Comments widget unavailable, replaced by another gadget

For ages, I had a widget in the right-hand column that highlighted recent comments. Recently this widget seemed to break down, and I haven't been able to find any kind of operational version. So, I've replaced it by an amusing widget that highlights the most popular blog posts. It's not obvious why people visit those particular blog posts rather than others.

Undesirable comments

When a blogger allows anybody and everybody to leave comments, it's inevitably an open invitation to spammers and other polluters to send in their rubbish. For a couple of months now, I've been obliged to intervene regularly to trash Japanese comments that point to a porn website. Two other topics attract comments from fuckwits: creationism and hang-gliding history. Reluctantly, I've been obliged to make the Antipodes comments process a little more watertight.

Talking about undesirable comments, I've just received a friendly but naive comment to an article I wrote in September 2006 about my former friend Jean Sendy (who died in 1978). Interested readers can use Google to discover that Jean Sendy's work has been plagiarized for years by a notorious nitwit whose name I will refrain from stating here. In any case, I don't intend to reply to the above-mentioned comment. As Jacques Chirac once advised a fellow-politician: "Never mention explicitly the name of an opponent, to avoid giving him publicity."

Old blog articles

Within the concept of blogs, there are weaknesses.

— In particular, while it's relatively easy to see what the blogger has just said recently, it's harder to follow him back in time. For example, if the author of a typical blog such Antipodes wre to talk today about a heroic person such as George W Bush, readers throughout the planet might cry out for specimens of the way that blog author spoke of this same hero in the past. How has the adoration of Bush aficionados evolved from one Iraqi event to another, from one catastrophe to the next?

— Another problem. Blog readers don't necessarily realize that there might be interesting discussions going on in the recent past between the blog author and commentators.

I am currently working on a possible solution to the first problem: an adjacent Flash website that would enable visitors to explore easily the archives of a blog author. Naturally, I'll talk more about my project as soon as it materializes.

Concerning the second weakness, there's no better solution than the duplication of all that occurred. My article entitled Fragile existence [display] provoked a reaction from a certain Anne Skye:

If this does not convince you of "His" existence, then nothing will, dear Bro. Next time you have a bug in your blog, try NOT doing the Hail Mary's and see what happens. Just kidding, you can't apply double blind control trials or any sort to the existence of "God", 'cos it's all a matter of a quantum leap of faith. But... I still can't help thinking, when I read your powerfully moving story, how "He" moves in such mysterious ways!

I replied as follows:

Anne Skye: I was relieved when you corrected instantly the suggestion that we humans can verify the effectiveness of Hail Marys by performing two tests upon identical situations, one with Hail Marys, and one without. The stumbling block, of course, is the concept of "identical situations". As Heraclitus said: "You cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you." And he sums up his vision of constant flux with one of the most profound and lovely declarations ever made by a mortal: "The sun is new every day." Between the initial test, with Hail Marys, and the following one, without Hail Marys, time has passed, and the world is no longer the same place. Even God has grown a little older. To put it roughly, He's no longer the same man He was a little earlier on. Has He grown wiser? Or has He maybe shown the very first symptoms of some kind of divine Alzheimer's? Has He simply changed His mind, for reasons that are known only to Him? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that God no longer repaired computer bugs of any kind, for moral and business reasons, because He realized that His interventions of this nature were unfair competition with respect to human specialists who depend upon fixing computer bugs to buy bread and shoes for their poor children. So, I see no way of testing the Hail Mary solution in a sound scientific style.

Now, your metaphor of a "quantum leap of faith" is another kettle of fish. I hasten to add that I would be disappointed to learn that you were using the expression "quantum leap" merely as a synonym for "big"... which it isn't, since quantum leaps are infinitesimally small, between one shell of orbiting electrons and a neighboring one, either up or down. Within the context of David Deutsch's fascinating conception of parallel universes, founded largely upon a certain way of interpreting quantum physics, it's perfectly conceivable that an individual's decision to have faith in God could be the outcome of a certain quantum value. [Don't get me wrong. I'm talking merely of an individual's having or not having faith in God. I'm certainly not talking of the hypothetical existence of God.]

Finally, you evoke the sentiment that our Cosmos behaves "in mysterious ways". I couldn't agree more with you. For a long time, up until the arrival of quantum theory, the scientific outlook on things was rigorous, logical, austere, Cartesian, cold, calculating, etc. In a nutshell, relatively simple for an agile mind, but as boring as hell. Then quantum theory upset the old Newtonian apple cart. Quantum theory is so extraordinarily bewildering that I wonder constantly whether I've truly understood the first word of it. Be that as it may, overnight, science became a synonym for Lewis Carroll's wonderland, since it encouraged us to explore the weird nature of things as they are seen through the looking-glass provided by intellectual tools of a new kind. Today, the challenge of scientific researchers, scholars and thinkers who wield these new tools consists of attaining what they often refer to as the theory of everything, referred to by the acronym TOE. I consider your "quantum leap of faith" as nothing more than the use of slightly different letters: GOD. But there's a significant detail: Those who talk today about TOE know what they're talking about...

Blog bug

Breaking news: Less than twenty minutes after posting this article, I was no longer troubled by the pernicious bug at the origin of my article. As you can see, my header [with the word ANTIPODES, followed by a descriptive line and an image of the Cournouze at sunset] is once more impeccable. Does this mean that my ten Hail Marys gave rise to a miraculous intervention? I'll leave it up to my readers to decide whether this might have been the case. Meanwhile, I place more trust in advice I found on the Blogger forum, suggesting that Google recently changed something without letting us know, and that the following lines of magic code should now be inserted into my HTML template:

#header-inner {
width:550px;
height:336px;
}

I'm wondering now whether or not I should simply delete the present article from my blog. On the one hand, since the bug has now been fixed, and readers no longer discover a squashed header block at the top of this window, the article has become pointless and indeed confusing. On the other hand, the article has the merit of introducing and demonstrating, in a real-time context, the novel approach to solving computing bugs that consists of frankly appealing explicitly to divine Providence. For the moment, I think it's preferable to leave the article in place, as evidence of a kind...

---------- end of breaking news ----------

For the second time in less than a fortnight, there's a bug in my blog: the squashed header block at the top of the window. I don't believe the bug was caused by anything I did personally. It just appeared suddenly... like an apparition of the Virgin. Maybe it has something to do with the rather blasphemous terms of my article about Saint Bruno. Along with other bloggers, I've reported this problem to the Blogger forum. There no longer seem to be any old-fashioned blood-and-bones human beings in charge of Google's Blogger system. So, I don't know if, how or when this bug might be fixed. Meanwhile, while awaiting a hypothetical solution to this bug problem either from Google or from the Blogger forum, I've decided to try the following bug fix, to see if it works:

1 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

2 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

3 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

4 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

5 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

6 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

7 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

8 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

9 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

10 Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

That's a count of ten. For the moment, we'll see if that's sufficient. Fortunately, because of the cut-and-paste feature of my word-processing software, and the fact that Google is offering me astronomical storage space for my blog, I'll be able to augment considerably, if necessary, the number of Hail Marys. One way or another, we'll get this bug fixed.

Blog problem: Something is broken

All seven pictures have disappeared mysteriously from my last article, entitled Sunny weekend with Manya. I've reported this problem to the Blogger forum. Maybe the problem will just go away tomorrow. Maybe it won't... in which case I'll try to get in contact with a human being in the Blogger administration [a difficult task]. I'm including the following photo for testing purposes, to see if it gets displayed or not:

Meanwhile, since starting the present article, a member of the Blogger forum has provided me with the following reassuring information:

Blogger apparently has some kind of problem with the images and
supporting them. This issue occurred all day yesterday and Blogger
didn't explain what happened but by the evening it seemed to be fixed.
But of course, the issue acted up again this morning. Unfortunately,
Blogger hasn't been communicative with the blogging community here so
we don't know what's going on and we're at their mercy. Rest assured,
it's not anything you're doing, but there's a bug in Blogger that
they're not letting people know about so we just have to hope they're
trying to fix it.

We're a vast community of blog authors, across the planet, who are exploiting this excellent service named Blogger. It's not a habit of the owner—the distinguished Google enterprise—to allow vulgar bugs to persist for long. So, I guess I should wait patiently for things to fall back into place. If that doesn't happen within a few hours, I'll simply reload the missing pictures...

PS Since the pictures did not reappear spontaneously in the article entitled Sunny weekend with Manya, I ended up reloading them. So, the article is now displayed exactly as it was when I first compiled it... and maybe I'll never know what went wrong.