Filed by: Julian on April 27th 2006
Top Excuses I have Tried to Use to Explain the Horribly Disfiguring Scab on my Cheek This Week
- Freak Two-up accident.
- Bitten by a turtle.
- Have you ever heard the expression “As easy as stealing candy from a baby?” Rubbish!
- I dorked into a whore – oops, I mean walked into a door.
- I stopped a fight in a bar. The guy knocked me down with one punch, and the fight was over.
- I burned it on the side of an oven – turns out you can’t commit suicide by putting your head in an electric oven.
- I was attacked by a rabbit.
- So, I am in the back of a taxi headed to my place with a spunk I picked up in a bar, and things are getting hot and heavy, when suddenly he gets changes his mind and claims he didn’t know I was a man dressed as a woman.
- Bulldog.
- Some guy fell off his unicycle in a weird way, and the unicycle was sent flying towards me, and knocked my feet out from under me.
- I am chatting up this woman in a bar, and things are going really well until I say “Why don’t you come to my place and fuck me stupid?” and suddenly she decks me, yelling “Who are you calling stupid?”
- Those diggers? Who would have thought they still have it in them? And it turns out they don’t carry much two-up money anyway.
- Nicked myself shaving.
- Working here is like banging your head against a brick wall.
- We took Easter egg hunting a bit too seriously this year.
- Lightning struck a tree right near me.
- I’m sorry; I can’t tell you – I don’t want my landlord to find out I am keeping an wild African animal in my apartment.
- I thought her husband was in Canberra for the ANZAC day march.
- I had a conjoined twin removed.
- Accident with a mouse-trap.
My conclusions
- Some people don’t mind at all if you spin them a story while others hate not knowing the truth.
- Stories involving animals are more believable. Stories involving illicit sex and losing fights are funnier.
- The true story (hidden in the list above) gets no sympathy.
Articles
Comment by Alan Green on April 27, 2006
Emacs-users deserve whatever scabs they get.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on May 3, 2006
Alan: I agree, of course, but may I point out many apps that are not Emacs use (some) Emacs key bindings? The shell does so by default, f.ex., and even in Vim, Ctrl-W in Insert mode does what you’d expect.
Comment by Alastair on May 3, 2006
Most Cocoa-based MacOS X apps have emacs-like key bindings, for another example.
However: use of ^w in this manner is *not* a sign of emacs usage. On emacs, ^w is bound by default to the kill-region command (more or less equivalent to a “cut” operation).
I don’t know where the “ooops^w” notation came from but it’s not from emacs (unless the bindings have changed recently which I highly doubt).
Comment by Andrew on June 4, 2006
Oops^w is from vi, where it goes back one (w)ord. At least, that’s where I saw it.
Oops^H^H^H^H is from every stupid terminal program you’ve ever used.
Comment by Julian on June 4, 2006
From Wikipedia:
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on June 5, 2006
We’re all unfrozen cavemen, I suppose.
Comment by Alastair on December 7, 2006
Because I spent some time this morning delving into the arcane nature of UNIX terminal line discipline, and had reason to research this, I now offer the following explanation.
^W is most commonly used as the WERASE character in the terminal line discipline. This operates in-kernel, meaning that all applications will benefit from this behaviour, provided that they are operating in the right mode.
You can check the current WERASE character using
stty -a. Although it’s non-POSIX, the two UNIX systems I just tried (RHEL4 and MacOS X 10.4) both recognised the character.The behaviour of WERASE is as follows (citing APUE 2ed):
So there you have it.
Also note that because the erased characters don’t go to the process, the erase can’t be undone. Unlike, for example, M-W when using a readline-based tool like bash. So ^W is probably not a good habit to let your fingers get into.
(BTW Julian I notice that you don’t render the cite attribute on blockquotes, perhaps remove it from the “you can use these tags” line?)