I was glancing at the Enhanced Weather Page for this part of the world, which normally features four different radar views, from different segments of the County Warning Area. One of them this evening was a bit more different than usual: admittedly, we’ve had a fair amount of rain today, occasionally mixed with snow, but nowhere near enough to give us a farging ocean.

This didn’t last long, though: while I was cutting the image from the page, they did an update, which replaced the offending image with one a bit less geographically unacceptable.

Still, I have to figure it’s probably at least slightly nicer on the Carolina coast than it is here, at least right this minute.

By now, everyone in the 918 knows that they’re about to get an overlay code.

Traditionally, overlay codes have been hated because they mean everyone has to dial ten digits, even to someone across the street. But who dials anymore? You call up the name on the cell and push a key.

And some places have more than one overlay, as Gothamist notes:

According to a press release, “929″ will join “718″ and the much-maligned “347″ in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. That’s because all the existing phone numbers will be tapped out by 2012, reports Neustar.

After Costa Tsiokos linked to this, I had to ask:

Was [347] really maligned? For that matter, does anyone malign 646?

His answer:

347 is generally shunned. In fact, I personally shunned it: My first NY number was a 347, and I couldn’t wait to dump it in favor of 646. 646 is deemed worthy, and an acceptable alternative to 212 (which is fairly impossible to snag).

Is this a preference for palindromes over non-palindromes? Or just a distrust of the new kid on the block? (New Yorkers have had over a decade to get used to 646.)

I think it’s a safe bet, though, that the first time someone says he has a 539 number, the person being told this will say something like “Where the hell do you live?”

And we here in the 405 should not be smug; we’ll be facing something like this ourselves in a couple of years. (572?)

“Publish or perish” used to be, I am given to understand, a directive given to university faculty: you did the papers, or you’d never work on this tenure track again, Bunkie. Now it seems to have filtered down to the students. Dani Shapiro writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Today’s young writers don’t peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller — and did.

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”

I suspect that the ones who really want to write — as distinguished from those who really want to have written, which is not the same thing — are passing up the creative writing programs and the festivals and the conferences and are spending their time staring down a blank piece of paper until the words start to flow.

(Via Little Miss Attila, who asks: “[S]ince when has any artist been entitled to get along without a day job?”)

Though that seems a secondary function, really:

“Must be worn by a siren,” says SondraK.

(Hat tip: Jeffro.)

Brief descriptions by JC of the last few First Ladies:

Nancy Reagan was America’s nagging mother, what with the “Just Say No” program. My mom would have suggested “just say no thank you”, but that’s another matter.

Barbara Bush was America’s grandmother, offering lemonade and cookies (careful of the lactose intolerant, you see), and reading to the kiddies at the public library. Full disclosure, she did in fact read to my kids at the library one time).

Hillary Clinton was best described by P. J. O’Rourke as “America’s Ex-Wife”, and that pretty much sums it up.

Laura Bush was an actual librarian, and did the official unveiling of the statue of Dr. Seuss. C’mon, that’s neat.

Michelle Obama strikes me as a playground monitor, an officious overpaid representative of the state who got the job through political connections.

If the pattern holds, the next FLOTUS ought to be pretty spiffy.

What you’re looking at is a highly-unrepresentative sampling of the search requests that arrived on this site during the last seven days, chosen mostly for potential snark value. We do this once a week; the possibility of unintended acceleration of this schedule is essentially nil.

candid jailbait spy:  What’s worse than a perv? A perv by proxy.

please god piss it away this time:  Um, this is not how you pray for rain.

does meredith vieira wear a bikini:  Certainly not in front of Matt Lauer.

twit_dollars:  The new Twitter-based currency. In an effort to reduce individual debt, no one will be allowed to spend more than 140 of them at a time.

backstage pass to 101 dalmatians:  Spot remover is specifically prohibited.

crossdresser glute pads:  See your local booty consultant for details.

I’m not well known for my great social skills:  Which may explain why you’re on the computer in the middle of the night.

cognitive dissonance at pier 1 imports:  It starts with that one item in the store marked “Made in USA.”

middle aged men expect bikini wax:  Then let them get it themselves.

sally kern is a nazi:  I don’t think she even owns a pair of proper jackboots.

Why was Alfred Kinsey a trailblazer:  He was originally drafted by the Celtics, but he couldn’t hit a free throw to save his life, so they traded him to Portland.

paranoia is good for you:  Not so loud. Someone might be listening.

Obligatory Rule 34 item: maureen dowd flirting.

A man’s gotta do, we are told, what a man’s gotta do, which demonstrates, I suppose, that you can’t keep a good tautology down.

Over at Cobb’s, Maxambit has come to the conclusion that this is what a man’s gotta do:

(1) A man’s first duty is to strengthen his own mind, so he may recognize how institutions and cultures compete to control it and then defend himself.

(2) A man’s second duty is to strive to accumulate sufficient wealth so he and his loved ones will have the resources they’ll need to live freely in the U.S., unencumbered by enslaving debts, discomforting relationships, or unrewarding labor.

(3) A man’s third duty is to do no harm to others who are within his sphere of influence.

I think I am on reasonably-firm ground in saying that most of us will not be equally successful at all three — which does not excuse us from continuing to work at them.

What little karaoke I’ve done, I’ve done in New Jersey, more than a thousand miles from home. (I’m not entirely dim.) It might have been even better to have sung in the Philippines, which is even farther away, provided I didn’t sing “My Way”:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

We will pause for a second while you ponder the idea of an “inherently sinister” English lyric penned by Paul Anka.

One voice instructor in Manila explains it this way:

“I did it my way” — it’s so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.

And, let’s face it, Sinatra was someone with whom you did not mess. Not that any of us are Sinatra.

Let us not, however, assume that karaoke-related killings are unique to the Philippines:

In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

There have been times when I wanted to punch Coldplay for singing “Yellow,” but that’s neither here nor there. Nor in New Jersey, for that matter.

Way better than those “Click It or Ticket” harangues.

(Via Autoblog.)

“These statements,” says the label, “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

This particular boilerplate, or variations thereof, appears on all those nutritional supplements they sell in the mall or at the health-food store; if the stuff did make claims, it would be considered a drug and would therefore be subject to tighter FDA scrutiny. And the FDA, cruel and heartless bastards that they are, will expect things like clinical trials and actual evidence of efficacy.

We ourselves are not always so skeptical, it seems:

I love my husband, but he’s so susceptible to believing “medical” advice… EXCEPT what his doctors tell him.

If I stop eating tomatoes and potatoes, my arthritis won’t go away. If my husband starts taking alpha lipoic acid, his type II diabetes won’t be cured. Homeopathic remedies and the people who sell them are worthless.

If it were just my husband, I wouldn’t worry much. But it’s not. It’s seemingly everywhere I turn recently. And so much of the misinformation calls itself science, that one really has to be careful not to be misled.

This calls for a disclosure.

I mentioned last summer that creeping neuropathy was leaving me a tad numb at the toes; I noted at the time that there was no cure.

What I didn’t mention was that I’d been reading all that same quasi-medical stuff, and I decided to try out, just for the hell of it, a bottle of what looks like ground-up shagbark and stray bits of linoleum compressed into green ellipses, the particular combination of which — including, not incidentally, the infamous alpha lipoic acid — is suggested (never “claimed,” of course) to have a salutary effect on such nerve damage.

From Wikipedia:

Lipoic acid has been shown in cell culture experiments to increase cellular uptake of glucose by recruiting the glucose transporter GLUT4 to the cell membrane, suggesting its use in diabetes, although these findings are controversial as lipoic acid worsened the condition of type 1 diabetes induced rats.

Of course, type 1 and type 2 are different as night and, um, well, twilight.

After about 180 of these tabs, I don’t think things have really gotten any better. But they also haven’t gotten any worse, which must be considered a boon for someone with a degenerative disease. Inevitably, this suggests a question: how much of this is due to the actual efficacy of the compound, and how much to the placebo effect? That, I can’t tell you. But if the next question is “Would you pay thirty cents a tab for a really good placebo?” the answer, I suspect, is Yes.

I suppose the next step is the homeopathic route: dissolve one tablet in forty-eight gallons of water, and then take a couple of sips every day.

Mmm. Pass the fried chicken.

It’s gotta be the halftime instructions. The Thunder trailed Golden State by one after the first quarter, managed to squeak out a two-point lead after the second, and then went up 36-23 in the third en route to a 104-95 win in beautiful downtown Oakland.

Or maybe not. Neither team shot especially well (around 42 percent), and rebounds were pretty even (49-48 OKC). Or you might look at this statistic: the Warriors pulled off a respectable seven steals. Russell Westbrook, all by his lonesome, came up with eight. His teammates had eight more. Golden State, a team which is renowned for its ability to force turnovers, gave up 23 of them, one every two minutes; the Thunder, which isn’t known for brilliant ball control, turned it over only 16 times.

Certainly most of Golden State’s offense was present and accounted for. Monta Ellis was bottled up a bit — thank you, Thabo Sefolosha — but Stephen Curry and Corey Maggette split 47 points between them, and eight of the Warriors’ 23 trey attempts paid off. Inexplicably, they missed eight of 21 free throws.

And here’s a sentence that seems a bit astounding: “Kevin Durant had a below-average 29 points.” Kid Delicious was slow to get started, and only hit 7 of 21 from the floor, but he contributed eight boards to the cause. Westbrook had seven rebounds, 21 points and 10 assists. OKC was 22-24 from the charity stripe and bought six treys in 14 tries. Nick Collison pulled down 10 boards.

So that’s five straight wins for the Weather-Related. There’s one more game on this road trip, against the Frail Blazers (bless you, Basketbawful), who somehow keep winning despite the absence of Greg Oden, Joel Przybilla and Brandon Roy. Either they have the world’s greatest bench or there’s a Rose Garden curse. I think the Lakers believed the latter up until tonight.

Last time we heard anything about Crossroads Mall, on the city’s south side, was when word got out that it had become the property of the Fed. At the time, I said basically one word: “Bulldozers.”

Now I’m not so sure. As is often the case with malls, while smaller stores paid rent to mall management, the anchor stores owned their sections outright. And one of the departed anchors has managed to find a buyer: Macy’s last month spun off its share of the property to something called Crossroads/150 LLC, for a tidy $1.5 million.

This particular something, reports OKCBiz, is managed by Richard Tanenbaum, who says he plans to retain it as an investment property. And I can’t really argue with him on this:

“It’s not the time to be buying anything,” Tanenbaum said with a laugh, “but, my goodness gracious, at 10 bucks a foot … It’s just one of those deals that you just can’t pass up.”

So: one down, three to go. Crossroads Maiden Lane LLC, the Fed’s entity, owns two of the anchor slots — JCPenney and Montgomery Ward (later Steve & Barry’s) — while Dillard’s retains their location.

I still can’t imagine what might happen to this place that would make it profitable, but I still am loath to bet against Richard Tanenbaum.

The first time I saw this, it set off my Misandry Alert: “Is this sexist or what?”

After a second look, I’m not so sure. I mean, if that young fellow is being oppressed, he certainly seems to be enjoying himself. Although we can’t tell for sure what’s going on outside the frame, I think it’s a safe bet that she’s not actually standing on his head. And it’s not like he’s looking up her skirt, either.

Compared to the general run of fashion advertising, this is a bright spot, says the intrepid correspondent for ShoeBlog:

I am weary of the pouting, leggy girl, wearing nothing more than lingerie, heels and a come hither look, sitting or laying on a sofa/chair, with soft focus. Virtually every shoe, handbag, fragrance, lingerie, and cosmetic advertisement features at least three of these components. Snore.

The shoe, incidentally, is from Giuseppe Zanotti’s Spring 2010 collection. I have a basic philosophical disagreement with stuff like this — boots, to me, imply protection, utterly contradicted by the open toe — but it does seem to satisfy one of my criteria for interesting footwear, which is “Can I imagine someone wearing this to XO, assuming XO were still open?” (Snarkists who question my urban-hipster credentials, and that should include all of you, are directed here.)

Excerpts from Megan McArdle’s Quarterly Plea for Comment Thread Civility, not necessarily in the original order:

Many people wander into the other half of the Blogosphere having carefully nurtured a plethora of witty responses to the straw man arguments that flourish in the echo chambers of both the liberal and conservative press. They are therefore expecting that as soon as they have shone the cold light of reason on the ridiculous notions of those rubes on the other side, all but the mean-spirited and vicious among them will immediately see the error of their ways. When they find out that those people have real live reasons for believing as they do, often bolstered by real live facts, they are hurt. This is not what they expected. They feel surprised, and somehow betrayed. At this juncture, they often choose to go on the offensive, name calling and writing sarcastic, bombastic screeds which often seem to center around the silliest and most biased material available to their side, yet are shocked to find out that libertarians are, for some reason, unconvinced by the latest publications from the CSPI. Often, defending their initial assertions against angles they hadn’t, in their previous hothouse environment, really considered, leads them to take increasingly extreme positions in defense of their original unnuanced view, until having found themselves arguing that in order to, say, prevent abortions we should take down the name and phone number of anyone who ever paused in front of a Planned Parenthood Clinic and then hunt them down and shoot them, they flounce away after declaring that everyone on the site is a bunch of ignorant [expletive deleted] who kill babies for fun. If you find yourself caught in this cycle, I have news for you: they’re not the ignorant [expletive deleted] here.

Other behavior by said ignorant [expletive deleted]:

No one gets to pick some time in the distant past when everyone was right, and declare that they draw their moral authority from the denizens of that halcyon era. The fifties and the sixties are over, folks. If your idea can’t stand on its own now, its popular history won’t help it.

So are the thirties, now that I think about it.

And finally:

And fer gosh sakes, will you get out a little more? The sureness of your own ineluctable moral superiority, of the venal stupidity of the other side, of the patent weakness of the opposition’s arguments and moral fiber, is a little tiresome. Cruise around and see what the other side has to say. Then attack them. Nicely, of course. Really, it saves a lot of trouble putting words in the mouths of straw men when you can probably find some idiot somewhere who said pretty much the same thing, and think of how much less typing you’ll do.

Despite its TL;DR capacity, I urge you to read the whole thing — and the subsequent comments, which for the most part do not sound the least bit chastened.

In Friday morning’s email:

This letter is from World Fund Discovery Management And Payment Bureau inaugurated by the World Financial Service Authority United States Of America/United Kingdom.

This body was set up to discover an outstanding fund being owed to Governments or Individuals all over the world through Contract Payment, Inheritance and Lottery Winning Prize Awards.

This body has been authorized to investigate and make the subsequent payment to any government, organization or individual, to whom its services apply. During our investigation, we discovered an outstanding sum of money in favour of your name and a mandate has been given to this body: World Fund Discovery Management And Payment Bureau to ensure that this fund gets to you without any further delay.

And you’ll have funds, funds, funds, till the scammers take your dollars away.

The only really distinctive aspect of this attempt is the name fabricated for the Director: Dr. Richard McWealth. Seriously. This is about as believable as a male-enhancement product being offered by Miles O. Johnson.

Syaffolee would like an explanation: “What is the rationale for putting a facial expression in parentheses?”

Putting (grin) or (smile) at the end of a paragraph or sentence does not make one look more literate or correct. True, both (grin) and : D are shorthands for those who are afraid that all readers will take them the wrong way*, but I would argue that writing an expression within parenthesis is also an indication of pretension and being not with it. At best, one could assume that the browser had a hiccup when trying to render an emoticon. At worst, it’s like claiming a porcelain toilet as po-mo art or orange Kool-Aid as the nihilist’s Minute Maid.

* Rule of thumb: Always assume that your words will be taken the wrong way.

Most of the nihilists I know prefer Tropicana, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway:

This type of written affectation is pointless. Get rid of the wordy facial expressions in your communications and I’m sure people will still get the general gist of your comment. If you really want to smile and grin your way through the internet, upload a video of yourself to YouTube.

Note to self: “Hitler discovers the emoticon.”

Oh, wait…

Robert Stacy McCain is reporting in from Birmingham, Alabama, and he notes in passing:

785 miles in 15 hours, including a two-hour nap in the car this morning at a rest area near Bristol, Tenn…

Which, of course, means 785 miles in 13 hours, including at least one, maybe two fuel stops, unless he’s bolted some Mondo Mobil auxiliary gas tank into that Kia Optima of his. I’m guessing he took I-81 down to Bristol and picked up US 11 there.

Relevant only to me: One of the first assignments dished out to me when I was a newlywed was to get rid of my devilish six-cylinder ‘66 Chevrolet. One of the replacements under consideration was a three-year-old Mercedes-Benz 240D with just about six figures on its odometer: the owner, a physician in a small city up towards Kansas, had retrofitted it with just such a tank. At the Benz’s typical 30 mpg, we were told, the car could do over 1300 miles on a single fillup of diesel. Downside: half the trunk space had been recouped for fuel storage, and zero to sixty was quoted in fortnights. We wound up with, of all things, another Chevy, this time with a proper small-block V8. It became her car; I wound up with a Toyota I’ve mentioned before.

Still, can you imagine McCain with a thousand-mile range? Because he can, you damn betcha.

In fact, we often don’t even know when it’s happening at all:

The King demoiselle (Chrysipetra rex) is not just one type of fish, but three distinct groups that recently split from each other, according to a new study.

Samples from three separate populations were sent to Joshua Drew, a marine conservation biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and this is what he found:

In his lab, Drew analyzed the samples for three genes — one that has evolved slowly, and two that have changed rapidly through time. His results showed a clear pattern: The genes that have changed quickly look different from one geographical group to the next, indicating that the groups only recently began to split.

“That means that this little fish we thought was broadly distributed has a mosaic of individual populations and each one is genetically distinct,” said Drew, whose study has been accepted for publication in the journal Coral Reefs. “That highlights how little we really know about how biodiversity on Earth is distributed.”

Question: Since coral reefs generally seem to be in suboptimal condition these days, does this mean we have maybe three times as many species with endangered habitats as we thought we did?

(Seen at Jenn’s.)

From left to right: Abigail Adams (John Adams, 2008, played by Laura Linney), and Joan Berkman (The Squid and the Whale, 2005, played by Laura Linney).

The thinking man’s sex symbol? How would I know?

Anyway, happy mumbleth birthday to Laura Linney.