I am not a lawyer — I don't even play one on TV — but I suspect that some aspects of this law-firm application are not entirely fictional.

(Via All Things Jennifer.)

Your friendly neighborhood governmental types say you should never, ever top off your tank, and for the last few years, I have evolved something of a routine: I stop when the pump clicks off, then squeeze in enough to round the price up to the next five cents. Assuming the pumps are calibrated to stop at more or less the same place, and given the fact that a nickel won't buy much gas, I can generally assume that I've reached an acceptable degree of tankfulness, if that's a word, and my gas-mileage computations will benefit, if not from guaranteed accuracy, at least a diminished degree of inaccuracy.

I bought Gwendolyn her first tankful on Day One, observing this protocol, and subsequently watched the gauge with some concern:

Which was a guess, nothing more. However, I filled up last night as the gauge grazed the one-quarter mark. (The 91-octane stuff she prefers was still under three bucks, albeit by a mere tenth of a cent.)

The owner's manual claims a fuel-tank capacity of 18½ gallons or 70 liters; the online service manual at Alldata says, again, 70 liters. The conversion factor is exact enough. The precious fuelstuffs flowed in, dollar by dollar, and then: click. I stared in disbelief at the pump. This can't possibly be correct, I thought: still, the click was indisputable. I went up five cents, then ten, finally fifteen, and quit.

Apparently at the one-quarter mark, Gwendolyn had used just under 10.6 of her allotted 18.5 gallons, 57 percent rather than the expected 75, suggesting that her gas gauge is even more alarmist than I ever imagined. I started her up, and the needle climbed to pretty much where it had last time, a needle's width above the F.

And those 10.6 gallons propelled her 263.7 miles, which means that through my usual around-town driving cycle, she averaged 24.9 miles per gallon.

I don't believe it either. Late June, A/C running more or less non-stop, the odd burst of speed, and still: twenty-four point nine.

Factoring out the World Tours, Sandy's average was twenty-three point nine — and she weighed 350 lb less and had something like three-fifths the horsepower.

Okay, smaller engine works that much harder. I understand that. Still, I have to admit that when I pulled into the station, I was thinking "If I can just get 19, I'll be happy."

And I'm thinking next time I might wait until the scary orange low-fuel light comes on.

(EPA numbers are here.)

I haven't actually seen it, but I'm guessing it might be in a museum somewhere. Over the years, the blade has been replaced three times, the handle four times, and — wait a minute.

What is an axe? A blade with a handle.

And if you've changed both the blade and the handle, several times yet, does the resulting object, obviously never once touched by George Washington, still qualify as George Washington's axe?

This question is far more serious than you think. Francis W. Porretto would say that it does:

And he throws a counterquestion into the mix: were you to find the original blade and (less likely, wood being rather impermanent stuff) the original handle and combine them into a unit, could you legitimately call the resulting object "George Washington's axe"?

Push this into the future. Right before you die, the contents of your brain are uploaded into a computerized storage facility of some sort. Time passes, as time is wont to do; eventually someone downloads those contents into an independent and, let's say, ambulatory, or at least self-propelled, container.

Is that you there?

And does it make any difference if time hadn't passed, if the transfer from the dying body to the new vessel had been instantaneous?

The robot R. Daneel Olivaw, in Asimov's Foundation and Earth, said that over the centuries, every part of him had been replaced and/or upgraded, and that he'd used version n of his brain to design version n+1, which was then activated in place of the older one.

This question goes back as least as far as Plutarch, which tells me that it's more than just a mere museum piece.

A Los Gatos, California home for a mere $350K? As always, there's a catch:

Zillow.com still has it at $790K.

Those of us who grumbled about Kelo v. New London will get some small measure of satisfaction out of this:

Kelo was one of the last two holdouts. What happened to the other?

Not exactly a happy ending, but it could have been worse.

(Thanks to Todd Zywicki.)

Byron Scott, two weeks ago;

Well, they got bigs at 12 and 15, and they did in fact go to the free-agent market for a shooter: Pacers forward Peja Stojakovic, who will be joining the Hornets (pending a physical) on a five-year deal worth $64 million, what ESPN calls "arguably ... the boldest acquisition in club history".

The Bees are under the salary cap and can actually afford this kind of money, and no doubt it was a powerful incentive, but Stojakovic and Scott go back a long way: both of them had played in Greece, and when Stojakovic originally signed with Sacramento, Scott was an assistant coach for the Kings. And Peja hadn't been a Pacer very long: he was acquired by Indiana in January in a trade for Ron Artest.

No trades are technically official until the 12th, but this one looks like a done deal, and with the three draftees from last week, the Hornets' signed-for-this-season roster is up to 12. Mike Kahn predicts:

And wouldn't that be nice?

Update, 7:30 pm: The Oklahoman is reporting that Grizzlies point guard Bobby Jackson will be signed by the Hornets, which presumably would free up Speedy Claxton to seek a starting role elsewhere.

Update, 7:30 pm, 3 July: "Elsewhere" seems to be Atlanta.

My brother (four years younger) has a pretty good memory for tunage, and it's not too uncommon for him to hear something I'm spinning over here and say, "Geez, I haven't heard that in years," then pick up on the next couple lines of the lyric.

This doesn't happen too often to me, since I've gone to the trouble (and expense) of acquiring all these records in some form or another, but "all," I have to remind myself occasionally, doesn't mean "every last one of them," at least not in any meaningful sense, because there are songs that even I haven't heard in forty years or so and yet will hit me like a bolt from the blue, especially when I can remember that, hey, I used to sing along with that.

Nineteen sixty-four, from the standpoint of American Top 40 radio, was the Year of the Beatles; one week in April the Fab Four actually had the top five in Billboard. But playlists were wide enough back then that lots of non-British stuff charted, and one fellow who showed up a lot in 1964 was Major Lance, a recent arrival on the Chicago soul scene who had been signed to CBS's reactivated Okeh label. What made Lance's records work was the unfailing good taste of writer-producer Curtis Mayfield, supplemented by occasional vocal backup by Mayfield's own Impressions. An unabashed dance number, "The Monkey Time," was Lance's breakthrough hit in 1963; he hit #5 with "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um," a song for all of us who are speechless in the wake of emotion, early in '64. Smaller hits followed; I remembered, and eventually acquired, "The Matador," but after that trifecta, that was it for Major Lance.

Or so I misremembered. I hadn't heard it for 42 years, but this past week, I happened upon "Rhythm," which wasn't a huge chart hit — #24 — and which for that reason never gets played on "oldies" radio anymore, and how in the world could I have forgotten a record with as much, um, rhythm as this?

And, lack of reinforcement notwithstanding, I still knew all the words.

I still have a rotary phone around here somewhere.

(Via Rocket Jones.)

"Lope"?

It is an axiom of Life In These United States (let's see if this draws in the Reader's Digest crowd) that real-estate advertising is a major contributor to the Grossest Domestic Product, which is more often abbreviated, not GDP, but BS.

I was trying to clear some space in what passes for an office around here and happened upon a printout of the actual MLS listing for this place, which I was schlepping around during the househunting days of ought-three. Let's see what they had to say:

I am less fond of the HUGE yard during periods when I have to mow it, but actually, this is pretty accurate: according to the disclosure statement, all of those updates took place between 1999 and 2003, with the exception of the A/C compressor, which is a bit older, and while "beautiful" is in the eye of the beholder, everyone who's seen the flooring since I've been here seemed to be favorably impressed.

And, well, they didn't say anything about "really weird landscaping."

You (by which I mean "they") keep asking for this stuff, and I keep telling you (by which I mean "you") about it.

desiderata key fob:  Go placidly amid the noise and haste, for your doors are already unlocked.

my friend set me up with amazon women taller than me:  And you didn't know how to thank him, right?

do black men have bigger penises than white men:  Darker, anyway.

David Copperfield's invisible girl:  If he's got one, I've never seen her.

myers-briggs gay correlation:  Maybe, maybe not. Try this.

mazda 626 and ford contour has same engine and transmission:  Same transmission, yes, if the 626 is a four-cylinder '94 or later; they never had the same engines.

Marg Helgenberger 36B:  Well, it can't be those Willows genes.

the danube is green:  What's more, it ain't clean.

implications of getting nair on your labia:  The word OWWW! comes immediately to mind.*

opposite of nondescript:  How about "descript"? Is that couth enough?

brazilian bikini wax "main line":  I'm sure you can find them throughout the Philadelphia metro area.

fawkes news:  Incendiary and balanced.

what is rule number 6:  There is no Rule 6.

welcome to wordpress mortgage:  And I thought Movable Type was expensive.

* Yes, I did use that last week.

Probably not. The burning hunk o' space junk that's due in the neighborhood today will keep its distance, and that distance is around 400,000 km, about the mileage on the average Philadelphia taxi.

This particular flying object rates a flat zero on the Torino scale, where 1 is the equivalent of being hit at 60 mph by a thirty-year-old Ford sedan.

Twenty-two dollars (and, says the application form, a four-month wait) gets you a vanity plate in Oklahoma. Not that you have that many options:

• Seven characters.
  
• No punctuation other than hyphen (one) and space.
  
• "Any special plate request deemed to be offensive to the general public will not be issued."
  

I had thought up a good one for a previous car, but never got around to applying for it: DCXXVI. No doubt this is due to a certain unwillingness to be conspicuous: drawing attention to one's vehicle is usually not a good idea, unless you're up to your eyeballs in fog — and if you are, a twelve-by-six metal rectangle isn't going to be much use anyway.

Still, the Topic Jar is about depleted, so if you'd like to recommend a plate that would be suitable for a 2000 Infiniti I30 with a whale-tail spoiler of dubious utility, I'm listening.

(The Sooner State, incidentally, also offers a series of environmental and wildlife-conservation plates; one of the latter includes an image of a deer. This plate is not being considered under any circumstances.)

Mr. Resin has spent much of the past two years as editor of Screenhead, one of the least-viewed of the Nick Denton/Gawker Media bloglike items, and he's saying goodbye at the end of this month:

He adds in comments:

Personally, I think they should let Resin run Sploid when Ken Layne retires/is sacked/tells Denton to perform an anatomical impossibility.

Update, 6:15 pm: Not gonna happen: Denton's going to unload Sploid as well as Screenhead.

Remember when Brittania used to rule? Now they just collect data:

The Ministry of Love: because we care.

"Now, what was that silly business about a ticket?"

Noteworthy about this year's version of Independence Day:

• I managed to stay in bed until eight-thirty, always a blessing, and still got the flag hoisted before nine.

• My son is twenty-five today, which means his auto insurance, instead of costing an arm and a leg, will be priced with more mundane organs.

• The complicated financial contortions I went through last month, what with a four-digit hospital bill come due and the unplanned-for purchase of a car, went through apparently without a hitch.

• I'm proclaiming a more-or-less open thread here.
  

So have at it.

Agent 86, you'll remember, had a phone in his shoe. Female agents, of course, wouldn't countenance such a thing: less room for the circuitry, and, well, sometimes it's just awkward.

Which perhaps explains this:

And never once do you have to fiddle with your Jimmy Choos.

A letter to the editor of the Reminder Community News in East Hartford, Connecticut — they get no link because their site is insufferable — as transcribed by Jennifer:

Expect a measure to change "Land of the Free" to "Land of the Reasonably-Priced."

And so does mine, according to this thing.

I'm enough of a throwback to appreciate this: a new cassette deck from Marantz.

The SD4051 has dual transports, variable pitch in playback, and Dolby B for noise reduction, for $320ish in Japan. No word yet on whether they're going to mail any of them to the States.

(I have two cassette machines, both from Pioneer: the CT-9R, now twenty-three years old, would cost nearly its original list price, which was $700, to bring back up to speed, and I picked up a cheapie on eBay about six years ago for $36 or so. At this writing, I have about 400 tapes; my last three cars have had tape players.)

There are no formal screenshots from Genesis: it's all text. And there's not a whole lot of Scriptural basis for the notion of God looking at His monitor and reading "Formatting Universe, 0.000000000001% Complete," but hey, He had six whole days, while I was dumb enough to try to clean off an old PC in half of an afternoon.

And anyway, I didn't exactly scrape it down to the hull and start over. For one thing, Windows 98 support is well and truly over; while I had my original Microsoft CD at hand, I wasn't entirely sure I could locate every last patch and tweak that's come down the pike since the dawn of time, and I wasn't about to upgrade this box to XP: the only real reason for keeping it at all is to provide a way to run my old scanner, which dates back, if not to Genesis, certainly to Phil Collins' solo days.

So the first order of business was to uninstall all but a handful of apps, which was as much fun as you think, and then to reformat three of the four disk partitions. (This is a nominal 40-GB drive, so each partition is nine point something gig, and it's slow going.) At some point it dawned on me that I'd deleted my install for Adobe Reader 6 — version 7 won't run on 98 — and so I had to download that monster again.

The box has now been stripped to Windows, stuff supporting the sound card (though there are no speakers attached at the moment), a graphics app (to acquire from the scanner), and Firefox (in case the other machines go troppo). I suppose it would be useful to install software for the CD burner, but it's not a high-priority item at the moment.

And while this was going on, I ordered some RAM for the laptop, which is still in good shape but which has only 256 MB, barely sufficient to take on XP's Service Pack 2. It should run better with 512. On the other hand, its original 20-GB disk is down to about 6.

Congratulations to Heather and Brian W. J.

(Photo here.)

Vaspers the Grate discovers Sturgeon's Law:

Some of us glory in our slopbucketedness.

And while the rule around here is to dock five points for saying "hegemony" with a straight face, it's hard to argue with his premise, especially since elsewhere in the piece he describes MySpace as a "foul toilet."

Still, most of us who read this stuff developed filters early on: we've learned to eschew the bad and seek out the good, or at least the less bad.

The rumblings began around 5 pm, and I decided I'd bring in the flag; the rain kicked in a few minutes later.

It didn't last all that long, but it had a dampening effect, so to speak, on the Fireworks of Dubious Legality in the neighborhood. (Technically, it's not dubious at all, as the city has banned all that stuff except for licensed operators, but it sounds funnier this way.) I heard fewer than twenty actual firecrackers during the evening, the equivalent of maybe 1.5 North Korean missiles. Then again, this area is short on actual kids, the primary audience for noisemakers and such — not that their absence has helped my lawn any.

Still, hey, a Fourth of July is a Fourth of July, even if it's on a Tuesday.

Make sure you must always buy. A particularly-heinous example:

Not even Karl Rove in all his majesty was as devious as this.

Back in '73, Dr Gene Sharp put out a three-volume set called The Politics of Nonviolent Action: in the second volume, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, he listed 198 such methods.

Speaking of 198, this is the 198th week of Carnival of the Vanities, this week hosted by The Business of America is Business. A week's worth of bloggage in a single page of links: now that's business.

There's very little I can add to this:

I have my doubts, mostly because at that rate — $50k for a fourfold increase — I'd be looking at $6 million, and I think I could be bought off by the Knights of Chastity for a bit less than that. (Send offers to the usual address.)

The Oklahoman's Don Mecoy plays with Google Trends, and discovers:

Not so much, really. We have lots of dirt, lots of Britney wannabes, and more state colleges than you can shake a stick at.

Or a bankrupt flea.

It's called SolarVenti, and it's a solar-powered dehumidifier that mounts on a wall facing south. And it works just like you think it would:

Except, of course, that it adds zero to your electric bill.

(Via Treehugger.)

The new desktop machine, with the OEM software provided — a slightly-stripped version of Nero — offers three speeds at which to burn CDs: 32x, 16x, and a lowly 8x.

Now I've always believed that the slower one burns an audio CD, the more likely it is to play flawlessly on whatever players one has. The old box burned at 4x or 8x, and it took me a while to work up the nerve to use 8x.

I have noticed, though, that the hyperexpensive stereo in my current car is a bit more sensitive than the more generic unit in my previous car: it doesn't notice bumps or anything, but once in a while it jumps slightly on a CD-R, and the newer it is — meaning, in effect, the more likely I burned it at a higher speed — the more likely it is to come up with audio problems.

As an experiment, I have taken a disc I burned at 8x and made a copy of it at 4x, using that old computer I'd cleaned off during the holiday. (If anyone cares, it's this.) We shall see.

The Oklahoman's main hoops guy, Darnell Mayberry, thinks so: he's already predicting the starting five for next season's Hornets, and really, it's hard to argue with this placement:

1. Chris Paul, point guard
   
2. Peja Stojakovic, shooting guard
   
3. Desmond Mason, small forward
   
4. David West, power forward
   
5. Tyson Chandler, center
   

Still to come: the departure of Rasual Butler (probably) and Arvydas Macijauskas (almost definitely).

And I'd like to wish P. J. Brown well as he moves to Chicago for what may be his last season: if the NBA has an Elder Statesman, it's P. J.

Well, maybe not.

Then again:

Too, too convenient?

Update, 11:40 am: Then there's this Gawker headline: Ken Lay Dead Getting Approximately Same Amount of Respect As Ken Lay Alive.

Myself, I'm a lathe, not a typewriter.

(I am not persuaded that this has any connection to the presence, or absence, of the Y chromosome.)

The Oklahoma auto buyer, some time within the first thirty days after the buy, must submit to the ritual known as "Tag, Title and Tax," in which he exchanges a large check for a small metal plate and a handful of documents.

It is not necessary to visit an actual state office to do this sort of thing: the Tax Commission has farmed this task out to various private enterprises under the general name "tag agency," and just about every county has one. (Oklahoma County, with a fifth of the state's population, has three dozen or so.) This is not to say that it's less expensive: while the actual tax has been cut slightly in recent years, it's still pretty stiff.

This paragraph from the Tax Commission could be scary:

This is presumably to keep you from selling your Cadillac to your brother-in-law for $200. And after thirty-odd years here, I'm persuaded that the gum-chewing (I think it's required) girl at the tag agency knows at least as much about the retail value of a vehicle as the Kelley Blue Book.

To the tax, add the price of the title ($11, generally), the price of the registration (under $100, but not much under $100), and pretty soon you're looking at real money. My own participation in the ritual cost $486.50, all of which was duly itemized on a handwritten slip.

And no, I didn't order a vanity tag. Under Oklahoma law, the plate stays with the car, not with the owner, when the car is sold; I decided I was too lazy to (1) take out two bolts and (2) learn a new number, and unless there's a warrant for the previous owner's arrest for skipping out of parking tickets in Kansas City, I figure I'm fine.

It's a whole new kind of profiling:

Of course, for some time now DHS has been blowing smoke up ... um, never mind.

Has anyone else encountered this thing? It sounds like yet another good argument for driving everywhere.

Do people attend auto races, or watch them on television, in the hopes of seeing a crash?

The most reasonable answer, I suppose, is that some of us do, but most of us probably don't.

Of course, we're generally watching NASCAR here in the States; the dynamics may well be different in, say, Formula 1.

And, while we're on the subject of crashing, the official supplier of engine-control systems for the 2008 F1 season will be ... Microsoft.

Now they'll be able to crash without ever leaving the starting line.

Tulsans know about César Pelli: he designed the BOK Center.

This morning, Lileks has some thoughts on the man:

If you're looking for the Norwest Tower, it's now the Wells Fargo Center. Go figure.

And really, "timeless and humane" is all we can ask of our architecture, right?

Improbable as that may seem, at least to me, this is the premise (well, a premise) of an actual podcast. (Approximately 27 minutes, and presumably not approved by "Mad Eddie" Finkelstein.)

Update, 9 July: The second edition is up; this link should cover them all.

Integris Health ran an ad on the op-ed page of The Oklahoman this morning, and it contains this whopper:

So if the charts say you should weigh, oh, 130 or so, you're considered a porker at — wait for it — twenty-six pounds. This is below Nicole Richie territory; this is right down there with Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.

I hope they read their instruments better than they read their proof copy.

The sleepy 'burbs of The Village and Nichols Hills have been awakened by a visiting perv who apparently has been making the rounds for quite some time.

Typical incident:

I suggest that if you encounter this guy, you point and laugh; it should kill whatever groove he thinks he's in.

(And if you ever see me wearing only socks and tennis shoes, you'll see a lawn mower in front of me, and I'll wonder what you're doing peeking into my back yard.)

Well, we're not there yet, but the Tree To Be has now topped the two-foot mark on its way to the sky. Sweetgum-haters like McGehee will point out that it's still mowable at this point, which is true; I've chopped down dandelions at this height before, and they've got a heck of a lot more infrastructure. (About a quarter-century ago, I had a dandelion staring me in the face, but that's another story, and it required more substantial hardware to remove.) On the other hand, if I ever get around to expanding this actual house — don't count on it any time soon — both sweetgums and the shed will become expendable, and I'll probably have to go away for a month just so I don't witness the carnage.

Gwendolyn (you met her here) is my first-ever Infiniti, and while there's plenty of data, some of it actually verifiable, floating around on the Net, she is, after all, six years old, more than a generation in automotive terms, and I decided I'd like to find some data from the time she was born, just for historical perspective.

By way of eBay, I snagged the October 1999 issue of Car and Driver, which I'd read as a subscription copy when it was new and subsequently sent to the shredder. The issue contains a one-page "minitest" of the 2000 I30 and a six-page ad by Infiniti to promote the car. The ad, of course, is just this side of hilarious:

As noted, I don't call her Shirley. The Infiniti tag from those days — "Own one and you'll understand" — is reminiscent of the old Packard boast "Ask the man who owns one," but not particularly precise; whatever you might think of Mazda's "Zoom Zoom" business, at least you knew what they were selling you.

The C/D testers gave the car a mixed review "in its class": "When considered against its competitors, the I30 has a fine combination of style, luxury, and adequate performance." Of course, these guys are hotshoes by trade — 8.3 seconds from zero to sixty seems like an eternity to them — and they seemed disappointed that the 2000 version, wholly new, didn't represent a quantum leap in performance over the previous generation. (They got seven seconds out of a Maxima with the same engine, but it had a stick shift.) And they complained about the forest of petroboard:

I turned back to the ad, and the interior shot revealed the Awful Truth: the previous owner had actually ordered extra fake wood. In the photo, synthoplanking appears only on the doors and the console; Gwendolyn's wearing the stuff all the way up to her air vents.

I will not allow myself to be perturbed by this; I learned, many years before, that you never, ever tell a woman she's wearing too much makeup, unless you're convinced she's doing Kabuki on the side. (What happens, of course, is that she leaves it all off one day, and you look at her stupidly and say "What did you do to yourself?") Besides, there's a road to watch.

I hadn't paid too much attention to the auto-parts store going in at 3217 North May; another concrete fortress would scarcely be noticed on this stretch of May, especially with that new Lowe's just south of 39th pretty much finished.

Until I got this letter from a reader:

The most recent occupant of this space, the Classic Rock Café/Bora Bora, has since relocated to Walker just north of 23rd. There are still Big Boy restaurants in ten states; Kip's, which had the Texas and Oklahoma franchise, seems to have vanished altogether. (I remember eating at a Big Boy restaurant within the last few years; it was probably in Danville, Illinois.) This photo, of the sign at a Dallas location that was torn down last year, was taken for this Web site, specializing in "the super-cool modern coffee shop architecture of the 1950s and 1960s"; the writer also devotes a page to savaging so-called "Dallas-style" homes, rather a lot of which are being built these days in central Oklahoma.

Speaking of homes, in previous editions of Spottings, I waxed lyrical about a new house being built at NE 7th and Oklahoma; the last time out, I said something to the effect that "had I a whole lot more money than I do, I'd like to live in something that doesn't look like anything else." Well, clearly it looks like something, and it's not like it doesn't fit in with the rest of the neighborhood, because there's nothing else around: most of this area was cleared off for the construction of the Centennial Expressway. And after all, it was conceived as a residence with studio, so it's going to be at least somewhat utilitarian. I still think it's neat.

The title of this New York Times piece is "At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust," and while I have no particular reason to question this assertion generally, writer Tamar Lewin backs it up rather peculiarly:

Spoons notes:

Whether there's also some grade inflation at work here is left as an exercise for the (non-Harvard) student.

This spring, I suggested you all run out and get a copy of Slow Road Home: a Blue Ridge Book of Days by Fred First, and now it's showed up at Barnes & Noble, for preorder, "available on August 28."

There's just one hitch: Fred published this himself, and he has made no arrangements to sell the book through bn.com, on August 28 or any other date.

Putting the most favorable spin possible on this, B&N presumably has noted that the book is in print and has a proper ISBN number (0-977-93950-2), and expects that the publisher will make it available to them in time.

On the other hand, for now this is clearly a case of, as Fred says, "selling what you ain't got."

In the four months since I put up a small post about Zillow.com, I've kept watch over the one property I know best — mine — and inexplicably, the Zestimated price has risen by nine grand during that period. I attribute this to strong sales elsewhere in the neighborhood.

On the other hand, I can't come up with any explanation for this:

And where did it go? Nowhere:

If there's a lesson here, it's this: Put not all thy faith in a single database.

Note to potential pro-life polemicists:

If you want to dramatize your point with quotations from supporters of abortion rights, you might not want to gather those quotations from The Onion.

Just saying.

(Via Caterwauling.)

One of the more amusing aspects of life in Oklahoma City is nodding your head at visitors and saying, "Yes, we did name our two largest airports after guys who died in a plane crash." You wait just long enough for the furrows to appear on their brows, and then you say, "What's more, it was the same crash."

On the other hand, we can't top this: Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia, is renaming its airport for Genghis Khan.

I wonder if Norm Mineta is looking for work.

(Via Fark.)

The Mutt-Man has suggested I give Gwendolyn a proper break-in on this road in Bolivia. It would be simpler just to push her onto the BNSF tracks and run like hell.

Meanwhile in the Philippines, it's the Blessing of the Police Vehicles, which appear to be the Altis variant of the Toyota Corolla, more closely akin to the North American version of the Corolla than to the standard Asian car. (The Philippine National Police apparently just acquired these vehicles under a mandate from the President to step up the war on local insurgents.)

Yes, ladies and germs, it's yet another installment of the tedious little series in which I copy search strings that led people to this very site, stack them in a single entry, and lovingly festoon them with snark.

Richard Carpenter cried when Karen sang it in the studio:  "What is 'Anarchy in the U.K.'?"

breast augmentation gone wrong, too high on the collar bone:  Look at the bright side: it will take that much longer to sag to waist level.

brazilians are superstitious amoral idiots:  With incredibly-clean genitalia.

I'm kept awake at night by the sounds of anthracite screaming:  Try bituminous. It's softer and quieter.

10 Things Your Lender Won't Tell You:  "7. You can't afford this. What were you thinking?"

what females have to say about erect penis:  "About damn time."

Lucia di Lammermoor by three stooges:  They sang the Sextet (well, half of it) in Micro-Phonies.

"cthulhu lives" dallas:  You were expecting maybe Farmers Branch?

searching for redhead I met at Henry Hudson's:  The bay or the pub?

Where can I find someone to give me one million dollars:  Start small. But not with a paper clip: that's been done.

amanda congdon cup size bra:  Zooming a little zoom, are we?

webcam force "take her clothes off":  That's got to be one hell of a powerful webcam.

decent farts:  Silent but nondeadly?

1000 days without sex:  Piece of cake. Not a very tasty cake, though.

sending fecal matter through the U.S. mail:  Don't we get enough crap already?

The Hornets, Ron Hitley says, were "long overdue for a mysterious resignation," and sure enough, team president Paul Mott is out after 14 months on the job.

What this portends is unclear, to say the least. And it's not like owner George Shinn has never done anything inexplicable before. Perhaps the identity of Mott's replacement, when the time comes, will provide a clue.

John Owen Butler didn't much like this house:

So he really won't like this one:

In Crown Heights, at 40th and Shartel. (Not my photo; this came with the draft report on Oklahoma City's Historic Preservation efforts, circa 2002. Except for tree growth and such, it looks about the same today.) And you know, I like pointy Tudor revivals as much as the next guy, but we're awash in the darn things.

See what you think of this:

(Emphasis as in the original.)

I am generally a firm believer in biting the hand that feeds me, but at first glance this strikes me as an admirable attempt to avoid the possibility of conflict of interest. (Which, of course, makes me wonder if I'm missing something somewhere, cynic that I am.)

I won't be doing likewise myself, but this is because I sell no ad space anyway, political or otherwise, and therefore the issue really doesn't exist for me. (If, however, at some time I begin taking ads, I will have to give this serious consideration.) Will others follow Ms O'Connor's lead?

The ban on "commercial or recreational activities" at Kansas' Lake Edun nudist facility apparently includes political fundraising: the state Libertarian Party was blocked from holding a three-day gathering at Lake Edun last weekend and had to move elsewhere on short notice.

The event was billed as Return to Edun, Return to Liberty, and this was part of the party's pitch:

Under the court order, Lake Edun must get a permit for any proscribed activities, but the county has so far refused to issue any permits, perhaps hoping that the couple who owns the property — ownership of the resort is vested in a foundation — will give up and move away. They haven't.

(Via Fark.)

Sources deep within 42nd and Treadmill report that El Jefe found one of these motherfarging reptiles pretending to be a suspension component.

Samuel L. Jackson was not available for comment.

Last fall, Oklahoma Natural Gas introduced a Voluntary Fixed Price program, which, if you signed on the dotted line, would get you 12 months of gas at $8.393 per dekatherm. (A dekatherm is about how much my water heater uses up in four weeks.) Inasmuch as the price at the time was in the seven-buck range, I decided to pass on this deal, and it's cost me every single month since then — until now.

Where things stand:

• 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.

• February: 6.4 used at $9.589; total price $61.37; VFP price $53.72; loss of $7.65.

• March: 7.6 used at $8.455; total price $64.26; VFP price $63.79; loss of $0.47.

• April: 4.6 used at $8.660; total price $39.83; VFP price $38.61; loss of $1.22.

• May: 2.0 used at $8.781; total price $17.56; VFP price $16.79; loss of $0.77.

• June: 1.2 used at $8.486; total price $10.19; VFP price $10.07; loss of $0.12.

• July: 1.1 used at $7.520; total price $8.55; VFP price $9.53; gain of $0.98.

• Cumulative: 39.4 used at $10.031; total price $395.61; VFP price $330.09; loss of $64.63.
  

This fall? I haven't decided. Why do you ask?

(Note: In July ONG began quoting usage figures to three decimal places, making rounding errors easier than ever. This is especially neat because meter readings are rendered in integers.)

Whether Service Pack 2 actually slows down a PC running Windows XP is a matter of debate; however, I'm quite certain that no one is arguing that SP2 speeds up a machine.

My notebook, a five-year-old Toshiba Satellite, seemed to be a bit draggy of late, though I wasn't sure whether this might be simply a question of perspective, inasmuch as it's no longer competitive wth contemporary hardware: an 1100-MHz Celeron, it was about as fast as my AMD Duron 850 desktop, acquired about the same time, but it's a snail compared to the new 'puter. And while I suppose I could dig myself deeper into debt and snag a nice Pentium 4 dual-core luggable, I reasoned that the path of least resistance lay in boosting the Toshiba's RAM beyond 256 MB, and by 256 I mean 240: sixteen megs are sucked away by the integrated video subsystem.

Fortunately, Toshiba considers this a simple process. From the manual:

And so forth. These guys would write instructions for toothpaste beginning "1. Remove cap."

There are, in fact, 16 steps, the last three of which involve opening Control Panel/System to verify the amount of RAM installed, which is now 512 496 MB.

Yes, the machine does run faster. Is it fast enough to override my desire for a new machine? Ask me in a couple of weeks.

Oklahoma City has big plans for making downtown the Next Residential Destination, and Tulsa has ideas of its own. Neither of them, however, have allowed for this:

The new arrivals in downtown OKC have been generally an upscale bunch; whatever amenities they can't find downtown are just a drive away. If all this is going to work, though, there's got to be some stuff downtown that you don't have to drive to: grocery, laundry facilities, an actual drug store fercryingoutloud. Otherwise you're blocking out people who might be able to afford living in the middle of things if they don't simultaneously have to support a secondhand Subaru.

I caught this ad in the Oklahoman:

This isn't at all bad, but:

1. It's at least a mile from Bricktown, the far fringe of "near";
   
2. The nearest place to buy foodstuffs is the Earthgrains/Rainbo bargain store on Broadway, and, well, man does not live by bread alone.
   

It is, however, within a couple of blocks of Metro Transit, which runs along 13th, and it's in the Heritage Hills East district, which means the city pays a little more attention to building condition than it might in lesser areas.

I haven't been too perturbed with the perceived lack of urban character of the Legacy Summit apartment development between the Museum of Art and Midtown: if the cookie-cutter design, borrowed from other Legacy communities in the 'burbs, saves a few bucks on rent, it's fine with me. Purists will howl; then again, purists tend to make more than $500 a week.

(Found at BatesLine.)

Last fall you might have read about office condos at 125 Park Avenue downtown; each floor of the five-story building was for sale.

And they're being bought: a local attorney has closed on the first of them, and three more are under contract. The upper floors sold for $400,000; the ground floor went for $300,000.

The building's Web site hasn't changed much lately.

I'm sure Dave isn't the only one who wants to know:

This seems to be a variation on what Roger Ebert called the "Idiot Plot", which is:

And I don't think you're allowed to make a Major Motion Picture these days without including at least an Idiot Subplot.

Some of you perhaps have wondered about the criteria for QOTW, since they seem to come from all over the place, and since there are plenty of weeks when there is no QOTW at all. And I must confess, the qualifications are somewhat murky. But in general, a paragraph (or whatever) that gets put in this slot is either something I wish I'd said, or sounds like something I have said.

"Sounds like," needless to say, is highly arguable. But the present QOTW, after I stopped roaring at it, called to mind my 2004 denunciation of an email spam: "[It] isn't worth a pint of marmoset urine."

Contrariwise, the QOTW constitutes praise. I think. Sam Smith got to drive an Audi RS4 for Automobile (August '06), and, he says, this is what happens when you hit the little S button on the dash:

Neither I nor Mr Smith are in the habit of getting bears drunk, let alone propelling them skyward with explosives, but I understood this better than perhaps I ought to admit.

The contemporary archetype is Kyle McDonald, who started out with one red paperclip and wound up with a house in Saskatchewan.

Suitably motivated, Kehaar seeks to swap a tube of silicone sealant for a beach house, something the men of Silflay Hraka have sought for nearly four years.

Much of the media coverage of yesterday's court ruling against various firms which "sanitize" Hollywood pictures and distribute the bowdlerized versions to their customers has been almost gleeful in its portrayal of those customers as the dumb hicks they obviously must be.

I carry no particular brief for dumb hicks, and I like my violence uncut and my nudity gratuitous, but I find this decision annoying. Nick Gillespie explains:

This isn't a censorship issue: it's a control issue. I, for one, am loath to permit The Industry to assert any power over any content I've paid for. My reaction would be the same if Visual Artist X complained that some people weren't hanging his paintings exactly in the center of the wall, or if Influential Band Y demanded that listeners play their entire CD through every time.

Culture isn't top-down anymore. Get used to it.

We got your globalization right here, pal: the latest incarnation of the classic British sports car will be built by the Chinese in Oklahoma.

Nanjing Automobile Group, which wound up owning the MG brand after the collapse of UK-based MG Rover, has announced plans to assemble MG TF coupes at a new plant to be built in Ardmore next year. Nanjing will also reactivate a British factory to build the roadster version of the TF, and will build home-market cars in China. Production is expect to begin in the fall of 2008.

Duke T. Hale has been appointed president and CEO of MG North America/Europe, which will be based in Oklahoma City. I'd say he's got his work cut out for him.

TF, incidentally, is a series name from MG's past: the original TF, a repository of 1930s technology, was built from 1953 through 1955, when it was replaced by the shockingly-modern MGA. The new TF will look like this.

Perhaps the bloodiest battle in human history was the Battle of Stalingrad, in which the Soviet Union crushed an invasion by the German Reich, with massive casualties on both sides: estimates range as high as two million. The battle raged on for 199 days, from the summer of 1942 into February 1943.

The Carnival of the Vanities, meanwhile, has raged on for 199 weeks, and The Bull Speaks hosts the newest edition of the original blog carnival. No casualties to report.

A couple of days ago, someone wandered into this site with the search string kevin calvey, KKK. Calvey is a state legislator running for Congress; the KKK needs no introduction. Nothing I'd said connected the two — they happened to be on the same archive page, and the archives around here tend to be huge — but I decided I'd read down the list of results, and turned up something else entirely: an actual page run by the Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in that traditional bayou town, Shawnee, Oklahoma. (I am disinclined to give them a link, partly on general principle, partly because they insist on running a bunch of annoying Java applets; you can find them easily enough if you're interested, since they have their own domain.)

And Rep. Calvey is indeed mentioned thereupon: he had voted against the African-American Centennial Plaza to be built at the Capitol grounds, and the Klan's Webmaster apparently lifted Calvey's press release intact, leaving in all the personal pronouns and stuff:

More amusing was the disclaimer: "We are not what you have been told by your media."

And from the Department of Unconscious Irony: the page sports a black background.

Text messaging is a tedious business at best, which explains the plethora of abbrev + spl diff.

It won't always fit the circumstances, but often your response can be expressed in a server response code:

Of course, if [YOU] were I, you could expect a lot of 500s.

(Via Lifehacker.)

The Fish City Grill is opening an eatery in Edmond (1389 East 15th in Spring Creek Village), and they bought a 1/8-page ad in this week's Gazette to announce the opening and to solicit job applications for "all positions." The next-to-last line, right above the inevitable URL, was "No Schmucks Please."

I figured this was just the usual desperate jockeying for eyeballs that routinely goes on in the Gazette; one place (was it Rococo?) once put up a shot of one wall of its wine cellar with the caption "Nice Rack." But apparently Fish City is serious:

I can think of a lot of enterprises, not necessarily serving food, that could benefit from this sort of thinking.

You gotta love this:

So it's become a sign-and-trade transaction, and I'm sure they had their reasons. (Most likely: the Pacers pick up a trade exception which they can use anytime during the season, probably $7.5 million or so, which far exceeds any amount of cash they forked over to the Hornets.)

Which leaves one question: Who the hell is Andrew Betts?

The Hornets drafted him 50th in 1998 out of Long Beach State; he never played in the NBA during the regular season, but took off for Europe, where he spent five seasons among three Euroleague teams, the last of which was Spain's Tau Ceramica, for whom he averaged 6.8 points per game. (By some weird coincidence, one of Betts' teammates that year — 2004-05 — was Arvydas Macijauskas, whom the Hornets waived yesterday and who will return to the Continent.)

And Betts comes back into the picture in this year's Vegas Summer League, playing for the Hornets. Will the Pacers pick him up for a minimum contract? Maybe he's hoping for exactly that.

Actually, I suspect that mere flavor is a minor factor.

[Possibly NSFW]

Working on one's car in the altogether, as did some goofball in Broken Arrow, is not advisable, says Mike:

Then again, if he'd been decent — but never mind. You'll recall that a motor vehicle depends on hot and nasty fluids, which you don't want to encounter under uncontrolled conditions.

And I need hardly point out that doing this sort of thing in the front yard is going to attract attention, generally of the sort one does not want. (Unless, of course, you're the Fridayland flasher, in which case you have more problems than I care to discuss.)

Valvoline asked a bunch of ASE-certified auto techs when they thought you should have your oil changed, and the majority of them said every 3000 miles, exactly what you'd expect them to say.

On one level, this is no more persuasive than, say, the Chick-fil-A cows asking you to "eat mor chikin"; on the other hand, erring on the side of caution, while it has its price, is perhaps less likely to lead to grief than erring on the side of "Maybe later."

Me, I drive about 10,000 miles a year, and generally get three oil changes during that year:

1. Right before the World Tour (2750 miles).
   
2. Right after the World Tour (7250 miles).
   
3. Halfway between World Yours (10,000 miles).
   

In practice, this means one in June, one in July, and one in December or January. This has worked rather well for me for several years. Infiniti recommends 3750 miles for Gwendolyn, which works out to three in 11,250 miles, which is, I think, sufficiently close to my own regimen. (On the other hand, I think leaving spark plugs, even platinum-tipped spark plugs, in an engine for 105,000 miles is insane.)

I might also mention that motor oil is a hot, nasty fluid, which means that it might be advisable to dress before removing the drain plug.

That ten cents, said George Wallace, exceeds the amount by which the nation's two major parties differ.

The Oklahoma Libertarian Party sent a nine-question survey out to all the candidates for the state legislature. They've posted the results, and given the limitations of the survey and the paucity of responses — only 46 surveys were returned — ol' George may have been on to something. Of the Democrats responding, the average score (on a 30-to-100 scale) was 74; the Republicans averaged 73. (Independents, some of whom may be LP members, averaged 84.)

I note with some amusement that J. M. Branum, a Green running as an Independent, scored higher than GOP stalwart Thad Balkman.

And the OKLP had the gumption to publish the comments of the respondents, which are worth reading even if surveys make your eyes glaze over.

It's called Dodgeball, and Melina explains:

Beats walking around with a Geiger counter, I suppose. And there's this:

I hasten to point out that (1) this service is not yet available in Oklahoma City and (2) the likelihood of my being on someone's crush list is somewhere between infinitesimal and nonexistent. That said, though, I'm impressed with the methodology.

And with this:

Although I have no doubt that the technology could be adapted for exactly that, which would cast a new light on the old term "call girl."

The amiable Dr. Chris Lawrence has adopted a more modest return address:

The USPS here seems to be wanting to get people to use "Nichols Hills" rather than "Oklahoma City" where appropriate; I keyed three addresses known to be inside Nichols Hills city limits, and all three of them came back standardized to NH — even the one in 73120 rather than 73116. (Not all suburbs get this kind of treatment.)

On a whim, I typed "10 N. Bemiston, Clayton, MO" into the USPS search screen. It duly came back:

Which, if you're keeping score, is the Clayton City Hall.

I suspect, though, that if you had the nine-digit ZIP correct, you could put "Saint Louis," "St Louis," "Clayton," or for all I know "Timbuktu" in there, and your mail would (eventually) get to the right place.

And apparently allowed it to spread throughout the building:

I'm not even sure I should post this, if only because I don't relish search traffic for "fun with respirator mask".

Meet CarSpace, which is, well, just about what you think it is: an automotive variation on the MySpace theme, produced by the Edmunds folks.

I should ask them if everyone gets Tom Magliozzi as first friend.

(Disclosure: I have a page at CarSpace, though I've done nothing with it. Yet.)

I wandered over to Miss Cellania this morning, and this thing bounced into the middle of the page:

"Mad," indeed. Apparently this is what they're talking about.

Update, 16 July: It's been fixed, or something.

A thread at Apartment Therapy suddenly turns into a tract or two:

This I can understand; I used to cruise Nichols Hills for gardening ideas, and gave it up after a few months because I knew I'd never be able to come close on my own — not while actually holding down a job, anyway.

On the other hand, this later comment seems a bit much, and not just for the (lack of) capitalization:

I mean, what kind of ninny puts a flat-screen TV over the fireplace? Heat rises, fercrissake.

(With thanks to Tatyana.)

I have yet to figure out every last button on Gwendolyn's instrument panel, so naturally I'd think that this is a question to ponder:

I'm pretty sure that you can make some kind of case for just about any automotive feature whatever, but this comment, I think, speaks volumes:

It's occasionally used in Oklahoma, though I suspect mostly for its decorative value.

CFI Care (not its real initials) farms out its prescription coverage to third parties, and this year's third party has done something I hadn't seen before: not only did they issue the usual list of this year's drug buys with the usual tut-tutting about ways to cut the expense, but they disclosed, not only how much I paid in copays, but how much they forked over to Sav-on. (Which sums, incidentally, are almost identical; I paid out $705.69, they paid out $705.04.)

Unwarranted conclusions I am reaching from the data provided:

• The stuff I take for my blood pressure has dropped markedly in price: it used to be $103 a month and is now $57.

• With the withdrawal of Vioxx from the market, prescription NSAIDs seem to have gone up a bit: the one I take now is up over $4 a tab. (I know these prices because under a previous third-party regime, we had to pay out the full amount at the register and then wait for a reimbursement check.)

• On the one generic drug I take regularly (it's a tranq), the flat $10 copay represents 76 percent of the retail price. On the two brand-name items above, I pay 53 and 27 percent respectively.

• However, the differences aren't always so marked: the ten bucks for a one-shot generic I had filled last year represented only 26 percent of retail.
  

The s