This showed up yesterday on Mediabistro:

A tipster tells us staffers at TV Guide have been told that there will be a mandatory 3pmET meeting today, where it will be announced that the print edition will be discontinued with the final issue being the Fall Preview. The tipster says TV Guide Channel and TVGuide.com will continue.

This makes three magazines to which I subscribe which have died this year. As always, the only question remaining is “What will they send me in its place?” Sometimes these selections are at least marginally astute: some years ago Brill’s Content sold off its subscription list to Mother Jones, which I didn’t mind particularly and which I still read. On the other hand, this past spring Premiere was replaced by Us Weekly, the equivalent of being forced to trade your Volvo sedan for a hat full of bus passes and a two-for-one coupon at the free clinic.

Update: Mediabistro recants, as noted in Comments.

Further update: Brian J. Noggle takes the lead in Abandoned Subscriptions.

This banner has been flying outside Cornerstone Christian Fellowship Church in Chandler, Arizona, to promote their Greatest Sex Ever series, because, well, where else would you go for a series of lectures on sex? The Home Depot? Still, there’s something disquieting about the whole thing, quite apart from the fact that it’s yet another manifestation of the unfortunate fact that church marketing sucks. Maybe it’s the missionary position? Or perhaps it’s just the idea that someone feels it’s necessary to push the envelope, as it were, to get people’s attention to what are supposed to be Eternal Truths and such. More to the point, I object to the very idea of “bringing sexy back”: contrary to popular belief, it never really left.

(Via Dawn Eden.)

But just as deadly: this is what faces New Orleans, and there’s a certain amount of sense, I think, in simply relocating it to higher ground.

Except that “simply” isn’t going to describe the process, so far as I can tell: just picking a site will be problematic at best. And then what?

Moving the bulk of the city would be more costly, at least at this stage before sinking increases and another disaster strikes. The costs of either decision will be enormous, but relocating makes more sense and will eventually be inevitable. Whether we cut our losses now and move or wait until a super-hurricane makes a direct hit and kills hundreds of thousands of people must be carefully considered.

There are a few psychoceramics out there who wouldn’t mind the loss of life so much, but they can be safely ignored.

The most cost-effective solution, perhaps, is to shrink the city down to its core:

One option would be to begin building newer, higher, stronger seawalls around the business and historic parts of the city, and declare other parts a national monument, in tribute to those who lost their lives to Katrina. The process of moving could be gradual, relocating refugees, destroyed businesses, port facilities, and other infrastructure to a new New Orleans.

I don’t expect this idea to sit well with the folks who think that they ought to (1) be able to live anywhere they want and (2) be subsidized for same. While I will happily grant them (1), I suspect (2) will be a tougher sell.

My workhorse printer, a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 720C, got a new black cartridge today, the previous one being spent, and it occurred to me at some point during the Align Cartridges routine that gawd, this thing is old, and indeed it is: I bought it (at Office Depot, I think, for something like $180) in 1997, which makes it ten years old, an eternity by computer standards.

And no, I have no plans to replace it; it works just fine, thank you very much, and you can still get cartridges for it with no difficulty. (In fact, recently at work we added a machine based on an HP engine using the same cartridge: the 45.) Further coolness: the 45 cartridge has a window in the front so you can tell how much ink is left in it, which is slightly more reliable than the current HP practice of popping up a dialog box on screen to tell you that it’s nearly empty, which in my experience it seldom is.

During these ten years, incidentally, I’ve gone through four DeskJets at work, following a few years with an old Epson 24-pin dot-matrix printer — which is still in service in another department. By now it must be pushing fifteen. Ribbons for the Epson are not hard to get, either.

One of the most heartwarming headlines ever: “City pays Michael Bolton not to sing”.

Now if I could just persuade someone to pay me not to blog.

(Via Fark.)

Sony, of course, invented the Betamax, the original standard for home video, only to watch it die in the marketplace, outplayed by JVC’s VHS. (I wrote a brief history of said death in Vent #82 back in 1997.) While Sony continued to make Beta recorders for the US market until 1993, and for the Japanese domestic market until 2002 (!), the real watershed event was the 1988 introduction of Sony’s first VHS recorder, about which I said this:

[T]his particular Sony machine, which offered a weird 15-year clock, would literally time-stamp a recording: you set the timer, the program records, you rewind, and there are the recording details at the beginning, right on the tape. Great for archivists, and for practically no one else on earth. This is the sort of gee-whiz thinking at Sony that brought us simulated digital frame grabs (on a late-Eighties Beta machine I still have), a clock-radio that requires half a dozen button operations to change the alarm time (which I bought and now deeply regret), and now CDs that hijack your operating system.

The company at times seems almost Dylanesque — most likely, you go your way, they’ll go theirs. Yet another example of Sony gee-whiz thinking is headed for the dustbin: the ATRAC music-encoding-plus-DRM system, and the Connect music store that sold it to people with latter-day Walkman units, are history. (I have a fairly-recent Walkman, and an interface to Connect was duly provided as part of the package, but I never had occasion to use it, inasmuch as the interface would also accept ordinary MP3 and even WAV files.) Sony has unveiled new Walkman players (can we call them “Walkmen”?) that don’t use ATRAC, and Connect apparently will be gone by spring.

All of this, of course, makes me wonder what sort of weird crap Sony is planning for the PlayStation 4.

A lot of us have poked fun at pop-music LP jackets over the years, most recently the esteemed Rocket Jones, and there’s always been one shibboleth to sustain us: “At least they’d never do something this tacky on a classical release.”

Wrong-O, Brucknerian Bob. Jason of Too Many Tristans presents a three-part collection of inexplicable classical-CD covers, including a special Pagliacci edition. “Send in the clowns,” indeed.

We expect the county records in the state’s metropolitan areas to be easily searchable online; we tend to doubt that we’ll find anything in the rural areas.

Duncan-based KellPro is now offering searchable land records in twenty-seven counties at OKCountyRecords.com. In six of those counties (Carter, Craig, Delaware, Grady, Logan and Ottawa) you can also search plat maps, although apparently you will have to set up an online account — contact your county clerk — to view images. If you have to go poking through land records for a living (and I know some of you do), this may prove useful to you.

Telegraph associate editor Simon Heffer is ready to cut off allowances:

Has anybody noticed that the more we spend on the underclass, the bigger it gets and the worse it behaves?

Has anyone noticed, either, that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as “middle-class”, but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state. Its supposed family units are not as the rest of us might define the term. It lapses routinely into criminality and lives in largely self-inflicited squalor. It has low educational attainment and is bereft of ambition. It is what we now call the underclass.

We have an underclass because we pay to have one. I do not mean that to be a glib remark, from which it could be inferred that, if we were to stop paying for one, it would magically disappear. What I mean is that 60 years of welfarism, far from raising people out of poverty and of the vices that sometimes (but not inevitably) go with it, has simply trapped them there. Welfarism has smashed the traditional, and vital, family unit. The state readily takes responsibility for families if those who should be running them decide, in part or in whole, to abdicate it. The huge outlay of money that allows this to happen is represented by politicians — and not exclusively those of the Left — as a great act of humanity and philanthropy. It is nothing of the sort. It is, rather, an act of sustained and chronic cruelty, and it leads to such horrors as happened in Liverpool last week.

Mr Heffer could probably repeat this column every few years with scarcely any changes, because that’s what’s going to happen to the policies that created the “underclass”: scarcely any changes. The War on Poverty, as President Johnson called it, makes the Iraq “quagmire” look like a small patch of gravel.

I did one actual Vent (#541) during World Tour ‘07, and one paragraph therefrom has come back to haunt me:

Commercial radio is in a sadder state than I thought. One of the few things I’ve heard that was at all worthwhile was a program by Jim “The Critic” Voight on Charleston’s WAVF (”96 Wave”) on Sunday morning. The Critic’s choices were interesting enough; more to the point, he was willing to defend them against potential audience complaints. Then again, this was a Sunday-morning show, and nothing in the station’s regular playlist makes me think that this is anything other than a weekend anomaly, and that the station normally doesn’t sound like that at all. (In their defense, it’s better than anything I’m likely to hear on Oklahoma City radio.)

And now 96 Wave is history. From Lou Pickney’s VarietyHits.com:

Heritage rock station 96 Wave (96.1 WAVF) in Charleston, SC abruptly dropped modern rock (and, presumably, the incumbent “Free Beer and Hot Wings” syndicated morning show) at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Friday 8/31/2007 to go Variety Hits as 96.1 Chuck FM. The station is streaming live as of this writing from the old 96 Wave website.

In its 22+ year existence, 96 Wave maintained a rock format. WAVF signed on with an Album Oriented Rock format in March 1985 as 96 Wave following a week of stunting with ocean wave sounds.

With the alternative rock format that swept the United States in the early 1990s, the station shifted from the dying AOR format to the growing alternative (also known as modern rock) format in 1993, though it kept the established 96 Wave name.

The last song played on 96 Wave prior to the flip was “My Wave” by Soundgarden. The first song played on Chuck FM was “Take This Job And Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck. According to radio-online.com, 96 Wave program director Lance Hale will remain with the new station in the same role.

What’s weird about this is that Chuck FM will apparently be leaving Chucktown:

[T]he station is slated to change its city of license from Hanahan, SC [in Berkeley County just beyond North Charleston] to Forestbrook, SC and drop its massive class C signal (100,000 watts from a height of 1777′) to go to a C2 status at 26,000 watts from a height of only 492′, and in the process lose its coverage of Charleston (moving to cover the Myrtle Beach, SC market).

Pickney speculates that this is a temporary move while a multiplicity of stations are shuffled, and the result will be something like this:

My guess: the 96.1 Chuck FM format will end up on on 101.7 (with the WKZQ-FM [Myrtle Beach] rock format moving to 96.1 FM when the switch happens), as Apex [owner of WAVF] will get the 101.7 license and NextMedia will obtain 96.1 after the swap. It is more complex than that, but for the purpose of analyzing the move, it suffices.

Who loses in this shuffle? Bamberg’s WWBD is moving from that city to the Isle of Palms, east of Charleston, about 90 miles away, but, says its owner, Bamberg/Orangeburg loses nothing in the deal:

Harold Miller, Miller Communications president and CEO, said the transition is aimed at improving the company’s and other radio broadcasters’ and groups’ facilities and stations.

“If approved, in time Miller will reach an opportunity to dramatically improve several of its stations,” Miller said. “The Bad Dog format will not leave Orangeburg. Miller Communications would be foolish to remove a format that the people have demanded be there. There are no plans to take Bad Dog out of Orangeburg.”

Which suggests to me that WNKT St George, which is moving to Eastover in this deal, presumably close enough to Orangeburg, will take over the Bad Dog format. Definitely a change from Cat Country.

On the other hand, I have to agree with former WWBD owner Vic Whetstone:

“It is not my baby anymore, but it was my baby,” Whetstone said. “Me and my staff, we operated a community station. We were so much a part of the community and promoting so many things. Unfortunately, this is not the way it is anymore.”

As I wrote in Vent #103 in 1998:

What do Pryor, Henryetta, Okmulgee and Muskogee have in common? Yes, they’re all towns in Oklahoma, but more specifically, they are towns in Oklahoma who used to have local FM service. Oh, the stations are still there, sort of. But the owners, visions of bigger bucks dancing in their heads, relocated the transmitting facilities to be closer to the Tulsa metropolitan area, where they could go after big-city audiences while still paying lip service to the communities to which they are licensed.

If anything, this process seems to have accelerated in the nine years since.

Not that I’ve gained any new readers lately, but if this is your first visit, what you’re seeing is a compilation of some of the actual strings entered into search engines that led people to this very site, selected largely on the basis of whether I could think up some smartass remark about them.

circuit city shoplifting policy:  They’re against it.

sword is better than pen:  More viscerally satisfying, anyway.

“Dakota Fanning” Lolita:  Bad idea. Besides, who could play Quilty? Johnny Knoxville?

doo dooo dooo doo doo doo doo dooo woo:  That doo woo that you do so well.

it’s wrong for just one company to make the game Monopoly:  Well, that’s Life®.

i need someplace privately to vent for free:  May I suggest Blogspot? It costs nothing, and it will be years before anybody sees anything you’ve written.

what happened to my lotus smartsuite:  You probably upgraded to Windows XP and now it craps out every time you try to load a file.

can a foetus be invisible at 8 weeks:  Well, it probably won’t show from the outside.

baristas that give blowjobs:  Doesn’t sound like any Starbucks I’ve ever seen.

vintage deadly curvaceous women in undergarments:  Doesn’t sound like any baristas I’ve ever seen.

make your jeep hemi faster with pantyhose:  Obviously this won’t work in the Jeep Commando.

but no one will understand lyrics:  Maybe if you can get the singer to enunciate a little better.

whiy is it called a porsche nine eleven illuminati:  What were you expecting? A Fnord Fnocus?

The Oklahoman’s Berry Tramel says the city should not offer to help finance the Sonics’ departure from Seattle:

Any owner who threatens to hit the highway with his franchise is demonized. But the city he lands in usually escapes such scrutiny.

That would change if Oklahoma City bankrolls the Sonics’ move. OKC is not desperate. We lived a long time without the NBA, and we could live some more the same way.

Just because Bennett and Co. are old friends worthy of trust doesn’t mean they can have the city’s credit card. Every owner, every sport, wants to squeeze out the best deal for his franchise. That’s what owners do, shoot for the moon. Heck, that’s what Bennett’s doing in Seattle, asking for a $500 million arena.

Oklahoma City should do all it can to prep for an NBA team’s arrival, but it should not help pack the moving vans.

Simple as that. The city can promise facility upgrades and better lease terms, but going beyond that is out of the question. Or should be. And if there’s anything under the table that we don’t know about, let’s hope someone upends that table before Bennett’s Halloween deadline.

Herewith, two links from Tinkerty Tonk which lead to but a single conclusion.

(1) Kissing means more to women than to men:

A New York State University team quizzed over 1,000 students, finding women place a big emphasis on kissing. They use kissing as a way of assessing the recipient as a potential partner, and later to maintain intimacy and to check the status of a relationship.

But men placed less importance on it, using it to increase the likelihood of sex, Evolutionary Psychology reported. The questionnaires revealed men were less discriminating when it came to deciding who to kiss or who to have sex with.

(2) Chocolate, in terms of stimulation, has it all over kissing:

Couples in their 20s had their heart rates and brains monitored whilst they first melted chocolate in their mouths and then kissed. Chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting “buzz” than kissing, and doubled volunteers’ heart rates.

So if women value kissing more highly than men do, and if they value chocolate more highly than kissing — face it, guys, you and I have been displaced by 3 Musketeers.

Venomous Kate is actually making some money at blogging:

August total: $2305.10
That’s an increase of $256.00 over last month, and almost double my first month’s earnings. Needless to say, I’m quite pleased.

As she should be. While this won’t pay all the bills, it’s got to help. A lot.

Disclaimer follows:

Keep in mind the total above represents earnings from four blogs, so your mileage may vary. Also, as you can see, earnings from “passive revenue” sources (e.g., AdSense and AdBrite) wouldn’t even pay for a matinee movie ticket. It’s earnings from work (albeit something as fun as blogging).

With four blogs to maintain you can bet it means at least 5 hours of effort per day, six and sometimes seven days per week: a modest income if you look at it in dollars-per-hour, and yet I’d be spending those hours — for free — at the computer in all likelihood. I just no longer feel bad about it.

Even spread over 40-hour weeks, this is still a pretty decent sum.

I’ve never been one of those people who believes that Money Always Corrupts, and certainly I don’t think it’s affected VK’s credibility, which remains pretty darn high. (She’s got sponsored posts, and they’re always occasionally marked as such.) On t’other hand, if she runs for office, I’m going to be worried.

Because you can’t keep a good iamb down, A Mid-Summer Night’s TXT Comedy:

R not thou puck?

EARTH GIRDLED 40 MIN MAX KTHXBAI

If you’re gonna buy you a Mercury and cruise on down the road, you might want to do it now, while there’s still time:

The writing’s on the wall for Ford’s pseudo luxury brand Mercury, which is now tipped to face extinction within the next couple of years. Flagging sales and no major new products in the pipeline mean Ford execs are likely to close the book on Mercury for good, and it could happen as early as 2012. Both industry experts and Mercury’s own dealers are predicting the brand won’t be around much longer. In fact, a recent survey of 125 dealers found that nearly four out of every five dealers were concerned that Ford is planning to dump Mercury.

How many new Mercs are in the pipeline? One: when the Ford Focus (probably still first-generation, while the EuroFocus is approaching the time for its third) gets a hybrid powerplant, there’s supposed to be one for Jill Wagner to hawk.

This is somewhat distressing, not because I’m a Mercury fan — I owned one, once upon a time, and it was an okay car when it wasn’t chewing on its own cylinder heads — but because I was sort of hoping that recasting the line as “chick cars” might bring some new owners into the fold. Apparently it didn’t work: maybe women won’t buy “chick cars” either.

But the death of the Big M is probably inevitable. GM and Chrysler have axed entire marques — Oldsmobile and Plymouth, respectively — for selling fewer than 300,000 units a year. Mercury is running around 180,000. All these years we’ve been told that Mercury was keeping Lincoln dealers afloat, but maybe Lincoln would do better as a standalone: flying solo certainly hasn’t hurt Cadillac, and I have to wonder how many MKZ sales Lincoln loses to Mercury’s much-the-same Milan selling for five grand less across the lot.

There is, however, a Diet Fork:

• Shorter and dulled teeth inhibiting user from grasping larger pieces of food at any one time

• Smaller triangular shaped surface area allowing dieter to hold less food than many other forks
• Uncomfortable grip compelling user to put fork down between bites, slowing the user’s eating speed

I need hardly point out that if your particular weakness is, say, nachos, this contraption will do you no good whatsoever.

“Pandering and exploiting your paranoia,” says DollyMix. I have to wonder if maybe John Edwards has something to do with this: it certainly passes the Wacky Test.

All over blogdom, Tam’s seen ‘em:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a blog that is a Large Mammal! in the Ecosystem, with a Technorati score of One Hojillion! and then I open its SiteMeter and it’s getting 100 hits a day, all from random Google searches. It turns out that they’re on every reciprocal blogroll known to mankind. Feh. That doesn’t get you the eyeballs; good writing gets you the eyeballs.

Wait a minute. There are reciprocal blogrolls?

I dunno if I’m getting eyeballs, but some body parts seem to be showing up here and on the meter.

This calls for Hershey bars all around:

Okay, who’s the wise guy in the back with the floss?

(Via Jalopnik.)

XM satellite radio sends an email to a subscriber:

Starting September 1st and continuing on Saturdays through late November, we may preempt certain news, talk, and entertainment channels so that we can air select college football games. The channels subject to preemption include Air America, The Weather Channel and America Right.

Subscriber notes:

Someone obviously has made some very careful programming decisions in an attempt to be fair. Unfortunately, knowing human nature, they’ll succeed only in ticking off just about everybody: liberals (Air America), conservatives (America Right), and everyone else (The Weather Channel). But you have to give ‘em credit for the symmetry.

I think I’ll go stuff a few more tunes onto my Walkman.

I usually dawdle, and this year was no exception, but I did finally complete my list of nominations for the 2007 Okie Blog Awards. While my vote counts exactly the same as anyone else’s, I have, I believe, one distinct advantage over everyone else: there’s no way I can possibly vote for me.

You’ve got a few days left. Use them wisely.

Last time we (or I, anyway) heard from Joel Kotkin, he was mocking San Francisco as being an “ephemeral city,” as distinguished from one that exists in the Real World, and snickering at the ostensible “creative classes” who are supposed to be saving our cities and such.

Mr Kotkin is still unimpressed by the sort of gee-whiz stuff that goes on in the name of civic development. In this interview on Townhall.com, he hits home rather a lot:

We live in this dream world where we say, “Well, if we have a fancy stadium with sky boxes, that will keep businesses here.” Well, what do you mean by businesses? Do you mean the gauleiters who represent multinational corporations, so they can hang out at a fancy football game? Or are we talking about somebody who’s got 15 people working for him in a shop somewhere in the suburbs and would like to get to 30? What are his issues? Are they tax issues? Are they training issues? Are they regulatory issues? You’ve got to go ask! I don’t see anyone interested in that anymore. It’s all “What does some 23-year-old, footloose student want? Does he have enough jazz clubs to go to?” Or some footloose 50-year-old corporate henchman. “Does he have enough arts facilities?”

As a country, we’re kind of delusional about our economies. I’ve found a few places in the country where they focus on this stuff, but I’m kind of becoming a persona non grata for raising these issues. I’m not raising them as a conservative, saying we shouldn’t have taxes or shouldn’t have regulations. I’m just saying, “How do you provide for a broad-based economic opportunity for your people? Isn’t that what’s it about?” Unfortunately, for most mayors in America, that’s not what’s it’s about. What it’s about is, “How do I keep the public employees happy? How do I keep the people at the very top of society happy? And how do I put on a good enough show so that everybody thinks I have a hip, cool city.”

And contrary to popular belief, the manufacturing sector is not dead, though there are those who apparently wouldn’t miss it:

This sort of gentry liberalism we have now, they don’t really want any of these jobs because, you know what, there is going to be pollution from these industries.

I would argue that if something is going to be manufactured in the United States, it’s going to have much less negative effect on the environment than if it’s manufactured in China. It’s almost like people want to shunt aside all the hard things and have the hard things done by somebody else so they can have their pristine environment. A, that has a sociological effect, since there is no upward mobility for a large portion of the population, and B, you have the stuff built in places that have much worse regulation. In California, they’ll put this regulation in and kick the guy out of California; so the guy goes to Texas, where he can pollute twice as much.

Or Mexico.

Michael Bates calls your attention to this paragraph:

I have to tell you, almost every place I go in this country, particularly where the economy is growing, if you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say “skills.” Machinists. Welders. It’s not like there’s a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there’s a plumber shortage, there’s a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this. Cities that have lost their industrial base don’t want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it’s almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.

God knows Oklahoma is embarrassed by the Oil Patch days; I guess it upsets Prius owners or something. Fortunately for us, we have a really good technical-training infrastructure; unfortunately for us, we won’t spend the money to support more students.

Still, at least we’re showing some growth these days, which means we’re doing something right. I worry, though, that civic development follows John Wanamaker’s rule of advertising: half the money is wasted, and we can’t tell which half.

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

“Just because people say they’re looking for a particular set of characteristics in a mate, someone like themselves, doesn’t mean that is what they’ll end up choosing,” Peter M. Todd, of the cognitive science program at Indiana University, Bloomington, said in a telephone interview.

And this is the study he directed:

In the study, participants were asked before the session to fill out a questionnaire about what they were looking for in a mate, listing such categories as wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, healthiness and attractiveness. After the session, the researchers compared what the participants said they were looking for with the people they actually chose to ask for another date.

Men’s choices did not reflect their stated preferences, the researchers concluded. Instead, men appeared to base their decisions mostly on the women’s physical attractiveness.

Women didn’t follow their own advice either, but they weren’t quite so single-minded, so to speak:

Women’s actual choices, like men’s, did not reflect their stated preferences, but they made more discriminating choices, the researchers found…. [W]omen were aware of the importance of their own attractiveness to men, and adjusted their expectations to select the more desirable guys.

“Women made offers to men who had overall qualities that were on a par with the women’s self-rated attractiveness. They didn’t greatly overshoot their attractiveness,” Todd said, “because part of the goal for women is to choose men who would stay with them.”

But, he added, “they didn’t go lower. They knew what they could get and aimed for that level.”

For me, it’s a new flavor of mixed emotions: derision plus desolation. And I don’t much enjoy it.

Something called “Environmental Defense” has issued a ukase to the effect that of the six largest motor-vehicle manufacturers in the US market, five are putting out more life-threatening carbon than they were fifteen years before, and Nissan, with a 9.5-percent increase, is the deadliest of them all.

“Market shifts to date fall far short of what would be needed to truly address global warming,” wrote John DeCicco, the study’s lead author. “New policies will be needed to significantly limit automobile carbon burdens.”

I suggest DeCicco attack this problem at the source: by driving a Nissan vehicle (I recommend, to save precious time, the new Nissan GT-R) into the heart of the sun.

(Via Autoblog.)

Geez. Enough with the Hsu jokes, already.

Addendum: Adam Gurri adds: “I’m already sick of them, and I don’t even know who the guy is.”

Jebediah Wilbury riffs on some really awful car names, starting with Ford’s Edsel, which wound up with the name of Henry Ford’s firstborn after thousands of possibilities, including a whole sheaf by poet Marianne Moore, were rejected. (Although I think “Mongoose Civique” would have been kinda neat.)

“Edsel” never bothered me all that much, perhaps because there weren’t too many of them around: the marque was unceremoniously killed off early in its third year. Some badges, though, perplex me to this day:

• Chevrolet Celebrity (1982-90): Chevrolet has always positioned itself as the car for Everyman, so tagging a Chevy as “Celebrity,” the very antithesis of what Chevy stood for, was counterproductive at best. At worst, they actually offered a trim line called “Eurosport,” with toned-down brightwork but no actual performance improvements.

• AMC Pacer (1975-80): Not such a bad name, really, but “Pacer” had baggage: it was the name for one of the lower Edsel trim lines.
• AMC Matador (1971-78): There was great amusement during the early days of the Chevrolet Nova and how its name meant “it does not go” in Spanish, though most of the stories turned out to be apocryphal. But “Matador” means “killer” — and not just of bulls.
• Pontiac 6000 (1981-91): A corporate cousin to the Celebrity, this Poncho was mostly innocuous, unless you bought the uprated LE version, which carried “6000LE” badges on each front fender, leading smartaleck children to yell, “Mom! Look! It’s a GOOOO-LEE!” The performance-oriented STE, at least, didn’t have to put up with this.
• Hyundai Excel (1985-94): This first Korean car on American soil did not actually excel at anything, so I’m assuming they named it after a spreadsheet.
• Ford Flex (2009-?): The last thing I want in an automobile is the suggestion of bendy sheetmetal.

Dishonorable mention: Kia cee’d (2007-?), sold only in Europe, because (1) it looks silly and (2) Hyundai sells a version as the i30, which bugs Nissanophiles.

On the other hand, a source of delight was Toyota’s Cressida (1973-92), so far the only car I know of named for a woman of variable virtue. (No Boxster jokes, please.)

Trini was repairing a notebook yesterday, and while she was testing its Net connectivity, the browser announced that it had blocked a popup.

This would not seem particularly unusual, until you discover that she’d tested the connectivity by connecting to Google, which is not generally a place where one encounters popups to be blocked.

Of her six standard levels of curse, this one, I surmise, rated about a 2.2, where 1 is shruggable and 6 involves hurling the offending unit into the nearest wall.

What defined the late Luciano Pavarotti as a true superstar, I think, was this: he appeared in some ghastly piece of Hollywood tripe called Yes, Giorgio, playing exactly to type, and it didn’t affect his reputation in the slightest.

What hurt was the diagnosis: cancer of the pancreas, which has a survival rate of somewhere around zero. He knew he was doomed, and he canceled his last tour.

Joshua Kosman fills in the details in the San Francisco Chronicle. This quote seems to sum it up:

He had the most gorgeous, supple, musical, Italianate lyric tenor of a half-century — maybe a whole century,” said San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley, “as well as a delightful down-to-earth teddy-bear personality that reached out and brought millions of people closer to opera.”

And now he belongs to the ages, exactly as you knew he would some day, the very first time you heard him.

The 3.0 version of Victory Soap is up and running, at least until such time as Andrea decides what to do with the 2.0 incarnation.

The Golden State sticks it to a Tar Heel, so to speak:

Estimated cost of a new catalytic converter and accompanying sensors for my 1998 Accord, including labor and tax, minus AAA discount: $902 and change.

Revised estimate after determining it needs a “California” catalytic converter, though the car was bought in Maryland and has never been west of Kansas: $1446 and change.

Two thoughts:

• When I moved to California in 1988, I was driving a 49-state 1975 Toyota Celica, which utterly lacked a catalytic converter; after a visit to a wizard at an Exxon station in Redondo Beach, I was granted a smog certificate, complete with presumed actual numbers obtained in the official test. I assume things have gotten more complicated since then.

• Price of the bank 2 (”front”) catalytic converter for a 2000 Infiniti I30: $813.38, not including tax ($48.52) or the exhaust gasket ($3.87). If California cars get a different part, I’m not aware of it, and neither is Alldata.

Still unexplained: why anyone would need a California converter (which, based on what little I know about CARB regulations, has to be essentially identical to the OEM cat) on the East Coast.