Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Okay, I'll play the "first line retrospective" meme, in which you're supposed to list the first sentence of your first journal entry of each month of 2005, but I cheated a bit because so many of my months started with an automated quote-of-the-day post. Once I started tweaking that much, I decided to tweak just a tad more, when an entry started with a parenthetical how-I'm-doing before getting to what inspired me to post in the first place. But you can read the results as though I'd just followed the rules absolutely if you like, as long as I haven't screwed up the table formatting ...

If the light bulb hadn't gone on with the idea of using 'wget' and 'lynx' to grab old entries for me instead of a lot of cutting-and-pasting, I would've decided this meme wasn't worth the bother.

Date:	First sentence of first entry, exactly per instructions even if it's a quote:	First "real sentence" of first "real entry" per my notions:	Editorial comments / parenthetical preamble left out of previous column:	Notes/Commentary:
2005-01-01	Watching fireworks from a window.	Watching fireworks from a window.		QotD was: "Never make a decision immediately upon waking up from a bad dream." -- Anon. (swiped from redbird
2005-02-01	"Clearly this gay marriage must have been what caused the downfall of the ancient Egyptian civilization, since it only lasted for about 2000 years after that." -- cdybedahl	As I was reading this article and shaking my head, the thought struck me: "Y'know, one group really does recruit, when you think about it.	(Quick how-I'm-doing update: I've pushed myself kind of hard the past several days, but still hoped to go to 3LF tonight.
2005-03-01	"One of the goals is, 'Active participation and support in initiatives that deliver strategically valued outcomes', which may be put in any Powerpoint slide, anywhere in the universe, anytime, with equal semantic contribution. -- austin_dern	If precision is saying exactly what you mean, then is postcision trying apply spin after what you said has blown up in your face?	(Help with the lock is coming late tonight or tomorrow evening; thanks for the suggestions, folks.)
2005-04-01	"Good journalism values balance above all else." -- the editors of Scientific American	Argh. My day has very much not gone according to plan.
2005-05-01	"Desert and mountain places located on the margins of society are locations of choice in luring God's people to a deeper understanding of who they are." -- Belden C. Lane	Home from Faerie Festival. Very tired. Did remember to leave before I completely ran out of spoons, instead of hanging out until the very end, but even so, I'm pretty wiped.
2005-06-01	"Locking people up without explaining why, and without giving them a chance to prove their innocence, seems a peculiar way to advance the cause of freedom in the world." -- Bob Herbert	I hear -- literally and repeatedly -- that the pre- Independence Day firecracker season has started a little earlier in Baltimore this year than it did last year.		I had to go to 4 June for the first "real entry" of the month. The second entry on 1 June was a "link sausage" post that started with: "Beware Of Camera! A collection of safety warnings from the sections of camera owner's manuals you probably skipped past in too much of a hurry."
2005-07-01	"But then, perhaps you are not to blame." -- the wizard Zulkeh	Just a quick reminder: Tomorrow, 2:00 PM, at the Town Green Park in Bowie, it's The Homespun Ceilidh Band, and at the MS Fantasy Ball in the evening, in Glen Burnie, it's Three Left Feet.
2005-08-01	A bit of advice: if you're going to eat cinnamon-red-hots ice cream and coconut lime habanero ice cream together, eat the cinnamon-red-hots ice cream first, then the coconut lime habanero ice cream.	A bit of advice: if you're going to eat cinnamon-red-hots ice cream and coconut lime habanero ice cream together, eat the cinnamon-red-hots ice cream first, then the coconut lime habanero ice cream.		The QotD began with: "i've developed a deep appreciation for the word douche as an insult." -- msdreadful
2005-09-01	"1. Guns don't kill people. People kill people."	The good news: I can pass my front hallway again.		The QotD was a three-parter that wound up sniping at Microsoft. The first line doesn't really telegraph that...
2005-10-01	I still think "Please disable the user" and "Please disable the user's account" are entirely different instructions. -- badmagic	Who is in charge of traffic? Is it Asphaltia, or does she only rule parking lots?
2005-11-01	"There is a belonging that goes beyond language." -- axiomaxiom	I'm frustrated; annoyed at my body and at my own poor planning, for a thoroughly unsatisfying Hallowe'en night (I'm tempted to declare Hallowe'en continued for as many days at it takes for me to be happy with it -- wasn't Samhain originally a three-day holiday?).
2005-12-01	"Phelps claims that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq because God is punishing America for harboring gays. -- Margaret Cho	I got curious. Then I got a little obsessed.

Hmm. I tried to do that with a stylesheet and a "class='foo'" clause in the <td> tags, but that trick only appears to work if I can put a <style> block in the <head> of the page, which I don't have access to in a LiveJournal entry (for perfectly sensible reasons). I'm going to have to reread the CSS docs later to see whether there's a way to attach a stylesheet like that to a <div> block that I failed to figure out. At least I got to use a stylesheet for testing it before posting.