Just about the only photo of mine that turned out from the Remembrance Day ceremony downtown a few days ago. It was sunny, fairly cold, and well attended – the paper said seven to ten thousand. Lots of kids & families, which is good.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The poem itself on WikiSource; about the poem on Wikipedia.
Base image for the graphic above courtesy of Veterans Affairs Canada. And I should note, in passing, that my text on the image recreates perhaps the best-known error possible with this famous poem…
Geocities shut down today (well, yesterday already, actually, but close enough) and in honour of all those truely awful Geoshitties websites over the years, XKCD has reskinned itself. Awesome.
I had a Geocities website, starting back in late 1998… This November marks eleven years of web presense for me. I didn’t commit every sin seen on XKCD’s exemplar, but pretty damned close. BLINK? Did that. Only briefly, praise Cthulhu. Black background with distracting graphic? Um, yup. Tables with visible borders? Afraid so. Tacky stock gifs and mystery-meat navigation icons? Animated background gif? Even in the dark ages of 1998 there were limits to which I would not stoop, thank you.
Hey, it poves that if nothing else, my design & coding chops have improved in eleven years…
(The title of this post comes from the discussion over on XKCD’s forum.)