At this rate, we’ll reach 100 episodes of this little sideshow by the end of next year.

Scarlett OHara New Jersey Band:  Guitar, drums and bass, but no fiddler-dee-dee.

can i sue homeowner for carbon monoxide death of my husband:  Why, did she lock him in her garage or something?

“mark cuban” intj:  Yeah, you gotta be an introvert in today’s NBA.

shredded coal mine boners:  This explains much about Big Bad John.

Does Daneel Olivaw ever have a relationship with a female robot?  Not that I know of; while development of female robots took place after Susan Calvin’s retirement, by then Olivaw was busy with the reinvention of himself.

does a 95 mazda 626 have clutch fluid?  That depends. Does it have a clutch?

involuntary celibacy penis size:  Usually not a factor.

maureen dowd curvy:  Well, kind of.

god hates bloggers:  Actually, God hates Blogspot, and is not all that crazy about Xanga either.

scholarships for descendants of pillsbury family?  If they don’t already have enough dough of their own.

How can you tell if a man is not sexually active?  For one thing, his blog is updated daily.

Or, how to lose 3 pounds in 3 days in bed.

Wake me up around the middle of September.

I remember seeing the trailer for Zyzzyx Rd. online in early 2006; it didn’t look all that appealing, but it stuck in the mind, which I suppose is all you can ask of a trailer, and the tagline — “What happens in Vegas is buried on Zyzzyx Road” — contributed to fixing that memory in place. For some reason, the spelling of the actual road, which is out somewhere in the desert on the 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, was changed for the film; your guess as to why is at least as good as mine, maybe better. (Picture borrowed from Paul’s Ponderings.) A lot of movies never get to a theater at all, but Zyzzyx did, and the combined star power of Tom Sizemore and the lovely Katherine Heigl brought it to a domestic gross of … thirty dollars. (Apparently two-thirds of the take came on the opening weekend, which is not unusual for smaller pictures.) Interestingly, the film has 36 votes on the Internet Movie Database; I’ve got to wonder how all these people saw it, since it’s apparently not on DVD.

(Story seen at Fark.com.)

Listed chronologically:

“Are we not men? We are Bevo” (4 January)
“Another one fights the rust” (7 January)
“Where the gripes of Roth are slurred” (29 January)
“Baby got loopback” (9 February)
“Freeze a jolly good fellow” (2 March)
“No Schick, Sherlock” (26 March)
“Cambridge face with the Oxford booty” (12 April)
“Everybody was feng shui fighting” (5 May)
“Oh, the manatee” (13 May)
“We got stubble! Right here in River City!” (28 May)
“Sidereal vicious” (27 June)
“Weasels we have heard on high” (5 July)
“Grout expectations” (26 July)
“Two Infinitis — and beyond!” (30 August)
“It’s all ova now” (1 September)
“When I think about you I retouch myself” (21 September)
(24 September)
“I shot the serifs” (5 October)
“Mi casserole es su casserole” (28 October)
“Too much too Zune” (14 November)
“There’s no base like chrome” (21 November)
“Wet ones of ass production” (25 November)
“People for the Merkin Way” (2 December)
“Keister bonnet” (7 December)
“Ellipsis sweet as candy” (7 December)

(Total number of 2006 posts: 2,126. Some marginally-acceptable turns of phrase are recounted here.)

It is no particular secret that rather a lot of people who lined up at the stores to grab the first PS3s and Wiis (somehow “Wiis” just looks funny, and throwing an apostrophe in there would make it look worse, quite apart from being wrong) did so with the express intention of immediately selling them at a profit.

But with over 90,000 auctions posted, how do you draw attention to your own? Exactly: throw in a little sex.

(Safety for work questionable; improvement in sales figures even more so.)

On today’s to-do list, only just recently completed:

• Laundry (three loads).

• Weed out 2006 magazine stacks. (Basically, this means: box up the six titles I keep, dispose of the rest. “The rest” filled 3½ lawn/leaf bags.)
• Listen to the Beatles’ Love all the way through. (Reaction is somewhere between “Cool” and “Meh”.)
• Start Zocor regime.
• Clean bathroom.
• Sort unpaid bills by due date. (Most of them are due on the 8th and will be paid on the 3rd.)
• Review annual memberships, add new one.
• Hang calendars. (I have three for this year, including one from these guys and one from these girls.)
• Check Gwendolyn’s fluids. (Oil change due in late January.)
• Disassemble bedroom fan, blow out accumulated dust, reassemble.
• Toss about 40 browser bookmarks that are no longer valid.

For someone as indolent as I, this is a lot of work for a day off.

I’ve had generally kind words for Movable Type’s version 3.xx spam tools; while the nasty stuff still comes in, none of it actually gets put on the site, which is fine with me.

For the last week or so, though, there has been literally no incoming spam, not even on TrackBacks, where most of them materialize. Since it’s too much to hope that the scumbuckets have mended their ways, I went looking for a more plausible explanation, and here’s what I found:

Bot-net tracker group Shadowserver noticed a gigantic drop in infected systems on Christmas Day. the total number dropped from more than 500,000 to less than 400,000, or more than 20%. Another independent group confirmed a 10% drop on their numbers. What’s the deal?

Well, interestingly enough, the combination of people getting newly purchased, XP Service Pack 2 PCs (or Macs), combined with machines not being turned on for the holidays and people being away from work, made the number of infected PCs decrease dramatically.

I suppose this means I should brace myself, starting about ten minutes from now, for an all-out assault on my scripts.

Update, 7:30 am: It took a whole hour for the first spam to show up.

A couple of decades ago, 7-Eleven stores took it upon themselves, with a nudge from nudnik Donald Wildmon, to stop selling Playboy and its ilk. Playboy responded with a “Women of 7-Eleven” feature; I responded by taking my business elsewhere. And I am legendary for the sheer persistence of my grudges, so I wouldn’t have noticed what Dave Munger noticed:

I bought a little gas at 7-11 last night. I had to go inside and pay first, which I didn’t have to do there before. The lady who worked there said that it was because they were in the process of switching from Citgo gas. She’d mentioned before that they’d been having a lot of trouble with people stealing gas, but now she tells me that Citgo (a Red Venezuelan outfit) used to EAT the cost of stolen gasoline! So basically, 7-11 hadn’t been bothering to stop people from stealing it.

I don’t know if this extends to Oklahoma 7-Eleven stores, which are not actually owned by Southland Corporation or its Japanese parent company, but around here, just about everyone has been insistent that you pay first ever since the first glimpses of $3 gas.

Last week, with the able assistance of Tamara K., I made some snide remarks about how we’re approaching mandatory bubbles for boys (and, for that matter, for girls), lest they get an owie somewhere.

Andrea Harris points out that the grownups apparently yearn for bubbles of their own:

[T]he two sets of Star Trek series, the original and the new, show how our society’s attitudes towards risk, and people who seek risk, have changed, and not for the better. I guess the most obvious explanation for the change is the fact that the generation currently in charge of the arts, the news media, and the educational system — hint, it was born after a certain war and the initials of its nickname are “BB” — is growing old and sickly, so everyone has to live through their increasing fears of falling over and not being able to get up just like we had to live through everything else they felt and did. This can’t be good, because after growing old there is only one experience left — the one you don’t live through. Then again, at least the grave is silent.

As a card-carrying member of the Vainest Generation, I have to concur. Fortunately, I didn’t get much coddling early on, so it’s not like me to expect any today, although my capacity for whining is at least average for my demographic cohort.

With this in mind, I’d like to borrow a hat, and then tip it to the Ethiopian army, which, in the traditional American spirit and with the assistance of some traditional Americans, fought a passel of Islamic nutjobs on a truly level playing field: if you got onto the field, you got leveled. Truly.

Autonet is rolling out a wireless-Internet package that runs off Verizon’s EV-DO network. And “rolling” is the operative word, since it’s intended for use in your car.

I bounced this idea off Trini, and she was quick to point out an application: “Set up a music server at home, and take your tunes wherever you go.”

It’s a little pricey — $399 for the hardware, fifty bucks a month — but someone who travels more than I do might find this an absolute boon.

Well, if Crossroads Mall can’t make a go of it with ownership from California, let’s give the Arkansawyers a chance:

Arkansas investors have purchased three malls, including Crossroads Mall in Oklahoma City. Midwest Mall Properties, formed by Doyle Rogers, John Flake and Sam Mathias, has also purchased Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville, the company announced Tuesday.

The purchase price was in the $400 million range, Midwest Mall said.

Sam Mathias operates Mathias Properties in Springdale, Arkansas; John Flake heads up Flake & Kelley Real Estate Management in Little Rock; Doyle Rogers runs the Doyle Rogers Company, with offices in Little Rock and Batesville. None of these fellows are what you’d call small-timers, so I’m pretty sure they’re not in over their heads.

The Macerich Company owned all three of these malls. Citadel in Colorado Springs is just under 1.1 million square feet and is anchored by Dillard’s, JCPenney and Macy’s. (There was a Mervyn’s, which has closed.) Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville covers 820,000 square feet; its anchors are Dillard’s, JCPenney and Sears. (Dillard’s has two anchor spots here, suggesting that something else left.)

Last spring I suggested that Crossroads was doomed; let’s hope that judgment was a trifle premature.

Update, 9 am Wednesday: Apparently, says someone who’s familiar with the area, the second Dillard’s at Northwest Arkansas Mall was built on; it didn’t replace something else.

The Warriors came to Oklahoma City having beaten the Hornets two games out of three, and boasting one new player: guard Kelenna Azubuike, the leading scorer in the D-League so far this season, who came up from Fort Worth today to help fill out Golden State’s injury-ridden roster.

The Bees ran up a 12-point lead in the first quarter; Golden State made up the difference rather quickly and then some. It was 49-45 Warriors at the half. The ever-unpopular Third-Quarter Drought™ left Golden State up 13 after three; the Hornets fought back in the fourth, at one point pulling to within three, but Golden State prevailed, 97-89.

Matt Barnes inflicted the most damage, scoring 29 (including 5 of 9 from beyond the arc) and hauling down 10 rebounds. One-time Hornet Baron Davis also dropped in 29. The new kid, Azubuike, got to play 16 minutes, garnering four points and three rebounds.

Both Rasual Butler and Jannero Pargo did some serious shooting, Butler scoring 30 and Pargo 24. Tyson Chandler still isn’t scoring a lot, but he pulled down 15 boards. The big difference? The Hornets gave up 16 turnovers, versus only 6 for the Warriors.

The Pistons will be here Thursday, as will the TNT broadcast crew. The Hornets beat Detroit earlier in the season; I promise to be delighted should it happen again.

There are few things in life as much fun as the curt dismissal of an entire genre:

Science fiction isn’t all Star Trek and spaceships but it is almost completely devoid of stylists, writers whose mastery of poetic language lends their works an enduring quality. It is really not that daring to suggest that the typical sci fi devotee is a socially awkward white male who prizes laborious detail of setting over literary quality. Hence the dominance of writers like Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert and William Gibson, in whose entire output one will find not a single stirring passage or notable use of metaphor. And yet their fans must number in the millions.

It is indeed not that daring, but that’s as far as I’ll go with it. I have to admire, though, the sheer pluck of someone who can read the complete oeuvre of three fairly prolific writers while presumably being bored throughout the entire exercise. (I couldn’t take that much of Herbert myself.)

Of course, there’s always the chance that our critic is more interested in demonstrating how superior he is to those SF partisans, inasmuch as he’s read The Vicar of Wakefield, but that couldn’t be it, could it?

And God forbid women should read this stuff:

My suspicions about any woman who announced a love of science fiction would be, in order:

1. Dumpy looking

2. Socially maladept
3. Resigned to grabbing the low hanging fruit of mating material

Encountering a truly good looking woman who enthuses about this male-oriented dreary genre trash would certainly cause me to raise an eyebrow.

Is that the problem? It’s “male-oriented”? Horrors! Bring on the romances!

(Via Kathy Shaidle, who presumably had her reasons.)

Yesterday, Ray Vaughn was sworn in for the first time as District 3 Commissioner in Oklahoma County; shortly thereafter, Brent Rinehart of District 2 nominated Vaughn to serve as chair.

Vaughn declined:

“I appreciate that, but honestly, I think the citizens would continue to be served best if we just continue with the same leadership we’ve had,” Vaughn said. “I need some time to learn this position.”

Which, you can be sure, annoyed Rinehart; the “same leadership we’ve had,” District 1’s Jim Roth, has been a thorn in Rinehart’s side for some time, and Vaughn has already said he will work with Roth to restore the Budget Board, which was abolished by Vaughn’s predecessor, Stan Inman, and Rinehart back in 2005 in a fit of pique.

Go get ‘em, Ray.

If you wish to apply to the Drug Enforcement Administration for “controlled-substance registration,” and you operate a hospital, a retail pharmacy or an individual medical practice, you must fill out DEA Form 224 and submit it to DEA with the application fee (currently $551).

I have no idea what substances Kehaar has been hitting, but apparently they didn’t keep him from running Carnival of the Vanities #224, the most recent incarnation of the oldest weekly blog compilation.

After yet another CNN blunder with a text overlay (though it pales by comparison to this one), Wonkette has a suggestion for Senator Obama:

Drop the middle name, drop the last name. Just go with BARACK, like Madonna or Prince or Beck. If this “rock star” crap is going to persist for the next 23 months, might as well go all the way.

Besides, you know Hillary and Rudy will, and Mitt probably won’t.

There are still places that will sell you an 800 or other toll-free number, and I have to believe that the proprietors are desperate to move these things, since the entire long-distance market is about to become obsolete, thanks to cell phones and VoIP. Besides, any time I see such a number on Caller ID, I know it’s a waste of time even to pick up the phone.

So when the new industrial-strength blocking device comes in, rather than force everyone to get an ID to call me, I’m simply going to block every single toll-free number in North America, be it 800, 888, 877 or 866. The machine can handle 175 database entries; this procedure will use up only four, leaving me plenty for future use.

Jeff Jarvis thinks he got ripped off by Burger King:

We go to Burger King because the kids eat their chicken nuggets. The dollar menu sells them four pieces for $1. At most stores, an eight-piece order used to cost more than double that, so my wife got me in the habit of ordering two four-pieces instead of one eight-piece. Finally, most of the stores saw how silly this was repriced their eight-piece nuggets to $1.99, a one-cent saving over the dollar menu. Fine. Thanks. So today, we went to another Burger King and I just ordered two eight-pieces without looking. Turns out, they don’t post the price of the eight-piece and they charge $2.29 for them. So I got two eight-pieces and got 16 pieces of fried chickenesque things for $4.58. If I had ordered four four-pieces, I would have gotten the same 16 fried chickenesque things for $4.

Which, if nothing else, lends credence to the following:

• You should never assume that prices will be consistent at franchised fast-food joints;

• There is no incident so trivial that someone won’t blog about it;
• There is no blog post so trivial that someone won’t link to it.

Oh, and Jeff? Wendy’s nuggets are better.

(Seen by Rachel.)

You’ve seen the Likert scale before: you’re given a list of statements, and you’re supposed to:

• Strongly disagree.

• Disagree.
• Neither agree nor disagree.
• Agree.
• Strongly agree.

The scale itself isn’t biased, but how it’s displayed can be:

Our bias for the left-hand side of space could be distorting large-scale surveys. Past research has shown that when people are asked to bisect a horizontal line down the centre, most will cross the line too far to the left. This leftward bias is thought to stem from the right hemisphere — it plays a dominant role in allocating our attention and is also responsible for processing the left-hand side of space. It may also be related to a cultural tendency to read from left to right. Now Andrea Loftus and colleagues have reported this spatial bias could be distorting survey results.

The researchers presented two groups of students with the same questionnaire statements about their experience at university (e.g. “My course has been enjoyable”), except that one group answered using a 5-item Likert scale that ranged left-to-right, from “definitely disagree” to “definitely agree”, whereas the other group answered using a scale that ranged left-to-right across the page, from “definitely agree” to “definitely disagree”. The positive questionnaire statements were the same as those used by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in its survey of 250,000 students.

In the current study, the students’ natural bias for the left meant those answering using the Likert scale that started on the left with “definitely agree”, responded with that answer to 27 per cent more statements than did the other group of students — that is, their views came out as more positive. By contrast, those students who answered using the scale that began on the left with “definitely disagree” responded more often with “mostly disagree”, meaning their views came out overall as more negative.

The most expedient solution, it would seem, would be to prepare all surveys of this type with half the forms with “Strongly agree” on the left and half with “Strongly disagree” on the left. Still undetermined: whether this bias persists to the same extent with extended Likert scales, with seven or nine choices. Also still undetermined: whether my beginning the description of the scale with “Strongly disagree” instead of “Strongly agree” reflects my bias.

(Via Zack Wendling.)

James Lileks, Technical Support Wizard:

Problem: wireless internet isn’t working.
Diagnosis: may have something to do with the WIRELESS button in the “off” position.
Solution: depress button.
Explanation designed to burnish reputation: “there was a problem connecting to the router.”

The man is obviously much kinder than I.

It’s been a while since there’s been a Worst Songs Ever thread, and Scott Kirwin is running one over at Dean’s World with the expected results. Scott’s own bêtes noires:

“You’re So Vain,” Carly Simon
“American Pie,” Don McLean
“Feel Like Makin’ Love,” Bad Company

What all these have in common, most obviously, is an origin in the 1970s, which some people contend represented the absolute nadir in popular music. I’m not sure I believe that, although of the twenty songs I dislike the most, fifteen were Seventies releases.

Actually, I like “You’re So Vain,” though I’d like it better if it didn’t turn up five times a week on the radio. Back when the charts had something to do with airplay, about 500-600 records would chart every year. A station with a Sixties-Seventies format, such as Oklahoma City’s KOMA, would therefore have upwards of 10,000 songs to choose from — but they play maybe a twentieth of that. Even Jack FM claims a playlist of only 1000 or so.

Feel free to contribute your own examples of songs which make you want to change the station.

Diane’s son brings home a note from class, and it’s a tad disquieting:

This semester the final exam will be particularly difficult. Unlike the previous final, I will not allow any notes, as it is your responsibility to keep up with your work, notes, and assignments. Nor will I allow any exemptions from my final exams, regardless of TAKS scores and final grades. You read it here first, folks, so do not ask! I believe that, as freshmen, it is good practice for all of you to understand the necessity of these tests, as they prepare you for the next three years of high school, and your collegiate career.

Not so awful, although that last sentence doesn’t scan. (TAKS is the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.) But then this appears:

However, being that I am entertained by competition, I am offering two classes a free 100 on the exam, one Regular class and one Pre-AP class. Here are the rules to the contest:

1. The class with the best overall semester grade score wins. This means the better you and your classmates do these six weeks, the better chance your class has of winning.

2. The class must have a sufficient passing score on the TAKS test. If your class has the highest grade average, but posts a less than stellar cumulative score on the TAKS test, you will not be allowed to win the contest.
3. Your class must have exceptional behavior. Some of my classes have decided that paying attention to the lessons is something unnecessary. The more of your classmates that are quiet and paying attention to the expectations, rules, and lessons, the better chance you have of winning in case of a tie.

As I write this, the Pistons are beating the Hornets; it’s 58-32 at the half. But you know, the Hornets looked really good at this morning’s shootaround, and that’s what counts, right?

You have to figure that when Rip Hamilton gets 17 points in the first quarter, the Pistons are going to dominate — especially since the Hornets managed only 19 in aggregate. And then it got worse: the Bees, unable to buy a bucket, scored a meager 13 points in the second quarter, shooting an appalling 31.8 percent in the first half.

But in the third, weirdly, it was Detroit who suffered the Third-Quarter Drought™, picking up only 14, and their 26-point lead dwindled to 18; it dropped to 14 early in the fourth before the Pistons started hitting on, you should pardon the expression, all cylinders, and dispatched the reeling Hornets, 92-68.

Bobby Jackson, recovering from a cracked rib and sporting a flak jacket worthy of the L.A.P.D., reported for duty, played five and a half minutes, scored 7, and then was spirited back to the locker room: apparently he hasn’t recovered quite enough just yet. And Rasual Butler, after scoring three in half an hour, retired with “flu-like symptoms.” Jannero Pargo scored 16 to lead the Bees, but he had to put up 24 shots to get it; the team hit only 29 of 88 from the floor, 30 percent. Tyson Chandler, meanwhile, pulled down 16 rebounds.

Oh, and Rip Hamilton? Despite exiting early with five fouls, he got 27 points. Tayshaun Prince had the night’s only double-double: 15 points, 10 boards.

The Pacers are supposed to be here Saturday. Maybe they can phone it in and save the airfare.

“Vorführeffekt,” in literal German, is “presentation effect,” but it has been extended to cover a very specific situation: when the technician you’ve called in (probably at great expense) to solve your problem isn’t able to replicate the issue with your machine.

The closest English equivalent I’ve seen is “serviception,” which presumes a degree of hardware sentience: the machine can actually sense the presence of the technician, and will behave properly until such time as the technician departs or the machine is moved out of range.

(Via Laura Lemay.)

Samsung is showing a refrigerator equipped with RFID. What for, you ask?

[I]t does manage to keep a close [watch] on the amount of food remaining in your refrigerated containers. Moreover, this eagle-eyed fridge will purportedly be able to send a shopping list [to] the owner’s cellphone or directly to the supermarket when it detects your milk, juice, eggnog, or assortment of critical condiments are reaching dangerously low levels. As if this wasn’t enough to lay down a pre-order, it will supposedly offer up recipes to users as well based on what’s currently residing in your fridge.

God only knows what this will cost:

[T]here’s no (presumably lofty) pricetag attached to this pipedream just yet, but it is slated to hit retail floors “around 2008 or 2009,” and maybe they’ll enable it to physically visit the grocery store and shop for you in the meantime.

Can it tell a good tomato from a bad one? And, perhaps just as important, will it flirt with the checkout girls?

Eric Siegmund, on running video on his iPod:

[A]t around 2 gig per movie, my iPod will hold “only” about 40 movies … but that assumes that I don’t want to carry any music or photos. Thus far, I can do without the latter, but an iPod without tunes is like a day without rutabagas, IYKWIM.

Incidentally, “a day without rutabagas” produces no Google results. Yet.

How do I know this day isn’t going well? A coworker was stuck for a word, and floated a definition past me, and said word turned out to be “incubus.”

I’m not sure which is worse: that she wanted to know about it, or that it was automatically assumed that I would know about it.

Tamara K., cracking wise today:

“And you may tell yourself
This is not my one-gig drive!”

Which is by way of saying that, after some weeks lurking at Woot, I actually snagged some wootage this week: an actual two-gig drive, with a real platter and everything, that plugs into a USB port. (Here’s the original sales pitch.) I suppose a flash drive might be a tad more reliable, and maybe a little faster, but this thing flat flies, and at eighteen bucks plus shipping, including a USB extension cable, it was hard to resist, especially since the alternative is to burn two or three CD-Rs every time I feel like backing up the files I’d most hate to lose. (I do have a flash drive here at the Shotgun Shack, but it’s smaller. Capacity, I mean.)

These sold out in ten hours or so; I suspect a few of them will be sprinkled through future Bags O’ Crap.

The DreamHost surfer dudes, who have hosted this place for five years now, went through considerable sorrow and pain last year, rather a lot of which was passed down to their unsuspecting customers. (One database machine I remember was thoroughly hosed, and not in a good way either.)

And their rep took a substantial hit:

Every time we had a server crash: “Overselling.” A network fubar: “They’re overselling.” A panel bug: “Didn’t your mama ever teach you about overselling?” A power outage? “Oh yeah, sign up for DreamHost if you happen to like a fresh bunch of OVERSELLING!!!“

Of course, the power outages didn’t help. Nor did the weird problem between our two core routers that made our entire network suck eggs for six weeks this summer.

What’s an egg-sucking hosting company to do? Well, if everyone thinks they’re overselling, then they’ll sell (slightly) less:

Every day, starting tomorrow, the amount of starting disk and bandwidth we offer new customers (this does not affect existing customers at all!) will drop. You can see the amounts here.

Of course, once the new customers are snagged, they can benefit from the ridiculous disk and bandwidth increases that we old-timers enjoy. (My current disk limit is 333 GB; I’m allowed 3.95 TB — this is not a typo — of pipe per month.) And incidentally, my Web-server machine is being moved Monday night to the New and Improved Datacenter.

J. M. Branum has a new project: the Oklahoma Wiki, and it’s intended to go beyond the information available at, say, Wikipedia, where, he says, “some of the more interesting topics are often not covered or are even censored by the editors.”

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Right now it’s kind of raw and unpolished, but that’s to be expected early on.