Last night I was sitting at my desk, waiting for the arrival of various ghosts and goblins, and, in tune with the date, I was contemplating the kinds of pain and sorrow that I could reasonably expect in the next few years, other than the obvious one of going to work. Two things hit me at once: I have a dental appointment next Tuesday, and right after that appointment, I get to stuff myself into the voting booth.

Okay, not the stuff of medieval torture chambers, but certainly enough to register on the Discomfort Meter. And since I'd already picked out my candidates, I figured I might as well do some research on the bevy of State Questions on this year's ballot. The results, such as they are, can be seen in The Vent. As for the ghosts and goblins, they apparently got the night off.

The irrepressible James Lileks (well, I certainly haven't repressed him, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to try) discloses Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Walter F. Mondale*.

*but the Democratic Party prefers you didn't ask

Lynn Sislo is not impressed with Oklahoma cockfighting or its boosters:

Well, of course not. Nobody bets on baseball. Except Pete Rose.

Lynn continues:

Taking the last point first, the country isn't stealing our children; they're high-tailing it out of here first chance they get.

But I wrestled with this question (which is, incidentally, State Question 687) for half a day, and while I suspect I find the cockfighting culture, such as it is, every bit as distasteful as Lynn does, I'm not ready to baldly go where so many have gone before and say, "I hate this. Let's ban it." If I could ban everything I didn't like, there wouldn't be a hell of a lot left.

Still, the ban is likely to pass — last poll I heard projected 62 percent in favor — and being excessively introspective by nature, I have to wonder: how much of my position is based on rock-bottom conviction, and how much is an effort to persuade myself that I'm much more open-minded than anyone else thinks?

Welcome to Dustbury, where every guess comes with a second-guess free.

Some people are unaccountably proud of taking Michele at A Small Victory off their blogrolls. Reason enough for me to add her to mine, I'm inclined to think.

And the Professor reports that his October bandwidth was 261.45 gb. For comparison purposes: dustbury.com October bandwidth was 0.651 gb.

Update, 2 November, 9:30 am: Mike at Cold Fury knows exactly what sort of crap up with which Michele has been putting.

A month ago, I'd have told you that Steve Largent, former First District congressman now running for governor, was a shoo-in. Now I'm not so sure. The gap between Largent, a Republican, and Democratic rival Brad Henry, is within the margin of error of your favorite poll. And Independent Gary Richardson is actually not trailing by much; instead of the expected two or three percent for someone outside the D/R axis, Richardson is pulling more than 20 percent in the polls.

The usual last-minute sources of campaign funds are coming through on schedule, and the advertising blitz is on. This one, I think, is going right down to the wire.

Originally posted 7 June 2002

Automotive magazines are routinely pilloried these days for such grave breaches of the peace as feature articles on sport-utility vehicles ("Isn't this supposed to be a car magazine?"), payola from advertisers ("The PDQ-10 was two-tenths of a second slower in the quarter but you ranked it first, no doubt in exchange for that two-page spread right after the letters column, didn't you?"), and, perhaps most heinous of all, testing vehicles that mere mortals couldn't possibly afford. The July issue of Automobile exemplifies this latter offense with a cover story featuring five cars of varying degrees of superness (the least-expensive being a Mercedes-Benz), averaging around 489 hp, being driven in Italy fergoshsakes. How are Carl and Lenny in Springfield supposed to relate to that?

The answer, I would argue, is that they're supposed to be motivated to drive, even if it's some disreputable middle-80s rustbucket with no more sporting credentials than Ralph Nader. One of the advantages of living here in the Big PX is that we still have a fair amount of wide-open space that (sometimes) can be traversed at wide-open throttle, and despite the best efforts of twee types who think we should be happy to ride the bus with all the other [fill in vague ethnic or socioeconomic pejorative], Americans, by and large, keep the pedal to the metal. And it actually may be, in some ways, more fun with less car; my innocuous little sedan with its modest 130 hp obviously won't flatten corners of the autostrada at triple-digit speeds, but I can run all day at six or seven-tenths without incurring the wrath of The Man. Provided I don't do anything stupid while running, that is. And many moons ago, I got enough seat time in a Maserati Quattroporte (you gotta love a language that has a word as luscious as that to mean something as mundane as "four-door") to learn a healthy measure of respect for a machine that pays you back for not paying attention by putting you into a ditch. Or worse.

Today Susanna Cornett unveils another of her considerable talents: the ability to take the ossified prose of the Arab News and turn it into actual, comprehensible English. How valid is her translation? The editors most certainly would not be pleased with the results, testimonial enough to its accuracy.

After one or two false starts, I am phasing in the Trackback system. For most people, this will make no difference, inasmuch as scarcely anything here is ever linked by anyone, but there's a lot to be said for keeping up with the Joneses. (No, Quana, this is not directed at you.)

The really detail-oriented readers will notice that the shade of blue used for links has varied substantially in recent days. Do not adjust your monitor. I think I'm going to keep this one. And yes, the left-hand column is slightly lighter than it used to be.

Before you ask: No, I'm not putting in a WeatherPixie. Actually, I've already done one, for the perfunctory page I keep at AOL for the benefit of chatters, and while it would be absurdly easy to copy the code over here, I figure my load times are long enough already. Rumors that I would recode the Pixie to look like Susanna Cornett are unfounded and have no basis in fact, and what's more, they aren't true, either.

I am trying to think of a better way to organize the blogroll without getting a third-party application involved. Suggestions are welcomed.

One thing I learned today: I should not be allowed near an anagram generator.

My apologies to the following bloggers:

Cue "Too Much Time on My Hands"....

Michael of 2 Blowhards, having been exposed to Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" (the extra R is for extra raunch, I suppose), wonders, quite reasonably:

Which, says Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly in his print review of Faith Hill's Cry (a collection viewed favorably at this site), was the 1980s:

But Willman is grumbling about the torturing of melody, not its complete and utter absence, so while the time-frame seems to fit, there's something else at work here, and I think it's that anyone with a hundred bucks' worth of electronic gizmos and a rhyming dictionary seems to be racing to cash in on hip-hop while it's still commercially viable — and while our soi-disant culture mavens are still willing to pretend that it's the Authentic Voice of the African-American Street instead of a substitute for that old suburban mainstay, the garage band. Some great music has come from garages, and undoubtedly there will be some raps that stand the test of time, but music historians of future centuries, I suspect, will consider both these genres mere footnotes.

For a single guy in his forties, I am relatively tidy: while I make no claims that either my kitchen or my bathroom is suitable for computer-chip fabrication, my bed is made daily, my socks are picked up, and my car does not serve as a rolling trash cart. (She Who Is Not To Be Named once commented that "This doesn't look like you just drove two thousand miles in it.")

There is, of course, a downside.

Canadian author Rohinton Mistry has cut short his book tour and gone home, complaining about racial profiling at American airports. Alfred A. Knopf, Mistry's publisher in the US, issued the following memorandum:

Cato the Youngest comments:

Mr. Mistry was born in India and has no ties of any sort to Islam.

For some lit majors, working as an airport screener might mean a substantial boost in pay. And Cato's quite-reasonable bottom line is this:

There's simply no way to do this with any degree of effectiveness without offending someone, a situation that likely applies just as well to blogging as it does to airport security.

Not that anyone takes my advice on anything, but these are the results I'm looking for on Tuesday:

Governor: It's hard to work up much enthusiasm for any of these guys. Brad Henry is your average faceless Democrat, and the GOP's Steve Largent basically does what he's told. That leaves Independent Gary Richardson, who is a flake. But he's an independent flake, and weirder yet, he's not trailing by much. At the very least, he would make things interesting, and in Oklahoma, where the governor's powers are rather sharply circumscribed anyway, "interesting" counts for more than you'd think it would.

Lieutenant Governor: Republican Mary Fallin has done this job for four years without causing too much grief. But Laura Boyd, one of the smartest (if occasionally one of the more quixotic, for a Democrat anyway) state legislators we've had in recent years, is running against her, after going nowhere in the governor's race in 1998, and I'd like to see her back in the public eye.

US Senate: This boils down to a choice between former Democratic governor David Walters, ambitious but deeply flawed, and incumbent Republican Jim Inhofe, who has no depth of any kind. It's Walters, barely, but he isn't going to win this one anyway.

US House, District 1: John Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, has been mostly an embarrassment. I don't expect much better from Democrat Doug Dodd, but rotating the idiots is closer to my idea of democracy in action.

US House, District 2: The GOP's sacrificial lamb in the most Democratic district in the state is one Kent Pharaoh. Incumbent Brad Carson will wash him into the sea.

US House, District 3: Frank Lucas, who used to represent District 6 back when we had a District 6, is easily the best of the current Republicans in the state delegation; the Democrats didn't even bother to put up an opponent this year. There's an Independent running on general principles, but Lucas is the master of this domain.

US House, District 4: The old stomping grounds of J. C. Watts. Longtime GOP attack dog Tom Cole is certainly more interesting, and possibly less annoying, than colorless Democratic state rep Darryl Roberts.

US House, District 5: Anything sentient, and some things that aren't, would be an improvement over Republican incumbent Ernest Istook. Neither Democrat Lou Barlow nor Independent Donna Davis has impressed greatly, but then, they don't have to; I'd prefer Davis.

Attorney General: It's Democrat Drew Edmondson over Republican Denise Bode; Bode was unimpressive during her stay at the Corporation Commission, and Edmondson annoys the state's fat cats, always a good sign.

Superintendent of Public Education: I've supported Sandy Garrett, the Democratic incumbent, in the past, but I think she's stayed too long and become too entrenched. I have some qualms about Lloyd Roettger, the GOP challenger; still, it's time for a change at this office, so here's to Dr. Roettger.

Labor Commissioner: Had Tim Pope won the Republican primary for this position, I'd have voted for him, if only because he was actually willing to question whether the post was worth keeping. Incumbent Brenda Reneau Wynn, who did win the primary, has always rubbed me the wrong way, and she has the unique distinction of being the only statewide officeholder ever to have a Tulsa World endorsement revoked. On the other hand, Lloyd Fields, last seen as a Democratic state representative, has thus far given me no reason to think he will do much to improve the system.

Insurance Commissioner: (Yeah, I know, why is this an elective office?) Incumbent Carroll Fisher, a Democrat, is fairly innocuous; opponent Doug Barry, a Republican, argues mainly that he's not Carroll Fisher. Advantage, such as it is: Fisher.

Auditor and Inspector: I'm inclined to give this one to Democrat Jeff McMahan, protégé of retiring auditor Clifton Scott, whose track record was pretty decent, though I see no real faults in Republican Gary Jones.

And that's the way I see 'em. That and $2.99 (plus tax) will get you one of the cheaper combo meals, if you don't upsize anything.

Briefly:

693, 696, 697, 701, 702, 703: YES.

687, 698, 704: NO.

My reasoning, or lack thereof, can be seen here.

Eric McErlain lived near Bloomington's old Metropolitan Stadium for six months, which you'd think (if you were a New Yorker of a certain political bent, anyway) would be enough to qualify him to be a Senator himself. But Mr. McErlain has no such lofty ambitions. Instead, he's offering to Governor Ventura a list of Minnesotans who might serve as the state's junior Senator while the Mondale/Coleman race is being fought over in the courts. Who's on the list?

• Prince Rogers Nelson
  
• Ex-Replacements front man, Paul Westerberg
  
• A rotating troika consisting of the founding members of Husker Du
  
• Kent Hrbek (Kirby Puckett being compromised at the moment)
  
• Jerry Lundegaard (as played by William H. Macy in Fargo)
  
• John Madden
  
• Winona Ryder
  
• Kevin Sorbo (of Hercules TV fame)
  
• Bob Dylan
  

You know, this could work.

Amizadai from Girl Unravelling sets the scene:

It's a long story, but the story of a cemetery is inevitably incomplete without the stories of its inhabitants, and Amizadai's narrative, which touches lightly on what little she can know of those stories, is to me very moving, perhaps because it is simple and unpretentious and has no agenda to push. There's a peacefulness to it all, a gentle rebuke to those of us who scream in fear at the thought of our own demise, even as we pretend to accept it.

Today marks the official opening of Windshield Ice Removal Season, which I find decidedly annoying, since the normal low temperature for this date is 44 degrees Fahrenheit, substantially above the freezing point. Then again, temperatures have been below normal for nearly a month — this October was tied for the third coldest on record — so, if anything, I am surprised it took this long.

I realize that there are some people who absolutely delight in this stuff. I am not one of them.

Verbatim, a major manufacturer of optical recording media, has announced a CD-R designed to look like a 45-rpm record. I simply have to get my hands on a box of these.

(Muchas gracias: Boing Boing.)

Prime Minister Bulent Eçevit, seventy-seven years old and in failing health, probably never thought he'd lose this badly. But his party got fewer than 10 percent of the votes in the Turkish election, meaning they will get no seats in Parliament. Meanwhile, as projected here earlier, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) under Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept to 34.2 percent of the vote, enough under Turkish law to form a government without having to seek a coalition partner.

Erdogan himself cannot become Prime Minister — in 1998, he was convicted of inciting religious hatred and was barred from seeking office for five years — which has prompted worries that the next occupant of the post will be a mere figurehead. Quickly, though, Erdogan moved to answer some of the more obvious questions which arose from the AKP victory: no, Turkey will not abandon its uniquely-secular position in the Muslim world, and no, Turkey is not backing away from its hopes of becoming part of the European Union.

The Turkish military, Cato the Youngest notes, "has historically been willing to throw out any government that threatened the secular order established by Ataturk." And indeed, the AKP victory is generally attributed more to dislike of the Eçevit regime than to any deep-seated desire among the Turkish electorate to follow the lead of the Islamic fundamentalists on Turkey's flanks.

It will be an interesting time, to say the least.

Anthony James "Lonnie" Donegan, the king of British skiffle, has died at the age of 71. He first hit big in 1956 with a version of "Rock Island Line", but he is best remembered in this country for the transcendent "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight", recorded in 1958 but which somehow took three years to chart (as Dot 15911), peaking at #5 in the fall of 1961, and leaving one further question unanswered:

"If tin whistles are made of tin, what do they make foghorns out of?"

He'd sing another chorus, but he hasn't got the time....

The Tylers never give up.

Having successfully relocated FM stations from Ada to Newcastle (KKNG, 93.3) and from Clinton to Okarche (KTUZ, 106.7) to reach the Oklahoma City market, the Tyler group had up to now been stymied in its efforts to move its Tishomingo station (KTSH, 99.7) to Tuttle.

The FCC, noting that there is now adequate service to Tishomingo from another station, has given its tentative blessing [link to Adobe Acrobat file] to the KTSH move, with a couple of kickers: Tyler must bear the expense of moving two other stations to other frequencies. KXLS in Alva will jump slightly, from 99.7 to 99.9, and KWFX in Woodward will move from 100.1 to 106.3. And Tyler will be allowed to operate in Tuttle with only 10,500 watts, less than half the power authorized in Tishomingo. This action dooms K259AM, a 75-watt translator on 99.7 rebroadcasting KLVV in Ponca City, though this is probably no big deal since the same programming is carried by Oklahoma City's KYLV at 88.9 with 4400 watts.

No, I don't know what format Tyler is planning, though it's likely not the sort-of-classical format they've been running down by the Red River the last couple of years. And while I've been railing against this sort of thing for years now, the FCC apparently feels that if these stations aren't allowed to play Musical Frequencies now and then, some of them will wither and die. Meanwhile, local radio continues its inexorable march to Metro Radio, shedding every last vestige of community in a desperate search for an audience that is mostly bored with existing offerings. No way can this be a Good Thing.

Keith Olbermann asserts:

I must have missed Warren G. Harding's Nobel Prize presentation somewhere along the way, but Olbermann insists that it's all perfectly obvious. Of course, Olbermann also thinks voting should be mandatory, a premise that is at the very least arguable.

If today's politicians seem to lack a philosophical bent, it's because so many of them think the basic issues are settled, and they're content to take their turns at the reins of the Nanny State. And as I get older and more contrarian, I become increasingly vexed with a political establishment which can argue with a straight face that one of the most important issues facing America today is how the government will help me buy drugs.

One hour to go before the polls close, and the state's estimate of one million voters strikes me as just a hair on the low side. At my precinct, there was a steady stream at 5 pm, but with a dozen "booths" available, things moved quickly enough; I was in and out in less than three and a half minutes. Then again, I knew (in fact, most of you knew) exactly which boxes I was going to mark.

Projections of winners, you ask? Too early yet.

Goodbye, Steve, and don't let a towel hit you in the keister on the way out.

Brad Henry, who wasn't even the front-runner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, appears to have won all the marbles tonight, sliding past Steve Largent in what was thought to be a safe Republican slot. In his report for Fly Over Country, Chris explains why:

Makes sense to me.

On the other hand, the GOP doesn't have a whole lot else to cry about; they will still hold all but one seat in the state's Congressional delegation, returning three incumbents and holding the District 4 seat vacated by J. C. Watts. (The Fox News site called District 4 for Democrat Darryl Roberts about an hour ago, which may have been a typo, since they hadn't called Districts 2 or 3, which were never in doubt; AP and other sources have called District 4 for Republican Tom Cole.)

But what you really want to know is: what about those cocks? Back and forth, up and down, all night, so far. But with 90 percent of the precincts reporting, the cockfighting ban was starting to catch on at the 54-percent level, and it looks like it will hold up.

The Oklahoma State Election Board will certify results on or before Friday afternoon, and they'll be readable here.

Tom Brokaw, I have to assume, was having a bad night. Fairly early on, Rush Limbaugh, invited to NBC's talking-heads party, explained that 2002 was only the beginning, and pointed out that when the Democrats were scratching around for Senatorial candidates in New Jersey and Minnesota, there were no up-and-coming youngsters, no potential Presidential candidates down the road: the best the party could do was to trot out elderly museum pieces. Faced with this less-than-startling revelation, Brokaw managed to give off an expression somewhere between disturbed and dyspeptic.

Meanwhile, life goes on for the rest of us, with the possible exception of Terry McAuliffe, who likely will be drubbed out of the Democrats' front office. I rather think he won't be missed.

Apparently Los Angeles isn't going to be split down Mulholland after all. While a slight majority of residents of the San Fernando Valley voted to secede and form their own city, the measure was rejected by the rest of L.A. by a two-to-one margin. Pollsters speculate that the western portion of the Valley, more affluent, was far more willing to say goodbye to L.A. than the east. Still, things will be different in the City of Angels, if only because the Valley has made it quite clear that business as usual is not acceptable on the far side of the Santa Monica Mountains. Will Los Angeles grant more autonomy to the Valley, or to Hollywood, which also lost a secession vote? The structure of city government, I think, is likely to change substantially over the next few years.

What's the relevance to Oklahoma? Consider its capital. Oklahoma City has 510,000 people spread over 604 square miles. The North Canadian River runs south of downtown, effectively dividing the city in two, and each half scorns the other. (In the early days of the 20th century, these were, in fact, two separate cities.) City services have yet to be extended to areas annexed decades ago. "It can't happen here," we are assured. I'm not so sure.

I mentioned this race way back in August and apparently never followed up on it. Anyway, in case anyone was asking, Jim Roth has defeated Beverly Hodges, 55 to 45 percent, to win the Oklahoma County District 1 Commissioner position.

Okay, you've got an English class to teach, more literary than grammatical this semester, and one of the books you have to cover is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What's first on your list of things you need to make this work? Enough copies to go around? Tom Sawyer as a prerequisite? If you're in Portland, Oregon, at the very top of the list is, of all things, sensitivity training. That whirring sound you hear is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, subterranean pinwheel.

How in the world did we ever get to this sorry state? Erin O'Connor explains:

It's not just Twain's expense, either; to the extent that our children are herded through this "multicultural" charnel-house, they are deprived of the opportunity to make up their own minds, to learn how to decide for themselves what a book like Huckleberry Finn — indeed, any book — really means.

(Muchas gracias: John Rosenberg.)

Oklahoma State Rep. Frank Shurden (D-Henryetta), one of the more reliably loose cannons in the legislature, has announced that he's planning a bill for next session to reduce the penalties for cockfighting imposed by the newly-enacted ban. No one, says Shurden, should have to serve jail time for participating.

And Shurden may have an ally in Governor-elect Brad Henry, who in the past has characterized the penalties as too severe and yesterday said that the cure might be worse than the disease.

What is most likely to happen, with or without Shurden's bill, is that cockfighting will eventually become one of those laws which is enforced selectively: the state is likely to look the other way unless they're trying to stick it to someone for some other reason. In rural Oklahoma, things will go on pretty much the way they always have.

James Lileks, waxing philosophical about the interaction of the divine and the damnable:

And I thank Him that He apparently doesn't think in hex; I have enough trouble with ten commandments, let alone sixteen.

Airports have three-letter codes. O'Hare in Chicago is ORD; Los Angeles International is LAX (I often wonder about those guys wearing "LAX Security" patches); Baltimore-Washington is BWI. Sioux City, Iowa is SUX, and you can imagine what they think of that.

Anyway, the FAA was asked back in March to change the code, and now has declined to do so. Airport officials in Sioux City may try again, but for now, they're stuck with what they have.

Those of us who blog swear by, and occasionally at, our templates. Yes, I know, I did this site for years with no content-management system (and, some might say, no content either), and there are still manually-maintained blogs out there, but the point seems relatively inarguable just the same, and I assure you, I didn't spend a great deal of time reinventing the wheel every day. Data-entry types, of course, are hopelessly tethered to various Templates of Doom.

Then again, that's all computer stuff. Do other more-or-less-cultural activities have the same need for ready-made, fill-in-the-blanks packages? Michael at 2 Blowhards is persuaded that there's some sort of PBS Documentary Kit out there, and all you need are the following:

Time to set free the Ken Burns within you, say I.

(Update, 10:26 pm: Reformatted slightly, but no textual changes.)

The Fed has cut interest rates yet again, by half a point, and the market has responded with yawns. Mark Byron points out that with the federal funds rate down to 1.25 percent, there isn't a whole lot of maneuvering room left for the Fed. The real shot in the arm, says Dr Byron, will come with the neutralization of Iraq, which will take some of the uncertainty out of both oil prices and global trade. Bottom line?

The balance of power in the Senate is settled, but there's one seat still in doubt: in Louisiana, where Democrat Mary Landrieu led the pack but failed to win a majority. Under the Tabasco State's laws, this means a runoff, in which Landrieu will face Republican front-runner Susan Terrell. And it means that Landrieu also faces a dilemma; she took so much trouble to separate herself from the goofiness of the national Democratic organization that, from a distance, she was almost indistinguishable from a Republican. The electorate, she perhaps fears, will reason that the choice is between an ersatz Republican and a real one, and will vote accordingly.

What to do? John Rosenberg suggests Landrieu ought to take a three-pronged approach: make Bush-like utterances on the war, come off as a traditional quasi-populist Democrat on most domestic issues, and adopt the following possibly-controversial position:

I have some doubts about this — by most accounts, black voters are nearly as conservative as white voters, and far more conservative than black leaders — but I'd like to see her try that myself, just to see what difference, if any, it makes in the African-American vote. I have had for some time a gut feeling that the only remaining proponents of racial preferences are the people who are making a living as advocates for such; the rest of us, regardless of color, are likely sick of the whole concept and wish it would go away already.

First Union is a big bank; its name appears on lots of people's checks throughout the eastern United States. Apparently it's still unfamiliar to some people, though: a Jacksonville, Florida woman was busted for allegedly trying to cash a forged payroll check for a phony company, drawn on, um, "Frist Unoin" Bank.

It could have been worse. Had she waited another month, she would have had to try to spell "Wachovia".

What happened to the Democratic Party on Tuesday? A thirty-year member (that would be, um, me) points a finger (no credit for guessing which one) in today's edition of The Vent.

Steven Den Beste reminds us that with the Republicans controlling the Senate, Fritz Hollings (D-Disney), ousted as Chair of the Commerce Committee, is no longer in a position to give much of a push to his miserable "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act", a bill with five co-sponsors, four of them Democrats. The Captain had previously derided this measure as the "MPAA/RIAA Wet-Dream Act of 2002", and he was being generous.

Is the CBDTPA well and truly dead? Not necessarily, but Den Beste looks at it this way:

And, lest we forget, Hollywood's tendency to pour money into Democratic campaign coffers.

You wanna know why all the bloggers hated the Democrats, Bunkie? It's because all the bloggers have computers.

Today's spam, claimed to be from the dubious address <zondervan2227e82@yahoo.com>, is fairly standard pornucopia effluent, with invitations and links to <3xgirl.com>, <sinfulmpegs.com> and <glamoursluts.com>, all of which are herded together along with God knows what else under the general heading of <servergod.com>, operated by one Robert Sudduth in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, a regular visitor to the database at SpamCop.

Most perturbing, perhaps, is that "zondervan" in the bogus email address. The real Zondervan is a legitimate publisher of, among other things, Bibles; I guess Sudduth figures nobody will set a spam filter for the word.

Last year about this time, I was going on about something truly bizarre in the Victoria's Secret catalog, a publication which apparently is mailed to everyone on the planet except me. As before, I obtained a copy from my old friend Nova, who claims to actually wear some of this stuff. (I will, of course, take her word for it, as the likelihood of getting to inspect her underthings for myself is vanishingly small.) She made it quite clear, though, that the replay of last year's hyperbauble, the ten-million-dollar Fantasy Bra (the sort-of-matching panty is included in the, um, package this year), is not something she would choose to wear even if she could afford it, for reasons having to do with hygiene and/or insurance. I think that's what she said, anyway; looking at the pictures in the catalog, I found it not especially easy to pay attention.

There's also a Star of Victoria diamond pendant for under a grand (well, two dollars under a grand), which goes well with this, but I rather imagine it goes well with most things.

1483: Martin Luther, primary player in the Protestant Reformation

1610: Ninon de L'Enclos, Frenchwoman of prodigious desires

1759: Friedrich von Schiller, German dramatist and poet

1925: Richard Burton, English actor

19xx: [Details deleted, on the off-chance that the person involved might see this, something not likely to happen with, say, Schiller]

1999: Nicholas Cole Havlik, esteemed grandson and world-class wrecker of furniture

Felicitations to all.

I'm not particularly hot-blooded, but I am running a fever of a hundred and three, and it's severely affecting my ability to come up with Neat Stuff for this section.

Fortunately, the December Car and Driver is here, and as always, it's packed full of quotable goodies.

Patrick Bedard, on the Washington-area red-light cameras:

John Phillips, reviewing the don't-call-it-a-BRAT Subaru Baja:

Twenty-four years I've read this magazine, and I could do another twenty-four if I live that long. If this fever doesn't break, though, I won't.

Michele at A Small Victory is looking for bloggers who are also veterans. If this describes you — it certainly describes me — please let her know.

"It wasn't me who started that ol' crazy Asian war," the song goes. "But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore."

And yes, I suppose it was a chore, in the strictest sense of the word: first we take care of business, then we can sit back and swap stories.

Some people will look at that word "proud" and grimace. "How can you possibly feel any pride in what you did?" Well, I did it well, and at the time, it seemed like exactly the right thing to do. Thirty years later, it still seems so.

No regrets from this former Army man; I wore the green, like so many others my age, and fortunately, most of us came back from where we'd been.

You don't have to spend any time remembering me today, but please do think of your friends and mine, your relatives and mine, who took on this "patriotic chore" themselves. And say a prayer, if you would, for those who didn't come back.

The United States Arctic Research Commission, noting that the polar zones are warming more quickly than the rest of the globe, has projected that in five to ten years, it will be possible to sail through what is now the Arctic ice cap at least a couple of months out of the year, cutting 6800 miles off the shipping distance from Asia to Europe. For supertankers, which have to round Cape Horn because they can't get through the Panama Canal, the difference is over 11,000 miles.

Assuming the Commission has called this one correctly, the fabled Northwest Passage is here at last, too late for Henry Hudson and Martin Frobisher, but on time to be a genuine boon to today's global commerce. And to think we did it all with our modest little SUVs.

The Baseball Crank explained it all over at Dr. Weevil's place:

That's me: the unexcited (and unexciting) moderate.

Is that Nancy Pelosi I hear shrieking down the corridor?

The last time Susanna Cornett missed anywhere near a whole week of bloggage, it was the week which began on 14 July, when she and I had lunch.

Now I'm scared.

Johnny Griffith, piano and organ mainstay of the Motown "Funk Brothers" house band, has died — ironically, right before the Detroit premiere of the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a history of the musicians who made what Berry Gordy Jr. called "The Sound of Young America".

Griffith played on literally hundreds of sides, from pure pop (the Supremes' "Stop! in the Name of Love") to gritty soul (Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine") to gutbucket funk (Jr. Walker's "Shotgun"). To Berry Gordy's dismay, the band would occasionally do outside sessions, which is how Griffith became the king of the Capitols' "Cool Jerk" and practically a second voice on Barbara Acklin's "Am I the Same Girl" (then a first voice, as the backing track became a bigger hit, as "Soulful Strut" by Young-Holt Unlimited).

Johnny Griffith lived 68 (some sources say 66) years. Some of the records on which he played just might go on forever.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm glad to see Bill Quick back at the old stand.

Yeah, I hate popups too, but I hate losing top-class reading material even more. And unlike most of us out here in blogland, Quick is a professional writer; it's damned difficult to blame the man for wanting to turn a buck once in a while.

Besides, this blogging thing gets in the way of real life now and then. Just ask Toren Smith.

John Chuckman's latest for Yellow Times, titled A toxin in the blood, contains the expected high level of blither, but what's most frustrating about it is — well, read this for yourself:

Mr Chuckman, having fled the premises during a previous war, probably won't buy "Those sons of bitches are trying to kill us, you nitwit" as a "sound reason," despite the fact that the aforementioned SOBs took out a couple of thousand of us last year. (It was in all the papers, so I'm sure he heard about it.)

"Corruption"? We had that before. "Poor appointments"? We had those before, too. A "huge and wasteful increase in military spending"? Huge, yes; but if we are now able to thumb our noses at the rest of the world's sensibilities, it seems to me that we got our money's worth.

What would Mr Chuckman consider a "worthy humanitarian initiative"? Finding homes for Palestinian militants before they wrap themselves in Semtex and mail themselves to Israelis for Chanukah? Sending food to Zimbabwe so Robert Mugabe can complain about its potential genetic background?

And enough of Bush's nonexistent desire to emulate Hitler already. So far as I know, the only time W. has ever said anything even slightly positive about anyone named Adolph was that one day at the ranch when they were trying out a new meat tenderizer at the grill.

(Muchas gracias: Silflay Hraka.)

Over at Rottweiler HQ, Exhibit A in the Free Speech Museum, Flag-Burners' Annex:

Still, if you're thinking about burning a US flag in front of Misha, I suggest you think again. He quite properly supports your right to do so, but he also quite properly supports his right to respond. And you will probably not like his response.

While hands are wrung at the seeming (and, I think, synthesized) return of Osama bin Laden, blogdom turns its attention to what really matters: the Carnival of the Vanities, now in its Mark VIII incarnation.

I have noticed that I tend to plug the Carnival more enthusiastically during weeks, such as this one, when I have no entries of my own. Not that I'm inclined to pay the guy with the really nice leather couch thirty thousand dollars in $150 increments to tell me why.

A service for journalists, wannabe journalists, J-school dropouts, and the occasional blogger: Vicky at Liquid Courage, noting that no Federal holiday is complete without a speech by the President, is offering a handy, only-minor-assembly-required kit to produce your opening line. And what's more, it's easily updatable, making it usable through the terms of the next ten or twelve Presidents.

The Evangelical Environmental Network and Creation Care magazine are asking one and all to ask themselves: What Would Jesus Drive?

"Economic issues," says Rev. Jim Ball of EEN, "are moral issues," and their upcoming ad campaign will exhort the faithful to consider the effect on God's gardens before rendering unto Chevrolet the forty grand for a Suburban.

There is, of course, Biblical precedent for this. In Acts 2, the car pool was invented: the disciples apparently managed to get to the first Pentecost in one Accord.

(Muchas gracias: Bob Whaley at Cruel Shoes.)

Apart from the usual Hollywood distortions, I know nothing about bullfighting. I've never been within five hundred kilometers of Pamplona; I skipped Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon; I haven't seen Almodóvar's Matador. I didn't even pick up Herb Alpert's "The Lonely Bull" until three years after its release. Repeat: I know nothing about bullfighting.

Your standard animal-rights types will be more than happy, I'm sure, to tell me that it's nasty and horrid and brutal and such. On the other hand, Jesus Gil, who has actually toiled in this particular vineyard, finds it eminently defensible:

If that's so, why are they almost always killed?

I still don't think I want to see one of these things up close and in person, but it's always nice to hear the other side for a change.

Michael McConnell is Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Utah. His thinking is conservative, his reputation is sterling; even his opponents joined in a letter supporting his nomination to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as mentioned in this very space a couple of months ago.

Well, evidently not all his opponents; a group called Alliance for Justice has found a fair number of leftish jurists to sign their names to a letter opposing McConnell's nomination. [Link to Adobe Acrobat file.]

John Rosenberg has this to say:

It's of a piece, I think, with some of the other life-as-we-know-it-is-over screeds that have been multiplying in the wake of Republican electoral successes. Sometimes I think they really want the sort of comic-book pseudo-fascism they imagine, just so they can taunt the rest of us: "We told you so!"

It's been a weird sort of autumn. After an October which tied for the third coldest in recorded history — of course, in Oklahoma, that means "since 1889" — November has been relatively normal, at least by the standards of Soonerland, but the winds have been shifting back and forth so fast that an actual golden-brown leaf, its cycle finally complete, will stay on the tree for a matter of seconds before it vectors into your neighbor's yard. For people who love autumn foliage, this generates mixed emotions at best.

Then again, I know from mixed emotions. Something from here got linked at Metafilter, which is a first; on the other hand, it wasn't because of anything brilliant I had written.

In the unlikely event that I do write something brilliant, I may actually have to start tooting my own horn.

Yeah, I know: The Guardian. But Matthew Engel actually manages to make some sense of the Oklahoma cockfighting dust-up:

And a point I myself made somewhere along the way:

Then again, it wouldn't be The Guardian without a shot at what's really bothering them:

Somehow I have a feeling that if there had been a cockfighting referendum in, say, Gaza, there wouldn't be any snide references to "murderous maniacs".

(Muchas gracias: Andrea Harris.)

Christmas music is bad enough on the 24th of December. On the 14th of November it is an abomination. Now add three dollops of synthetic Nashville twang, and you have "The Bull's Country Christmas", the Bull in question being radio station KQBL. There's just one catch: this isn't airing on KQBL, but on KMMZ, the erstwhile "Memories 96.9".

This much I know: Citadel, one of three major group owners in town (the others being Renda and — gag — Clear Channel), has negotiated a Local Marketing Agreement with Chisholm Trail Broadcasting, the smallish state chain which owns KMMZ. Under the LMA, Citadel will assume responsibility for programming the station, in exchange for an undisclosed percentage of revenues.

This much is speculation: Citadel will move KQBL's programming to 96.9 on or about 26 December. The alt-rock "Spy" stuff, currently heard at night on WWLS-FM (105.3), will take over at 104.9. Evenings on WWLS-FM will return to simulcasting its AM facility, known familiarly as "The Sports Animal".

Why is this happening? I suppose it's another splash in the ongoing pissing contest between Citadel and Clear Channel. And it gets better: The Oklahoma Publishing Company has agreed to sell WKY, the oldest AM in town (it goes back 80 years or so, and OPUBCO has owned it for 74 of those years), to (wait for it) Citadel. WKY is currently programmed under an LMA by, you guessed it, Clear Channel.

In the meantime, Renda's three stations are all comfortably perched in the top six, and they couldn't care less about any of this stuff. Nor do I, really, except for its amusement value, since most of my radio listening is to that weird NPR and PRI stuff.

Well, it started out as a song by Paul Simon; if nothing else, I've proved that my scansion can be as idiosyncratic as his.

Cue the guitarist, and:

An autumn day,
It's the middle of November.
I say, "Go home,
Take your damned inspectors, nothing here to see!"
'Cause the only thing that matters here is me:
I am Iraq, I am defiant.

(And Iraq never learns,
And a tyrant finally dies.)

Obviously "Weird Al" Yankovic has nothing to worry about from the likes of me.

Thanks to Bob Radil, who suggested this (though not to me, actually) on rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s. (Yes, I still read Usenet. Who knew?)

And apologies to Mr Simon. I admit, this one is even worse than "I Am a Schmuck (I'm from Lawn Guyland)", which I shan't repeat here.

If I remember correctly, the oldest woman ever to appear in a Playboy pictorial was fifty-five. (This would be Nancy Sinatra; how does that grab you, darlin'?) Still, there are names on the magazine's wish list who will never be removed no matter how old they get, and one of those names belongs to Sophia Loren, who reportedly is miffed for being offered only £100,000 for doffing her designer duds. This does not mean that if Hef ups the ante, she'll do the deed, but the sheer thought of it — well, do I actually want to see a 68-year-old Italian woman in a reasonable semblance of her birthday suit?

If you've read this site for more than twenty seconds, you already know the answer.

This is something I've pondered myself once or twice, with results so inconclusive they don't even deserve to be called "results". From Lactose Incompetent:

I can usually distinguish bad writing — give me ten minutes and I'll give you paragraphs full of it — but spotting good writing is a trickier business. Not as tricky, however, as producing it:

I wish I had the temerity to describe what I write as having "style".

But I do understand the "hodge-podge" bit: sometimes I think I'm doing the prose equivalent of Peter Schickele's Quodlibet, in which every single musical phrase is lifted from some other, presumably better work.

Aimee Deep notes that both al-Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden and Disney chairman Michael Eisner had been keeping a low profile, only to resurface this week, and asks the question no one else dares ask:

Gee, you think we should ask Koppel?

Anna at Belligerent Bunny has a grand and glorious tale about a missile we don't have, but ought to, and theoretically still could. Even the name — Tacit Rainbow — is spiffy.

Al Gore just can't get it through his head that he lost.

But being the inventive type that he is — after all, he strung up with his bare hands that very first T1 line between MIT and the Pentagon back in '69 — it was inevitable that Gore would resurface with a new, more efficient way to count votes.

And it was also inevitable that the plans for the system would be leaked, and Marc Lundberg, proprietor of Quit That, has the details. I have to admit, it's disarming in its simplicity.

Hmmm...

J. Jonah Jameson dumping on Spider-Man again? Well, yeah. But, as Bryan Preston points out, the ol' web-spinner gets about the same sort of press as your average conservative Christian: if it's at all positive, it's probably grudgingly so.

"One of the more repugnant features of our modern society," says Kim du Toit, "is how we have become increasingly used to treating individual human beings as mere ciphers." There are situations where this is excusable — the military, for one, because it's one environment in which the individual truly must be subordinated to the group, and in prison, for another, because if you've gotten there, it's part of the price you pay. (I point out that otherwise, the military and the correctional system are not all that similar, no matter what I told Major Whatzisname back in 1974.)

Back to du Toit:

I think it's actually worse than that, and I think we can blame the government for it. Under our preposterous tax code, those of us who work for someone else are not assets of any sort, any kind of investments: we are expenses, pure and simple, and it's unrealistic to expect corporate types, forever mired in their bean-counting milieu, to be able to make any kind of connection between Badge #521 and Fred over in IT.

And it doesn't much matter how big the corporation is, either. Were I to leave 42nd and Treadmill, the place would take a substantial productivity hit and would lose one of its few remaining connections to reality — it was explained to me just this past week how burning up a couple thousand bucks or so a year on a publication that no one reads and no one will read, which in fact is viewed by its target audience as an annoyance, is considered a brilliant effing idea — but as far as they're concerned, it's just a couple of accounting entries to change and a COBRA form to fill out.

Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, working for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law, have an ongoing project to document Internet filtering in various forms and fashions. One of the subprojects this fall is the determination of sites blocked by the government of the People's Republic of China. Described as "an experiment in open research," Zittrain and Edelman have worked up a system whereby any URL can be entered and then tested in real-time (within two minutes) to see if it is accessible to Chinese Internet users.

Needless to say, I had to try this out for myself, and by gum, according to this testing regime, this site is blocked. Presumably no one from the Chinese mainland is authorized to view any of my stuff. This explains one phenomenon: an earlier version of the Music Room here was once duplicated, from first byte to last, and pasted onto some Chinese Web site. They even copied my counter code, which is how I found out about it in the first place. The hits (never more than one or two a day, but what the hell) dried up this summer, and perhaps now I know why.

(Muchas gracias: John Little, The Blogs of War. He's blocked too.)

A number of people have asked me, given my status as Repository of Unrelated Factoids, why I haven't tried to get on the TV game show Jeopardy! My standard answer — "I have the charisma of Sam Donaldson on Quaaludes" — seldom mollifies them, but eventually they stop asking.

However, David "Clubbeaux" Sims has made the effort, and while I'm in no position to award charisma points, I'm sure he's a lot more interesting than I am.

As noted previously in this space, Justice and Development (AKP) party head Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from Parliament, will not be able to serve as Prime Minister despite winning more than enough votes in the Turkish general election. Erdogan has now submitted three names for consideration to Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, and Sezer has chosen Abdullah Gul, 52, once Minister of State in a 1997 coalition government formed by the now-outlawed Islamist Welfare Party. There is still speculation that Erdogan will be pulling Gul's strings.

I never knew Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who worked his way up the ranks at The Tulsa Tribune to the publisher's office, but anyone who cared anything about Oklahoma journalism in those days knew his work, and mourned ten years ago when the Tribune closed its doors. A few thoughts along these lines, this week in The Vent, now in issue #317 with no (well, not much) sign of slowing down.

When The Road Information Program announced in May that Oklahoma had the worst bridges in the country, almost none of us were surprised; while only one bridge in the state (I-44 at 51st in Tulsa) made the Bottom 100 list, fully a third of the state's bridges are considered "structurally deficient," and another 7 percent are "functionally obsolete."

Bringing all these bridges up to spec would cost about $5.4 billion, which of course we don't have. Senator Jim Inhofe is chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which means that he may be able to scare up a few more dollars in federal highway funds. In an unexpected move, Robert Milacek, a Republican state senator from Enid, has proposed a state vote on an increase in fuel taxes to pay for improvements. The alternative? Perhaps federal "wheel stamps," to help pay for auto suspension parts broken while trying to traverse these battered old bridges.

I really think this guy at Lactose Incompetent has actually worked here; either that, or it's just as bad the world over and we are all screwed. Neither of these is comforting.

I do my best to get a summer break in spite of them. Otherwise, this is spot on; as the bottom-ranking nerd, I have no hope.

The chief RockSnob, DragonAttack, with the able assistance of the Aspiring Pirate, has charted for your delectation forty-five (of course, it had to be 45) songs with parentheses in their titles — something to peruse the next time you feel like a bullet (in the gun of Robert Ford).

Wendy, aka Weetabix, describes the shopping on the far side of the Styx:

I dunno. I'm kinda white and fairly trashy, but I do my best to avoid Le Mart du Wal. I'll occasionally set foot in a Sam's Club, generally to buy incredible quantities of something I wouldn't want to be seen buying at Albertson's, but actually to visit a Wal-Mart? That's just not on the agenda. And it's not your standard left-wing Exploiter of Peoples argument, either; I figure any retailer that isn't exploiting us greedy buyers is only a few pages away from Chapter 11. I just don't deal well with Incredibly Huge Crowds. I don't go anywhere the day after Thanksgiving, for that reason alone.

And where was I four hours ago? The checkout line at Target (which, of course, is pronounced "tahr-ZHAY"). And they had (O frabjous day!) those Verbatim CD-Rs designed to look like 45s, priced way higher than any other recordables on the shelf ($8.49 for a box of ten with full-size jewel cases). Would I have driven the extra 0.4 mile to Wally World to save maybe sixty cents on these? Not likely.

How predictable was this? District Judge Willard Driesel has granted a temporary injunction barring enforcement of Oklahoma's new cockfighting ban in the area of his jurisdiction: Choctaw, McCurtain and Pushmataha counties. A permanent injunction will be sought; the state has already announced it will appeal the judge's decision.

Judge Driesel, for his part, has a problem with the ban as written: "You're making extinct the very bird the state says it is trying to protect." If he'd stopped there...but no. Instead, he took the plunge into Preposterous Metaphor Land with this whopper: "We punish child molesters but don't prohibit the raising of children."

Anyone up for a statewide ban on schoolyard fights?

What's a "Culture Representative"? At Tufts University in Medford (pronounced something like "Meffuhd"), Massachusetts, it's a reserved minority slot in the student government, intended to ensure that those who have been historically underrepresented have some sort of voice and some sort of recourse against abuse.

Enter Rob Lichter. Writing in the Tufts Daily, he disclosed the existence of a previously-ignored minority:

Jeff Jacoby, in an op-ed in The Boston Globe, is sympathetic:

Meanwhile, Lichter and other conservatives at Tufts continue to pursue a Culture Representative position, motivated by the not-exactly-unspoken desire to undermine the whole system. There's a faint hint of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" here, but nobody said the process was going to be either easy or pleasant.

(Muchas gracias: Erin O'Connor.)

In fact, get a hundred rounds. It's National Ammo Day, a day to celebrate the Second Amendment and, just incidentally, to scare those folks who think firearms are just too icky for words or too horrible for mere mortals to own.

There will be no more "420 Specials" at Your Pizza Shop in Canton, Ohio; the Repository reports that shop owner Pat Koury, responding to a request from a DARE official and a memo from the head office, has taken down the offending signs. "420", of course, is widely believed to be drug slang, though I have yet to meet a single stoner who responds to the number.

Your Pizza Shop is located at, um, 420 12th Street Northwest.

Columnist and "liberal iconoclast" Harley Sorensen asks the following "rhetorical question with no response required":

Sorensen, as it happens, was using this opening as a wedge to take a potshot or three at the nascent Department of Homeland Security, but there is an answer to his question. Gregory Hlatky takes up the query:

He shoots, he scores.

Tape drives interpret the position of the write-protect device differently from the way you or I (especially I) would do it.

Contrary to popular belief, reports Radley Balko, corporations funnel far more money to the left than to the right.

How can this be? Balko points to a couple of contributing factors:

Does money from the Ford Foundation count the same as money from Bill Ford's personal checking account? The Feds may disagree, but I figure it probably does. Balko continues:

The GOP hasn't asked me for anything, since I'm not a member, but I don't know anyone who's received a Republican fund-raising letter that boiled down to "If you don't give us money, you must be some kind of liberal."

Balko doesn't dig into the psychology of the matter, but I have to wonder if maybe some of the corporate types who write checks to groups which actively oppose their interests do so in the vain hope of buying, or at least renting, their silence: "Here's fifty grand. Please shut the hell up." I can't recall any instance in history when this actually worked, though I'm certainly amenable to an empirical experiment, price available on written request.

The Citadel/Clear Channel pissing contest goes on.

I mistyped the URL for KQBL, Citadel's country station in Oklahoma City, which is www.1049kbull.com, as www.kbull1049.com, and got sent to KTST, one of Clear Channel's two country stations in the market.

Incidentally, neither kqbl.com nor ktst.com will take you to either station site.

Miss Christine takes a dim view of tip jars:

Possibly even deep-seated, at least from where I sit, but I'm not quite so sour on the concept. Yet. If by some fluke of nature I start pulling 2,000 visitors a day instead of 2,000 a week, it won't cost me one dime more to operate this site. Let it become 20,000 a day (yeah, right), and maybe I'll get worried.

Besides, were it not for self-indulgent rambling, I'd have a lot less to read in the evenings.

For poor Page, "RTFM" is honored mostly — make that exclusively — in the breach:

Unfortunately, this willful sort of ignorance extends into other areas of technology. I've been known to hang out on a couple of automotive message boards, and when the Same Damn Questions recur, I'm not above being snippy enough to tack on "Further details can be found in Section [whatever] of your owner's manual." And, sure enough, the next reply is I bought it used and I don't have one.

Well, why the hell not? You can't go to the dealership and plunk down $25 for something to show you how your expensive little playpretty actually works? I bet you spent more than that upgrading your goddamn stereo, you corksoaking icehole. But no, you'll be back here in three months begging for help with your "check engine" light because you can't bear the thought of paying the shop to hook up a scan tool.

And then I erase all that and type "See your nearest authorized dealer for a copy." Wonderful things, those Terms of Service.

Dr. Earl Leathen Warrick, one of the "founding fathers", if you will, of Dow Corning, has died in Orange County, California.

Warrick, born in 1911 in Butler, Pennsylvania, devoted his career to polymers and elastomers; he invented silicone rubber and held, singly or jointly, 44 US patents.

It was a failed experiment, though, that perhaps brought Warrick his greatest fame. During World War II, Warrick and fellow researcher Rob Roy McGregor were trying to work up a synthetic rubber that could serve as a workable substitute in the wake of wartime shortages. "3179 Dilatant Compound" really wasn't suitable for tires or weatherstripping, but it did have quite a bounce to it, and they took it home to the kids. Dow Corning had no particular interest in selling children's playthings, so it was left for some astute marketing type to buy up lots of the stuff, seal it into little plastic eggs, and spread it across the land, where you and I eventually spread it across the Sunday funnies.

You can still buy Silly Putty today; in fact, you can buy Dow Corning's original 3179 Dilatant (call it Sensible Putty) directly from their Midland, Texas facility — if you're prepared to order at least two 50-lb cartons.

Susanna Cornett is not one to mince words, anyway:

I could argue, I suppose, that "that's not my style," but that would imply that I actually have a style.

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act doesn't affect me," you sniff. "I don't download music and I don't pirate software. All those people complaining about it — nothing but a bunch of thieves trying to justify themselves."

Well, think again, chum, and by "again" I mean "once." Storm Concepts operates a site called FatWallet.com; its members utilize an extensive array of message boards to swap information about bargains available online. Perfectly harmless, right? Then some big-name retailers threatened the site with legal action under the DMCA, claiming that their sale prices are trade secrets, hence actionable. Subsequently, FatWallet.com asked members to refrain from posting prices from those retailers, lest the lawyers escalate the attack.

Now ask yourself: Are people who are trying to save money thieves? If you're prepared to answer "Yes" to this question, I fully expect you to pay full MSRP on your next car, and to brag about it to all your neighbors. I expect you to call the police and complain about everyone in line during two-for-one Wednesdays at Whataburger. And I expect you to take the standard deduction on your Federal tax return for the rest of your unnatural life.

Or you can do us all a favor and fall on your sword right now. If you don't have a sword, get one. And don't expect a discount.