This is the time of year when the voice of the Predictor is heard in the land. Sometimes this voice is grandly general, sometimes it's foolishly precise, but it's well-nigh inevitable this time of year.

Hence: an open thread for you to make some calls of your own.

Butt-head (this is too coherent for Beavis) once said, "I don't like things that suck." In the spirit of this declaration, I'd like to announce that for the coming year, I plan to do fewer things that suck. (Writing things that suck, alas, is a different dynamic entirely.)

Besides that, the following items are on the list:

• Get through the 19th of October.

• Get rid of at least one credit card, and the balance owed thereupon.

• Crank up my 401(k) contributions by a third.

• Track down this book.

• Eat fewer Fritos®.
  

None of these should be particularly difficult.

I'd complain about this, but unfortunately, it's exactly my own position on the matter:

And it occurs to me that were there some HTML tag to duplicate the childish^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinfamous backspacing trick we used to use in 7-Bit Heaven, I'm sure it would have descended into cliché just as quickly.

I can see the demand for this. The Texas electronics firm Keyless Ride is introducing a new remote-control system which permits you to access your existing keyless-entry system with devices other than your fob: a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, perhaps.

So if you lock your keys in the car, you just hop on the cell, dial up a code, and the door pops open.

(Or, if you're a cheap so-and-so like me, you have a spare key in another pocket.)

What's the most famous road in America?

Right you are. But Route 66 is less than a pale shadow of itself these days, more memory than actual roadway, and the remaining drivable sections of it are slowly, sometimes not slowly, being reincarnated as tourist traps.

That leaves the crown to the New Jersey Turnpike, a supersized ribbon of asphalt and angst that bisects the Garden State, the subject of a six-page tribute by David Holzman in the February issue of Car and Driver.

I first drove the Turnpike in 2001. Having only just finished a vaguely-similar road in Pennsylvania, I was filled with trepidation: C/D's own Brock Yates had once described the Turnpike as the American equivalent of MiG Alley, and, well, I'm no fighter pilot. It took only a few miles, though, for me to realize that if I were going to get into trouble, it would be caused by some nimrod with out-of-state plates: someone like, um, me.

Holzman's piece doesn't romanticize the Turnpike, but neither does it complain: the article, like the Turnpike itself, simply is, and in true Jersey fashion, it doesn't much concern itself with your reaction. The usual names are checked, from Bruce Springsteen to the Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, and there are the obligatory mentions of the delicate scent of sulfur dioxide and Paul Simon's whine about counting the cars with Kathy. But what matters here is the road, and whether you think it's the nexus of American despair or simply the least-complicated way from Point A to Point B, last year motorists and truckers rolled up more than six billion miles and paid $440 million in tolls.

The Interstate system, which wasn't even on the drawing boards when the New Jersey Turnpike was built, was intended as a reasonable facsimile of the German autobahnen. The Turnpike never had any such international ambitions: it's as American as apple pie and more so, lately, than Chevrolet. Houston architect R. Gregory Turner explains:

Mr Turner, I should point out, used to live near Exit 9.

And for a lot of us, when we think of New Jersey, we don't necessarily think of the Boss, the corruption, the chemicals, The Sopranos, or even the Shore; we think of the New Jersey Turnpike, and we wonder if we're going to run into beach traffic.

The winds hit 45 mph on a regular basis this afternoon, and the temperature was an amazing (and a record) 75 degrees. Perfect weather for grass fires, and they got bad enough on the northeast side of town that an evacuation order was issued for an area centered on NE 63rd between Coltrane and Sooner, an area largely rural, but only about two to three miles from I-35. Farther north, fires near Guthrie forced the closure of the highway for an hour or so.

Winds are slowing down now, but relative humidities are still low and won't climb much tonight. Monday will be cooler; however, temperatures will rise sharply again on Tuesday.

You wouldn't think this could be quantified, but apparently Supreme Court records show that Antonin Scalia is 19 times funnier than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Transcripts of oral arguments have often been punctuated by a simple [Laughter] indication, but until October 2004, it was not possible to identify the Justices by name.

Now it is, and Jay D. Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, has been crunching the numbers on the wisecracks. Scalia, says Wexler, is responsible for some 77 "laughing episodes"; Ginsburg, only four. (Clarence Thomas, who tends not to say much during oral arguments, is credited with none.)

The methodology, of course, is not perfect: [Laughter] can indicate anything from a chuckle to a guffaw.

(Via Alan Sullivan.)

Keystone Lake-based Start Pictures is working on The Buckle: Gays in the Bible Belt, a documentary by producer/director Todd Roberts and writer Tim Cornman.

The filmmakers are looking for stories:

Cornman and Roberts being straight guys, it will be interesting to see how they sort things out. I honestly don't know how I'd handle such an assignment.

File this under "Support your local indie filmmakers."

Natural gas supplies from a pipeline running from Russia into western Europe have dropped by more than a third, and the Russians claim that Ukraine, whose quota has been cut off by Russia for nonpayment, is stealing the gas.

Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, supplies about one-quarter of the gas used in western Europe; Italy, France, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary report they're getting 24 to 40 percent less than expected. Ukraine denies that it's siphoning off the gas, and contends Moscow is trying to punish Kiev for seeking greater ties to the West by quadrupling the price of gas.

Even the higher price — $230 per thousand cubic meters, or about $6.51 per thousand cubic feet — is roughly comparable to the rates paid in the European Union, and a bit lower than the current price in the US.

Update: The US has weighed in on the issue. Says Sean McCormack of State:

McCormack apparently did not define "over time."

Update, 3 January: The Russians aren't backing down, but they've turned the gas back on.

Mr. Right turns up a helpful article by Wayne Bruce, DVM, on the care and feeding of the moonbat (Lunaris vespertilio). Emphasis is laid upon the necessity to spay/neuter, and there are gratuitous references to patchouli, Kool-Aid, and Oliver Willis.

What's that you say? Wingnuts? I just take one out of the toolbox when I need one.

Regular readers will recall my occasional differences with my health-insurance provider, identified as "CFI Care," usually with a disclaimer: "Not its real initials." Although it may be cute, it's just a substitute, and I've often wondered if maybe I'm doing a disservice to the general public by not revealing its real initials, even as I insulate myself from the slings and arrows of outrageous corporate lawyers.

Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times has run into a similar situation. Someone swiped his debit card; his bank decided that the $2000 or so that was siphoned out of his account constituted legitimate withdrawals and will not compensate him. Here's what he said:

I have a slightly better soapbox than Joe does, and I'm usually reticent about spilling the beans unless I am really, really ticked off. (The loss of two grand would qualify as at least two, maybe three reallys.)

The Consumerist, where I found this, is wrestling with the same question. Suggestions from the field will be welcomed.

There's no other word for it, but it's a W, and when you've had only twelve in twenty-nine games, you'll take it. (Yeah, I know, the Bees had only two in 29 games last year, but that's ancient history.) It was, said Gerry Vaillancourt, "a game where you just gut it out." Ultimately, the Hornets managed a bit more in the guts department, fighting the Charlotte Bobcats to a tie after the first quarter, building up a mere one-point lead at the half, and finally pulling away in the final four minutes, 103-86.

I don't know if Byron Scott was frustrated coming into this game, but he used only seven players tonight, and J. R. Smith wasn't one of them. Chris Paul got 24 points and 11 assists; David West dropped in 20 points more. Speedy Claxton and Rasual Butler combined for 25 points off the bench.

The Miami Heat arrive at the Ford Center Wednesday; the game will sell out just from people wanting to see Shaq.

Some of my mumblings from last spring:

[Note: The first link in the above paragraph has been changed from the original post.]

Ground has been broken for the new road, but, as Zen master Yogi Berra might have said, it ain't over 'til it's over. I missed this last week — apparently it was in the Norman Transcript — but Doug Loudenback exhumed it for OKCTalk.com. Dig this:

The NATI is Tom Elmore's group, which has been fighting this alignment of the Crosstown for years. I'm not even going to ask what the Bioenergy Wellness Center, which is a holistic-medicine/acupuncture place in the Asian District, is doing here.

ODOT's argument has been that if we really want rail transit, well, we've got the Santa Fe station right downtown, though there is an abundance of neither track nor parking in the vicinity of the Santa Fe, and there'd still be the need to coordinate with Amtrak.

I'll say again what I said then:

Which, of course, may be the whole idea: to make it too expensive to consider.

There's no other way to say this quite the way Donna says this:

[Emphasis in the original.]

"Honey, does this song make my playlist look bigger?"

Well, maybe Day 150 or so.

On the downside, this presumes a level of dryness which may not always be realizable, or perhaps a level of wetness you might not wish to have distributed.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, says The New York Times, will cut a deal with federal prosecutors: he will plead guilty to three felony counts — fraud, public corruption and tax evasion — in exchange for his cooperation in going after the Big Boys.

We'll see if Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK), who received $6000 from Abramoff, since given away, and $23,000 from his associates in previous years, says anything.

"Aviator," in the Lincoln lineup, was seen as the junior Navigator — and a notch up from its Mercury and Ford cousins. Now it's about to become the MKX, a fragment of a Scrabble® rack that doesn't score well in Ravenwood's Universe:

I blame this on Honda, which sold bazillions of Acura Legends and Integras before deciding that they'd rather be known for Acuras than for the bazillions of Legends and Integras on the road. Now there's the RL, the TL, the TSX and the MDX, and can you tell anything about any of them from this jumble of consonants?

If you're going to have alphanumerics, they ought to be at least hierarchical: BMW sells a 3-series, a 5-series, a 6-series and a 7-series here, in approximate order of price (the 6, sold only as a coupe, is pricier than the 7 it most closely resembles, though there are other 7s), plus high-performance M versions (for instance, M3 and M5). No harder to comprehend than, say, the TTLB Ecosystem.

Ford, at least, was ingenious enough to come up with a scheme to name all its SUVs with E words (Explorer, Expedition, Escape) and its cars with F words (Fusion, Focus and — stretching it a bit — Five Hundred). And no, I don't want to hear your F word for a Ford car. Chevrolet, of course, has its own collection of C words. But Chevy was the major practitioner of the fine art of naming vehicles after places no one would ever see them: think Bel Air or Biscayne. (They still sell Malibu and Monte Carlo, even today.) And Hyundai has named its two SUVs after Western cities: Santa Fe and Tucson. Might there be a Reno in its future? Dodge has already locked up Durango, after all.

Toyota used to have a whole bunch of C words of its own: Camry, Celica, Corolla, and the earlier Crown, Corona and Cressida. I always coveted the Cressida, and once suggested to a dealer that they develop a Troilus package for their pickup truck. This got as much response as you think it did. They occasionally did deviate from the scheme, though: there was, for example, the MR2, almost immediately dubbed "Mister Two" in the press, a tiny two-seat roadster that had just about enough cargo space for a Hershey bar if you didn't get the kind with almonds.

Disclosure: I drive a Mazda 626. This meant more back when they had 323s and 929s on the lot.

Normally I wouldn't grumble about new construction in Buffalo (that's New York, not Oklahoma), but this particular deal sounds venal enough to have been cooked up in Tulsa. The Greater Buffalo Blog reports:

Some of the gory details:

They say "façade" for a reason: that's all that's left of the original Gas Works. The building itself was demolished in 2000, at which time it had been on the National Register of Historic Places for twenty-four years.

Preservationists complained:

Drawings of the new facility along the bottom of this page. "HealthNow" is the parent company of BC/BS-WNY.

Oh, and Buffalo is trying to land a Bass Pro Shops store too.

To the left, an ad in this week's TV Guide. To the right, an ad in next week's TV Guide. I yield to no one in my admiration for this pose, but there is such a thing as overkill, and this is it. At least Maureen Dowd hasn't decided to make use of this particular pop-culture reference — yet. (Click either to embiggen.)

This seems to be a new trend at New Year's: picking one's best post of the previous year.

I don't know if I really want to reread all 2,161 posts I made last year — geez, that's almost six a day — but I'm willing to listen to recommendations.

For now, though, the one I'm perhaps most proud of, or anyway least embarrassed by, is this one, which came out in the very first week of the year, suggesting it's been downhill ever since.

Well, their checkbook showed up, anyway: the Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved reimbursement grants (at 75-25) for firefighting expenses in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.

Meanwhile, small fires continue to crop up, and the chance of rain between now and next week is somewhere between not much and nil.

Kiva is a variation on the microcredit theme: the site maintains a list of borrowers, and anyone with a PayPal account can lend any of them as little as $25. Kiva works through the Village Enterprise Fund, an African organization which provides seed capital to small entrepreneurs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, word of this got to the left side of blogdom first; I'm on record as being a fan of microcredit in the Third World, but I missed the introduction.

Erica explains the appeal:

Really big disasters — tsunami, Katrina, and the like — get all the attention and most of the dollars; operations like this remind us that it's not some distant mass of humanity, but individual people, who occasionally need help.

Surlywood has one of those monitored alarm systems, with a phone connection, a battery backup, and a REALLY loud siren, which requires a permit from Oklahoma City ($20 initially, $5 a year thereafter). My annual permit expires at the end of December; on 26 November I sent my renewal application. (My bank reports that the city cashed my check on the 30th.)

The 2006 sticker has yet to arrive, so this morning I called the OCPD to see what was going on. Apparently the poor soul on the phone had been getting a number of these calls: as he tells it, they had outsourced production of the permit decals, and late last year they changed suppliers — and the new supplier is way, way behind. (I got the distinct impression that it wasn't the OCPD who wanted to change the contract.) In the meantime, he said, not to worry, and if by some fluke I'm written up for an expired permit, they'll take care of it.

I don't feel better, exactly, but at least I'm not alone in my plight.

Update, 5 January, 5 pm: The new decal has arrived.

There was a time when I imagined haranguing Slaughterville, Oklahoma for its name was about as dumb a stunt as PETA could pull.

Evidently my imagination is sadly limited:

Shucks, why not temporarily replace the torch with a Bud Light? At least Anheuser-Busch would pay for it.

(Via Lawren, who says: "I can see ole Lady Liberty in a Chanel suit, clutching a Fendi bag, or wearing a gorgeous strand of Mikimoto pearls, but pleather? Those folks at PETA must wear and smoke a lot of grass.")

Some reasons Berry Tramel says we should be pulling for Texas over USC in the Dilemma Bowl:

Yes, there are nine other reasons.

Beyond that, deponent (who attended a school in Austin which shall remain nameless) saith not.

They played that on the Ford Center PA about halfway through the third quarter, and by then the Hornets could have been waving at them; it was 72-50 at the time. Miami would narrow the gap, what with Dwyane Wade getting a triple double, Jason Williams banging down the treys, and Shaq being, well, Shaq, but otherwise the Heat were cold after the first quarter, and the Bees chalked up a win, 107-92. Byron Scott played everyone (except the Officially Injured) tonight, and six Hornets got double figures, led by Desmond Mason with 24 and David West with 20.

This is only the second time this season the Hornets have had two consecutive 100-point nights — and the first time, they lost both those games.

One more game in the home stand: Friday night, against the Trailblazers.

It's no particular secret that you can block most of those unsolicited credit-card offers with a phone call: 888-5-OPT-OUT.

Unfortunately, what I want is to block one particular card issuer who has cheesed me off more often than I'm willing to endure, without necessarily killing the flow from other issuers who might have favorable deals. I suppose I'm going to have to write them and complain.

At some point, inasmuch as I've overhauled my plastic portfolio twice in the last six years, I ought to sit down and write a summary of my experiences with the Big Boys in the industry — which is almost all of them now.

Almost unnoticed in the flurry of Hornets vs. Heat and the sideline story of some football game in Pasadena (did I mention "Hook 'em Horns"?) was this little tidbit of information:

The Sacramento game is the one being considered for the Lloyd Noble, what with a Bon Jovi concert booked for the Ford Center that weekend, and I think it's a safe bet the Kings will happily play the Bees anywhere other than the, um, home hive.

No word yet on the last three Baton Rouge games; the official story so far has been that they're considering moving them to the New Orleans Arena. In the one outing in the City of the Red Stick, the Hornets drew a meager 7300, only halfway filling up the Pete Maravich Center, about thirty-eight percent of capacity at the Ford, where the Hornets have sold out four of the last five.

Update, 6 January: The Arena it is.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to the usual trouble of looking up a cute numerical reference, since the newest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted by Harshly Mellow, doesn't bear the usual weekly numeric identifier — although with HM assuming command from the retiring Bigwig, the "Mark II" designation affixed by Zeuswood is certainly legitimate.

That said, let me point you to the Cessna 172 Skyhawk, the most successful light aircraft ever built; after nearly half a century, the Skyhawk is still in production today.

The Cross Lander sport-utility vehicle, assembled in Romania, is being granted an exemption from the NHTSA airbag requirements until May 2008; the manufacturer had claimed economic hardship.

Since the government demands airbags only on vehicles weighing 5500 lb and under, look for the 2009 model Cross Lander to gain about 1100 lb of road-hugging weight. And no, this shouldn't be difficult; Kia's first Sedona minivan weighed 4700 lb or so, a direct result of corporate penury — at the time, they couldn't afford any of the usual automotive weight-saving techniques and still meet their price point.

In the meantime, US-bound Cross Landers will bear a government-inflicted warning label. When they'll actually get here, of course, remains to be seen.

Brad Berens, executive editor for iMedia Communications, talks to Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, and one thing he'd like to know is how to tell the Good Blogs from the Bad Blogs:

Joel Johnson John Brownlee, writing for The Consumerist, takes a stab at it:

Five points off for "hegemonies," a word which grates like Dragon Lady nails on a fresh chalkboard, but otherwise this makes sense. The next question: can this premise be extended to political bloggers? Obviously the "fondness" is present: there's a reason for that term "political junkie," after all. And junkies of both political and shopping persuasions have a distinct tendency to conflate needs and wants. The difference? Government, unlike retail, has no particular incentive to be responsive.

Then again, how much has Dell learned from Jeff Jarvis?

Forms W2 at 42nd and Treadmill were distributed today.

As in Charlie McCarthy. Think about it for a moment: Edgar Bergen made history as a ventriloquist. On the radio. At least you never saw his lips moving.

2006: Sirius, one of the two satellite radio services, has struck a deal with Playboy Enterprises to produce a Playboy-branded radio show.

History in the making? Not likely. Something about this doesn't make sense, even to me, and I'm the guy with the database of women you can't see.

Then again, they keep telling us that aural sex really isn't sex.

(Brian J. Noggle can't see this either.)

It's a rhetorical question, says Andrea, but it's a question just the same:

The answer, of course, is that they don't; the massive expansion of Christian media in recent years, largely under the national radar, has relegated him to the status of one voice among many, and not the loudest or clearest voice either. The reason he gets play in Big Media is twofold:

• They know very few individuals in that particular marketplace, and Robertson has been around long enough to make a name for himself;
  
• They naturally gravitate toward a spokesman who happily regurgitates their most blatant stereotypes.
  

For that segment of society who considers religion — well, this religion, anyway — an oddity committed by and for odd people, Pat Robertson is their worst fear personified; it would never occur to them that he's basically just a Bizarro World transmogrification of Al Sharpton.

And no, the right wing doesn't embrace him either: Robertson was one of the original prototypes for the term "idiotarian". If Pat Robertson did not exist, it would not have been necessary to invent him, but the temptation to do so would probably have proven irresistible.

The first time I heard Lou Rawls, I didn't know who it was; all I knew was that someone was singing some serious counterpoint to Sam Cooke on "Bring It On Home To Me," and I wondered if I'd hear him again.

That was in 1962, and I didn't know that Rawls had already been signed to Capitol, where he would record a series of jazzy R&B albums. He didn't chart a single until 1965, a version of the standard "Three O'Clock in the Morning," but the next year, the soulful "Love Is A Hurtin' Thing" proved that he could stay up a lot later than that.

Lou stayed with Capitol until 1970; his last hit for them was a cover of "Bring It On Home To Me," which makes perfect sense. He moved to MGM, then to Philadelphia International, where he discovered he could fit in beautifully with the Gamble-Huff machine's dance anthems.

Cancer hit Lou twice: his lungs in 2004, his brain in 2005. The combination of the two proved lethal in 2006. He will be remembered for a handful of movies, a lifetime of service, and a collection of memorable recordings. He was either 70 or 72; the number matters less than the fact that he was here.

Nick Lachey says he used to walk around in Jessica Simpson's shoes.

Immediate reaction:

• She obviously isn't a petite size 6B;
  
• There's hope for Maureen Dowd yet.
  

Incidentally, shoes of identical length, if size X in a man's style, are size (X + 1.5) in a woman's style — at least, on the American scale.

The Oklahoma Tax Commission has sent me a Form 1099-G, and I know why: I itemized deductions in 2004, and this means that the tax refund I received is considered income for 2005. Nothing startling about that.

However, something doesn't quite add up: the amount specified on 1099-G exceeds the amount of the refund — by an amount which happens to equal the amount I kicked in for use tax.

I have emailed the OTC with a query, and also asked why they didn't bother to include the $45 rebate that popped up this fall. (Best guess here: they haven't gotten the records back from Bank of America, to whom they outsourced the sending of the actual rebate checks.)

Well, sort of. The third quarter was an utter disaster: just barely into it, Chris Paul tore a ligament in his right thumb, and he'll be out for at least two weeks; the Hornets managed a pathetic 11 points in 12 minutes. Juan Dixon, who got a season-high 28 against the Bees at Portland, did almost as much damage in Oklahoma City, scoring 27.

And yet the Hornets, having gone from 19 points up to six down, survived, slapping down the Trailblazers 90-80, winning their third in a row for the first time in almost two years. You have to figure Kirk Snyder will be starting for a long, long time; he picked up 22 points, cleared six boards and blocked four shots. David West pulled off the double-double, with 19 points and 13 rebounds.

A quick trip to Atlanta to meet the Hawks, and then the Pistons come to town Tuesday. What happens on Friday is still unclear; Sacramento will be here, but the exact location of "here" is yet undetermined.

Update, 9 January: "Here" has now been determined: it's the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, which officially seats 11,528 for basketball — though legend has it that for OSU and Texas games, they've shoehorned in as many as 13,000.

How conservative is George W. Bush? Well before he got into his present job, the answer appeared to be "Not very":

(From Vent #180, 9 January 2000.)

In response to unprecedented demand, I have compiled a list of my dealings with ten credit-card issuers, some of which worked out very well, and some of which didn't work out at all. When it got beyond 7k, I figured it was Vent material, and so it wound up as Vent #468.

As always with such things, past performance is no guarantee of — well, much of anything, really.

Edward announces the end of lactose incompetent:

While my own experience hasn't followed the same pattern, I can understand the need to get away from the blog: its demands are endless, its rewards sporadic, its ultimate importance undetermined. But I believe that writing is no less true, or at least no more untrue, just because it conforms to the blog format: sonnets and screeds, epics and whimsy, stories long, short and really short, all seem to coexist just fine.

The need for speed is another matter. When news runs on a 24-hour cycle, matters of little import are accelerated into a prominence which in the long term they will not deserve: I spent part of this morning rereading my January 2003 archives, and some of the tempests of that time's teapots produce barely a memory bubble today.

I will, of course, look for Edward under his real name on a bound volume; but I will miss the ability to click on him.

Found at Ravenwood's Universe:

Heaven forbid.

Well, actually, they call it "Sam's Song"; when Bing Crosby recorded it back in 1950, it didn't occur to him to retitle it "Bing's Song" — or, for that matter, "Gary's Song," what with Gary Crosby singing along with his dad. Bing just didn't do things like that.

On the other hand, Dean Martin, even in the presence of Sammy Davis, Jr., had no such compunctions.

And however many years later, a man named Sam is on the cusp of history, and who's vowed to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings? Why, a fellow named Dean, as Sean Gleeson illustrates.

The Oklahoman is running ads for Brokeback Mountain.

If this sounds odd to you, you haven't been here very long.

It could have been much, much worse. Chris Paul is out, Kirk Snyder took ill at halftime, and Speedy Claxton dislocated his ring finger in the second quarter. Claxton made it back — in fact, he scored 29 points, his career high — but the depleted Hornets fell to a comparatively healthy and hot-shooting bunch of Hawks in Atlanta, 101-93. David West picked up 22; J. R. Smith, back in starting rotation, scored 7.

So much for four in a row. The Bees fall to 15-18, with the Pistons coming Tuesday.

Macas Watch: Arvydas Macijauskas got eight points, three rebounds and an assist in about 27 minutes of playing time.

A judge in Montgomery County, Maryland has ruled that mooning someone does not constitute an act of indecent exposure.

Raymond McNealy, 44, of Rockville, had a dispute with a neighbor; he expressed his opinion in a graphic, if not necessarily callipygian, manner. Originally, the courts found against McNealy; in his appeal, he claimed that state law demanded a more, um, frontal assault for conviction, and this week the appeal was upheld.

Counsel for McNealy remarked that the decision should "bring comfort to all beachgoers and plumbers" in the Old Line State.

Last summer I said something about prizing the ability to look really good in really insubstantial shoes.

Well, you can't get much more insubstantial than this.

Meanwhile at the Baxter Building, Reed and Sue Richards are facing a formidable foe: the government, which considers that they, in their capacity as half the Fantastic Four, are endangering their children (Franklin and Valeria), placing them in potentially life-threatening situations — this saving-the-world business clearly has its difficult aspects — and which will confiscate the youngsters pending a formal hearing.

(Through issue #533, in which Torch and the Thing, meanwhile, are going to engage Bruce "Hulk" Banner, and not during a period of Bruceness either. This is, after all, a comic book.)

So what's changed?

Not much, really; it's hard to imagine Tom DeLay stepping down at all unless he was at least somewhat satisfied that it would be business as usual in the House.

Now if he'd actually resigned his seat, instead of just his position as Majority Leader, it might have had some impact. But that wasn't going to happen, and everyone knows it.

I expect the Democrats to make some small Congressional gains in this year's election, but I don't think this action will have much impact either way: DeLay still has a fair amount of clout; the Democrats will likely not succeed in painting DeLay's old pal Jack Abramoff as a purely-GOP bagman; the election is still nine months away.

A University of Chicago survey suggests that Americans are suffering greater misery: 91.5 percent of us suffered at least one "negative life event" during 2004, up 2.4 percent from a previous survey in 1991, and the average number of NLEs was a whopping 4.3, up from 3.8.

The NLEs are on a scale from 1 to 100: the worst is the death of a child, which scores 94.3. The least-miserable event reported in the article is feeling ill enough to seek medical treatment, which scores 51.6. This sounds rather high, and suggests that the scale can't possibly be linear — how can two trips to the doctor (103.2) be worse than losing a child? — but it does suggest that there is plenty of room on the scale for minor inconveniences. For example:

• $300 gas bill: 18.5
  
• Toilet runs all day: 7.7
  
• Finding a beer can in your yard: 6.4
  
• It's a light beer: 9.6
  
• The phone rings at the office: 8.2
  
• It's two minutes after opening: 12.3
  
• It's two minutes before closing: 16.4
  
• Your Congressman has been taking money from Jack Abramoff: 4.5
  
• He's going to keep it because there was nothing wrong with it: 6.6
  
• He's going to give it back and thereby expiate his guilt: 11.8
  
• Your bandwidth bill goes up as your RSS feed is picked up by 1500 a day: 2.1
  
• 1440 of them are spam blogs: 20.7
  
• Your basketball team is displaced by a natural disaster: 11.5
  
• They make twice as much money in their temporary home: 46.8
  
• Your girlfriend wants to see one of those chick flicks: 9.7
  
• It's Brokeback Mountain: 13.5
  
• You dream about your ex: 3.8
  
• You enjoyed it: 9.4
  
• You discover someone has already done a better version of this: 10.6
  

(Original survey found via such small hands.)

The third of May, nineteen ninety-nine. Some of the strongest winds ever measured on planet Earth are passing literally within a few hundred yards of my door. Everything I've been taught tells me to stay inside, batten down the hatches, and wait. And yet I'm standing outside, watching what I can through clouds that go beyond grey, beyond black, to some non-color that surely exists only at the end of the world, because I can't look away: this is one of two primal forces of nature, and, I realize, the only one I will ever experience.

Brokeback Mountain is about the other. No one, I suspect, can prepare for passion at this level: it simply is, and everything you've been taught is pushed to the background, biding its time for an inopportune moment to remind you of its presence. And yet this particular primal force doesn't demand either Sturm or Drang, something director Ang Lee well knows. Sweeping and sumptuous visuals aside, this is a deliberately small film: it keeps its focus on the two leads and the different ways they come to grips with the same fact, and in more than one scene, the words that go unspoken cut closer to the heart than the words you hear out loud.

Which is why this isn't one of those tedious "message" pictures that go out of their way to beat you over the head with whatever bit of philosophy is au courant for the moment: every scene, every line, every offhand gesture is bent to the service of the story of these two men. And in that specificity, paradoxically, lies its universality: denied easy access to the stereotypes we might desire, we are forced to look at these characters in comparison, not to a pattern, but to ourselves. Brokeback Mountain speaks to everyone who's ever had to cover up the most important facts of his life.

Or her life; the audience when I attended was about sixty percent women. For this is, when you think about it, a "chick flick," a classic Hollywood weeper, gender considerations notwithstanding. I can understand why some men might shy away from it; I found the sex scenes between the two guys a bit gruesome. But then, I found their sex scenes with the women they married to be just as gruesome: any points they scored for "normal," they lost for "obviously going through the motions." Ennis did love Alma; Jack might even have loved Lureen; but those relationships would inevitably have to take second place behind what happened up on that damnable mountain back in '63.

Manipulation of the audience? Certainly. That's why we go to the movies in the first place. Moralists will no doubt point out that there is a price for giving into one's desires; I would remind them that there is also a price for suppressing them. Brokeback Mountain tallies them both, side by side.

For some inscrutable reason, about five dozen folks wandered into this site over the past couple of days looking for quotes from Dame Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), who wrote twenty-odd novels; a paragraph from one of them (The Towers of Trebizond, 1956) is reproduced here.

Since it's fairly certain that Dame Rose is still dead, and since most of the requests came from MSN Search, I have to assume that something on MSN referred to Macaulay for some reason. If you happened to see it, I'd appreciate knowing just what was going on.

In the meantime, here's another Macaulay quote, because I can:

Yea, verily.

1. Register your ex's name as a domain and whine about her for ten pages.

2. There's a 2?
   

(Via Cruel.com.)

Update, 11 January: Well, this is cute. There's a comment here, identified as from a member of a police department I shall not name, requesting information on this matter. I, of course, didn't have any, and said so. This is the response I got:

Inasmuch as there is no indication that any of the other half a dozen or so sites who picked up on this link received any similar communications, I'm going to assume that the major objection was actual mention of the town name in the title. Since it's largely irrelevant except for prosodic purposes, I've opted to delete that name; I've also fuzzed up the comment for concealment purposes. (No sense blowing his cover.)

On the other hand, if I deleted everything that might irritate someone, you'd be looking at a blank page right about now.

For at least twenty years, there have been rumors of a live-action film version of the Sixties animated TV series The Jetsons, and now it appears they might actually pull it off. So far, we know they've gotten the family cast:

• Steve Martin:  George Jetson
  
• Jonathan Lipnicki:  His boy Elroy
  
• Lindsay Lohan:  Daughter Judy
  
• Diane Lane:  Jane, his wife
  

So: Jason Alexander or Danny DeVito as Mr. Spacely?

Something about this project disturbs me greatly (memories of Rosie and the originals, no doubt). On the other hand, I'd love to see how they make George's car fold up into a briefcase.

Sean Gleeson explains why he's voting Republican:

Hey, some of us have to watch the building until the grownups come back.

(Disclosure: I voted for Lieberman in this state's Presidential primary in 2004, for all the good it did.)

Who knew Ted Kennedy had a dog named Splash?

Okay, it's a Portuguese Water Dog, so it's not like he was striving for maximum irony here, but something still seems awry: imagine Bernhard Goetz operating a Subway® franchise.

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Patterico castigates the Los Angeles Times for a chunk of verbal effluvia set in type:

Which prompted the following comment from reader Harry Arthur:

Inasmuch as one of the more blatant users of this particular rhetorical device is, um, well, yours truly, I demur. For one thing, I'm hardly "self-satisfied." For another, I have a fair number of readers who strike me as being quite a bit brighter than I am, and hardly any who qualify as "unwashed, backwards rubes." (So far as I know, they at least wash.)

Mostly, when you see "um" on these pages, it's a variation on the also-overused <em> tag; it's a combination of "emphasize this" and, where appropriate, "write your own joke." I have faith enough in my readers to believe that they can, and will. And, well, I think Mr Sixpack (and Mr Arthur, should he read this) would notice this immediately.

Two years ago:

No, not three.

WKY radio has given up the format. In fact, they've largely given up English; the station is now broadcasting a Spanish-language music format which seems to be basically the same thing owner Citadel is running on KINB (105.3), but a few seconds out of sync. I suppose this means it's not technically a simulcast.

Coverage of Blazers hockey will presumably continue in English; I have to assume there isn't as yet any demand for hockey coverage en español. (Operative word: "yet.")

WKY, of course, was the flagship radio station of the Oklahoma Publishing Company for many years; as one observer noted on a radio message board, "I bet old man Gaylord is spinning in his grave about now."

KOKC, the #3 news-talk station, now rises to #2 — although with the numbers they get, I'm still inclined to think of them as #3.

Despite the fact that I live a dull Midwest nonexistence — or would, if I, you know, actually lived in the Midwest — Mister Snitch sees this lack of activity as perfect television-sitcom fodder.

The pitch:

I never thought Maud Newton was all that arch. (Sean, in fact, lives more than three miles from me. Then again, so does Maureen Dowd.)

The pilot:

"What's with the orange?"

"Oh, I was just adding some highlights to whatzername's hair."

The gimmick here, of course, is that any time someone else is speaking, the screen width >NARROWS< to simulate a blockquote.

I have to assume that this is payback for faithfully watching Parker Lewis Can't Lose all those years. "You're not the Nixon of love!" cried Frank Lemmer.

In a statistical sample, the mode is the value which occurs most often. It might be near the median, but it doesn't necessarily have to be: not all curves make nice bells.

Which is by way of introducing Tyler Cowen's concept of the Modal Spouse:

This is, of course, not the only view available:

Wait a minute. There are thirty eligibles?

This is, in essence, a restating of the old principle that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," which goes back at least as far as Voltaire. And settling for what you can get (call it Option Two) is presumably more likely to produce positive results than waiting for what you think you really want (Option One).

Except, of course, that I've already exercised Option Two, and made a botch of it. (Well, I had help; normally it takes two pairs of shoes to kick a marriage to the curb.) Bottom line: either a choice which has proven itself to be suboptimal, or a choice which likely will produce no results whatsoever. It might be easier just to throw I Ching.

Out the window, if need be.

(Via Jacqueline Passey.)

If I were writing the textbooks, anyway. The world is dressed in white — except for the roads, shiny ribbons of dark grey, wet but nothing more.

How often do we get these? Not very.

And it's odd that almost all the precipitation we've had since mid-autumn (which is not much) has been in the form of snow: maybe three inches, which in terms of actual moisture is barely enough to water one's lawn.

A slow and torturous demise for the slob who picked up a couple of cartridges for a DeskJet — and then neatly parked the empty boxes back on the shelf, creating the illusion of greater stock than was actually on hand.

Update, 10:50 am: Confession received from slob.

A bad idea, says P. J. O'Rourke:

Probably none until he tried to collect royalties.

Obviously I need to write more articles on dating.

(With thanks to Agent Bedhead, who caught this before I did.)

Somehow I can't imagine this catching on in the States:

I've got to wonder if this is why he's the former dean. But it gets better:

"Of course"?

Suddenly, demure Wendy Shalit comes off as a wild-eyed libertine.

The only way this could possibly be beneficial is if one of the participants looks like me.

(Via aldahlia.)

With Chris Paul back and in close to top form, the Hornets played even with the Pistons for half the game — in fact, they had a three-point lead at the half — but Detroit took command in the third quarter and would maintain it the rest of the way, winning 96-86, their 27th win in 32 games. Rip Hamilton did the most damage, scoring 30 points.

It wasn't all bleak: five Hornets scored in double figures, and David West once again pulled down 20. But a loss is a loss, and the Bees fall to 15-19.

Two days off, and Sacramento comes to town — or, more precisely, to Norman.

Once again, actual questions that led people to this site.

does faith hill own the warner bros. nashville record label?  No. And come to think of it, neither does Warner Bros.

who is smarter man or woman?  Woman. She doesn't ask questions like that.

mazda are built here?  Only the Mazda6 are built here.

Ford Contour what do the indicator lights mean?  RTFM.

is she into you?  Not likely.

how long to keep yogurt beyond sell by date?  I'd suggest no more than ten minutes.

why is there oil mixed with the coolant in dodge neon?  Um, you blew a head gasket?

where is the cd4e transmission manufactured?  Batavia, Ohio.

what's it like to live in western Oklahoma?  It's very nice, if you don't insist on seeing foreign films every night.

are there Taco Bells in England?  Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Is Powerball coming to Oklahoma?  Starts tomorrow, 12 January.

Or maybe it hasn't. This came from the local Mazda store:

Which means, if I read this correctly, that I was one month overdue the moment I left the dealership.

In the fall of 1943, according to legend, a US Navy ship was supposedly dematerialized and transported by means unknown from Philadelphia to Norfolk, in something known familiarly as the Philadelphia Experiment. The vessel involved was reported to be the USS Eldridge, DE-173, a Cannon-class destroyer.

If you prefer your 173s a bit more tangible, The Hip and Zen Pen is hosting Carnival of the Vanities #173, the latest installment of the original weekly blog compendium, dozens of great articles (and one of mine) just a click away.

I haven't set foot in a Cropduster Blockbuster Video store in about a decade, and apparently I haven't missed much:

I made my first forays into home video in 1981, buying a Beta VCR and a CED videodisc player; I followed with a LaserDisc player in 1982. I split my business between Buttons, a video cousin to the Sound Warehouse chain, which was quick to get hardware goodies, and Kaleidoscope Video, a local store with two locations and enormous quantities of nonhits on tape.

But that was then. Now I rent nothing; if I want to see it badly enough, I'll actually catch it in a theater, or if it doesn't play here — too common an occurrence, alas — I'll figure out some way to get the DVD. (And I'm not above writing to the producer if I have to.)

And should I have actual time for rentals at some point, I'll probably sign up for something like Netflix. Less hassle, better selection.

And if the Democrats can't bestir themselves to bring it up except in the vaguest possible fashion, Brian J. Noggle is here to help:

Joe Biden should have asked this. He needs the publicity for his Presidential bid, and if past performance is any indication, he could have read it right off the screen without worrying about attribution.

Update: What was I thinking? There is no spoon.

What we're doing here is trying to quantify a decision I made last fall: Oklahoma Natural Gas offered a Voluntary Fixed Price rate of $8.393 per dekatherm for twelve months, which I turned down because gas was rather a lot less than that at the time.

Unfortunately for me, it's rather a lot more than that right now:

• November: 2.4 used at $11.044; total price $26.51; VFP price $20.14; loss of $6.37.

• December: 4.4 used at $11.550; total price $50.82; VFP price $36.93; loss of $13.89.

• January: 9.7 used at $12.012; total price $116.52; VFP price $81.41; loss of $35.11.

• Cumulative: 16.5 used at $11.748; total price $193.85; VFP price $138.48; loss of $55.37.
  

The February bill is normally the worst of the year anyway, so I'm not exactly looking forward to next month.

Inasmuch as I'm supposed to be pining for this, um, "unattainable snarkgoddess" (a phrase for which I score an actual Googlewhack as of this writing, though this post will eventually trash it), here's a not-entirely-random Maureen Dowd description from this denunciation of a Norwegian quota system by E. M. Zanotti:

"The cactus is our friend." — Maria Muldaur, "Midnight at the Oasis"

Actually, cacti don't strike me as particularly pretentious, except for the saguaro, and that could be just a trick of perspective. They sure are prickly, though.

Last spring, when I drove the entirety of Grand Boulevard, I noted that the pavement south of NE 36th Street was deteriorating, which could be taken as a euphemism.

The city has now decided to do something about it. From the Consent Docket from last week's City Council minutes:

This will be useful when they start seriously promoting this Adventure District business — the Oklahoma Railway Museum is right along this stretch — and it will make some of my drives home a little less stressful.

While we're discussing this area of town, I note with some sadness the closing of the Krispy King chicken joint on 23rd west of I-35. Popeye and the Colonel presumably are feasting on its bones.

OG&E, embarrassed by two much-publicized power outages in Bricktown, is taking steps to address the issue.

The first outage, on 17 December, lasted 3½ hours, and was traced to corrosion on a pole crossing arm near I-40. All such arms along this corridor have now been replaced.

The second, a two-hour blackout on 2 January, was blamed on a malfunctioning switch.

But the real problem, apparently, is that all of Bricktown is served by a single substation: when it goes, everything goes. The utility is planning to alter its grid to serve half of Bricktown from a substation on Classen west of downtown, and is contemplating the possibility of splitting the district into thirds, bringing in a substation from the Health Center area.

Capacity, said OG&E, is not the issue; it's a lack of backup.

Then again, after the first outage, they said that the issue was the failure of the Corporation Commission to grant the company the full amount of their most recent rate-hike request.

Melissa Joan Hart and hubby Mark Wilkerson are celebrating the arrival of their first child, Mason Walker Wilkerson, all nine pounds of him.

At least she won't be calling him Fergface.

Someone has come by looking for an MP3 file of John Cage's infamous 4'33", a three-movement piano piece which contains in aggregate four minutes and thirty-three seconds of rests, but no actual notes. (Previous discussion here.)

Now I'm wondering if maybe I should go ahead and put one together. This is one of the few pieces I can play, after all.

Kim du Toit came up with a list of a dozen icons that define America, and at the very top was the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, a car that even today is recognizable seemingly from blocks away, even by people who claim they can't stand cars.

Robert Cumberford, then on the GM design staff and now Automotive Design Editor of Automobile, said last year that the '57 came out the way it did because the promised new bodyshell wasn't going to be ready in time, and they had to do the best they could to disguise the '55-'56 bodywork. While the '55 is decidedly the simplest and arguably the purest incarnation of this generation, the '57 is clearly bolder — and no doubt this is why it gets the nod over its older sister.

And those rubber boobs on the front? Cumberford says that they were intended to be chrome, but they tended to smash the taillights of the car in front on the transporters.

As for the '58 with that fancy new bodyshell — forget about it. Almost everyone else did.

Steve Gigl nominates a phrase for oblivion:

I wonder what he thinks of this site's slogan.

If you were wondering if anyone in this state (besides me) would go to see Brokeback Mountain, hear this from GayOKC.com's Rob Abiera:

AMC was also impressed:

The obvious point, says Abiera:

Which doesn't surprise me in the least.

Lemuel Kolkava has seen the handwriting on the wall:

"Lemon curry?"

Now which is worse: a Vegan book of recipes, or a Vogon book of verse? Choose your answer carefully.

Buried in a story about the shuffle on the Six Flags board of directors was this bit of alarming news:

"Put up for review," to my mind anyway, translates as "Gawd, this stuff sucks."

I'm thinking old man Six is about to be put out to pasture.

With the arrival of Jack FM in the Oklahoma City market — okay, it's in Blanchard, fercrissake — I figured this commentary by Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams might be pertinent:

It occurs to me that no one ever says this about Bob.

Robert McHenry in TCS Daily proposes this small Constitutional amendment:

Just like jury duty, but for twenty-four months.

Distinct advantages:

• No incumbents.
  
• Very little time to get to know the schmoozers on K Street.
  
• Term limits essentially automatic.
  
• Seniority system blown to smithereens.
  
• Did I mention no incumbents?
  

Possible drawbacks:

• You are not guaranteed to be represented by someone smarter than, say, Ernest Istook.
  
• The first House so constituted would likely have a surplus of really stupid bills under consideration.
  

On second thought, strike that second drawback: we already have a surplus of really stupid bills.

William F. Buckley Jr. once opined that he'd rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston phone book than by the 2000-member faculty at Harvard. I can't help but wonder what he would think of this idea. I suspect it would not sit well with the American left, which would reject it, not so much because it sounds somewhat Buckleyesque, but because their particular concept of government calls for Great and Sweeping Ideas, which J. Random Voter is presumably not likely to come up with on his own if suddenly he's thrust into the House. Not that the right is exactly devoid of elitism, as Harriet Miers could probably tell you.

Oh, and one more drawback:

• Were this to be passed, it would likely be harder to get the 17th Amendment, which calls for the direct election of senators, repealed.
  

Nobody, not even Robert McHenry, said it was a perfect scheme.

Am I a "center-right" blogger? Maybe, maybe not. But I have no problem endorsing this:

I trust that bloggers to my left, and the Democratic leadership, will be similarly motivated to support reform efforts.

We'll never know if moving this game from Baton Rouge to the Lloyd Noble Center really made any difference to the players; Desmond Mason has seen the place before, but he played here as a visitor in the Bedlam Series.

The Hornets didn't spank the Kings as badly in Norman as they did at the Ford for the season opener, but 90-76 is nothing to sneeze at, and while the Bees had another one of their patented lousy third quarters — a meager 17 points — Sacramento was worse.

Notable: the return of Bostjan Nachbar, who's been on the bench since the 28th of November; Rasual Butler sank four treys (in four attempts) and a couple of two-pointers; Chris Paul still seems to be well.

Now 16-19, the Hornets head for Houston tomorrow.

As close as I ever got to Scott Ott-style reporting:

(From