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I had a very odd dream last night. I was on a boat, helping out on a whale-watching tour. I did this for real, and often dream about it, particularly when I’m a bit stressed. I was up on the observation deck, when I saw—to my utter joy—that we were surrounded by killer whales (orcas), leaping and breaching high into the air. The tourists on deck got very excited about this, and reached out their arms. I warned them not to put their hands into the orcas’ mouths as their teeth were sharp, but one woman did just that. The orca wasn’t being aggressive, but her hand got badly cut. At once, the orca took on the form of a man, and jumped on board to apologise to the woman (orcas are so polite). He was naked and his human skin still bore the striking black and white patterns of his orca form.

We all went down to the galley for some coffee, and while we were down there a storm blew up. A huge wave broke against the stern of the boat, and propelled us forward violently. “That was a huge wave”, I said. The orca looked scornful; “Call that a big wave? Pah, that’s nothing.” Then he smiled his big, sharp smile.

You might notice that some of the comments in the list below each post now have white backgrounds, and others have grey backgrounds. There’s a story behind this. I wanted to have a fancy alternating colour scheme for the comments, so that they would have alternating white and grey backgrounds¹. Fine, I thought—this should be easy. Each comment has a comment ID number, so if I write a function to check whether the ID is even or odd, I can set the class attribute of the li element to ‘even’ or ‘odd’ appropriately. Sorted.

Or not. I had forgotten that the comment IDs are assigned as each comment is made over the whole site, so that the numbers on the comments on each post are not necessarily consecutive. So instead of a nice orderly alternation, I have a distressing degree of randomness. I’m sure that there must be a way to do this properly, using the content() attribute of lists, but I can’t think how. Does anyone know how, or can you point me to a helpful tutorial on the subject?

¹ In the memorable words of Pete, the yellow was a bit jingly.