The Dark Furie

From 1943 to 1978 Lloyd Black was a police officer in Houston. He died when his grandson Carl was only thirteen years old, so in 1990 just before Carl Black graduated from the police academy, he formally requested his grandfather's old badge number. Usually officers receive badge numbers in sequential order of when they joined the force (with current badge numbers being in the 8000s), but officers can traditionally request the numbers of family members who have left the police department. Carl's superiors took one look at the request and thought he was joking, so when he requested it again for his graduation he had his grandfathers old badge pinned on his chest. He'd wear that same badge for three months on the force before a new badge with the same number was made for him. These days, Carl is a twenty year veteran of the force who works monitoring sex offenders, and he has become a minor celebrity in the five thousand man Houston police department because of his badge number. After all, who else would request 666 - the number of the beast?

Carl says he never once thought about what the number may mean to other people, as he was just concerned with honouring his grandfather's memory. It first dawned on him that it might cause problems when other officers at the police academy moved away from him when they saw the badge, one of them even crossing himself. He recalls one time that a priest asked him to leave his church without registering whatever complaint he had called the police for help with. Still the badge number has done Carl more good than bad, with several people admitting their crimes as soon as they got a look at his badge, and then there's the time it saved his life.

Carl recalls the night in 1992 when he was sure he was about to be put in hospital or worse. The six feet, six inches tall two hundred and eighty pound thug was determined not to be arrested. He tore his shirt off and screamed "You're not gonna take me to jail!" at the young officer, before running at him and grabbing him. The giant got ready to strike then his eyes widened in fear as he caught sight of the badge number. He dropped to his knees and surrendered, saying he wasn't going to fight the devil.

If you've read this page since yesterday (and if you're reading this then it counts), then you've seen the winter snow effect that I've added to my theme. And, if you've been reading this page for a while now, you'll know that it's something I do every Christmas. Previously I would always put a different theme up for the Christmas season in order to do this, but when I redesigned my theme at the start of this year I built it so that I'd be able to add these sorts of effects to it much more easily. In fact, that's one of the reasons I spent so long redesigning it, planning which elements should be changed and making sure it all fit together nicely.

Part of this redesign process meant that I couldn't use the old snow effect I had anymore, as it has a white background and the text on the page would be invisible against it. However I'm not going to delete that snow file, partly because I can't find it but, mostly because others could get some use from it. If you're able to see animations you can watch a small sample of this effect at the top right of this post and, if you like it, I've set up a couple of lines of code for you to add to your own pages to have some snow on there too. I should warn that the first line wont work with blog designs that don't have black text, because the text will be invisible against the background.

The following line of code will add snow to your blog's content area:

#wrap4 {background:url(http://media.share.ovi.com/m1/original/0532/27c92d8f62514d8586b4fb9f0bbfb4dc.gif)top center repeat;background-attachment:fixed;}

And this line will add snow to the sides of your blog in the background area

body {background:url(http://media.share.ovi.com/m1/original/0532/27c92d8f62514d8586b4fb9f0bbfb4dc.gif)top center repeat;background-attachment:fixed;}

A lot of my readers will already know exactly what to do with these codes, but quite a few of you wont so here's a short tutorial on how to use it.

• Copy the line you want to use to your clipboard
• Go to your design page by hovering over My Page then clicking Account followed by Design
• Click on the words "customise your design" and when the page loads click the Advanced tab
• Paste the line into the text field on that page
• Click the circle next to "Use my custom stylesheet together with the current blog design"
• Finally click the SAVE button and you're done
• Go to your page and refresh it to see the snow effect

I hope this little trick brings some of you some extra enjoyment this winter season. If anyone experiences any problems, feel free to let me know in the comments here.