more whining about LJ markup

A pet peeve of mine: Often somebody on LiveJournal formats a list full of LI elements in the old-fashioned caveman HTML way, without closing tags, like so:

<UL> <LI> foo <LI> bar <LI> baz </UL>

Now, in the ultramodern XHTML world we have to close all our tags so we can't have that. So something in the system dreams up this abomination out of its little machine brain:

<UL> <LI> foo <LI> bar <LI> baz </UL> </LI></LI></LI>

Wrong, wrong, WRONG.

Keep watching the skies!

I'm amazed that, having ridden on the 2003QQ47 bandwagon, the press is not yet getting itself worked up in a lather over my personal favorite killer asteroid, 2003QO104.

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body mass index

A Washington Post op-ed writer complains about the definition of obesity.

The last time I went to the doctor, after remarking on how skinny I was, she measured my Body Mass Index just for kicks, and was shocked to discover that I'm at the extreme high end of the "normal" range, on the verge of being officially overweight by the charts.

I've been skinnier (and fatter too), and I'll be the first to admit I've got a barely visible spare tire developing around the middle. But it's still pretty weird.

What's hamburger? Chopped ham? No! It's chopped steak!

Why did those old ads for A1 Steak Sauce have a spokesman who looked exactly like Dick Cavett? Did they do focus-group research back then and discover that Dick Cavett was the hero of the steak-eating generation?

Update: Forgot to add the disclaimer that, in fact, the observation that he looked exactly like Dick Cavett was publicly broadcast by Eddie Murphy at the time. But this does not mean that I am ripping off Eddie Murphy, as it was (a) in the context of an entirely different joke and (b) immediately obvious to everyone anyway, as the appearance of Dick Cavett was for some reason generally known; I forget why.