Dark thoughts about O'Connor

Everybody was surprised about O'Connor being the one who retired first. Shocked, even. I just thought it was unfortunate until I heard her say the Scary Words:"I want to spend more time with my family."
This has been, in recent years, code for "I've been run oput of office and I don't want to talk about it."

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But there have been too many of these sudden reversals and retirements and they have been too convenient for the Republicans. I'm not above thinking there have been middle of the night visits.

Meanwhile, I have sent the requisite emails about the new judge. And you can too: go here and while you're at it, go here.

My son walked in while I was sending the emails. "You don't think that's going to affact George Bush, do you?" he asked. And then I realized what it's for, really: it's to break up the apparatus. The greater the voice of opposition, the more Republican defectors we get, and the more spine the Democrats get, and that's what we need, to save ourselves, and I'm not being hysterical here. On the radio yesterday I heard that the funding for developing nuclear bunker busters has been restored from being cut a few months ago -- naturally I can't find anything about the story today. The link, by the way, is to the present type of bunker buster, which does not have a nuclear warhead but is packed with depleted uranium. Depleted is, you know, a misleading term, since depleted uranium has enough going on to make you very sick.

In other news, I'm halfway through Black Star Rising and I still can't tell what Frederick Pohl is on about -- but he certainly seems to be having a lot of fun.

in other news . . .

I did not miss green garlic season after all. Went to the Saturday farmer's market(1) for fruit but mostly brought home green garlic, garlic flower, and these green onions with round white onionness on them.

(1)

Tuesday -- farmers market in Felton (in the mountains: twelve? wiles away)
Wednesday -- farmers market downtown (the one I can walk to)
Friday -- farmers market westside (in a gentrifying industrial block) and Watsonville
Saturday -- farmers market in Aptos.

I think the other days have them somewhere close by, but I don't remember.

Does anybody know why I keep getting a munged page with the error message that the style code didn't finish running in a timely fashion? It never happened before this week and now it's happening more than once in a day.

css questions

Here is the layout I would like to use for the index page for Bella and Chain. Nice and clean, right? To the left of the leftward bike chain will be the links to the chapters. To the right of the rightward chain will be a description of the project. Between, the current chapter.

As I understand things, to make the page readable by the most people possible, the three areas of the page should be set in percentages relative to the width of the browser area the reader is using. I almost understand how to do that using the css block things. I'm getting there.

But see what's happening at the top of the page? I want that wheel to overlap with the chain just like that. So far I think that the chain is a separate image from the wheel and title, so that the chain can repeat-y down the page. But I want the wheel to be in that position relative to the chain no matter what the width of the screen is. If I set the chain at 20% from the left, and I set the wheel at 5% from the left, and the screen gets wider, the wheel moves to the left relative to the chain: if the screen gets narrower, the wheel moves to the right relative to the chain. Can I anchor the wheel image to the chain instead of relating it to the box or the screen?

Alternately, if I set the side bits to absolute measures, and anchored the chains and the wheel to some number of pixels or ems from the left (and from the right for the rightward chain), would the center box with the current chapter still accomodate different sized browsers?