… for you to pee on.

Perhaps surprisingly, Triumph is not involved.

(Via Tinkerty Tonk.)

Admittedly, that’s a tad misleading, since the format isn’t actually dead. On the other hand, it seems like every year a commercial station that used to play classical music starts playing something else.

In Milwaukee, that “something else” is ersatz jazz:

In the city of Milwaukee’s second radio format change in a week, WFMR-FM (106.9) is dumping classical music in favor of the “smooth jazz” that WJZI-FM (93.3) dropped last week.

The move marks a return to the smooth jazz format that the station now known as WFMR said it pioneered in the mid-1990s. The station hit the air in 1995 with a playlist that included David Sanborn, George Benson, Kenny G and Al Jarreau, all of whom will be featured again at the station.

This is news you wouldn’t even tell Tchaikovsky.

Two observations:

• “Smooth jazz” is neither smooth nor jazz.

• A 2 rating evidently isn’t enough to sustain a format anymore. And the top-rated commercial classical station in a major market — KDFC in San Francisco — pulls around a 3.5.

I should note that there was a brief period when you could tune in “smooth jazz” in Oklahoma City; it was on my first group of presets at the time, although I reserved the right to push the next button at the first sign of the strangled-duck noises made by Kenny G. I wouldn’t mind if it returned, subject to the same provisions. And anyway, our classical station, noncommercial as it is, isn’t going anywhere.

(Via triticale.)

Realty affiliates of The Prudential produce a freebie magazine with real-estate listings in this market and some others; sometimes I remember to pick one up on the way out of the supermarket.

On the cover is a nice faux-Spanish Mediterranean west of Edmond near the Rose Creek golf course. It’s quite lovely in that slightly-overwrought way — too derivative to make Architectural Digest but more interesting than the palace-from-Dallas stuff that prevails in the newer ‘burbs — and is priced high enough to insure that any prospective owner won’t flinch at the prospect of a Titleist bursting through a first-level window. It’s located on Shorerun Drive, and the first time I saw that I read it as Sho Rerun Drive, like they were repeating the first season of The L Word or something. Now I’ve been out this way once or twice (call it 170th and May), and I don’t think of it as being, well, on the shore. The usual Google check (I’d drive out there myself to take a look, but I just got out of the shower) produced a suitably-dated satellite picture; apparently Shorerun Drive runs by the shore of a water hazard, or maybe a retention pond.

Which, by the standards of Oklahoma City suburbs, makes this an unusually-appropriate name for a street: in Edmond, for instance, there are more streets named Oak something, or something Oak(s), than there are actual oaks.

Addendum: Apparently this sold in mid-June, for not too much below the asking price, which explains why I couldn’t find a picture in the agent’s portfolio of listings.

“Why did you shoot at us?”

“You have Avril Lavigne ringtones.”

The coveted John Salmon endorsement:

Before you vote for a candidate, consider how he or she will look after four or eight years in office. It’s unlikely to be a welcome sight, so therefore I call on the lovely Téa Leoni [to] run for the highest office in the land. Her qualifications may be mostly visual, but most of a Prez’s real work is done in TV appearances anyway.

Hmmm. Let’s see:

And there’s one other advantage: you’d have freaking Fox Mulder on the premises, a boon to today’s conspiracy-theory-driven politics.

We must emphasize that each of these items is a real query, posted to a major search engine during the past week, which led the searcher to one of the ten thousand or so pages on this site; from the hundreds of queries, we’ve specially selected these for maximum smartass-remark potential.

nair for men on penis:  You don’t want to be a smoothie that badly.

what benefit does the light train transit have:  It doesn’t weigh as much, therefore it doesn’t use as much fuel.

can i put mayonnaise in my hair:  The Condiment Police won’t bust you, if that’s what you mean.

into you she is:  So Yoda gives dating advice now?

mac sucks put gum in the floppy drive:  That would suck with just about any operating system.

bodice ripper fantasies:  Honestly, I don’t know anyone who fantasizes about having her bodice ripped.

Mutt Lange buys Dr. Phil:  Must have been a present for Shania.

is it illegal to clean houses in the nude:  Not necessarily, but you can’t assume the occupants of those houses will approve.

“lindsay beyerstein” “penis size”:  I’ve never met Lindsay Beyerstein, but I’d be willing to bet she doesn’t have a penis.

can a woman use a epilator in islam:  Not on her eyebrows, anyway.

joseph lieberman at nudist beach:  Gosh, he’s more independent than I thought.

“tears on my pillow” and “maureen dowd”:  Love is not a gadget / Love is not a toy.

condoleezza rice pedicure:  If you’re gonna wear Ferragamo, you might as well do it right.

will the salon wax my rectum:  Not until they’re done with Condi’s pedicure.

They’re called GRAIN, and this is what they’re about:

GRAIN is an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.

And they take a dim view of the Rush to Ethanol:

[T]he stampede into agrofuels is causing enormous environmental and social damage, much more than we realised earlier. Precious ecosystems are being destroyed and hundreds of thousands of indigenous and peasant communities are being thrown off their land.

Worse lies ahead: the Indian government is committed to planting 14 million hectares of land with jatropha (an exotic bush from which biodiesel can be manufactured), the Inter-American Development Bank says that Brazil has 120 million hectares available for biofuels, and lobbyists in Europe are speaking of almost 400 million hectares being available for biofuels in 15 African countries. We are talking about expropriation on an unprecedented scale.

And we’ve heard that word “expropriation” before:

[T]he push for agrofuels amounts to nothing less than the re-introduction and re-enforcement of the old colonial plantation economy, redesigned to function under the rules of the modern neoliberal, globalised world. Indigenous farming systems, local communities and the biodiversity they manage have to give way to provide for the increased fuel needs of the modern world.

One of the main justifications for the large-scale cultivation of agrofuels is the need to combat climate change, but the figures make a mockery of this claim. According to the US government, global energy consumption is set to increase 71 per cent from 2003 to 2030, and most of that will come from burning more oil, coal and natural gas. By the end of this period, all renewable energy (including agrofuels) will only make up 9 per cent of global energy consumption. It is a dangerous self-delusion to argue that agrofuels can play a significant role in combating global warming.

They can, however, play a significant role in pushing up food prices, which doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful goal.

When I was still in school, back during the Pleistocene era, they took the trouble to impress upon us the value of crop rotation and the folly of expecting the same land to produce the same stuff year after year after year. But hey, we can’t waste time on that sort of thing: we need fuel, dammit.

Sheesh. I think I need a drink. Which, incidentally, would contain ethanol.

(Via Hippyshopper.)

Well, okay, they do, but mine hasn’t, and, well, I refuse to play Mr Hardware Early Adopter Guy for Apple, especially if it involves getting involved with AT&T.

Besides:

The iPhone is the trophy wife of the cellular world. It’s gorgeous to look at, interesting and amusing at parties, but at the end of the day it’s going to fark your gardener, take your money, and leave you unfulfilled.

None of these features is worth the expense to me, and I speak as someone who just ordered a lawn mower off Amazon.com, fercrissake.

And Venomous Kate grills a pretty mean blogger.

(Okay, I’m not that mean. Come to think of it, I’m not the least bit pretty, either.)

TV Guide polled its Web readers: “Who do you think has a greater chance of bouncing back professionally?” The choices: Isaiah Washington or P*** H***** (I can’t even bring myself to type her name).

Fifty-five percent of the respondents voted for H*****, which compels me to ask: “Bouncing back to what?” What exactly is it she does, beyond the production of headlines and carbon dioxide?

I have to figure that neither S. Duncan Black nor Alonzo G. Decker ever imagined that their company would be selling something like this: it resembles an electric drill (which Messrs. B and D invented ninety-odd years ago) in no way except for the fact that it has a power cord.

Still, one of these LawnHogs will be taking up residence at the palatial Surlywood estate as soon as Amazon.com can get it on a truck and into my hot (okay, tepid) little hands. Lowe’s Web site has it for the same price, but Amazon was giving away free shipping, and they claimed to have it in stock; Lowe’s won’t tell you if they have any on hand until you actually push the Add to Cart button. Besides, this gives me more than enough reward points on Amazon’s Visa to get me a $25 gift certificate.

Yes, I have an extension cord. There’s a GFCI-equipped outlet on the front of the house, another just inside the garage, so I’ll have a place to plug in the beast. And I’m sure I can find a use for the approximately 1.2 gallons of gasoline that won’t be going into the old mower.

Been there, been subjected to something like that:

I had some fleeting and absurd (patently so to me even at the time) visions of one of the NCOs looking cock-eyed at my Berkeley t-shirt and cargo shorts and saying, “Well, well, well, looks like we already got ourselves a troublemaker,” or some such. Instead, they found me someone with an extra set of clothes I could borrow.

Then, another NCO pulled me aside and told me my hair was too long, and I should get it cut as soon as possible. Another strike, also insignificantly minor in any reasonable scheme of things, but consider: I’d now been there a whole 15 minutes or so and my sole interaction with the Army thus far consisted of being told what I needed to fix. At the time, I was glad they weren’t handing out guns yet or else I’d probably have blown my own foot off.

It turns out that there were multiple people who needed haircuts. And they apparently hadn’t been distressed by the fact that the barber shop was closed. There were also some who showed up the next morning in the wrong PT uniform. But I didn’t see any of that that afternoon, I saw only well-prepared people who made me look like a slacker or an incompetent, and I thought to myself that it would be a real shame if they figured that out about me so soon. I’d been hoping to space out revealing those facets of myself over at least a few months.

Of course, I went through this in 1972, arguably a nastier time to be joining the Service. But it’s perversely gratifying, I suppose, to see that the same sort of effort to rip the new arrivals out of their comfort zones is still being made today.

And best of all, this chap is heading for the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. An officer, natch. We lowlifes in the bottom enlisted ranks always assumed that butterbars and such were getting an easier time of it: sometimes it was quite a while before we learned otherwise.

Sicko took in a modest $4.5 million in its first weekend, a bit under some of the wilder predictions, but still within the Exhibitor Relations Top Ten (at #9). On the other hand, it’s not like Michael Moore spent Jerry Bruckheimer-level money on it, and apparently Moore, or at least his agent, is one sharp negotiator:

Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel at Endeavor, negotiated one hell of a deal with the Weinstein Co. for his client. Moore is in line to receive 50 percent of Sicko’s gross profits (that’s after the theater owner collect their take of ticket sales), arguably one of Hollywood’s most lucrative deals for a filmmaker. To put it in perspective, it’s well beyond the cut that Tom Cruise used to receive in his heyday on films (and big-name actor deals are usually much richer than directors, but Moore obviously works both in front and behind the camera).

But the place where Moore’s deal is most noteworthy is in his DVD take. A-list actors and directors usually get a small slice of the proceeds, which is taken from only 20 percent of the total DVD revenue (the studio would hold back the other 80 percent). These numbers have pretty much been sacrosanct in Hollywood for years and have allowed the studios to recoup any theatrical losses with their homevid take. But in Moore’s deal, he’ll be receiving 50 percent of all DVD revenues.

According to traditional Hollywood accounting, if you get profit points at all, they’re out of the net, after every conceivable cost has been deducted. Moore’s getting gross points, most likely more than enough to constitute what some of us in different walks of life used to call FYM. He says so himself:

Nothing can ever be held over my head in the sense of “If you don’t do this, we won’t give you your money!”

Which is an exceedingly comfortable position to be in.

If you’re going to blame PayPal’s debit-card unit for two consecutive declines — and the abuse you heaped upon our poor, unsuspecting customer-service people indicates that you are — you probably ought not to use that same card again the same day.

Which, by the way, was declined. Again.

As far as the NBA draft goes, this year marks the beginning of the era of “one and done”: high-school graduates can no longer place their names in the hat until they turn 19, which generally means one year of college before jumping to the ostensible Big Time, a major change from the thirty-year-old Oscar Robertson Rule which stripped away most draft restrictions.

Robertson himself has misgivings about “one and done,” but perhaps not the ones you’d think:

For every LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, there are hundreds of other teenage athletes who have been mistakenly led to believe they’re ready for the NBA. Once they enter the draft and find out they’re wrong, it’s too late: they’re not allowed to attend or return to college on an athletic scholarship.

In no other line of work is someone penalized for leaving or delaying school and returning later. Besides, college coaches — who can make millions of dollars — negotiate with other colleges, or with NBA teams, all the time. They don’t forfeit their employment if they decide to stay put.

Athletic scholarships should be guaranteed for four years, instead of renewable year to year by the college. College athletes should also receive a modest stipend and more realistic expense money. If athletes have to struggle to get by, of course they will want to turn pro as soon as possible. They’re also more likely to accept money from agents who want to sign them, although agents aren’t the only people who slip money to college athletes. (Signing with an agent makes players ineligible for the college game, whether or not money has changed hands — but coaches are allowed to collect fees for referring agents to players!)

The NBA and the NCAA have brilliant people working in management. Certainly they can come up with a better system than “one and done” that is equitable for the colleges and the athletes, gives athletes an incentive to stay in school and reinforces the value of education.

And maybe the NBA, which has an obvious interest in this sort of thing, can kick in some of those scholarship dollars along the way.

(Noticed by Henry Abbott.)

It seemed improbable, but there it was on the water bill: PLACE BULKY AT CURB BY 6AM (WED) 07/04/07. The first Wednesday of the month is our usual day for Bulky Waste pickup, so that wasn’t a big deal, but it’s the Fourth of July, fercryingoutloud.

So yesterday afternoon I wheeled the old lawn mower to the curb and folded down its handle, lest anyone think I was just taking a break, hoping the city would pick it up in the morning. I needn’t have worried: it’s not 6 am yet, and already someone has hauled it away.

The new one, says Amazon, has been shipped.

The National Weather Service outpost at Will Rogers World Airport, where official readings for Oklahoma City are obtained, reported no rain on the 3rd, the first time they’ve issued such a report since the 12th of June.

Which means that it rained on twenty consecutive days. (Total June rainfall was 10.06 inches, about twice the usual.)

Time has run out for lyricist Hy Zaret, who died this week about six weeks short of his 100th birthday.

Zaret put out lots of words over the years, but the ones you probably remember were the words he put to Alex North’s theme for the 1955 motion picture Unchained, notable both for containing serious emotional content and for never mentioning the film’s title even once in the lyric.

“Unchained Melody,” as it was called, hit the charts in four versions in ‘55; Les Baxter (Capitol 3055) took it to Number One, but his version was more or less an instrumental (there’s a brief chorus), leaving the vocal prize to Al Hibbler (Decca 29441), who coaxed it to #3 and bestowed upon it pop-standard status. Lots of people recorded it over the next decade or so; Phil Spector tossed it into a 1965 Righteous Brothers session as the B-side to “Hung On You” (Philles 129), the intended follow-up to “Just Once in My Life.” But “Hung On You” never broke Top 40, and DJs turned the 45 over to find, not the usual Spector throwaway instrumental, but a lovingly-produced Bobby Hatfield solo performance in front of the Wall of Sound at its lushest. (This being a B-side, rumors persist to this day that the other Righteous fellow, Bill Medley, actually produced it; I have my doubts, though Medley’s production for the Brothers’ post-Spector discs for Verve demonstrates his mastery of the Wall.) “Unchained Melody” climbed to #4; its inclusion in the 1990 romantic fantasy Ghost led Verve to reissue the single, which reached #13. (A re-recording by the Brothers also charted, reaching #19.)

Zaret, of course, approved. He was reportedly not amused by a George Martin-produced version by the Goons, which Parlophone stuffed back into the Abbey Road vaults before it could see the light of day, prompting the Goons to move to Decca. The recording finally surfaced in 1990, and apparently not even Dr. Demento would play it.

(Note: MP3s expire eventually.)

An idea from Randy Rager:

Washington D.C. should be turned into a giant prison, and the capitol should be moved to Oklahoma City, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Top Ten ways the government would be different if the capitol were moved to Oklahoma City:

10. Supreme Court fall session begins after the football season

9. Congress gets a cost-of-living decrease
8. K Street lobbyists lined up on 23rd
7. New “Capitol Oaks” subdivision in Edmond
6. Ted Kennedy could see some really deficient bridges
5. World Bank opens branch in Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market
4. Mary Fallin demoted from Representative to Delegate, takes six months to notice
3. A Congressman’s girlfriend jumps into the Bricktown Canal in the dead of night
2. Maryland refuses to take back the District of Columbia
1. Finally, funding for the Gary England Monument

Not to discourage them or anything.

Or at least priced like that. Lachlan shakes her fist at the Automotive Gods:

Last month, I paid off the car. Today, it’s in the shop with a tentative estimate of $1321.00.

• Cracked thermostat housing

• two hoses related need replaced
• leaking valve cover gasket on the engine
• brakes need re-done (rotors resurfaced, too)
• miscellaneous little crap

AND … the car is at 87k … so we’re looking at having to replace the timing belt within the next year or so, and the 100k maintenance, which runs about a grand. GRRRRRRRRRRR.

Which seems like a lot of money to pour into a Ford Focus, fercrissake, but just about anything you drive these days is going to run up some serious bills when it breaks down, and sometimes when it doesn’t. When I bought my current ride at 88k, I expected to fork over $1500, maybe $2000 to get it back into tip-top shape; it turned out to be twice that. (Geez, they have a lot of emissions equipment in these damn cars.) On the upside, there’s no timing belt, the regular 90k service was under $500, and most of the 105k service is the replacement of the original spark plugs, which admittedly cost fifteen bucks apiece, but there’s only six of them.

I did, however, look around for a Focus maintenance schedule, and it doesn’t look that horrible:

100,000 Mile Service

• Change engine oil and replace oil filter

• Inspect accessory drive belt(s)
• Inspect tires for wear and rotate
• Replace spark plugs
• Replace the PCV

The timing belt shows up at 120,000 miles.

It occurs to me that (1) Lachlan is female and (2) it’s not unheard of (though it is reprehensible) for service shops to put the figurative screws to female customers.

Disclosure: When I went car-shopping in 2000, I test-drove two Foci, and came this close to buying one, but wound up with a Mazda 626.

I suppose I might as well face it:

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² – Online Dating

(From Steph Waller, who evidently has more of a life.)

You already know how I do it: with a piece of pricey hardware to block most incoming calls. Here’s a more-amusing alternative:

Ten years ago, Susan and I purchased a talking caller ID box. It’s one of the greatest inventions ever, and I’m not sure why they didn’t completely replace normal called ID boxes. When our phone rings, a pleasant female voice speaks the number aloud, area code first.

Whenever a long distance caller is announced, there’s a little game I play. If I’m sitting in my lounge chair near my laptop, I’ll click on Google whenever I hear the phone begin to ring. At the end of the first ring, the box begins to announce the number. “Four, zero, five … ” During the second ring I’ll type the phrase “area code 405″ (or whatever area code was just announced) into Google. During the phone’s third ring, Google spits back the results. Typically I don’t have to click on any of the links; the information should appear somewhere in the first hit or two. That gives me the fourth ring to determine whether or not I know anybody from that area code, and if I should pick up the phone.

Apparently it’s still possible to buy a Caller ID unit with a voice box, though I have no idea whether its voice is pleasant, or even female.

And this, in turn, suggests a new Google application: a Caller ID box which connects to Google and immediately returns the appropriate information. Ultimately it could be incorporated into a VoIP phone or even a Web-enabled cell phone.

Or how about this: the box connects to whocalled.us and sends up a query. If there’s a match in their database, the call is automagically hung up before you ever hear the ring.

I reprint this Oklahoma Gazette item with a certain level of sadness:

[F]or those who heard rumors, it is true: the much-loved Beverly’s Pancake Corner, 2115 Northwest Expressway, is closing, and the area will be rebuilt, possibly as a clothing district.

Customers have the end of the year to eat at the location, but then Beverly’s will move and reopen at a new, as-yet-undisclosed location on Northwest Expressway.

Beverly and Rubye Osborne originally opened the Beverly’s concept as “Chicken in the Rough” decades ago.

For “decades ago” read “in 1921.” Here’s what I said in 2004:

Beverly Osborne’s first restaurant … was just north of the State Capitol on Lincoln Boulevard; eventually there were half a dozen across town, the last to be built being the Pancake Corner at Northwest Expressway west of Pennsylvania, which sports red floor tile almost identical to the tile on my bathroom floor. Time, attrition and urban renewal took their usual toll, and now the Pancake Corner is the only Beverly’s remaining. Still, it’s hard to imagine that it was much different in the Good Old Days than it is now: it’s a classic diner of the old school, everything happens right up front so you can see the level of chaos for yourself, and while prices are inevitably higher, the menu and the recipes are largely unchanged. I should be in such good shape when I’m eighty-three years old.

The current building dates to 1958. The furniture store next door, I assume, is equally doomed.

Not a function of taquitos for lunch, but of a so-far-unresolved conflict: World Tour ‘07 is supposed to begin Tuesday (I have medical stuff to take care of on Monday) and I am no nearer to setting an itinerary than I was a month ago.

The basic criteria are as follows:

• Thirteen or fourteen days. Fifteen at the outside. (I’ve noticed I start to run down rather seriously after fifteen.)

• At least one pass through the Kansas City metro. (This is primarily to visit the Younger Generation.)

One possibility under consideration is a sort of Reverse Trail of Tears route, which ends up somewhere close to North Carolina. Advantages: there is much of this area I have not seen in years, if at all; roads tend to get interesting as the mountains get closer; a lot of bloggers along the way. Disadvantages: a lot of this may end up on I-40; if it doesn’t, I may run perilously close to a sixteenth day; a lot of bloggers along the way.

I’ve also considered a Trans-Texas Tour, looping through the Lone Star State. Advantages: I never get tired of Texas; the variation in scenery is considerable; Texas road discipline is something to respect. Disadvantages: Texas in the summer is either hot or damned hot and the endless rains won’t help; tricky to make that loop through Kansas City.

Other possibilities present themselves, but these are the front-runners right now. Suggestions are welcomed.

It is said that 20 percent of the customers cause 80 percent of the work, and where I work it’s more like 13/87. There is, of course, nothing that can be done about it.

Or is there?

Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information. While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.

Therefore, after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007. This will allow you to pursue and engage with another wireless carrier.

There’s a simulated buckpass here, in the form of the passive voice — “the decision has been made” rather than “we have decided” — but otherwise this is the sort of thing I would love to do to certain of our stragglers: “You are causing us more trouble than you are worth. Go away.”

I expect Sprint will be reviled for this action, if only because it’s shown up on Consumerist, where denouncing Evil Corporations is a way of life, but in my capacity as a person who (1) doesn’t make incessant demands of the firms from whom I buy service and (2) has to put up with an amazing number of people who do, I’m giving them somewhere around 2.25 cheers.

Pepsi-Cola has introduced something called Diet Pepsi MAX, which contains 46 mg of caffeine per 8 ounces, a jolt just this side of, well, Jolt. They’re pitching this stuff as an antidote to the Great American Yawn, and according to their survey, as recounted by Popgadget:

• 84 percent of Americans experience a daily “afternoon slump.”

• More than half of respondents admit to yawning up to five times a day.
• Another 86 percent believe that those yawns are contagious.
• One-third of Americans (31 percent) blame the workplace as the reason for their exhaustion.
• Half of all survey respondents have caught someone asleep on the job, while 28 percent have confessed to falling asleep at work themselves.
• The most popular ways respondents overcome their slumps at work include walking around the office (58 percent) and consuming caffeinated beverages (52 percent).
• About one in five respondents (18 percent) has faked a yawn to get out of a conversation.
• Nearly one in ten (8 percent) Americans has yawned while on a job interview.
• 54 percent of working Americans say they would take a nap at work to reinvigorate themselves in the afternoon if given permission by their supervisor.
• One-third (32 percent) have admitted to yawning on a date.
• Nearly one in ten (9 percent) Americans has had a bug fly into their mouth while yawning.

That last, I think, I’d rather not have known.

Oh, and one hundred percent of women who have dated me have yawned during the proceedings. (Warning: this may not be statistically significant due to painfully-small sample.)

If you were wanting to compare caffeine counts, try this.

Just a little something I found in the City Council minutes:

Resolutions authorizing sole source purchases, fiscal year 2007-08:

1. Various soft drink products, 7UP/RC Bottling Company of Oklahoma City (SS8-C83013), estimated cost $30,000. (ATTACHMENT)

2. Coca-Cola soft drink products, Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company (SS8-C83014), estimated cost $135,000. (ATTACHMENT)
3. Budweiser beer products, Premium Beers of Oklahoma, L.L.C. (SS8-C83015), estimated cost $100,000. (ATTACHMENT)
4. Coors and Miller beer products, Capital Distributing, L.L.C. (SS8-C83016), estimated cost $60,000. (ATTACHMENT)

The ATTACHMENTS are attached, not to the minutes, but to the agenda; apparently these beverages are for use at municipal golf courses.

And no, you can’t have a Pepsi. Not even at Earlywine.

This is, in fact, a Bentley Continental GT with Hyundai badging. And not just on the deck lid, either: the familiar H also adorns the nose and the wheel hubs. What’s more, “Hyundai of Bel Air,” the ostensible dealer named on the plate frame, does not actually exist.

Precisely why someone would do this is something of a mystery. Autoblog (which has more pictures) speculates:

[W]e’re thinking this guy lost a bet with his Ferrari buddies and was forced to transform his six-figure Conti into a Tiburon wannabe.

I suppose the next step would be to affix a HYBRID badge.

Joanna looks at both sides of the issue and decides we should dump the penny:

[T]here’s absolutely no way that it’s not more expensive to have pennies than to not have them, both from a consumer and a taxpayer standpoint.

Still, she has ideas for the least-valuable coin in your pocket:

As a fundraiser, I see the penny thing as a huge opportunity. Charitable organizations themselves like Goodwill and the Red Cross could advertise getting rid of pennies by donating them and not using them anymore. That would represent a lot of cash and would incite the social movement against pennies for a good cause. Then people can write off the donation, the organizations could turn them over to banks, banks exchange them with the Treasury for higher coinage, and the Treasury can sell them to private companies who make tacky commemorative plaques that tasteless people can buy from QVC late at night. Everybody wins!

It’s either that or melt them down into clean copper clappers, an idea that leaves me with that zinc-ing feeling.

Andrea Harris scalps Ursula K. Le Guin:

Le Guin clearly prefers Indian culture (especially that of the California tribes she grew up being told about by her anthropologist father) to that of her own people. She has one of the worst wannabe complexes in the country. (I wonder if the fact that Ward Churchill has actually had a successful career as a pretend Indian drives her nuts.)

This leads me to another Le Guin topic. A couple of years ago, the SciFi channel did a trashy miniseries based on her Earthsea Trilogy book. It was clear from the trailers that it was going to suck, so I gave it a miss. Le Guin hated it, of course — but the funniest reason she had for hating it was that they didn’t hire Indian actors to play the parts of the Earthsea-ers, all of whom (except for the Kargad, who were a blond, white, Viking-like tribe) she had described as being brown-skinned and black-haired (though the fantasy culture she cooked up for them was clearly European; castles, merchants, prices, wizards, etc.), and revealed were her way of writing about her beloved Indians in her favorite genre. Though except for skin color there was nothing remotely “native American” about any of the fantasy people in the novels. This is a turnaround of the usual liberal/progressive argument that actors can play anyone no matter their skin color — we can have an all-Chinese cast do Macbeth in clown suits and speaking Gujarathi and it will be just as profound and meaningful as in Richard Burbage’s day. It’s funny how, suppress it how they may, the Judeo-Christian underpinning to a multicultural academic’s worldview will pop out.

Point of order: if the Chinese do Macbeth, do they still refer to it as the Scottish Play?