News You Can Bruise for 2006 July 17

Mon Jul 17 2006 06:29 Monde mondial: From a French message board:

BeautifulSoup, c'est l'un des meilleurs parseurs HTML du monde mondial, c'est ce que j'utilise pour mon script de conversion blueflagz => RSS

"Monde mondial"? Does that mean "real-world"? If so, that's a great idiom.

I don't know when I'm going to be fixing Rubyful Soup to have the features of Beautiful Soup 3.0, but it's probably going to be after a bunch of WADL work.

Mon Jul 17 2006 13:22: One good thing about being President of the United States: the food is great!

When he entered, President Bush walked within two feet of me, and for some reason, he turned and looked me in the eye and said, "Let's eat!".

Ned Batchelder and his wife's White House adventure: parts 1 and 2.

(5) Mon Jul 17 2006 20:31 Maple Syrup Vengeance: In California you can go to a pretty nice breakfast place and they'll serve you real maple syrup in a glass with a spout, or a little syrup ramekin. If you go to a cheaper place they might have fake maple syrup but it'll be in a glass with a spout so you can pretend it's real. Even IHOP does this.

In New York, right next to the place where the maple syrup comes from, they don't do any of this. I've been to fancy breakfast restaurants, as fancy as any I ever went to in California, and they all treat maple syrup like cheap jelly. It's made by Smuckers out of corn syrup and it comes in little plastic tubs with pull-off tops, like non-dairy creamer. They have to stock this stuff because all the restaurants here do delivery, and how are you going to deliver maple syrup in a little syrup ramekin. But they take it a step further and also give it to the people who came over to their restaurant in person! So when I go out to breakfast I never order anything with a dependency on maple syrup. I guess I could be a huge snob and bring my own little container of maple syrup, but then why don't I stay home and make my own waffles?

I've eaten at places in the south (IHOP being the exception), where the restaurant just buys a 20-pack of Log Cabin squeeze bottles and plunks one down on each table. New Yorkers probably think their system is better, but I don't see how. I never thought I'd have anything good to say about IHOP's syrup, but at least it doesn't look obviously fake.

Incidentally, Rocks'n'Diamonds is turning into ZZT.