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With all due credit to George Carlin.

• People who get emotionally invested in high school football games.
• People who think female empowerment and sexual empowerment are the same thing.
• People who think sexual empowerment and exhibitionism are the same thing.
• People who drive SUVs in the city.
• Men who wear Speedo underwear, or worse, men who wear Speedos to the swimming pool.
• Anyone who believes the Atkins diet will have no harmful consequences.
• Internet users who substitute letters for short words, such as “r u there, m8?”
• Christians who believe the most important part of Jesus’s martyrdom to be his suffering.
• 12-year-old girls who wear short skirts and tanktops.
• Straight men who hang out in lesbian chat rooms.
• People who send unsolicited e-mail about SPAM blocking programs.
• Anyone who believes rap music to be valid iconography for black culture.
• Philosophy majors.
• Vice presidents.
• Poor people with really nice shoes.
• Anyone who believes Kurt Cobain had something important to say.
• Mac users (Sorry, Andy)
• Mothers who let their kids run wild in public
• Large woman in shirts than don’t entirely cover their stomachs.
• People who say “Correctamundo.”
• Whatever shortsighted twits decided that it’s alright to let kids kill foreigners at 18, but not drinks beers for another three years.
• Smokers who sue the tobacco industry because they “didn’t know it caused cancer.”
• Country music fans.

The road to heliologue.com has been a long one, starting 5 years ago on a remote corner of the web known as angelfire. Then, I was running a 133mhz Compaq unibody, a depressed kid making pages with bloodbars and “dark” (read: bad poetry). I used the in-site html editor, and thought that frames were an impossibly difficult concept.

Eventually, I came to appreciate webmastering for its art as much as the content I displayed, which was invariably poetry of some kind, which I still wrote en masse. Usually, I’d spend feverish days fleshing out a redesign, staying interested only long enough to upload content into my free host du jour, and falling away until such time as I wanted to design again.

On Thanksgiving of 2003, I bought heliologue.com; though it may seem paltry, owning my own domain is a dream I’ve had ever since I first put a hex value inside of a font tag. It was a rite of passage that baptised my burgeoning interest into an all-out hobby.

I wish that I had kept all of my old material, but alas, all those really terrible sites have been shattered into 1s and 0s and overwritten by even more amateur webmasters, the new generation of depressed kids and dripping blood bars.

Within the last two years or so, however, I have bothered to retain my site layouts, and so I archive them here as a possible amusement for those of you deranged enough to bother caring. They are ordered with the most recent first. Some are complete sites, some are only outlines. What is there is how the site was when it was taken down, and I make no apologies for broken links, spelling errors, or strange visual effects (none of my older sites were written with compatibility in mind).

Links will open up in a new window.

Heliologue: Lavender | This is really nothing more than a reskin of the original Heliologue. Same content, black and purple colors. This same was also used on the first incarnation of my MoveableType blog.

Heliologue | This major site redesign was an attempt to rid myself of complicated visuals and have a easy-to-read, functional site. It was nice in its own way (at this point, I introduced a poor-man’s blog, meaning I created entries and manually updated links and such for each one), but I craved something more artistic.

Unnamed | This little beauty never actually went live. What started out as a nifty foray into the world of (switchable) stylesheets turned into one problem after another. Eventually, I narrowed down to one stylesheet, but by that point had lost my interest in the idea. This site is basically just an index page and nothing more.

hesperanthæ & heliotropes | A long time ago, when I was first delving into the somewhat disappointing world of Flash, I created a full-screen site, basically a letterbox format with menus on the top and bottom. Dubbed “the mercury pool” (you’ll notice my penchant for the lowercase), it was visually stunning… and as slow as a sick bison. This time around, I went for the exact same layout, but with less Flash and slower loading times. Again, it’s visually attractive, but people didn’t like the full-screen aspect, and I wasn’t pleased with the corner I had designed myself into. This incarnation, which had gone into affect shortly before I bought my domain, went down within a month.

the construct | There’s really no interesting story behind this site. I had been experimenting with alpha layers, had some nifty backgrounds, and decided that it would be fun to combine the two. Towards the end of its lifespan, I began to add a second, prosaic portion to the site (the journal construct) using the same layout as an earlier site (novembre is mostly made of dirt), which is, again, pretty, but hard on the eyes. Needless to say, I lost interest.

novembre is mostly made of dirt | Mentioned above, the design of this site more or less came about because I liked the image used throughout. The navigation technique is culled from an earlier site (seeing a trend here?) that uses scrolling DIVs. Apparently, I was smart enough to get that working, but not enough to put that mess of a matrix into a table. Eesh.

sahasrara | Okay, everybody! Eastern mysticism time! No seriously, the name of this site came about from the eastern philosophies of chakras, which are an extension of the more commonly known “pressure point.” The point being, “sahasrara” was the chakra of the crown (top of the head), which was supposed to indicate the divine. This site utilised all Flash, and is tricky, sometimes. I stopped updating it more or less right around the time that I met my girlfriend, which is weird when you consider that I more or less predicted it. Anyway, be warned that almost none of the fonts that I originally used still exist on my hard drive, so when I exported my back-ups, they all display in system fonts, which guarantees visual problems Too bad.

deciduity | This site name was borne out of a poem that I wrote (then my favorite). It was really no different from my its predecessor, except I incorporated a bit of flash, and first started using scrolling DIVs. I eventually got tired of the navigation aspect, which I viewed as bland. After leaving it more or less untouched for many months, I took it down.

entropy + inertia | Written as a junior in high school, this little site was my most ambitious to (its) date. It almost never happened, but my friend (he knows who he is) helped me with a hack & patch javascript to change frame images. Unfortunately, this site was a pain to keep up, not only because of its many parts, but also because changing the navigation script itself was a monumental undertaking.

My father got a far-right solicitation in the mail today, from an organization called ADF. The envelope boasted several thumbnail photos of stern-looking religious men and said something like “Stop the ACLU from undermining your family values!” When I looked at the material inside, I was somewhat disgusted.

The basic gist of this particular mailing (though I suspect the group has many more points of argument in their ideology) is that the ACLU, by filing lawsuits to remove displays of The Ten Commandments from courthouses and government buildings, is an evil organization with evil purposes. The letter makes several erroneous or misleading points:

The Bible (and hence the Ten Commandments) are inherent to our legal system.

From the ADF website:

In the words of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the founders modeled themselves “upon God’s ancient people” and “wrote what they considered to be a modern-day interpretation of the basic biblical principles of government.”

The founders didn’t base their constitution upon anything but the English Bill of Rights, and then attempted to correct the errors that England had made (read: head of state and head of religion as one person).

While it’s true that religion, especially Christianity, has played a definite role in our nation’s history, to assert not only a religious dogma’s purposeful inclusion into a judicial code and that said legal code is incapable of existing without said religious influence is silly. It would surprise most conservative Christians to learn that many of the nation’s founding fathers or proponents (Jefferson, Franklin, Paine) were not Christian at all, but rather Deist, and not at all pleased with Christianity. There are a number of chain emails stating, in effect, “OMG THER ARE RELIGIOUS INSCRIPTIONS ON GOVERNMENT BILDINGS TAKE THAT ACLU LOL!1!!” The debunker naturally brings into account, for instance, Jefferson’s many thoughts on the subject.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.

By filing these lawsuits, the ACLU is attacking “religious freedom” (or “religious liberty”).

By “religious freedom”, of course, the ADF means “mainstream Christianity’s integration into secular government.” When Christians want religious freedom, they only want it for themselves, not for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Cultists, et al, to whom the Ten Commandments are nothing but a western curiosity. Is it religious liberty for a nation populated by multiple creeds and faiths to have a government that (superficially, at best) endorses one particular piece of “history” or “culture,” as the ADF calls it? No, religious liberty would be a lack of endorsement of any one particular religion. That, or besides the Ten Commandment plaques, you’d have to have a monument by any religious group that wants one. Perhaps Utah’s Supreme Courthouse should hold a monument of a Mormon man porking all five of his wives. Isn’t that an important piece of Utah’s “history” and “culture”?

What? No, not that religion!

The inability of religious groups to ally themselves with or promote themselves through the government is directly equatable with religious repression (i.e. “praying in the public square”).

This is probably the most patently absurd argument that the ADF puts forth. Not only does their “answer” to this “frequently asked question” fail to cover this point at all, but it would be virtually impossible anyway. The government is allowed (and the ALCU has fought battles for) the equal use of the “public square” for religious as well as secular activities.

The ADF website lists “Churches and other religious organizations should have no access to public facilities.” as a popular myth. Who really believes this?

The ACLU, despite what they say, are extremely “hostile” towards religion.

Here’s what the ADF says:

The ACLU opposes equal tax treatment for religious bodies with other charities.

Possibly because religious organizations aren’t true charities?

The guide states, “The insertion of the words ‘under God’ into the pledge of allegiance is a violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.” (This is not a new policy in light of the pending Supreme Court case. This refusal to acknowledge God is contained in board minutes from 1954!)

It isn’t a violation? Perhaps they’ve been against it since 1954 because that’s when the phrase was inserted into the pledge.

The guide states, “Freedom of religion does not extend so far that parents may withdraw children from classes which they feel conflict with their religious principles, even when they cannot practically avail themselves of the right to send their children to private schools.” (In other words, they oppose an “opt out” for people of faith.)

So, the ADF would like parents to be able to take their kids out of a science or history class because they teach things that contradict their faith? And then we’d have what? An abundance of uneducated religious radicals? I imagine the ACLU, like most normal parents, want their child to have a full education, and if aspects of it differ from their faith, they can set it right again at home or at church. Isn’t that what those places are for?

While the ACLU states parents should be unable to remove their children from classes that are in direct conflict with their religious beliefs, they do believe anyone can “opt out” of patriotic displays: “Although a salute to the flag and oath of allegiance are commonly accepted practices in school assembly exercises, exemptions should be granted to a student whose religious scruples or other principled convictions lead him or her to refuse to participate in such exercises.” (This double-standard reveals the ACLU’s hostility toward religion.)

A public ritual is akin to a science class?

In other cases the ACLU, which claims to be a great advocate of free speech, in reality advocates censorship of free, open, and public expression of America’s heritage, faith traditions, and holidays.

I love this, I really do. Groups like this love to substitute “religious dogma” with “heritage,” “history,” or “culture.” See above for a debunking of this. In other words, this last sentence, like the rest of the ADF’s far-right propaganda, is total nonsense. They can’t distinguish between public and private ownership, expression, and endorsement. Nor can they bear the thought of religious and secular worlds being separate in fairness to the diversity of the country.

What a sad, sad little organization.

Bush’s ego stroking is rather ridiculous.

“The world’s safer…. Libya’s no longer a threat. Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror,” Bush said in an exclusive interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

The world’s safer? There are more terrorists now than there were in 2001, but the world’s safer? A country that was never a threat except to India has joined the loose coalition and that’s a sign of security?

“There are 50 million people that once lived in tyranny now living in societies which are heading toward democracies,” he said.

“…heading toward democracies” being the key phrase here. I assume Bush’s definition of “heading toward democracies” is pretty wide.

“The economy is growing. We’ve overcome a recession and corporate scandals, a stock market decline and an attack,” he said. “And yet we’ve recovered and our economy is getting better. The education system is getting better because of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Medicare law has been strengthened so seniors will have prescription drug coverage starting in 2006.”

(*) The economy is growing very slowly, and still at a net loss. The oft-trumpeted fact that Bush will be the first president since Hoover (read: Great Depression) to preside over net increase of zero jobs.

(*) The FY 2004 funding failure is $1.4 billion below what would be required to maintain 2003 purchasing power next year. Bush’s FY 2003 budget proposal was little better, falling $7.2 billion short of funding approved for FY 2003 in the original legislation. [Office of Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, 6/9/03; National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 2/03; CongressDaily, 2/3/03; National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), 2/5/03; New York Times, 2/5/03; Washington Post, 4/1/03]

(*) “New government estimates suggest that employers will reduce or eliminate prescription drug benefits for 3.8 million retirees when Medicare offers such coverage in 2006. That represents one-third of all the retirees with employer-sponsored drug coverage, according to documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.”

“I will argue that Saddam Hussein out of power has made the world a better place and a safer place,” he said. “We thought we’d find stockpiles. The whole world thought we’d find stockpiles…. But what we do know is Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction, and after September 11th, a risk we could not take was that he would share that capability with our enemies.”

Fine. Now make it a pressing issue to remove every other cruel dictator in the world, like the president of Uzbekistan, which is, oddly enough, part of the coalition of the willing. Oh, and the entire world did not think we’d find stockpiles. If that were true, why did Hans Blix ask for more time to search for weapons? Given that the WMDs were our “primary” reason for going to war, wouldn’t it have been prudent to spend the time to make sure they exist?

“Senator Kerry is justifiably proud of his record in Vietnam and should be. It’s noble service,” Bush said. “The question is who can best lead the country in a time of war. That’s really what the debate ought to be about. And I think it’s me, because I understand the stakes.”

This is mind-bogglingly stupid. While I will be the first to admit that having been a soldier does not immediately qualify one as the most apt to run a war, to assert that a mediocre businessman turned president (having, I believe, no other experience as a public servant) is better suited to lead a very political war than a 20-year senator and decorated war veteran is simply asinine.

“I think there may be handfuls of people that are very emotional, but I think by far the vast majority of Americans are wanting to know whether they’re going to be able to work and whether or not the government’s doing its job of protecting the country,” he said. “I don’t have a sense there’s a lot of anger.”

Moron.