First there was the original post (which this morning I can't seem to find for some reason), and then The Professor was all over it:

Of course, in line with the Law of Unintended Consequences, this brought Wonkette cascades of additional linkage.

But what's most amusing about this is that Ana Marie Cox, who puts together all this stuff, is at least as far left as James Capozzola himself; in a radio interview for WAMU [requires RealAudio], she reveals that she actually voted for Nader in '00 — not that it matters a whole lot, since she lives in D.C. and all.

I note that Capozzola has switched his endorsement this year from Kucinich to Kerry; there's still time for most of you to order new bumper stickers.

(Update, 2 February, 4:15 pm: If you've come here from Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine, you can find the original of Capozzola's post, snatched from Google's cache, at this link.)

A 17-year-old car thief was booked into the Hotel Whetsel this past week. Officials said it was the kid's 69th arrest.

There are those who complain that the state of Oklahoma executes juveniles; I'm starting to think we're not executing enough of them.

Apparently we truly can't control where the movies begin or end; the SciFi channel has finally quit showing reruns of the last three seasons (the only ones to which they had the rights) of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This isn't exactly surprising — when production ended in the late 90s, it should have been perfectly obvious that the reruns would end in the not-too-distant future — but it's still a shock to the system, since MST3k was arguably the last comedy show with any legitimate claim to innovation.

CT points out that there wasn't much chance of a revival anyway:

Which rights, I presume, have to be renegotiated for the video issues as well, which haven't exactly been pouring out of Rhino lately.

Oh, well. Push the button, Frank.

If you saw this at the Axis of Greeblie and wondered why I haven't done a similar list, wonder no more.

Well, yes, I'm going to forbid my daughter to see Justin Timberlake, which is probably about as difficult as telling her to avoid gargling with bleach, but the most telling comment about yesterday's Bowl (they tell me that there was a football game, of all things, going on in the background) came from Linda Richman, by way of Robb Hibbard:

And that's the end of that.

Update, 9:05 am: Well, almost. Greg Hlatky points out that this was to be expected:

And frankly, Janet — Miss Jackson if you're nasty — has generally been the least annoying member of the family; this may have been a setup, but I'd like to think they didn't warn her in advance.

Wesley Clark's campaign expenses in Oklahoma have gone up by $450.

Leaving McAlester for Oklahoma City this weekend after a campaign appearance, Clark's three-car entourage was busted by state troopers for doing 88 mph in a 75-mph zone [scroll to bottom]. Clark staffer Reid Cherlin, driving the lead car, says he had the cruise control set on 83 mph, presumably in the belief that ten percent over will not get you a ticket.

Each of the offenses carries a $150 fine.

Fortunately, the food's good, and the service is measured in seconds, not in years — and that's what matters.

The Oklahoma primary is tomorrow, and it's time I checked to make sure everything is in order before I trot off to the polls:

• Register at new address: Check. Did this back in November, in fact.
  
• Find new polling place: Check. It's at the Presbyterian Church, a quarter-mile away, and no, I don't think this is an undue breach of separation of church and state.
  
• Select a candidate: Uh, I'll get back to you tomorrow.

A regular reader complains about the coverage of the uncoverage of Janet Jackson's frontage:

But of course. They are the very definition of trivial. But trivial, as it happens, is what we do best; if we expended this much energy on dealing with, say, governmental and corporate corruption, or what's going to happen to the Federal budget when all these damn baby-boomers retire at once, we'd run the risk of actually accomplishing something that various groups of people manifestly don't want accomplished and will resist to the bitter end. What's more, it would stretch the national attention span well beyond what's considered to be its upper limit.

Give us something insignificant, however, and our species shines: oh, if we could only ask Robert Jenkins about his ear.

There may be as many as half a million voters today in the Oklahoma Presidential primary, and the vast majority of them will likely be Democrats; there are just about as many Republicans as Democrats in this state, and there is, technically, a GOP race, but I doubt there will be an enormous amount of turnout, since President Bush is headed for a coronation at the party convention this summer. Still, I'd like to see some votes for Bill Wyatt, if only to get Bush's attention.

Me? Well, as a registered Democrat in a closed primary, I don't have the option of supporting Wyatt. On the other hand, the candidates on my ballot strike me as something less than inspired. And while the differences among their domestic policies are largely trivial — will we spend too much, or way too much, on health care? — exactly one candidate seems to grasp the notion that there are more immediate threats to the Republic than a percentage point or two of taxation, which is why when I'm through with my dental appointment today, I will grit my semi-sparkling teeth and pull the lever for Joe Lieberman. Yes, he spends money like a 21st-century Republican; yes, he's a common scold, occasionally rising to the level of uncommon scold. But in 2004, the desired characteristic, in true Firesign Theatre tradition, is Not Insane, and rather than opt for the bumbler, the banshee or the Botoxed, I'm going with Joe.

The redoubtable Man from F.U.N.K.L.E. explains how it is that City of God director Fernando Meirelles came to be nominated for a 2003 Academy Award for a picture released in 2002:

On the other hand, nothing winning an Oscar® — not even Oliver! — can possibly rival the embarrassment level of the Grammy for Best New Artist bestowed upon Milli Vanilli.

Such a Valentine's day deal: For fifty bucks, one of the half-dozen barbershop quartets of the OK Chorale will bang on the door of your Significant Other, present a card and a long-stemmed rose, and sing two songs.

That is, if said S.O. lives within about a 14-mile radius of downtown, which pretty much eliminates anyone I'd consider for this gift.

Remember when leftists were the ones who worried about nuclear proliferation? Mark Steyn does:

I never did quite buy that "mutual assured destruction" business — it seems unlikely that both sides could inflict absolutely equal damage, and anyway Oceania/Eastasia/Eurasia/whoever would be accused of targeting the inner cities rather than the suburbs, thereby demonstrating hideous and unacceptable prejudice against the socioeconomically challenged — but armed societies, back then, were generally acknowledged to be polite. Some of them still are.

Still, politeness is a virtue mostly unknown to the mad medievalists of the Middle East, so I'm pleased to report that taking away their armaments, even the most insignificant Weapons of Half-Assed Destruction, pays dividends in two ways: it assists in assuring our survival, and it serves as an object lesson to our multiculturalists, who persist in believing that any society which doesn't have a McDonald's is superior to any society which does.

The old "balance of power" shtick is dead, and good riddance. How many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned? So long as we're threatened by terrorists, the answer, my friend, is "Blow it out your ass."

This evening, this very site was the #1 Most Traded on BlogShares, with 20 transactions in the past 24 hours.

Didn't make a dime on the deal, of course.

First post, 8 pm: The polls closed about an hour ago; John Edwards has a very slight lead over Wesley Clark, hovering around the 30-percent mark, with John Kerry back in the lower 20s.

KOMA is reporting that in Oklahoma County, Howard Dean managed a reasonable second and Joe Lieberman actually made double digits, but out in the rural areas it's almost all Edwards and Clark.

Turnout seems pretty good; I was the 346th voter in my new precinct, two hours before closing. (In a strange twist of fate, the person right in front of me was the previous owner of my house; she's definitely gotten prettier since she moved out of here, and obviously she hasn't moved very far if she's still in the precinct.)

Update, 8:30 pm: Bill Wyatt has gotten almost 7 percent of the GOP vote with half the precincts counted.

Update, 9:05 pm: KTOK is reporting that with 75 percent of the numbers in, Edwards and Clark are still in a dead heat at 30 percent; Kerry has risen to 26 percent; Lieberman will apparently beat Dean for fourth.

Update, 9:25 pm: With 1942 of 2237 precincts in, the Clark-Edwards difference is 0.02 percent (71 votes); Wyatt is up to 9 percent for the GOP.

Update, 9:40 pm: KOMA has called it for Clark.

Update, 9:45 pm: Clark has opened up a 700-vote lead; Wyatt is over 10 percent.

Update, 9:55 pm: Clark's lead has grown to over 1000, which should be enough to nail it down. Edwards is a very close second, Kerry not quite so close a third; Al Sharpton outpolled Dennis Kucinich to pick up sixth place.

Deaniacs were lined up in the median on the Northwest Distressway this afternoon; I hope none of them threw themselves into ongoing traffic.

The numbers will be posted by the State Election Board here; the results will not be certified as official until next Tuesday.

Sign seen in the window at Flip's Wine Bar & Trattoria:

A few people took this warning seriously: turnout was pretty decent, even on the GOP side where there was less of a race, and state party officials beamed, noting that the largely-bipartisan decision to move the primary to early February had paid off in vastly greater interest by both voters and candidates.

The AP's exit poll attempts to explain the motivations of state voters.

No doubt about it: this is going to be one heck of a ride between now and November.

Eric Scheie, perplexed by the flap over the Philadelphia restaurant Chink's, observes:

And, of course, no teacher dares assign Joseph Conrad's The Person of Color of the Narcissus these days.

Curious to see the extent of this sort of thing, Scheie went looking for a household product that is seldom seen these days: Spic and Span, which was spun off by Procter & Gamble in 2001 but which is still being manufactured.

Thus motivated, I investigated, and verified that the original surname of Manny, Moe and Jack, the Pep Boys, was not, as I had imagined, Pepstein.

A perfectly cromulent Carnival of the Vanities is up for your reading pleasure at Pete's A Perfectly Cromulent Blog, and while I'm not in a position to judge cromulence levels, I can assure you that once again, the Carnival features the best of last week's bloggage in a single, link-ridden page.

It's a popular game here in Soonerland; if for some reason (and there's always some reason) the state gets some derisive coverage in the pop press, well, it's all the fault of those wacky fundamentalists.

Over the years, I've demonstrated that I'm not above this sort of thing myself, which illustrates a truism: hardly anyone in the middle, and absolutely nobody on the left, ever has a kind word for Christian conservatives.

Like most truisms, this contains a fair amount of falsity. I commend to you the following example, from the March 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which isn't up on their Web site yet. According to Colonel Tom Wilhelm, defense attaché at the American embassy in Mongolia, a chap somewhat in Wesley Clark's political neighborhood who admits to voting for Al Gore in 2000, the "flowering of the middle ranks," as correspondent Robert D. Kaplan describes it, and the marked improvement in overall discipline since the days of Vietnam, are in no small part due to an influx of Christian evangelicals into the Armed Forces over the past decade or so. Says the colonel:

Inasmuch as Wilhelm was there, in Macedonia anyway, I'm inclined to take his word for it.

Violence, we are told, is caused by many things: venal media, wrenching poverty, societal pressures, and, lest we forget, easy access to guns.

In fact, the connection between any of these and any single violent act is tenuous at best. We make these assumptions because we can't handle the idea that some people, indifferent to the tenets of a civilized society and irrespective of circumstances, are going to do Bad Things; surely there's some way we can reach them, make them see the error of their ways.

Andrea Harris knows better:

I don't believe anyone is entirely beyond redemption, at least in the Scriptural sense, but until Ludovico arrives with his technique, we're going to have to deal with sociopaths in the time-honored fashion: isolate them, put them where they can't do any further damage. Obviously there are degrees of depravity — the Palestinian suicide bomber is more of a menace to society than the suburban shoplifter — but neither is entitled to a free pass, and I don't much care which theory about extenuating circumstances gets trotted out.

Tuesday I plugged the OK Chorale's Singing Valentine offer.

It occurs to me that you might conceivably want to have female voices in four-part harmony, in which case be advised that the OKCity Chorus is offering a Singing Valentine package of their own.

A little reminder from Bruce:

Or, in Pete Townshend's phrase, "Meet the new boss — same as the old boss."

The last clause of the First Amendment keeps Congress from infringing upon the right of the people "to petition the government for a redress of grievances," and inasmuch as corporate structures are considered the functional equivalent of persons (see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific, 1886), you're pretty much always going to have corporations with grievances (such as, say, insufficient profits) which they would like Congress to redress.

Of course, your non-profit organizations tend to be just as corporate, and therefore just as legally corporeal; the Sierra Club — theoretically, at least — has the same Constitutionally-mandated access to Congress as does ExxonMobil.

Lobbyists, like the poor, are always with us; they just wear more expensive suits.

What do British MP George Galloway, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, and the Minister of Forestry of Myanmar have in common?

Answer: While Saddam Hussein was handing out bribes to the likes of Jacques Chirac, he was apparently awarding millions of barrels of oil to those three and many others for, um, services possibly to be rendered, a serious perversion of the oil-for-food program. Mr Galloway, President Megawati, and the unnamed Myanmar minister are listed as having received vouchers for one million barrels of oil (call it $30 million or so), and they're hardly the largest recipients of Saddam's largesse.

Alan Sullivan, who has reproduced the complete list as released, sees a slogan just waiting to be turned into a meme: No oil for blood! And I suppose there's some comfort in knowing that Saddam, ruthless killer that he was, also dabbled in more mundane offenses.

What's the worst possible vacation spot for children? An abandoned steel mill? The Michigan caucuses? The back seat of Michael Jackson's car?

Why, it's the Big Rock Candy Mountain!

I mean, lemonade springs might be nice if you don't mind total immersion in something yellow and spewing, and I'd love to see a bulldog with rubber teeth just once, but cigarette trees? Why, John Banzhaf would have a myocardial infarction.

Yeah, I know. Haywire Mac wrote this as an ode to the road, to the hobos who hopped freights and such; he wasn't thinking about the kids at all. But eighty years later, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" has somehow become a song for children, and the youngsters don't seem to be any worse off for it — though I suspect today's vendors of tunes for tots don't bother to do the last couple of stanzas, sparing your grandchildren and mine the scary image of a lake of whiskey. Or worse, of stew.

(Inspired by Dawn Eden, which is getting to be a fairly common occurrence these days.)

As a person who owns a brace of Betamaxes, I appreciated this DragonAttack dialogue greatly:

Exeunt omnes.

I suppose I should go look for an 8-track player, just to fill the void — well, a void — in my life. And yes, this explains much about why I passed up version 5.2 of some horrible godawful spawn-of-Satan piece of "financial" software today in favor of my existing installation of the merely-sucky version 2.24: if you can't prove to me it's actually better, I don't want it.

Which I do, on occasion.

Today Wonkette has dubbed Howard Dean "the Betamax of political contenders," which fits just perfectly: the picture might appear better to some people, but playing time is definitely short.

One aspect of Gene Stipe's guilty plea hadn't occurred to me: Stipe controlled five radio stations in southeast Oklahoma, and the Federal Communications Commission could theoretically deny license renewals to those stations because of Stipe's sentence.

Perhaps fittingly, Richard Lerblance, who was elected to fill Stipe's old Senate seat, has applied to the FCC to purchase the two Stipe companies which own the stations. (Little Dixie Radio owns KNED-AM and KMCO-FM McAlester and KESC-FM Wilburton; Bottom Line Broadcasting owns KTMC-AM-FM McAlester.)

Two nightmares (for the price of one!) last night, and while the one where I'm trapped on a game show hosted by the evil twin of Don Francisco might have been marginally more entertaining, the one that spawned the afterthought — and therefore the blog post — is the one about the old IBM punch-card system. I spent some time at a Model 029 punch, and to this day the sight of one of those cards makes my eyes glaze over.

The afterthought went something like this:

Each 80-column card (there were 12 possible punches in each column, but no more than three could be used) represented 80 characters, which today we would describe as 80 bytes.

As of this morning, this Web site was using 57.125 megabytes of disk space, which is awfully close to 60 million bytes. Which means that to reproduce this site on punch cards would require, oh, 750,000 of them.

I guess it's time to do another backup.

Brian J. Noggle made this observation as a comment to a post by his beautiful wife:

I make rather less than fifty thou a year, so I buy even less beer.

Groundhog: The other other white meat.

Don't take my word for it. Ask Fred.

"Entering Oklahoma — set your watch back 90 years."

Actually, despite the old joke, sometimes we manage to be contemporary. Our semi-electronic voting system is speedy, far more reliable than anything they've come up with in benighted states like Florida, and dirt-cheap to operate.

Sometimes we're even ahead of our time. Who else in 1937, eleven years before the birth of Al Gore, would have thought of taxing the Internet?

No, really. From the instructions from Form 511, the Oklahoma income-tax form, page 10:

Which, of course, includes all that stuff you ordered from nevermindwhereweare.com.

Conveniently, the use-tax rate is usually equal to the sales-tax rate: 4.5 percent state, plus county and city levies if any. (Here in the Big Town, it's a startling 8.375 percent.)

Businesses, who have had to keep books on this matter all along, have been paying this tax on a regular basis — last year, the tax brought in $92 million or so — but this is the first year that the Tax Commission has attempted to collect it from individuals through the income-tax return; they hope to increase the take fivefold.

And if you haven't saved all your receipts from online purchases ("if", he says), the state suggests an estimate of 0.056 percent of your adjusted gross income: if you made around $30,000 in 2003, your presumed use tax is $17. I don't expect anyone to go to jail over this, but a lot of people are going to be caught off guard.

The Amateur Gourmet attempts to make, if not mountains out of molehills, cupcakes out of Janet Jackson.

Google was unable to turn up any Milton Berle kielbasa recipes.

(Muchas gracias: JaxVenus, Days Gone By.)

Fifteen-year-old Emma Zevin lives in San Francisco, and she is not thrilled with the present-day pop scene. Entertainment Weekly (#751) quotes her as follows:

Emma is currently completing her collection of Beatles CDs.

I wouldn't have thought, forty years after the fact, that the Four would still be considered Fab, but in some small way I feel that my musical tastes, such as they are, have been vindicated.

And you know, that can't be bad.

A very busy Saturday, with two stories to recount.

Last month we were introduced to FergNet, our most recent facsimile of a health-insurance plan, and in said introduction I reckoned that the name-brand drugs prescribed for me would be a couple of bucks cheaper.

This notion, of course, violates the First Rule of Health Care: "If you can afford it, the price is too low." And indeed, when I presented a prescription, the pharmacist looked at his terminal screen, raised an eyebrow, looked at the screen again, and pronounced solemnly: "Since this calls for a sixty-day supply, they expect you to pay two copayments, one for each thirty-day quantity."

Sneaky little devils. So instead of $2 ahead, I come out $28 poorer. Six iterations of this, and — well, it won't matter, because someone else will be taking over the company plan by then and will have a different bag of tricks altogether.

Later on, I had wandered into Borders for something or other, and was greeted by a chorus of Camp Fire Girls vending their usual array of chocolate-covered carbs. I gave them my standard putoff — "Let's see if I have any money left after I go through the store" — and continued into the heart of the stacks, emerging with a couple of periodicals and a hardback or two. I did, in fact, have enough for a box of goodies, and the Official Adult Supervision, while fumbling for my change, gave me the "Don't I know you from somewhere?" look.

Which he did. Back in the 80s, he had run one of the larger Apple-based BBS systems around town, named for a Robert Asprin series, and I was one of the users thereupon. Of course, back then, I was still in fictional-female mode, so I was duly introduced under the pseudonym, which I acknowledged, noting that "That was years ago."

But by then three pairs of nine-year-old eyes had grown to saucer size. "You used to be a girl?"

I explained the story as best I could, and they seemed content with the explanation. Passersby, who heard only bits and pieces of the tale, tended to look at me funny.

Oh, well. My Warhol-approved 15 minutes stretches another couple of nanoseconds.

(And I'm going back to the "CFI Care" term for our health-care provider, because it's funnier.)

*Garish Name Application Techniques, which have acquired staggering popularity in today's Congress, and have achieved prodigious levels of banality in so doing. Prime example: The USA PATRIOT Act, an acronym of such mind-numbing idiocy that if Ashcroft and company don't disown the whole package over Constitutional concerns, which they won't, they ought to can it for having a stupid, maudlin, wretched name.

And God forbid someone should concoct some legislation whose purpose is, say, Keeping Internal Terrorism Threats Everywhere Neatly Suppressed.

This year, Lyric Theatre, the mainstay of local musical theatre, decided that there might be some audience for off-Broadway, non-mainstream stuff, and established something called Second Stage to mount productions that you might not think would go over in sanitary central Oklahoma.

Judging by the crowd at the Civic Center's Little Theatre today, they needn't worry. Pageant: The Musical Comedy Beauty Contest, Second Stage's debut offering, satirizes that American institution nine ways from Sunday, mocking insipid talent competitions, brainless "spokesmodels" and vapid production numbers, and throwing in just a hint of backstage backstabbing. It's screamingly (I almost said "hysterically," but that wouldn't do, would it?) funny, and the ending might be different every night, since members of the audience actually pick the winner. (Earning the tiara today was Miss Great Plains, who in her talent spot performed a bit of wayward oratory called "I Am the Land.")

All in all, it was a wonderful two hours of silliness, complete with an actual wardrobe malfunction, made more ironic by the fact that the victim also serves as Lyric's costume designer. (Of course, as a Southern belle, she never lost her sense and sensibility for so much as a second.) I have no idea what the second offering from Second Stage will be, but I'm there, Jack.

Or at least, an awfully damned hot one, and one which proves the old saying "Garbage in, garbage out."

I wake up to the droning automated voice of the National Weather Service's VHF radio station (162.40 MHz), and this morning it was duly recapping yesterday's statistics: low 25, high 109.

One hundred and nine?

Trust me, it didn't feel like that when I was walking from the Civic Center to the Sheridan-Walker parking garage. But somehow this bogus number (the high was more like forty-nine) got into the database. (Here's a screen shot of the local NWS data page, before they get around to fixing it.)

Normal high for this date is 52 degrees.

Try as I may to be, um, heteroflexible, I have a great deal of trouble keeping up with the new taxonomy of gayness; there are so many groups and subgroups (and subsubgroups, and no domme jokes, please) that it's well-nigh impossible for someone outside the community to get the hang of it, so to speak.

And just when I'd figured out LGBT, too.

(Bubba, of course, considers them all a mass of undifferentiated preverts, but then he'd include peace activists, environmentalists, and about two-thirds of the Democratic party under that label too, so it's not as precise as he'd like to believe.)

(Via Tongue Tied)

Is George W. Bush inarticulate? Jane Galt responds, "What if he is?"

The best mile I've ever run is 5:53; obviously I have no business covering sports — especially now, when walking a mile will probably destroy what's left of my knee joints. (Which is probably not true, but I'm in no mood to test things, and I just popped another Bextra.)

If academics and journalists were the only ones who got to vote — a situation, I suspect, they would find most desirable — the President's halting speech might be a drawback. Personally, I like the idea that he has to think it over before he comes out with something. To me, it helps to dispel the notion that Bush is nothing more than Karl Rove's carefully-coached sock puppet; I mean, if he'd memorized all these lines, he'd have a smoother delivery, right?

Besides, however effective I may be at getting words onto the page or the screen, I fumble and hem and haw and choke whenever I'm called upon to address X+1 individuals, where X is equal to or greater than 0, so I have a certain amount of sympathy for W. I just wish he'd figure out "nuclear", if only because "nucular" reminds me of Jimmy Carter.

Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a link back to your site?

Lynn's thinking runs something like this:

It's never occurred to me to ask for linkage; usually I insinuate myself into someone's consciousness by loading up his comment section. (I once emailed a blogger about something or other, and she wrote back wanting to know how come I didn't plug my own site in said email; apparently she thought it was standard operating procedure, and maybe it is.)

Once in a while, I'll get a request of this sort; I do try to look at any URL that's sent to me, and if I find something worthwhile, I'll usually give it a plug, though getting on my blogroll is seldom (never say "never") instantaneous and rarely likely to result in increased traffic unless you're pulling something like five hits a week and three of them are yours.

A measure to ban soft drinks and sweets from grade-school vending machines failed to get past the Senate Education Committee; the final vote was an 8-8 tie, which doesn't necessarily mean the bill is dead, but it's certainly coughing up blood.

It wasn't quite a party-line vote, either. Six Democrats and two Republicans voted for the bill; six Republicans and two Democrats voted against it. Generally, the proponents agreed that too many kids eat too much junk; opponents argued that these matters should be settled at the local, rather than the state, level.

In 1966 the Rutles faced the biggest threat to their careers. [Ron] Nasty in a widely quoted interview had apparently claimed that the Rutles were bigger than God, and was reported to have gone on to say that God had never had a hit record.

The story spread like wildfire in America. Many fans burnt their albums, many more burnt their fingers attempting to burn their albums. Album sales skyrocketed. People were buying them just to burn them.

But in fact it was all a ghastly mistake. Nasty, talking to a slightly deaf journalist, had claimed only that the Rutles were bigger than Rod. Rod Stewart would not be big for another eight years, and certainly at this stage hadn't had a hit. At a press conference, Nasty apologized to God, Rod and the press, and the tour went ahead as planned. It would be the Rutles' last.

(Dear Dawn: Yes, I do pay attention.)

Poor old Dr Atkins. Poor old fat, dead Dr Atkins.

This is the crux of the high-carb biscuit:

Eighteen stone equals 252 pounds.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, apparently, is a front group for PETA, which certainly explains why they'd oppose the Atkins Diet.

Remind me to grill a rib-eye this evening.

Tattoo parlors, for some inscrutable reason, remain illegal in this state.

JMBranum points out that the state's Green Party, in its official platform, has called for the lifting of the ban. Fine with me. This is the Greens' rationale:

Besides, having to drive to Gainesville burns up a whole lot of fossil fuel.

Our congratulations to Ch. Darbydale's All Rise Pouchcove — you can call him Josh — the four-year-old Newfoundland who won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show last night.

Had it been so damned important, do you really think they'd have put you in charge of it?

Just asking.

Seventy-three men sailed up
From the San Francisco bay
Rolled off of their ship
And here's what they had to say:

Well, okay, they didn't say anything about the Carnival of the Vanities, now playing this week at On the Third Hand, but if they had, they might have mentioned that for the 73rd time, it's the best of the week's bloggage for your inspection, so ride, Captain.

Alex Beam is still apparently doing a slow burn over being roasted by bloggers:

Actually, it's not "self-styled'; it was Bill Quick's idea.

And if Beam thinks that Blogdom Assembled somehow embraced Dean to a greater extent than did Democrats voting in the primaries — which is to say, hardly at all — he needs to fire the person he hired to read blogs to him. (I hear kuro5hin has a couple of prospects.)

(Muchas gracias: ronbailey.)

Religious conservatives, says Adam J. Bernay, are missing one obvious point in the gay-marriage debate:

Well, okay, if you say so. How is this power to be wrested from the State? Is there popular support for a referendum on the matter? Do religious non-conservatives — or the non-religious — have their own interests, their own reasons to want to preserve the status quo?

So simple, this solution, that it automatically sets off the Huh? detector in the back of my head.

Marriage is, or ought to be, something other than, in Dawn Eden's phrase, "governmental sanction of sexual practices." Does the answer lie in taking the government out of the equation altogether? I'm still pondering this one.

If nothing else, this debate should silence, at least for a while, that old saw about how you "can't legislate morality." Actually, it's one of the few things you can legislate — you don't hear anyone saying you can't legislate thermodynamics.

This is something Lileks said, but I wanted a copy of it here as a reminder to — well, me.

In view of the above, I believe it is a Good Thing that I was not blogging in the middle Seventies, or even keeping a handwritten journal: much of what I said, what I did, in those days would be unrecognizable at best and indefensible in any case.

Senator John Edwards was grilled (actually, sort of warmed over) by Katie Couric on NBC's Today show this morning, and in the wake of various Kerry and Bush stories, she asked him about his own military experience.

Which he didn't have; he pointed out that he's 50 now, and by the time he turned 18, the draft was pretty much done away with, so "I did not have to serve."

I'm 50 now, and I still have my draft card, and I still have my draft lottery number (which was twenty-five). John Edwards is not quite six months older than I am; I rather doubt that they'd cancel the draft for him and then bring it back for me.

(Update, 1:30 pm: I poked around the Selective Service System site and got Edwards' lottery number, which was 178. Certainly he was never actually called for the draft. Still, the way he answered this morning — there's video on the MSNBC site linked above [requires Windows Media Player 9] — could lead someone to think that he'd somehow gotten away with something. Or worse, that he thought he'd gotten away with something.)

Well, it hasn't gotten to that yet, but Oklahoma City's Metro Transit is getting ready to spend a million bucks or so on a feasibility study for a light-rail system.

This, mind you, while the city (connected to the usual conduit for federal funds) is getting ready to spend $350 million or so on a rerouting of Interstate 40 south of downtown which will trash five rail lines already in place.

I have my doubts about light rail in places as spread out as this — Oklahoma City covers over 600 square miles all by itself, and the suburbs will presumably want a piece of the action — but if we're seriously going to consider it as an option, ripping up rail lines for the sake of I-40 is utterly insane; not even Phil Hartman could sell a bill of goods that preposterous.

Last fall, I reported on the upcoming Democratic Party credit card, issued by Providian, a bank which has been working to upgrade its portfolio from the largely-subprime accounts that nearly drove it to bankruptcy in the late 90s.

I have now received a promotional offer for the Democratic Party Platinum Visa, and from the looks of things, Providian is still thinking like a subprime lender: I mean, 17 percent? The big print, of course, is devoted to a balance-transfer deal of 3.99 percent, which runs out in September. The designated DNC rebate is 1 percent.

I haven't seen an offer for the Bank One Republican Victory Fund Visa, but I suspect the terms might be better; the card I do have from Bank One runs less than 10 percent, and the best deal I've ever wangled from Providian is, yes, 17 percent.

It didn't help that in the same mail there was an offer for a MasterCard from Capital One, another issuer I have forsaken in search of lower rates, for 12.9 percent. (On the other hand, C1 wanted an annual fee, which the Democrats didn't.)

If your filtering software is obtuse enough to think my site is pornographic, it's prima facie evidence that two roads diverged in the wood, and you took the path of least resistance.

Literally for months, Windows Media Player's auto-update feature has been nagging me to upgrade to version 9, and finally I bit the bullet yesterday and downloaded the 13-megabyte package.

This morning, of course, there was a new "security update."

Let it be said that all software beyond the level of Hello, world! has bugs and/or "random features" and/or "undocumented functionality." Still, any Microsoft package rivals the Albert Hall for holes.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, apparently satisfied with having trashed the memory of Dr Robert Atkins, has gone back to its primary function: haranguing perfectly innocent towns into changing their names.

In years past, they've concentrated on New York towns: first Fishkill, then Hamburg. (How they managed to miss the Catskill Mountains is beyond me, especially since they went there to pester producers of foie gras.) Now they've turned their attention to Oklahoma, and the town of Slaughterville, south of Norman, which is of course named after grocer James Slaughter.

Other towns in Oklahoma which probably should fear for their identities:

Battiest: Insults persons with psychological disorders. (Actually, it's pronounced "bah-TEEST".)

Beaver: Offensive to women. (See Beaver College — oops, Arcadia University.)

Bowlegs: Mocks a physical disability bone condition.

Bushyhead: No comment.

Hooker: Likewise.

Kremlin: Obviously a leftover KGB plant.

Slapout: Promotes violence.

Warr Acres: Promotes lots of violence.

Yukon: Named after a sport-utility vehicle.

And God forbid anyone should spell Tulsa backwards.

(Muchas gracias: Cam Edwards.)

(Update, 18 February: Slaughterville says "Neigh"...er, "Nay".)

What would a Constitutional amendment defining marriage strictly according to Old Testament principles look like?

I suppose that depends on which principles you choose to read.

(Muchas gracias: JP LeCompte.)

Joni Mitchell has the jump on me here:

I've looked at love from both sides now
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all

With this thought in mind, and this being the feast of Valentine, patron saint of jewelers and greeting-card manufacturers, I have chosen to celebrate with a 25-track mix tape that captures both the frolic and the frustration of the day. I have no reason to think that the musical selections therein will do anything for your love life, but they will demonstrate both acceptable taste and relative diversity, neither of which is likely to hurt. The period covered is 1959 to 1972, which inevitably brackets the time when I first became aware of the existence of girls and the time when I realized that they weren't going to be aware of mine.

Or not. After all, it's love's illusions I recall, and just as perplexingly, it's more likely to be Judy Collins' version of "Both Sides Now" I recall than Joni's.

Last year I was bemused to be on the receiving end of the World's Smallest Instalanche: while others linked by the Professor bask in hundreds, even thousands, of visits, the best I could do was fifty-three.

Yesterday I was surprised to discover that an item posted here had been rejected by Fark. (If you're curious, it was the one about the death of Weekly World News editor Eddie Clontz.) I know this because all links submitted to Fark are posted at their premium service, TotalFark, and as of this morning twenty-two TotalFarkers have dropped by.

I keep telling myself that I'm happier at the top of the D-list than I would be at the bottom of the A-list, but I'm not quite sure I believe me yet.

So far, things haven't moved much beyond the Hysterical Rumormongering stage.

I'm inclined to agree with this observation by Charles Dodgson:

Emphasis added.

And "ritual purity"? "We befoul the air, we take bribes under the table — hell, we take bribes over the table — but by God, we keep our pants on."

A few things I spotted today while wandering about town:

At 50 Penn Place, I found myself parked next to a Volkswagen Cabrio with a "Re-elect Gore 2004" sticker. Did I miss something?

Jim Tolbert, who owns, among other things, the Full Circle Bookstore at 50 Penn Place, is running for mayor of Oklahoma City — the election will be 24 February — and inasmuch as he lives around here, most of the yard signs that have sprung up in lieu of spring foliage are Tolbert signs. Curiously, he even has yard signs in Nichols Hills, which is outside the city limits; Tolbert may have friends in this old-money enclave, but he won't get any votes there.

Sign at a jewelry store on May Avenue: Valentine's Day Nomination Bracelets. Admittedly, I don't have an actual Valentine, and I have no reasonable expectation of ever getting one, but it bothered me no end that I had no idea what a Nomination Bracelet was. (Now I know.)

And for some reason, almost all the copies of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in the rack at Albertson's were turned upside down.

You read enough bad press about Windows, you start to wonder just what sort of horrible things really are inside that mass of code.

Now I know.

(Via Rocket Jones, who always suspected as much.)

Last year, Rep. Leonard Sullivan was trying to drum up support for renaming the North Canadian River (so called because it lies north of the Canadian River) the Oklahoma River.

Sullivan's idea went nowhere, but it's resurfaced this year in a reduced form: Senate Bill 1259, now out of committee, would rename the segment of the river that runs through central Oklahoma City — seven miles from Meridian to Eastern — to, yes, the Oklahoma River.

I couldn't tell you if anyone from Canada came through here with the idea of naming two rivers after his homeland, but French explorers and traders were active here in the late 17th and early 18th century, ending presumably around 1762 when France signed the Louisiana territory (which included Oklahoma) over to Spain so they wouldn't have to give it up to the British. (Spain traded it back to France in 1800, just in time for France to sell it off to the nascent United States.)

Proponents of the change are always citing the tourist trade as justification. Personally, were I just visiting town, I'd be more curious about a river called "Canadian" way down here than I would a river called "Oklahoma," but maybe that's just me.

Fark linked to this Music from the Movies article with the following inspired text:

Well, okay, they spelled "Philip" with two Ls, but that may have been part of the gag.

Figures lie, and liars figure, and sometimes you get the worst of both worlds: take a look at this graph of US casualties in Iraq.

I haven't checked the actual numbers, but even if they're absolutely correct, there's a blatant bias in the way the graph is designed: unless some of these deaths are somehow reversed — something not seen in the Middle East for around 1,970 years, and then only once — the curve can never go down. At best, there will be some sort of plateau of finite duration; otherwise, it keeps going up and up.

Which, of course, is what the designer intended, with the hope that you will assume from the shape of the curve that things are getting worse and worse in Iraq.

Ten years from now, we'll probably see this guy day-trading in the bond market.

It's not just spammers who pass on those weird tales of herbal concoctions that are alleged to increase one's wangage; the questionable products are also occasionally advertised in national magazines. I found one such in the classifieds in Car and Driver, tucked in among sellers of, um, spare and replacement parts.

The stuff in question costs $60 for a month's supply — quantity discounts are available — and in answer to the reasonable question "What the hell is this?" the following is stated:

"This is not what you may wish"?

I assure you, the decision is not entirely mine.

And about those Mangaians: I was unable to document that sexual-frequency claim — and, truth be told, if I were similarly busy I wouldn't have time to fill out the damn questionnaire — but I did find this reference:

With that kind of pressure, they're probably enjoying themselves every bit as little as the desperate clod who spends sixty bucks to address the wrong inadequacy.

This oughta be good: Writer (and iconoclast) Dawn Eden has signed on to do a piece for Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics, a compilation due this summer from editor (and iconoclast) Jim DeRogatis. The premise is simple enough: are all those revered rock classics of yore deserving of reverence?

In a word, no. Even works I dearly love, like Pet Sounds, have their detractors, and as we all know, it's far more fun to be snarky than to be solemn. Eden is taking on Brian Wilson's oft-bootlegged but officially-unreleased Smile, and from the bits and pieces I've heard over the years, I suspect there's a darn good reason, beyond Wilson's raging pathologies of the moment, that this stuff has stayed in the can. I'm definitely looking forward to this compilation, even as I contemplate the possibility that some of my sacred cows will end up as Quarter Pounders with Cheese.

There was no way I could pass up David Kent's debut novel Department Thirty. For one thing, Kent lives here in town; for another, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to put out a novel about shadowy anti-government conspirators. In Oklahoma City. In 1995, yet.

But this isn't some variation on a theme by Timothy McVeigh. Kent's scruffy hero, Ryan Elder, comes home to Oklahoma after being sacked from yet another radio job, and his parents seem strangely distant, even cryptic.

And then they kill themselves.

What all this is about takes a while to unfold. Some of it is sort of predictable, some of it isn't, but all of it moves at decently high speed, and you know there's bound to be a screenplay in there somewhere. (Of course, if they do make a movie out of Department Thirty, they won't film it here; they'll throw in some exterior shots of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and shoot the rest in Vancouver, so this is one of your few chances to tour the Okay City's meaner streets.) It's a good read, and I'm looking forward to Kent's next book.

Getting across the Potomac isn't the easiest thing in the world; I've only done it once, and I'm not exactly champing at the bit to do it again.

So I probably won't see the outcome of this little dust-up, which involves the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. The Wilson is currently being redesigned, and a Maryland official has decided that, hey, you know, as President, Woodrow Wilson was a segregationist and well, we don't want a bust of him staring at us over here in Prince George's County, which is about 60 percent black.

Admittedly, Wilson's stance on segregation was not what anyone would call enlightened. But the Maryland official isn't objecting to Wilson's name being on the bridge; she objects to having his image displayed. In her estimation, he "deserves less attention." Note that she didn't say he deserves no attention.

There are times I wish I could split hairs with this degree of precision.

(Via Ravenwood's Universe)

Number of days without setting off alarm system accidentally: 70
Intensity of alarm, in decibels: approximately 115
Response time of alarm company, in minutes: 0.8
On 1-10 scale, embarrassment level on phone with alarm company: 5
Dumbasses living here: 1

Fr. Jim Tucker of Dappled Things is compiling a list of — well, let him tell you:

He starts with a few dozen; by the time you read this, there may well be a few dozen more.

What's most interesting here, I think, is that certain of our cultural mavens are persuaded that this particular brand of spirituality is obsolete, that no one pays attention to it anymore — and yet there is no shortage of evidence to the contrary.

If Blogspot is doing its usual "I Can't Find That" shtick, the list begins at 3 February, 10:43 am.

Alisha Virginia Oulette has been fighting fires in Danvers, Massachusetts for six and a half years.

When she signed up with the department, she was Albert James Oulette; in compliance with the Benjamin Standards of Care for M2F transsexuals, she has begun to live openly as a female. Surgery is still a year or so away.

Danvers has never had a female firefighter before; city officials don't expect any problems.

(Via California Yankee, who, unlike me, was restrained enough to avoid making any sliding-down-the-pole references.)

Lynn, we know, is fond of this state, its people, its flora and fauna, sometimes even its weather.

She draws the line, however, at the Legislature, and offers by way of illustration three particularly dumb laws.

No doubt she could come up with more without a whole lot of effort.

Well, it can't be too far off. While today was the first day since the 25th of January with actual above-average temperatures — and about time, too — the real harbinger of spring is the ever-lengthening day, which finally reached 11 hours today after bottoming out at a painful 9:35, on its way to the twelve-hour equinox. (For summer buffs, the longest day of the year at this latitude runs 14:25.)

I still have half a dozen bare trees, but their time is coming.

Various sources, none of them yet linkable, have reported the death of singer Doris Troy yesterday in Las Vegas.

Born in New York in 1937, Doris Higginsen — "Troy" was her grandmother's surname — started singing jazz in the late Fifties and writing songs on the side as "Doris Payne". In 1963 she cut a solo demo of "Just One Look," which she'd written with Gregory Carroll, with whom she'd sung in a group called the Halos; Carroll produced. When the Sue label balked at releasing it, she took it to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, who promptly put it out and watched it rise to the Top Ten. Over in England, the Hollies were big fans; they cut both "Just One Look" and her later "Whatcha Gonna Do 'Bout It". The Stateside hits dried up rapidly, and she moved to the U.K. She signed to the Beatles' Apple label in 1969, where she cut an album. The background still beckoned, though, and Troy contributed vocals to lots of British discs, most notably Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. And the musical Mama, I Want to Sing!, written by Troy's sister Vy Higginsen, is based on Troy's own story.

By most people's reckoning, I suppose Doris Troy could be considered a "one-hit wonder." But oh, that one hit!

(Update, 18 February: Here's David Nathan's tribute from soulmusic.com.)

Terry Nichols, on trial for 161 cases of murder in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, apparently has floated the idea of pleading no contest to the charges in exchange for an agreement from the prosecution not to seek the death penalty.

Don't count on this motion going anywhere; I'm inclined to think that had Nichols, like co-conspirator Timothy McVeigh, been sentenced to the Super Shot for the Federal charges on which they were convicted, there wouldn't be any support for trying Nichols on state charges in the first place. And The Oklahoman pointed out last week in an editorial that Nichols could have copped a plea long ago, suggesting that it might have been more favorably considered before all the trial mechanisms were set into motion.

But that was then. Unless something wholly unexpected takes place in the next couple of weeks, the trial will begin as scheduled on the first of March.

(Update, 8:45 am: Cam Edwards isn't surprised that the prosecution isn't biting: "The whole reason Nichols is on trial is so we can kill him.")

Last week, PETA offered twenty grand worth of soy products or something to the folks in Slaughterville, Oklahoma, in the hopes of persuading the town to change its name to "Veggieville".

Bill Hightower, who raises Limousin cattle in Slaughterville, came up with a counteroffer:

I need hardly add that the town is retaining its name, and beef is still what's for dinner.

As of this morning, if you Google for "why women pick losers" and press the I'm Feeling Lucky button, you will be taken to this very blog — specifically, this page.

Somehow, "lucky" is not my most immediate reaction.

At least I don't show up for "miserable failure".

To know recursion, you must first know recursion.

If that makes sense to you, you'll understand Slice City, a Sims game that is actually played by Sims.

I am not making this up.

Not to be confused with "Teenage Lament '74", Four Right Wing Wackos are proud to present Carnival of the Vanities #74, with dozens of this past week's best blog items, plus one from me.

Apparently the British are as obsessed with home-improvement television shows as we are, and thousands of Brits, motivated by the tube, have ripped out their carpeting to reveal the wooden floors beneath. (My daughter, when she bought her house, did exactly the same thing; it's unclear how far the family tree extends into England.)

Unfortunately, just because you can walk on carpeting doesn't mean you can walk the same way on wood, especially highly polished wood: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents is reporting that injuries due to falls on indoor floors have quadrupled in the last five years.

Two words: "area rugs."

(Via Fark)

I'm not inclined to get worked up over the current flap over gay marriage in San Francisco; I mean, isn't there always a current flap in San Francisco? So if Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to try to add his name to the Civil Disobedience Hall of Fame, it's fine with me.

Still, the very definition of "civil disobedience" indicates that a law has been broken. Civil-rights marchers in the South, forty-odd years ago, were prepared to take the consequences of their actions. I'm not quite persuaded that Mayor Newsom is prepared to take the consequences of his.

Update, 11:05 am:
Michele had a piece this morning on the larger topic — as usual, far better than anything I have to say on the subject — and a fellow known as "A Different Bill" commented as follows:

I admit to a certain amount of bemusement by all this. Whatever I may think of gay marriage — which at the moment is actually fairly close to this, minus an imprecation or two, subject to change without notice — I really can't work up much enthusiasm for Newsom: it's not like he's exactly putting his life on the line for this cause. (A visit to Selma, Alabama might be in order.) Still, I know better than to underestimate the power of small gestures.

Here's one for the theologians in our midst:

Is there any human act that can be said to violate all Ten Commandments at once?

Terence Jeffrey, editor of Human Events, says: Yes, there is.

(Via Hit & Run)

Uh, make that milestone.

Tomorrow this site will get visitor number 400,000.

Will it be you?

(Update, 3:19 pm, 20 February: If you're the IE5.0/Mac user at 204.87.68.252, somewhere in the Mountain time zone, you're the one.)

UltraTart will honor the tradition of Lent by giving up something very dear to her.

And from the looks of things, it will be effing difficult.

(Not safe for some workplaces)

One of Bigwig's research projects turned up this list of Barbie dolls custom-crafted for the Oklahoma City area.

For those keeping score, I live about halfway between Nichols Hills and the Paseo. There being no specific doll for this neighborhood, I have to play with myself do without.

Rep. Ernest Istook on the condition of Oklahoma City's Northeast 23rd Street:

And those signs start at Kelley Avenue, a couple hundred yards from the entrance to the Governor's Mansion. So it's a Good Thing that our share of the federal pork distro this year will include $500,000 to help defray the expenses of cleaning up the busiest street on the east side.

The effect on Oklahoma City's African-American community, for whom 23rd is arguably the primary business thoroughfare, is less clear. On the downside, some marginal firms may be forced to move, especially if the street, as I expect, is widened. But what remains, based on what the city was able to do on Northwest 23rd, will probably look a whole lot nicer, which may spur new development in the area.

Lesley at Plum Crazy passes on this insane but simple meme:

Well, okay. There are 1331 songs on the playlist on this box, mostly fairly mainstream. Let's see what happens:

  1. "Silhouettes," a case of mistaken identity in the Herman's Hermits remake.

  2. "Wonderland by Night," Bert Kaempfert's lovely instrumental with a hair-raising trumpet part.

  3. "Zip Code", the Five Americans once again turning a communications medium into a song (cf. "Western Union").

  4. "No More Mr. Nice Guy," the Alice Cooper manifesto.

  5. "Flowers on the Wall," the Statler Brothers statement on loneliness.

  6. "Loser," transmogrified from the Beck original into ultra-lounge by Richard Cheese.

  7. "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", B. J. Thomas reminding us of Butch and Sundance.

  8. "Diamonds and Rust," in which Joan Baez remembers what used to be.

  9. "Wild Thing," an example of Boston Soul from the pseudonymous "Senator Bobby."

10. "The Loco-Motion", a little bit of rhythm and a lot of soul from Little Eva.

11. "Let Me Go the Right Way," a very early Supremes track with Florence, rather than Diana, on lead.

12. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," another shot of B. J. Thomas, this time channeling Hank Williams.

13. "Walking in the Rain," the Ronettes speculating about Mr. Right with help from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.

14. "Walk Away," Donna Summer's blend of torch and dance.

15. "Kazooed on Klassics," by the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, which I hope needs no explanation.

16. "Electric Avenue," in which Eddy Grant anticipates a department at Montgomery Ward.

17. "Courtney Love Stinks," a Bob Rivers Twisted Tune.

18. "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)," dark sarcasm from Pink Floyd.

19. "When Liking Turns to Loving," Ronnie Dove on the cusp.

20. "Metamorphosis," a ten-minute sonata of sorts by a mid-Seventies version of Curved Air.

If nothing else, this might explain why I usually keep the radio on the classical station, or spin one of the 40 CD-Rs I store at deskside.

This gay-marriage business will be a big issue this fall, says House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas):

You know, Tom, the throat is only one possible route.

(Via Wonkette, who was actually even less subtle than I.)

The first rule of ticket quotas is: you do not talk about ticket quotas.

The second rule — but never mind, you can see where this is going.

An Oklahoma City police officer is claiming that he has been harrassed for failure to enforce those, um, nonexistent quotas, and his attorney claims there are actual OCPD internal memos which state the precise numbers for one particular division.

The OCPD Public Information Officer issued the following statement:

This could get complicated very quickly.

(Update, 27 February, 4:45 pm: The police chief explains why it's not a quota: officers aren't told they must reach a certain level of points and aren't punished or rewarded by their point totals.)

Vinny Ferrari has been listening to the radio again, and he's detected what Susanna Cornett (gawd, I miss her) might call "framing bias", pointing out that ABC's coverage of the San Francisco gay-marriage imbroglio was a tad less than evenhanded:

I don't think that this is necessarily a liberal (in the present-day sense) cause, and indeed most of the opposition is coming from conservatives, but his basic point — that in Big Media, conservatives are almost always identified as such, suggesting that they're somehow a departure from the norm — seems pretty sound. I got a whiff of it yesterday during NPR's coverage of the Iranian elections, which they cast as a clash between the "right wing" and the "reformers" — as though reform in Iran was something engineered by the left.

And similarly, if you hear the phrase "public-interest group" on the radio, eight times out of ten they'll be talking about liberals.

A common complaint among guys of a certain age has to do with the general dearth of Major Babes: they may know lots of women, but no one that will really knock your socks off, you know?

Given the emphasis we tend to place on the visual, I've generally assumed that since I know a fairly substantial number of women who are eminently capable of destroying my entire sock wardrobe with a couple of glances, my tastes, if that's the word, are fairly small-c catholic.

And indeed, after following this link thoughtfully provided by Michele, which brings up a fairly lengthy test (presented by Match.com) that purports to determine the ingredients that contribute to that sock destruction, I felt I had confirmed my thinking on the matter, inasmuch as in the test, just as in real life, the women I found most attractive from a purely-physical standpoint didn't look that much alike. Obviously, I felt, I had fairly elastic standards of beauty.

And then came the bombshell in the middle of the results, which I quote:

Damn.

In addition to being unappealing, overbearing, mercurial and generally annoying, now I'm also excessively (like 98th percentile) selective?

And come to think of it, I haven't bought any socks in over a year.

When your vantage point becomes increasingly blogocentric, as mine seems to have of late — one reason I still write those Vent pieces is to remind myself that there is something beyond the daily grind — we tend to forget that there are still other forms of discussion out there.

A fellow named Sean wrote me to plug something called Volconvo, a squoze-down term derived from "volcano" and "conversation", which isn't a blog at all, but one of those script-driven message boards (specifically, an Invision Power Board). I gave it a once-over, and mercifully, it's generally sane and by all appearances effectively moderated — I didn't see anything that reminded me of Freepers in full drool or the tortured illogic of the Democratic Underground, and apparently Mike Godwin got the day off.

Sean writes that he's "trying to make a difference, ever so slowly." I'd say that he's got the right idea.

And the task falls to Dawn Eden, who was assigned duty on a two-page color section devoted to The Passion of the Christ that appeared in this morning's New York Post. (The paper's Web site, as of a couple minutes ago, contained only the intro.) Part of that duty was to determine how closely director Mel Gibson had hewn to the text of the Gospels.

Her conclusion: It's a mixed bag.

This might explain John Paul II's reported enthusiasm for the film, anyway.

Still, whatever Gibson's vision, give him credit for sticking to it, and for going outside The Industry to sell it. Had this been the usual Hollywood biopic, we'd probably be yawning at the prospect of Ashton Kutcher in Dude, Where's My Cross?

(Update, 23 February, 5:45 pm: Dawn, following up, turned up this Christianity Today interview with Gibson — and check out that title!)