As I mentioned in a comment to the last post, I will no longer be updating this blog.

While that is of course a tragedy to none, I was touched by those who commented, or e-mailed, asking me to continue. Alas, my schedule makes that infeasible; Sirocco has to call it quits.

Thanks to all who have dropped by! My e-mail address will still be working.

To go out in style — and as a hat tip to fellow Zapffe aficionado Mr. P (we few, we happy few, we band of brothers!) — I will sign off with two final translations of the great existential pessimist. The short pieces in question represent, respectively, the first and the last by the adult Peter Wessel Zapffe. As usual, the originals are better.

One night, man was seated upon the curved back of the earth, and there were stars on the vault and a stone below his bottom. Then he felt that he was there, and that it was him, and he was deeply puzzled, for he had not known before. And he spoke aloud and said: Lo, I am pushed from below and stars are above my head! Yet as he heard his own voice, he became anxious and began to shout more loudly: Lo, I am pushed! And it was as if he drew it from his angst.
     From this day hence he did not eat, and his brethren he knew not any longer. Whenever his angst appeared he would scream the same words, but each time in a new way, as if always seeking a better one. And at times, his eyes would shine as he screamed. Those who met him would sometimes pause to wonder at the strange sound of his voice.
     Then his heart burst, and people gathered to remember him. None had understood him, himself least of all, but all felt that his words were the highest wisdom.

Dear all of you who have come to say goodbye to the incarnation that was made available as an abode for my spiritual life. Say goodbye to the inscrutable synthesis that emerged in 1899 and kept together for 90 years, before it again disintegrated back into its inorganic elements.

Thank you for coming, all of you, and each specifically, each with his own perspective on this that has happened, in part foreseeably and in part as a fruit of pure happenstance. This, which we partly owe gratitude and must partly consider our perfidious foe – if we imagine a governing consciousness behind it all.
     And if we do not, then we have in part been lucky in the great lottery, and in part drawn blanks or actual harm. But it often feels as though some consciousness is waiting in ambush to strike us in our vulnerable moments. In any case, we come from nothing and go to nothing and that is nothing to worry about.
     Goodbye, everyone.

After returning this blog from hiatus, I tried reading it in Internet Explorer. This was a first, since IE, being the inferior browser it is, was uninstalled on my computer until a recent Windows XP upgrade.

And what does my eye spy? Unlike Opera and Firefox, IE displays the sidebar at the bottom of the page, starting where the main column ends. So for all these many months, visitors using IE - as most, inexplicably, do - have been unable to access the menu save by scrolling down. Death, where is thy sting?

If anyone has any idea how to fix this in WordPress 1.5 CSS, please drop a comment or an e-mail. I certainly don’t.

Meanwhile, let’s sing it together: Internet Explorer is a worthless excuse for a browser. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and visit one or both of these sites for a free download:

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5
• Opera 8.51 for Windows

So, which is better? For me, it’s a draw. Opera has the more functionality, but Firefox can be customized with extensions such as Adblock. On a Windows platform, Opera is a little faster; both are appreciably faster than IE. Both allow tabbed browsing.

And both display my sidebar where it belongs.

Update: thanks to Shana in the user forums, I found a fix. Of course, my indictment of Internet Explorer stands!

PS. Shana’s web development blog, 2+designs, is worth a look.

The world’s northernmost desert wind picks up again.