Catching Up: Best of 2005: May

Here's another installment in the continuing effort to distill the best postings from my personal mailing list. These are from May 2005. * * * * * Late-Night Political News from About.com "Laura Bush was a big hit at the White House Correspondents Dinner. This is something new for the Bush family -- intentional comedy." -- Jay Leno "President Bush said today that Social Security could be going bankrupt. He said the good news is that it won't happen for at least 50 years and by that time you won't even have to worry about Social Security because the temperature of the Earth will be 158 degrees." -- Jay Leno "Just 72 hours after President Bush met with Crown Prince Abdullah and held his hand, oil prices fell to under $50 a barrel. Boy, imagine if President Bush had let him get to second base -- we'd be paying like a buck-ten a gallon now." --Jay Leno "I guess you all heard about the big scare at the White House yesterday. You know about this? A false alarm about a plane violating White House airspace caused the Secret Service to evacuate the president from the Oval Office. That shows you how times have changed. Remember back in the '90s when an alarm just meant Hillary's coming?" --Jay Leno "Everybody was scared. The Bush twins were running, trying not to spill their margaritas." --David Letterman "This is absolutely true. During the scare Vice President Cheney was inside working while President Bush was outside riding his bicycle. So it was a typical day at the White House. Remember the last time this kind of thing happened, he was reading a children's book. This time he was riding a bicycle. How old is he -- 12? ... You laugh but as soon as they gave the all-clear he went into the kitchen to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich." --Jay Leno "President Bush and Russian President Putin discussed a plan to create a permanent cease fire in the Middle East. And if it works there they are going to try it on the Hollywood Freeway." --Jay Leno "In his biggest decision ever on the environment, President Bush has moved to open up 1/3 of all remote national forest lands to road building, logging, and other commercial adventures. This is part of the No Tree Left Behind program. In fact, if you'd like to see one of our giant Redwoods they'll be at Home Depot next weekend" -- Jay Leno "In honor of Cinco de Mayo down in Washington, Tom DeLay is accepting all bribes in pesos." --David Letterman "The new president of Iraq said that U.S. troops will probably be out of that country in two years. ... The bad news is they'll be next door in Iran." --David Letterman "Condoleezza Rice made a surprise trip to Iraq on Sunday. Also surprised to be in Iraq on Sunday: thousands of U.S. troops who were supposed to be home by Christmas." --Amy Poehler "The hand grenade thrown at President Bush turned out to be real. The Secret Service said today they're examining whether security changes need to be made. Duh! ... Somebody walks up and throws a hand grenade at the president and I can't get on a plane because I have a nose clipper -- hello? There's something wrong." --Jay Leno "Next Tuesday I have to testify in the Michael Jackson trial. I've been getting ready for my testimony all week. I've been drinking wine and looking at porno magazines." --Jay Leno "Newsweek had to retract a report about the Koran. The article caused violent anti-U.S. rioting in Muslim countries. And that's too bad because up until now they really loved us." --David Letterman, on Newsweek's story about U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushing a copy of the Koran down the toilet "The White House said today the Newsweek report has damaged the U.S. image overseas. And, believe me, when it comes to damaging the U.S. image overseas, the White House knows what it's talking about." --Jay Leno "According to a USA Today poll, 90% of people say prayer works very well for them in curing pain. Which is also the Republican health care plan. Keep praying!" --Jay Leno "In an unlikely pairing, Hillary Clinton made an appearance this week with Newt Gingrich to push a health care plan. The press is making a big deal out this thing with Newt but, hey, if anyone knows how to appear in public with a man she can't stand, it's Hillary." --Jay Leno "We got big trouble overseas. In Afghanistan they rioted because they got wind of the report that American soldiers flushed the Koran down the toilet. This is the kind of thing that makes us very unsafe because it makes jihadists want to kill us. But I got to give it to Halliburton, they make a heavy-duty toilet." --Bill Maher "It's the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. That was the war where our troops defeated the ruthless tyrant and then we actually left." --David Letterman * * * * * Websites of Note Suggested Names of Musical Bands A few examples: Adios Pantalones Afghanistan Banana Stand Almighty Lumberjacks of Death Armed and Hammered Army of Prawns Avenging Lawnmowers of Justice Throwpaper Timewaster Pay attention to which way the fan is blowing Clippings There's this blonde out for a walk. She comes to a river and sees another blonde on the opposite bank. "Yoo-hoo!" she shouts, "How can I get to the other side?" The second blonde looks up the river then down the river and shouts back, "You ARE on the other side." A highway patrolman pulled alongside a speeding car on the freeway. Glancing at the car, he was astounded to see that the blonde behind the wheel was knitting! Realizing that she was oblivious to his flashing lights and siren, the trooper cranked down his window, turned on his bullhorn and yelled, "PULL OVER!" "NO!" the blonde yelled back, "IT'S A SCARF!" Excerpts from a New York Times article, which I headed with the words "Reminder: Sell Your House": Having been sanguine about real estate in recent years, Mr. Greenspan began to change his tone in March, when he cited some analysts' concern that the housing market might "implode." A nursing dog foraging for food retrieved an abandoned baby girl in a forest in Kenya and carried the infant to its litter of puppies, witnesses said Monday. The stray dog carried the infant across a busy road and a barbed wire fence in a poor neighborhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital, Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper. The world's oceans have an enormous amount of what is called thermal inertia - a phenomenon that means that the effects of climactic changes are manifested very slowly. The cumulative impact of the past 150 years or so of greenhouse gases emitted during industrial development is only now starting to warm the planet, and that warming will continue long after we have created sensible policies to reduce greenhouse gases. So no matter what we do, a wave of climate change exiles is inevitable. One option for dealing with this is to tighten our borders and inure ourselves to the exiles' cries for help. A more sensible, and just, approach is for the top greenhouse gas emitters - including China and India - to grant entry to the up to 200 million people who could lose their homes to rising seas by 2080. KEARNY, N.J., May 7 - It is the deadliest target in a swath of industrial northern New Jersey that terrorism experts call the most dangerous two miles in America: a chemical plant that processes chlorine gas, so close to Manhattan that the Empire State Building seems to rise up behind its storage tanks. According to federal Environmental Protection Agency records, the plant poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius. Yet on a recent Friday afternoon, it remained loosely guarded and accessible. Dozens of trucks and cars drove by within 100 feet of the tanks. A reporter and photographer drove back and forth for five minutes, snapping photos with a camera the size of a large sidearm, then left without being approached. In the past 15 years, mortgage and home-equity borrowing has risen from 35.1% of home values to 43.9%. That has made families, especially those with unskilled workers, more vulnerable to a catastrophic jolt such as job loss or serious illness. Personal bankruptcies increased fivefold from 1980 to 2002, with many filers citing a layoff or medical emergency as the tipping point. Borowitz Report Excerpts Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon today that the conflict in Iraq had improved to the point that it could no longer be considered a quagmire and should now be thought of as a morass. . . . The Defense Secretary said that the decision to invade Iraq could no longer be considered "a boneheaded mistake of unthinkable proportions" and should now be thought of as "a colossal error we will regret for years to come." "That's a measure of how much things have improved," he said. "Anyone who takes a look at the big picture over there would come away saying that the situation is disastrous but not catastrophic." . . . Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to bristle at the question of one reporter, Charles Dolgian of the Toledo Blade, who asked if it was still appropriate to refer to the war in Iraq as "a train wreck." "It is most decidedly not a train wreck," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It is a train derailment in which the train hurtles down the embankment and bursts into flames." Mexican President Vicente Fox and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers today announced ambitious plans to collaborate on what they called "the most insulting remark ever made by a public figure." . . . Mr. Fox, who insulted both Mexicans and American blacks in a comment made Friday, and Mr. Summers, who outraged women with remarks made earlier this year, appeared ebullient at the prospect of working together to offend everyone on the planet. "We have been big fans of each other's work for a long, long time," President Fox said. "To finally be able to work with Larry to create what we are hoping is the most retarded gaffe in the history of the world is a dream come true." While most observers called the joint venture of the two loose-lipped public figures an inspired pairing, one leading producer of offensive gaffes, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, said he felt "hurt" and "excluded." Pilot Tests Tower: "Delta 351, you have traffic at 10 o'clock, 6 miles!" Delta 351: "Give us another hint! We have digital watches!" Tower: "TWA 2341, for noise abatement turn right 45 Degrees." TWA 2341: "Center, we are at 35,000 feet. How much noise can we make up here?" Tower: "Sir, have you ever heard the noise a 747 makes when it hits a 727?" O'Hare Approach Control to a 747: "United 329 heavy, your traffic is a Fokker, one o'clock, three miles, Eastbound." United 329: "Approach, I've always wanted to say this...I've got the little Fokker in sight." A student became lost during a solo cross-country flight. While attempting to locate the aircraft on radar, ATC asked, "What was your last known position?" Student: "When I was number one for takeoff." A DC-10 had come in a little hot and thus had an exceedingly long roll out after touching down. San Jose Tower Noted: "American 751, make a hard right turn at the end of the runway, if you are able. If you are not able, take the Guadeloupe exit off Highway 101, make a right at the lights and return to the airport." The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport are renowned as a short-tempered lot. They not only expect one to know one's gate parking location, but how to get there without any assistance from them. So it was with some amusement that we (a Pan Am 747) listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground control and a British Airways 747, call sign Speedbird 206. Speedbird 206: "Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of active runway." Ground: "Speedbird 206. Taxi to gate Alpha One-Seven." The BA 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and slowed to a stop. Ground: "Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?" Speedbird 206: "Stand by, Ground, I'm looking up our gate location now." Ground (with quite arrogant impatience): "Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?" Speedbird 206 (coolly): "Yes, twice in 1944, but it was dark -- and I didn't land."

Here's the Deal: Barack, Hillary, and Bill

My speculation for the week: 1. Barack and Hillary are campaigning together. Hillary would not be doing this unless she already had a deal she couldn't refuse. When they sat themselves in easy chairs in Dianne Feinstein's living room, they got right to the point. Hillary would not be this happy with anything less than the vice presidential slot. Barack's promise is that, at the appropriate time, selected for maximum political advantage, he will announce her as his VP candidate. 2. Hillary is motivated to do everything in her power for her and Barack to win. That means bringing every last one of her supporters on board for Barack, if possible. That also means muzzling Bill. He has been very unhelpful for her in this campaign, especially when compared to what he could have done if he had been more focused. The deal is, Hillary is the VP candidate; she takes the spotlight off Michelle Obama; the Clintons' 1990s baggage is history; and Bill Clinton is not a significant part of the package. 3. Bill is motivated to mind his tongue and do what Barack and Hillary need. His motivation is that he will be Barack's first nominee to a Supreme Court position, or possibly some ambassadorship (to e.g., the United Nations). He probably got his pick, and he probably does want to be back in the game in some regard. He lies low now; he gets rewarded later.

Iranian President Khatami Should Visit Montana

The Iranian news agency IRNA reported today that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has rejected the idea of talks between Iran and the United States, and has said that Iran should raise a "high wall" to keep out U.S. influences. This would seem to spell trouble for Iran’s more moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, who has suggested that the two countries should break down the barriers between them. Fortunately for President Khatami, however, Ayatollah Khamenei has two separate concerns, and one of them is quite interesting. The ayatollah is afraid, not only that American cultural and scientific contacts will undermine his Islamic revolution, but also that the U.S. government will “use satellites, computers and huge information networks ... to politically dominate others.” In this latter concern, the ayatollah is not alone. The Militia of Montana shares his fear. Its Website, for instance, repeatedly refers to a “government out of control” and tells of stories in which private citizens, believing in their freedom under the Constitution, have been harassed and even murdered by federal government agents. In short, when it comes to the subject of the U.S. government, the militia and the leader of the Islamic Republic might share some common interests. A meeting between President Khatami and representatives of the Montana Militia would have political difficulties, but it would also yield some benefits. First, from the Iranian side: if President Khatami met with militia representatives, he would be following through on his declared interest in making contact with real Americans. After all, militia leaders are among the nation’s stoutest defenders of the Constitution. At the same time, Khatami would not offend the supreme ayatollah by meeting with representatives of the U.S. government. On the contrary, he might actually please the ayatollah by encouraging some of the harshest critics of our government. The Militia might also gain from such a meeting. Under other circumstances, such a rendezvous -- like a conference with Libya’s Moammar Khadafy -- would produce much criticism. But the Iranian president is seeking peace, not war. The public would likely recognize that it is in our interests to improve ties with his country -- which, after all, is a major oil supplier and could be the principal threat, in coming years, to Israel and Saudi Arabia if it continues on the path of isolated Islamic fundamentalism. If the Militia are the people with whom Khatami chose to meet, that would be far better for America than no meeting at all. The Militia would gain in greatly increased public exposure, and could significantly alter its public image as a group of gun-toting extremists. It might also find some common ground with the ayatollah's dislike of overly technological society. And to assuage the concerns of its own members, the militia could end the meeting with a joint declaration outlining points of agreement and disagreement. The primary common interest of the Militia and the Iranians is their desire to reduce the federal government’s habit, as they see it, of wielding and abusing its power in areas where it has no business. That concern with governmental misbehavior is, of course, fundamental to the Constitution. Many Americans might feel nothing in common with either the Militia or the Iranians, and might initially share the government’s presumed dislike of any such meeting between those two groups; but many Americans would also agree that the IRS, the Pentagon, and other federal agencies are capable of abusing the public trust. We would all benefit if the Iranians and the Militia could identify specific areas in which government accountability can be improved. We would also benefit from an increase in understanding and contact between our nations, and from the opportunity to reduce the isolation that seems to persuade extreme militia members (and extreme Iranians) that terrorism is necessary to get the attention of the American public. If Castro can allow the Pope into Cuba, then surely the U.S. government can allow Iranians into Montana. It might be the first time that most of those visitors would discover a different side of America, far from the streets of New York and Washington. Perhaps their experiences in such places have given them a skewed understanding of America that the beautiful land and the decent people of Montana could counteract. It might be highly illuminating for them to discover that, in the future, their anti-American rhetoric might be more precisely targeted, not upon the American people as a whole, but upon those excesses of government behavior that we and our Constitution also abhor. [Originally posted February 5, 1998, but not presently showing up in a Google search. I would word it differently now, and some of my views have changed; then again, I can't fully reconstruct the world of 1998 in my mind right now, and I do feel that there should have been more creative and determined efforts to engage Islamic fundamentalists before September 11, 2001.]

Importing AutoCorrect Entries from Microsoft Word into OpenOffice Writer II

This is a continuation of an earlier post on the same topic. I belatedly discovered that the DAT file that was updated, when I entered a replacement term manually into OpenOffice (OO) Writer, was not at the location I had thought. Its actual location was C:\Documents and Settings\Ray\Application Data\OpenOffice.org2\user\autocorr. But copying the updated DAT file there did not make AutoCorrect work either. At this point, I ran out of time for the investigation. Hopefully I, or someone else, will eventually find a relatively straightforward way to get AutoCorrect entries from Word to OO Writer without manually re-entering them.

Importing AutoCorrect Entries from Microsoft Word into OpenOffice Writer

Microsoft Word allows users to save shortcuts that will correct or expand what they type. For example, if I type "hte," Word has (I think) a built-in correction to "the." Word knows that "hte" is not a word. I have added a lot of other shortcuts to cut down on the typing: "BO," for example, becomes "Barack Obama" if I type "BO" and then hit the spacebar or use some other punctuation. The challenge, for me, was to import those thousands of built-in and added shortcuts from Word to OpenOffice.org's Writer program. I had posted a question on the matter some time back, but so far it has not yet drawn an answer I have found workable for my purposes. Therefore, I decided to try modifying some advice I had found posted elsewhere. The following is a complete description of the steps I took: 1. I used Method 1 (using AutoCorrect.dot) from http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/ExportAutocorrect.htm. In Word 2003, I clicked on the button to make a Backup of my Word AutoCorrect entries. That gave me a Word document entitled "AutoCorrect Backup Document." 2. I copied the entire document and pasted it into Microsoft Excel. In Excel, I deleted all rows that did not have actual autocorrection values (e.g., I deleted the column headings). I also deleted all columns other than the actual before-and-after values. (In my case, there was just one such column, called RTF, filled with entries of "FALSE.") I saved this Excel spreadsheet as AC.XLS. 3. Find the OOo language file you're using. For me, using US English, that file was called acor_en-US.dat, and was located (by default) in C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.4\share\autocorr. I will call this simply the DAT file. 4. Although it claims to be a DAT file, it is actually a zipped file, containing several different files. Use your file zip utility to view the contents of the DAT file. Inside it, you will see a file called DocumentList.xml. You can view the contents of DocumentList.xml using Notepad. (Some of these steps may not be as straightforward for you as they were for me. I'm using 7-Zip for my zipper and OpenWith (a Windows Explorer extension) to open DocumentList.xml using Notepad without having to extract the file first. But whatever. Other tools may work as well or better.) 5. With Notepad's WordWrap feature turned off, here's what I saw at the start of DocumentList.xml: [?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?][block-list:block-list list="http://openoffice.org/2001/block-list"][block-list:block name="-->" name="→"][block-list:block name="->" name="->"][block-list:block name="(C)" name="©"][block-list:block name="(R)" name="®"] and it basically just went down the list from there. What I saw at the end of DocumentList.xml was this: [block-list:block name="yuo" name="you"][block-list:block name="yuor" name="your"][/block-list:block-list] Actually, that wasn't exactly what I saw. My blog website here, Blogger.com, is too smart for me. It automatically converts HTML coding into HTML, so I can't show you exact HTML. I have had to modify it for this presentation. The modification I have made has been to replace angle brackets with square brackets. In other words, when you see "[" above, please replace it in your own typing with "<" and when you see "]" above, please replace it with ">". Also, be advised that there are no line breaks in the DocumentList.xml file. It just runs on without interruption from beginning to end. It is not like the nice, organized table that AutoCorrect.dot gives you. So when you are inserting additional AutoCorrect items into DocumentList.xml, you need to just stick them into the flow, not put each one on its own separate line. As the foregoing materials from the start and end of DocumentList.xml show, all I had to do was to insert my own AutoCorrect entries between the beginning and the end. The beginning (before the first AutoCorrect entry) was like this: [?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?][block-list:block-list list="http://openoffice.org/2001/block-list"] and the ending was simply [/block-list:block-list] (Remember, again, that you need to type ">" where you see "]" etc. in this presentation.) In between the beginning and the ending, as shown by the examples above (where e.g., "(C)" becomes "©"), the entries each have this format: [block-list:block name="BEFORE" name="AFTER"] So if I wanted to have only one AutoCorrect entry in OOo, replacing "BO" with "Barack Obama," here would be my complete DocumentList.xml file: [?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?][block-list:block-list list="http://openoffice.org/2001/block-list"][block-list:block name="BO" name="Barack Obama"][/block-list:block-list] Therefore, going back to my AC.XLS file in Excel, here's what I had to do: 6. Insert a column before the BEFORE column. In other words, the new column A in my spreadsheet would be blank, and column B would contain the characters to be replaced ("BO" in the present example). The purpose of this blank column, and of other blank columns C and E discussed below, is to contain material that we are going to combine together into one grand entry in column F. The steps described below provide a basic Excel technique that you may find useful for a variety of applications in the future. 7. Insert a column between the BEFORE and AFTER column. In other words, column C in my spreadsheet would now be blank, and column D would contain the replacement ("Barack Obama," in the present example). 8. In the blank column A, on the first row of the spreadsheet, type the stuff that appears on each individual replacement line before the BEFORE item. In other words, the first cell, at the top left corner of the AC.XLS spreadsheet, should contain just this: [block-list:block name=" including the quotation mark. (Again, you should have an opening angle bracket "<" rather than an opening square bracket "[" on that line.) 9. In the blank column C, type the stuff that appears between the BEFORE and the AFTER items, including the quotation marks, as follows: " name=" Finally, in the blank column E, type the stuff that appears after the AFTER item, including the quotation mark, as follows: "] replacing the closing square bracket "]" with a closing angle bracket ">". 10. Column F can now concatenate (i.e., combine) the contents of columns A through E. This calls for use of Excel's CONCATENATE function. To enter a function in Excel, just type = and then the name of the function, followed by open parentheses. Then follow the pop-up tips and close the parentheses. In this case, the command that goes into cell F1 is: =CONCATENATE(A1,B1,C1,D1,E1) If you are having problems so far, it may be helpful to mention two Excel factoids. First, you can use the ampersand (&) to concatenate instead of CONCATENATE. Second, you can use CHAR(34) to insert a quotation mark manually. 11. What you have entered into the blank cells in row 1 of AC.XLS needs to be copied all the way down. So do that. Fast way: go to cell A1; hit Ctrl-C; hold down Shift and hit the End key and then the Home key; use arrow keys so that only column A is highlighted; and then hit Enter. Do the same with columns C, E, and F. 12. If all has gone well, you should now have a column F filled with entries in the format shown above: [block-list:block name="BEFORE" name="AFTER"] for each of your Word AutoCorrect entries. These are now in OOo Writer format. Now you've got to get them into Writer. Column F in AC.XLS is dependent on columns A through E. To remove column F from Excel, set it in stone so that its contents do not depend on columns A through E anymore. To do that, select column F (Shift End-DownArrow) and then (in Excel 2003) select Edit > Copy and then Edit > Paste Special > Values > OK > Enter. Changes in columns A through E should now have no effect upon column F. 13. Delete columns A through E. Save AC.XLS as AC.TXT in Text (MS-DOS) format. Kill Excel. Open AC.TXT in Word. You will see that Excel found it helpful to insert extra quotation marks everywhere. Make sure that AutoFormat and AutoFormat As You Type are set not to replace straight quotes with smart quotes. Then, using Ctrl-H (or whatever), replace "" (i.e., double double quotes) with " (i.e., just one double quotation mark) throughout the entire file. 14. Another set of unwanted quotation marks may appear at the start and end of each line. Remember, the desired format is [block-list:block name="BEFORE" name="AFTER"] not "[block-list:block name="BEFORE" name="AFTER"]" (Remember to see "<" when I use "[" as discussed above.) To get rid of those unwanted extra starting and ending quotation marks, take advantage of the fact that ^p is Microsoft Word's way of saying it's time to start a new line. (That's for a carriage return. For a line feed, it's ^l (that's ell, not one).) Do a Ctrl-H to replace "^p" (including quotation marks) with ^p (having no quotation marks). Thus "^p" becomes ^p and "[block-list:block name="BEFORE" name="AFTER"]" becomes [block-list:block name="BEFORE" name="AFTER"] for each item in the list. You may have to clean up the first and last items in the list manually. After this, there were still some lingering beginning and ending quotation marks, so I had to run each part of the foregoing replacement again: "^p becomes ^p and ^p" becomes ^p 15. You may need to do some additional clean-up, now or later. In my case, I saw that (C) was now going to produce a question mark (?) rather than a copyright (©) symbol. Evidently Word and/or Excel didn't use standard ASCII for that symbol. That would be something I would have to fix later, probably by inserting the symbol into some text and then copying and pasting it into the AutoCorrect dialog box. I also saw that smart single quotes had sneaked in: "don't" was now "don?t." I started to fix that with a manual search and replace, putting apostrophes (') in place of question marks (?); but then I saw that fancy French accents had also gotten mangled into question marks too, and would require individual attention, so I just made it Replace All and to hell with it. 16. Now it's time to mash it all together, in good old DocumentList.xml format. Do another global replace (Ctrl-H), this time replacing ^p with nothing. Your nice clean lines will disappear, and you'll have just one tremendously long paragraph full of autocorrect commands. 17. Having done a huge amount of work, it's a good idea to do a very belated backup. While we're at it, let's save it as a different file name. In my case, I saved it as AC1.TXT. Choose US-ASCII (Other encoding), don't insert line breaks, and don't allow character substitution. When I did this, I got a warning that text marked in red would not save correctly in the chosen encoding, but I couldn't find any text in red, else I would have tried to fix it in Word. 18. Open AC1.TXT in Notepad. If WordWrap is off, it should look a lot like DocumentList.xml did. You should be looking at the introductory material, like this: [?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?][block-list:block-list xmlns:block-list="http://openoffice.org/2001/block-list"] where, again, I have replaced angle with square brackets so this website will not treat it as HTML. After the introductory material, we have the familiar long list of OOo Writer autocorrect entries. If you're interested in merging those into the set you're bringing over from Word, you might want to copy them from Notepad into Excel back around step 5, above, and then sort them to insure you aren't installing duplicates or contradictions. 19. I wasn't interested in OOo's AutoCorrect entries, so I just deleted everything in DocumentList.xml between that introductory material and the ending line, which I will show here in quotation marks so you can see it with its angle brackets intact: "" Then I pasted the full contents of AC1.TXT into that gap between the starting and ending material in DocumentList.xml. 7-Zip allowed me to save this updated version of DocumentList.xml in the DAT archive; otherwise, I'd have had to save it as a separate file and then zip it into the DAT file as an update. 20. Having done all this work, I made a backup of acor_en-US.dat. I ran OOo Writer. It didn't seem to recognize my definitions. So I saved this post at this point, rebooted, and tried it again.

Catching Up: Best of 2005: April

Here's another installment in the continuing effort to distill the best postings from my personal mailing list. These are from April 2005. * * * * * Late-Night Political News from About.com "If it wasn't bad enough that it was tax day, President Bush says he's anxious to sign the new bankruptcy reform bill, which makes it a lot tougher for people in financial trouble to get help. He says that we Americans need to learn fiscal discipline. He says that as a young man he only carried one credit card and that was just to chop up the coke." --Bill Maher "Stocks plunged again Friday, suffering their worst day since 2005 and third-straight triple-digit loss for the Dow Jones Industrial average. On the bright side, your Social Security money isn't in there yet." --Amy Poehler "President Bush's approval rating has now dropped 10 points to a record low of 45 percent. Do you realize if the presidential election were held today, John Kerry would have to work twice as hard to lose?" --Jay Leno "President Bush said this week he will ask Congress to further loosen the immigration laws. Apparently he found out there are still some people in Mexico." --Jay Leno "The nation's second-largest oil company, Chevron Texaco, announced it was buying rival Unocal Corp. A spokesman for Chevron Texaco, which made a $13 billion profit last year, says the new company will be called 'Bend Over, America.'" --Dennis Miller "You know the difference between Jane Fonda, President Clinton and President Bush? Jane Fonda's the only one that actually went to Vietnam." --Jay Leno "Between the praying that people are doing for the Pope and the praying for Terri Schiavo, the switchboard is backed up. Christians are furious, they realize a lot of people are just talking to some guy in Bombay." --Bill Maher "They say this time there will be repercussions. The officers who told Bush the lies he wanted to hear will either be fired, suspended, or transferred to work on Social Security." --Bill Maher, on the latest report on Iraq intelligence failures "One in four returning Iraqi veterans have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. I know that sounds high, but it includes everybody who says, 'Am I crazy, or were we sent there under false pretenses?'" --Bill Maher "Anti-war protesters have now showed up at the Michael Jackson trial because they realize, hey, cameras and free publicity. One embarrassing moment, a protesters had a sign the other day that said, 'Bring our boys home.'" --Bill Maher "The College of Cardinals has set the date of April 18th for the secret vote. What they do is an elite group of robed figures meet behind closed doors and they choose the new leader. Today Bush said 'Yeah, that's how I got elected the first time.'" --Jay Leno "Executives at the Fox News Channel announced they're going start a Fox News financial channel. Yeah, the Fox News financial channel will be different because whenever the stock market goes down, they'll blame it on Hillary Clinton." -- Conan O'Brien "It was the biggest funeral ever in the 2000-year history of the Catholic church. People were waiting in line to get a glimpse of the pope's body for 24 hours. By the time they got to the head of the line, they smelled worse than him...Well, they didn't embalm him. He was laying out all week. And he still looked better than Michael Jackson." --Bill Maher "Forty members of Congress also went to the funeral. They said it was great to be out of Washington and to get a break from all that prayer and Bible quoting." --Bill Maher "When President Bush was shown on the giant TV screens, during the Pope's funeral today, the crowd at the Vatican booed. When president Bush heard this he said 'what does boo mean in Eye-talian?'" --Conan O'Brien "Dick Cheney was saying a couple of things to the press, he said he fully expected to see a woman president in his lifetime. And I was thinking, well, hell, he'll be lucky if he sees Thursday in his lifetime. ... Say what you will about the vice president, he is an optimist. He also said he fully expects to see a Hollywood celebrity convicted in his lifetime." --David Letterman "Federal authorities are investigating whether or not Martha Stewart violated rules of her house arrest when she attended a Time magazine gala last week. Meanwhile, there is no news yet on the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden." -- Jay Leno "Before Social Security, Americans had to keep working long after they were past retirement age -- kinda like the way Cher has to now." --Jay Leno "In honor of Earth Day, Congress passed the Bush energy bill, which gives billions of dollars in tax breaks to the coal and oil companies and opens up Alaska for drilling. It's hard to hide the glee in the White House. Today President Bush appeared in front of one of those backdrops that just said 'F--- You.'" --Bill Maher * * * * * Clippings WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. penal system, the world's largest, maintained its steady growth in 2004, the Department of Justice reported Sunday. . . . The United States has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population, seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies. . . . Criminologists attribute the growth in the prison population to "get tough on crime" policies that have subjected hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug and property offenders to long mandatory sentences. . . . It costs around $22,000 to lock up one person for a year. . . . In addition, the United States jails around 283,000 people with serious mental illnesses . . . . Mice forced to breathe hydrogen sulphide — known best for its rotten egg smell — go into a kind of suspended animation . . . . Finding a safe way to do this in humans could lead to new ways to treat cancer and prevent injury or death from blood loss, or help people undergo and recover from surgery better . . . . "We think this may be a latent ability that all mammals have . . . ." Many cases have been documented of small children, and the occasional adult, reviving from near drowning in icy water after their body temperatures had dropped, their metabolism rate lowered and they had stopped breathing for more than an hour. . . . After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk. . . . [Runners in the 2002 Boston Marathon] gave blood samples before and after the race. While most were fine, 13 percent of them - or 62 - drank so much that they had hyponatremia, or abnormally low blood sodium levels. Three had levels so low that they were in danger of dying. Budget Living magazine, April/May 2005, p. 81, advises that you can save a lot of money on dental work by getting it done in Mexico. "Right now, the most popular dental destinations appear to be India, the Philippines, and Hungary -- all countries with a surplus of well-trained professionals. Hungary is especially rich in tourist- friendly dental school grads, and getting treated there costs around a third of what it does here -- a crown will run you about $135 in Budapest; $600 in the U.S." * * * * * Unitarian Jihad (Appreciating this item requires a general awareness of Unitarian tendencies.) The following is the first communique from a group calling itself Unitarian Jihad. It was sent to me at The Chronicle via an anonymous spam remailer. I have no idea whether other news organizations have received this communique, and, if so, why they have not chosen to print it. Perhaps they fear starting a panic. I feel strongly that the truth, no matter how alarming, trivial or disgusting, must always be told. I am pleased to report that the words below are at least not disgusting: Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary. Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression! People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion. We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes. Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues. We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons. We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: "Sincerity is not enough." We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it's true doesn't make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone. Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he's pretty sure the world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the Sunday Flowers and Banners committee. People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution. Startling new underground group spreads lack of panic! Citizens declare themselves "relatively unafraid" of threats of undeclared rationality. People can still go to France, terrorist leader says.

Catching Up: Best of 2005: March

Here's another installment in the continuing effort to distill the best postings from my personal mailing list. These are from March 2005. * * * * * Beer I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. -- Lyndon B. Johnson When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading. -- Paul Hornung 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not. -- H.L. Mencken Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza. -- Dave Barry * * * * * How Long You Will Live Calculator http://webcenters.compuserve.com/compuserve/atplay/lifeline.jsp * * * * * Late-Night Political News from About.com "Russia has agreed to help Iran build a nuclear reactor. Yeah, because when you think well-built nuclear reactor you think Russia" -- David Letterman "Martha Stewart is getting out of prison so today the terror alert was raised from Orange to Pesto." --David Letterman "A Senate committee announced it will hold a hearing to discuss what to do about identity theft. The committee will be run by a man claiming to be Senator Charles Schumer." --Conan O'Brien "Speaking of everybody's favorite ex-con, Martha Stewart participated in an online chat last night with her crazy fans. She says her ankle bracelet is uncomfortable, to which I say – try spraying on a little Pam or maybe some extra-virgin olive oil." --Jimmy Kimmel "Hillary Clinton is repositioning herself constantly. She is now campaigning against sex and violence in TV shows and video games. She said studies show that children who are exposed to sexual images are more likely to blow her husband" --Bill Maher "Bill Clinton is recovering -- they put a tiny camera right inside of him and Ken Starr said why didn't I think of that." --Bill Maher "A lot of people thought Michael Jackson was faking it yesterday but people who know Michael say he does have back problems that flare up from time to time. Like when he's on trial for child molestation." -- Jay Leno "It appears the parents of Terry Schiavo have run out of options. The Supreme Court declined to intervene, thus representing the 10th legal judgment in favor of Mrs. Schiavo's husband and guardian, Michael -- meaning the Schiavo feeding tube will soon be removed from the cable news networks." --Jon Stewart "On the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq gas prices in L.A. reached three dollars a gallon in some places. Didn't we win that war? I mean, I know there were no weapons of mass destruction but apparently there's no gas there either." --Jay Leno "There is a 24-hour surveillance team monitoring Martha Stewart's whereabouts. Nothing yet on al Qaeda." --David Letterman "McGwire refused to say whether he ever took steroids but I think he did because, as he was leaving, one of his tits fell out of his suit." --Bill Maher * * * * * Martha Stewart Living Free By CHUCK COLSON EARLY Friday morning, one of America's most celebrated prison inmates, Martha Stewart, walked through the doors of the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, W. Va., to the great delight of her fans. Her release has people asking a pertinent question: What, precisely, are prisons for? When I arrived at the Maxwell Federal Prison in Montgomery, Ala., in the summer of 1974 in the wake of Watergate, I was greeted by a burly caseworker who seemed undaunted that he was processing the former special counsel to the president. "Just remember one thing, Colson," he said. "The reason you are here is to be punished." Not a particularly warm welcome, but sound theologically. Any system of justice requires punishment, which prison certainly is. It's painfully dehumanizing to be stripped and searched, assigned a number, and handed six pairs of used underwear and brown dungarees, as I was. That prison is punishment is the first lesson. Eventually, every inmate hears the correctional officer's favorite sonnet: "You did the crime, now do your time." Prison is cold. The second lesson inmates learn is how to do the time. During my first two weeks I was administered a battery of tests, after which the guards assigned me to the prison laundry. For me, doing time wasn't so bad because I also enjoyed reading and soon discovered that I could counsel needy inmates. But most inmates "did time" by trying to sleep it away. In the dormitory at any hour of the day or night I'd find half the inmates stretched out, sleeping 18 hours a day. Life in prison corrodes the soul. The third lesson is that there is vocational training for the fortunate few, but for most, the only "training" is learning how to avoid getting caught the next time. At Maxwell, evening conversations in the TV room sounded like seminars on improving professional criminal qualifications. It's not surprising that 67 percent of inmates are arrested or incarcerated again within two years. * * * * * Borowitz Report Breaking News SEVERE EARTHQUAKE IN INDONESIA HAS NO EFFECT ON SCHIAVO CASE Networks Explain Decision to Stay in Florida A severe earthquake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale which struck Indonesia on Tuesday had "little or no effect" on the Terri Schiavo case, the 24-hour news networks confirmed today. The networks made the announcement to explain why they had for the most part retained their massive media presence outside Ms. Schiavo's hospice in Florida while offering scant coverage of the Indonesian disaster, which has so far resulted in a death toll topping 1,000. "While the Indonesian earthquake appears to be a disaster of unspeakable magnitude, it is difficult to see it having any lasting impact on the Schiavo story," one network source said. "The public trusts us to deliver Schiavo news on a 24-hour-a-day basis and we do not intend to betray that trust."

The World May Get Bigger

Africa and Asia used to be very far from America. Then they invented airplanes, and then came the era of mass international travel. Then jet fuel got expensive. I just read an article in Business Week that says jet fuel is now four times more expensive than it was in 2000, when the Supreme Court appointed George Bush to be president. It says they are working on biofuels that will be cheaper than current jet fuels and won't freeze at high altitudes. But demand for fuels of all sorts is expected to continue to grow. Of course, Americans who would fly to faraway places must be able to afford the price of a ticket. As lower and even middle classes in the U.S. continue to be squeezed by readjustment to life in a more interconnected and competitive world, there is presently little prospect that international flights will be more affordable in the foreseeable future than they have been in the past. Young people in recent years have been able to speak of visiting other continents as blithely as previous generations spoke of visiting other parts of the United States. If the cost of such trips increases and the number of people who can afford them decreases simultaneously, there could be a dramatic change in how familiar those other continents seem to the next generation. To the extent that Americans have less direct personal exposure to other countries through travel, it may seem increasingly important, from an educational perspective, to bring larger numbers of foreigners to visit or live here. That may be politically unpalatable, however; hard times at present appear to stimulate xenophobic attitudes. Foreigners may also be less excited about moving to the U.S., as compared to other countries, if attitudes here are not welcoming, if the U.S. appears less wealthy, or if universities in other countries become increasingly competitive with the universities that presently attract students and faculty from abroad. It will doubtless continue to be possible to broadcast news from other nations, but the general public demand for such news may diminish if other lands come to seem increasingly remote and unrelated to one's life. Americans who do not visit or live in other countries, who encounter fewer people from other countries visiting or living here, and who come to feel more distant from other countries, would likely act the part. It is conceivable, that is, that consciousness of diversity would resemble a tide that ebbs and flows, rather than an inexorably growing phenomenon. People in future generations could actually know or care less about foreign lands than people do today. In the worst case, voters in the U.S. may already be embarked upon a course of collective ignorance of other lands, such that the Iraq invasion represents the first or, perhaps, the latest -- but not the worst or last -- large move against the grain of world opinion; and the world may increasingly contain people who can and will punish us for such missteps.