Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Fred Phelps and his cavalcade of loons were recently broken financially by the State of Maryland. I followed part of the debate about this at Harry’s Place (alas I can’t find the thread, sorry) and whilst I suppressed a wry smile at Phelps being thoroughly fucked-over I think there are two more important issues at stake.

At this point I feel I must add a personal perspective (and no, I’m not coming out) and I have followed via the ‘net the progress of the Phelpsians for longer than they have been commonly known about in the UK (via documentaries on BBC & C4). Indeed, when I first heard of them I emailed a Topeka, KS newspaper and by first dispatch received an extremely nice email from a sub-editor saying that Phelps was for real and his website and other activities were genuine and not the wind-up I suspected. The kindly lady in Topeka lamented this fact. Alas, I no longer have the email. My IBM Deskstar HD self-destructed shortly afterwards. It was apparently a failing common to that model. Hitachi have subsequently sorted it but too late for me - I’ve gone over to Western Digital. I digress.

Anyway, back to my two points…

The first is simple. The first amendment rights of the Phelpsians to be thoroughly obnoxious I feel should trump any attempt to censor them by law even when their activities go from the merely contemptible to the outright obscene it should not be the law that nixes them. Not when there are folks like this around. Of course that raises the issue of the value of non-government actors and that’s a wider issue I’m not prepared to raise right now though hats off to those bikers. I shall raise it though, this is a libertarian blog afterall.

My second point is more nuanced. The first, the defence of freedom of expression, is an absolute. Fred Phelp’s rag-tag army of loons are utterly self-defeating. Even parking that URL guarantees that the overwhelming majority of the much maligned US “Religious Right” is against them. They focus the issue of homophobia in the US and they define battle-lines in such a way that practically everyone else is on the side of the angels.

In a way that Mr Phelps would hardly approve of, he has added to the gaiety of his nation even more than if he’d (forgive me for this image, I will suffer for it at 4am) taken part in a Gay Pride conga line in the Castro district of SF wearing naught but a leather thong.

Unfortunately, in a perverse effort to conserve bandwidth, the author of this theme constructed the PHP and CSS without standard formatting. I mean nada spaces beyond what is absolutely syntactically required, none of the standard indentations or anything. I suspect he or she had ‘em stripped out mechanically to save a coupla K. It’s annoying and not just because I pride myself on my code-style.

I shall find a way. Hell, I can program in Fortran 77 using a CLI. Visual C# be buggered, shell systems are where it’s at!

So no cool invisible tiger graphics just yet. Designing them was kiddy stuff compared to the inpenetrables of Wordpress (no access to the HTML) or Blogger (no access to the CSS). I may have those the wrong way round but I was so narked by that point that I almost threw the Thinkpad out of the window. And this is my beloved “Echo”, a computer I adore and a machine whose almost confiscation almost resulted in an entirely justifiable assault on a US TSA official. I resisted temptation because my shoes were being X-rayed at the time and in my stocking feet I was not in any position to give them the kicking (up the bracket and indeed elsewise) they richly deserved. They also had guns and it would’ve brought my honeymoon to a spectacularly premature halt. And in Philadelphia of all places. W C fields was wrong. Philadelphia Airport - And you thought Atlanta Hartsfield was bad!

I suppose I also kinda wanted my marriage to last longer than one of Brittney Spears’s.