Woot pulled off a suitably wack little stunt today: at midnight, they had the much-desired Brisket of Cow, though priced, not at the usual $1, but at $1 million plus $1. (Screenshot here.) I went ahead and ordered the damn thing anyway, just to see what sort of excuse they’d come back with when my MasterCard was duly declined for $1,000,006 including shipping.

They came back with this:

Whoops! Lucky for you that we just ran out of room in our money vault, so we can’t take your million dollars. But if you have that kind of money to throw after garbage like this, email jtoon — at — woot.com. We can work something out…

Nicely done, gentlemen.

Update, 12:35: They put the “I want one” button in Bounce Mode just before 12:30, just to add to the general level of perturbation, and some members of the community are arguing that it was, in fact, possible to buy the Blistered Old Crow, had you followed the simple instructions which were hidden in plain sight. Which, if true, makes this even better a stunt.

We’re not doing such a great job of financing teacher retirement: the state system has never been more than 60-percent funded, and is now running in the vicinity of 49 percent.

Kurt Hochenauer reports on a possible new approach to funding:

A resolution calling for a vote of Oklahomans to redirect mineral income to the state teachers’ retirement system has been passed by the House.

Under the proposal, sponsored by state Reps. Tad Jones (R-Claremore) and Joe Dorman (D-Rush Springs), voters would decide whether to amend the state’s constitution so the underfunded retirement system could benefit. Once the system was funded at 80 percent, the money would go back to the School Land Commission.

Text of the measure (Rich Text format) is here. Says Doc Hoc:

This seems like a permanent solution to the problem, though voter approval of the measure could be problematic, and the fund needs immediate new funding. Its sponsors say it would not affect overall funding for schools.

I’m sure I could vote for this measure without affecting my status as a tax-cutting right-wing meanie. And it sailed through the House, 98-3; I’d be very surprised if it died in the Senate, though the wild card here has to be Governor Henry, who’s currently in “I have a veto and I’m not afraid to use it” mode.

Sometimes it’s the filler that packs the punch. From an unattributed blurb in this morning’s Oklahoman classifieds:

Currently, single women purchase 22 percent of new homes, compared to only 9 percent by single men. They purchased 1.5 million homes in 2005, which equates to one in five sales.

This spike in homebuyers can be attributed to the greater number of single women out there who are choosing to go it along without compromising lifestyle. US Census Bureau findings report that more than half of all adult women live alone.

Well, that “half live alone” business, as it happens, is not exactly true, and “compromising lifestyle” is a phrase that simply screams “We are not serious,” but just the same, single women are indeed buying more houses these days, and single men have been stuck around the 10-percent level for decades.

Another possibly-arguable set of premises from the same article, this time a list of “common trends” among these women:

• 3 out of 4 women spend less than $200,000

• Prefer 2 bedrooms or more
• Are more likely to choose resales
• Buy in city over suburban areas
• Will not compromise on location or quality of neighborhood
• Prefer condos or townhomes with well-run neighborhood associations
• Desire security and/or gated access
• Want close proximity to stores, shopping and fitness centers

Except in the condo/townhome market, just about everything is “2 bedrooms or more,” and in Oklahoma City in particular, three out of four sales to everybody fall under $200,000. (January median price was $123,383, report the metro Realtors.)

I should point out here that the palatial Surlywood estate was acquired from a single woman; I suppose I should have asked her what she saw in the place. (She has since bought a larger house not too far away.)

Some days it seems you just can’t reason with a dealership:

My 2005 TSX has only 20k miles on it, so there’s still 30k miles left on the warranty. A couple of weeks ago I took her in for what I thought was some minor warranty fixes. Little did I know…

The Service Manager refused to fix the split in the [seat] stitching because he claims:

1. that I get into the car “wrong” (whatever that means). He claims that I brush against the side-bolster of the seat, and that this is not the correct way to get into the car. I asked where in the owners manual it describes the “correct” way to get into the car to no avail.

2. that I wear the wrong kind of pants. Yes, you read that right. The guy told me that blue jeans tend to scuff the leather, and that I might not have this problem if I wore slacks. Apparently getting into the car with Levis is not considered “normal use” under the terms of the warranty.
3. that I should have taken it back to the dealer who sold me the car (in Sacramento, about 80 miles away). Ya, I don’t get it, either. That’s not what the warranty says….

I suspect the rivets in one’s jeans are more hazardous to leather than mere denim itself would be, though I have no expertise in coefficients of fabric friction other than, you should pardon the expression, seat-of-the-pants estimates.

I did, however, pull out Gwendolyn’s manual to see what Infiniti had to say on the subject, which turns out to be nothing: unlike Acura, Infiniti, at least in 2000, did not see fit to exclude upholstery from warranty coverage. And after 95,000 miles, including about 7,000 miles so far under my decreasingly-fat arse, Gwendolyn’s leather seats are in excellent shape.

Mark Ashley, writing for Consumerist, suggests a solution: “Drive naked.” Um, not on leather, Marcus; besides, there’s always going to be someone who finds your lack of pants disturbing. (Solution to solution: throw a bath towel over the seat.)

You know the tune:

99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
Fix one bug, compile it again,
100 little bugs in the code.
(go to start if bugs>0)

(Courtesy of Punctilious.)

It’s two, two, two movies in one!

(Seen at Brad Sucks.)

If you’re just tuning in — and where have you been? — this is a weekly exercise in which we look at what was sought by Googlers and Askers and Yahoos and such, and make fun of as many of their searches as possible.

clothing optional beaches in oklahoma:  Wait a minute. There are beaches in Oklahoma?

don’t start sentences with it:  It just wouldn’t be proper.

suppository fanfiction:  Right. Like there aren’t enough assholes in real life.

hoosier daddy in donald duck voice:  Now, now, we don’t talk about Unca Scrooge’s trip to South Bend.

how much is my vintage McDonalds item worth?  If it’s an actual sandwich, probably not much.

gorgeous person in distress:  There’s about 60 percent of contemporary fiction, right there.

maureen dowd siblings:  ”Are there any more like you at home?” he asked fearfully.

is infiniti i30 a chick car:  Mine isn’t. In fact, it doesn’t interest the chicks at all.

nudist wears pantyhose:  Must be a work day.

backplane sex:  Is this how you get motherboards?

weed whacker powered bicycle:  You might not want to ride this while wearing shorts.

average women naked photos:  On average, women won’t pose for naked photos.

creep ogles tall women:  The creeps I know don’t discriminate on the basis of height.

Present-day revisionists have managed to inculcate the notion that the post-JFK 1960s and the Nixon 1970s were all revolution, all the time, and the fact that I don’t remember it that way at all doesn’t count, because after all I’ve sold out to The Man. (Actually, I just live down the street from him.)

One thing I did remember learning during that period is that I didn’t understand the female half of the species at all, a situation which has changed hardly at all in the intervening decades.

With the dubious and possibly unattainable goal of addressing both of these issues at once, I have made a small investment in research material: I bought about a hundred back issues, roughly 1964 to 1975, of American Girl, a monthly magazine published (until 1979) by the Girl Scouts of America, and I will be going through them over the next few months looking for stuff that might possibly be relevant in some small way to my 21st-century existence. And, of course, whatever I find, I will duly wedge into this little text box.

In the meantime, here’s a pertinent observation by David Warren, dated yesterday:

I tell younger people sometimes that “I was there at the fall” — that I can remember a time before the Western world finished going crazy. They don’t believe me. They think everyone remembers the end of his childhood that way. But no: they are wrong and I am right. The nadir was achieved around 1969, when all the gulls of the ‘sixties came home to roost. On the exposed hull of the ship, as it were.

He finds evidence in his old high-school yearbooks:

[T]wo years later, and the teachers are a mess. The ties are disappearing, and some of the men are growing beards. One is actually wearing sunglasses. The younger female teachers are dressing to kill. Longhairs have started to roam the corridors; several of the kids look drugged. Group photos are chaotic, and the photographers should have been sued for half the mug shots. Hippie-dippie graphics have invaded the yearbook itself. The comments with the graduates’ pictures have become dangerously risqué and smartass.

This corresponds precisely to what I remember. At the end of the earlier school year, the old principal had been fired: he was a drill sergeant (literally, ex-military). The new principal was a “reformer”: a nice guy, a sensitive guy. Overnight, Ontario’s Hall-Dennis Report had also swept through, with its smug title, “Living and Learning.” Half the subjects had become “electives”: 300 pupils in Grade IX Latin became four pupils in Grade X. The bottom had fallen out of educational standards that had already been slung very low.

All these changes happened (not quite literally) overnight. Yet within a year or two, nobody could remember that anything had ever been any different. Or rather, nobody would dare remember. For suddenly we were living in that brave new world, and anyone who doubted it was marked as irredeemably “square.”

As the Beach Boys never sang, “Help me, rhombus.”

Been there, ran over that:

During his career, Walt [Disney] probably did more to protect animals that don’t deserve protecting than anyone else in human history. Mice, whether you call them Mickey or Minnie, are not cute little adorable balls of furry fun; they are vermin. Ducks really are as vile-tempered as Donald is, so there’s a little truth in advertising there, and deer are not sweet, lovable nature’s children who only want to play and frolic in the forest primeval with their cute little furry friends without having to worry about people and their nasty firearms; deer are oversized rats with hooves. Deer don’t want to frolic in the forest primeval; they want to eat my mother’s geraniums and her shrubbery and crap all over my front yard every chance they get. So when my co-workers accused me of trying to kill Bambi the other night, my answer is a) I didn’t kill the deer, b) I wasn’t trying to kill a deer at all, it was an accident, and c) the little bastard had it coming.

Next time, waste ‘em. Might as well get some satisfaction out of it.

I make the turn into the onramp, and it’s not ten feet before I discover that traffic isn’t going anywhere, and of course there’s no Plan B: I can’t back up, and the ramp leads to one place only.

So I merge in at about 15 mph, and I start wondering where the hangup is. I decided it was probably two miles ahead, where a section of pavement, pounded by rain last week, finally separated itself from the roadway, leaving a crater worthy of the dark side of the moon. (Which wouldn’t surprise me, since there are spots on 50th, closer to home, where telling your asphalt from a hole in the road is all too easy.) Fine, I said to nobody in particular, I’ll just get off at the next mile and take the surface streets.

Then I saw the black-and-white in the median, a car with its rear in the air well off the shoulder, an 18-wheeler a couple hundred feet ahead, and I realized that there was no hazard at all: it was the phenomenon known as “rubbernecking,” a bunch of people slowed to a crawl in gleeful anticipation of seeing the carnage for themselves.

And upon this discovery, I put the Venturi effect to work and shot through a narrow opening in traffic, putting this discouraging vision behind me as quickly as Gwendolyn was willing to permit.

It occurred to me shortly thereafter that if this had truly been the Venturi effect, a partial vacuum should have been created; I consoled myself with the knowledge that plenty of them already existed, between the ears of the schmucks I’d left in my wake.

But no pix yet, reports daughter-in-law:

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 (yes, just one day before Laney’s fourth birthday) @ 3:14pm we became the proud parents of our third child. Our new little man Gunner Memphis Hill weighted in at 9lbs 6oz and is 22½ inches long. He had his first doctor visit today and is a perfect healthy little guy.

For those keeping score, this is grandchild #4. As for the name, hey, I’m just happy they didn’t name him after me.

By now, everyone knows how to get out of a car gracefully without showing your underwear. Maybe. Used to be, the tricky part was getting into the car:

Make your entrance gracefully. The best way to make a transition from pedestrian to passenger is by putting your left foot on the floor of the car and then easing into the car in a sitting position. If it’s one of the low-slung models, though, you’ll need to change your approach completely. First, sit sideways on the seat with your feet outside the car and swivel forward. Let your body form a gentle “S” curve, with your legs crossed at the ankles.

At the time, there presumably weren’t any high-slung models, so don’t try this with a Ford F-150.

And yes, there are instructions on debarking:

When you’re ready for your exit, take the most attractive way out by sliding along the seat until you can put a foot on the ground. Lower your head and slip out smoothly.

This would seem to imply a bench seat. Interestingly, the illustration accompanying this wisdom seems to be a drawing of a Jaguar E-type, in which case, um, well, you’re on your own, sweetheart.

[From "Key to Car Dates" by Kitt Gerard, American Girl, August 1968.]

Apparently this is. (Translation: “I want one too.”)

There’s no real overlap here: Woot doesn’t do any business in Constantinople Istanbul. (Heck, Woot doesn’t do any business in Juneau.) Still, you have to wonder when the lawyers are going to show up.

The restoration of the Underground has been completed, though there’s one thing more that needs to be addressed: the Underground needs its own Web site as a promotional tool. Otherwise, it’s likely to be overlooked, and not in a good way either.

Perhaps Downtown OKC, which at least has a map, can lead the way.

Bloodwise, I am type A, and Rh-positive.

If this works out, I won’t have to care anymore:

In the 1980s, a team in New York showed that an enzyme from green coffee beans could remove the B antigen from red blood cells. It proved too inefficient for practical use, but Henrik Clausen at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and colleagues have now screened bacteria and fungi for more powerful enzymes. “The diversity you get in the bacterial kingdom is much higher,” Clausen explains.

The researchers homed in on two enzymes. One, from a gut bacterium called Bacteroides fragilis, removes the B antigen. The other, from Elizabethkingia meningosepticum — which causes opportunistic infections in people — targets the A antigen. The purified enzymes are highly efficient.

And, less A and B, you’re left with O, the “universal donor” — provided you can get past that tricky Rh factor. Plasma, of course, is another matter.

(Seen at I See Invisible People. Title comes from this.)

By some probably-not-all-that-coincidental coincidence, the first RedHawks home game of the season is scheduled for the same night (Friday the 13th, yet) as the last Hornets home game in Oklahoma City. I have to figure that this took some doing, since the ‘Hawks are on the road for their first eight — four at Memphis, four at Nashville — before coming home and playing four more against the Redbirds. I may have to stay home with a blanket over my head. On the upside, Bobby Jones is back as manager, which can’t be bad.

New ticket prices, if there are new ticket prices, haven’t been posted yet: last year, general admission was six bucks, field boxes ran $11, and club level was a mere $15.

Despite the return of demigod Michael Redd, Milwaukee had dropped six in a row before tonight, but the Hornets kept them under wraps during the first half, taking a 67-56 lead and giving up only one personal foul (by Desmond Mason, on Redd). What’s more, Tyson Chandler had his double-double by halftime.

As everyone knows, the time to score on the Bees is during the third quarter, and the Bucks duly pulled to within six, courtesy of long-ball prowess and nine Hornet turnovers. To kill time in the fourth, Sean and Gerry tried to analyze Rasual Butler’s shooting, Vaillancourt suggesting that in the absence of other explanations, Butler’s streakiness could be attributed to astrological factors. Rasual promptly dropped in two consecutive treys, half of a 12-1 run for the Bees, shutting down that line of thought. And the Bees won it 119-101, their highest point production all year.

Still, Redd outscored everyone, dropping in 27 of the 46 points scored by the Bucks’ starters. Lynn Greer and Ruben Patterson paced the bench with 19 and 10 respectively.

But the Hornets ruled the boards, outrebounding Milwaukee 47 to 25 — Chandler got twenty, alongside 18 points — and after that fourth-quarter spurt, they wound up with nine 3-balls, same as the Bucks, and on five fewer attempts yet. David West was deadly, hitting 8 of 11 from the floor and 8 of 8 from the line, for 24; Desmond Mason was right behind with 21. Chris Paul scored only 8, but dished up 14 assists; Butler, Jannero Pargo and Bobby Jackson were all in double figures off the bench.

Short road trip, this; the Hornets come back to the Ford tomorrow to host the Sonics. The Suns will be in town Friday.

I suppose, if I were absolutely, positively determined to pay the least amount of money for stuff, or at least to persuade myself that I was paying the least amount of money for stuff, I could drag myself into a Wal-Mart.

But then I might run into someone like this:

True story: Checkout lines were very long and slow, and I’m standing behind some guy and his wife. Among the items in their cart was a package of some sort of Easter candy, you know, six or eight individually wrapped chocolate whatevers. After a while, he opens the package, unwraps a candy and eats it. Several minutes later he eats another, and then another. They finally get to the checkout, and he was disappointed that the scanner charged him full price for the half-empty package of candy.

His wife proudly crowed, “See? Told’ja!”

This is one of the few times I’ve ever felt any empathy with Mark Morford.

I was never a great Yoko Ono fan, but neither did I understand the rather shabby treatment that she got at the hands of various Beatlemaniacs for many years: yes, she was a few degrees off plumb, but so was John, and if clearly he was the greater musical talent, she made a pretty decent Muse for him, and her own musical explorations weren’t the horrorfests they were made out to be. (Well, except for “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” which was sort of what you’d get if you’d tried to replicate Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music with actual flesh.)

Two lengthy articles about Ono showed up at my desk this week, a new interview by Tony Sclafani in Goldmine (not on their site yet), and a two-year-old (at least) piece by Joshua Rotter for MacDirectory. (Yoko, in case you were wondering, used a G4.) What these pieces have in common is the same Michael Levine photo, in which Ono appears in a dress as short as anything sold on Carnaby Street in the Sixties. I have no idea when it was taken; it was startling, and it certainly didn’t reflect the classic Johnandyoko bagism shtick, but what the hell. Ono is seventy-four now; she’s paid more than enough dues and should be able to do whatever she pleases.

Follieri Capital, which specializes in financial products for Roman Catholics, and Washington Mutual have teamed up to offer the World Missions VISA, which is being launched this week via major advertising campaigns in Catholic publications. One percent of card purchases will be donated to the Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1822, which supports Catholic missionaries in 120 countries. That’s the World Missions VISA. Don’t leave Rome without it.

Shel Silverstein wrote, and Johnny Cash sang, a ballad about a boy who grew up with the name “Sue,” and you’ll remember that Sue grew up bitter and resentful — eventually, weapons were involved — as a result. I have no idea whether this sort of thing will happen to a girl named Metallica or a boy named Jihad, but I don’t think it’s really useful to have laws against such names: “Earning the lifelong resentment of their ill-named progeny should be punishment enough.”

Keep in mind that my daughter came this close to being named for a Beatles song — one by McCartney, at that — and I have a grandchild named “Gunner.”

Jacqueline Passey takes a phone call:

Customer: “Can you send me a catalog?”

JP: “I’m sorry, sir, unfortunately we don’t have a paper catalog, but all our products are listed on our website.”

Customer: “Oh, I’ve never done that web thing before. Do you need, like, a computer with a phone line?”

Well, okay, not everyone does that web thing. We have customers at 42nd and Treadmill who don’t.

(Aside: Those people, incidentally, cause us little trouble. It’s the clowns who think they know what they’re doing who produce ninety-point-something percent of the grief. There was a time when I would actually speak to them and attempt to help them salvage something from their wasted lives. Never again.)

We might infer from this that Ms Passey’s employer deals in low-tech wares, like yarn or organic foods or something like that.

And we would be wrong.

They were carrying out the bodies all night, or so it seemed. Tyson Chandler’s turf toe reasserted itself in the first quarter, and he withdrew; Desmond Mason caught an elbow under the eyeball in the second, sending him to the bench; Chris Wilcox, whose elbow it was, discovered shortly thereafter that he was in pain; Devin Brown took a pop to the ribs in the third, but returned. And, of course, Peja Stojakovic and Ray Allen are out for the duration.

After falling behind 21-19 at the 12-minute mark, the Hornets gradually built up a lead; they were up 78-65 after the third. The Sonics promptly went on an 11-2 run to pull within four; both teams went cold, and with 80 seconds left, it was 84-82 Hornets, which means that in 10:40 the Bees scored a whole six points. In the next minute, nobody scored anything. The Sonics got the ball back with 23 seconds left, used 21 seconds to score a bucket, and suddenly it was overtime — which, of course, meant the Hornets’ troubles were over, since they hadn’t lost a game in overtime all season.

I kid, but not too much: there’s something about those little five-minute periods that concentrates the Bees’ minds in a way 12-minute quarters don’t. They rolled up a 10-point lead, courtesy of seven from Bobby Jackson (out of 18); the Sonics whittled it down to five; the final difference was nine, 101-92. Maybe sometime they’ll explain how the Hornets could score 17 points in five minutes after scoring six points in 12 minutes.

It was a good night for double-doubles: David West (18 points, 14 rebounds), Marc Jackson (13 points, 12 boards), and Chris Paul (11 points, 10 rebounds, and 9 assists, almost the triple) all shone. Still, none of them could touch the Sonics’ Rashard Lewis, a hard man to defend, who scored 27 points and grabbed 10 boards. And the radio guys, trying to see if it would work a second time, made fun of Rasual Butler’s shooting; Butler may or may not have heard them, but he scored 16 anyway.

So the Bees are now 35-40 with seven to play. (Last year they finished 38-44.) The first five playoff spots are filled: right now it’s the Lakers in sixth (39-35), the Nuggets in seventh (37-36) and the Clippers in eighth (36-37). The Lakers play the Clippers later tonight; last I looked, the Warriors, in 9th (35-39), were beating the Rockets. Assuming Golden State wins, they’ll remain one game in front of the Hornets, so both of them are hoping that the Battle of L.A. ends with the Lakers victorious. And, lest we forget, of those seven to play, two are against the Clippers.

Meanwhile, there’s another obstacle: the Suns, who will be here Friday.

First shot of Gunner, born on the 28th of March. Still has that rich tomato-ey glow. (Runs in the family, I think.) Personally, I think Alicia and Russ were trying to save some money on birthday parties, since Laney’s the 29th of March and Gunner’s the 28th. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it as long as I think I can get away with it.) Oh, and don’t even think about calling him “Gunsy.” (Addendum: I really think they’re going to quit after three, but then I really thought they were going to quit after two, so pay no attention to me.) (Further addendum: For some reason, I decided that this picture would look better somewhere other than hung off the right edge of the page, so I moved it in. Wouldn’t be the first time I made some dubious aesthetic judgment.)

So I got home, booted up the box, went outside and shoved the lawn mower around for while, came back inside, and discovered a Critical Update. Oh, joy, another one, I thought, looked it over, installed it, rebooted.

Came this:

Rthdcpl.exe – Illegal System DLL Relocation
The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

The .exe in question is the audio-control interface for the Realtek integrated audio, which the new Windows hotfix promptly hosed. So there was yet another download, this time manual, dammit, and on the next boot the DLLs showed up where they were supposed to be.

Still: Sheesh. It’s times like I this I yearn for the gentle SYS calls on the old Commodore 64.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 237, which represents employees of the City of New York and some Long Island municipalities, is the single largest local in the Teamsters union.

By comparison, Carnival of the Vanities #237 is a tad on the small side, but sometimes it’s not the size that matters.

Oklahoma County District 2 Commissioner Brent Rinehart and his 2004 campaign manager, former Representative Tim Pope, were hit with felony charges this afternoon: conspiracy against the state, knowingly accepting a contribution to a political candidate through an intermediary or conduit (three charges), money-laundering (two charges) and perjury (six charges).

The conspiracy charge involves a promotional piece called the T-Bone Tribune (not to be confused with this T-Bone Tribune), which was misattributed in Ethics Commission reports to a PAC which also served as the “intermediary or conduit.” The perjury charges involve underreporting of campaign contributions. (Complete court document in PDF format here; lesser charges were filed against certain of Rinehart’s donors.)

The Oklahoman had been on this story for a while:

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation began looking into Rinehart’s finances after a February 2006 investigation by The Oklahoman, which found several donors who had given the maximum allowed $5,000 to Rinehart’s 2004 commissioner campaign also gave money to a political action committee run by Pope.

Pope said he told Methvin he planned to use the money to pay for a mailing criticizing Rinehart’s opponent. The cost of the mailing was listed on Rinehart’s campaign finance reports as an in-kind donation from The Oklahoma Republican Assembly, run by Pope.

And Pope was in hot water earlier this year, having been fined $4500 for his noxious automated phone calls trying to undermine District 1 Commissioner Jim Roth, who is, shall we say, not Brent Rinehart’s best friend.

Pope, at least, used to have something resembling a level head. Rinehart’s, I suspect, has always been flat.

Update, 6 April: Rinehart and Pope turned themselves in this morning: bail for each was set at $24,000. They are scheduled to appear before Judge Carol Ann Hubbard on the 17th of May.

If you’re traveling through the Philippines and find yourself visiting the South Cotabato Provincial Hospital in Koronadal City, you might want to curb that desire for a smoke, because the hospital staff will send you some place you might not want to go:

“The law requires us to designate a smoking area so we picked the morgue,” said Dr. Edgardo Sandig, South Cotabato health officer.

Sandig said they decided to impose the rule because of the continued violation of the hospital’s “no smoking” policy by visiting relatives or acquaintances of patients.

(Via Interested-Participant.)

GM’s Maximum Bob Lutz was complaining this week that the Bush administration’s plan to tweak fuel-economy standards upward would ultimately raise the price of a motor vehicle by $5,000.

“This technology does not come for free,” said Lutz, and of course that’s true, but how much technology does come for free?

Besides, there are plenty of other upward pressures on vehicle prices: the demand for new gadgets; new safety gizmos, some useful, some perhaps less so; the rising price of raw materials; the rising price of labor.

Me, I’m not worried so much. I owned, in succession, two Mazda 626 sedans. The 2000 model weighed about 200 lb more than the 1993, had a dozen more ponies under the hood (from a mostly-identical engine), and offered about 8 cubic feet more interior room. I got 23 mpg from the ’93, and 24 mpg from the ’00. Small incremental improvements, while they don’t necessarily make for good ad copy, really mount up after a while.

Or I could look back at my old ’75 Toyota, which struggled to get 19 mpg from its 2.2-liter 96-hp four-banger (with a stick, yet), and compare it to my current car, which weighs 700 lb more, boasts 227 hp from a 3-liter V6, and gets 21 mpg. With an automatic. Not to mention vastly cleaner exhaust.

Or I could simply mention that Honda and Toyota and friends aren’t grousing in public: they’re simply handing out new specifications to the engineers.

Quote of the Week contender from Pete Guthier: “You let these idiot legislators start making one thing illegal because it’s connected to something else, and the next thing you know, everything is illegal.”

Like, for instance, sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda:

First, the state said you must make a special trip to the pharmacy counter to buy certain cold medicines. That was to curb production of methamphetamine.

Now, a St. Louis legislator wants you to do the same thing to buy an even more common household item — baking soda — because it’s used to make crack cocaine.

Sales of cold medications containing pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed, are strictly regulated in Missouri. Customers must show a photo ID when they buy the medicine. Pharmacists must log the names and addresses of buyers, including how much they buy. People under 18 may not buy the medicines.

The sponsor of the baking soda bill, Rep. Talibdin El-Amin, D-St. Louis, said the same approach was needed for baking soda because crack cocaine is often produced by dissolving powdered cocaine in a mixture of water and baking soda.

Logically, a dihydrogen-monoxide ban should be next. There’s already plenty of support for it.

(Via Bitter Bitch.)

The last few lines of Bus:

see the happy moron he doesn’t give a damn I wish I was a moron my God maybe I am
you can search around the world and when you return you’ll find that what you were looking for was right where you started
as soon as I get to Boston I’m taking the bus back to New York.

By Alison E. Ruffley, then thirteen, of Tenafly, New Jersey, in American Girl, May 1971. I have no idea if it was this Alison E. Ruffley, or even this one, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Well, actually, it was forty years ago come June, but these things require some lead time:

To mark the 40th anniversary of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album a clutch of modern day British groups are to record their own versions of some of the tracks recorded on the original 4 track studio equipment. The Kaiser Chiefs, James Morrison, Oasis (maybe they’ll finally get round to sounding like their idols at last), The Fratellis and Travis are amongst those lined up for the venture which will be aired [on BBC Radio 2] on the actual anniversary of the release of the original album on June 1st.

(Note: The album wasn’t released in the States until the second of June 1967. Incidentally, the CD version came out on 1 June 1987 worldwide.)

Me, I’m hoping for an appearance by the one and only Billy Shears.

So you’re getting ready to play the Phoenix Suns, who have won 56 of 75 games, and you’re missing your starting center, your starting point guard, and your chief cutter, all of whom were beaten up in the last game. What do you do?

The Hornets shuffled the lineup, or what was left of it: Jannero Pargo started at the point, Rasual Butler at small forward, Marc Jackson in the middle, and while they probably weren’t going to win this one anyway, they actually did win three of the four quarters by two points, and if they hadn’t fallen behind by 14 in the first quarter, they might have pulled it off. As it stands, though, they lost by eight, 103-95.

And all the starters finished in double figures, led by David West with 17 and Marc Jackson with 16. The Bees actually outshot the Suns from beyond the arc (7 of 17), but the Phoenix offense, paced by Leandro Barbosa with 26 including six treys — aside from Barbosa, the Suns were 2-21 shooting the 3-ball — was overpowering when it had to be. Steve Nash concentrated on support, but still got the double-double: 15 points, 12 dimes.

Tomorrow night in Minnesota, and it’s not a whole lot colder there than it is here. With six games to go, the Hornets are three games out of a playoff spot: not mathematically eliminated, but not in an encouraging position either.

I think we can retire that “Hyundai = bargain brand” business once and for all.

Consumer Reports has reports on four small SUVs in the May issue. The biggest news is that Hyundai’s Santa Fe in Limited trim is now considered the second most desirable vehicle in this class: it outpoints Toyota’s four-cylinder RAV4, but trails the V6 version (which apparently has never been called “RAV6″). This is a very creditable showing for the Korean marque, but here’s the kicker: of the twenty small SUVs which CR has tested recently, the Hyundai had the highest price as tested: $30,745, one of only three vehicles breaking the $30k barrier. (The 16th-place Jeep Compass Sport is the cheapest, at $21,660.) Admittedly, equipment levels inevitably vary somewhat, but it wasn’t that long ago that Hyundai was competing almost solely on price. Not anymore.

And if they can play alongside Toyota and Nissan, what’s to stop them from playing alongside Lexus and Infiniti? Not a thing. Besides, they still have the best TV spot around.

I don’t track my FICO score too closely. I do know that it jumped a bit after I bought the house, a bit more after I no longer had a car payment to deal with, and then sagged about the time I had to start dealing with car payments again. It has never occurred to me to start taking extraordinary steps to prop it up.

Especially steps this extraordinary:

[S]ome borrowers are turning to a fast-growing business on the Internet: companies that claim to boost credit scores by transplanting the credit DNA of people with excellent payment histories into the credit files of people with sub-par histories — ostensibly without breaking any law.

The companies claim to raise FICO credit scores by 50 to 250 points or more by adding low-scoring borrowers as “authorized users” onto the credit card accounts of people with FICO scores well in excess of 700. The positive payment information from such cardholders then flows into the files of the persons with sub-par credit.

This, of course, assumes that Warren Buffett is too busy to notice Donnie Deadbeat’s presence on his credit report, and maybe that’s a fairly safe assumption. Usually “authorized users” tend to be family members — say, daughter away at college — but they don’t have to be:

Federal law, however, does not limit the number or prescribe the type of authorized users permitted on any single account. Nor does it prohibit the rental or sale of authorized user designations. Exploiting that loophole, numerous companies have popped up on the Internet offering to buy and rent out the credit card “trade lines” or accounts of credit cardholders with high limits combined with perfect payment histories.

The idea that the not-inconsiderable sum paid by the debtor for this dubious FICO boost might be applied more usefully to reducing his debt doesn’t seem to enter into the picture. And to think we were surprised by mortgage fraud.

(Via Fark.)

You might remember this from February, when I said something to the effect that “committed typewriter fiend Andrea Harris might want one of her own after she sees this.” Well, she’s seen it, and she wants it. I wonder what she’d think of RSS feeds via telegraph sounder. (Me, I want this rotary-dial GSM cell phone, just to see how T-Mobile, which is desperate to sell me some high-zoot electrotoy with a camera, an MP3 player and a medical tricorder, would react to its presence.)

Update, 8 April: Tam likes it too.

Update, 9 April: Tam’s readers seem to like it too; we’ve picked up 440 565 hits from View from the Porch at this writing. This is more than twice as much as I’ve ever gotten from that other person in Knox.

While the Oklahoman works on rolling out NewsOK Beta, a smaller paper in the British Isles has gone for a simpler approach. The Buckinghamshire Advertiser, owned by group operator Trinity Mirror plc and selling 20,000 copies daily, has converted its Web site to a Movable Type blog, complete with RSS feeds and links for Digg, del.icio.us, and Reddit. Of course, all the traditional sections — News, Columns, Sport, and such — are rendered as MT Categories.

Peoria Pundit Billy Dennis says this is “more evidence that print is doomed”:

I’m sure it’s easier to use than any newspaper Web site software I’ve ever tried to use. And I’m sure it’s less complicated than whatever it is the [Peoria] Journal Star uses. Any small newspaper in America can put something like this together — including paying someone to design their template — for several hundred dollars, not to mention the cost of Web hosting, which might cost $100 a month for a dedicated server. It does as good a job as presenting the distributing news in words and pictures as any printing press, which costs much, much more to use. And it doesn’t require any trees be cut down, pulped and transported across the country in trucks or on trains.

And consider that if it costs that little for a newspaper to run, what’s stopping folks — perhaps disgruntled newsies with some start-up capital perhaps — from coming along and doing the same thing and not bothering with a print edition.

I’m not entirely convinced that print is doomed: you can’t line a birdcage with a Web site. Yet. And there are still people who have no particular interest in these here Intratubes. What’s more — well, here’s how Eyebrows McGee tells it (previous link, scroll to comments):

This might come as a shock, but we actually DON’T NEED 24 hour news. There are few things short of tornadoes I need to know about RIGHT THIS INSTANT, and they have sirens for that. (And — shock of shocks — they actually still break into broadcast network television for things that are REALLY important.) And there are a lot of people my age who are opting out of cable TV and 24-hour connectedness in favor of choosing our times and places to get data. The wired generation knows better than the Boomers how empty and repetitive 24-hour data streams can be, because we’ve never lived in a world without them. I was TWO when CNN joined the world. I do not remember a time before 24-hour news and I have never attended a school without a computer lab.

Small wonder, then, that I prefer my news in a single discreet chomp, well-written by competent journalists and analyzed by people who follow a story for years and know its ins and outs. I’ve been surrounded by the vapidity of instant-streaming news since I was an infant. I prefer something a little more substantial and a little less torrential.

By coincidence, the Oklahoman sent me a renewal form today for my print subscription.

A few weeks back 42nd and Treadmill hired a man, tall, lanky and youngish, to work one of the Customer Service stations, which might have been a wise decision, given the tendency of some of our more obnoxious customers to try to drive the female staff to tears or worse; I have to figure that anyone who can face down a clutch of murdering insurgents has nothing to fear from that bunch. (Surely whatever they’re paying him, it isn’t enough; I’ve answered phones there before, and it is a dispiriting experience at best.) In an effort to get an answer for one of the callers, he wandered into my den of inequity earlier this week — for some reason, they always call during break time — spotted the open MT interface, put two and 3.21 together, and asked, “You write that?” Apparently he’d discovered the site during his none-too-copious free time in the Land of Sand. I am, of course, always surprised to find that anyone reads this stuff.

Cut to this afternoon, while I’m filling up my grocery basket. I have a weekly Anti-Shyness Exercise, if you will, which calls for me to strike up a conversation with at least one woman I don’t know. This has generally not been difficult, but the ginormous pre-Easter crowd presented obstacles of its own. And then one thing happened which hadn’t previously: the woman I don’t know struck up the conversation with me. Turned out to be a reader of this very site, who recognized me from a photo I’d left over at MySpace. (Whether this is a defense of MySpace, or a major security issue, is left as an exercise for the student.) We stretched this into a discussion long enough to inculcate despair in shoppers who just wanted a loaf of bread, dammit, because I am, of course, always surprised to find that anyone reads this stuff.

Or so it looked early on: Minnesota shot over 60 percent in the first half to nail down a 57-51 lead. The Hornets recovered and then some in the third, outscoring the Timberwolves 29-18 and going up by five. In the fourth quarter, seemingly no one could score: through seven and a half minutes, the Bees picked up a mere six points, the Wolves only five. It was 96-94 in the last second, and the Wolves’ Hail Mary shot at the buzzer fell away, leaving the Hornets with an unattractive but necessary win.

Minnesota had six players in double figures, though Kevin Garnett didn’t get there until the very end. Reserve guard Rashad McCants led the Wolves with 17; the Minnesota bench was good for 45 points, and the Big Ticket had a lowish 13 points and a solid 12 rebounds. The Wolves tried 23 treys, and made 14 of them.

Chris Paul led all scorers with 18, and ten dimes to boot. Also with a double-double: Marc Jackson, with 15 points and 11 boards. (The Bees attempted thirty from beyond the arc, and connected on eight; Marcus Vinicius, who played six minutes, got one of them, his second of the season.)

Five to go, and two of them are against the eighth-place Los Angeles Clippers, who will be at the Ford Center Tuesday. (The last Oklahoma City game is Friday, against the Nuggets; the season ends with three on the road, against the Rockets, the Kings, and finally the Clippers.)

Driving, we are always told by the state Department of Always Telling Us Things, is a privilege, not a right. I’m okay with that. But maybe it’s a privilege too seldom withdrawn:

If you can’t keep up with traffic, you don’t deserve to drive. If you can’t properly yield, you don’t deserve to drive. If you try to bully your way into traffic, nearly taking the nose off of the car you cut off and the bumper of the car you get in behind, you don’t deserve to drive. If you can’t close the TWENTY car length gap between you and the person in front of you, but insist on driving 30 mph on the interstate because the other two lanes next to you are truly that backed up and are going that speed, you don’t deserve to drive.

I think I’ve seen these people, and no, I wouldn’t mind if their privileges were withdrawn.

This, though, seems a trifle strong:

You should have your tires shot out, causing you to spin wildly into the cement guard rails, crashing, and then having your body flung from the vehicle, thoroughly maiming you, but doing no fatal damage.

I mean, all four tires? Come on.