I've got a version from Posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at November 12, 2003 07:34 PM - just sent from Hotmail - I'm never sure how the HTML and graphic will be handled across systems - tried from the work account and failed for refusal to handle HTML.

Hmm. This looks about as I remember when I saw this post back on Friday. Furthermore, I cleaned out my cache this morning, as part of my daily paranoia, and it still looks the same.

Makes me wonder what draft 2 said.

Jon, it looks just the same to me as well. I recollect it ended with the Twain thing, and if there was any other version, I never saw it.

Well, it's nice to know I'm not completely nuts. Or if I am, I'm not the only one. :)

Solidarity in insanity.

Clark, I got the text you sent -- but alas, it's the scrootched version. Thanks for making a game try.

Jon, Pericat, it didn't use to end incoherently.

Teresa, I never saw any other version. I thought it was a bit abrupt, but figured that was just me. In any case, the version which is up now is, I suspect, the version that was posted; if not, the earlier was substituted very shortly afterward.

I92m pretty sure I recall a non-incoherent ending, and one that didn92t end with du Toit92s copyright info. But I just grepped through my Safari cache, and I don92t see anything but the current version. I don92t think my cache has anything older than a day or two of stuff in it.

Maybe you or Patrick could try the same thing? (I don92t recall if you92ve gone to OSX.) Do the following:

1. Open a Terminal window.
2. Type cd ~/Library/Caches/Safari/
3. Type grep -r 'absence of a link' * (Even better, instead of absence of a link use a distinctive word or phrase that92s in the finished version of the essay but not in the current one, if you can remember it exactly.) This ought to return a list of files, looking something like Binary file 06/12/4123192938-0413807823.cache matches.
4. Type open . (yes, that92s oh-pee-ee-en-space-period) to open the current directory in the Finder. Now you can find those files in the list and, one by one, drag them into a Safari window to get a look at them.

Good luck.

I have one as of 11/15/2003 1:14am MST -- I'll send it via mail.

Glad to read that I'm not the only one who gets riled up by Kim du Toit. Right ON,Teresa!

Stu (blogging from Germany).

What pericat said. I only ever saw the version that ended with the (unidentified, but I recognized it) Mark Twain quote. And I'm pretty sure that was on the day it was posted. If, as we must conclude from some of the other comments, it once ended differently online, it reverted pretty damn quick.

It's still a fine post, however it ends. Though I hope that the corrected version separates out the long quote from du Toit more clearly from your own writing. That was a wee bit confusing at first.

You've seen Philosoraptor's great rant on the subject, haven't you? Of course you have.

Shows how much we all love ya Teresa, I only ever saw the version that ended abruptly, I assumed it was me misunderstanding or missing a common referent.

I'm going to try my caches here at work, once it stops being one of the busiest days of the year for me.

There was a period first day when I saw the comments list for the du Toit essay growing but the du Toit essay did not display in the RH frame.

I took that to be an anomoly of local caching - odd the LH frame should update but the RH frame revert - but it may not have been.

Clicking on the comment list as displayed on the left side frame opened a page with what I now understand to have been the second version essay (that's the one I had from the "with comments" layout first day) at the top with comments including a growing series of new comments (which I took to likely have been mostly in work on poster's local machines more or less simultaneously) in order below.

Within a short time on the splash page the du Toit was again displayed at the top of the RH frame in what I believe to be the current rather than the preferred version.

Can't speak to the TG issue, but male hairpieces that are worn in an effort to look younger are more likely to be noticed than hairpieces worn to look the actual age but with more hair -

Teresa,

Did the missing version have a link to a post by Sgt Stryker?

I seem to recall there being one, then it went away.

Yes, it linked to Sgt. Stryker. Just so.

What would be the Windows equivalent of the procedure Avram described?

Teresa, that depends.

You would want to search the files in your browser's cache directory. Where that is depends on which version of the OS and browser you're using.

For Internet Explorer, select "Internet Options" from the "Tools" menu, click the "Settings" button in the "Temporary Internet files" section of the "General" tab. Then click the "View Files..." button. Then click the "Search" button and enter some text unique to the page you're looking for (or you could just look for files named "004023.html").

For Mozilla, you'd have to bring up the preferences dialog ("Edit" menu, "Preferences..."), and choose the "Advanced" category, "Cache" subcategory. That will show where your cache folder is. Select the text it shows, and copy it (click on it, Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy). Open a Windows Explorer window, and paste the cache folder text into the address box. Then open the "Cache" subdirectory. On the "View" menu, "Explorer Bar" submenu, select "Search".

Unfortunately, I only seem to have the "scrootched" one that ends with the unattributed Twain quote. The only mentions of "stryker" in my cache are for this post. It looks like Mozilla only preserves the most recent copy of a page in its cache (which I guess makes sense).

I think I saw a version that said it wasn't surprising he was on his third wife. Then when I went to comment it, that line wasn't there.

While it's not surprising he's been divorced twice, it's pretty amazing that he got THREE different women to marry him. Smart women, foolish choices? Or maybe he talks a good line.