I.e., it's either Zechariah twice or Zephaniah twice, with different file names. Oy Bozhe. Fortunately they're not very long books—Zephaniah is three chapters, Zechariah is fourteen—so redoing the work on whichever one didn't get done won't take as long as it would for, say, Isaiah (66 chapters—Bible typesetters really dread Isaiah). But still: even if the names do only differ by two out of nine characters, they're still different books; they've even got Haggai between them, for heaven's sake. (Yeah, okay, I didn't notice the problem all morning either; but I was doing a lot of batch work, not actually looking at the text.)



Zechariah and Zephaniah are probably doomed to always be mistaken for each other; like Slovakia and Slovenia, the presidents of which probably hear the other country's national anthem more than their own when they deplane in a foreign country. Maybe those two should just combine national anthems, have the same tune with different words; and when nobody's looking, we can combine those Z-named prophets into the single book of Zechaniah (or Zephariah; flip a coin). Heck, throw some of the other minor prophets in there too: Zephanahum, Haggakkuk, Hoseamos, Joebadiah. I'm pretty sure no one would notice.



Disclaimer: I'm not advocating taking the books out of the Bible (I think you have to be the Pope or start your own religion to do that); just squishing them together to reduce the number of book titles. I have a similar feeling every time I work on a Bible concordance: I don't necessarily wish the Bible had fewer total words, just that it had fewer different ones.

Today's time-waster

Via NewYorkish:



Build a Better Bush, a sort of digital Mr. Potato Head with a photo of Dubya. There aren't too many features you can change—just hair, eyes, and mouth—but options include "bad hair dye," "comb-over," "wall-eyed," "needs a shave," and "missing some teeth." (The NewYorkish post laments, "Sadly, this little program doesn't allow you to pierce or tattoo him (or even add a little red string to his wrist), but hopefully we'll get lucky and someone will design one before the election.")

Advice solicitation

For the two or three people who actually read this regularly: What's your favorite blogging platform, and why? I've been meaning to get off Blogger for, um, a long time, but haven't ever really taken the plunge. A year ago I downloaded and installed MT, but didn't implement it, and now they want money, which I'm reluctant to pay. Especially since some of the other platforms are getting more widely-used and looking pretty spiffy. I like the look of Expression Engine, as seen at pesky'apostrophe and Sixth World, and popular among the goddesses of Moxie; it costs money too, but every site I've seen with it is just neat-o keen-o, and there's a free 30-day trial. Greengrl is using WordPress, which is free, free, free!, and has some of the functions I've been desperately wanting (categories, a little calendar doofunny), but I'm not sure how good it is with redesigns and skinning (my other majorly-craved feature). That "free" thing motivated me to download and install it yesterday, and poke at it a bit; the PHP-handled stylesheets gave me a headache, and I don't know how much one can do to change the way the comments look, but it has a nice interface and the installation was almost as easy as promised. (It would have been easier if I'd remembered all my database information, which is my own darn fault.)



I'm thinking I'll stick with WordPress, and see what I can do with it; but before I invest heaps of time editing the imported entries and assigning categories and trying to figure out the templates and all that, does anyone have any particular testimonials for or warnings against what they're using, or what they used to use and moved away from? Is ExpressionEngine worth the money, especially since I'm not exactly high-traffic and trend-setting? Is there anything else out there I should look into?



So, hey, talk to me. I'll be here all week, don't forget to tip your waitress, and don't feed the squirrels, even if they ask.

Overheard

In my office, during a conversation on crime and punishment (i.e., which counties you're most likely to get fried in) in Mississippi:

A: Justice is not blind.



B. Just cross-eyed.

A PBS program on the Olympics, with footage from the various modern games; as the Munich tape rolls, J.: "Two words that will only appear in a science-fiction novel: Jerusalem Olympics."

"Salus populi," but not those populi*

Dear Missouri:

Yeah, well, we don't like you either.

Sincerely,

Zhaba



(I refer, of course, to the vote to amend the Missouri state constitution to prevent same-sex marriage; I think I'll have to start calling it "Mister-and-Missusouri." [Not that I usually call it anything; I can't remember the last time I talked or wrote about Missouri at all. {After a find-in-files search on my entire computer: Okay, once: it's in a New York Times article quote that I posted during the Democratic primaries in February.}])



Although—I'm trying to look on the bright side here—every state that votes to change its own constitution is another reason not to change the U.S. Constitution. Hey, if the states are banning it themselves, the country doesn't need to ban it, does it? And that seems to be the only argument that works right now, anyway, and the only one that conservatives can get behind (including, recently and notably, Lynne "Don't ask about my lesbian daughter" Cheney): Leave it up to the states! Small government, remember? And then, if in two or five or ten or eighty years, the people of the states that vote against same-sex marriage now decide that, hey, maybe it's not such a bad thing after all, it'll be a lot easier to individually amend the amendments of those state constitutions that it would be to change the U.S. Constitution again.



So, apart from this bit of carping, I'm not going to get too bent out of shape about it. I'll reserve that for the president and members of the U.S. Congress and anyone else who's trying to f!ck with us on a national level. And it's not like I was planning to spend a lot of money vacationing in Mister-and-Missusouri anyway...



^* Missouri's state motto: "Salus populi suprema lex esto"—"Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law."

Anthropomorphism of the day

Overheard: two guys talking about the weather (currently 82°, 71% humidity); one of them refers to it as "sultry."



My train of thought: Sultry? "Sultry" is Rita Hayworth. This is just sticky and nasty. This is Christina Aguilera.