Jack Black is one happy husband, actor, comedian, and singer this week. His wife just gave birth to a baby boy on Saturday! Jack Black is a father!

Whoa! In general, it seems to me that most web pages that claim they are HTML are valid HTML documents the same way that counterfeit money is valid money. Meaning, not very. On the other hand, most pages that declare themselves valid XHTML that I have seen - actually are. Or at least pretty darned close. Which is why I was surprised when I had a look at the source for this page. You know, with the old "View Source" command in the web browser. Well, there are attributes in the div close tags. Below is one, as an example - with the angle brackets removed so as not to make the HTML-restriction filters go nuts on it. /div class="right" See? You cannot do that! It is not even valid XML if you do that!! I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to know what 'div' start tag a 'div' end tag goes with. But that is NOT the way. A correct way, if you really want to mark end tags, would be to follow them with a comment that tells the id attribute of the element they go with. End tags can NEVER have any attributes. EVER. Period. And I have never seen this particular error before. Not in a dozen or so years of reading and writing HTML. XHTML that is invalid XML is just plain weird!

I posted a few questions about movies at MetaCritic about some first-run movies half a year ago. Nobody ever responded. Is it dead? One of the movies I asked about was Bloodrayne. Anyone seen that? Is it any good?

An article about Ann Coulter, the vicious whining authoress, caught my eye today. Apparently, having attacked roughly fifty percent of the citizens in this country, she has now turned her American-hating gunsights on the widows whose husbands were murdered on the morning of September 11, 2001. Read her point of view in Anti-liberal US writer calls 9/11 widows witches (Reuters, 2007-06-08 ). In the article, she points out: 1. How for all she knows, their husbands were going to divorce them anyway. (There is a name for this sleazy tactic in arguments, it is called Argument from ignorance. And by the way, the wives of the dead corrected her ignorance yesterday.) 2. How difficult it is to attack someone who is the victim of attack. (Amazingly, she is invoking the Appeal to pity fallacy on her own behalf). 3. She talks about how the widows (which are single mothers now, raising the children of their murdered husbands alone) are having the time of their lives full of frivolous fun (this is called the ad hominem fallacy.) Their response is in Hillary lashes out at Ann Coulter (AP, 2007-06-07):

We have been slandered. Contrary to Ms. Coulters statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day,

You know, some jobs are difficult - not because they are worth doing - but because she shouldn't be done. I really encourage everyone who reads this blog entry to do the following: 1. Read Ann Coulter's words in the 2 articles above and the ones about her that these articles link to. 2. Read the Wikipedia definition for Demagogy, and compare and contrast it with Ann Coulter's public persona. 3. Read the Wikipedia definition of Logical Fallacy, and see if she is using sound logic - or invalid arguments based on logical fallacies. 4. Email your friends and send them links to the articles about Ann Coulter's statements. Send them the links to Demagogy and Logical Fallacy too. See if they come to the same conclusions as you. Find out if they heard of this Logical Fallacies trick before, either at school or from one of their friends. You rarely have someone exposing the questionable techniques so brazenly, so often, and thus so easily found so they can be studied and even counted. So for her part, Ann Coulter at least does a good job of providing American moms, dads, and youth a chance to memorize these dubious techniques in time before Fall 2008. There is plenty of time to share them with your friends, even. So do that too. One last thing. Decide the following for yourself. When Ann Coulter tries to get you to buy her new book by going on talk shows and attacking this group or that, is she striving to sell you a book of facts and sound logic, or is she trying to unload some propaganda on you and trick you into paying her for it?

HDTV is not exactly new. But it is not exactly old either. There is a whole lot going on in the area. PC Magazine has an HDTV news page to help you keep abreast of the subject. They have links to new products and prices, an HDTV weblog, and some HDTV-related RSS newsfeeds. If you are planning on buying an HDTV set in the next couple years, now is the time to start reading up on the subject. You will probably have that set for more than just several years. So you will want to make sure that when you get one, you know everything you can about the subject. I have already mentioned a couple other sources of HDTV information. This one sort of rounds things out.

Yahoo Video has convenient access to lots of videos. The site seems more attractive than Google Video. Video content is being produced quite frequently by individuals now. Wide availability of inexpensive miniDV camcorders and the bundling of video editing software with modern operating systems. has made editing video a little like a combination of word processing and image processing.

Google has come out with a web-based spreadsheet. You fill in the cells and examine your spreadsheet - all in the comfort of your nice, familiar web browser. You can import CSV and XLS files, and export them too. Right now the program is in limited beta. Given the amazing speed at which Google operates, it seems likely the Google Spreadsheets program will be publicly available and out of beta before 2007. Google also has a word processor they acquired called Writely. They are not yet making available - last I heard.

Yahoo Answers is a social Q&A website. They have a Television section on the site. Yahoo has just beefed their Answers system up a bit In addition to getting more capacity for their server, they also refreshed their software. The site is a little prettier now. The upgrade just took place yesterday.

Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 came out very shortly after Firefox 1.5.0.4. Looks like the development of these two projects has achieved parity.

I new version of Firefox came out last night. Just do the Check For Updates command that is in the Help menu of Firefox 1.5 and later. That will bring you all up to date. For details, see the Firefox website.