Hmmm....

All this "rage" from Mona Magno-Veluz, because she, um, gained five pounds.

You probably didn't know that Sony was still building the occasional Betamax, so it likely makes no difference to you that production will end after a 27-year run.

Maybe I ought to go get my SL-HF900 fixed; they bring big bucks on the used market, even today. Fortunately, my SL-HF840D still works, and I have plenty of blank tapes.

While looking at some local TV-station sites as perfunctory research for the preceding item, I noticed that apparently the Fox TV network doesn't demand that its local affiliates wrap themselves in Rupert Murdoch-approved isolation; quite a few Fox stations have affiliations with CNN, including KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, KABB-TV in San Antonio, and WTIC-TV in Hartford, Connecticut.

There's nothing particularly weird about this — CNN swaps video with affiliates of the other major broadcast networks as well — but really, if the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy™ were the ideologically-driven monolith it's alleged to be, shouldn't Murdoch, or Fox News boss Roger Ailes, or somebody, have pulled the plug on these deals by now?

Not likely. Fox, first and foremost, has to make money, and annoying the affiliate stations is not the most efficient way to do it. What's more, Fox, having acquired the old United Stations (Chris-Craft) group, now owns some of the biggest UPN affiliates, including WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey (New York City market) and KCOP-TV in Los Angeles. Strange bedfellows are the rule, not the exception, in today's Big Media market.

Admittedly, the world is not exactly teeming with Volokhs. Still, I read The Volokh Conspiracy fairly regularly, and I've subscribed to Movieline for over a decade, and it never once occurred to me that Movieline founder and CEO Anne Volokh might be somehow related to Sasha and Eugene. As Homer J. Simpson might say: "D'oh!"

During the six years this site has been in operation, I have delivered a few righteous denunciations of things which I thought needed denouncing, but I don't think anything in this domain qualifies as a world-class Fisking; I've never really been all that vicious.

Until I got home this afternoon and found, of all things, an eviction notice waiting for me, five days after the rent was due — but seven days after it was paid. And I've got the receipt to prove it. What's more, they cashed my check on Tuesday, which is rather easily verifiable by a call to the bank.

So this particular quasi-Fisking will be delivered in person tomorrow morning. I don't really expect anyone to quake in fear when I arrive, but you'd better believe they're going to be shaking when I depart.

And if their response is not satisfactory, well, it will be Google-able for the remainder of eternity, for the edification of all.

Update, 6:40 pm, 7 September: The one staffer on duty happened to be the one who signed the rent receipt, so there was little arguing to do; what bothered me was the bland admission that, well, these things happen. Perhaps they do; however, they should not.

The next step, perhaps, is to blame those horrid liberals in the Connecticut Department of Public Health; apparently Ann Coulter is a couple years closer to AARP membership than she's been willing to let on. Of course, whether she's 38 (as she claims) or 40 (as Connecticut records indicate) is largely irrelevant, unless you think that 40 is some horrible age for a woman to be, in which case I suggest you've been hanging around too many Britneys for your own good.

And let us not snipe solely at Ann Coulter. Just to show you that this sort of thing transcends mere political stances, Barbara Walters' bio has always said she was born in 1931, two years later than the actual date.

Besides, Walters and Coulter share other attributes besides the ability to write off years with the stroke of a pen: both are well-served by short skirts, and both tend to overestimate their journalistic credibility.

(Muchas gracias: Jeanne d'Arc.)

As Ron Ziegler used to say, previous statements are inoperative: they issued the Final Demand today. And fortunately, it was a day in which everything at 42nd and Treadmill had gone terribly wrong — Christ on a crutch, why do I put up with these nitwits? — so I was in the proper mood to deliver world-class invective.

Actually, it fell slightly short of world-class, but what the hell, it's better than they deserved; I should have sued the bastards. In the meantime, there is still the task of providing Googleable information about this place, which is called Courtyard Village, owned by Pacific West Management, and managed (and I use the term loosely) by Lisa Rada (for now, anyway; they go through personnel like Gray Davis goes through campaign contributions), for the benefit of anyone seeking a flat east of Oklahoma City and north of Tinker Air Force Base.

Ms Rada, incidentally, seemed unimpressed when I indicated that I was expecting a written apology, and that I would post it here when it arrived — and that I would post references to its absence until it does.

And if I discover anything deleterious has been added to my credit record as a result of this, well, you'll get to hear about that too. I was assured that it would not, but how likely am I to believe that?

Posting, incidentally, may be light around lease-expiration time.

It's called Trident White, and I never would have bought it had it not been fastened to a bottle of Listerine (another Warner-Lambert product, and how come AOL hasn't bought them yet?); I've never been much of a gum-chewer, perhaps due to an inability to snap it with authority. It's low on the calorie scale — 2.5 per piece — and contains some odd dairy derivative yet is lactose-free. And best of all, it's supposed to whiten, or at the very least maybe de-yellow, one's teeth.

All this is secondary, though, to actual chewing satisfaction, and here the stuff comes up short. This particular flavor (billed as "peppermint", but it tastes like discount-store mouthwash) is something less than enthralling, the pieces are tiny (perhaps to ensure that 2.5 calories per), and I have certain qualms about anything this small that lists a dozen and a half ingredients. And titanium dioxide? Well, that certainly explains the "white" part.

I have no doubt that it will sell, and sell well, but I don't think it's persuasive enough to win over Doctor No. 5.

Look for a definition of the handy Yiddish term "chutzpah", and you'll likely be told of the wiseguy who murdered his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan. As nuanced explanations go, this is one of the best.

I'm approaching the front door, and for the third time in a week, there's a notice stuck up there. Is this the written apology from the landlord for the shabby treatment I've been getting of late? Of course not. It's the standard sucky "renew your lease now and get a smaller rent increase" pitch. The increase isn't much — 2.3 percent — but that hardly mitigates the gall.

Actually, given the history of this place, I suspect I may be here longer than the current management (Pacific West, for all you Googlers), in which case I think I shall keep discreetly silent about future plans until the last moment possible.

The big news at 42nd and Treadmill today was the arrival of new Certificates of Benefits from our newly-appointed Czar of Health Care Bucks. It is apparent to me that said Czar is desperate to save dollars any way possible: the Certificates, seventy-six pages, were printed, per the back page, in 1995, and sixty pages of changes, amendments, exclusions, Special Notices, and other insurance-company effluvia are stapled to the inside covers. Needless to say, this makes the Table of Contents well-nigh worthless; I have to assume that the First Commandment of Insurance — "Thou shalt not pay claims if there is any way to avoid them" — has a Sub-Commandment somewhere about making the actual obligations of the company as murky and indistinct as possible.

Of course, we'll drop them in a year or so, once they've finished the initial contract and start charging what they really wanted to charge in the first place, and subsequently we'll be suckered in by yet another pack of twerps who'd rather be in Mergers and Acquisitions than in some tedious business like health care.

Okay, I give up. What the heck is a Shenandoah Steak Sandwich?

Update: Jump forward one week.

10:15 am: "Slow drain" reported to management.

5:15 pm: First acknowledgment of report. Minion inspects tub, finds a small quantity of damp detritus, flushes bowl, watches quantity of detritus increase twofold.

5:20 pm: Minion returns with quart bottle of Volcano Extract or something, spritzes a quarter of it down drain.

5:25 pm: "Didn't work. I'll call the plumber."

5:50 pm: Entire building is suffused with the gentle aroma of discarded jockstraps. I decide I will not cook tonight, and order pizza.

6:20 pm: Pizza is delivered.

7:00 pm: Tub now half-full of brown, brackish, bubbling brew.

7:50 pm: Level of said brew recedes to half an inch. I pour two gallons of boiling water into the cauldron.

8:00 pm: Nasty phone call to management.

8:04 pm: Management advises that plumbers are "on the way".

8:10 pm: Begin questioning neighbors. Upstairs residents report no problems; downstairs residents aren't home.

10:45 pm: Winds kick up to 60 mph; storm begins.

11:25 pm: Peak of the storm; winds exceeding 65 mph, rain falling at 0.05 inch per minute.

11:27 pm: Plumbers arrive.

12:05 am: Plumbers, having run both ends of line, report no blockage; suspect combination of Volcano Extract and boiling water may have loosened up the clog.

12:10 am: Off to bed at last.

5:15 am: But it doesn't last, does it?

I admit up front that this is not my area of expertise; the only thought I've given to this sort of thing up to now has been wondering what it's like to stop at the top of the Ferris wheel when Freddy Cannon or Chuck Barris or somebody fell in love down at Palisades Park. On the other hand, I can't let this go by without comment, either.

So here's the story: beginning October first, amusement-park rides in New Jersey will be subject to statutory limits on gravitational forces — sort of. Under the new rules, amusement-park rides must not exceed a force of 5.6g for more than one second. The law was devised after the death of two women at Ocean City in 1999 who were thrown from a malfunctioning roller-coaster car. Had the coaster been working properly, the riders would not have been subjected to forces exceeding 5.6g — no ride in New Jersey is designed for forces over 5.0g — but the state evidently felt that outlawing malfunctions themselves was not a viable option.

Do high g-forces cause brain damage? The medical profession is divided. On the other hand, extensive brain damage among New Jersey residents could be just what ethically-challenged Senator Robert Torricelli needs for his reelection effort.

(Muchas gracias: Bo Cowgill.)

"Is it just me," I wondered, "or are all these new Walgreens stores real eyesores?"

It's apparently not just me.

Last week, I asked:

The answer, courtesy of those fine folks at the Greater Southington (CT) Chamber of Commerce:

Gotcha. And thanks. (Of course, out here in Soonerland, if you ask someone about "pulled pork", he'll glare at you and tell you it's none of your damn business, but that's another issue entirely.)

Now to contrive to get one of these sandwiches without having to drive 3200 miles....

The always-alert (and almost frighteningly gorgeous) Aimee Deep points to a deal between an advertiser and America Online which was apparently used to generate bogus transactions in an effort to inflate revenue figures for both parties. "I can tell you from personal experience," says Deep, "that these Big Media companies try to coerce you [into scams like this]."

This must be some of what AOL Time Warner used to call "synergy" until the word became a colossal joke.

With the exception of Southwest Airlines, which seems almost immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that the competition routinely suffers, American air carriers have pretty much been reduced to panhandling.

So, is Southwest doing something right, or is everyone else doing everything wrong? I'm not quite sure. Kim du Toit, on the other hand, is a bit more certain about things:

Indeed, something to hope for. In the meantime, if I have to go somewhere, I drive. (It's not like I'm going to France or Hawaii or Madagascar anytime soon.)

Under our old, complicated, expensive health plan, the cheaper of my two Daily Drugs would cost me a $10 copay.

Under our new, simplified, low-cost health plan, the cheaper of my two Daily Drugs costs me $23.50, which sum is then submitted to the Plan Czar, who applies the pertinent formula and then sends me a check for — well, nothing, since I haven't met this year's overall deductible.

Next year, if the rumors are true, in order to receive the maximum network discount, we have to have these prescriptions filled at a drug store in the Sudan.

Will the real Saddam Hussein please, um, shut up?

Not that it matters anymore, but I wear a size 14 (US) shoe.

New today: things you can expect with really bad credit, courtesy of The Vent.

Bigwig has nailed 95 feces (more or less) to the wall, a story which will bring sighs of recognition to any parent who cries "Pee, pee!" but there is no pee.

I am in no way heartened by the fact that in almost every corner of the nation, there are workplaces every bit as toxic as 42nd and Treadmill, and for much the same reasons; all this means is that there are going to be people just as annoyed as I am.

However, giving them an airing is probably a Good Thing, so I refer you to Caterwauling.com, and recommend that you scroll down to the Part Deux entry under October second. (No individual links that I could find, sorry.)

And the sky is grey, and where are the blog updates?

Angie Schultz finds four-part harmony on such a winter's day.

Kim du Toit wearily points out the obvious:

Then again, if his description of Maryland's politicos is accurate — and I'm inclined to believe that he's got them pegged to the nth detail — it's not at all obvious to them. Yet.

Of course, you've heard about those term-papers-for-sale operations, and certainly you'd never, ever consider buying one of these things and passing it off as your own research.

Jack Schwartz did his own research (which I am blatantly copying) on one of these outfits, and he reports:

And I am envious. Ten bucks a page? And we're sitting here blogging for...uh, yeah, right, never mind. Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, and don't shade your eyes.

The Loyal Peon is annoyed by questionable weapons speculation in the DC-area sniping epidemic:

Um, they get paid for it?

I yield to the Peon's weapons experience — indeed, to most people's, since I've never owned multiple guns and didn't fire off that many rounds when I wore Uncle Sam's duds — but I do claim some expertise in shooting off my mouth without backup. And in your average newsroom, you're probably not likely to find a whole lot of firearms enthusiasts, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that these on-air conclusions are being pulled out of thin air, made only slightly thicker by thirty seconds of Googling.

Last time, I was kvetching about the way in which prescription drugs were being handled by our new insurance carrier. A revised version of said kvetch was dispatched by snailmail to the pertinent officials last weekend. They have now responded with a check for the proper 70 percent of the out-of-pocket expense. Apparently the entire group was miscoded, so presumably they've heard from four or five dozen people by now. I am, of course, grateful for the refund, which, all things considered, was pretty damned quick; but I will be even more wary than usual when I actually have to seek outpatient (or, worse, inpatient) services.

Tim Blair reports the following offer, made by a professor of English at Wheaton College:

"Millions," says Blair, and I don't doubt it for a moment.

Governor Parris Glendening has ordered a ban on outdoor shooting (indoor shooting apparently is unaffected) in four Maryland counties, ostensibly to cut down on false sniper alarms by people reporting hearing gunfire. The likelihood that the resident sniper is actually going to observe this ban is, shall we say, on the low side. And the ban plays hell with some previously-authorized hunting seasons, which means that in exchange for not catching the sniper, suburbanites will have their gardens eaten by deer.

(Muchas gracias: Ravenwood.)

If I confined myself to topics clearly within my area of expertise, I'd probably post only one or two paragraphs a month. (Never you mind whether you think that would actually improve the site.) I have, however, steered clear of the speculation regarding the D.C.-area sniper, except to point to an occasional bit of information. What was needed, I felt, was a one-shot, all-inclusive, low-shriek-level overview of the gunman and his possible motivations.

This task was undertaken over the weekend by Susanna Cornett, who is not one to shy away from the Big Jobs. She mentions, in a paragraph on qualifications, that she is not an FBI profiler; it is my opinion that the FBI would be far better off if she were.

The Arab magazine Majallah, according to Fox News, has published what purports to be Osama bin Laden's will, dated 14 December 2001 and obtained from a "very reliable" source in Afghanistan.

Much of the document is devoted to whining: about how the hated invaders showed strength of purpose; about how Afghans — even the Taliban! — put up such meager resistance; about how al-Qaeda would be a lousy career choice for his children. And, of course, it's liberally salted with verses from the Quran.

Bloggers have insisted for months, despite contrary reports of dubious origin, that what's left of bin Laden has been decorating a rock somewhere in an Afghan cave. US officials aren't saying a word — yet.

The major thrill of getting out of Daylight Savings Time isn't the sixty minutes of sleep I didn't really get on Sunday morning; it's the fact that for the next couple of weeks, anyway, I can drive to work when the sky is something besides pitch-dark. (Sunrise Saturday was 7:49 CDT, which means I arrive an hour before dawn; even around the late-December solstice, sunrise will not get any later than 7:40 CST.)

From the standpoint of climate, I won't miss this October much; while it's still a few degrees warmer than the coldest on record, it's only a few, and we're headed for the freezer later this week. The TV Weather Weasels are already hedging their bets.

It's my brother Paul's birthday.

It wasn't that many years ago that there was some doubt he'd ever make it this far. What's kept him going is the combination of modern medicine and old-fashioned faith — and the conviction that you have to have both to make it work.

At this rate, he should be good for forty-five more.

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

There is, of course, a downside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1483: Martin Luther, primary player in the Protestant Reformation

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

1759: Friedrich von Schiller, German dramatist and poet

1925: Richard Burton, English actor

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

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

Felicitations to all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cue the guitarist, and:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gee, you think we should ask Koppel?

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

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

Back to du Toit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nice-O-Meter at claus.com inexplicably lists me on the kinder, gentler side of the ledger:

Stuff like this could ruin a guy's reputation, you know?

(Muchas gracias: Miss Christine.)

Scott Ganz takes a break from serving time on a jury to explain huge punitive-damage awards:

And they don't even get a cut of the proceeds, either.

Is there a solution to this?

The Weekly World News (imagine The New York Times after twenty years of Howell Raines) reports that the actual eject button for the human soul has been located in the angular gyrus of the right cortex. Or something like that.

This might almost be plausible, but it leaves a whole lot of questions unanswered: why, for instance, is there no channel selector? And is it possible to fast-forward individuals whose time isn't running out fast enough?

With the former Senate Majority Leader martyred and the Republican Party duly purified, attention must now be turned toward the blatant racial policies of non-governmental organizations. Gregory Hlatky suggests we begin with a group which touches millions of households in the nation and somehow is never, ever called to answer for its crimes. He refers, of course, to the American Kennel Club:

Why, there's actually a club bearing this blatantly-racist name! Do these beautiful dogs know they're being used as cannon fodder to preserve the privileges of The Man?

Most of the time, day or night, you can turn to one of the news channels and see footage of people killing one another, or heads of people talking about people killing one another. And if you do this often enough, you might conclude that peace as a concept is as remote as Neptune, and as unlikely to be reached in your lifetime.

And this conclusion works, sort of, if you are inclined to define "peace" as something contingent upon the absence of war. In which case, erase "Neptune" and replace with "Betelgeuse": man's inhumanity to man is a seemingly-permanent feature of the landscape, at least to the extent that man himself is a seemingly-permanent feature of the landscape.

But it's not every man, on either end of that equation. Like so much else, peace, as a process, must begin with the individual. And peace on an individual level is more complicated. Life itself is fraught with conflict: things just refuse to fall into nice, neat little patterns we can follow by rote. At some point, we are faced with questions as basic as "Should I stay or should I go?" Can you just walk away? Sometimes you can. Sometimes you can't.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, a radio station once had the temerity to follow John Lennon's "Imagine" with his "Working Class Hero", a mordantly bitter tune that demonstrated pretty convincingly, at least to me, that the lightest and brightest of dreams could — maybe even had to — coexist with fear and loathing and disillusionment. Finding a balance therein is, I think, one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I suspect it will take me the rest of my days. But it's a conflict from which I cannot walk away.

A short time later, I was in the Army, and during this time I had some cards made up which identified me as "Specialist, United States Peace Force." Unofficial, of course. Some noted — some will note, even today — that I wore a uniform and carried a rifle (and sometimes more), and that by so doing, I belied my own self-description. I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now. The argument that you should never, ever strike first is awfully close to the argument that you should never, ever take vitamins. I don't know any homeowner who will say, "Aw, let's give the termites a chance." If conscience demands, as it will, that we think things over before we commit ourselves to some frightful war in the Middle East, it demands also that we consider the consequences should we walk away.

Peace on the individual level: "Can you live with the decisions you have made?" I'm working on it. And thank you for working on it for yourself.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled greeting-card sentiment.

Dean Esmay has come up with a list of half a dozen offenses which, in his view, qualify as Crimes Against America, trangressions so heinous that the only suitable punishment is "immediate loss of citizenship and expulsion from U.S. territory."

Fortunately, Mr Esmay has tongue firmly in cheek. I think. (If not, I see trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for Balzac.)

The Republicans have been calling for tort reform for some time, at least partially because trial lawyers are generally lined up under the Democratic banner, but mostly, I think, because there is increasing irritation with the ongoing whine of self-described victims: "I am hurt," they cry, "and somebody's gonna pay!" Whether the somebody in question is at all culpable is at best a secondary consideration.

I got a reminder of this last night in a chat room, courtesy (so to speak) of a person who, I am given to understand, has suffered some romantic reverses in recent months; while those who presumably hurt her keep a low profile, anyone she considers a friend or associate of the culprits is duly attacked on sight. (Well, except me: it is generally a waste of time to heap invective on me, since my reputation for payback in kind is fairly colossal, if largely undeserved, and besides, trying to hurt my feelings is rather like trying to cool off a glacier.) It was a dispiriting experience all around, comparable to watching fourth-graders taunting each other in the playground and trying out all the new words they learned watching Cinemax.

To paraphrase the bumper sticker: feces transpire. They always have, and they always will. In this Oprahzoid era when being a victim is the next best thing to being a celebrity, everyone wants a cut of the compensation fund — whether it's deserved or not.

Personally, I think she should get a blog.

If you're in Connecticut and you covet a traditional fever thermometer with a column of mercury enclosed in glass, this is the last day you can buy one.

(Disclosure: I own no holdings in thermometer manufacturers, CVS, or Walgreen's.)

This is the time of year when pundits issue predictions, and sometimes they prove to be absolutely stunning in their prescience. Needless to say, such a level of prognosticational perspicacity is the exception rather than the rule; apart from the occasional weather forecast, I've been consistently wrong on all manner of things. I do believe, however — and since this is a meteorological prediction, sort of, there's a chance I might be right — that Kevin McGehee has nailed it with this one:

Somebody give that man a raise.

Millions of people at America's airports. How do you determine who's just a passenger and who's a terrorist? The new IMAO Frank Test for Terrorists avoids the hemming and hawing and cuts directly to the ten questions that need to be asked. What's more, the Test prescribes a quick and effective means of removing terrorists once identified:

I think he'd feel even safer seeing two of them thus ventilated, assuming they travel in pairs, but certainly this is a start, and let's face it: you don't get this kind of innovative thinking from the likes of Norm Mineta.

The ragtag bunch of losers known as the Earth Liberation Front (no link; I have some standards) is claiming responsibility for setting jugs of gasoline under six sport-utility vehicles at a Girard, Pennsylvania dealership and igniting them. Three SUVs were destroyed; three jugs failed to ignite.

What I want to know is this: Why in the hell are these people wasting fossil fuels? Don't they read their own propaganda?

(Muchas gracias: duckboy online.)

The American movie-going public has apparently adjusted to five or ten minutes of advertising before the Feature Presentation. We don't like them, mind you: we're just resigned to the inevitable.

This sort of blasé acquiescence hasn't made it to China yet. Zhang Yang, upset because the 9:30 showing of Hero was delayed until 9:34 by advertising, filed suit against the theater and the film distributor, demanding the removal of the ads and a refund of his 40-yuan admission (not quite five bucks), plus an additional 40 yuan as compensation. Zhang Yang, as it happens, is a lawyer. Of course, had this happened in the States, there would be a class-action suit and demands for damages in the millions of dollars, which, after legal fees, would eventually be paid off to members of the class in buy-one-get-one-free coupons for Raisinets.

(Via Fark)

The group known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has announced a boycott of KFC because of alleged animal-rights abuses — which, given PETA's predilections, probably includes being served on a plate.

Perhaps miffed at being left out of the proceedings, members of the Earth Liberation Front are reportedly getting ready to fire-bomb a Pizza Hut.

There is almost always something to keep me awake when I really, really need to be sleeping. Lately it's a low (below 50 Hz) rumbling that I can't localize but which definitely isn't originating within my living quarters. Obviously something somewhere besides my nerves is vibrating, but what? The upstairs flat has been vacant for two or three weeks, and if it were their heating unit, which is directly above mine, it would shut off once in a while, and even if it didn't, I should still be able to hear it more clearly from directly below, and I can't.

If it varied at all in pitch, I'd think "subwoofer," but this is pretty constant. I tell you, stuff like this will kill me even faster than work.

For reasons undisclosed, apparently Joe Garagiola will be replaced in the broadcast booth at the Westminster Kennel Club show this February by CBS weatherman Mark McEwen.

I was sort of hoping for Fred Willard, but I see no reason to be picky.

(Muchas gracias: Gregory Hlatky.)

Ryan Rhodes has a really Sweet song for the UN inspection team. Laugh out loud. I did.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself has said: "Jeebus, I could run this place better than these clowns"? Somehow I doubt it. In my own office, this utterance is heard roughly sixteen times a week, and not just from me.

Besides, what qualifications could possibly be required? Secra can certainly fill the bill at her workplace:

She also proposes policy changes, the most truly innovative of which is "Walking away from a paper jam will be considered a dismissable offense."

Oh, well, we'll never lure her away from the Bay Area.

Most states are suffering budget woes these days, and Utah is no exception. But few observers expected the axe to fall on the highest-profile appointment in the state, porn czar Paula Houston, who will be out of a job on the first of April. The Utah legislature had cut the $150,000 for Houston's office out of the state budget; Attorney General Mark Shurtleff realigned services in an effort to keep the program going, but faced with $750,000 in cuts to his budget this year and possibly more of the same next year, the AG pulled the plug.

I am reasonably certain this does not mean that West Valley City (Houston's home town) is going to start looking more like West Hollywood.

There hasn't been a really good answer to this since Johnny Carson retired ten years ago.

Until now, courtesy of Weetabix:

Every time I see that, I have to clean the monitor. Again.

First, the families of a pair of DC-area sniper victims announced they would sue Bushmaster Firearms and a gun dealer for ostensibly making it possible for the snipers to pick them off.

Next, Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association of America announced that local ISPs should be required to pay the RIAA for allowing their customers onto peer-to-peer file-swapping networks.

Finally, the Farmers and Miners Bank of Oronogo, Missouri is expected to announce that it will file a claim for damages against the Ford Motor Company, one of whose vehicles was used by Bonnie and Clyde as a getaway car following the robbery of the bank in 1932.

Once I quit answering the phone, things got pretty quiet around here; the hateful little box hardly even rings anymore. When it does, though, the odds are it's something strange.

For instance, why on earth would anyone from ESPN call me? It's represented on the Caller ID screen as belonging to ESPN, and cross-referencing the number places it firmly in Bristol, Connecticut, which is ESPN's home base. (I actually drove past it during last year's World Tour.) The most likely explanation is that someone misdialed by a digit or so, but I somehow find it hard to believe that there are people in a Major Entertainment Organization who dial as sloppily as I do.

There are those who insist that life's obstacles are essential to the development of one's personality. Virginia Postrel, just recovered from IntraLASIK, sees things slightly differently:

I suspect I'd be warped even if I hadn't suffered anything at all, but the idea that we are merely the sum of our experiences has always bugged me, and I'm always delighted to find a reason to reject it.

Well, okay:

Not even I would have had the nerve to use the term "box hedge" in this context. And American television, at least the ad-supported stuff, probably isn't ready for D. H. Lawrence, let alone female hirsuteness. It took Playboy sixteen years (!) to get up enough nerve to display any shrubbery at all.

But back to this Guardian piece by Mimi Spencer:

Eyelash-fluttering is passé? Horrors!

Truth be told, I really don't believe that a guy's level of, um, enlightenment correlates particularly well with his enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for body hair; historically, testosterone has demonstrated itself to be quite indifferent to ostensibly higher brain functions.

I will state for the record that it is most unlike me, upon seeing the drapes, to speculate as to the nature of the carpet. (This is undoubtedly due to the fact that I can imagine no circumstances under which I would be able to make the comparison with any degree of precision.)

Back to Mimi:

Was "Who the hell has time?" one of the options on the questionnaire?

Really, I don't expect anyone to endure the torment of a bikini wax (I assume it's a torment; I'm in no mood to check this empirically), but I wasn't that crazy about Helena Bonham Carter before she played Ari.

Oh, and the Number One sign your next-door neighbor is a Playboy Playmate: Her lawn is completely bare, except for a narrow strip on each side.

It wasn't that long ago that Condé Nast was practically giving away its magazines; I remember renewing Wired for a year for twelve bucks. It probably costs that much to mail the damn thing.

Comes the renewal notice for Vanity Fair: one year $24, two years $42 "Preferred Rate". Preferred by them, maybe. I balked and went to the Web, where their fulfillment house offered two years for $30 if I coughed up my email address.

So, in exchange for a fistful of highly-filterable emails, I'm up twelve dollars. Should you, dear merchant, wish to bribe me similarly, you know where to find me.

Poor Edward. He's been on the job barely a week, and already he has to put up with this:

This woman has issues, you think? You haven't heard the half of it.

And actually, neither has anyone else, as of this writing; Edward, his storyteller instincts honed to a fine edge, is letting the details accumulate rather than jumping to the punchline. Look for the entries titled "Pretention" and read upward.

As always, the Professor has sage advice regarding the destruction of the space shuttle:

Rand Simberg should have something to say later today.

Meanwhile, prayers might seem to be in order.

Update, 10:50 am: Rand Simberg has checked in, and he's calling, once again, for some rethinking of the space program:

When I was growing up in the Jurassic period, it was taken for granted that space flight by 2000 or so would be routine. Obviously it isn't. Would more extensive experience have prevented this disaster? It's hard to say for sure, but it seems reasonable to me that if we'd done a lot more of these flights, we'd have a better grip on what can go wrong and what can be done about it beforehand.

Leaving a "medical facility" in a Baghdad suburb today, Dr Hans Blix cast his eyes downward for a fleeting moment, and in that split second he saw something of grave importance:

His shadow.

There will be, apparently, six more weeks of weapons inspections.

Legendary rock producer/recluse/nudnik Phil Spector was arrested today for allegedly killing a woman in eastern Los Angeles county.

[insert "Unchained Melody" joke here]

Update, 10 pm: I left this in a comment at The Last Page, and after reviewing its contents, I figured I may as well inflict it on you guys as well. The melody, I think, you already know.

I should probably create a "Taste Takes a Holiday" category for this sort of thing. Then again, I'd probably have to pay Laurence Simon a retainer.

From the We Must Protect The Children™ files:

What word is that?

The word is "gun".

"Look out! He's got — um, wait — one of those things, you know?"

(Explanation, for those requiring one:  Mrs. Sousa's Canadian, so it takes four of her letters to equal three of ours.)

If Salon's latest sob story is to be believed, they'll run out of (borrowed) money at the end of February and have to shut down.

I suppose it's too late to ask that the balance of my Premium subscription be transferred to FARK.

(Muchas gracias: Jeff Jarvis.)

Those of us who have seen only the six-hour telecast (which is about 4:08 after you fast-forward through the commercials) from the Westminster Kennel Club show have no idea what goes on for the rest of the time, and if I'm reading Greg Hlatky correctly, we may not want to know:

And there was more room to stretch out, too:

I once went to a show in Oklahoma City, with 14 (I think) rings, and it seemed crowded with only 2000 dogs. (And there's something disconcerting about the phrase "only 2000 dogs," if you ask me.) No carpeting, either; concrete and plasticky mats with a grooved pattern. And the only person who slipped was yours truly, but this was because I was being kneecapped by an exuberant Irish Wolfhound puppy the size of — and comparable in greenness to — the Incredible Hulk. The owner was profusely apologetic, and I wasn't injured, but it was a weird experience just the same.

If you thought area-code changes were fast and furious, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Three of the Baby Bells are complaining that voice-over-IP calling — where you send your voice as bits through the Net — will eat up the pool of available phone numbers even faster than cell phones and pagers and fax.

The most likely scenario, ten years down the pike: area codes grow to four digits, and telephone numbers to eight. We'll get used to it eventually, though I worry about how I'll explain "867-5309" to Jenny's children.

The San Francisco Examiner has "repositioned" itself as a free daily newspaper, and will be distributed only through stores and racks; there will be no more home delivery. This move is widely seen as the last attempt to keep the Examiner alive before it's either folded into the thrice-weekly Independent, also owned by the Fang family, or killed off entirely.

I suspect Daily Pundit Bill Quick will shrug this off, figuring the rival Chronicle, whose columnists and letter-writers are regular targets of his wrath, can't possibly get any worse.

Bleeding Brain proposes some timely adjustments to the periodic table. Francium, a nasty reactive (and radioactive) metal, should be renamed; the proffered suggestion is "Britanium". Double the T (Rule, Brittanium!), and I'll go along with it. (Otherwise people might think you're naming it for Britney Spears, and her area of expertise isn't chemistry, but semiconductor physics.)

Further recommended is the renaming of Europium for "the first astronomer who discovers intelligent life forms in France." This could take a while.

I demur, however, when it comes to the renaming of Berkelium. I have no particular reason to want to commemorate Berkeley, but BB's suggested name — "Blogium" — duplicates an existing element.

That element, of course, is Boron.

Still not good enough a reason to do it in the road.

(Via DiVERSiONZ)

A couple of weeks ago, it was speculated in some circles (yes, even here) that Salon might not make it past the end of February.

Are they counting the hours themselves? Looks like it.

Does this startle you?

I wonder if an entire company has ever up and quit....

Now if someone asked me this:

I'd respond something like "Because if it weren't secret, the place would be crawling with angry environmentalists."

But the question is not for me.

I still have an actual rotary phone. You know, the kind that dials with a dial; you stick your finger in and move it around in circles and...uh, never mind.

This sort of thing would never do for the Oval Office, as The Third Kind's Phil illustrates.

There was yet another ad on the radio this morning for Botox, and after the usual revulsion ("People are injecting a known toxin into their faces? Ewwww....") passed, I started wondering: Can other Nasty Substances be pressed into useful work? Can salmonella help your lawn? Does smallpox have a future as an industrial lubricant? Will anthrax kill termites?

Okay, it's too early in the morning for such things, and anyway it's been more than thirty years since I set foot in the lab. But who back then would have predicted that botulinum would have a commercial application?

Catalog retailer Spiegel — besides its own huge fashion book twice yearly, it also produces the Newport News and Eddie Bauer books — has filed for bankruptcy protection. Spiegel had been ailing for some time and had been delisted from the Nasdaq last year.

Spiegel's glory days, I suspect, coincided with the golden era of TV game shows, to which they often supplied prizes, always identified as coming from "Spiegel, Chicago 9, Illinois." (The arrival of the ZIP code, which rendered it "Spiegel, Chicago, Illinois 60609," seemed to deflate the announcement somewhat.) Their catalogs grew increasingly stylish, even arty, in recent years, and were sold at newsstands.

The effect the company's reorganization will have on director Spike Jonze, heir to the Spiegel empire, is unclear.

To no one's surprise, there's now an entry at petitiononline.com collecting signatures asking for an investigation into the death of Rachel Corrie, last seen meeting the business end of earth-moving equipment in the Gaza Strip.

But what's to investigate? She was playing Human Shield, and this particular role evidently took more out of her than she had intended. Nothing out of the ordinary. If anyone should be investigating this incident, it's the Darwin Awards committee.

In 1991, the Congress decided in enacting the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that unsolicited faxes, since they created not only inconvenience but actual cost to the recipients, could legitimately be legislated out of existence. Subsequently, the state of Missouri filed suit against two junk-fax operations, who claimed that their, um, product was protected by the First Amendment. The US District Court hearing the case sided with the faxers; the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has now reversed that decision.

The pertinent part of the ruling:

I tend to be somewhat uneasy about government involvement in matters of this sort, but in this case I'll make an exception, since someone calling my fax machine uses my consumables, and not all junk-fax purveyors honor do-not-call requests. I'm hoping that this finding by the 8th Circuit will serve as precedent for a national antispam law: I get maybe two dozen junk faxes a year, but I get three dozen spams every day, and I doubt the government would permit me to kill the miserable SOBs who send them.

No news organization, I think, is more reviled in blogdom than Reuters.

As it happens, the Reuters staff isn't too happy either, what with the CEO drawing a bonus of nearly $1 million while leading the company to a staggering $630 million loss. Management, of course, defends this sort of thing.

(Via Romenesko)

Peter Arnett, we are told, is covering the war for MSNBC and for National Geographic Explorer, a narrower range than it sounds. At Regions of Mind, Geitner Simmons reports that Arnett's reportage so far has been, to be charitable, a bit on the soft side:

It seems they could have saved some money by just hiring Robin Leach. He's got lots of free time these days, and who else can intone "Presidential palace" with such gravitas?

It's bad enough that college athletes so often fail to graduate, but what really bugs Ernie Chambers is knowing that the schools and the NCAA tend to look the other way when it happens. The proposed Chambers Rule would address this situation on a game-by-game basis by requiring that the school with the lower graduation rate spot the team with the higher graduation rate one point for each percentage point difference. An example:

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the NCAA to enact the Chambers Rule on a national basis, but I'm willing to bet it would result in more diplomas for these kids in a relatively short time.

Formally, he's Yakee A Dangerous Liaison, but everyone knows him as Danny. He's a three-year-old Pekingese, and he beat out twenty-two thousand competitors to win the top prize at Britain's Crufts dog show, the world's largest. (By comparison, the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York is limited to 2500 dogs.)

Now there's a challenge to his title. The Times is reporting that Danny had had surgical alterations: a facelift. Danny's owners deny any such thing ever took place, but the Kennel Club will investigate.

(A facelift? On a Pekingese? The mind boggles.)

Brigadier General Yossi Kupperwasser of Israeli intelligence has suggested, in a statement to the Knesset, that Iraq may have stashed weapons in Syria, which would explain at least some of the failure of UN weapons inspectors to find them.

According to the general, these weapons might be made available to Hezbollah for use against Israel, although he said the likelihood of a direct attack on Israel remained low.

According to Venomous Kate, Saddam Hussein is very much like the Norwegian Blue, with the possible exception of the plumage.

(Not via InstaPundit)

Saddam is dead, says Glenn Reynolds. While debate continues over whether he's merely dead or really, really most sincerely dead, Reynolds is willing to be put to the test:

To quote the Great One himself: Heh.

As far as the US is concerned, the major airport serving Baghdad is now called "Baghdad International Airport". Your travel agent, assuming he's goofy enough to book you a flight there in the next couple of days, will continue to use the three-letter code "SDA", which presumably is derived from the airport's previous designation as Saddam International.

Will there be an effort to change the code as part of the ongoing process of de-Saddamization? I doubt it. Historically, it's damned difficult to get an airport code modified, even if it truly sucks.

Sarin gas? Nope. That facility near Baghdad was actually a production site for pesticides.

Then again, I was once hosed down with malathion — don't ask — and I assure you, I didn't like it much.

Despite my relatively high proximity to the place, I've never actually set foot in Colorado. And if The Fat Guy has assessed the place accurately, I may not want to:

I'm sure someone (probably in the People's Republic of Boulder) has calculated the optimum backpack-to-Birks ratio.

Connecticut is starting to look better as a vacation destination, despite the distance.

This is probably not the best time in the world to be named "Saddam Hussein".

Especially if you live in Norway, fercryingoutloud.

Saddam Hussein, a young Iraqi Kurd refugee who arrived in Norway in 2001, has petitioned the Oslo government to change his name officially to Dastanse Rasol Hussein.

(Muchas gracias: Jesus Gil, who probably has thought about changing his given name once or twice.)

"Iraq," said Ambassador Mohsen Khalil at an Egyptian news conference, "has now already achieved victory — apart from some technicalities."

Gee, you think this argument will work for the Kansas Jayhawks?

When last we heard about Danny, the Pekingese who took Best in Show at Crufts, there were rumors that the dog had undergone surgery before the event, and the Kennel Club was going to investigate.

They have, and this is the report: yes, there was an operation, but no, it wasn't intended to compensate for a cosmetic defect. The poor dog had a throat problem which was corrected, nothing more.

Greg Hlatky, who's had to spend a few zillion dollars on veterinarians himself over the years, has further details.

Compared to the stereotypical Average American Consumer, I am way low on the Fickle-O-Meter. I still have my 1974 stereo (and quadraphonic!) receiver and speakers, and one magazine subscription that has run since 1978. I've kept the same bank account for twenty-eight years, despite the fact that the bank has changed hands twice during that period. In short, I am generally a loyal customer, provided you don't try to stick it to me — and once you do, you're history.

Relegated to the past tense this afternoon: my long-distance company for the past two decades. (I won't mention any names, but I'm sure they made a mint off me during those months when I was always talking and talking.) Never before have I seen a firm actually lose an electronic payment. My bank was incredulous — "How could they do that?" — but after checking to see that yes, the payment was sent in a timely manner, and no, the recipient never heard of it, they promptly reversed the charge to my account. I wrote the offending firm a check for the entire balance and promptly switched my LD service to someone else offering the same rate. And if you've switched LD services lately, you know that this is not something to be undertaken lightly; anti-slamming rules, to prevent unauthorized changes, make authorized changes exceedingly cumbersome. Still, as the phrase goes, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

And, just incidentally, the new LD provider was happy enough to offer me a better rate than what I'd had or what I'd asked for, once they heard I was leaving That Other Firm.

What the hell? The once-mighty Reuters is now resorting to buying banner ads on BlogSpot?

Okay, it's not like PETA was selling ad space to KFC or anything, but it's still weird. (Click here for a larger version, including the URL of the site where, quite by chance, it was found.)

The lovely Michel no longer has to go through life as a 34A; she has successfully raised $4500 at her Web site to cover the costs of, um, rack renovation.

No word on whether she's going to raise any additional funds for a back brace.

(Via The Register)

Electricity and running water are scarce in postwar Iraq. I know this because NPR has managed to mention this situation on every single program this week except maybe Car Talk. The ill-concealed subtext: we have no idea how these poor people are suffering, since nothing like this ever happens over here.

This conforms to a basic leftist recipe: mix compassion and smugness, beat endlessly, bake halfway. The icing on this particular subtextual cake: it's completely wrong.

I was restocking Coca-Cola this weekend — to the dismay of health-care professionals, dentists, indeed everyone except the supermarket, I go through an amazing quantity of the stuff — when I had the bright idea of checking out the competition. I don't mean Pepsi or Royal Crown; I'm familiar with them, and I grab a bottle of RC now and then to revisit my younger days, when a carton of RC was the favored promotional giveaway by the local Top 40 station and I was desperate for free stuff. (Besides, She Who Is Not To Be Named...but never mind about that.) What I mean are the new Muslim-oriented knockoffs, conceived (I presume) in response to the opening of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Israel, both of which promise to kick in some of their receipts to, um, causes of interest to their customers. Not being particularly willing to import any of this stuff, I settled for browsing their Web sites.

Qibla-Cola, which pledges on every bottle "10% of profit to 3rd world causes", may seek to position itself as the anti-Coke, but it emulates the Coke model almost entirely: in addition to the flagship brand, there are Qibla 5 (Sprite), Qibla Fantasy (Fanta Orange), and Qibla Water (Dasani), and diet versions of all but the latter. No Qibla al-Pibb yet, but give them time. The Qiblas come in 500ml and two-liter bottles; cans are promised soon. Qibla-Cola's ad flyer (a two-meg PDF file, which strikes me as overkill) proclaims "Time to make a choice!" and presents the slogan: "Liberate your taste." Almost amusing, really.

On the other hand, Mecca-Cola is deadly serious. How serious? Their slogan is in French: "Ne buvez plus idiot, buvez engagé!" And, indeed, the parent company is called Mecca-Cola Beverages France. (They're hiring, incidentally.) Even the English-language pages contain the French slogan, translated as "No more drinking stupid, drink with commitment!" Mecca-Cola kicks in 20 percent of net profit to its causes, half to "Palestinian childhood" (does this include Semtex?) and half to local NGOs in its distribution areas. In a bizarrely Cokelike gesture, their signature product is called Mecca-Cola Classic.

I have, of course, no idea how these concoctions taste, but I suspect they're at least potable, perhaps on par with, say, budget-priced Wal-Mart knockoffs. And it's probably a Good Thing to see Muslim capitalism at work, if only because there are going to be imams here and there who are appalled by the whole concept. Still, pouring money into Palestine is rather like — well, drink enough cola, regardless of brand, and the metaphor becomes obvious.

Licensed to Kill, Inc. is a Virginia-based tobacco company. I think. Certainly that's what it says in their corporate charter. Whether they'll actually market any of their product line remains to be seen: certainly I haven't seen any at the local stores yet. Still, considered solely as a vendor of agitprop, they're already way ahead of those schnooks at the American Legacy Foundation.

I don't know why I didn't think of this:

Actually, I know why I didn't think of that; the slots at 42nd and Treadmill that fit that description are already filled, and have been for some time.

(Via Fark)

You know the joke:

Adjust for inflation: something called QualityWatchWorld spammed me today with an offer of, and I quote, "Italian-crafted Rolex — only $65 - $140!!" This, I presume, would look splendid hanging on my wrist as I drive my Burmese-built BMW over to Philly's Phaux Phurs.

Something called ATWGS is mentioned in the fine print, so I decided to run them through the search engines, and found this, which is a bit more upfront:

From the looks of things, this spam has been around awhile. Meanwhile, I'll look elsewhere for the "ideal gift," thank you.

Vin Crosbie at Poynter Online reports that the British newspaper The Independent, in an effort to make some money off its site, will charge £1 for online articles by Robert Fisk.

Actually, if The Independent really wants to make some serious cash, what they should do is register Robert Fisk's name as a trademark, and then demand royalties every time a blogger Fisks™ somebody.

(Via Jeff Jarvis, who asks, "Did they ever think that the readers of Alternet don't have disposable income?")

(Update, 24 April, 11:20 am: ScrappleFace notes that Congress was considering a bill to impose Fisking™ royalties six months ago.)

Last week, I mentioned that Reuters was buying ad space on Blogspot.

As of last night, and possibly earlier, so was The New York Times.

"Will being owned by Google do anything for Blogger?" Evidently it will.

Six-foot-eight LeBron James, 18, about to finish up his years at Akron, Ohio's St Vincent-St Mary High School, has declared himself available for the NBA draft.

Laurence Simon doesn't have a problem with this:

And were he to spend those four or five years at, say, the University of Oklahoma, he probably wouldn't even end up with a sheepskin. (Automotive upholstery doesn't count.)

News item:

No comment. I mean, really.

(Via DiVERSiONZ, may his pain diminish.)

Rachel Lucas, on the jacket photo of Hillary Rodham Clinton's new book:

(Mental note: Do not annoy Rachel Lucas.)

According to Susanna Cornett, this is the beauty of New Jersey:

Like more reasons were needed?

Actually, I can appreciate some of this. Brock Yates once said that the New Jersey Turnpike was the American equivalent of MiG Alley, and I have no reason to doubt him; usually it's somewhere around Exit 7 when I recall just why it is that racers wear gloves. On the other hand, if anyone in Jersey ever cursed me (and that includes you, Susie Q), I don't remember it.

The magazine formerly known as Movieline, which is now passing itself off as Movieline's Hollywood Life, has gone to a larger-sized page format and has restarted its internal counter at Volume I, Number 1, but the really weird change is in the publishing schedule, which now reads like this:

By comparison, here is the same sort of passage from Mad, Volume I, Number 334 — founder William M. Gaines once said, "We'll never have a Volume 2," and he meant it — March/April 1995:

Before Gaines' death, they made no claim to "bi-monthly" anything; Number 105, September 1966, says this:

All this neatly obscures the fact that Mad actually came out on a regular schedule: every forty-five days. And the dates were chosen, reported Frank Jacobs in his biography of Gaines, to insure that no issue was ever actually on sale at newsstands during the month printed on its cover.

Of course, Gaines is gone, Mad is now taking ads and is coming out on a regular monthly cycle, but I've gotta wonder: Has Anne Volokh of MHL been influenced by The Usual Gang of Idiots?

Greg Hlatky relates an only-in-New Jersey sort of event:

Migod, I think I've actually stayed at that inn.

I've had fairly kind words for the Garden State during the week or so I've actually been there. Then again, I live in Oklahoma, which sometimes seems to run neck and neck with New Jersey as Official National Laughingstock, and I suppose this could affect my judgment in some way. But even allowing for this factor, I don't think I could come up with something quite like this (Hlatky again):

I live three miles from a former EPA Superfund site, so this impresses me perhaps less than it could.

Still, New Jersey was where I met Susanna Cornett, and New Jersey was the site of my first face-to-face meeting with the ineffable She Who Is Not To Be Named. ("Eff that," she said.) And no, neither one of them is actually from New Jersey, but what else can I do? Try to say something nice about Frank Lautenberg?

The ever-cheeky Page bills this as "Best. Headline. Ever." And, well, it is not advisable to disagree with Page, especially when she's right.

According to Entertainment Weekly (issue #710, 16 May), Rebecca "Mystique" Romijn-Stamos says that if she really could shape-shift, she'd like to become a guy — "just to see what it's like to pee standing up."

Yeah, that'll get my ten bucks for X3.

The major reason for redesigning American paper currency, we are assured, is to make counterfeiting more difficult.

Needless to say, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is not about to identify all the little technological tricks that go into the new bills, but Cam Edwards thinks he's found the secret ingredient.

So I looked at that number, blinked, and figured it must have been a punchline at some point or another:

But apparently it's for real, and belongs to this guy; it's not mentioned on his Web site, but it does appear in his ad on the back cover of one of our multitudinous local phone books.

It could be worse, I suppose. God forbid there should be, for instance, an anorexia support group at 1-877-2 GO BARF.

Canada's National Post reports that as many as three percent of Canadians feel some sexual attraction toward children, a figure obtained from the psychiatrists who treat sex offenders in the Great White North. This seems a bit high to me, and indeed the phrasing in the article — "up to 3%" — suggests that the bigger number is there just for bigger impact.

The Post story quotes Dr John Bradford, clinical director of forensic psychiatry and the sexual behaviours clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, as saying that statistically, a child is more likely to be killed by a parent than by a pedophile, a statement which set off Susanna Cornett's BS detector:

I don't know if the article was intended to whitewash pedophilia, but there's a definite air of "Why are we picking on these people? They're not violent or anything." Neither are embezzlers, generally, but we have no problem picking on them.

Pedophiles, in fact, have one thing in common with embezzlers: they've violated a trust, spat on a relationship that is fundamental to society. Whether or not they actually draw blood is irrelevant.

There's one great thing about working as a steward (ring attendant, more or less) at a dog show, says Greg Hlatky (21 May, 8:20 pm), who's done it:

Which reminds me: I heard a story that some woman in California, circa 1990, presumably new at this, took serious umbrage when both the steward and the judge referred to her sweet, innocent, inoffensive little pet as a bitch. How dare they? (I'd love to get some corroboration of this, should any exist.)

And I suppose I can see her point. I was once introduced to someone with a Bichon Frisé, and immediately asked, "Is that, like, French for frizzy bitch?" Maybe she'll speak to me again, but I doubt it.

If this Daily News item is to be believed, the Mayor of the City of New York has a major thang for Jennifer Lopez.

Of course, there's always room for J-Lo, but isn't Bloomberg already more or less spoken for? And what happens if, God forbid, Jenny lights up a Pall Mall while she's on the block?

(Via Fark)

Venomous Kate reports that not only is al-Qaeda's interest in biological and chemical weapons continuing, but the demand is being met by supply, and according to the Pentagon, the major suppliers are the Russians and the Chinese. Meanwhile, despite Code Orange Crush and increased "chatter", Americans seem no more concerned than usual. (Then again, didn't we invent "Out of sight, out of mind"?)

There is, of course, a national holiday coming up, and it's certainly not above your standard garden-variety terrorist to want to screw with it. On the other hand, a Memorial Day attack — on a day when we honor our war dead, fercrissake — might even piss off our pacifists.

According to a team of former financial advisers, Michael Jackson is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Union Finance and Investment Corporation, a South Korean firm with Los Angeles offices, has filed suit against the erstwhile King of Pop, claiming unpaid bills of over $12 million. According to the suit, Jackson had engaged Union to help him untangle his messy finances; Union subsequently discovered that Jackson was down to about two months' worth of available funds.

(Keep in mind that two months' worth on the Jackson scale would probably get most of us regular folk who might wear tennis shoes — or an occasional python boot — through a couple of years.)

A Jackson family attorney said he doubted that Michael Jackson's situation was all that dire, though he did add the caveat that "I cannot say it for 100 percent sure because nobody knows his financial statements."

Trial date is set for the 18th of June.

(Update, 11:10 pm: Tiger wants to know why, if MJ were truly bankrupt, this action couldn't be handled in bankruptcy court.)

Few people avoid the telephone as much as I do, but apparently Boathouse Group is just crammed full of kindred spirits, prompting this corporate nastygram:

I think we can safely assume that someone got Byrned.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

John at Collinization comes up with another reason to, in his words, "get the hell out of New York":

It's probably a good thing Mardi Gras isn't held in New York; they'd probably ban the parade because of the hazards of secondhand beads.

Okay, maybe not. Not yet, anyway.

In the meantime, if you want Martha Stewart's side of the story, she's posted her official denial on the Web, along with a letter from her legal team.

I need hardly point out that the design is simple, tasteful and elegant, though the color scheme rubs me the wrong way.

Kim du Toit will not give you a sample:

42nd and Treadmill routinely inflicts these things on all new hires, on the dubious basis that some of us may at some point be asked to drive a truck, but I suspect that anyone who's been here longer than a few weeks is getting a lot of prescriptions filled.

And sometimes without a prescription, even.

Jane Galt puzzles over the question of why Howell Raines left The New York Times in such a big hurry despite perfoming precisely according to Pinch Sulzberger's desires, and reaches a conclusion:

Not that this is likely to happen at the Times — or at any place I've ever worked, for that matter.

And whether you believe that blogs killed Howell Raines (a nice thought, but more than a trifle overblown, I think) or that he was brought down by simple hubris, it seems clear to me that the Times, at least for the short haul, is better off without him.

Max Power: the Greg Packer of his generation.

No, really.

The Council of Europe, one of those pesky non-governmental organizations that the UN and its friends so cherish, has come up with a notion that demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that if someone were to propose something like the First Amendment in the European Union, it would be laughed off the agenda in record time.

Declan McCullagh at CNET's News.com reports that the Council is about to adopt a measure which would demand that should a person or an organization be criticized on the Net, at a news site, on a listserv, even in a blog, the Webmaster or list-owner must make space available for a response to that criticism, what they call the "right of reply."

This is nothing particularly new for Europe. Many European countries have provisions similar to this for Old Media, and the U.S. used to have something like it — Section 315, the infamous "fairness doctrine" — before it was abolished in 1987. At the time, naysayers (myself included) warned that an end to the regulation would inevitably mean an end to controversial topics on television; a decade and a half later, even the most perfunctory slide through the dial shows it hasn't done any such thing.

And if this abomination is passed by the Council and enacted into law in a number of countries, it will be a sure sign that those countries are more interested in keeping feathers from being ruffled than in any recognizable form of free speech — and yet another indication that we are wise to seek our allies elsewhere.

Most of this Sandy McLendon piece at FlatRateTech deals with perceived weakness in Ford's customer service, but the penultimate paragraph extends way beyond Detroit:

(Via BlueOvalNews)

Your basic Scary Introduction: "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Or, if you're six-year-old Avigayil Wardein of Naples, Florida, "We're the cops and we've come to close down your lemonade stand."

Something about a permit. And the city says that they don't do this sort of thing "unless someone complains," so I have to assume someone was whining about it. Does Bill O'Reilly sell sodas on the sidewalk?

The Minneapolis/St Paul area is apparently awash in tenants who haven't the faintest idea about how to live up to the responsibilities detailed in their leases. Are Twin Cities landlords cracking down on the clueless? Fat chance.

However, in lieu of actual cultural changes, there's an operation called the Housing Lifeskills Centre, developed by a property manager, which is a six-week course to teach these characters how to behave in a manner which won't get their sorry keisters evicted. "A lot of the things we teach," says instructor Linda McNew, "are things that you or I take for granted."

Saint Paul (the blogger, not the city) is incredulous:

There are. And if you don't rent to them, you'll probably be accused of the worst sort of discriminatory tactics.

It's the same sort of devalued value system which says that no matter what your problem, it's always somebody else's fault, be it The System, The Government, or simply The Man.

There was a nice young couple (both military) who used to live upstairs from me; he dropped by the other day to visit some friends. "Nostalgic for the old homestead?" I teased. "A bit too much gunfire for us," he said.

Yeah, I'll get out of here one of these days — and not in an ambulance, if I can help it. But the problems that exist here, like their counterparts in Minnesota, aren't going away any time soon, no matter how many cute little programs are instituted.

The last line of the chorus of Deteriorata, the classic de-inspirational recording from the National Lampoon, is this:

More than just laughing, it appears.

Courtesy of Ravenwood:

It's not such a bad place, actually, so long as (1) you're buying something that never, ever has any defects and (2) you don't need the buying advice they don't actually provide.

Or used to, anyway.

(Via Hit & Run)

(Update, 7:30 pm: Bigwig has identified the creature, and it's not as dorky as he thought.)

Some of us put in a lot of hours of lab time in our day, but Margi grasps this basic truth of research intuitively:

Of course, to make it a more representative sample, we should probably get forty scientists. And I won't complain at all if someone wants to extend the study to, say, 535 Congresspersons.

Both Rust (Conservatives Suck) and Bruce (This Is Class Warfare) have reported on the changes in Federal overtime regulations proposed by the Bush administration. Neither of them is particularly happy about the plan. Said Bruce, apparently admonishing middle-management types:

And Rust observed:

I'm not especially thrilled with the proposal myself, although it's unlikely to affect me personally. Certainly the categories established for overtime exemption by the Depression-era Fair Labor Standards Act ("executive", "administrative" and "professional") are vague, and vagueness opens the door to abuse. But I do wonder why the ceiling for guaranteed overtime pay was set where it was ($22,100 per year). And some of the new qualifications are a bit perplexing: for instance, admin types, currently required to "exercise discretion and independent judgment" to be exempt, would merely have to occupy "a position of responsibility," doing work of ''substantial importance" or requiring "a high level of skill or training.''

I put in about 49 hours a week on average. My skill level is somewhere between tremendous and immeasurable; on the other hand, I'm even lower on the organizational chart than the Litho in U.S.A. label, and what I do seems to be important only if I don't actually do it.

I've avoided saying anything about the Blair Hornstine caper, mainly because every time I got my rhetorical ducks in a row, some new development moved the pond. Now that Harvard has decided not to accept her at all, not exactly a coda but certainly the last repeat, what the heck got into that girl?

The most rational explanation came at Number 2 Pencil, not from Kimberly Swygert herself, but from a commenter to this post of hers. Said Kate (no, not that Kate):

It makes perfect sense. And it probably would have worked, too, until they started complaining about the tie for valedictorian, and suddenly there was a reason to check her papers.

Good judgment, they say, comes from experience, which in turn comes from bad judgment. Score this one under Experience, and see if Miss Hornstine ultimately turns it to her advantage — but don't bet more than the spread.

While wandering around New Jersey last week, I spied a couple of signs that didn't make a whole lot of sense. "Keep New Jersey moving," they said, signed by Governor McGreevey. From the wording, this could be anything from a traffic-calming pitch to an ad for Metamucil, so I figured it was just McGreevey's way of reminding you that he's the governor on an otherwise useless sign.

Jeff Jarvis, however, finds them somewhat worse than useless:

I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation for this.

As a lede for a story, this is hard to top:

I'm sure there was more to it than that, but here's the backstory:

In 1864, the Confederate States of America was not doing as well as it had hoped, and Charleston Harbor had been effectively blockaded by Union forces. In response, the Confederacy had developed a submarine. CSS Hunley looked something like an old boiler converted for marine use, largely because it was. Its armament was equally low-tech: a front-mounted harpoon which would ram enemy vessels, leaving behind enough of an explosive charge to blow them up while the Hunley, they hoped, would back away in time.

It worked well enough in its one and only test: on 17 February 1864 the Hunley took out the Union blockade vessel USS Housatonic. The Hunley resurfaced briefly, but never returned to port, and lay on the bottom of Charleston Harbor for over a century. In 1995, divers found the sub, and in 2000, it was raised from the sea and sent to a laboratory near Charleston for study.

Which brings us to that time difference. The study team is trying to figure out how long the Hunley might have survived after the attack. Survivors from the Housatonic — only five sailors were lost to the Union — reported that the attack came between 8:45 and 9 pm. One of the artifacts recovered from the Hunley was the pocket watch carried by Lt. George Dixon, the sub's commanding officer. It's frozen at 8:23, presumably by the action of seawater.

The Confederacy, it seems, operated on local sun time; at the time, all US naval vessels were synchronized to sun time at Washington, DC. The difference between the two is about twenty-six minutes. The attack on the Housatonic took at most five minutes; if it began at 8:45 Union time — 8:19 local Charleston time — it's possible that the Hunley was so heavily damaged itself by the attack that only the one brief surfacing was possible before the sub was dragged off to Davy Jones' locker.

It's probably more than 26 minutes too early to say for sure, but this explanation seems plausible enough, unless perhaps you're a descendant of Lt. Dixon or one of his crewmen.

Oh, and standard time zones were implemented across the States in 1883.

(Suggested by Fark)

If you're a guy, the OkiePundit is not interested in seeing your rump:

Don't ask me. I'm still trying to decide if "ugly-ass", in this context, is redundant.

When my daughter and I talk, topics fly fast and furiously, and somewhere alongside the consideration of convertibles, real estate and the perfidy of Toyota starters, she wondered: "Would there be this much news coverage if the power went off in the middle of the country?"

I thought for a moment, then answered: "Well, yes, but most of it would be on The Weather Channel, because we'd be in the middle of a farging ice storm."

In the background, I can hear the air conditioner kicking in.

We get another crummy C-60 ostensibly from Osama, and the world goes spastic once more.

Is it real? According to Venomous Kate, it may not matter:

Heracles, presented with exactly this task, called upon an ally: Iolaus, his charioteer, who stood off to the side with a torch. When Heracles lopped off a head, Iolaus was there to burn the stump to prevent regrowth. The last head, it is said, was immortal, so Heracles buried it beneath a boulder.

And just to prove that this ancient tale has contemporary resonance: Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, for whom Heracles had performed this task and nine others as ordered, refused to release Heracles from his bond: not only did Heracles actually get help with dealing with the Hydra, but he had tried to turn a profit on the cleaning of the Augean stables.

The beast can be — will be — killed. But don't expect to meet cost projections, or to garner more than perfunctory support, along the way.

Health-O-Meter, a leading manufacturer of bathroom scales (so to speak), has introduced a new product line which will record weights up to 400 lb.

With two-thirds of us overweight, at least according to the bean counters of the Nanny State and the minions of the insurance industry, who seem to think we all should look like Kate Moss after a long weekend, it was probably inevitable. The real need, I think, is for scales that read in stone, which, at least to non-British ears, might seem less accusative: "Twenty-eight stone? Doesn't sound so bad."

(Via Fark)

Speaking of Indiana, it presents some unusual problems for travelers on a schedule: of the state's 92 counties, only fifteen observe Daylight Saving Time, and some of them are in the Central time zone. (Most of Indiana is on Eastern Standard Time year-round.) A business/labor/trade alliance which spent a year and a half trying to persuade the state government to switch to DST has finally thrown in the towel; the General Assembly won't budge.

Not being keen on DST myself — you can't cut off one end of a rope and tie it to the other and expect it to be any longer when you're through — I doff my hat to those stubborn Hoosiers.

(Via Fark)

"Would there be this much news coverage if the power went off in the middle of the country?"

This was my daughter's question while watching the anguished reports from the darkened Big Apple. The answer, from E. Henry Thripshaw:

The coasts, as Susanna says, just don't get it.

Dawn at Altered Perceptions explains everything you always wanted to know about Health Maintenance Organizations.*

* but asking wasn't approved by the oversight committee. **

** I owe Tiger royalties for this shtick.

Julian Sanchez reports in Hit & Run that former Senator Robert Torricelli, a "man with the dubious dual distinction of being sleazy by the standards of both politics and New Jersey," has found happiness after Congress as a Trenton power broker. Said Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers, "He's now in a position to make the money without the public scrutiny." The Torch, in fact, has wangled for himself the responsibility for an environmental cleanup site in Jersey City, a position which will enhance both his stature and his bank account.

And speaking of the environment, Anna Quindlen has a suggestion for dealing with wild bears who wander into suburban yards:

"Gee, Yogi, aren't we getting awful close to Route 130?"

"Don't worry, Boo-Boo-boy, they don't issue building permits anymore. We can have a pic-a-nic anywhere we want."

According to Bigwig, there was supposed to be a (not quite) earth-shattering Kaboom.

The Register has some idea:

And what it spends the money on, evidently, is mechanisms to defend itself from the Real World:

Where's Romenesko when you need him?

Apparently I am farther behind the times than I had realized.

It's been an article of faith in these parts that lining one's hat with aluminum is the surest way to ward off the sort of mind-control beams that are routinely used against us by enemies both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. But time and technologies wait for no one, and, at least with regard to certain classes of extraterrestrials, a more effective screen is made with 3M's Velostat™ electroconductive shielding material.

3M, needless to say, makes no such representations with regard to its product, but of course it can't.

(Via Cruel Site of the Day)

I wasn't there on the morning of the 11th; I was doing the same old workaday stuff that I always do. But the radio was on, I was half-listening, and suddenly the voices got higher and more agitated and eventually it sunk in that the world had changed right then and there.

There are many stories from that day. Some of the best of them are collected at Voices: Stories From 9/11 And Beyond, which surely you've read by now. And as of this afternoon, I'd thought it over, and decided I had nothing to add to the discussion, nothing to say I was willing to call my own.

And then the floodgates opened and the words followed in rapid succession.

It was written on the night of the 9th, but it's dated September 11th, and it's up now as Vent #356. I'm not sure if it's the best thing I've ever written, or the worst. Probably it's somewhere in between. One thing for sure: it's an object lesson in what happens when you try to retain too much composure for too long a time.

(I owe this one to Michele; the strength she's shown in collecting and compiling the stories — and in putting the fools in their proper place — has been truly inspirational.)

Why, you try to convince everyone on earth that you've got the Hottest Brand Going.

Even if what you're selling is nothing more than air.

Just when I thought the book had been closed on the University of Mississippi's Colonel Reb, up pops a new chapter.

Chris Lawrence was trying to avoid the topic himself, until he found this site, and found it annoying:

On the other side, Patrick Carver, blogging as The Ole Miss Conservative, says his objections to the change aren't rooted in tradition, per se:

Lawrence, in an updated post, pointed out that this is basically the way the Ole Miss administration works on almost every issue.

After that CSS Hunley story I posted yesterday, and in view of some comments I've seen around blogdom in the past, I'm beginning to wonder just how much anti-Southern sentiment there is — not against the region itself, but against its trappings, its mores, its differences from those parts of the country which by dint of sheer media concentration dominate the culture, and whether some of that sentiment has actually penetrated below the Mason-Dixon line. It's not an organized movement, to be sure, but I have a gut feeling that some of our cultural arbiters have decided that some things are, well, just too Southern, and I suspect some Southerners are thinking that Reconstruction is still going on.

And I have to wonder, as people bail out of Boswash because it's too expensive and out of California because it's totally farging insane, if the newly-empowered South will bear a grudge.

(4:40 pm: Rewritten slightly to discourage conspiracy theorists.)

Jesse Youngblood, you've just pulled off a bank heist, and you've gotten away with a cool thousand. What are you going to do now?

You say you're going to deposit some of the loot in your account at the same bank?

BZZZT!

Wrong answer.

(Via Fark)

For some reason, an inordinate number of clueless Googlers™ are coming here looking for the current (2003 edition) Forbes 400.

They should be looking at Forbes.com — specifically, here.

The person living directly over you has both a taste for hip-hop and a subwoofer.

The Feds do not have the authority to set up a so-called "do not call" list to block telemarketing; Judge Lee R. West has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission, which established the list, exceeded its authority in so doing.

A suit filed in Oklahoma City, a town where call centers seemingly outnumber taverns but trail churches, had challenged the FTC. Plaintiffs included a number of telemarketers and the Direct Marketing Association.

(Advantage: Fusilier Pundit, who anticipated legal issues with the list.)

In the meantime, I'm not home.

The Joint Operating Agreement between The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is still on.

Under the provisions of the twenty-year-old JOA, the Seattle Times Company handles advertising, production and circulation for both papers, and the profits are split 60-40. (It was originally 68-32, but the agreement was amended in 1999 to compensate for the Times' move to morning publication.) The Times sought to end the JOA this year, citing three consecutive years of losses; Hearst, the owner of the P-I, filed suit to block the Times. Today a King County Superior Court judge sided with Hearst and its claim that the losses suffered by both papers in 2000 were an extraordinary event, brought on by a seven-week strike; the JOA makes specific allowance for such events.

Hearst insists that the P-I cannot go it alone; Times management claims Hearst is trying to bleed them dry and then buy them out. (A separate agreement between the papers gives Hearst first crack at buying the Times.)

JOAs generally are in decline; fewer than half of the agreements set up since the passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act in 1970 are still in force. The Tulsa World used to be in a JOA with the rival Tulsa Tribune, but the Trib closed in 1992. Daniel Gross, writing in Slate, says the concept has overstayed its welcome:

And if the P-I subsequently goes under, at least one blogger won't miss it. Says the Timekeeper:

The Seattle JOA provides that should the P-I fold, Hearst can go on collecting 32 percent of the profits from the Times for the next 80 years. Maybe they can use some of that gelt to improve the product at the Chronicle. (Which Chronicle — San Francisco's or Houston's — doesn't matter at this point.)

What's with all these bad hair days lately?

(Yeah, I know: I'm just jealous because they have hair, and it's probably not a whiter shade of pale either. And no, I will not speculate as to the condition of their legs, either.)

It's inevitable; within two or three years, the majority of ATMs will be running Windows.

I wonder if Popeye's takes PayPal?

(Muchas gracias: Combustible Boy.)

The Segway has now truly arrived as an American transportation device: it's being recalled. Apparently when it gives you the Low Battery warning, it's not kidding, and sudden changes in power demand after the warning can cause the machine to buck or stall, a situation which has reportedly caused three falls.

The solution, says Segway, is a free software upgrade. Maybe. You'll still never get me on one of those things.

"Of course," she mused, "I can always take matters into my own hands."

(Via Cruel Site of the Day)

A federal judge has decided that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the Washington Redskins disparage Native Americans, and therefore the trademark on their name remains valid, despite a move to revoke it.

I'm waiting for someone to file suit against the New York Giants, claiming that despite the name, they aren't in fact any taller than anyone else in the NFC East.

(Muchas gracias: Phillip Coons.)

For a while, anyway, it's just going to be Siegfried and, while Roy remains on the critical list after one of their famed white tigers turned on him during a performance.

It's a reminder that no matter how many precautions are taken beforehand, the art of illusion is very nearly as dangerous as it looks, and we probably wouldn't pay any attention to it if it didn't look dangerous. (The same is true of auto racing, only more so.) Still, that's not any kind of argument for abandoning the spectacle; it's just the way it is, and Roy knows this as well as anyone. He'll be back soon enough.

The world may not beat a pathway to your door, but you'll earn the gratitude of Dr. Weevil, and surely that's worth something.

VeriSign has issued a flurry of defenses of its temporarily-sidelined SiteFinder service, criticized in some quarters as being inimical to the proper operation of the Net.

While part of VeriSign's argument is technical — SiteFinder, they insist, has minimal impact on the rest of the Net — at the heart of the matter is not bits, but bucks:

So saith VeriSign senior VP Mark McLaughlin. And he doesn't stop there, either:

Which leads to the obvious question: Who should be pulling the strings, the techies or the money men? VeriSign obviously has decided on their answer.

From the Government Is Your Friend files, courtesy of South Africa's News24:

Disturbing visual: US Postmaster General John E. Potter giving himself a mock dope-slap and saying, "Why the hell didn't we think of that?"

You will, John, you will.

(Inspired by Jerry Scharf)

The most expensive ZIP code, says Forbes, is not Beverly Hills 90210 or New York 10021; it's Jupiter Island, Florida 33455, where the median house price last year was a staggering $5.6 million, more than twice as high as second-place Aspen, Colorado 81611.

If you read this chart and feel dejected, come to Oklahoma City, where living in our toniest ZIP — 73116 — will set you back a modest $295,416.

Disclosure: While I once had a 90254 mailing address, I did not actually live in Hermosa Beach ($580,000).

(Via DiVERSiONZ)

Desiree Goodwin is a research assistant in the Harvard University library system; she's been there nine years, and she's still a research assistant because, she says, she's black and she's beautiful.

Neither the EEOC nor the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination has found sufficient reason to challenge Harvard with Goodwin's complaint, so she's filed suit against the university herself.

"White women wore sexy clothes, were outgoing, attractive and they were getting mentored and getting promoted, while I was being ignored and asked to work extra hours," Goodwin says. "I think it is racist because they feel threatened by the success of someone they don't feel is like them."

She approached her supervisor, and was allegedly told that "her skimpy clothing and zealous search for promotion" had made her a "joke among her...colleagues" and that she could easily get a job anywhere else.

I'm thinking there's something here we're not being told.

Meanwhile, I refuse to believe there has ever existed such a thing as an excessively-sexy librarian. And if you don't believe me, ask Professor Harold Hill (no relation).

(Via Fark)

(Update, 21 March 2005: More recent developments here.)

(Update, 4 April 2005: She's lost her case.)

(Update, 9 December 2005: This post says nothing new, but it has a picture; her LISNews.org interview is here.)

I've driven on Massachusetts rotaries and New Jersey jughandles, and when I have, I've wondered, "Criminy, could they possibly make things any worse?"

Somehow, I managed to miss the Michigan Left.

(Via Altered Perceptions)

(Update, 8:30 pm, 14 October: The Webmaster of michiganhighways.org is grateful for the extra traffic, but he wonders about the hostility level. [You may need a Yahoo! account to read this.])

Former Kentucky state senator John Doug Hays is under indictment for vote fraud; prosecutors wanted to try him in Frankfort, the state capital, rather than in Pikeville, near Hays' home, out of fear that they couldn't raise a proper (read "prone to convict") jury on the senator's home turf. A temporary compromise was reached, and the case was moved to London, Kentucky.

A defense motion to move the trial back to Pikeville was met with objections from the prosecution, citing worries about pre-trial publicity. And then US Attorney Kenneth R. Taylor unleashed this bombshell: after everyone with an opinion on the case had been disqualified, he said, "all that would remain to try the case would be illiterate cave dwellers."

Sheesh. It's National Brotherhood Week, fercryingoutloud.

(Suggested by Fark)

The often-bombastic Robert Scheer opens with "Free Rush Limbaugh!" and explains why:

Why, indeed?

At least Scheer isn't calling for Limbaugh's head on a pike, unlike some on the left.

It's Saddam himself, of course; no mere tank car full of chemicals or hut stuffed with warheads could have caused the horrendous damage that routinely accrued to Saddam's discredit.

Robert Prather has passed along an email from a Marine stationed in Baghdad who says that from what he's seen, Saddam made "Hitler look like a schoolboy." Is the continuing occupation worth the cost in American lives? Says this American on the scene:

What you really want to read, though, is the story of his encounter with a young Iraqi woman whose entire family was destroyed by the Baath party because, as Christians, they might be expected to side with the US.

I should think that would be enough "mass destruction" to fit anyone's definition.

The last box — the one which will be lowered six feet into the earth amid whispers of "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" — may no longer be adequate. As Americans bulk up, the standard 24-inch casket is becoming a tighter fit than a coach seat on a 737. Nor is cremation necessarily the answer: think "grease fire."

Goliath (!) Caskets of Lynn, Indiana manufactures a 52-inch casket, known informally (and perhaps inevitably) as the "B-52". It won't fit in a three-foot cemetery plot, to be sure, and instead of half a dozen pallbearers, you might need twelve or fifteen.

I'm starting to appreciate Lou Grant's comment: "When the time comes, just stand me outside in the trash can with my hat on."

As Al Franken can tell you, Fox News can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.

On NPR's Fresh Air, Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, revealed that Fox News had threatened a lawsuit (against, presumably, Fox Television, which owns The Simpsons) over a brief parody of an FNC newscast.

Regular viewers, of course, will note that The Simpsons has always mocked all things Fox unmercifully, having even written Rupert Murdoch into a script or two, with no complaints from the front office. Murdoch, it appears, has thicker skin than Roger Ailes. (And your average condom, it appears, has thicker skin than Bill O'Reilly.)

Eventually, FNC backed down, though they warned that the fake news crawl might, um, "confuse the viewers." Yeah, right. Maybe when Sean Hannity is on.

(Via Hit & Run)

(Update, 31 October, 7 pm: Groening now admits that he was pulling our chains. As always, at the base of the most effective satire — and given the way so many of us were sucked in, this has to be considered effective — there's a core of solid truth: yes, Fox News is that thin-skinned. Ask Al Franken.)

I always figured someone would eventually sue Michael Moore over Bowling for Columbine, but I didn't figure it would be a relative of an Oklahoma City bombing conspirator.

James Nichols — he's Terry Nichols' brother, living in Michigan — says Moore interviewed him and deceived him about what he planned to do with the interview. He accuses Moore of libel, defamation of character, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. If you've seen the film, Nichols is the chap who tells Moore he's got a gun under his pillow.

The esteemed Greg Hlatky describes a prosthesis for pets, and in so doing answers that age-old question: "What do you do with a dog with three balls?"

Silly me. I always thought that you walked him and pitched to the muskrat.

According to Weird NJ, the central point of weirdness in Hudson County is, yes, Jersey City.

No comment so far from Susanna Cornett, who understandably is fleeing to Alabama.

(Via Fark)

He was called Don Juan de Oñate, and he was the first of the conquistadors who decided to stay.

In 1993, sculptor John Houser was commissioned to create a statue of Don Juan, three stories tall, for the center of El Paso, Texas. "Without Oñate," says Mary Davis of the El Paso Mission Trail Association, "we would have no missions, no El Paso or Juárez, no beautiful Hispanic culture, no New Mexico."

Just the same, the El Paso City Council has decided that Oñate doesn't deserve a memorial after all; Houser's sculpture, when it's finished, will carry no references to Don Juan, and will be stuck out at the airport.

What happened? In 1599, at Acoma Pueblo near present-day Gallup, New Mexico, seventy Spaniards under Oñate, having picked up a story that the native Acoma planned to wipe out the Spanish colony, stormed the Acoma fortress. They were outnumbered roughly twenty to one, but Oñate's men prevailed, inflicting heavy casualties and, say some historians, visiting cruelty upon the survivors.

John Kessell, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico, finds the controversy curious:

But "sensitivity" carried the day, and Don Juan de Oñate, now just "The Equestrian", will be exiled to some point out of sight and out of mind.

(Via Tongue Tied)

United Air Lines, still slogging through financial turbulence, has christened its new low-fare subsidiary "Ted", which by some strange coincidence is the last half of "United".

This looks like a good excuse to bring back Braniff and chop off all but the first letters; depending on where you set the blade, you can target Metamucil-slurping oldsters or chase after Hooters Air customers.

(Via Fark)

One of the Major Utilities around here found themselves with a service order and insufficient information to fill it, or so they thought, so they tried to call me on the old land line. I know this because their phone number turned up on Caller ID.

What's interesting here is that you can't call them back; you dial the number given, you get the standard tripartite tone and then the canned voice of the intercept operator telling you that this number has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Then, of course, the same number shows up the next day as having called again.

This sort of screwing around with the general public really ought to be barred — or, alternatively, made available to the rest of us.

A number of property owners in Park County, Wyoming are asking that the county commissioners do something about the name of the road that runs past their land.

Park County has adopted an alphanumeric system for roads that previously bore no name, and the one that's causing all the stir is County Road 6FU. Residents are embarrassed; vandals steal the road signs as a matter of course.

The commissioners have asked for suggestions for a new name.

(Via Fark)

The Oklahoma Observer ran this in the 25 November issue, credited to the ever-ubiquitous Anon.; I don't know where it originated, but a test Googling brought up two copies from different states. Make of it what you will.

(May Kimberly Swygert forgive me.)

Edgar Bronfman Jr., who once transformed Canada's Seagram beverage operation into an entertainment giant by buying MCA/Universal, subsequently selling out to the French conglomerate Vivendi, is back in the business again, outbidding Britain's EMI to acquire Time Warner's Warner Music Group, the fourth largest music company.

Bronfman's group of investors will pay approximately $2.6 billion (US) for the Warner Bros., Atlantic, Elektra, and associated labels, plus Warner's music-publishing operation.

The Big Five will shrink to Four next year, when Sony Music and Bertlesmann Music Group merge to form Sony BMG.

"Two in the non-breast-feeding section, please."

Burger King says that, um, exposing one's whoppers is permissible.

Although you can't, I presume, use two hands to handle them.

(Muchas gracias: hln.)

For he hath been dipping his wick in places he ought not.

(I never have had much faith in antiporn activists, personally.)

(Via Fark)

From the journal Eurotrash:

We pause to imagine (if it's not too close to dinnertime) PETA boss Ingrid Newkirk in full tingle.

Now that you've, um, enjoyed that visual, try this Gedanken experiment: Should vegans swallow?

Why, no, I didn't get anything for my birthday. Why do you ask?

(And, while we're on the subject, is it kosher?)

MSN Search has me #5 for i am a schmuck.

Who knew?

Relapsed Catholic reports (8 December) on this most vivid example of the Law of Unintended Consequences in action:

Of course, persons in wheelchairs are de facto saints, and their actions are not subject to criticism by those of us who can (more or less) walk. That said, I think it's a safe bet that Mr. Busybody is utterly indifferent to the plight of the victims of the collapse.

(Muchas gracias: Christopher Johnson.)

I understand very little about TMJ dysfunction — so far as I can figure, the temporomandibular joints are a bit more complicated than, say, the constant-velocity joints on my car, and I understand them hardly at all — but I somehow doubt that treatments related to the TMJ will have any effect on dyslexia, despite this bald assertion:

Sounds like two parts chiropractic, one part P. T. Barnum to me.

(Muchas gracias: I Speak of Dreams.)

The Arab street is not happy these days, which doesn't necessarily explain why the Minneapolis Star Tribune felt compelled to put in an inquiry to Ahmed Samatar, dean of international studies at Macalester College. Dr. Samatar explained that many of the Muslims he knows were disgusted by the Department of Defense video of the captured Saddam Hussein, not so much because they sympathize with Saddam or excuse his behavior, but because, reported the Strib, "Islamic culture places great emphasis on respecting the dignity of all human beings, even a defeated enemy, perhaps especially a defeated enemy."

Were this true, I would have to wonder why it is that the keepers of the Islamic cultural flame haven't taken steps to expel, or at least chastise, the ostensible Palestinians, whose respect for dignity continues to be conspicuous by its absence.

Ottumwa, Iowa, a picturesque town on the Des Moines River, does not like pit bull terriers: they are classified as a "dangerous animal" and are banned within the city limits.

This is not, in itself, particularly unusual. What's weird here is that the city seems to be extending the very definition of the breed. The promotional material for the Southeastern Iowa Kennel Club's February shows, to be held in Ottumwa, reprints what is represented as the pertinent city ordinance [requires Adobe Acrobat Reader], and this is what Ottumwa apparently considers to be a "pit bull":

As far as the American Kennel Club is concerned, these are three separate breeds of dog. (The AKC does not register American Pit Bull Terriers.) More to the point, "Heinz 57" mutts are banned if they have any ancestors among these breeds, whether or not any breed characteristics can be discerned in an individual dog. The dog shows in Ottumwa will not accept any entries for any of these breeds.

In late summer, a lawsuit was filed against the city challenging the ordinance.

Terriers, by nature, have a certain amount of attitude: they do tend to push their envelope just a bit. This is part of what makes them terriers, and indeed a meek dog is likely to be marked down by a terrier judge at a show. But attitude does not equal viciousness, and ordinances such as Ottumwa's, I think, ignore the fact that any animal can become vicious if it is ill-treated, and this is is the fault, not of the dog, but of the dog's owner. I've known too many sweet-tempered Rottweilers to believe anything else.

From the official breed standard for the Brittany, as published by the American Brittany Club:

Jon Hammer, a New York City lawyer who wasn't getting any show points for his Brittany because her tail was ten inches long, sued the breed club and the American Kennel Club, arguing that docking the tail constituted a form of animal cruelty, barred under New York law.

This week, the state Court of Appeals, by a 6-0 vote, told him to get his tail out of the courtroom.

Maybe it's just me, but I tend to think that a lot of the whimpering about the discovery of one whole case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka "mad-cow disease") in the entire US comes from one panicked subset of the population: the people who think we shouldn't be eating anything more complicated than walnuts in the first place.

Meanwhile, here in the Land of the Thousand-Dollar Grill, while there's some reasonable amount of uncertainty at the production end of the business, actual sales are steady so far. I don't eat quite as much of the stuff as I used to — in truth, I don't eat quite as much of anything as I used to — but it's going to take a lot more than one case of BSE to get me to give up on it.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) says he wouldn't go to Times Square tonight "for anything".

Says Shays, "I wouldn't go into places when you're packed and where if there was panic, a lot of injuries would take place."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, pointing out that former POW Shoshana Johnson would be part of the New Year's celebration, suggested that Shays give her a call and "learn a little bit about courage."

As bombast and bluster goes, this is all very well and good, but what I want to know is this: does Shays smoke? If so, he's probably not going to want to go to New York under any circumstances.

Sinclair Broadcast Group's News Central concept has been controversial from the beginning; in fact, last summer Sinclair's VP/General Counsel Barry Faber found himself defending the operation [requires Adobe Reader] before the presumably-skeptical Senate Commerce Committee.

Well, I'd like to think I'm at least as skeptical as a Senator, so I figured the least I could do was to check out a News Central broadcast, which I did last night at 9 pm on Sinclair's KOKH-TV, the Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City.

My most immediate reaction, actually, was marveling at the ingenuity of it all: the KOKH-TV news set is essentially identical to Sinclair's News Central set in Baltimore County, Maryland, and although you never see the local anchor and the News Central anchor sitting together trading quips — given the amount of this that goes on at other local stations, I'm inclined to think this is an improvement — it's never blatantly obvious that the newscast is pasted together from separate segments. (Take away 16 minutes from the hour for commercials, and the balance between national and local segments seems to be split about 3-2.)

I have some concerns, most about weather: for instance, is the guy from AccuWeather, which provides the lion's share of News Central weather reportage, going to know about sudden storms out here in Tornado Alley fast enough to issue the appropriate warnings? Then again, none of the three big radio groups in town have any weather facilities of their own — they rely on the local TV stations to provide their forecasts and updates — so I have to assume that News Central has given the matter some thought, and next time we have spectacularly crappy weather (right now, it's merely cold), I will check.

Then there's The Point, the commentary by Sinclair's VP/corporate relations Mark Hyman. Hyman leans decidedly right, which doesn't bother me; however, he has that patented Fox News snarkier-than-thou smirk, which does. (Note to television executives: If you're gonna rip off the Fox News Channel, rip off its most appealing feature: news babes in outfits that seem scantier than they really are.) I'm not sure how well this will play in markets less conservative than Oklahoma City, which is, well, almost all of them.

Local news, as the estimable Laurence Simon reminds us, is intended as a profit center; any public-service considerations are secondary. Obviously Sinclair hopes to make its local newscasts profitable, and this is the path they've chosen. People with impeccable journalistic credentials will look at it and recoil in horror: "They've taken away the local angle!" I'm not so sure. If the "local angle" demands that three minutes be spent on interviewing the neighbor of someone who was shot by the cops — which happened last night on some other station — I'm happy to see it taken away.

Somebody at the editing console at WFAA-TV in Dallas — well, no, that's wrong, because apparently there wasn't anybody editing that day.

You'll need Windows Media Player to see the actual video clip.

(Via Cruel Site of the Day)

Last Minute Network Ltd, a British online travel vendor, managed to irritate some Web surfers with some pseudo-King James pitches; said surfers complained to the UK's Advertising Standards Association. A sample:

Not funny, especially, and, saith the ASA, not offensive, particularly. Which makes sense, I suppose: everyone talked like that in 1611.

The Federal Communications Commission has called AT&T Wireless on the carpet for falling down on number portability; the Death Star, meanwhile, is telling customers that there may be as much as a five-day delay in moving numbers between cell carriers.

When it doesn't take six weeks, that is.

And this time, you get to see the, um, inner workings, because it doesn't do the math for you.

Ready?

Which Democratic primary candidate are you — in bed?

(Not suitable for all ages or workplaces; via Doc Searls.)

What's that? Oh, me? I'm an intriguing (or possibly nauseating) mix of Joe Lieberman and Carol Moseley-Braun.

A filler item in The Oklahoman read like this:

As noted by yours truly back in March 1998, www.socialsecurity.org is the Cato Institute's privatization page.

I would advise area Social Security recipients to log on to the correct Internet site when seeking information about their Social Security benefits or Medicare services.

A bill to legalize tattooing in South Carolina has passed the state Senate, and a longtime opponent in the House has apparently dropped his opposition, pending the adoption of his recommended amendment.

Should the Palmetto State make body art legal, it will be the 49th state to do so. I need hardly point out who's holding out.

What's the worst possible telephone number you can imagine?

If the first thing you come up with is 867-5309, you might want to check with these folks.

(Courtesy of my infamous old pal Dull N. Boring. No credit for knowing what the N is for.)

From Miscellaneous, Etc., a Friday Five item engages the Rage Reflex:

Of course, here in Oklahoma, we're more interested in suing over license plates than in agonizing over them, but maybe it's because they cost so much here to begin with that we're disinclined to spend the extra $25 or so.

For the record, I briefly entertained the idea of a vanity plate — "DCXXVI", if you're curious — but decided I would likely get rear-ended by some fool on the Belle Isle Bridge trying to decipher the damned thing.

It's called the Cabin Fever Cluster, and it's a four-day weekend of dog shows in Muncie, Indiana.

Except this year. The Horizon Convention Center decided that they couldn't risk hosting the shows because of their new carpeted floor, and the clubs involved weren't about to put down plastic sheeting and watch a thousand dogs slip and slide all over the place.

I wonder if Greg Hlatky was planning to bring any Borzoi to Muncie.

It's a new year, and once again we have a new health-insurance carrier at 42nd and Treadmill; CFI Care (not its real initials) is out and the Mrs Grace L. Ferguson Preferred Provider Network and Storm Door Company (not its real name) is in.

A quick look at the copays: doctor's office visit, up $5; my usual generic drugs, up $4; my usual name-brand drugs, down $2. The details, of course, determine the location of the devil. But I'm pretty sure FergNet won't have a coverage manual where the addendum pages nearly outnumber the original pages.

Former Jethro Tull keyboard player David Palmer would like to inform you that following successful sexual-reassignment surgery, she wishes to be known as Dee.

This presumably kills any chance of a Songs from the Wood reunion tour.

The vision of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools is "to become the top-performing school district in the nation."

Posting the honor roll apparently conflicts with this vision, or at least with the vision of the district's lawyers: Tennessee's privacy laws, they say, forbid releasing any academic information unless prior permission is given for each item disclosed.

At least one Nashville principal seems happy with the restriction: Dr Steven Baum of Julia Green Elementary School, "a school for Thought and Thoughtfulness" which serves comparatively upscale students, says that "if there are some children that always make it and others that always don't make it, there is a very subtle message that was sent."

(Via Joanne Jacobs, who suggests that the motivation is the fear of lawsuits by the parents of mediocre students.)

Catherine Bosley, the Ohio newsanchor who took off her clothes [link highly unsafe for work] during her Key West vacation and gave up her job after the photos were circulated on the Net, is defended by Mike Pechar:

I'd agree with Mike that her behavior wasn't immoral — there are times when it's darn hard to keep clothes on me [visual not safe for anyone] — but I can see how the station management might have panicked: anything that might cost a tenth of a ratings point is to be avoided no matter what.

I had originally written something here about how difficult it might be to take Bosley seriously as a newscaster if all the guys are imagining what she looks like in her birthday suit, but it occurred to me about mid-sentence that guys probably do this routinely anyway.

There's a tendency to expect our heroes to have feet of clay — we are a cynical species at times, which I believe to be a survival mechanism — but seldom do we envision that said clay might go past the ankles, past the belt-line, all the way to the scalp.

Which may or may not have something to do with how Donna finds her fondness for the Monkees more shaken than stirred.

(Addendum, 2:15 pm: Speaking of Donna, she's pulled her picture off her front page; if you're going through withdrawal symptoms as a result, you might take a peek at the logo at Wonkette.)

This is what shows up on Caller ID when somebody is trying to sell you something.

Or anyway, what used to show up; the new Federal rules governing telemarketing require, as of today, that an actual phone number be sent, and, if their telephone-service provider is so equipped, the name of the firm calling in.

Three calls today to my landline, as follows:

11:59 am: No name given, but an 800 number. (I was subsequently able to identify the number as coming from Fleet's credit-card operation.)

1:20 pm: Local number, identified as The Oklahoma Publishing Company, presumably selling subscriptions to The Oklahoman. (Calls from OPUBCO have been consistently identified as such since I got this number in early December.)

5:23 pm: Listed as "Anonymous Call", presumably using a block.

About once a week, I get a call from a "local" number with a 555 prefix. (Yes, I know, but that's what it says.) I once tried calling it back, and was told by the intercept operator that the call could not be completed. I will shed no tears if this practice has been outlawed.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that Jodie Allen of US News and World Report, part of the panel this morning on The Diane Rehm Show, said that the WMD intelligence obtained by the US before the invasion of Iraq was "overexaggerated."

And if I'd been paying closer attention to the show, I might have fired off an email asking how much exaggeration was considered appropriate.

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

Exeunt omnes.

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

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

This is the crux of the high-carb biscuit:

Eighteen stone equals 252 pounds.

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

Remind me to grill a rib-eye this evening.

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

Just asking.

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

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

"This is not what you may wish"?

I assure you, the decision is not entirely mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Ravenwood's Universe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two words: "area rugs."

(Via Fark)

The myrmidons of The Washington Times are quick to point out that while the paper was indeed founded by members of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, Moon himself does not exert editorial control. And this would seem to be at least partly true: for instance, the Times endorsed the war in Iraq, which Moon has opposed.

Still, I wonder sometimes how closely Moon watches what's going on. Today I pulled up this Mark Steyn piece from the Times' Web site, and the page load halted partway through. A popup box then appeared to advise me that Korean-language support (!) was going to be loaded. I've never seen that before at the Times.

(If you want to read the Steyn article, which nicely skewers John Kerry, I suggest you use this link instead.)

American Greetings, perhaps in a hurry to get the shipment to Wal-Mart before the Sons of Sam pitched a fit, accidentally misprinted a batch of SpongeBob SquarePants Valentine cards, rendering the young aquatic fellow, not in his usual diaper-interior yellow, but in the deepest ebony.

Or perhaps not. Printing for these is outsourced to China, and presumably they wouldn't know SpongeBob from dim sum.

(Snarfed from Tongue Tied)

John Leo sneers at it:

Well, it's not quite that simple:

Still, whatever the motivations, the result is pretty much what Leo describes. Having spent a brief period many years ago without a roof over my head, I rather think I'd be incensed at being effectively walled off from part of the city. On the other hand, I don't think Kansas City aspires to be the next San Francisco, either.

When last we left former news anchor Catherine Bosley, she had resigned her position at an Ohio television station.

Now Mike Pechar reports that Bosley is suing a number of Web sites that have been carrying the photos of her taken at that infamous Key West party, hoping to stop distribution. Says Pechar, it's probably too little, too late; is there anyone who hasn't seen them?

The general thinking around here is mostly "How do we get Amy McRee to take her clothes off?"

Mickey D's will no longer supersize it.

Walt Riker, speaking for McDonald's, explains:

Of course, if you really want to be frustrated at McDonald's, try ordering a Quarter Pounder without cheese. (I did find a location in suburban Indianapolis that didn't flinch at the request, but that's a long way to go for a burger.)

Could there possibly be a game more blatantly racist than chess?

Look at the very beginning. White moves first, thereby taking the offensive; Black must wait for White's first move, and then must defend against it.

Of course, you can always change the rules, but then it wouldn't be chess, would it?

Gee, I hope Pejman doesn't find out about this.

(Via Tongue Tied)

Over at Fraters Libertas, Atomizer is happy to tell you what's wrong with this Star Tribune editorial about the Twin Cities transit strike. Says the Strib:

Atomizer lists a few folks the Strib forgot (or chose not) to mention:

Most of us, I suspect, would rather deal with the rest of the world on our own terms at our preferred times. One of the most annoying traits of the present-day American left, I think, is its tacit belief that interaction with other people ("hell," pace Sartre) is not only something to be desired, but something to be enforced where possible. I will never be able to forgive Richard Milhous Nixon for that "Bring Us Together" crap; its sheer simplicity evidently persuaded a lot of simple souls that stuffing people into small spaces could soothe the suffering in the seething city.

A lot of simple souls who wound up working at the Star Tribune, anyway.

Back in the Jurassic period, when I was working for an Evil Utility which shall not be named here, somebody in a suit came up with a policy to regulate trips to the toilet. Being the paperwork person, I duly designed a sign-out sheet for travelers, to which you were to affix your name, employee number, time in and time out, and circle #1 or #2 as appropriate.

The policy was abandoned shortly afterwards.

I don't do this sort of thing now, mostly because if there's anything (besides paper and time) wasted around here, it's subtlety. But I'm always happy to see someone following the same inspired path.

Truth be told, I have no idea whether Stonebridge Life is any better or any worse than your present insurance company, or than mine.

But I do know this: anyone who calls me nine times in eight days, as has their agent in DeKalb, Illinois, will never get dime one from me, even if the deal includes premium waivers eleven months a year, guaranteed renewal even if I move to Haiti to take up the practice of vodou, and Bernadette Peters' cell-phone number.

Well, no, I can't.

And I don't recommend trying the Wal-Mart in Covington, Georgia either.

(Via Fark)

I'm not sure what to think of David Talbot's new expansion of Salon. Sidney Blumenthal will head up the site's new Washington bureau; there will be a working relationship (read: "We will swipe each other's stories") with the Guardian; and finally, there will be some tie-in with Air America, the nascent progressive radio network.

But given this push toward leftish groupthink, I suspect Wonkette has called it about right:

Sheesh. That could take weeks all by itself.

I have never owned a satellite dish, partly because until recently I didn't live in a place where such things were allowable, and partly because now that I do, I see no reason to screw around with the appearance of my house just for the sake of a handful of TV channels. (I do have cable, but then I also have a cable modem, and there are bundled discounts involved.)

And correspondence addressed to DishNetwork's CEO from Matt Deatherage and Xrlq suggests to me that I might not want a satellite dish, either.

A weekly paper which shall go nameless printed a rant about inattentive drivers, one of the noirest of my personal bêtes, which contained this howler:

I sent a note to the writer in question, to the effect that I've never seen one; in 25 years of driving around this town, I have yet to come across a stop sign with 25 percent fewer sides.

I was ready to leave it at that until Entertainment Weekly #756 showed up with a review of the soundtrack from the Starsky & Hutch movie, which baldly stated:

Even if TVT Records botched the credits, which I doubt, the uplifting funk in question is titled "Dazz," and it was recorded by Brick. It's even defined in the lyrics: "disco jazz." (There was a followup called "Dusic," about which the less said, the better.)

I haven't written to EW about this. Yet.

(1) The Orange County, California community of Aliso Viejo, relying on "bad research" by a staffer, worked up an ordinance to ban the mysterious substance dihydrogen monoxide. I must point out that Aliso Viejo isn't the first town to be spooked by the stuff, though; two years ago, a radio report frightened people in Olathe, Kansas.

(2) Playboy prognosticator Allen St. John, in the April issue, predicts a Red Sox/Cubs World Series; the Cubbies, says St. John, will prevail in six.

(Muchas gracias for item 1: McGehee.)

Steve Gigl reports that the Minneapolis suburbs of Crystal and New Hope are contemplating merging.

I know very little about Hennepin County — my only visit to the place was last summer during World Tour '03 — but I'm guessing there must be something in the Minnesota temperament that makes this plausible; something like that would never happen down here in Soonerland. Warr Acres, for instance, would be loath to give up its "Warning: Higher Taxes Ahead" signs on the way out of the city limits.

On the other hand, Hall Park, a tiny Cleveland County enclave, voted last year to dissolve itself and become part of Norman, but I'd be hard-pressed to call that a "merger"; we're talking one square mile added to a city that sprawls over more than 170.

Michael Blowhard has happened upon a product pitch that might actually repel customers.

Quite reasonably, the manufacturer refrains from using that particular slogan on its Web site.

Those wonderful folks at Coca-Cola have recalled every last bottle of Dasani water sold in Great Britain after the finished product exceeded British standards for bromate.

Coca-Cola's vaunted "purification" process apparently involves bubbling the water through calcium chloride; the company has said that it got a bad batch of CaCl₂ which contained excess amounts of bromide salts.

Thames Water, which runs the water supply in Sidcup, Kent from which Dasani is drawn, was quick to point out that it wasn't their fault.

Dasani sales in the US — it's the #2 bottled water, trailing Aquafina, a similarly-conceived product sold by (of course) Pepsi-Cola — will probably not be affected.

I think I'll go have a Dr Pepper, since it's almost 10.

(Muchas gracias: Mike "Interested-Participant" Pechar.)

Well, okay, don't get carried away. This offer is at one location only — 5821 W Interstate 20, near Little Road, Arlington, Texas — and it's subject to change at any time. Please note, there's a two-beer limit per customer.

And no, this isn't a promotional gimmick of some sort. After two years, a local community group persuaded a judge to revoke the restaurant's beer license, claiming that an atmosphere in which inebriated men gawk at women dressed like Creamsicles was a recipe for increased sex crimes in the area. No actual evidence was presented to support this claim, nor was any action taken against another Hooters location on the other side of Arlington.

If they can't sell beer, though, Texas law allows them to give it away, and that's exactly what they're doing, presumably until all the legal antics are concluded.

"Free beer at Hooters." Said Rod Dreher in The Dallas Morning News blog (19 March, 10:51 am): "Are there four more beautiful words in the English language? I ask you."

Many years ago, Tom Lehrer spelled out the facts about New Math:

This Christian Science Monitor piece suggests that even understanding what you're doing is now largely irrelevant:

Say what?

Had this been dished up to me in sixth grade, I'd have picked a prime number and pointedly explained that there aren't any more connections, thank you very much. Do sixth-graders these days even know what prime numbers are?

(Via Kimberly Swygert, who thinks this sort of thing is more "execrable" than "exemplary".)

Lileks goes to Sam's Club:

I mention this because (1) it's Lileks, after all and (2) the State of Oklahoma has been emotionally wedded to this card: if you renew your auto registration by mail, you must send a check or money order, or charge to Discover.

Curiously, the state will accept Visa and MasterCard — American Express, even — in payment of income tax.

And the rates for the Wal-Mart/Sam's card are here.

On 26 January, I posted my first article on Catherine Bosley, the Ohio ex-anchor who partied hearty in Key West and paid dearly for it when the pictures showed up.

On 26 February, I noted that Bosley was suing to halt Internet distribution of said pictures.

Today being 26 March, I figured there had to be something Bosley-related in the news, and sure enough, the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the photos can circulate once more.

Surely there will be further developments, say, around the last week of April.

(Once again, via Interested-Participant.)

It is an article of faith among conservatives and libertarians that anything private enterprise can do efficiently, government will do less so, and they'll point at the US Postal Service or Britain's National Health to hammer home the point.

But what's a rule without an exception? In Blue Summit, Missouri, a little unincorporated area between Kansas City and Independence, there's a strip mall, so to speak, called Erotic City, created by one Elvin L. Boone. Mr Boone, however, departed this world in the 1990s, and he did so before executing a will, so the Probate Court of Jackson County is operating the smut shops until such time as the property can be divided among his heirs. Inasmuch as Boone's eight children seem to be an uncooperative lot, working up a settlement has been difficult, and it perhaps hasn't helped that the Court, charged with being fair to everyone involved, has reportedly done a better job of running Erotic City than Boone himself did.

If all goes well, probate will be wound down some time this fall, and the county will be out of the sex business — though my daughter, who owns a home in Independence, looks at her property-tax bill and is convinced that she is being screwed by Jackson County.

(Via Fark)

I didn't have to go to work today, which means that I missed out on one last opportunity to do the 11-mile trek from Surlywood to 42nd and Treadmill in actual daylight; of course, that Spring Forward nonsense kicks in tonight and shoves the clock further out of sync with reality, to the benefit of — whom, exactly?

Well, for one brief, shining moment, Erica:

Okay. That's a tangible gain. Anyone else?

To anyone who was pleased that the Los Angeles Times picked up five Pulitzer Prizes, the second-largest single haul in the award's history — I think we can safely say that the cheering section won't include Xrlq or Patterico — I remind you:

You can't spell "Pulitzer" without "putz."

Oh, yes, The Oklahoman got one once. In 1939. For editorial cartoons (by the late Charles G. Werner). Don't hold your breath waiting for the second.

As an occasionally-practicing guy, I do have a stash of Hugh Hefner's legendary publication — about twenty years' worth — in the next room, and once a year, by tradition, I review the young ladies who used to have staples in their midsections (Playboy switched to another binding method in the middle 80s), and select one of the twelve for Playmate of the Year.

And then inevitably I watch in bemusement as the magazine selects someone else. It is always thus; last year I noted that I had been wrong twenty times in a row.

I am not even slightly surprised to announce that for "twenty", you should now read "twenty-one"; my source deep within the Mansion even asked for my World Series picks, with the stated intention of betting on anyone I didn't select. (Red Sox over the Cubs in six, in case you want to do likewise.)

Of course, I know far more about baseball than I know about women, but you could replace "baseball" with just about anything from aardvarks to zymurgy and the statement would be no less accurate.

Dylan doing spots for Victoria's Secret? It was so foretold nearly four decades ago, by Zimmerman himself. Paul Bryant reports to the Spectropop list:

But he was so much older then; he's younger than that now.

The other day (well, Sunday, actually) I expressed the opinion that an unnamed Oklahoma City neighborhood was capital-S Scary. Over in San Francisco, Bill Quick lives in a neighborhood that some people regard that way, but he's not the least bit fearful:

Methinks I doth protest too much, or at the very least too early.

The neighborhood I lived in before the acquisition of Surlywood seemed to be following the same path that leads "over the top of the hill," likely for the very same reasons. Certainly we had no shortage of subsidized tenants, and the crime rate spoke for itself. But I don't have any figures for, um, Scarytown, so it's possible I might be unreasonably maligning the area.

Still, when I mentioned it to some coworkers, most of them visibly shuddered.

I don't get as many Free AOL! discs as I used to, which I attribute to having moved and therefore having left some mailing lists behind. This is clearly not an option open to most people, but I have tended to shrug off the invasion: how hard is it to toss the offending wheel of polycarbonate into the circular file?

Enter, stage left, Lori Hancock, a member of the California Assembly (of course), a Democrat (natch) from Berkeley (where else?), who has introduced a bill to require that discs from AOL and its rivals include self-addressed, stamped envelopes to return the unused discs to the sender or, alternatively, to a recycling facility.

AOL, desperate for subscribers, will undoubtedly be appalled at this measure; California, perhaps anxious to preserve landfill space, might actually approve it in the name of holy environmentalism. I'm inclined to support the bill, if only because it would annoy AOL; there is poetic justice in the idea that the carpet-bombing marketroids from AOL might be sentenced to 1000 free hours of community service. And really, there's no middle ground here, unless you want to use the discs for skeet.

Oh, Kimberly Anne, where are you when we need you?

Donna may seem apolitical, but she has a cause:

Given her level of determination, we can probably say goodbye to fast-talking, slow-walking, good-looking Mohel Sam.

Then again:

In thirty years, it might even be possible to reassign their sex on the fly, so to speak.

I figured I could go a whole month without any Catherine Bosley references, but inasmuch as 136 people showed up here in the last hour Googling the poor woman, the least I can do is fan the flames, right?

So: The Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals last month lifted an injunction against distribution of the infamous Bosley footage; this week, a Web site which had licensed the video from the person who shot it won permission from the Court to exhibit it.

And it's not even the 26th yet.

For the past ten years or so, I have dutifully filled out the Consumer Reports annual survey and voted in their board election. This year I did the survey online, and it went fairly quickly, though one thing puzzles me: desktop computers are considered separately, while notebook computers are listed under "Electronics."

I'm sure my particular survey was fairly boring: I had a reasonable array of products, none of which have ever required extraordinary service. (Except for the car, which gets a reasonable facsimile of the periodic maintenance recommended by the manufacturer, they haven't required any service at all.)

And in the board election, all else being equal, I vote against anyone I've ever heard of, on the basis that if the individual managed to get into the news, it was likely for something I would be inclined to oppose.

An undergraduate tour guide at Dartmouth was overheard telling a crowd of prospective students and their parental units that one thing the school didn't have was graduate students.

The guide was apparently off message, as they say these days, since in fact, Dartmouth readily admits to having graduate students.

(Via a Dartmouth graduate student)

Aaron at Free Will notes that for some reason, our industrial-strength environmentalists tend to live in the city:

For an answer to "Why is that?" he points to this Michael Crichton speech:

It's one big Yellowstone out there, they think. God forbid they should ever actually see how the rest of the world lives.

(Courtesy of Spoons)

Okay, the calendar still says April, but it's gonna be hard to top this one.

A clerk in the Brooklyn Family Court claims he suffered herniated discs in his back after a courthouse toilet shattered under him.

The New York Post reports: Hurt in Line of Doody.

No, there's no chance the person who wrote that headline will be canned.

Health-insurance operations, I am convinced, rely on the unwillingness of most of their customers to read the thousands of words that constitute the average group policy.

Unfortunately, I read the damned things, and today someone is going to have to come up with an acceptable explanation for refusing to cover to any extent a standard name-brand drug that is listed on the copy of the formulary that was provided, a drug prescribed according to their rules and requested through a participating pharmacy as defined in said rules.

In a more rational world, I'd pay the entire tab for the drug and confine my insurance claims to seeking partial reimbursement for really expensive treatments — which, of course, would cut my insurance premiums substantially. But this is the world we have, and this is the policy I have, and if they're not going to honor its provisions, they're damned well going to explain why.

Oh, no, don't worry, we're not about to enact Hillary® brand Hyperexpensive National Health Care. At least, not yet. But it's difficult for me to support the private sector when the private sector is busy looking for ways to stick it to me.

(Update, 1:30 pm: After spending entirely too much time with an annoying automated voice-responder system — I have no objections to disembodied voices per se, and actually came this close to developing an insane crush on one many years ago, but "Margaret," as she was identified, seems to be one part Stepford, two parts Windows, and I kept hoping for a BSoD — I got to the heart of the matter, which is this: before they can fill this prescription — which, incidentally, is a condition either not specified in the contract or mentioned at a point far removed from any conceivable context — they wish to speak to the prescribing physician, presumably so they can talk him into a cheaper drug. After six years with the doctor in question, I think it's a safe bet he'll tell them to jump a stump and fill as prescribed, you farging busybodies.)

If you were the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator and you wanted to catch someone who'd skipped out on court costs, where would you look?

ACS, a Dallas-based company hired by OSCA to find the state's scofflaws, has one unexpected — and perhaps unexpectedly effective — source: the pizza place. "When you call to order a pizza," says OSCA's David Coplen, "you usually give them your correct name, your correct address and your correct phone number."

Neither ACS nor OSCA will say exactly which pizza joints are willing to sell this information to them, though Domino's says it doesn't traffic in customer identities.

The question, of course, is whether people will start giving out bogus names when they order, thinking Papa John or someone will fink on them — and how many people named Dick Hertz are there in this town, anyway?

(Via Fark)

Renee at Ailanthus finds this just ever-so-slightly inconsistent:

It's a bank, fercryingoutloud. The chances that there are live humans on the premises at all are something less than fifty-fifty.

(I asked Soothing Mortgage Company about that last bit. They said that no, there weren't any ironclad guarantees, but they'd never actually sold any such loans, and offered to produce evidence — some sort of Fannie Mae report, I assume — to this effect.)

Finally, something both left and right can agree on: this is truly horrendous.

This comment by S. W. Anderson, posted to John Cole's blog, seems to say it all:

So mote it be.

The national anthem of Switzerland, Alberik Zwyssig's 1841 "Swiss Psalm," text by Leonhard Widmer, is overtly religious, sexist, and generally outdated. Even the Swiss Federal Council says so. But they're not going to change it.

When the Psalm was officially proclaimed to be the national anthem in 1981, after many years of unofficial use and twenty years as the "provisional" anthem, the Council declared that the Psalm was "a purely Swiss song, dignified and ceremonial, the kind of national anthem that the majority of our citizens would like to have." And the Swiss do not undertake change lightly.

There are four verses to the Psalm, though usually only three are translated into English.

(Via Tongue Tied)

This apology appeared on Outside the Beltway and will not be repeated.

[Cue the Trondheim Hammer Dance]

Are we living in the age of Cotton Mather? Some people, reports Andrea Harris, seem to think so:

"Twisted" doesn't even begin to approach the sheer anfractuosity of the matter: the assumptions which must be made to characterize our society as sexually repressed require not only the suspension of disbelief but the denial of the obvious and the redefining of the terms. It's perfectly obvious to anyone who's paying attention that people are doing whatever, and screwing whomever, they choose; there is no Department of Copulation Control knock, knock, knocking at your front door demanding that you disengage immediately or face the wrath of John Ashcroft.

The very existence of John Ashcroft, however, enrages these people. Their demand for complete freedom includes a demand for complete freedom from criticism, especially criticism from persons in power: the moment someone says anything that can be construed as unfavorable, why, it's the stomp of a million jackboots in stern synchronization. And it's got to be at least a million, because there's a conspiracy out there to repress us all.

I can't tell you what truly motivated Lynndie England. Maybe it will come out in a court-martial. But I'm not buying the notion that she's simply responding to the pressures of society, or that it's an inevitable consequence of war, especially a war of which the Libertine Elite does not approve.

(Disclosure: Written while unclad.)

You've undoubtedly already read this from Lileks, but I simply must mention it here, partly because Lileks is always quotable, but mostly because the gentleman in question was a topic of discussion this weekend while my brother and I were deconstructing some of the mental edifices we had built over our formative years.

The gentleman in question is Dr Hunter S. Thompson, and, says Lileks, his influence remains considerable:

The generation that followed, of course, will go "Who?" and will eventually get around to rebuilding what the Boomers tore down for the sake of cool.

"I'd like to return this, please."

"Certainly. We'll be happy to refund your money. What was wrong with it?"

"It didn't suck enough."

Contracts between SBC and the Communications Workers of America run three years, and the last four contracts were reached with relatively little grumbling and/or sabre-rattling.

Not this year. The contract expired six weeks ago, and while negotiations have continued on and off, CWA has now announced a 24-hour strike notice. A strike isn't exactly inevitable at this point, but neither side, I think, really wants to avoid it: the union would like to appear just as hard-nosed and militant as possible, and the company would save a few bucks on payroll while the picket lines are up.

One sticky point was health care for pensioners. (Disclosure: I worked for the company long enough to qualify for the minimum retirement benefit.) Around Christmas, SBC sent a letter to retirees informing them that they would have to start paying the premiums for their health insurance. Benefits for retired employees, though, are not a mandatory bargaining issue, and under labor law not sufficient justification for a strike. Much of the negotiation since the April expiration of the contract has been devoted to getting this issue off the table; eventually, SBC agreed to delay the implementation of their plan for at least five years.

But with the pensioners now presumably taken care of, there are still thorny issues to be dealt with. One of these, unsurprisingly, is job security. SBC is moving into other areas — wireless, DSL, satellite — and CWA wants a piece of that action.

I'm guessing, at this point, that there will be a strike of about three weeks, about as long as it lasted in 1983. (Been there, carried that sign.) This enables the union to appear strong and forthright, and saves the company a few bucks before it caves in.

A wastebasket in my office is in serious disrepair, and presumably at some point it will be replaced with a new one.

And then we'll wonder: "What do we do with the old one?"

But not for long.

Communications Workers of America will walk off the job at SBC Friday just after midnight, but the union said its members will return Tuesday morning.

As strikes go, this is both fairly short — SBC was struck for three weeks in 1983 — and decidedly unusual: how often does a union tell you exactly how long they'll be on strike? A good-faith gesture, perhaps, but in my opinion a fairly strange one.

Sony, which already owns two movie studios — Columbia and Tri-Star — is going for the trifecta. The Japanese electronics giant has revealed that it is negotiating to buy MGM, controlling interest in which is held by investor Kirk Kerkorian through his Tracinda Corporation.

This strikes me as more of the "synergy" delusion that nearly killed the corporation formerly known as AOL Time Warner. Sony obviously wants to sell gear to deliver its branded content, but by and large, consumers don't give a flying fish about branded content: they want content and they don't care who owns it.

Interestingly, most earlier MGM films are owned by Time Warner; Ted Turner bought MGM in 1986, kept the film library, and sold off the studio. The highlight of the current MGM library is the United Artists series, which includes the Pink Panther movies and James Bond. (MGM and UA wound up together because Kerkorian had acquired UA in 1981.)

Labrador Retrievers come in three flavors: black, chocolate and yellow. Labs tend toward a gruff sort of handsomeness, and they are the single most popular breed right now, as measured by American Kennel Club registration data, so there are going to be a lot of people taking pictures of Labs.

There is a downside to this, though, and Fred First has been there:

But Fred doesn't whine about problems; he scratches around for solutions. And sure enough, he has one:

This seems to be encroaching on Weimaraner territory, but I like the idea. The national breed club for the Lab, however, probably won't; they consider any departure from the canonical colors to be a disqualification, as does the AKC in competitive events. Still, normal people, as a rule, don't schlep their dogs to the show circuit, so I suspect that should there be a demand for neutral-colored Labs, eventually there will be a supply.

An interesting Gedanken experiment, using the magic wand of Matthew Yglesias:

Certainly this would be interesting to test in Oklahoma City, where two-thirds of the city area is actually located in suburban school districts, the result of greatly expanded city limits overwhelming the same old school-district lines from the Pleistocene era. You can be sure that a real-estate agent here will ascertain within the first fifteen seconds whether you have school-age kids, and if you do, you will be directed to Edmond (north) or Putnam City (west) or Moore (south) or Mid-Del (east) unless you absolutely insist on something in the central city. (I am a couple of blocks from a school in the Oklahoma City district; I have no idea of its reputation.)

Brock Sides, quoting The Commercial Appeal, reports an example in Memphis:

Of course, my house sold in four days with no open house, but I was looking for something other than a school with a superlative rep.

Meanwhile, should my brother move, they won't bother showing him anything over here; he's living in the Putnam City district now, and he'd prefer to stay there so long until the Resident Kid graduates. This is, I rather think, the majority viewpoint in such areas.

Right now, though, I'm not persuaded that in an area like Quail Creek, through which a school-district line runs — Edmond to the north, Oklahoma City to the south — there's that great a difference between the halves of the subdivision on otherwise-similar houses.

And acting in one's own self-interest, says Yglesias, has a back-door effect of sorts:

This seems true enough, though there are a lot of factors contributing to property values, of which perceived school quality is only one.

I live in what the city calls an Urban Conservation District, which means more or less that they'd like for this neck of the woods to continue to look as much as possible as it did when it was carved out of a farm in the late 1940s. To support this notion, there are some restrictions on building and on rebuilding. I knew this when I bought the place, so it's not like I'm hostile to the concept of preservation.

Still, sometimes it's possible to overdo it. The National Trust's new list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places includes the entire state of Vermont, for one reason alone: Wal-Mart is putting seven superstores in Deanland.

Trust president Richard Moe explains:

Which begs the question: If an operation like Oklahoma City-based Six Flags were going to put seven theme parks in Vermont, which likely would play hell with traffic and the environment, would the National Trust be similarly up in arms? I rather doubt it. Wal-Mart, to preservationists, is the Great Satan, its machinations motivated by pure evil, its stores a repository of all that is banal and consumption-oriented.

Vermont was the last state to get a Wal-Mart store — the first one opened in 1995 in Bennington — and the existing stores were subject to the provisions of the state's Act 250, which is intended to guard against the very situations the Trust decries. If the proposals for the new stores fail to meet the Act's ten criteria [link requires Adobe Reader], Vermont can forbid construction. In the past, Vermont has had no trouble enforcing Act 250; if all seven of the new Wal-Mart stores are built, it should be safe to assume that the company has met the requirements of the state's Environmental Board.

Target apparently has no stores in Vermont. I wonder if they would get the same response from the National Trust if they'd planned seven Super Targets for the state.

(Suggested by a Fark item)

The story so far:

Daughter asks for bondage pants.

Dad says no.

Obvious question: "What kind of world is this when 15-year-old girls are talking about bondage?"

Less-obvious question: "Bondage requires pants?"

"University of Georgia" is a trademark owned by — well, it's not the University of Georgia, who forgot, or something, to renew the trademark when it expired in 1997.

Which probably wouldn't be that big a deal, except that the University of Georgia Foundation, which has now registered the trademark, was about to be cut loose by Georgia's Board of Regents and reduced to unofficial status; it's entirely possible that the University and the Foundation could wind up in court over this bit of branding.

In terms of theoretical potential mischief, this surpasses the previous record: the reliably left-wing Harper's Magazine licenses the name "Harper's" from HarperCollins, a publishing house owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, a group associated with the right wing. There has never been any indication that HarperCollins might pull the magazine's license, or that of Harper's Bazaar, owned by the largely-leftish Hearst group, but today the unexpected is commonplace.

The WB's Superstar USA, says Donna, is "immensely evil":

Inasmuch as I've never been impressed by anyone I've seen on American Idol, not even William Hung, I rather doubt I'll be paying much attention to this batch of sub-karaoke warblers, and I thank Donna for doing the dirty work for me.

AmeriDebt, a credit-counseling operation which ran massive advertising campaigns before running afoul of the Federal Trade Commission, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The firm, which stopped acquiring new customers last fall, is continuing to serve its existing customer base; at least five states have filed suit against them, charging that AmeriDebt misrepresented its services.

American Equine Nutrients is located just off I-35, about a mile from Remington Park. Their product line, perhaps unfortunately in this Internet age, bears the brand name 404.

Despite this, be assured that their Web site is up and reachable.

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your royalties on Communist Party USA merchandise.

One Myron Tereshchuk (could there possibly be two Myron Tereshchuks?) has entered a guilty plea to a charge of attempted extortion. He had run a service which produces extracts of patent and trademark registrations for the legal profession; the service ran afoul of the Feds for some reason or another, and Tereshchuk decided that it was the fault of MicroPatent LLC, a competitor of his.

Using other people's unsecured wireless networks, Tereshchuk broke into MicroPatent's network and sent threats to its management, culminating with a demand for $17 million in exchange for not broadcasting MicroPatent's proprietary information all over the Internet. And it might have worked, had not the demand ended with the following instruction:

The FBI, which had suspected the guy earlier, paid a visit to his house and found evidence nearly as incriminating, plus raw materials for grenades and ricin. Boom lowered, perp arrested.

Sentencing is scheduled for late October.

(Via Fark)

Courtesy of Robb Hibbard, a list of things wasps don't like:

I think I can qualify on at least some of these.

Last year, Missouri enacted a number of booze-related laws, and one of them kicks in tomorrow: keg registration.

Retailers will now have to tag each keg containing four gallons of more and keep a record of the purchaser, including name, address, and date of birth, for a minimum of 90 days. (Ripping off the tag means you lose your deposit.)

This is nothing particularly new in the Show-Me state: the city of Springfield has had a similar provision for three years. I doubt seriously, though, that anyone can show that it's had any measurable effect on underage drinking, the ostensible purpose of the law. David Overfelt of the Missouri Retailers Association sees it the same way: he considers it "a feel-good thing for the anti-alcohol groups."

Meanwhile, a couple of states away in Colorado, Republican Senate candidate Peter Coors continues to argue that 21 is unworkable as a minimum drinking age in the first place, a notion which, when floated, immediately brought out the big guns of the Nanny State.

My own policy on drink is similar to that of Mark Twain: when others are drinking I like to help, otherwise I remain dry. And I continue to believe, as I did when I was eighteen and hoisting a few, that any age limit set by the government is arbitrary by definition.

(Muchas gracias: Brock Sides.)

The anonymous Swiss bank account is a thing of the past.

Beginning today, a new law intended to combat money-laundering will require that anyone opening an account in a Swiss bank will have to provide proof of identity. Some accounts may still be officially identified by numbers, but the bank will be required to obtain the name of the accountholder.

The next step? Perhaps — gasp! — tax withholding on foreign-owned accounts? What would Harry Lime say?

Every year around mid-June, they start to appear: sometimes nothing more fancier than your average roadside fruit stand, sometimes giant box stores. And they're always just outside the city limits.

Fireworks are illegal in Oklahoma City and some of the suburbs; I've seen people buy bottle rockets and such at a stand in Crutcho, an unincorporated area, only to be promptly busted by the cops the moment they crossed into Midwest City territory.

Some whole states, like Massachusetts, also ban fireworks, which generally means a quick trip up to New Hampshire. The National Fire Protection Association, as it has every year for the last few decades, is calling for a nationwide ban.

I often wonder what would happen if the sparkler, the least-impressive item in the Fourth of July arsenal, hadn't been invented until just this year. The minions of the Nanny State would go ballistic: "Are you out of your tiny little minds? You're going to set these on fire and then hand them to children? How cruel and heartless you must be." P. J. O'Rourke, now that I think about it, once said something similar about motorcycles, which are Generally Regarded As Scary among product-safety obsessives.

Personally, I'm inclined to throw my lot in with the Darwinists on this one: if you're stupid, you deserve the second-degree burns you're going to get. And make damn sure you don't point that stuff at my roof, wouldja please?

Is your electric utility a "public nuisance"?

If you live in California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont or Wisconsin, your state's Attorney General evidently thinks so; those states and the City of New York have joined together to file a public-nuisance lawsuit against five major power companies, demanding that they cut carbon-dioxide emissions in the interest of curbing global warming.

The utilities — AEP, Southern Company, Xcel, Cinergy, and the Federally-operated TVA — are said in the suit to produce about ten percent of the nation's CO₂ output.

According to the suit, those emissions can be reduced by increasing efficiency at coal-burning plants, switching from coal to cleaner-burning fuels, investing in energy conservation and using clean energy sources such as wind and solar power. Some of this is even true, though the "cleaner-burning fuels" business is a canard. How much carbon dioxide is produced from a fuel is solely a function of how much carbon it contains in the first place; anything else along for the ride has no effect on CO₂.

If the suit should fail, the next step is obvious. Humans exhale carbon dioxide with every single breath, yet have no emission controls whatsoever. So far.

I have no problem, generally, with treating children to a demystification of the more bizarre trappings of adulthood.

I don't think, though, that the process should involve putting them in the kids' mouths, fercryingoutloud.

(Via Michelle Malkin)

(Update, 2:50 pm: Kimberly Swygert asks, "Someone remind me again why it's the schools that refuse to teach sex-ed, or who teach abstinence, who are supposedly the biggest threat to teenagers today?")

From The Braden Files, the USMC version of psychotherapy:

Um, cancel my honeymoon in the Catskills.

As the phrase goes, you should Read The Whole Thing.

(Muchas gracias: Hatcher of Hatcher's Hack, who left this as a comment at cut on the bias.)

There's something misleading about this photo, and I think it's the fact that the items in question are, um, packaged singly.

Chris Rywalt has seen too many scalpels wielded, or something:

Speaking as a six-foot male weighing a tad more than 314 pounds at the moment — my driver's license says 295, but that's another issue — I'd just like to say that I go out of the house rather a lot. Sometimes I don't come back for a couple of weeks.

However, I must insist that I don't have any antipathy toward blondes, bleached or otherwise, conforming to the stereotype or otherwise; airheads can be of any hue, and there's more than sufficient supply to insure great variety thereof.

Ms. Christine has found out, mercifully not the hard way, that if you lose your ticket on Southwest Airlines, you have to buy a new one, and wonders why:

Of course, it may be the case, not that the programmers are total morons, but that they're working to the specifications demanded by total morons. This is a situation that exists far beyond the airline industry.

Call it a Federally-mandated surcharge under Section ID-10T, and stamp the replacement ticket accordingly.

On 31 July, a Barbados sheep was euthanized at the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center near Glen Rose, Texas; it had tested positive for rabies.

Which means that the children who visited Fossil Rim's petting zoo during late July were exposed to the disease. Sheep don't bite very often, but licking the face or an open wound is quite enough to pass on the infection.

The Children's Animal Center at Fossil Rim will be closed for 90 days; you can read the official announcement here [requires Adobe Reader].

Steve Skubinna poses a question to Andrea Harris, and offers some answers:

Being something of a traditionalist, I think there's still a place for the jackboot; tried and true, it still packs a wallop, delivering a full measure of imagery with each and every step. Besides, if the future is indeed, as Orwell says, "a boot stomping on a face forever," you can bet it's not an Ugg boot.

That said, should Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham prefer to crush dissent in strappy sandals, I'm probably the last person in the world to object.

Apparently five American girls, according to the Social Security Administration.

Name by name, but not by nature, one hopes.

Hanah Metchis at Reason discloses that while India gets lots of condoms from the First World, what with AIDS and humongous population growth and all, not all of them are being used in accordance with the label instructions:

It would never work in Oklahoma; we're used to our roads being ribbed for extra, um, whatever.

(Title swiped from Shannon Love)

A bald declaration by the Los Angeles Times:

Of course, since minorities are now the majority in Los Angeles County, it might be reasonable to ask if 83 percent of suspects, bitten or unbitten, are minorities. Not that the Times would ever ask such a thing.

Patterico has even more questions, none of which seem to concern the Times.

The logo of the Department of Health of the District of Columbia somehow fails to inspire confidence.

(Via Hit & Run)

The envelope said:

Walgreens, never noted (in this market, anyway) for its reticence, sent me this in the mail with one of those conditional-purpose checks for $20, presuming that it could lure me away from The Drug Chain Formerly Known As Eckerd's, whose stores here will presumably be changing to CVS.

This is very much in keeping with Walgreens' "In your face, Eckerd" marketing plans: it seems that every new Walgreens store in this area is located as close as possible to an Eckerd's. In my neighborhood, you can find Walgreens at 5120 North May; Eckerd is at 4805. Near where I used to live, Eckerd has a store at SE 15th and Air Depot; Walgreens bought a dormant branch-bank location across the street and built a new store.

What's really neat about this sort-of-check, though, is that it doesn't apply to prescription co-pays; you have to fill a prescription and then buy $20 worth of nonprescription stuff to get the credit.

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to ban the use of Silly String in the Hollywood district on Halloween, citing environmental and security considerations.

Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents the 4th District, including part of Hollywood, says if the stuff makes it through the sewers at all, it can harm marine life, and what's more, it can endanger mounted police on patrol.

And I rather think that if people are disgorging more than a quarter-mile of the string at a time, it's going to make a hell of a mess.

Still: Silly String? All these years, and suddenly now it's a threat? I have to wonder how an anti-Silly String measure would have fared in pre-Bloomberg New York City.

(Update: In comments, Vickie points out a precedent.)

The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology reports that if you're in a negative mood, you're a more reliable eyewitness than another observer who might be bright and chirpy. Professor Joseph Forgas of the University of New South Wales says:

A further experiment suggests that people in a bad mood demonstrate more effective critical thinking and communication skills. Again, Professor Forgas:

Remind me to post a copy of this report at work.

(Via Fark)

How does one afford the incredible price of dinner at Milliways?

While I have no reason to doubt the existence of the star system of Bastablon, I suspect its advertising executives are purely fictional — unlike this.

(Via some Vogon at Fark)

Dawn Eden muses about being on the receiving end of a stereotype:

For once, I am grateful for the weird tangles in my family tree, whose roots extend to Mexico, Syria and Lebanon, and the British Isles, with stops God knows where in between.

Reprinting the following paragraph from a term paper written by C.D. Harris in 1995, qualifies, I believe, as "fair use" under US copyright law:

On the other hand, though I am not a lawyer — don't even play one on TV — I'm pretty sure this doesn't.

The First National Bank of Bedrock?

Well, why not? There is a town called Bedrock, near the western edge of Colorado, and it's not necessarily harder to run Web-based financial services there than it would be in Denver or Salt Lake City.

But the Feds determined that it was a fake, and shut it down; a spokesman for the Comptroller of the Currency speculates that the "bank" site was used to collect personal information from modern Stone Age families potential customers.

(Via Fark)

I figure something like this might be awaiting me a few years down the road:

No, no jokes. Not this time.

(Via Baldilocks, also resisting the effort to crack wise.)

Let's see if I have this right:

God forbid her cherry should be popped, but you can fool around with the chocolate all you want.

Who came up with this preposterous confection? Planned Parenthood's Teenwire, of course. And as always, when Teenwire spouts nonsense (or worse), Dawn Eden reports.

A question from J Bowen of No Watermelons Allowed:

Well, yeah, if you're designing for convenience. On the other hand, if you'd like the stack to have some sort of stability, you put the heavier items (larger sizes contain more material and therefore weigh more) toward the bottom.

Okay, it's a minor thing — we're not talking differences of forty to fifty percent here — but gravity doesn't cut any slack.

Alternative explanation: Smaller chaps are pickier and will go through more items before buying, leaving their discards on the top; larger fellows are just happy to see something their size.

Whatever the reason, it's no less true of specialty shops that cater specifically to Big Guys, either; 1X is seemingly always higher in the stack than 4X.

Bookseller Edward Hyde suspects Regnery is playing games with a top-selling title:

"In print," I suspect, is a term which has different meanings to different people. To you or me or Mr Hyde, it means that there are that many copies of the book out there somewhere. Not having had a book published, I have to wonder if maybe the publisher considers "in print" to include any press runs actually ordered, whether they're complete or not. (I'd appreciate any information on this from anyone who knows.)

Meanwhile, the immediate result, at least for Hyde, is frustration:

Migod, he is serious.

Though probably not the easiest to explain to your friends.

Which reminds me: Are the events of this past week paying me back for this?

(Via Erica, who traces this, um, meme back to here.)

Paul at Wizbang describes what happens if Ivan comes ashore at the worst possible place:

I'm hundreds of miles away and I'm coming down with the chills.

Oremus.

Via email from a friend on the Redneck Riviera, way too close to Ivan to suit either of us:

1. An oak tree on the ground looks four times bigger than it did standing up.

2. Even after all these years it is still nice to spend time with Col. Mustard in the ballroom with the lead pipe.

3. When house hunting look for closets with lots of leg room.

4. Water from the shower is much colder than water from the kitchen sink — and tastes just as bad.

5. AA, C and D are the only alphabet we need.

6. The four-way stop is still an ingenious reflection of civility.

7. Radio can be the best way to watch television.

8. Chainsaw-wielding men are nothing to be afraid of.

9. SUVs are the best makeshift tents on the market.

10. You can use your washing machine as a cooler.

11. It's your God-given right to sit on your back porch and eat Chinese takeout by candlelight in your underwear.

12. We shouldn't complain about "useless" tools in the garage — we actually DO need a generator.

13. You can't spell "priceless" without I-C-E.

14. Downed power lines make excellent security systems.

15. Lakes can generate waves.

16. Gasoline is a value at any price.

17. Cell phones: Breaking up isn't hard to do.

18. The life blood of any disaster recovery is COFFEE.

19. The need for your dog to go out and take care of business is directly proportional to the severity of the storm.

20. Candlelight is better than Botox — it takes years off your appearance.

21. Air conditioning: BEST. INVENTION. EVER.

22. Water is a comfort food. But 3-day-old Cheetos are too.

23. Shadow animals on the wall — still fun.

24. No matter how hard the wind blows, roadside campaign signs will survive.

25. You should never admit to having power at your house in the presence of coworkers or neighbors who do not.

26. There's a plus to having NOTHING in the refrigerator.

27. Getting through the day should be an Olympic event.

28. The movie theater can be a most pleasant place, even if the feature is Alien vs Predator.

29. Somebody's got it worse.

30. Somebody's got it better. Obviously, they're getting preferential treatment.
    

Thanks, Deb, and you too, Squiddy.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has voted 3-2 to abandon the county's 47-year-old seal in an effort to avoid a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The revised seal will drop the image of the Hollywood Bowl with the cross over it, remove the oil derricks, and replace the goddess Pomona with a Native American woman carrying a bowl of acorns.

If this isn't silly enough for you, LAist has a recommendation for a new design.

Men's Health magazine, tossing together a salad of disparate data bits, has come up with a list of the Least Sloshed Cities in the US, and at the top are Montgomery, Alabama; Yonkers, New York; and Hialeah, Florida. (I assume this data got mined before Florida became the hurricane capital of the solar system.) All these towns scored A-plus on a combination of DWI arrest rates, alcohol-related traffic deaths, and mortality rates for various ethanol-related liver diseases.

Scoring an F were New Orleans, Spokane, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Anchorage, El Paso, and worst of all, Denver. (Must be those Rocky Mountain Blogger Bashes.) Here in the Okay City, we're tied (with Seattle) for 82nd out of 101, with a solid D.

I think this calls for a drink.

Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, a group which might be characterized by Big Media as a "conservative think tank" — if it's just a "think tank" with no qualifier, they mean it leans left — has written a book called Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health-Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer. Some of what she's found out:

For comparison, I offer the time-frames from my recent illness, which I consider to have begun on the 4th of September, that being the day I decided to seek medical assistance rather than ride it out. The 4th, I note, is a Saturday.

• Waiting time to see primary physician: 58 minutes

• Time between referral to specialist and actually being seen by specialist: 18 hours, 45 minutes

• Time between being seen by specialist and actual surgery: 25 hours, 30 minutes

• Out-of-pocket expenditure: To be determined, estimated $420

I can see why Canadians might want to spend a few loonies south of the border.

(Via Eternity Road)

Former stripper Jessica Conrad has written a book called Dance Naked: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Hottie (New York: Harmony Books, 2004). Conrad believes that one way to improve your love life — assuming you're a woman whose love life needs improving — is to follow some of the tips used by, yes, professional strippers. I'm not part of Conrad's target audience, and I surely have no inner hottie to unleash, but I did read the book, and being the analytical type, I found some interesting, or at least marginally bloggable, data.

For example, the top twenty-five stripper names, in alphabetical order:

1. Alexis
   
2. Amber
   
3. Ashley
   
4. Bailey
   
5. Brittany/Britney
   
6. Chantal
   
7. Christi
   
8. Cindy
   
9. Dylan
   
10. Heather
    
11. Jaime
    
12. Jasmine
    
13. Jennifer/Jenny
    
14. Jessica
    
15. Jordan
    
16. Kate/Katie
    
17. Madison
    
18. Melissa
    
19. Michelle
    
20. Ryan
    
21. Sienna/Sierra
    
22. Taylor
    
23. Tiffany
    
24. Tyler
    
25. Xena
    

Each of these has a general connotation: Cindy is "superfriendly but young," while Heather is "the ultimate popular-girl name." Conrad herself opted not to use her name Jessica — "Jennifer's friend who also wants to be friends with Heather but isn't" — and after some flirtation with "Melody" and "Petra," she became "Kayla." Interestingly, some of these names apparently have waiting lists: presumably a strip club (a place I have never actually been) doesn't want duplicates.

"Xena," by the way, is "funny and strong." Of course.

With the increasing number (and size) of service fees levied by seemingly everyone these days, most of your How To Manage Your Feeble Finances articles suggest the same thing: "Try to talk your way out of them."

And every week, a couple of dozen characters call up 42nd and Treadmill to try exactly that. I think one or two have succeeded this year. One who did not is the guy who defaulted on a $135 payment last week and was assessed $30 by our Department of Meanies, and who argued to our customer-service person today that we ought to let him off the hook because he's "unemployed."

But Pharaoh's heart was hardened, for the following reasons:

1. A supervisory type on the premises actually knows the sleazeball in question, and he's not unemployed at all;
   
2. When we opened the last batch of stuff for today, he had another order in, this time for over $200.
   

From this day foward, the individual in question will be viewed with the same skepticism as a CBS photocopy, and for much the same reason.

Robb Hibbard has had it up to here with his nonpower mower:

I have two rules that serve me in meeting said aesthetic minimum:

1. Do not have the best yard on the block.

2. Do not have the worst yard on the block.
   

This year, I believe I met these requirements for all but six or seven days of the mowing season, largely because my power mower spent ten days in the shop.

And Robb, two words: "sport sandals." Excellent for this sort of thing.

I have, perhaps, an inordinate fondness for the city of Cleveland, but it's always been perfectly obvious to me that for all its surface gloss, and its recent investment in high-dollar attractions such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Jacobs Field, something was very wrong underneath it all. (During World Tour '01, I made a point of going through some of the more decrepit parts of town rather than visit the tourist traps.) And Cleveland's status as the nation's poorest large city, beating out even the likes of Detroit and Newark, would seem to confirm that wrongness.

Costa Tsiokos isn't surprised:

Or, as pundits of yore would have said, you can't spend yourself rich.

Which is why when Oklahoma City assembled its wish list of Metropolitan Area Projects, the new shiny arena was only one of nine proposed investments in the central city, which cost upward of $300 million in aggregate but which have generated so far more than $1.6 billion in additional investment.

As more recent pundits might have said, "Go big — or go home."

The city of Oakland, California, at least for the time being, is no longer setting up roadblocks to catch drivers under the influence; it seems that the license checks are also catching rather a lot of illegal immigrants, and well, that is so discriminatory, you know?

The umbrella group Oakland Community Organizations has been fighting the roadblocks. Says OCO's Jesus Rodriguez:

Cars found to be operated by unlicensed drivers in Oakland are routinely towed; it costs $125 plus storage fees to retrieve a towed vehicle.

As a general rule, I am not a big fan of DUI checkpoints: while yanking drunks off the road is certainly a laudable goal, I doubt the police are getting all that much of a return on their investment of time, money and equipment, and meanwhile you and I are waiting in line, our patience wearing thin, our time deemed officially worthless.

On the other hand, I have to side with Larry Reid of the Oakland City Council, who isn't particularly sympathetic to the plight of the, um, undocumented:

Meanwhile, the city is revising its guidelines for checkpoints, which may include advance notification of checkpoint locations to Latino community organizations. I wish someone would tell me about these things in advance. Then again, I'm legal and therefore presumably not entitled to such consideration.

(Via Tongue Tied)

It's official: Phil Spector has been charged with the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who was found dead in Spector's home in February 2003.

Spector, who posted $1 million bail, said very little when the grand-jury indictment was read, but responded angrily after leaving the courtroom: '"The actions of the Hitler-like DA and his storm-trooper henchmen are reprehensible, unconscionable and despicable."

The trial could be held as early as the 16th of December.

But I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen just this way. From Paul Bouchereau, who covers the media beat for the Oklahoma Gazette, in today's issue:

It may not take three whole months; I suspect some people will tune in on election night just to see if CBS gets itself into another train wreck.

Once and for all: There is no rule at Pottery Barn that says "If you break it, you own it."

The Barista of Bloomfield Ave. — serving Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield — offers some alternative rules that might be pressed into service.

Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the trees in Houston's residential neighborhoods are live oaks, which is fine if you like live oaks, possibly troublesome if you're a tree expert.

"Only 10 percent should be one species," says urban forester Charles Burditt. "Otherwise, a disease or other catastrophic event could wipe out a large percentage of your trees."

Do I get any points for diversity? I have a cottonwood, an evergreen or two, twin redbuds, and a couple of elms that are not at all well.

(Via BlogHOUSTON)

It's a fairly safe bet that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be socked with a 25-point penalty and a $10,000 fine for an expletive he uttered in Victory Row at the EA Sports 500 yesterday; there is apparently ample precedent should NASCAR decide to do so.

Did Janet — Miss Jackson if you're nasty — really cause all this?

The image of the Avon Lady — neat, upright, unpretentious, pretty but not drop-dead gorgeous — is practically indelible, despite Avon's efforts in recent years to jazz up the product line. And I mean some fairly smooth jazz, too: if you've seen any of the recent biweekly campaign catalogs, you know that alongside the usual arrays of powders and moisturizers and lipsticks, they're vending some sort-of-sexy lingerie, not exactly Victoria's Secret, but not flannel and muslin either. It gets worse in March and April as they hawk this stuff for Mother's Day, which always leaves me with a serious case of cognitive dissonance: I can imagine it on Stacy's mom, I guess, but my mom wouldn't ever have gotten near it.

Still, I'm just this side of 51 years old; I can deal with images of scantily-clad (or less) women. I'm quite certain I couldn't when I was ten. And I really don't think it's a good idea to have grade-school kids trying to sell this kind of material for classroom fund-raising; it's probably less fattening than your average World's Finest chocolate bar, but kids are already getting overwhelmed with sexual stuff way before they're ready for it, and besides, what does your average Little League shortstop know about sun-protection factors anyway? Gimme back my Avon Lady.

Walter Williams, as quoted by La Shawn Barber:

I understand the rationale for this sort of thing: should a student not flunk out as a freshman, there's a chance he'll be back as a sophomore. If that were the only objective, though, it would be easier just to pass every freshman routinely and be done with it. But apparently Dr Swinton takes this stuff seriously: Williams quotes a report in The State to the effect that two instructors were sacked for not adjusting their grades by Swinton's fudge factor.

I grew up in South Carolina, a state which is not renowned for its academic brilliance, but a state which, at least when I was there, was willing to hammer on its students to get them to learn this stuff already. It is disheartening to see Benedict, an historically black college with a 130-year track record, shifting its emphasis away from academics and toward the politics of self-esteem; it's hard to see how SEE is going to contribute positively to the task of turning out graduates who are "powers for good in society".

The Houston Comical Chronicle managed this howler in this morning's dead-tree edition:

The online copy has been fixed, but anybody who reads the Chronicle's editorial page — assuming someone actually does read the Chronicle's editorial page — will witness this bit of sloppiness.

(Via BlogHOUSTON, which did.)

Gwyneth Paltrow, in whom I have entirely too much interest after having seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, caught a fair amount of flak for naming her daughter "Apple".

Well, at least it's better than "@".

(Via Fark)

The Musée Jacques Chirac, located in the village of Sarran in the Limoges region, collects some five thousand objects given to the French president by foreign dignitaries and, um, other persons. What it's not collecting is revenue: attendance has dropped from 67,000 in 2001 to 37,000 in 2003. At £2.70 a head, the museum's accumulated deficit should be paid off sometime around the twelfth of never.

Greg Hlatky offers a suggestion:

Maybe the UN will concoct an Oil-For-Museum-Passes program.

I have never felt that it was my obligation to contribute (if that's the word) as much money as possible to the government: while I'm not going to file a false tax return, I'm also not going to shy away from every last exemption and deduction and exclusion I can legitimately claim.

Which apparently is also the policy of Teresa Heinz Kerry, who managed in 2003 to reduce her Federal tax liability to 12.47 percent. (Disclosure: My own tax bill, on about 0.78 percent as much income, was 10.69 percent.) In the light of John Kerry's faux-populist sentiments these days, his wife has come under fire for paying so little in Federal tax; I would argue that the flaw, if flaw it be, is in the tax system itself, not in Mrs Kerry's presumably-legal gaming thereof.

As would Fritz Schranck:

And a good argument for the so-called Fair Tax, as well.

I pay most of my bills through my bank's online facility, though one-shots (medical stuff, subscription renewals, that sort of thing) are better handled by old-fashioned checks, since it's a pain in the neck to set up new payees in the system.

Moira Breen has noticed, down there in the fine print, that there are other bills not suitable for online payments:

"Guess you still have to make your payments to terrorists via the old-fashioned check or money order method," says Moira. I wonder if the same limitations apply in France.

A descendant of the warrior Crazy Horse (1842?-1877) has discovered that in 1951, a French strip club was given the same name.

Harvey White Woman, an executor of the estate of Crazy Horse, wrote a letter to the operators of the club asking that the name be changed:

Alfred Red Cloud, another Oglala Sioux, delivered the letter to a club manager. He had his own concerns:

It is unlikely, I think, that the operators of the Crazy Horse will be able to claim convincingly that the club's name had nothing whatever to do with the revered chief: founder Alain Bernardin had a keen interest in the American West in general and the cowboy saloon in particular. On the other hand, should a lawsuit be filed — so far, no litigation has been announced — I rather think it will be difficult for the tribe to prove damages; apart from this story, the entirety of what most people on this side of the Atlantic know about the Crazy Horse Saloon is that in the 1965 film What's New, Pussycat? Woody Allen plays a shlub who has gotten a job there. "I help the girls dress and undress," he says to friend Peter O'Toole. "Twenty francs a week."

"Not much," O'Toole says, and Allen shrugs: "It's all I can afford."

(Via Tongue Tied.)

The Top 10 reasons why Republicans are more satisfied with their sex lives than Democrats:

10. Two words: James Carville

  9. With Bill Clinton sidelined, total Democratic sex is off 62.7 percent

  8. GOP doesn't require Certificate of Gender Equality in advance

  7. Democrats are in a hurry, while Republicans have DeLay

  6. John Kerry said No before he said Yes

  5. Democrats favor targeted cuts, if you know what I mean

  4. "Honey, maybe if you tried a little affirmative action...."

  3. Democrats classify wet spots as EPA Superfund sites

  2. Walter Mondale in leather? Oh, hell, no

  1. You can't spell "Republican" without "pubic"

I'm not quite sure what to make of Sinclair's announcement that they will not broadcast Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal in its entirety after all.

In its place, some 40 of Sinclair's 62 stations will air a one-hour program titled "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media," which, from the sound of it, will incorporate some footage from Stolen Honor.

While there's no indication that Sinclair advertisers were defecting in substantial numbers, Sinclair common stock has dropped by a sixth over the past seven trading days.

Kevin Aylward asks reasonably:

Sinclair's official announcement, complete with the list of stations airing the "POW Story" broadcast, is here.

(Update, 20 October, 2:45 pm: JimK at RightThoughts has seen Stolen Honor and reports.)

The right side of blogdom has had great fun at Teresa Heinz Kerry's expense, generally for good reason. But suppose — just suppose — that she's not really the mean-spirited jackass some say.

Impossible? Baldilocks hears something different:

Yeah, you could say, "Well, if I was married to John Kerry, I'd be unhappy too," and you'd probably be right, but as Pascal reminds us, the heart has its reasons, and they don't always fall neatly into place.

As everybody except John Kenneth Galbraith, who must have been out of town, noted last night, the Boston Red Sox last won a World Series in 1918. This revelation packed enough of a punch to obscure the fact that the Bosox have appeared in no fewer than four World Series since the end of World War I. How did they do?

    1946 World Series — St. Louis 4, Boston 3
    1967 World Series — St. Louis 4, Boston 3
    1975 World Series — Cincinnati 4, Boston 3
    1986 World Series — NY Mets 4, Boston 3

This might not be a bad time to pick the [fill in name of National League club] in seven.

(Via Plum Crazy, "Home of the Vast Yankees Astros Cardinals Conspiracy.")

(Updated as deemed appropriate.)

In 1650, James Ussher (1581-1656) was serving as Archbishop of Armagh and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin. A busy man, but not so busy that he couldn't calculate the very moment of creation:

The evening and the morning were the first day, says Genesis, so Ussher obligingly published his starting moment as 6 pm (sunset, more or less) on 22 October 4004 BC.

The Geological Society of London will celebrate the 6000th birthday of the universe today, out of respect for Ussher's efforts, even though they will tell you that the good churchman was "spectacularly wrong." The fact that 4004 BC was 6007 years ago will be quietly overlooked.

(Suggested by Fark)

From the Only in New Jersey files:

In Franklin Township on the 26th of April, Robert J. Clark Jr. shot and killed a man in his back yard who was trying to steal his all-terrain vehicle. Gloucester County prosecutors charged Clark with murder, aggravated assault and a weapons violation.

The county grand jury, faced with the details, voted not to indict Clark on any of the charges, and in fact charged another man, alleged to be an accomplice of the thief, with burglary and theft.

Prosecutors are not taking this rebuff lying down, and are considering taking Clark's case to a second grand jury.

Then again, we're talking New Jersey here, where, says the New Jersey Coalition for Self-Defense, "the penalty for using Mace to fend off a rapist has a more severe punishment than the legal sanction for rape."

Obligatory Oklahoma comparison: This weekend Tulsa hosts the world's largest gun show at Expo Square.

Just what the world (or at least that part of it which is overrun with barking moonbats) has been waiting for: a font which lacks the letter W.

Versions distributed after the election, I assume, will include an additional L.

(Via Dowingba.)

Glen Ridge (NJ) Schools are no longer sending notes home: all communications with the parental units will be conducted via email. (Presumably every home in the district has some sort of email access; I haven't heard any outcry from the Poor and Unwired.)

As a test, the district sent out this email. It does attempt to cover all conceivable issues, though this one might have thrown some people:

Hmmm. Can one reply to an email which was not received?

And "if we hadn't received it," wonders the Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, "how would we know?"

So does this mean that George W. Bush is comparatively reckful?

Well, we got through the first day of Check 21 with no noticeable effects, although the credit cards processed through 42nd and Treadmill showed an increase in declines, which I am more inclined to attribute to customer perversity than to the new Federal regulations, which after all deal with, well, checks.

Then again, it might get worse: I have to figure that some of the same lunkheads whose MasterCards are maxed out are probably trying to pay their bills with checks which, if not hot, are certainly warmer than their surroundings.

So what did bin Laden really say? At Belmont Club, Wretchard offers a complete transcript and reads between the lines:

[Emphasis in the original.]

Left unspoken is one other question: if we buy bin Laden's deal, who gets to pick up the tab?

Of course, this doesn't mean a healthy diet for the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority won't necessarily benefit from the eventual passing of Arafat, either, says Meryl Yourish:

Meanwhile, if you were planning to mourn this fellow, you might take a look at some of these.

Update, 8 am: While Arafat continues as the Muslim equivalent of Schrödinger's Cat, I am reminded of this bit of speculation I did last fall:

Assuming by now Colin Powell isn't already cleaning out his desk.

Diane Rehm: "Yasser Arafat lies in a French hospital...."

Person in my office: "Why not? He lies everywhere else."

Just how big is Fallujah? Matt Deatherage looked it up:

Oh, I don't know; a lot of smart people have left Pittsburgh.

But underestimating the magnitude of a task is nothing new for the Bush administration either; while they have the long view down cold, counting the number of steps between Point A and Point B is not their strong suit.

People hate Wal-Mart for lots of reasons: they don't like the crowds, they don't like having to park in the next county, they don't like the idea that somebody else (not them, of course) would drive twenty-five miles to save 99 cents on a box of Tide rather than walking into Ma and Pa Kettle's old gen'l store.

This is, however, the first instance I can recall of someone hating Wal-Mart because they expect to collect their unpaid debts:

Last I looked, bad checks were illegal.

And I must say, if 42nd and Treadmill were as hard-nosed about collecting from deadbeats as Wal-Mart apparently is, there would be suicide on a Guyanese scale. I can assure you, I would not miss these characters (calling them "customers" is an insult to the people with whom we do actual business) with their lame excuses and their inflated senses of entitlement. Fortunately, The Powers That Be are starting to see things my way.

(Via Always Low Prices.)

Somehow I got it into my head that privately-operated schools might be a little saner, a little less obsessed with process at the expense of results.

It's probably a good thing I didn't put money on that premise, according to this Reuters ("One man's news service is another man's slush pile") report:

There's only one possible response to this, and Kimberly Swygert, no slouch herself at doing the 'wheel, has already made it:

The kind of place, in other words, where even superheroes could be sued for saving lives.

Rock on, Dr. Swygert. And Deirdre — when you make the Olympic team come 2012 (2008?), make sure you forget to mention where you went to school. They don't deserve you.

As close as I've ever been to Detroit is Allen Park, which is somewhere east of the airport but not quite in the river. This should tell you right up front that I have no first-hand knowledge of America's answer to Pompeii. Still, so long as there are live reports like this one from Agent Provocateur, I need not feel as though my life were somehow still incomplete.

(Note: The full article should be considered Not Safe for Some Workplaces.)

I'm reasonably certain that it wasn't always like that, but for now, I'm thinking "outtakes from RoboCop."

The merger of K mart and Sears, Roebuck, if nothing else, explains the Big K's strategy in the last couple of years: go through Chapter 11, strip away as much as possible, and try to look like you're worth $11 billion.

K mart will continue to operate under its own name in its reduced marketing area. (All the Oklahoma City stores were closed as part of the bankruptcy restructuring.) Whether K mart stores will accept Sears store cards, or vice versa, remains to be seen; Sears also issues a branded MasterCard, which presumably would not be affected, inasmuch as Citigroup acquired Sears' credit-card business last year.

The usual noises about economies of scale and so forth were made, but the real question has yet to be answered: how does the Sears/K mart combination — how, indeed, does anyone — expect to compete with Wal-Mart?

Last night, while I was unwinding in a chat room, someone said "You gotta turn on ESPN right now!"

What I saw was appalling enough, but apparently I didn't see everything, and after reading about it, I'm rather glad I didn't. I don't know if this is the biggest fight in sports history — seems to me that European football riots make this little dustup in Detroit look like a middle-school shoving contest — but it's certainly an embarrassment for the NBA.

Payback, to be effective, must be swift and fierce.

It may not matter in San Francisco, where the city is contemplating charging grocers 17 cents per plastic bag in an effort to discourage their use, inasmuch as they're not recyclable or anything, and will charge just as much for paper bags which are recyclable, to avoid the accumulation of waste — and, I suspect, to avoid being charged with discrimination.

The director of Californians Against Waste uttered the following:

Which is interesting, because it's an indication that the minions of the Nanny State no longer find it necessary to jump through high-minded rhetorical hoops in an effort to justify their latest schemes: they're in this to modify behavior, dammit.

And as always with such things, the marketplace does a far better job on its own.

(Via Fark)

(Update, 3 pm: Fritz Schranck suggests a solution.)

It's not that I'm suffering from Fear of Flying, which is more precisely described as Fear of Crashing; I've logged tens of thousands of miles over the years. (There was a brief period in my early twenties when I'd flown more miles than I had driven.) But I seldom bother these days. One reason is simple efficiency: except for the World Tours in the summertime, most of my destinations are fairly close by, and while flying is quicker, there's still the annoyance of lining up ground transportation at the destination point. Unless the fare is incredibly cheap — there once was a time when Southwest offered an occasional OKC-MCI (Kansas City) one-way fare for $19 plus tax — it's less of a hassle to drive.

Nowadays, thanks to what passes for increased airport security, flying isn't even that much quicker anymore, at least in the judgment of James Joyner:

When they're telling you to arrive at the airport two, even two and a half hours early — well, I can be almost halfway to Kansas City in two and a half hours. And as I've noted before, my car has never once lost any of my bags.

Conventional wisdom holds that today is the worst, the most hectic, the scariest shopping day of the year.

Which, of course, is wrong. CardWeb reports on MasterCard's research:

Maybe I will go to the mall.

(Update, 2:55 pm: If I do, I'd better walk. A spot-check reveals that it's possible to park at Penn Square, if you're willing to wait for someone to leave.)

Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia proposes incentives for accurate property valuation by taxing authorities:

Why 97 percent?

Makes sense to me. I don't think this particular problem is rampant where I live — Oklahoma County has most recently valued Surlywood at $70,172, which is a bit less than I paid for it a year ago, and the current US News and World Report claims (in a chart that isn't reproduced in the Web version of the article) that home prices in this market rose 17.4 percent in the past year. More to the point, the 5-percent cap on assessed value goes into effect next year on this property, unless I sell. (Fat chance.)

Still, I keep hearing from family members in places like Austin that their property taxes have risen not only out of sight but out of telescope range, and increased valuation, they say, is the culprit.

(Via Jane Galt.)

The difference between a mere misfortune and an actual calamity, according to Benjamin Disraeli:

In a suggested update to this Vent, a reader, in addition to pointing out that the first WTC attack should have been included among the "terrorist attacks," recommended I include also the construction of the United Nations facilities in New York.

I demur — at the time, it didn't seem so — but if the UN (the organization, not necessarily the buildings) should ever collapse, I plan to list it as a "public service."

Um, did you look for WMD in northwest Arkansas?

(You just know Wal-Mart has to have something to do with this.)

Well, actually, no, I'm not. But the annual gift catalog from Kambers, the first one I've received since the death of Eleanor Kamber two years ago, features two pages of Hummer™-branded stuff, including a pewter-and-zinc windshield scraper for a mere thirty-five bucks. There's also a CD organizer that fastens to the visor, in case your discs aren't getting enough sun, for $25. All these things, produced under license from General Motors by a New York-based importer, are certainly justifiable as gifts, though I can't help but wonder if they could sell that CD case for $17.95 with a Hyundai label.

Ann Althouse's property-tax bill for 2004 was $11,926.89.

<sound of jaw striking parquet floor>

To run up a tax bill of that size in my neighborhood, she'd have to have a house worth $985,816.

She says elsewhere that the tax on the mythical average house in Madison, Wisconsin, worth $205,359, is $4,458.

This suggests a rate of 21.71 per thousand, which implies that her house is valued at about $549,400.

For comparison purposes, a home valued at $549,400 in my particular taxing district would be taxed $6,598. Not that there are any such; City-Data.com reports that as of 2000, there were only 11 homes in this entire ZIP code worth as much as half a million bucks, and Realtor.com says that the average home around here sells for a modest $93,541, which I calculate would run up taxes of $1031.

Fritz Schranck, living in the sacred land of Delaware, is of course paying quite a bit less.

The editors of Discover, a science mag published by a Disney subsidiary, replied to a letter from an intelligent-design advocate (January '05) with this comparison:

Obviously, this doesn't settle anything. My own thinking here is that it would be a fairer comparison were there any languages as complex as DNA strands: there are, admittedly, only four different building blocks, but the structures are astoundingly convoluted.

Then again, my own thinking along these lines has always been something like "Evolution is God's standard upgrade path," a position that appeals neither to hard-core Darwinists nor to young-earth partisans. I'd like to hear some rational (or at least justifiable) arguments either way.

Donna is facing a dilemma, and this is the way she approaches a solution:

I'm inclined to think that with role models like these, she'll come out of this just fine.

A letter from TXU Energy Australia, addressed to "Paranoid Fool" in Melbourne, Victoria, was delivered to photographer Albert Comper, who took exception to the letter's "Dear Paranoid" salutation.

TXU, of course, has no idea how this happened, although the incident does recall one of our Stateside legends:

Well, it could have happened. Of course, in the days of Pullman cars, there weren't advocacy groups for persons with mental disorders to point out how "incredibly offensive" the TXU letter was.

(Via Fark)

Some people actually fall for this:

A chap from San Antonio named Alan Louis Chavis apparently got enough "pure profit," even at the discount price of $25, to operate two customer-response centers, which he was careful to locate in faraway Oklahoma. It didn't save him; in September, prosecutors in Oklahoma put him on trial for mail fraud, and yesterday Chavis was sentenced to 19 years and three months and ordered to forfeit $250,000.

One down, however many thousands to go.

The French are apparently upset that the Carl's Jr. fast-food chain would mock their nation on the basis of three military defeats.

Then again, it was only a thirty-second spot.

Dave Pell of Davenetics notes that insurance giant Geico is suing Google for trademark infringement; the reptilian corporation asserts that Google, by selling Sponsored Links to Geico's competitors, which will come up when you run a Google search for Geico, is violating Geico's trademark rights.

I found this out because Dave bought a Sponsored Link from Google, which will come up when you run a Google search for Geico.

File this under "Geez, I wish I'd thought of that."

(Update, 15 December, 8 pm: Google prevails.)

If you'd like to own Bill and Hillary Clinton's house in Fayetteville, Arkansas, you'll have to outbid Mayor Dan Coody; he wants the University of Arkansas, where both B&H were on the law-school faculty in the 70s, to acquire the house and operate it as a tourist site.

Owners James and Janet Greeson are asking around $285,000 for the one-bedroom, one-bath house at 930 South California Boulevard. A recent appraisal suggested a price of $199,000, which does not include $75,000 in recommended improvements; I don't know whether the kitchen, which had been done up in the sort of Seventies orange and yellow that would make James Lileks cringe, has been restored to sanity.

If that price seems high to you, be advised the house is probably bigger than you think: 1790 square feet, which is more than half again as large as my palatial three-bedroom digs.

(Via Rita, who sees the house as a potential fuel source.)

The city of Indianapolis says that a new stadium to replace the aging RCA Dome would add $30 million a year to the local economy, over and above the $75 million in revenue generated by the presence of an NFL team.

Which, out of a mere eight home games, sounds awfully impressive. And taking a leaf from the Oklahoma City playbook, Indy has bundled the stadium plan with an upgrade to the Indiana Convention Center, the total price to be some $700 million.

Still: seven hundred million American dollars? The entire set of MAPS projects here in the Okay City, including a convention-center upgrade, cost maybe half that. This new stadium must be absolutely incredible.

And even if it is, what's to stop the Irsay family from sneaking the Colts out of Indianapolis in the dead of night? It's not like such a thing has never happened before. I wish Indy well, but the numbers here don't seem to add up.

(Via Punch the Bag.)

The homeless Montreal Expos might not find shelter in Washington, which bothers Rocket Jones' Ted hardly at all:

In defense of the District, at least Council Chair Linda Cropp had the radical idea that stadia ought to be built with funds provided, at least in part, by someone other than taxpayers, a notion which was received poorly in some circles but which makes perfect sense to me.

File this under "Once in a Lifetime": there's an actual (albeit very small) picture of Michelle Malkin in Playboy.

No, not like that, ya perv. In the annual The Year in Sex roundup (January '05), there is, not entirely unexpectedly, a marginally-raunchy picture of Jessica "Washingtonienne" Cutler, and to give credence to her particular transgressions, there's a clip from the Post (which Post, I couldn't say) with Ms Malkin's column, complete with standard photo of the columnist. The column, incidentally, was given the title "Slut on the Hill" by the Post.

It is, I note in passing, a sign of something that InStyle arrived the same day, and comparing the cover photos, I was much more inspired (if that's the word) by Diane Lane than by Jenny McCarthy.

Well, at least Fayetteville doesn't have to worry about snow on the streets:

In other news, the city plans to get its police helicopter airborne again some time in the next few weeks, soon as Sam's Club gets in a fresh shipment of Alka-Seltzer.

(Via Rita, who actually remembers her high-school chemistry.)

A fairly large area of town has no cable access today, owing to the failure, if not utter destruction, of some unspecified component; yours truly is among the irritated customers.

The Mrs Grace L. Ferguson Cable TV and Storm Door Company, of course, doesn't make this sort of information available to just anyone. (God forbid they should put word of a partial system outage up on their Web site, where at least those of us who have some form of alternate Net access might see it; why, someone might think badly of them.) No, you must negotiate the twists and turns of their phone system, cough up four-ninths of your Social Security number — is this not illegal or anything? — and hope you got to the right place, because none of the proffered options actually describe your problem.

Maybe I'll send them a note about this, after I tear them a new one for their spam-handling, which amounts to "Here you go, happy eating"; these people are loath to block an email even if it contains the words DANGER: WORM in caps in the subject line and has twelve different starving piglets as attachments.

(Update, 5:30 pm: They have no idea when things will be repaired.)

First, the bad news:

No statement from James Wolcott yet, so just reuse this one from September:

You've got to figure he's champing at the bit for that killer asteroid to show up.

The Metropolitan Police in England has adopted the term "visible minority ethnics" as a catchall term for black and Asian persons, rather than referring to them as, well, black or Asian.

Some white officers had apparently adopted the phrase so that they could avoid saying the words "black" or "Asian," lest someone be offended. And a police official, cited in The Telegraph, stated that the term would allow these communities to be distinguished from lighter-skinned "invisible" minority ethnics.

A bandaged fellow identified only as Griffin commented: "Little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water."

(Via Tongue Tied.)

Bruce asks:

It's a manifestation of the divine sense of humor. And the punchline? The wasteland briefly known as Palestine, which the Israelis built into an actual country to the general irritation of Arab Muslims worldwide, is the one place in the Middle East that doesn't have any oil.

And one could consider it also a manifestation of the divine sense of mercy, since were it not for oil, the entire Arab world would be about as much of an economic power as Kansas City.

Kansas City, Kansas.

In 1971 Mickey Newbury put together a track he called "An American Trilogy," which, as advertised, incorporated three songs which qualified as quintessentially American: "All My Trials," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Dixie." Issued on Newbury's Frisco Mabel Joy album, it became a Top 30 hit and prompted a cover version by a quintessential American in his own right, Elvis Presley.

At the Wisconsin Senate inaugural yesterday, the Richland Center High School band played "An American Trilogy," which disturbed Senator Spencer Coggs. Coggs wrote to Dale Schultz, the Senate's Majority Leader (who, incidentally, is from Richland Center), expressing his dismay:

What's disturbing about "An American Trilogy"? That "Dixie" business. Reminds people of slavery, doncha know.

Um, Senator Coggs? That line about "old times there are not forgotten," like the rest of the song, was written by Dan Emmett. A white guy from Ohio. In 1859, fercrissake.

I expect your next legislative action to be a statewide ban on cotton products.

(Via Tongue Tied.)

I saw this as an ad on Gawker, and while it's certainly eye-catching, I'm not entirely sure it's the best way to pitch voice-over-IP telephone service.

First off, UNICEF's official policy on intercountry adoption:

The Hague Convention sets down some fairly strict rules of its own, and there are lots of other hoops a family wishing to adopt an overseas child must jump through.

Still, the demand is there, and I've always looked at adoption as a win-win situation: the parents have a child of their own, and the child doesn't wind up in an institution, or something worse. And there's apparently lots of interest in adopting young tsunami victims; Dawn Eden reports that ten percent of her traffic has been search queries for "tsunami victims adoption." It is the apparent policy of non-governmental organizations, however, to make this as difficult as possible, and recent statements to the effect that "children are best left where they are in environments that are familiar to them," as Australian UNICEF boss Carolyn Hardy has said, might be true under the best conditions, but hardly the best conditions prevail in the wake of the killer wave: it's not an environment familiar to anyone.

You might conclude that UNICEF and other NGOs have an agenda beyond the welfare of children. Dawn Eden spells it out:

But of course. Better a thousand children should be warehoused, better a hundred should perish, than a single imam be outraged. Thank you, O Religion of Peace.

BBC News' Have Your Say, in the wake of the tsunami, asked for reader comment on this issue:

Which moved Shawn Hampton of Colorado Springs to respond this way:

Meanwhile, tonight on The Money Programme, we're going to look at money.

(Via David Fleck at Progressive Reaction.)

A pilot departing Oklahoma City's Wiley Post Airport on New Year's Eve has reported that someone shone a laser beam in his face immediately after takeoff. The pilot contacted the control tower, and police searched the area adjacent to the airport.

Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who was in the city yesterday visiting the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, announced that beginning next Wednesday all laser incidents must be reported to air traffic controllers. I expect that in the interest of avoiding the appearance of profiling, all reported incidents will receive the same response, regardless of the color or angle of the laser involved.

Late last summer, I made the following observations about real-estate classifieds:

These, while worthy of comment, were hardly weird. But Rita tops them all:

I'd love to put up one of those, just to see if it would persuade the milkman to deliver the ol' 2-percent in Klein bottles.

The search for ways to attract the "creative class," as Dr. Richard Florida would have it, has reached Spokane, and activists have come up with the notion of creating a "gay district," an "actual physical part of town" that will cater to the GLBT (add initials as needed) lifestyle.

What bothers me about this is not so much that there would be a gay district in Spokane — we have one in Oklahoma City, fairly diffuse but centered not far from me, that bothers me not at all — but that they think it can be imposed from without. It can't. (The last time American cities made an effort to create separate neighborhoods, the symbol was not a rainbow, but a large black bird.) And if you're wise, you don't announce in advance that you're going to create a district: you just do it, a building or two, maybe a block or two, at a time, and then present the world with a fait accompli.

This is not to say that my home town is exactly a hotbed of tolerance. But organized opposition to the GLBT community is conspicuous by its sheer ineffectuality: there is the usual rattling from legislators, and State Question 711, passed last year, certainly didn't help matters, but there's a big difference between political posturing and actual harassment, and for all its bluster, SQ 711 didn't actually change the status quo. Oklahoma County quietly added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy a few weeks ago; the newest county commissioner squawked, but he's just one voice among eight on the county's Budget Board, which on a previous vote before his arrival passed it unanimously. (They will vote again on Thursday.)

Oklahoma City's Asian District is not the Asian District because there are signs posted that say so: it is the Asian District because these are the people who moved in, who rebuilt the structures, who created new businesses, who established a sense of community. It works the same way for districts that aren't based on ethnicity.

(Via Dawn Eden, who has a different set of objections.)

(Update, 20 January, 10 pm: The Oklahoma County non-discrimination policy will not be reversed.)

Jane Galt asks:

I remember this very question from an episode of Lois and Clark, to which they responded just about the way you'd think they would. And as of this writing, Ms. Galt's commenters are split fairly evenly on the issue.

As the keeper of this silly thing, I of course throw in my lot with the unseen ones.

I'd like to say that I'm surprised at this:

But after learning last year that most of the pedestrian "Push Button/Wait for Walk Signal" controls in New York City don't work, I'm a lot harder to surprise.

(Via Deb at Accidental Verbosity.)

Barclays Bank, which acquired the Banco de Valladolid in 1981, was sued by Domingo Lopez Alonso, former majority owner of the Spanish bank. The bank had failed, and Lopez had turned over his shares to the Spanish government under its restructuring rules; Barclays basically picked up what was left after Madrid paid off the depositors, and, said Lopez, Barclays cheated him out of what would have been rightfully his.

The court found for Lopez, and awarded him, according to the order as printed, 1.1 quadrillion euros, roughly $1,400 trillion US, an amount far in excess of the Spanish gross domestic product, possibly almost enough money to bail out the US Medicare system.

Interested parties are operating on the assumption that this is a typo and a subsequent court order will correct the figure.

(Via Fark.)

Someone set us up the population bomb, said Paul Ehrlich, and Jared Diamond is apparently going to ride it like Slim Pickens out of a B-52.

Bigwig points out a possibly-fundamental flaw:

Climate-change (formerly known as "global-warming") buffs will note that 540 degrees Fahrenheit over seven weeks doesn't count; it's 0.54 degrees over seventy years that matters.

LilRed admits to being miffed:

If I understand the concept of "control top," it's technically not her top that's out of control.

(Of course, with my luck, by posting this I'll have totally alienated a woman with legs to die for and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to grow hair so I can tear it out.)

From the official press release:

Fremont police chief Craig Steckler points out that last year the department received about 7000 alarm calls, 98 percent of which proved to be false.

Meanwhile, Costa Tsiokos asks:

Should my alarm go off, which has happened three times in fourteen months, each time due to a screw-up on my part, the security company has checked in with me — average response time, 55 seconds — before taking further steps. Oklahoma City imposes a fine if you've had too many false alarms; as far as they're concerned, I haven't had any, because the accidental alarms have been properly intercepted. And what I think is the most likely means of tripping the alarm accidentally in my absence (no, I'm not going to reveal it here) has yet to happen, despite multiple instances of conditions favorable for it.

It's hard to blame Fremont for wanting to conserve its limited resources for actual burglaries and such. But is this the leading edge of a trend where, in CT's words, "overworked and understaffed police departments would answer calls only made via security firms"? I hope not.

At least, the last one I'll ever be able to afford.

Exclusive Resorts, which offers access to about 150 Überrentals worldwise, has signed a deal with American Express, whose Centurion cardholders (annual fee: $2500) will now be able to sign up for Exclusive's membership package at less than the usual $375,000 fee and will get double the usual rewards bonuses for staying at Exclusive's properties.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, Discover and Wal-Mart are teaming up on a store card.

Phil Dennison reports that Fox News' closed-captioning software can't tell Bill Kristol from Billy Crystal.

It's probably a good thing Meet the Fockers has dropped out of the No. 1 spot at the box office.

A bank robber in the Netherlands was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to repay the bank the 6600 euros he stole — less 2000 euros to cover the cost of buying the gun he used to rob the bank.

Dutch law apparently specifies that a convicted criminal must be in approximately the same financial position at the time of conviction that he was in before the crime was committed. The robber presumably would have been out 2000 euros had he bought this gun and not robbed the bank.

If there's a lesson here, it's simply this: if you're going to rob a bank in the Netherlands, you might as well buy a new, and preferably expensive, firearm.

(Via Tongue Tied.)

Okay, this is three and a half years old fercryingoutloud, but I'm not always a quick study, and, well, I've been laboring under the delusion that "MSNBC" stood for, um, something else.

(Courtesy of Victory Soap.)

Just in case you thought CNN was wrong about everything.

(As well you might, if you remember this.)

If the bane of your existence is a