Michael Bates reports that the last Casa Bonita in Oklahoma, at 21st and Sheridan in Tulsa, closed last night when their lease was not renewed.

Casa Bonita used to have locations in Oklahoma City — in fact, the chain's first locations were here in OKC — but they've long since gone away, and in fact the only remaining Casa Bonita is on the west side of Denver, Colorado, presumably still within a reasonable distance from South Park.

The stepchild of the Casa Bonita operation, Taco Bueno, continues to flourish.

As the Shorts Season draws to a close and all those glorious legs (some of them actually walking about 42nd and Treadmill) go back into hiding for the winter, I am bemused to report that Angela McNeany of the Chicago 'burbs has, we are told, the best legs in America.

My immediate reactions are three:

1. Well, someone had to;
   
2. At least it wasn't Katie Couric;
   
3. If said gams are truly that incredible, it's probably a good thing I'll never see them.
   

(Via Fark)

A local public school — I'm guessing in Mid-Del — apparently has been soliciting student participation in activities at a local church, which prompted a debate on a local message board. (I am fairly confident I know which church is involved.)

The principal of the school says he's looking into how the church flyer got into school distribution in the first place.

And that's the problem here: that the school was actually distributing a church flyer, which appears to step over the line drawn by the Establishment Clause. I'm thinking that if they had simply parked a box of flyers in the hallway with a Take One sign, they might have been able to slide, but apparently they sent them home with the individual students, a distribution vector which always suggests Official School Business. ("Make sure you give this to your parents.") I have no problem with churches doing outreach to public-school students, but they can't use those schools as their agents.

(Update, Sunday: It ain't necessarily so. Read this.)

Found at Ravenwood's Universe:

I suspect it depends on when his birthday falls.

Miriam's idea for filling that Supreme Court vacancy:

Except to note that her name is indeed Mary, I think I'm going to leave it at that.

As this site approaches the ten-year mark, I have decided to fill up space commemorate its history with excerpts from its semi-glorious past, in a sort of "This Week in Blogorrhea" mode. For example:

(From Vent #71, 1 October 1997.)

The Seventh Generation company, based in Burlington, Vermont, derives its name from a precept of the Haudenosaunee, otherwise known as the Iroquois Confederacy, to the effect that decisions must be informed by their potential impact on the seventh generation to follow.

The company sells a variety of paper and plastic products and household chemicals, and earlier this year I decided to give some of their product lines a try, on the reasonable basis that paying a little more for a little less overall waste and/or toxicity can be justified.

After a couple of months, I've appointed Seventh Generation to be the official Surlywood supplier of paper towels and bathroom tissue. They are not, however, getting the contract for trash bags: in two successive boxes, the little plastic welds, which are supposed to keep the drawstrings in place, didn't.

It wasn't that long ago that recycled-material products weren't even slightly competitive, so, applying the principle of "When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue," I assume that this stuff will get better as time goes on.

The following public-service announcement is brought to you by The Daily Bitch:

You have been warned.

Don Mecoy of the Oklahoman interviews Hornets owner George Shinn in tomorrow's edition, and, well, judge for yourself:

(Emphasis added.)

I may be wrong, but it sounds to me like already Shinn wants to stay.

(Update: The Oklahoman has now posted the interview.)

It was buried way down in the paragraph, but Google didn't seem to mind:

Not to be confused with the real Sharon Sheeley, a songwriter of considerable prowess, alone or (usually) paired with Jackie DeShannon; Sheeley passed away in 2002.

Our Googler, as it happens, was looking for the original Brentwood Bay soap; turns out he was a participant (he played Rev. Bernard Bradshaw). [Insert "small world" reference here.]

Just for the hell of it, here's an actual excerpt: a phone conversation between the fictional Ms Sheeley, then still working in local radio news, and the Brentwood Bugle's Bill Badderley.

I still don't know Badderley's agenda, though I suspect he was basically biding his time until he could retire and was close to the NGAS point by then. (NG = "Not Giving"; you can figure the rest.) And this was before Sheeley was hired away from the radio station by the paper in the next town.

When last we left this story, I had suggested that there were Constitutional issues involved.

Sean Gleeson reports on what those issues are:

Which would indicate that if the school is handing out promotional material for non-religious organizations — been a while since I've had any dealings with grade schools, but I rather suspect that they might be — they have no basis on which to refuse material from religious organizations.

And that would seem to settle that.

Addendum: The Subjective Scribe says it's okay with him if they send home no materials at all:

Krispy Kreme's largest single franchise operator is suing Krispy Kreme, charging that executives at the home office misappropriated funds designated for marketing and billed their franchise for bogus charges.

The partners of Los Angeles-based Great Circle Family Foods LLC contend that Krispy Kreme is seeking to drive them into bankruptcy.

Krispy Kreme has been under considerable fire recently: a New York State inquiry and an SEC probe have questioned the company's finances, and a previous lawsuit claims that KK management manipulated the balance sheets to conceal deficiencies in the company's pension program.

The company spokesperson would not comment, but given the shellacking Krispy Kreme has been getting in the press of late, I surmise that her eyes glazed over when she was questioned.

(Via McGehee.)

Motivated by the cause of Truth in Advertising, Tamara K. suggests the original 18th-century text be updated as follows:

Any rights not specifically enumerated above presumably devolve upon the Senate Judiciary Committee / local county commissioners / Halliburton [choose one].

Lan Lamphere, whose Overnight AM radio show used to be carried here on KOKC, questions the official story about the explosion on the OU campus yesterday:

The explosion apparently took place in the courtyard of George Lynn Cross Hall, across Asp Avenue from the stadium; Boren says [link requires Adobe Reader] there really wasn't a second device.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Sunday Drive.)

Update: The Oklahoma Daily has a roundup of announcements and findings and statements and whatnot here.

Mike at Okiedoke is, he says, "trying to imagine a dustbury party platform."

It might be something like this 1986 scrawl from P. J. O'Rourke:

Actually, this is something of an exaggeration: I don't give a damn about banking-secrecy laws, and Nastassia Kinski doesn't do a thing (well, okay, she does one thing) for me.

(Update, 8 October, 4:40 pm: An actual endorsement from Ian Hamet. I'll have to get his opinion of Ms Kinski.)

I hadn't seen this before, and I'm not sure why I'm seeing it now, but toe rings under hosiery? Seems to me it would be (1) uncomfortable and (2) an invitation to snags, but then this isn't an area where I have any noticeable expertise.

So how much gasoline does George W. Bush's pickup truck actually burn?

None, apparently.

Harvey imagines, with entirely too much detail if you ask me, how blogdom would change with the arrival — via surgery, one assumes — of the Instapundette.

(Hey, it could be worse. At least he didn't suggest bleaching Oliver Willis. Yet.)

An email that made the rounds:

Um, no, you can't.

(Via Doc Searls.)

This thread at Okiedoke is highly worrisome. Mike started it out sensibly enough:

The idea was to gauge the depth of the divide, which is a perfectly reasonable question. What's perturbing, though, is that as of this morning (subsequent postings might, and probably should, change things), I am outpolling everyone except John McCain. This is simply unbelievable, at least to me: who knew there was that much support for McCain?

And anyway, while I've already put out a sort of platform, I really don't have any political ambitions per se: the one job to have, I think, is Karl Rove's, and I don't quite meet the evil-genius specification called for by that position.

Besides, announcing plans to run for office is the surest way I know to unearth previously-buried copies of that calendar I posed for in the middle 1980s, and no one should have to see that on Drudge.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSblog predicts that the Harriet Miers nomination will be rejected:

I don't know. It's been reported (this morning on NPR, for instance) that some members of Congress had suggested to the President that he nominate someone without extensive judicial experience, and Miers certainly meets that criterion. The nomination does suggest, however, that Bush wasn't in any mood for a knock-down, drag-out confirmation fight, to the presumed disappointment of the (more) conservative wing of the GOP.

I don't think this nomination is doomed, but it's surely not going to sail through the Judiciary Committee in a matter of minutes either.

If you work for Sears, says Sears Holdings chairman Aylwin Lewis, you do not carry a competing store's shopping bag onto a flight for which Sears is paying.

Sears has been running a shuttle between Detroit and Chicago for employees at the old K mart headquarters at Troy, Michigan, which is being phased out as a cost-savings measure in the wake of the K mart/Sears merger.

Lewis also asked employees to get Sears credit cards if they don't have them, to visit Sears-owned stores "three to four times a month," and to make friends and relatives and neighbors more Sears-conscious.

In the wake of the Sears announcements, and any rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, Sonic chairman Cliff Hudson has not actually ordered that any Sonic employee seen in a Braum's parking lot is to be shot on sight.

Finally, a good reason to vote for Brad Henry.

Remember these?

•   <———  This is a bullet.
  
•   <———  So is this.
  
•   <———  This, too.
  

That is, unless you're teaching in the City of New York:

If I had a dollar for every idiotic complaint about "negative connotations," I could retire and have plenty left over for ammo.

(Via Ravenwood's Universe.)

The Oklahoma City Convention & Visitors Bureau has, shall we say, a serviceable Web site; it's not particularly cluttered, which is good, but it reeks of 1999. (Which is to say, there's nothing on it that I, with my decidedly-limited portfolio of mad Web skillz, couldn't have done.)

Others take a dimmer view of it. This letter was sent by the techier-than-I Gerard Morentzy to the OKCCVB, and is reprinted with his permission.

And while we're on the subject, a URL that might actually stick in the mind would be a useful thing to have. (They own visitokc.com, but I don't remember seeing it promoted anywhere.)

Why Topeka rates a (!), I don't know, unless it's because of that CSI episode.

Greg Hlatky is contemplating changing the name of A Dog's Life, a step that one does not take lightly.

I myself have been through this once already: this site was established as Chez Chaz in 1996, and retained that name until the dustbury.com domain was acquired in early 1999. I'd been using "Dustbury, Oklahoma" as a pseudonymous location practically from Day One, and it seemed logical that I should adopt some version of it as a domain.

But you should have seen some of the names I threw away:

• Girthwatch
  
• Fnord Fnocus
  
• Instaputz
  
• Site Unseen
  
• Ghoti
  
• Deeply Superficial
  
• Henry Fondue
  
• 163,216
  
• Odi et Amo
  
• Fdisk
  

And some were actually worse.

Addendum: I found my Site Unseen logo buried in the archives.

The big question about Harriet Miers seems to be "Does Bush know something that the rest of us don't?"

Well, duh. (Caution: Not safe for work.)

(Via Lindsay Beyerstein.)

The United Nations is persuaded that it, and not those awful Americans, ought to have control of the Internet. Aside from being totally unfair to Al Gore, this is a generally bad idea, but it really can't be implemented:

See Beta vs. VHS for comparison.

John F. (comment to previous link) explans how UNCOOL would work:

We could get the same results by turning the whole shebang over to the Mafia, and probably a hell of a lot cheaper to boot.

What do you do when the pace of life is accelerating faster than you can?

Why, work on the blog, of course:

I note that I still haven't begun the Version 9 upgrade. Hmmm....

Dawn Eden has announced that she's taking a break from blogging to work on her book The Thrill of the Chaste.

Gawker suggests some alternate titles that presumably wouldn't have made it past the editors at Dawn's Christian-oriented publisher:

Actually, I kind of like a couple of those.

Something styling itself "Citizens Against Corporate Welfare" slipped a flyer onto my door today which castigated Rep. Trebor Worthen of District 87, where I live, for voting for two bills they considered particularly heinous.

With the possible exception of 42nd and Treadmill, CEO salaries are bloated just about everywhere in the nation. I'm assuming (since CACW didn't bother to spell it out) that this was HB 1588, which provided exemptions from the state Gross Production Tax for really deep drilling (12,500 feet and beyond). (Text of the enrolled version in RTF format here.) This bill passed the House 79-19 on its way to being approved by the Governor; I don't remember taking a position on it myself, but historically there are only two occasions when oil and gas producers are looking for incentives:

1. When prices are low;
   
2. When prices are high.
   

Then there's SB 484 (enrolled version in RTF format here), of which CACW said:

Well, actually, what 484 does is to take away the ability of cities and counties to regulate any fertilizer products of any sort. I complained about it myself in Vent #434:

Today's Legislative Lesson: A chickenshit bill doesn't necessarily have anything to do with literal chicken shit.

If anyone outside District 87 got a flyer from "Citizens Against Corporate Welfare," I'd like to hear about it.

Actor and occasional singer Hamilton Camp once sang (on Warner Bros. single 7309, never issued on an LP):

Camp outlived the Times by more than twenty years; he died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 70.

Wouldn't you love to hear the Dixie Cups again?

Sure you would.

(Via Oddfellows Rest.)

The issue of TV Guide shipping this week is the last issue in the magazine's traditional digest-size format; next week it grows to "regular" size and sheds all those pesky local TV listings.

For the occasion, they've issued nine alternate covers, each an update of a cover used once before. (On my subscription copy, it's Reba McEntire stomping grapes à la Lucille Ball.)

Inasmuch as there are probably going to be a brazillion copies of this issue out there, I'm thinking maybe I won't put this one aside for safekeeping. And considering the fact that the other day, while looking for something else, I found a 1988 issue of TV Guide which, so far as I can tell, is distinguished only by a leg shot of Rita Braver, this must be considered Unusual Thinking for me.

This being National Newspaper Week — is there a parade? — there is the requisite quantity of promotional materials to remind us of just how essential the daily paper truly is.

Eric Siegmund happened upon one of them and happily mocks it. Here's the text from the original (which you can see at the above link, or here in PDF format):

Eric finds this pitch risible:

I am reminded of something Michael Bates said last year about the Tulsa World:

As forums (fora?) go, this strikes me as being well short of the "ideal."

One impertinent statistic: Most days that I see it, the Oklahoman runs four or five letters to the editor. Assuming that this is a standard practice at the Black Tower, this means that since August of 2002, they have run about 5,700 letters. During the same period, I have accumulated 11,000 comments.

Now I have to assume that their market share has to be a lot higher than mine; they're the only general-interest daily in town, and I run just one blog among dozens, maybe hundreds. Besides, my comment-to-post ratio, slightly above 2, is distinctly lower than average for this traffic level; there's far more actual dialogue at other blogs.

Besides, "Web Blog" is at least slightly redundant.

The father of the "Sooner bomber" is disputing claims that his son was a budding jihadi:

The FBI says they have found no connection between Joel Henry Hinrichs III and any known extremist groups. (Full text of FBI statement in PDF format here.)

Including, of course, that one.

One item within the 75k or so of rotating boilerplate that appears in the "It Is Written" section reads: "Man loves little and often, woman much and rarely."

Girlfriday finds this statement questionable, and it might well be. For myself, I can say only that my experience in that baffling man/woman stuff is not likely to produce any words of wisdom.

(Who said it originally? I don't know. It's on a few quotation sites, always credited to that legendary deep-thinker Anonymous.)

From Double Take in the current Urban Tulsa Weekly:

Actually, it's the parking that gets you, not the burgers.

Here's where the numbers come from, for the curious.

Howard Stern no doubt knows this number: FCC Form 159 must accompany all administrative payments to the Federal Communications Commission, which includes fines.

If you'd rather not FCC around, there's the Carnival of the Vanities #159, the latest edition of the soi-disant Best of the Blogs, hosted this week by Technogypsy.

The online poll at NewsOK.com as of this writing:

I draw no conclusions. Yet.

(Update, 7 am, 6 October: It's down from 2-1 to 3-2.)

Chris at PhilDennison.net has a tribute to Badfinger drummer Mike Gibbins, who died Tuesday at 56.

Of the original foursome, only Joey Molland remains; Pete Ham and Tom Evans are long gone.

If you made a list of everything you'd consider buying over the Net, automobile tires are probably way down there, perhaps above cheeseburgers but well below books and music and tchotchkes.

It's a fairly busy time at work these days, and I said to myself, "Self, do you really want to go buzzing all over town looking for P205/60R-15s?"

I didn't. Enter the Tire Rack, a major dealer (lots of big brands) with a Web storefront and the ability to drop-ship a quartet of donuts to a nearby tire shop for installation.

I knew about these guys because they sponsor One Lap of America, one of the more amusing racing events around, and because they have five or six pages in almost every major auto mag every month.

And while I figure I'd have no problem finding the low-end Bridgestone Turanzas I've been driving on for 50,000 miles, I didn't much like them; while dry grip is decent, they let go way too easily in the wet, and they're noisy to boot. (There is a Turanza series above this one, but the price differential struck me as excessive.) I'd had Michelin X-Ones on my previous car, which I really liked, but which are amazingly pricey when you can find them.

In the end, I called upon Dunlop, who had made the OEM tires for my old Toyota Celica back in the immediate post-Fred Flintstone era, and who offered the SP Sport A2 Plus in the size I needed and with an appropriate speed rating: H. (My car won't do 130 mph, but the tires could take it if it could.) If you pay attention to UTQR ratings: treadwear 460, traction AA, temperature A. Four of these came to a stirringly-negligible $224, plus forty bucks to UPS them out of Indiana and whatever (I'm guessing $100) I get charged by A to Z Tire Warehouse over on NW 10th, who will be doing the install.

If the $370-ish tab seems high to you, keep in mind that it's worth something simply to avoid going to Pep Boys.

The stately 16,000-square-foot Tudor house on South San Rafael Avenue in Pasadena, California which was used for exterior shots of Bruce Wayne's place in the Sixties Batman series has fallen victim, not to a supervillain, but to something much more mundane: a fire, which essentially gutted the place.

The owners were in the process of remodeling, but this is surely more than they had in mind.

(Via Fark)

(Update, 7 October, 7:20 pm: Would you believe it was the wrong house after all?)

I do not believe this phrase means what he thinks it means:

So speaks Howard Dean, Democratic Party chair, on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

One word of advice, Dr. Dean: Don't buy the liverwurst.

(Seen by Baldilocks while perusing Wizbang.)

A few weeks back I muttered something incoherent about "Desperate Librarians", partly because I'm a sucker for goofy calendars featuring individuals in varying degrees of undress, and partly because I wanted to see if "Weyauwega" is really spelled like that. (It is.)

As for the calendar itself, which bears the cutesy tag "The Book Stops Here," it's quite a bit more modest than the usual run of such things, and each of the staffers is hiding behind a book with a work-related "title" Photoshopped thereupon. The librarian inclined to reveal the least is Miss June, whose large-format volume is emblazoned "librarians definitely should wear clothes." Certainly at work: it's probably cold in there.

I suspect this particular cultural artifact is on a vertical trajectory, the shark waiting below; whether the vector is upward or downward remains to be seen.

Car and Driver editor Csaba Csere has heard the same stories you have about so-called "plug-in" hybrids that get triple-digit gas mileage. In his November column, he reveals that he dispatched editor-at-large Barry Winfield to get some seat time in one of these cars if at all possible.

It wasn't. Writes Winfield: "The developers of plug-in hybrids are extremely unwilling to have their babies tested by any means right now." Some things are known: with the gasoline engine disconnected, the Toyota Prius, the usual test bed for plug-ins, is limited to 28 bhp running on batteries only, and tops out at around 34 mph.

Winfield's conclusion after trying to get a grip on the state of this particular art:

C/D, whatever their degree of cynicism, actually did test a Honda FCX fuel-cell vehicle this year, and they reported that apart from a different portfolio of noises, it was pretty much like driving a Civic — assuming you could fatten a Civic up to 3700 lb. Of course, there is as yet no hydrogen-refueling infrastructure to speak of, but the FCX seems much closer to being a Real Car than any of these electrified buggies.

Traffic has picked up markedly this week, and I can't think of any good reason why. The usual 800-a-day average, after sliding into the middle 700s during the summer, has somehow jumped over 1,000; even Sunday drew 916. I'm not getting any extra linkage that I know about: I'm still ranked just above 3,000th in Technorati, and still in the middle of the TTLB Large Mammal phylum. And while I've had a couple pieces on the Norman splodeydope, arguably the biggest non-basketball story in these parts, I'm hardly leading the way on any of this stuff.

No, I'm not crowding my bandwidth limit or anything. (My host is projecting 8 GB for the month, which is a lot by the standards I'm used to but far from getting into the dreaded Extra-Cost Zone.) But if by some fluke I'm actually doing something right, I'd like to know just what the heck it is.

You have to wonder if maybe J. B. Pratt was too far ahead of his time.

In his thirty years in the grocery business, he came up with some ideas that sounded distinctly odd: he had sections devoted to products actually grown or made in Oklahoma, and he put the organically-grown produce right up front where you couldn't miss it.

This would have worked wonderfully in, say, 2003 or 2004, but it didn't play well in the 1980s and 1990s, and the last outpost of Pratt's modest empire, Shawnee Community Foods, which closed this summer, is about to be auctioned off, part of his company's Chapter 7 liquidation.

Smaller grocery stores survive: Kamp's continues to anchor the Asian District, and Crescent Market, literally as old as the city itself, is still hidden away in Nichols Hills. Braum's has added small grocery sections to some of its dairy stores. But the big story, not unexpectedly, is Wal-Mart, which garners about half the local sales.

The sad thing, I think, is that it would probably take a J. B. Pratt to create the sort of niche market that is needed downtown: his stores were always just enough off-kilter to shake off the stigma of the suburban Big Box. (His Wellmarket in Edmond, opened in 2001, had the right idea, but it closed after half a year.) And Pratt, in Chapter 7 himself separately from the company, is in no position to do so.

Sean Gleeson presents: Ask Harriet!

(McGehee is gonna love this.)

I note that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has recently added an online reader forum, which is called The Vent.

It's a pretty good name, if I say so myself.

Erica's Audience Participation regimen:

I duly shouted out, and this is what came back:

In answer to #7, it was a combination of three factors: accumulated Wanderlust, which I hadn't been able to work on because of ongoing motor-vehicle issues and low cash flow; scoring a third vacation week at 42nd and Treadmill; and finally, my acquisition in the fall of 2000 of my first new car, ever, which made for even less cash flow but eliminated the vehicle issues.

So, after a decent break-in period, I hit the road. Running.

(I posted this as a comment to her original thread, and decided that it wouldn't hurt to take advantage of #8, even if she did cross it out. Oh, and it's this Dean.)

Whatever is going on down there in Norman, they don't want to talk about it:

Which, of course, is exactly why those documents get sealed: to eliminate possible comments and/or potential tip-offs.

Beneath the surface, the iceberg continues to grow.

(Via A Blog For All.)

Now this is scary:

I am nothing if not incredibly foolhardy gutsy.

1.  For Jay and Deb of Accidental Verbosity, the Beatles' "Two of Us," from Let It Be:

2.  Sam Cooke speaks for me:

3.  You mean it's not already a steaming mass of putrid refuse?

Go rent Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do! One of the Wonders' Play-Tone labelmates is a girl group called the Chantrellines, who do a lovely little pseudo-Spector number called "Hold My Hand, Hold My Heart." Acting credits go to Darlene Dillinger, Julie L. Harkness and Kennya J. Ramsey, who probably didn't actually sing on the song, but I'd love to see who did.

From back when "MoveOn" actually meant something:

(From Vent #120, 9 October 1998.)

As evidence goes, there is circumstantial, and there is really circumstantial.

This paragraph in an Oklahoman story is instructive:

The reporters have arranged these, it appears, in increasing order of relevance.

Living "near" the mosque, for instance, is no big deal: it's located fairly close to the University (on George Avenue), so lots of students are in the vicinity, and no one seems to recall ever seeing him there anyway.

In my experience, finance types (like Hinrichs' roommate) tend to be fairly apolitical, but none of the finance types in said experience were Pakistani (like Hinrichs' roommate), so score this as a slight possibility, but no more than that.

There's still the question of what he wanted with this humongous cache of explosives, and anyone who knows anything about the Oklahoma City bombing knows about ammonium nitrate. Unfortunately, for the moment, the answer to this question was washed off the side of a bus with a hose.

The News-Journal sort of endorses the Delaware Supreme Court's decision not to force an ISP to reveal the identity of a blog commenter:

Fritz Schranck points out that the News-Journal editorial is itself unsigned, and adds:

Text of the ruling in PDF format here.

(Prompted by Lynn S.)

About five years ago, there was a little Web toy to generate "glam names"; the name of a friend of mine, fed into the form, was rendered "Nova Hotsex", and that was the name I used for her on this site in those days. Generally speaking, this falls under the heading of No Big Deal. But today, I was looking at the site stats via Analog, which produced the table to your right (which has been edited to remove IPs not pertinent to this piece), and you'll notice an awful lot of IPs in the 212.138 range. A call to a Whois produced the following notation: Part of this IP block has been used for proxy/cache service at the National level in Saudi Arabia. All Saudi Arabia web traffic will come from this IP block. If you experience high volume of traffic from IP in this block it is because your site is very popular/famous of Saudi Arabia community.

This, of course, seemed implausible: what would the Saudis want with this site? So I went back and matched up IPs with referrals, and every last one of them was Googling for "hotsex" and was fed the link to Nova. Perhaps Riyadh has decided that this search string is sinful and is duly punishing the searchers by referring them to me.

Not to mention flat-spotting the tires, which are about to be replaced anyway.

The story is hard to figure from two positions back, but so far as I can tell, the doofus in the aged Infiniti got about a car length and a half beyond the intersection and stopped cold, prompting the Cadillac right behind to do likewise. I was barely underway, so the pedal got only a slight tap.

A few seconds passed, the Infiniti moved on, and then stopped again. This time both the Caddy and I were moving at a decent clip and had to burn it off in a hurry. M. de Ville did a very quick 90 and got the hell out of the way; I dropped back until the doofus had picked up about three or four car lengths before hitting the gas again, and then took the next turn off.

"If you don't know where the hell you're going, don't go there on Saturday afternoon" is always good advice, and doubly so on May Avenue.

Then again, about three hours earlier, somebody of similar smarts, westbound on Britton, decided that it wasn't worth waiting for the left-turn signal at May to come around again and followed the last car through despite a total lack of yellow — and totally not noticing the presence of a Village police officer, pointed southbound on May and in position to give chase. Easier busts than this you will seldom find.

I continue to get search queries for the gas mileage on the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, which is currently in production, which costs, as Dr. Evil might say, one MILLION euros, and which apparently can actually reach its top speed of 400 km/hr, a couple of ticks over 250 mph.

At this price, what could you possibly care about fuel consumption? Still, Wolfgang Schreiber, head of Bugatti engineering, assures you (in Automobile, 11/05) that it's "acceptable":

This is pretty close to what my sister got out of her Dodge Li'l Red Express Truck, which wasn't nearly as fast. Or as expensive.

That's right, squirrels on crack.

I have been accused from time to time of coming up with an article just because it fits a title that's been kicking around in the back of my head. Occasionally this is even true. But never before have I even contemplated the idea of squirrels on crack.

Although Rita has.

(Via Jacqueline Passey.)

Technically, it's a Variable Attitude Submersible Hydrofoil©, a fully-enclosed watercraft that can operate on the surface or dive for short periods.

More familiarly, it's known as the Bionic Dolphin™, and what amazes me about it is that it's controllable over the same three axes as aircraft (pitch, roll and yaw), something you find in submarines but not in surface watercraft.

I don't even want to know how much it costs.

It's way late at night, I'm sitting here looking at Michele's boobs, and she says:

And I suppose we are: it's not a function of clothing, or the occasional lack thereof, but the willingness to put ourselves on display, as Cromwell is supposed to have instructed the artist doing his portrait, "warts and everything."

Some blogs deal with the most intensely personal topics you can imagine; others don't come close. I think we set a boundary for ourselves in advance and seldom if ever venture beyond it, though where that boundary actually lies is going to be different for each of us, and what's more, our individual comfort zones seem to be subject to occasional variation. (Once in a while I go back and reread some of my stuff, and "What was I thinking?" isn't at all an uncommon reaction on second sight.)

There's potential for conflict as the boundary comes closer: "Do I cut off the story here, or do I bring in all the gory details?" I usually compromise and bring in some of the gory details, on the dubious basis that if I had cut off the story, I really had no reason to post it, and then I'd be scratching around for something else to write about. (The price I pay to maintain the fiction that I am some sort of prolific writer.)

Still, there's at least a hint of "Look at me!" in almost every post, personal or not, if only because we'd like to think that someone is in fact looking: this is why God, or Dave Smith anyway, invented Site Meter. And I'm not above wording something to make it look like more is going on than there really is.

Our man with the high explosives in Norman presumably violated the majority of these helpful rules for Philadelphia suicides:

Other than suggesting that you take your shower before you get dressed, I wouldn't change a thing. Those of you inclined to off yourselves, please consider the impact of your act — if not upon your immediate family, then certainly upon the investigating officers.

Matt Barr reads John Tierney so you don't have to:

Of course, should this turn out to be a ratings hit, they'll drag it out for as long as possible, but Tierney's thought of that too:

I like. But how does Judy rate on the mysterious Poindexter factor?

By Lindsay Beyerstein:

I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with her less.

A better Nobel laureate than IAEA and Mohamed El-Baradei? Debbye Stratigacos makes the case for an alternative Peace Prize winner:

Me, I'm just grateful they didn't cobble up another award for the late, unlamented Yassir Arafat.

Found on the local craigslist:

I've been here thirty-odd years, and the number of people actually killed by the religious right during that period seems fairly minimal. There is plenty of proselytizing, to be sure, but everyone reacts to it differently; the sort of person who takes the slightest mention of any deity as a threat is probably not well-suited to life on the Windy Plains. Me, I consider it to be just like telemarketing: it can be an irritant, but nowhere does it say that I have to pick up the phone.

Our writer says he's "happy," which is a plus, and when he finds out how much of a house he can get here for, say, a quarter-million, he might well be ecstatic, though probably not inclined to attribute said ecstasy to divine intervention.

And I am not inclined to discourage someone just because he's "left on social issues"; it's a minority viewpoint around here, to be sure, but active crushing of dissent is conspicuous by its comparative absence. A lot depends on how insistent he is on being surrounded by like-minded souls.

A reply to the fellow asserted baldly that "coming here will murder your muse," which is maybe a half-truth: frustration plays hell with the creative process, to be sure, but no muse I know of takes it as anything more than a challenge.

Of course, in my idea of the best of all possible worlds, he arrives the same day as Steve H.

Benjamin Franklin, tongue perhaps in cheek (though we'll never know for sure), once explained why younger men should seek out older women, and this is the sentence that always struck me the hardest:

Not that I have any experience making old women happy — for now, we will overlook the young ones I may have made miserable — but that's not why we're here.

A fellow identified as "Steve Trevor," noting a reference to Harold and Maude in this Donnaville post, commented as follows:

I never claimed to have truly lived, and I suspect I would have thought twice before posting something like that to the blog of a woman barely into her thirties, but maybe that's just me and my off-center sense of propriety.

Still, I suspect that there's truth to what he says, and really, there are worse things in life than being on the same side of an issue as Ben Franklin.

"Well, if some doofus in Oklahoma can make a bomb, so can I."

"Me, too!"

From The Clog Almanac:

Besides the actual desk itself, there are five pieces of wooden furniture in this room, a room small enough to enclose them all within a twelve-foot diameter. Clockwise from north-by-northeast:

1) The box itself sits upon a small end table, not quite two feet off the ground. There is a lower shelf, which contains a power strip and whatever happens to get thrown there.

2) The remains of a video rack — the swinging doors disappeared years ago — support my scanner (which is legal-size, so it needs a lot of support), my answering machine (which is downright tiny), various tools, and a twenty-year-old cassette deck, should I decide to dub a tape to CD.

3) A small drop-down desk (there was a matching chair, but the operative word is "was") contains everything pertinent to paying the bills, which, given the number of bills I have, is quite a lot.

4) A bookshelf reaches nearly to the ceiling, and is almost completely full.

5) An old chest of drawers, painted white, holds up my small shelf system and a Cambridge SoundWorks Model 88 radio (one of two I own). In years past, this chest held about four hundred tapes, but at the moment, only one drawer is full; it contains about ten years' worth of photographs and the attendant ephemera.

What all these have in common, besides the fact that they circle my chair, is the fact that I got none of them new. The end table and the video rack were garage-sale purchases; the desklet once belonged to my ex, but was passed to me with the rest of the second-best furniture at breakup; the chest was salvaged from the woodchipper, or some similar fate; and the bookcase was presented to me by a friend who now has built-in book storage — which she should max out any day now, if she hasn't yet.

Not exciting, perhaps, but this is not a room wherein a great deal of excitement takes place, as those who saw my dubious television appearance may recall.

Well, maybe not, since he's daid.

But listen to Meryl:

I'd say something here, but someone would no doubt remember my origins in northern Illinois.

And besides, sometimes it's fun to work the stereotypes, as I did the first time I visited Joisey.

A lot of school districts are hoping to get bond issues approved, but here in the Big Town, unless you're in one of those districts, there's only one matter on the ballot: changing one line of the franchise agreement between the city and Oklahoma Natural Gas.

Under the current agreement, business customers who buy gas from an ONG competitor but still use ONG's pipelines — there are about three hundred such — don't have to pay the three-percent franchise fee. The new wording will specify that anyone using ONG delivery systems must pay the fee, regardless of the origin of the gas.

The new franchise agreement, if approved by voters, will be in effect for five years.

Who suffers from (or perhaps enjoys) it? Andrea Harris has the details:

Gotta love that word "shenanigans": it conveys both malfeasance and triviality.

What the TruCons want, of course, is someone so plainly hard-right that (s)he doesn't even have to write any opinions: they'll already know how it's going to come out. The President didn't give them one, and I suspect it's because he figured those same TruCons didn't have the stones to get one through the Judiciary Committee, let alone the full Senate. The spectre of Donald Rumsfeld, I suppose: "You work with the Congress you have, not the Congress you want."

Oh, it's going to be great fun the next couple of weeks as Republicans force themselves to crib from the Democratic How To Obstruct A Nomination playbook. Those Texas gals (and I used to be married to one, so I know what it's like) can really mess with your head.

I don't recall ever seeing it this low. At 10:30 am I got to my precinct and cast ballot #6. The poll workers said they'd be surprised if they finished the day with a dozen. The Election Board, or somebody, really ought to put some thought into combining some of these issues, or, if they're sufficiently subcritical, figure out some way to postpone them to November.

(If you're thinking "What election?" read this.)

Addendum, 12 October, 1:20 pm: I'd say 2.6 percent is pretty low. The measure passed with about 62 percent of the vote.

Pawn shops, cash-advance and check-cashing storefronts in Oklahoma will not be selling lottery tickets; the Oklahoma Lottery Commission has so decreed.

In a separate action, local 7-Eleven stores have decided not to carry the tickets, reasoning that keeping that much cash on hand is not something they want to do.

Approximately 1200 stores will be selling the tickets starting tomorrow, about a third as many as the Commission had hoped.

Addendum: Bubbaworld points out:

I wouldn't put it past them.

Sandy, you may remember, is my most faithful companion, my modest little Mazda sedan, and today she was fitted with a whole new quartet of tires.

I have yet to explore the outer limits of their performance — it's seldom wise to do so on fresh rubber anyway — but the Dunlops seem to have plenty of stick, and while I didn't install a soundmeter in the car, I'd guesstimate they're about 1.5 to 2 dB quieter than the OEM Bridgestones, which at 65 mph is quite noticeable.

And three cheers for A to Z Tire at 10th and May, who installed these donuts this morning in about 45 minutes, and who apparently didn't have to rush to do it: their service envelope (free rotation every 7500 miles) contains a couple of cryptic notations which turned out to be the factory-recommended figures for air pressure (32 psi) and lug-nut torque (85 lb/ft). (And no, they didn't use an air wrench; I watched.) The Tire Rack has a feedback system to rate its installers; these guys were already at the top of the heap, but one more round of praise won't hurt.

Oh, and incidentally, my projection of $100 in installation cost was way high; including the state waste-disposal fee, the tab came to $72.50, bringing the total for all this stuff to just under $340. Not bad, and I shouldn't have to do this again for at least four years.

Were this on Fark, the description would end with "Still no cure for cancer."

For now, we have this:

I don't sleep particularly well, and during a typical night I will assume two, maybe three, of the six positions. (Curiously, my afternoon nap, on those rare days when I get one, is in yet another.)

I do admittedly take up a lot of space; the fetal position is not for me. The most likely explanation for this, though, is the extremely low probability that I'd be sharing that space.

(Via Acidman.)

Miriam is deceived by Mapquest and winds up lost on the far side of Wilmington, something I've managed to do myself without computer assistance.

This aside in her last paragraph, though, will pin some people's How Dare You meters:

I will say only that it's difficult to zone a parcel, or a neighborhood full of them, for maximum nift, and that the only road I know of named after me (which almost certainly isn't named after me) is actually in a really nifty part of some other town.

In the 1990s, General Motors spun off its parts business to a separate company called Delphi. This past weekend, Delphi's US operation filed for bankruptcy. What does this portend? Peter M. DeLorenzo, in his capacity as the Autoextremist:

Given the fact that something like one out of every eight jobs in this country is connected somehow to the automobile, this isn't good news for anyone. And where Detroit goes, so goes the nation:

When one door closes, another opens. But look for some folks to figure out a way to jimmy the locks.

An observation from Jonah Goldberg:

Microsloth Word 97, confronted with "Miers," suggests "Mires," "MIA's," "Mie's," "Miens" and "Myers." I trust you can write your own jokes.

Jan the Happy Homemaker, describing the pain and sorrow associated with trees that shed in mass quantities: No Cedar Makes Your Life Easier.

Even got a smile out of Mr. Clean, I'll bet.

The number of acres in a quarter-section; also, the sum of the first eleven primes.

Speaking of which, there's prime bloggage in Carnival of the Vanities #160, hosted this week by Chris Hallquist, the Uncredible Hallq. I believe him.

But not now, if you please.

Meanwhile, surely this corresponds to the opening of a seal: a