Category: oddities

RIP GoT

OK, fair enough if you’re not into Game of Thrones, but I spotted this in the parking lot of Tienda Inglesa shortly after the final episode aired, and it struck me as oddly appropriate.

Years ago, I was maybe a hundred pages into the first book of George R R R R Martin’s (I may have a couple too many Rs there) Song of Ice and Fire series, when a British friend revealed it was an HBO television series. Thus ended the reading.

For all its gratuitous gore, the show was fascinating and complex for several years. However, when Season 7 ended, with Season 8 not slated to appear for two years, it had become silly enough that I wasn’t sure I’d watch any more. But I did, and it’s over, and good riddance: its descent into silliness (and stupidity) charged forward, oblivious to a large audience that was apparently more intelligent than the series’ writers.

Or perhaps the series’ writers were simply under the gun to wrap things up, come hell or high water. Which they did, as if from plot-device to-do list. Check. Check. Check.

Anyway, a single meme for Season 8: the coffee cup.

You spend $15-20 million on an episode that included 55 nights of battle scene shooting, and leave a Starbucks cup on a banquet table?

It kind of sums things up.

How to treat a hero

José Gervasio Artigas Arnal is the national hero of Uruguay, predating political divisions which rendered such universal accord mostly impossible. Artigas’ story is complex, involving Spain, England, and Portugal, and eventually banishment in Paraguay. But hero he is, and it seems every town in the Oriental Republic has a street named after him. There’s a departamento (state) called Artigas. You can find his statue in Washington, D.C., New York, Caracas, Athens, Mexico City, Newark, New Jersey, and Quito, Ecuador .

And in Pando:

There, screen-printed plexiglas panels proclaiming tolerance, peace, union, family, and love shield waterworks that are – can they be described any other way? – pissing on his monument.

The pigeon temporarily perched on his head adds a further bit of indignity.

Maybe I read too much into it? I guess I have this design thing.

Every yard should have one

Uruguay "negro" lawn ornament

Ah, Uruguay! Every day that I walk dogs with Syd, we go by this house. FWIW, only 4% of Uruguayans are black. 

If you’ve been with me a while, you might recall similar remarkable coffee packaging (which El Palacio Del Cafe subsequently changed).

On another note, weather here went from very rainy to very hot. How hot? Just before I took this photo, all six dogs were in the recently filled swimming hole. I don’t remember ever seeing that before

Dogs enjoying a swimming hole

A little geekiness

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that occasionally it changes appearance. That’s because I change WordPress “themes,” the templates that determine how everything displays. Many themes don’t allow full-size photos. In my last change, I found one that did. So I was thrilled…

…OK, stop right there. Today I notice that this theme has decided to replace my changing Uruguay header pictures with a black and white photo of mountains with snow, of which Uruguay has neither. How the hell did that happen? Actually, I kind of like the irony. I think I’ll leave it for a while.*

But this theme had something I didn’t like: when I wanted to make something italic, the theme displayed it as bold italic.

So for weeks my daily to-do list has had a reminder to fix it.

But how? I went to the theme developer’s site to find a helpful forum, only to find that the theme hasn’t been updated in two years. Bad news. Kind of on my own.

I downloaded the theme’s stylesheet. Nothing amiss there: the <em> and <i> tags were probably mapped to italic. So what next? I looked at the source code of a blog entry, downloaded the header.php file, and there it was!

html code

OK, not exactly in-your-face obvious. But in line 36, the theme is calling for Google web fonts, and font Open Sans italic is only specified as 700 weight, which as you know — because doesn’t everyone work with Google web fonts every day? — is bold. So I got the correct “call” code from Google fonts, created a “child” theme in WordPress, and inserted the “correct” code in the header.php file there, which overrules the original (without the risk of your changes being wiped out with a theme update, even though that seems unlikely after two years).

And it works!

I still have no idea how header.php was invoked by my blog posts, but perhaps that’s because…well, I did look into PHP programming at one point and essentially decided life is too short.

I’ll leave it at that.

 

* No doubt it has to do with my messing around with code I don’t understand.