I mean, the ones we didn’t vote for. Nina wants to know, and she directs her query skyward:

Secretly, I wish I could be more like them. Shallow, self-serving and oblivious. As a woman, I wish I could just look at one, get turned on and have lots of meaningless sex. Why didn’t you wire me this way, especially now? But noooo, you wired me to connect emotionally and then physically.

I don’t get it and I certainly don’t like it.

All I can do is trust you knew what you were doing, hope, pray and beg for a decent keeper somewhere to be found in the pack. Are there any good, non-creepy goofballs left and available?

There are, I am told, women who are wired like men. Are they any happier? I don’t know, but I suspect they’d never admit it if they weren’t.

And I can relate to this:

Could you give me some hope? Something to hold on to? Or why not take away my desire altogether?

I seem to have followed, quite unintentionally, Plan C: my libido is somewhere between vague and nonexistent. And since that’s probably the only place where I can deal with it on a consistent basis — but never mind that.

Sometimes I think we’re all just thrown into the ocean: mostly, we’re ships that pass in the night, but some of us eventually drown.

It went like this:

I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous “7 Dirty Words.”

I am absolutely certain that the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words, which will go a long way toward proving that it’s the right which is still concerned with ideas while it’s the left that’s obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective.

His challenge was answered in less than a heartbeat, using far more than six months’ worth of data:

So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

The methodology, while elegant, isn’t perfect — it won’t, for instance, separate some foulmouth from Camp A who trolls Camp B, and sheer verbosity isn’t taken into account — but there’s no reason to be surprised at the outcome.

(For the record, if you run a similar search on my site, you get 63 hits. Then again, this is not a popular blog.)

The Oklahoman’s Tricia Pemberton’s daughters discover the Hula Hoop at Wal-Mart:

“Mom, look they’re only $2.50. Can we get one pleeeease?”

Two dollars and 50 cents is cheap entertainment these days, so I said sure before they could beg for a movie or the latest CD.

On the way out of the store, Emmitt, a greeter, stopped us.

“I was working Phoenix, Arizona, in 1956 when the hula hoop first came in,” he told us. “We sold about a thousand of those a day for four straight months.”

Emmitt was a little off on his chronology — Wham-O (still the greatest corporate name in history) began selling the round plastic doomaflatchie in 1958 — but I suspect he understood its world-changing nature.

Unlike, for instance, the doofus board of Hudsucker Industries:

Board Member 1: What if you tire before it’s done?
Board Member 2: Does it have rules?
Board Member 3: Can more than one play?
Board Member 4: What makes you think it’s a game?
Board Member 3: Is it a game?
Board Member 5: Will it break?
Board Member 6: It better break eventually!
Board Member 2: Is there an object?
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it’s done?
Board Member 5: Does it come with batteries?
Board Member 4: We could charge extra for them.
Board Member 7: Is it safe for toddlers?
Board Member 3: How can you tell when you’re finished?
Board Member 2: How do you make it stop?
Board Member 6: Is that a boy’s model?
Board Member 3: Can a parent assemble it?
Board Member 5: Is there a larger model for the obese?
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it’s done?
Board Member 8: What the hell is it?

Geez. Even Alvin wanted one of them, and he was a farging chipmunk.

One other thing: Wham-O’s original hoop, forty-nine years ago, sold for a buck ninety-eight. Adjusted for inflation, this should be $13.92 today. And they say Wal-Mart is bad for us.

Jay Lamm, among other things the founder of the 24 Hours of LeMons road race, writes in the April (of course) Car and Driver about a revolutionary vehicle from Chinese-owned MG — the 2008 Long March:

The name, of course, refers both to the chaotic 1934-35 retreat of Communist forces and the later consolidation of power by Mao Tse-tung’s cadres over the antirevolutionary Western-leaning Chiang Kai-shek. It also refers to the formidable hike that awaits all MG owners who try driving long distances. Based on the most recent MG TF, the Long March is mildly redesigned with narrower headlights, optional pagoda roof, and Supplemental Active Restraint System (SARS).

For power, the means of production is a 2.5-liter gang of four making 28,275 BDARCORFP (Brake Disgraced Anti-Revolutionary Cadres on Re-Education Farm Power) at 6800 CRPM (Cultural Revolutions per Minute). Lubrication is by the sweat of the masses, and sequential-shutoff injection ensures that each cylinder receives fuel according to its needs and generates power according to its abilities. As Nanjing eschews rubber cam belts, the top end has nothing to lose but its chains. Balance shafts were rejected as decadent and counterrevolutionary.

It goes on from there, working in just about every Communist cliché that ever was, which means inevitably that the narrative occasionally becomes Wobbly.

Sing it:

The telephone brings the news so easy from afar
If only progress could do more
But it only brings a reason to destroy the proper season
For a chapter in our lives to take its shape

(From “Two Three Two,” written by Mike Wedgwood, on the 1973 album Air Cut by Curved Air.)

Since then, progress has done more: it’s the Carnival of the Vanities #232, live at Silflay Hraka, and it brings the best of the blogs so easy from afar.

It was Billy Joel, I think, who addressed the issue most directly:

It was a beautiful song but it ran too long
If you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.

But that was 1974; in this era of InstaEverything, even 3:05 is an eternity. I once put together a compilation CD with no songs over two minutes, which if nothing else makes for rather more variety: 42 tracks in just under 80 minutes. Radio wouldn’t dare do this.

Well, actually, they would. Enter Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), which unapologetically edits your standard classic-rock tracks down to the essential stuff. Purists, of course, will be horrified. Stations, they say, should be delighted:

Records that were 2:00 — 3:00 minutes long have been replaced by repetitive epics. It’s not unusual for today’s recordings to regularly cross the four or five minute mark. The immediacy of radio has ground to a musical dawdle. While TV, newspapers, movies and other media have sped up, radio has fallen out of pace with today’s rapid lifestyle. Button pushing listeners and competition from new media is fierce. TSL is down.

A return to shorter songs is essential. Will listeners object? The answer is no. Several focus groups conducted by Harker Research show that most people don’t even notice. When a song begins, the average radio listeners pays attention to the beginning then makes a snap judgment. Do I know this? Do I like it? Then it’s punch or play. They seldom reflect on the song as it ends. Most people use radio as wallpaper, a background to their daily activity.

I sampled some SASS, and I think I’d notice that they’d boiled down Manfred Mann’s take on Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light,” which runs around 7:05 in its LP incarnation and 3:48 as a single, to a startling 1:45 — but it would take probably half a minute for it to sink in, and by then they’re a third of the way through the next song.

So I’m inclined to think this would work better than you’d think. Try to imagine Iron Butterfly’s infamous psychotrope “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” in two minutes flat. I did.

Either traffic is worse across town, or I’m unusually lucky these days:

It is a fact of life that once you hit a red light, it is inevitable that you will then hit a red light at 90% of the lights thereafter.

The morning commute runs eastbound on Northwest Distressway from Linn (2600 block West). If the light at Villa (2500) catches me, the one at Penn (2100) generally doesn’t, and of the next three (mall entrances, Belle Isle, Blackwelder), I am seldom snagged by more than one. The last one is at the former Classen Circle (1400), and it almost always gets me — but from there I proceed onto I-44, where the only lights I need fear are shaped like gumballs and are usually mounted to the tops of Ford Crowns Victoria.

Conversely, or perhaps perversely, I get caught at every light going back the other way, without fail. Must be a timing issue.

“You could kill him on the train,
You could kill him on a plane.
You could kill him here or there,
You could kill him anywhere!”

Sorry. It’s impossible not to think in these terms when you’re dealing with this recent revelation:

It seems that Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Seuss Geisel) and seminal mystery author Raymond Chandler were friends and drinking buddies when both authors lived in La Jolla, California.

One can’t help but wonder what they talked about or, really, what they drank. (Scotch for Chandler. Ooblek for Seuss?) Did they share stories about agents? Editors? Sequels? Or how about their respective concerns around plot and deadlines and story pacing? Did Chandler sometimes say stuff like, “You know, Doc, I really love that elephant character, Horton. But you had him sitting on a whateveritwas for that whole damned book. Readers are fickle, they get bored. You gotta shake things up. See, it’s like this: next time out, let Horton pack some heat. That oughta spice things up. You need the danger; the uncertainty. And see if you can’t weave a rhyme around ‘gams’.”

On the flipside, of course, there’s the possibility that Seuss offered up some tips for Chandler: telling him how he could brighten up his stark prose with the addition of a few carefully chosen rhymes.

Bartholomew Cubbins knew all this, of course, but he kept it under his hat.

(Via Bill Peschel.)

And some weasels, apparently:

Have you ever found a deal at Best Buy’s website only to travel to the store and find that the “sale” is over? Did the Best Buy employee show you “proof” on their “website”? It now seems that there are really TWO websites, and they’re identical except for the prices. Here’s the deal:

• You walk into a Best Buy to purchase a sale item you saw on their site.

• The employee tells you that the item is no longer on sale, and shows you what looks to be Best Buy’s website, but it’s really a secret intranet that Best Buy’s corporate office denies exists. The price on the website shows that the sale is over.
• You cry and leave, then at home you see that the sale isn’t over at all. What happened?

This happened:

In the wake of an investigation launched by the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, Best Buy has finally admitted that the now-infamous “secret intranet” (used to mislead in-store customers about BestBuy’s online prices) exists. The website looks identical to BestBuy.com … except for the prices.

The secret website was first revealed by George Gombossy of the Hartford Courant (Way to go, George!). While investigating a tip from a reader, George was shown the internal website. It was identical to BestBuy.com, but showed a higher price for the item he was interested in. George was misled by Best Buy employees to believe it was the “real” BestBuy.com. Eventually he found some Best Buy employees who admitted to the site’s existence and even showed him how it worked.

I asked a Circuit City staffer about this sort of thing, and was told that they don’t have a setup like that, and what’s more, sometimes their Web site has lower prices than the stores and “it really pisses off the managers.”

Which, you have to admit, is a better name than Lamp/Lamp.

(Via Popgadget.)

First quarter, it looked like the Bulls were just going to walk away with it: they’d jumped out to a 15-point lead early. The Bees came back to tie it at the half; it was still tied at the end of the third. Then in the fourth, Chicago went on a 21-5 tear, and the Hornets never came back: the final was 104-93, the Bees’ 20th loss in 29 road games. Basically, it was the old Third-Quarter Drought™ moved to the fourth quarter, which is no one’s idea of an improvement: the Bees scored only 14 points in the last 12 minutes.

The Bulls had three players over 20 points: Ben Gordon with 27, Luol Deng with 24, and Kirk Hinrich with 22. Tyrus Thomas started in place of the ailing P. J. Brown, scored 10 and blocked three shots.

The Oklahoman ran a story this morning on how Tyson Chandler was still peeved at Bulls coach Scott Skiles long after being traded to the Hornets, and if Chandler thought he had something to prove, he did make a good showing: yet another double-double, with ten points and 13 rebounds. All the Hornets starters, in fact, were in double figures, as was reserve guard Bobby Jackson, but just barely: Chris Paul’s 16 was the team high.

So this March starts like last March: with a loss. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into the 3-11 debacle it was last year. Next game is Sunday evening at the Ford, against the Jazz. Unfortunately, the Jazz, at 38-19, are hot.

Somebody sent this pitch to Consumer Reports, which tucked it into the annual Auto issue. A dealer was offering seemingly-astonishing trade-in values: “100% of original MSRP,” they said, hoping you wouldn’t notice the fine print, which indicated that they would subtract 55 cents per mile.

I saw that, remembered that my previous automobile cost me 59 cents per mile to operate, and concluded that this could not possibly be a good deal.

And then I sat down and actually did the math. Gwendolyn’s sticker was $30,519; she has 94,210 miles, which at 55 cents each comes to $51,815.50; her trade-in value at this place would therefore be minus $21,296.50.

The disclosure forms would likely be hilarious.

During World Tour ’05, I scheduled a stop in Concord, New Hampshire. As per my usual practice, I didn’t actually book a room until 48 hours before arrival, and it was somewhat offputting to hear that a fairly modest room that had run $80 or so when I was there three years earlier had zoomed up well into the triple digits.

The reason became apparent when I arrived: Concord is maybe fifteen miles from New Hampshire International Speedway, and I had come during a week when a major racing event was scheduled. Had I waited a few more hours, I’d have been out of luck altogether.

So I wasn’t too surprised to hear that rooms in downtown Oklahoma City are very hard to come by this coming week, what with the Big 12 basketball tournament and all, and what few rooms there are will cost you. For example: the Courtyard by Marriott, 2 West Reno, is next door to the Ford Center; they’re asking a minimum of $299 per night. (A more typical rate at the Courtyard is $189.) The Skirvin Hilton apparently has a couple of openings on Sunday for $329.

Just for the hell of it, I wandered over to the Web site of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Some rooms this week are quoted as low as $235.

For all of you who were wondering just how this supply-and-demand stuff works, now you know.

Venomous Kate blitches about a blatant plea for linkage:

Sure, sending a trackback linking me as (and I quote here) “the perfect woman: smart, sexy and perfectly capable of kicking your ass.” I saw your trackback. I visited your blog. I smiled. But, really, perhaps you shouldn’t have then written that you assume I’m too stuck up to add you to EV’s blogroll.

(Aside: This is not all that far from my own definition of the “perfect woman,” assuming she actually exists, an assumption I am not prepared to make at this time.)

About 98 percent of the TrackBacks I get around here are the usual zombified offers of drugs or gambling or washing-machine parts. Of course, I am neither smart nor sexy.

AWG writes from Norman:

There’s a popular slogan here in Norman that is along the lines of the old “Keep Austin Weird.” It reads: “Don’t Edmond My Norman.” I love it! As some of you may not know, Edmond is a higher end suburb on OKC Metro’s north side. Norman, however, being a college town, has a funkier feel to it. Not to say Edmond is dull or anything, it’s just that Norman is, well, cooler.

And yet last I looked, Edmond was a college town: UCO isn’t exactly one of those trade schools that advertises on The People’s Court.

I think perhaps some of this is due to the fact that a lot of places with Edmond addresses aren’t actually in Edmond; the Oklahoma City post office doesn’t deliver north of 150th or so, and much of the “suburban sprawl” that is often decried in these parts is actually taking place within Oklahoma City limits, and a perusal of the real-estate ads will tell you that “Edmond,” as a concept, is now just about everything north of Memorial Road and south of Guthrie.

Then again, if Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk were moving here, you know he ain’t coming south of 122nd.

I’ve written before about Central Oklahoma Habitat for Humanity and board chairman Ann Felton, who has built this chapter of Habitat into one of the most active in the entire nation, and today seemed like a good day to see what they were up to.

Turnout was pretty impressive today for the very beginning of the biggest project they’ve ever had: a complete subdivision. Hope Crossing is just west of Kelley between Wilshire and Britton, and eventually it’s going to provide housing for over 200 families. The First Presbyterian Church of Edmond is sponsoring the first house. This is the first time Habitat has had to assume responsibility for roads and utilities, and winter delays pushed back the start by a week, but I have faith in their ability to pull this off.

To get an idea of what Hope Crossing might look like when it’s done, I drove out to Spencer to see Douglas Meadows, where Habitat built 51 homes over three years. The addition sits between NE 45th and 46th just west of Douglas Boulevard; Donna Lane, which marks the western boundary, has been renamed for Ann Felton. And it looked pretty much as I expected it to look: small but neat houses, single-car garages, low on clutter, high on sunshine. There’s also a park with a playground, named for the late Habitat board member Keith Hickox, and maintained by the city of Spencer.

I’ve said before that topographically speaking, northeast Oklahoma City is the most attractive of the four quadrants; I’m always happy to see it getting a lift.

Closer to home, I got to see something truly hideous today: an actual 2007 Lincoln Navigator, Ford’s attempt to outbling the overwrought Cadillac Escalade. But while the ‘Slade is merely silly, the Nav is wondrous bad: the grille is in two sections, each trying to out-chrome the other, and the interior is exactly what you’d imagine for the 50th Anniversary Edsel. Lincoln will sell every one of these things they build, but they’ll snicker every time one goes out the door.

The Consumerist, generally a favorite around these parts, offers a roundup of the “top 10 worst gaffes, flops, and disasters in the history of American marketing and advertising”, and indeed the cited items (including New Coke, the Edsel, and Calvin Klein’s pubescent hotties) qualify as serious missteps. I take exception, though, to number 5 — the Beatles LP Yesterday and Today and its infamous “butcher” cover — not because I think the record is all that fab, or because I’m amused by the attempt to associate baby dolls with baby back ribs, but because of this offhand closing remark:

Yesterday and Today went on to become one of the only Beatles albums to actually lose money, thought this probably had less to do with its cover art than that it was a compilation album with no new material.

Depends on what your definition of “new” is. In the United Kingdom, Beatles albums generally contained 14 tracks; US releases usually had 11. Only six of these tracks had been released before in the States, and none on an album: “Yesterday” and “Act Naturally,” a 45 containing two songs that were cut from the US version of Help! (we got bits from the score instead); another 45, “Nowhere Man” and “What Goes On,” cut from Rubber Soul; a third single, “We Can Work It Out”/”Day Tripper.” That left “Drive My Car” and “If I Needed Someone,” also clipped from Rubber Soul, and “I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Doctor Robert,” which hadn’t yet been released on the UK version of Revolver, and which would not appear on the American release.

And it was this butchery by Capitol, EMI’s US outpost, which was often cited as the motivation for the “butcher” cover, though in fact this same photo had been used already on a Beatles release: the UK single of “Paperback Writer.”

Otherwise, this is neat: Edible Chess. One possible drawback: neither descriptive nor algebraic notation allows for nutrition information.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Even if McGehee were going to Tokyo, he probably wouldn’t eat here.

(Via Troy Worman.)

I bought this batch of cordless phones during the last Woot-Off, and they do have their quirks.

Three handsets were provided; needing only two, I hooked up the base station and a single remote station, and discovered that the handsets are numbered 3 and 1 respectively. Number 2, I assume, is still in the box. The manual indicates that you can add a fourth, though it must go through a tedious “registration” process; the ones sold in the package have the numbers already built in. The numbers aren’t of much use unless you plan to use the intercom function, and since I have no reason to call another room to see if I’m in there, I have no such plans.

Said manual, incidentally, is labeled as “Part 2″. Part 1, so far, is conspicuous by its absence; I’m guessing this was one of those “quick-start guides” that routinely get stuffed into new electronics packages these days, though this set I bought is a refurb (rox0rz!).

Life, said Joni Mitchell, is for learning, and who am I to argue with a Canadian farm girl with killer legs who rewrites Mingus?

• I seem to have the 63rd best video card on earth.

• The University of Tennessee pays Glenn Reynolds less than $160,000 a year.
• If you want to visit Grand Forks — and I think you should — you might consider not going in winter.
• “Whipping cream” ain’t what it used to be.
• Lest you become too comfortable in your home: reversible-density lofts.
• Snails recycle mucus.
• A girl group in burqas? But of course.
• It’s bound to be a hit: the combination vacuum cleaner/boom box.
• Pajamas: not the healthy choice.

More whenever, or something like that.

There must be something about ESPN’s cameras that spooks the Hornets. With a national television audience looking on, the Bees started out strong and then ground to a halt, while the Utah Jazz dominated the boards and the charity stripe, winning entirely too easily, 108-94.

The Hornets had opened up an 11-2 lead over the Jazz in the first quarter, but that didn’t last, and while the Hornets were still up 19-15 after the first stanza, Utah opened the floodgates, winning the next three quarters and their 40th game of the year. Center Mehmet Okur dropped in 28 points; sophomore guard Deron Williams contributed 20, and Carlos Boozer added a double-double, 17 points and 12 boards. The Jazz outrebounded the Hornets, 47-37.

Tyson Chandler had a double-double before the first half ended; he wound up with 20 points and 19 boards. Chris Paul also DDed: 14 points, 10 assists. And all five starters scored in double figures, though once again it didn’t much matter. The Hornets racked up 29 personal fouls; the Jazz got 31 points at the free-throw line, versus only 14 for the Bees.

And after this, things get harder: on the road, against the Nuggets, the Suns, and these same Jazz. (“This” same Jazz?)

As has become customary on Monday morning, here’s a variety of unusual searches that landed people somewhere within this domain.

photocell use in blister packaging:  I’ve always thought that the person who invented the blister pack was definitely in the dark.

coulter topless:  At least some of blogdom seems to want her beheaded, if that’s close enough.

detect a girl pee in public:  I don’t know about you, but if I detect a girl, I can’t pee at all.

bdsm sites, in oklahoma city, oklahoma:  The State Capitol comes immediately to mind.

gm ford chrysler illuminati:  Um, that’s “gm fnord chrysler illuminati.”

What happens if a cop sees you mooning someone:  You spend a lunar month in the pokey.

what is the torque on a aspirin bottle?  My torque wrench keeps stumbling on those childproof caps.

“dwyane wade” tithe amount:  D-Wade makes $3,841,442 this season. Do the math. (Next year it’s much more.)

is katie heigl naked in ZZYZX ROAD:  How should I know? I’m not one of the six people who saw it.

is that, those, this, these prepositions?  Them aren’t.

does yogurt give you worms:  Not unless it had it to begin with.

how can i resent the OBD codes on a 2004 chrysler sebring:  Pay someone $75 to pull them.

are the characters in mozartballs actual people:  Indeed they are; I’ve met two of them.

sexual turn ons for sagittarius women of:  Of what? Not that I’d know anything that would turn them on, mind you.

wear pantyhose to renaissance festival:  If they’re at least 400 years old.

cast of dukes of hastert:  John Boehner, Jack Abramoff, and a special appearance by Mark Foley.

Last October, the community of Loxahatchee Groves, Florida voted to incorporate, and ten candidates for the town council have been meeting in local forums.

Well, mostly. One of the ten begged off last week from a forum held at Sunsport Gardens, a local naturist resort; she said that she’d be embarrassed to bring her children along, as she’d done in two previous gatherings. It may have cost her some votes.

Another candidate admitted to some nervousness beforehand, but pressed ahead:

“I’ve been in public speaking a while. This is new for me. Normally if I’m nervous I just picture my audience nude. I don’t know what I’ll do now.”

I bet he did just fine.

Well, yeah, they won last night, but there’s more to it than that:

Jerry Sloan’s opinion? Hurry back, NBA.

“It’s a wonderful city. The people have been terrific here, the ones I deal with in the arena, and the people I run into on the street,” the Jazz coach, a southern Illinois native, said of Oklahoma City. “It’s a great basketball city…. A tremendous building, too.”

There are no plans to relocate a franchise in time for next season, but Derek Fisher, president of the NBA players union, believes the city has proved itself during its two-season Katrina-prompted tryout.

“The NBA now has a feel for what it would be like to have a team here, because they’ve hosted well,” the Jazz guard said.

Now all we have to do is, um, find an actual team.

A rumor that’s filtered into Consumerist:

I have no proof of this, but it comes from a reliable source (well, someone I consider reliable).

Home Depots in the South (specifically, Tulsa, OK) have a special “MethAmphetamine Lab” Section. Since all the Meth-Lab supplies are legal, they got sick of junkies coming in and pestering their staff for the whereabouts of dozens of supplies. Now they just point them to the designated aisle.

Actually, it’s against the laws of this state to simplify matters for anyone who’s even heard of meth labs. Ask your cousin with the head cold if you don’t believe me.

(Besides, whoever came up with the idea that Home Depot might organize its stores by functionality? Not bloodly likely, bucko.)

Last month one of the Evil Banks who owns the plastic-related segment of my soul sent me a notification to the effect that they were going to pile a few extra percentage points on some Visa card or other. I objected, and said so in return mail; they acknowledged the exception in what we will call Letter 1.

And then I opened Letter 2, which contained an explanation of why they did what they did, which surprised me very little until I noticed that they were referencing an account ending in, oh, let’s call it 1234.

I have no accounts ending in the digits indicated, from them or from anyone else.

Best possible interpretation: they’ve conflated someone else’s debt with mine.

The pertinent credit-reporting agency has been tapped for a fresh report. The bottom of this will be gotten to.

You’ve all seen them, and I’d bet you’ve made fun of them too: $500 cars with thousand-dollar stereos — and, lately, rims that sell for $3k or so.

I must point out, though, that similar outrages to sense and sensibility exist at other price points. Exhibit A: a $150,000 shift knob.

The real knob, of course, is the nudnik who buys the damn thing.

(Note: This isn’t much better, but at least it’s only $40.)

Agent is the Usenet client from Forté; I have used it for about a decade or so. According to their FAQ, individual newsgroup database files up to 8 GB are supported.

Since each file represents a single newsgroup, and I subscribe to 31 newsgroups, I might interpret this as allowing 248 GB worth of articles and binaries and whatnot. Not a good idea if you have, say, a 250-GB drive. (Really not a good idea if you have less than that.)

Anyway, I cleared out 9 GB last night — just shy of 696,000 individual items — and it took almost an hour. I don’t think I should let the stuff go for so long next time.

News Item: Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. pulled the plug on Premiere magazine today, announcing that the April issue will be its last.

The truly sad part, of course, is that this puts Libby Gelman-Waxner out of a job.

Scripts today have been running either slightly faster or quite a bit slower than normal; I’m unable to determine exactly why for either condition. Also, my POP3 mail to this domain isn’t running (though I can retrieve it through IMAP), so if you wrote me and you haven’t heard back, this may be why.

Or it may not. Given the events of today, which in aggregate will be hard to beat for Worst Workday of the Year, I don’t believe anyone’s explanations for anything.

(Having shot off my mouth, I now discover that I can’t get my IMAP mail either. Sheesh. What a day.)

The Hornets played even with the Nuggets for about 18 minutes, and then slowly, inexorably, turned into a team that couldn’t buy a bucket. After winning the first quarter by a point, the Bees were down ten at the half, down twenty-three during the Third-Quarter Drought™, and managed to pull back to within eight halfway through the fourth quarter, only to see Denver start clicking again. Final: Nuggets 106, Hornets 91, Denver’s first victory over the Bees this season.

Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony did their usual sparkling work, combining for 45 points. But the man who shook things up the most, I think, was Marcus Camby, who dropped in eight points, pulled down 11 boards, served up six assists, blocked six shots and grabbed four steals — about as close to everywhere as a player can be in this game.

The Hornets bench was busy tonight, contributing half the offense, but this was due mostly to comparative fecklessness on the part of the starters, although Tyson Chandler got his usual double-double (15 points, 18 rebounds, both team highs) and Chris Paul managed one of his own (13 points, 14 dimes). It was nice to see Rasual Butler hitting again: he led the bench with 11, including three of six treys.

This road trip just gets harder: Friday at Phoenix, Saturday at Utah. Next game at the Ford will be Tuesday against the Nets, and they won’t be pushovers either.

Every now and then, I remember the start screen of my old Commodore 64, which boasted “64K RAM SYSTEM” and “38911 BASIC BYTES FREE”.

Stuff like this often serves as a trigger to that, um, memory:

[T]he supply of data technically outstrips the supply of places to put it.

IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on one zettabyte) in 2010.

An exabyte is one billion gigabytes, or what you’ll need to install Windows 2012.

One question remains unanswered, and Terry brings it up:

No mention of what the amount would be if porn were subtracted.

Oh, a couple of gig, easily.

(And speaking of Commodore….)

Well, okay, if you insist: cocoa Peeps.

Although I’m inclined to accept Sereena X’s caveat:

They are utterly tasteless. But if you bite off the head, in dim light the body looks like a chicken nugget.

I hope that’s enough.

There was media rumble at the end of February about country music returning to the Los Angeles FM radio dial after a six-month absence, and it didn’t occur to me to ask what it had replaced.

Now I know:

[T]he Los Angeles commercial classical music station KMZT-FM (105.1) — “K-Mozart” — switched its format to country music, bringing the latter genre back to FM radio in the Los Angeles-Orange County market.

The Los Angeles Times reports that KMZT (formerly 105.1 FM) has swapped names and formats with sister station KKGO (formerly 1260 AM) — billed as “Go Country.”

The paper quotes owner Saul Levine, president of their parent company, Mt. Wilson FM Broadcasters, as saying, “After 18 years of programming classical music, which I love, it’s been an agonizing thing, something we haven’t done on the spur of the moment. I really hope the classical music audience will be understanding. I sympathize with those who will be upset.”

Two college stations will continue with classical formats on FM: KCSN (Cal State Northridge) and KUSC (University of Southern California).

Dawn Eden traces it back to the spring of 1957. And she’s posted a Beverage Alert, which strikes me as eminently sensible.

Apparently one (if one is young enough and dexterous enough, which lets me out) announces the existence of Best Friends Forever status by texting “233″ to the BF in question; this is, of course, the set of numbered keys corresponding to the letters BFF.

I suppose I’m one of the oldest friends of the Carnival of the Vanities, having submitted a piece to the very first edition; now that the 233rd weekly compendium is up, I suppose I can admit that I sent something to this one too.

“She would have been eleven today.”

Courtesy of Vincent Ferrari, three tips for dealing with Fred in IT, and how they compare to dealing with my department:

Don’t Demand Anything — Unless Fred reports directly to you, you’re not going to get anywhere if you crash into his Star-Wars-laden cubicle with guns drawn. The second you start getting pushy with old Fred, the second he’ll “suddenly realize” that your problem is going to take 2-3 days to resolve. So, in short, be nice to Fred and let him steer the conversation. After all, he knows how the system works and you need his help — if anything, bring an extra Mountain Dew along with you to help grease the wheels.

I might also add that I’ve already prioritized all the corporate functions, and yours, Debbie Downer, are as close to the bottom as is humanly (or electronically) possible. If you need something today, the optimal time to ask for it is last week.

(Oh, and I prefer Coca-Cola for my deskside buzz, though Dr Pepper and RC are accepted gratefully.)

Don’t Expect to be Coddled — Fred probably isn’t going to hold your hand. He’ll either fix the problem for you or give you some possible fixes that you should try out first. If he goes for the latter, your best bet here is to write it down. There’s nothing that will annoy him more than you coming back 2 minutes later asking “What was I supposed to click again?”. If it’s a multi-step solution, jotting it down will further ensure you execute it correct (and you’re likely to impress Fred in the process). If you can’t follow instructions, expect resolution of your problem to come much slower than if you had. That actually segues nicely into the final point.

If you have an actual hardware issue, you’re probably going to Trini, because (1) she’s the official hardware person and (2) there’s a reasonable chance she will not snap your head off. Still, this applies pretty much across the board, with the proviso that if, after scraping your machine down to the bare metal, a week later she finds the same adware whose excision demanded that scraping in the first place, she’s going to compare you, intellectually, to an igneous rock, and you will come off second best. (Me, I assume sedimentary until proven otherwise.)

They Like it when You Listen — Fred isn’t a magician. In fact, a good programmer is one of the most logical, analytical people you’re likely to come across outside of NASA. So, while many of the details of his work may be Greek to you, his solution (and likely his explanation) are probably pretty logical.

As the BOFH, I do no substantial programming: I can write a quick and dirty database query, maybe, and I can tell you why your HTML looks like refried crap — for that matter, I can tell you why my HTML looks like refried crap — but you’ve got to go to the Code Warrior for the serious assaults on data. At some point he may tell you why you are wrong. And he will be correct.

These principles, I suspect, are extensible to an IT department of almost any size.

It is, like all such lists, deeply flawed, and there’s always the suspicion that there are criteria other than musical merit for the ranking. (There is, for example, no planet in this solar system where Pink Floyd and the Dixie Chicks have comparable musical importance.)

For those who asked, or will ask:

• Number of these I have: 47

• Number of the top 10 I have: 7
• Earliest: Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours (1954)
• Latest: Shania Twain, Come On Over (1997)
• Most embarrassing revelation: I originally wrote down for “Latest” Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995), then sorted the list by date to be sure, and: “Wait a minute. Do I have that damn Shania album?”

Also, anybody who prefers Sparkle to Young, Gifted and Black doesn’t know squat about Aretha. I’m just saying.