A complaint from Dennis the Peasant:

Beginning last Sunday, my site traffic has dropped to almost exactly by half from where it normally is. On weekdays, I averaged — until this week — roughly 1,000 unique visitors a day. This week I’ve pulled an average of under 600. Is this because I am now running pictures of my face on the bodies of David Beckham and some anonymous barbell boy? It would be entirely logical to assume so, but in reality what has happened is that Google Images has gone through some sort of update. And in the course of said update, many of the images from this site have either been relegated to the back pages of any given image search or have disappeared from the image search altogether.

I suppose I should take the fact that I’m now revealed as being even more insignificant than previously thought as a bit of a blow, but I can’t really muster the ego to work up even a minor sulk. I just don’t care.

Which is, of course, the only way to view a downturn in traffic: studied disdain.

Rather a lot of Google Images searches that landed here made no sense whatever to me: they’d serve up a monthly or category archive, a couple hundred meg, maybe more, and an unrelated photograph, mostly because somewhere in those couple hundred meg are two words which the searcher put together but which I never did. If Google is restringing an algorithm to make this less likely, it’s fine with me. Not that I have any desire to see Dennis’ traffic diminish, mind you. (And mine hasn’t dropped at all, for some inscrutable reason.)

I might also point out that if I really wanted to kill off my readership, I’d post shots of my head Photoshopped onto my own body.

The Oklahoman’s Don Mecoy sees some unexpected fallout from the News Corp. acquisition of Dow Jones:

The historic Dow Jones Industrial Index, which tracks stocks of 30 of the nation’s largest companies, is part of the sale. Mr. Murdoch now has the option of renaming the most important, most reported stock index. How do you like the sound [of] “Fox News Industrial Average” or “MySpace Industrial Average” or even “Rupert and Wendi’s Stock Index?”

I’m holding out for “America’s Most Shorted” or “Can You Invest Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?” myself.

Trini got her first shipment from Woot’s T-shirt operation, and it’s a pretty decent piece of work, executed in 100-percent cotton by the American Apparel guys.

One thing is troubling, though: the fabric-care tag contains the ominous notation “not for use as pants.”

Who didn’t see this coming?

A first-of-its-kind credit card has been unearthed that contributes a portion of card purchases to buy greenhouse gas emissions offsets. GE Money [has] launched the Earth Rewards Platinum MasterCard which enables cardholders to contribute a full one percent of their card net purchases to GHG emission reduction projects; or contribute one-half of one percent to reduction projects and receive one-half of one percent cash back through their monthly statements. Cardholders will be able to switch back and forth between reward programs whenever they choose, at no cost and with no loss of rewards. GE says if 100,000 cardholders spend $750 per month, the annual greenhouse gas credits retired would be the equivalent to removing more than 175,000 cars from American roads for one year.

Interest on $1000 for a year: $180.

Rewards on $1000 for a year: $10.

That smug feeling you get from your dubious environmentalism: priceless.

Neither Rand nor McNally will acknowledge such a thing. Just the same, those of you who followed World Tour ’07 may remember that Kirk was plotting the route, day by day, on Google Maps.

It finally occurred to me to take a look at the finished product — I’d seen it in its formative stages — and while the link is a mouthful, the results are just fine. Thank you, sir, and remember: 2008 is not so far away.

I pulled up at the Gazette office this afternoon to snag a copy, and parked near the door was a shiny new(ish) Vespa with, heaven help us, bumper stickers. I admit I did crack a smile at “One Less SUV.” (Across the street at Iron Starr I caught sight of a pink scooter, which temporarily disrupted a substantial number of brain cells for reasons I’d just as soon not go into.)

Of course, if you hang around alt-weeklies and other places with ostensible countercultural cred, you hardly need bumper stickers to determine the Zeitgeist. To demonstrate, Stewpid reads the minds of the Whole Foods shoppers, and comes up with stuff like this:

“Where are all the hot horny hippie chicks? This place doesn’t even have subs. This sucks.”

“Hmm, if I frown over the label of this Ugandan wine for five whole minutes, will people stop suspecting that I am just buying it because it costs $4.99?”

“I just bought a wrap with Thai peanut sauce! I am like the most ethnic, exotic person on the entire planet!!!! I am like the Angelina of my entire subdivision! Thai sauce! I’m edgy!!!! Grrrr!!!!!!!”

Being about as edgy as the Pillsbury Doughboy, I am in no position to grumble, but just the same, I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of hot horny hippie chicks. Not that any of them are likely to cross my threshold.

You ain’t woman enough, says Faith Hill, to take my man’s nutsack:

When a ballsy female concertgoer reached out and grabbed Tim McGraw’s nether regions Saturday at the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana, his missus told the errant fan in no uncertain terms that that sort of behavior is frowned upon in them there parts (no pun intended).

“Somebody needs to teach you some class, my friend,” a finger-wagging Hill told the woman. “You don’t go grabbin’ somebody else’s, somebody’s husband’s [privates], you understand me? That’s very disrespectful!”

Take it easy, Faith. Sit a spell. Breathe.

(Via Hecklerspray.)

Woot is now shipping low-cost and/or low-mass items via SmartPost, a venture in which FedEx does the front-end work and then hands your parcel off to the Postal Service. How it’s supposed to work, according to FedEx:

FedEx SmartPost offers you an efficient, value-oriented, and timely way to ship high volumes of low-weight packages to residential customers. We pick up, sort, line haul, track and deliver your packages to the post offices closest to your customers. The USPS makes the final delivery to the residence. As a result, you reduce transit time, minimize handling, and maximize postal discounts.

The T-shirt department is shipping everything SmartPost unless you ante up $5 for FedEx overnight. (If you don’t, you pay zilch for shipping.) And you can be sure that not everyone is happy about this. From the Woot message board:

Woot needs to make the SmartPost logo on the main product page link to either this blog or somewhere in the FAQ about how SmartPost will take longer than normal.

Because you’re never going to be able to tell from looking at the logo. (Disclosure: I have had no issues with SmartPost, though the sample size — two — is not statistically significant.)

Alan Sullivan says he wouldn’t be surprised to see more Twin Cities bridges crumbling:

They use far too much road salt during the long Minnesota winters: it rots out the cars, and eventually even steel girders give way. It’s time for local authorities to cut back the chemicals and rely more on old-fashioned sand.

We don’t have this problem in Oklahoma: we simply cheap out on the actual construction.

Meanwhile, I picked up this bulletin from a MySpace friend:

No one laugh at me any more about going over bridges and being afraid.

No giggles here.

William C. Montgomery, at The Truth About Cars, on the single-minded nature of Nissan’s Xtronic CVT:

According to Nissan’s literature, the 16-valve DOHC mill cranks out 175 hp and 180 ft.-lbs. of torque. In real life, the [Altima] Coupe’s mechanical stableyard feels a good twenty horses shy of that total. Blame the Xtronic Continuously Variable Transmission. While the shiftless non-cog swapper quickly and accurately finds the right gear ratio in most situations, it quickly and accurately finds the right gear ratio in most situations. In other words, the mpg bias sucks the fun right out of the system.

In defense of Nissan, they have a pretty good (if costly) continuously-variable air-conditioning compressor that is almost imperceptible in normal driving.

Will there be an attempt to restore the old-and-busted Fairness Doctrine for broadcast media? Not if Air America’s Thom Hartmann has anything to say about it:

The “progressive has failed” frame is simply wrong. In just three short years, our format has gone from a small handful of progressive stations to 10% of the talk radio content of this country. If I’d started a soda pop business in my garage and in three years had taken 10% of Coca-Cola’s market, my picture would be on the cover of Forbes! Nobody thinks of Apple as a failure, but they only have 4.8% of the U.S. computer market, and that’s taken them 20 years! What if a new music format had taken 10% of the radio market in just three years? Everybody would be talking about it, it’d be moving onto bigger and bigger sticks, and programmers would be figuring out how to clone it in every local market across the country! Conservative Talk radio didn’t catch on instantly, either. We don’t need no stinkin’ Fairness Doctrine, and we don’t need to be lectured by failing talk show hosts. We just need a few more industry pros to take seriously the very real accomplishments and the ongoing potential of this format as it matures. Add to that a few shots at bigger sticks [industry jargon for radio towers], dedicated sales forces, and decent imaging and promotion, and maybe we’ll be 20% within the next three years!”

There are a couple of things askew here — Apple, once upon a time, had a market share far greater than 4.8 percent, and 10 percent of the content does not necessarily equal 10 percent of the audience — but otherwise Hartmann’s nailed it. New formats do not flourish overnight. But should they catch on in a few major markets, others will take notice. (Jack FM was on in Canada for a year and a half before any US station picked it up.)

And the competition? There is that panoply of right-wing commentators, but perhaps the biggest threat to commercial “progressive” broadcasting is good ol’ National Public Radio, a reliably left-wing bunch, firmly entrenched, pretty much ubiquitous, and known to receive actual checks from some of us center-right types. It goes without saying, though, that there are people for whom NPR is insufficiently leftish.

I can see one other possible snag: old-time radio guys, a lot of whom are still around, hear the word “progressive” and think it’s the old FM album-rock format from the 1970s. Ultimately it may be necessary to coin another term. What is not necessary, of course, is any sort of government action.

If you’re not keen on giving out your credit-card numbers, you can probably relate to this:

I received a free iTunes download from Ticketmaster this morning. To retrieve said download, an Apple account had to be created.

And, of course, Apple wants to know how they’re going to collect from you — even if they’re giving you a freebie.

I used to advise people to get a card with a very low limit just for such occasions; yes, I know that you’re not going to have to eat any illegal transactions, but there’s a certain satisfaction in sticking it to identity thieves. At the time, I had a MasterCard with a whopping $100 limit, which I used for all manner of low-level Net transactions. Unfortunately, I was diligent in making payments, and now that card has a $12,500 limit, and I’d just as soon AverageOnlineMerchant dot com didn’t have any record of it.

So I’m thinking maybe an American Express gift card, say $25 worth. (I get one of these every few months for spending some ungodly sum on my Amex.) It acts pretty much like any other American Express card, and once you get tired of it, it’s easy to burn off somewhere.

The alternative — you get freebies without having to sign up for anything — is too remote a possibility to consider.

Norman Geras’ normblog profile is one of the longer-running regular features in blogdom: over the years there have been more than 200 interviews, including most of the A-list bloggers, with occasional forays into the B-list.

We won’t mention how far Norm had to dip into the alphabet to come up with me, but I was happy to participate just the same, and I thank him for the opportunity.

One of the AP pieces on the I-35W collapse in Minneapolis notes that on a scale of 1 to 100 for structural stability, the failed bridge scored a 50.

The Oklahoman reports that Oklahoma City’s Crosstown Expressway rates a 49, though the state does not consider it unsafe. (The bridge was closed once, in 1989, after a crack in a support beam was discovered.)

I am very much a creature of habit: I didn’t overthrow WordPerfect 5.1 until the last days of Ami Pro for Windows, which I persisted in using even after Lotus bought it, changed its name to WordPro and added almost Microsoftian layers of bloat to it. I am still trying to get the hang of OpenOffice.org, and at first I thought that my objections to it were rooted in its name: products, I aver, should not be named for their URLs.

But maybe it’s merely Baby Duck Syndrome, which apparently affects heavy-duty code warriors like Jeff Atwood the same way it does us nonwizardly types:

I’m as guilty of software imprinting as anyone. I was provided an evaluation copy of Visual SlickEdit, but I couldn’t bring myself to try it out because I have already “imprinted” on the Visual Studio editor. I’m still learning ways to be more effective in my preferred editor; is it really worth my time to divide my effort and attempt to learn a new, unfamiliar editor that I may not even ultimately use? That’s the software imprinting dilemma.

This is probably not the time to admit to ten years’ experience with Outlook Express.

(Via Wheels within Wheels.)

Yours truly, a bit over a week ago:

Virginia, starting this month, is collecting civil penalties in addition to fines in an obvious effort to fatten the exchequer.

The Old Grouch helpfully pointed out in comments that these applied only to Virginians.

And apparently that particular bit of discrimination was enough to get the law enabling them struck down:

In the first case of its kind, a Henrico County General District Court judge today struck down as unconstitutional the Virginia’s controversial speeding ticket tax that had been in effect since July 1. Judge Archer L. Yeatts III ruled that the civil remedial fees violated the equal protection clause by applying additional, mandatory fines of up to $3000 on Virginia drivers, but not out-of-state drivers who may have committed the same driving violation.

“A ‘dangerous’ driver is a ‘dangerous’ driver, whether he or she is a life-long resident of Virginia or simply passing through on his or her way to another state or county,” Judge Yeatts wrote. “The court rejects the speculations postulated by the commonwealth, and mindful of its obligation to do so, has exhausted its speculation quotient in trying to conceive of any others that would be a rational basis for the distinction between resident and non-resident ‘dangerous drivers’.”

Source here. For now, this applies only to Henrico County. Still to be answered: how a government can pass off a fine as a mere fee.

(Courtesy of Bitter Bitch.)

Kevin Beck on Asperger’s Syndrome:

The most interesting thing about Asperger’s syndrome is that its “discoverer” decided he had it and named it after himself, which he might have done even if not “suffering” from this “disorder.” Maybe.

Asperger’s, like too many other mental illnesses, is in effect an almost whimsical diagnosis of exclusion: If someone is really smart, arrogant beyond measure, and tends to be an asshole or otherwise impossible to converse with in a normal way, then he must have a form of autism. It’s not treatable, but hey, labels are always fun and interesting.

And inevitably, there is a quick-and-dirty test online, consisting of 50 questions on a four-point scale (there is no Neutral). The cutoff point:

Scores over 32 are generally taken to indicate Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism, with more than 34 an “extreme” score.

Well, isn’t that special.

There is, of course, a limit to how seriously I’m going to take a mere 50-question inventory of this sort, but then I’m really smart and arrogant beyond measure.

(Via the kindly James Joyner.)

Regular readers will know that while the World Tours have a distinct air of spontaneity to them, made more so by my ongoing unwillingness to book rooms more than about 48 hours in advance, some of the behind-the-scenes details (financial arrangements, packing techniques, that sort of thing) are scienced out to the nth, or at least the eth, degree.

I have to admit, though, I never planned anything like this:

[W]hy don’t I just drive across this great country of ours? Then came inspiration! It was like the stars converged over my head, giving me the opportunity to accomplish my life-long dream —

— yes, getting laid by a different woman in all fifty states.

Why settle for just one when America offers so much variety?!

All men have this dream, but how many of us get to achieve it? We always get bogged down with marriage and babies and cleaning out the garage!

I’ve never had this dream, but I presumably lack imagination. (And I definitely lack possibilities.)

Still, if he can pull this off — well, if nothing else, the bloggage ought to be extraordinary.

If you attended schools in South Carolina about the time I did, you got some serious instruction on the Civil War Between the States for Southern Independence. One project assigned to two-person teams in our history class: produce a four-page newspaper for distribution in the city of Charleston for 13 April 1861 — the day after the mighty Southern cannons opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It was fun, and my partner and I did A-level work (actually, if you ask me, I think it was B-level work with A-plus-level graphic design: he was good at that sort of thing), but the time we spent concentrating on minutiae from the first day was time we wouldn’t have to study the sweep, the flow, the dynamics of the war.

Which today, thanks to modern technology, you can do in four minutes and twenty-four seconds:

(Via Scribal Terror.)

There’s no other way to explain “Rank: 1,” unless Dave Sifry’s trying out a new Rankness Index, an unlikely possibility at best. Still, I figured I ought to preserve this for posterity, since there’s no way anyone’s ever going to see this again unless I get much more proficient at Photoshop. At the time, the Top 100 button did seem to work correctly. (I’m guesstimating my actual Technorati rank to be around 23,000.)

Addendum, 9 pm: Robert Gorell of GrokDotCom sees a perfect opportunity to bait links.

Magazine publisher LPI Media is seeking to get rid of the stuff:

We are now offering our U.S. customers the option of having your Out and Advocate subscriptions mailed with or without plastic wrap.

Please help us reduce the negative environmental impact of the plastic wrap currently mailed, and divert more magazine resources from printing/delivery to news and content development.

I hope there’s some follow-up on how many subscribers actually do decide to forgo the extra plastic. And I wonder what it would take for Condé Nast to give up on it: just about everything I get from them is given the Laura Palmer treatment.

Last week I tried out the Homeland version of The Store Formerly Known As Albertson’s, and I was not particularly impressed, so this week I ventured out to a location taken over by Williams, at 7001 NW 122nd.

This one was a little harder to judge: the floor plan is totally different, so much of my evaluation time was spent in the tedious business of finding stuff. (I never did find the taco-seasoning mix. At the old store, it was located near the pasta — the idea of putting it near the taco shells instead of 1.5 aisles away apparently doesn’t fit into contemporary marketing strategy — but no such luck here.) And the aisles were seriously cluttered: evidently I’d hit them very early in the transition and they were busy restocking stuff.

One thing Williams had in common with Homeland: they weren’t going to a lot of trouble to get rid of old Albertson’s house-brand products. The 1.75-quart tub of A-brand ice cream, $3.99 in its original home, was $3.69 at one store, $3.79 at the other. As clearance sales go, this does not impress. The major difference between them, though, was that despite the fact that both these stores kept most of their personnel after the change, the Williams crew has a distinct good-ol’-boy (or -girl) flavor, the same one I’d seen in their now-defunct Mayfair Market. And unlike Mayfair, the new Williams store does not seem to stock unfrosted blueberry Pop-Tarts, which I reasoned would be shelved near the 62 other flavors.

I’m inclined to give these guys another shot in a week or so, to see if they’re a bit more organized, but they’ve got one strike against them: NW 122nd and Rockwell is a heck of a long way to go for groceries.

After a week of no rain — something that hasn’t happened since early March — I hauled out the sprinkler for the first time this year and gave the front yard an actual watering. And, as often happens with unusual events, there was some unusual fallout.

A band of youngsters, seven or eight of them, the youngest maybe nine years old, was walking up the street on this hot (high today was 95) afternoon while I was digging a few holes in the flower bed. They didn’t see me, but they did see the sprinkler, and the absence of a sidewalk notwithstanding, they adjusted their path to make sure they got under at least one sweep.

As the last of them was getting a shower, I suddenly appeared from behind a shrub with a pair of hedge shears, the AK-47 of hand-operated gardening tools, and for one brief moment, there was palpable (if soggy) tension in the air as they waited for me to tell them to get off my damn lawn. I said nothing, and finally one of them yelled what could have been a “Thank you.” It seemed reasonable to let it go at that.

Meanwhile, there was an audible screech from the big elm tree out front, and it didn’t take long to determine its source: a bird who had taken up temporary sanctuary in the tree was apparently disturbed by these jets of water, perhaps because they were coming from the wrong direction. (Rain falls down, right?) With plenty of feather-ruffling, he darted from one set of branches to another, back and forth, shaking off the water and giving out with another screech about every third dart. This was, of course, impossible to photograph, since the bird was moving at high speed and water was slicing through the area almost as quickly, but I did manage to get off one halfway-decent shot, in which the irritation seems plainly visible on the bird’s countenance: that beak, I’d bet, would be digging into my shoulder blades if he’d had his way. He continued to complain until I’d called off the deluge and reeled in the hose.

But for now, you’ve got to get the ’08 Cadillac CTS:

Cadillac added a TiVo-like feature that caches a rolling hour’s worth of audio from the radio or satellite radio. So if you like a song and want to hear it again, just hit the rewind button. With satellite radio music, the recorder uses the track/artist/time-of-day information to insert bookmarks at the start of each song, so you can find what you want quickly. (For AM/FM radio, the skip feature works in 30-second increments.)

It’s not quite perfect yet, though:

There are a couple of gotchas: If you change from satellite to radio, or even station to station, the cache flushes. And Cadillac won’t let you save favorite XM satellite songs to the hard disk the way the Pioneer Inno handheld XM receiver does. Why not? “Because they [Pioneer] are in litigation,” explained engineer Charles Massoll. But bless the engineers: The feature was engineered into the audio system but not activated, so if the recording industry ever decides features are good if they get music fans to listen to more music, it’s ready and waiting.

I caught the gist of this in Car and Driver’s CTS preview, couldn’t quite believe it, and went hunting around for corroboration. Considering the littlest Caddy (if there were a BMW 4-series, it would be just about this size) is high on my want list, I have to hope that this goes over well.

Mythusmage sets a goal:

At the age of 53 I now — given my family history — have less than 40 years to live. With medical advances I might actually reach 2045. Still and all, it means I really don’t have much time to get donations added to my sparse and pitiful record of $5.00 (From Lair of This Blog is Full of Crap if you were wondering).

That is the reason behind this post; I would like to see more donations come my way before my demise around the middle of this century. Five dollars, ten dollars, a thousand dollars, I don’t ask for much. (Though a five thousand dollar donation would probably get the attention of Homeland Security, and I don’t think anybody wants to deal with that kind of paperwork. So think kindly of Homeland Security employees and help reduce their paperwork load.)

Unlike certain parties who shall [Andrew Sullivan] remain unnamed, I will not hit you with some phony baloney immediate crisis. Instead I will use a phony baloney distant crisis. I will blog for as long as [I] can on whatever equipment I must use. Even if I’m limited to 15 minutes a day on it. All to keep posting strange, confused, confusing posts on strange, confused, confusing topics. With the occasional strange, confused, confusing post on something that actually fakes importance, pertinence, and even topicality better than my usual crap.

Donate not because it would help me upgrade my computing equipment. Donate not because it’s the right thing to do. Donate not because you’ve got some extra cash and don’t know what to do with it. Donate instead because it means you won’t have that money to donate to he who shall not be [Andrew Sullivan] named. Remember, if you give it to me you won’t have it to give to [Andrew Sullivan] him.

There are few things in life I appreciate more than clear-cut motivation.

Like the Mage, I am 53; unlike him, I have no expectation of lasting until 2045. (Tomorrow I expect to be read the medical equivalent of the Riot Act and put on a diet of gruel and igneous rocks. None of that sedimentary junk.) And I’ve never actually requested any donations. On the other hand, if you’d like to reimburse me for the five bucks I sent him, I won’t even complain.

I was fiddling around with my MP3 Walkman, contemplating the possibility of avoiding Sony’s cumbersome SonicStage interface, when I noticed that the folder on the machine which actually contains all the music files is called OMGAUDIO.

Lame (not to be confused with LAME) as it was, I giggled a bit, and then went looking to see if these letters were supposed to stand for something and/or if Sony had synthesized a backronym. No suggestions of such, but I did happen upon these guys, who have produced what appears to be some pretty nifty stuff — probably with no help from Sony.

“Stranger on the Shore,” Mr. Acker Bilk’s evocative clarinet piece that topped both British and American charts in 1962, has some truly-mournful qualities to it, but to one woman, it’s the saddest song of all. It starts with a slumber party, and then:

Once the lights were out, we kept the radio on — very softly — while the get-together continued downstairs. I heard lots of songs on the radio that night, but for some reason “Stranger On The Shore” stuck in my brain, attaching itself to our musings on what adults did at parties and what it would be like when we grew up. We had all sorts of plans and ideas. And all of that talk was infused with the Acker Bilk music on the transistor radio.

How does so much stuff get wrapped up in an old song? Well, it does. I’m sure there’s some kind of psychological, sound-memory thing firing off between my dendrites, but I can’t help but think there’s more to it than just some scientific explanation.

I’ve had the best of all possible lives (well, except for the money part). I’ve done things that I could’ve never imagined at 10 years old while listening to a scratchy-sounding transistor radio on a Friday night in the winter of 1962. I’ve gone way beyond the wife and school teacher I thought I was destined to be.

Still, I keenly remember the visions of what adult life would be like. And reality is so, so different. Not many Holly Golightly-black cocktail dresses and witty, intelligent adult conversations at city-fied parties. But it’s more than that. There was something bigger. Some big adult secret world that I imagined as a child, only to grow up to find that world doesn’t exist the way I’d dreamed it would be. I don’t dwell on this stuff, believe me. Just when I hear that song.

I never went to any slumber parties, a perhaps-inevitable result of not having been born a girl, but I think I understand this. I have a similar reaction to Bert Kaempfert’s “Wonderland by Night,” which for me evokes a startlingly-exact mental picture. It’s a Friday night, somewhere between ten and midnight, and a convertible is crossing the bridge into downtown; reflections of the streetlights play on the pavement, on the hood, on us. Her little black dress has a row of sequins, and as we pass under the lights, they glow ever so slightly, but it’s nothing compared to the glow on her face as she smiles. “Now, you know we have to be back by….” She lets the sentence trail off.

“By when?” I ask.

She leans in slightly, faces me, crosses her legs. “Well, certainly before Thursday.”

I was, of course, too young to imagine how this narrative might have continued. But it seemed so very real, and one day not so long ago I contrived to be crossing a bridge into a city at the moment this song came up on the stereo and I swear I could actually almost see her. (And if I’ve ever seen you in an LBD, trust me: it was you I almost saw.) I don’t know what in Kaempfert’s arrangement, or in Charly Tabor’s trumpet solo, implanted these images, but they’re strong enough to have persisted for more than forty years.

And yes, there is sadness:

A lost, enticing, oh-so-cool adult world dreamed up by a 10-year-old girl listening to a song on a transistor radio in the lavender bedroom of her best friends in the winter of 1962. That loss is why the song is so sad to me.

I know what she means.

(Note: I’ve pulled the MP3s, on the basis that you’ve had enough time to hear them, and besides, my bandwidth bill is big enough already.)

The referrer log is a river, endlessly flowing, bringing the details of your visits; once in a while I stick in a pan, shake it a bit, and see if I can come up with some pure comic gold, or at least some risible pyrite.

is it illegal to be in your back yard naked in phoenix:  Not necessarily, but you’d better have SPF 6.0221415 ^ 10²³.

walmart how do they get away with paying such low wages:  Because you keep shopping there.

der wienerschnitzel vegan:  Cognitive dissonance boiled down to three words.

clever ways to deal with a steep driveway in the winter:  ”Bribe your neighbor to shovel it off” seems like it might work.

girlfriend says penis taste weird:  Compared to what? Arugula? Zucchini?

big hooters:  The one on I-240 is 5,285 square feet.

ocelot spleen:  We never get requests for proper food.

how to get infinite minutes on a motorola V170 phone:  Plug the flux capacitor directly into the charging port.

INTJs don’t date:  Not true. They just won’t date you.

what does it mean when a transmission is rebuilt:  It means you get to write a very large check.

how do I undress the Feng twins:  Presumably one at a time.

car is an extension of men’s penis:  If that were the case, you’d see bigger bumper guards.

Chinese President Hu Jintao is on an anti-corruption crusade, and one of the results of Hu’s campaign is a deliciously-vicious online game:

An online game in which players can torture and kill corrupt officials that a Chinese local government set up to teach people about the perils of graft is proving a roaring success, state media said Thursday.

“Incorruptible Fighter,” developed by the government of east China’s Zhejiang province, was launched just over a week ago and is already so popular that it is being redesigned to accommodate more players, the China Daily said.

The game, which lets players get ahead by killing officials by means of “weapons, magic, or torture,” has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, the Southern Metropolitan Daily said.

Hey, it beats the hell out of screaming your head off at C-Span.

(Via Purple Avenger.)

Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor is apparently trying to drum up business for downtown eateries, reports meeciteewurkor. A staffer at St Simeon’s Episcopal Home on the northside found this on the corkboard:

Dear Residents:

Mayor Kathy Taylor has asked for assistance in letting Downtown employees know that many of our Downtown restaurants are struggling, particularly the ones open at night. [List snipped.]

Until the BOK Center opens they need our help. Please send the attached list to anyone you know that visits downtown and remind them that during this construction period it would be appreciated if they would be patrons of our Downtown establishments.

I don’t find this particularly troubling, but I must note that (1) the residents might not be able to patronize those fine Downtown establishments and (2) St Simeon’s is up at 37th and N. Cincinnati, a good three or four miles from any of them.

Two years ago there was a fair amount of buzz over a USB-based turntable from Ion, which plugs right into the PC and lets you rip that vinyl that’s been cluttering up your room. Apparently it’s sold well enough to justify a spin-off product: the TAPE2USB cassette deck, with actual switching for chromium-dioxide (Type II) and metal (Type IV) tape types.

Some form of the machine has apparently been floating around the rest of the world for some time now, but this is the first I’d heard of it. It won’t be a must-buy for me, though, until they add in Dolby B noise reduction, which so far I haven’t seen in Audacity and which Audacity developers say would be “tricky to get … right without straight-up copying the actual process,” something they’d like to avoid for the obvious reason. However, there is apparently a Winamp plugin with a built-in Dolby B workalike, so hope is not yet entirely dashed.

M-E-H.

I had responded to something mehworthy with “Meh” today, and it occurred to me that surely someone must have snapped up “meh” domains already. I cranked up the browser, and sure enough, meh.com, meh.net, meh.org, meh.biz and meh.info have squatters occupants. Five different occupants, yet, or so it appears. A couple of them greet you with a popup. (And what is it with these dot.info domains, anyway? With the singular exception of Eternity Road, every last one that shows up in my referrer logs is a spammer or worse.)

Incidentally, meh.tv redirects to Carson Daly, which proves there is justice in the world.

Any suggestions for who should get meh.gov?

(Found at Flibbertigibbet!)

According to the Daily Mail, the Labour government seeks to reduce solid waste by giving you less space to stash it:

Families will be forced to squeeze their rubbish into new extra-small wheelie bins or risk a £1,000 fine under the latest Labour plans to crack down on household waste.

A Government report calls for the nationwide introduction of ‘bonsai bins’, a little more than half the size of the current 240-litre models, to encourage households to separate their rubbish for recycling.

And the new guidelines warn against letting larger families keep the old big bins because other households might suffer from ‘bin envy’.

People who fail to cram all their non-recyclable waste into the 140-litre European-style wheelie bins will face criminal prosecution if they leave extra rubbish on the street in bags.

Emalyse sees this piece as an effort by the newspaper to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt:

Forget the arguments over the merits of recycling (The Mail piece isn’t engaged in tackling the broader arguments or offering alternatives) and that the cause of household waste is overpackaging by the supermarkets, reliance of prepackaged microwave meals, the throwaway consumer culture we are all encouraged to be part of (not things that the Mail is likely to attack), this piece is a fine exercise in using FUD to whip up discontent in the readership and crowbar in a ‘family under attack’ subtext. It’s a classic Daily Mail piece that panders to the usual fears and anxieties. The core readership must be foaming at the mouth after finishing their morning paper with sheer indignation and outrage.

FUD is, of course, a time-(dis)honored method of boosting one’s commercial profile; Microsoft’s Bill Gates is an acknowledged master. Still, this whole “bin envy” concept strikes me as serious projection: as Dr Freud never said, sometimes a bin is just a bin.

Meanwhile, here in the Land of the Free and/or Reasonably Inexpensive:

A second Big Blue is free. If you have more to throw away than even two Big Blues can hold, we offer extra cart service for $2.45 a cart per month.

I have two Big Blues, which hold about 240l each. In the last four years I think I’ve filled both in a single week twice; there have been several weeks when I didn’t haul either of them out to the curb because they weren’t sufficiently full to justify the effort. On the other hand, I’m not even considering calling the city and asking them to repossess one of them.

Well, not entirely new: she’s still at the same URL and she’s still running b2, but the new, improved, arguably less dissonant title is: Violins and Starships.

Tagline: “a little bit 18th century, a little bit 24th century…”

Which, you’ll note, averages out to 21st.

I have no particular fondness for the United Auto Workers, though I will tell you up front that the last UAW-built car I bought — a Mazda 626, assembled in Flat Rock, Michigan with about two-thirds domestic parts — was the single most reliable vehicle I’ve ever driven: in 55,000 miles there were a total of three unscheduled repairs, and two of them (a wiper blade, to replace one bent by a vandal, and a windshield, to replace one cracked by a random rock) clearly weren’t the fault of any aspect of the manufacturing process. (And the third, the adjustment knob on the driver’s seat, could perhaps be attributed to the forces exerted on it by the driver’s fat ass.) Pity they can’t make these things deer-proof.

So I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the notion that the current woes of the American auto industry are entirely the fault of the UAW and President Ron Gettelfinger and their roughly $25-an-hour price premium over the nonunion guys who work for Toyota and Hyundai and such. Yes, they’re going to have to make some concessions during the current round of negotiations, but as Frank Williams writes in The Truth about Cars, “the crucial adjustments must come from management”:

They can try to lay blame wherever they want, but the union didn’t approve the lackluster designs that have been rolling out of Detroit for years. The union’s not responsible for badge-engineered product planning. The union didn’t fill the executive suites with yes men (and women) who will kiss whatever they have to kiss to keep their jobs. And the union had nothing to do with putting beancounters in charge instead of engineers.

Bottom line: labor costs have zero impact on what cars consumers decide to buy. You could argue that an extra grand here and there — taken out of direct costs and plowed back into new vehicles — would make The Big 2.8′s vehicles more competitive. Given the failure of heavily discounted domestic product to strike back against the Toyotas of the world, you could make an equally compelling case that lowering the domestics’ production costs wouldn’t have any impact on the end result and, thus, U.S. consumers’ choices.

The UAW could work for free and it wouldn’t make any difference, if what they’re building is seen as More of the Same Old Crap. There are a few folks in Detroit boardrooms who understand this. How likely is it that these are the same folks having to negotiate with the union?

BatesLine quotes Ken Neal in the Sunday Tulsa World:

The story of Tulsa’s downtown is a story of decline, but the downtown neighborhood is still one of the most valuable in the city. Although commerce has largely fled to more lucrative locations in suburbia, magnificent old skyscrapers remain and downtown is the seat of banking, government, courts and the legal and financial community.

The city government sadly has neglected downtown for decades. Much of the work under way now would not be necessary if infrastructure had been replaced as needed through the years.

Neal uses that word “neglected.” I do not believe it means what he thinks it means. Neither does Michael Bates:

For the last 50 years, city government has gone from one scheme to another to improve downtown: Urban renewal, the Inner Dispersal Loop, the Civic Center, the pedestrianized Main Mall, the Williams Center, and now the arena. Each city government-driven project has closed streets, driven out residents, brought down buildings, and generated new surface parking lots. As I’ve explored old news clippings, I’ve found that Ken Neal was a fervent advocate of most of those destructive ideas. The parts of downtown that are the healthiest and liveliest are the parts that the planners of decades past thought unworthy of their attention, like the Blue Dome District and the Brady Arts District.

Which fact should serve as an object lesson to Oklahoma City, where the urge to overregulate has never quite been entirely dampened. At least we’re no longer being bowled over with wrecking balls. (If you’re in the Core to Shore area, south of the old Crosstown, your mileage may — will — vary.)

It’s at 300 SW 7th Street, and there’s a rally Saturday at 11 10 am to try to save it.

From the release (background here):

OKC Union Station’s rail yard is the last grand urban yard in the West with all its original space intact. Existing rail lines sprawling all over the metro and state converge here.

Unfortunately, our Department of Transportation is determined to destroy this treasure to make way for a hyper-expensive highway we don’t need.

It’s time ODOT ends the plan to destroy the Union Station yard to make way for a “New Crosstown” and simply repairs and upgrades the “Old Crosstown” — which reportedly could be done for less than $50 million. (The actual cost of the “New Crosstown” plan may now well exceed one billion dollars — that’s for “four miles of new roadway”.)

Using the state’s unique 900 mile network of publicly owned rail lines, OKC Union Station is the only hope Baby Boomers and older Oklahomans have of seeing a comprehensive, regional rail transit system in our lifetimes.

This last paragraph may have been a misfire: rather a lot of people, including me and I’m one of them fercrissake, have no particular desire to cater to the Boomers, in aggregate a fairly-annoying lot. (Says Kim du Toit: “As an aging Boomer myself, nothing fills me with as much dread as watching my spoiled, petulant and self-absorbed generation getting older, and wailing about it.”)

Still, if you’re anxious to see some actual passenger rail in these parts before the next asteroid sweeps by, or even if you just think the New Crosstown is a boondoggle, come to the station at eleven ten Saturday. It will last, they say, about an hour.

Your major proponent: Tom Elmore, North American Transport Institute, 405.794.7163, or gtelmore at advancedtransport dot org.

Nobody nose but Gail, it seems.

News Item: Chrysler’s new owner, Cerberus Capital Management, expects the carmaker to return to profitability in roughly three years’ time. In a recent interview, Cerberus boss John Snow told reporters “I think you’ll see that Chrysler will be in much better shape within three years. This is a plan to get it back to profitability.” To ensure that it actually happens, former Home Depot chief Robert Nardelli has been appointed as the automaker’s new Chairman and CEO.

Top Ten steps to be taken by new Chrysler chairman Bob Nardelli to bring the company back to prosperity:

10. Equip all Five Star dealerships with both English and Spanish signage

9. License the Hemi to John Deere to build the world’s fastest lawn tractor
8. Redesign the Dodge Ram logo to look less girly
7. Fire whichever dorkwad thought the world needed a Jeep that seats seven
6. Outsource everything smaller than the Pacifica to Hyundai
5. Promise never to allow Lee Iacocca on television again
4. Same goes for Dr Z
3. Revive Dodge La Femme, offer Amanda Marcotte a test drive
2. Two words: Demon roadster
1. Create unprecedented buzz by burying all new models for fifty years

And don’t you miss rich Corinthian leather?