It’s a fair distance from Gwendolyn’s exhaust manifold to her two-stage muffler, and along the way are no fewer than three catalytic converters. Somewhere on the far side of 90,000 miles, I had to replace the front tube, where the pre-cat lives, followed shortly thereafter by the center cat, and after handing over my Visa for that second replacement, I ruefully asked the service manager when I could expect the rear unit to fail. He said he’d never seen one of those go bad.

I suppose, though, it’s probably a lot like this:

[T]he item to be “fixed” was exhaust (all three catalytic converters) — and they could fix it in a couple days, and for the cost of the parts. (plus, I got the good muffler and the OEM parts) So I get someone else to do the labor, and I still get the good parts. Not a spot of rust on the “old” stuff, by the way. I mean, surface rust, but not one thing rusted through.

However, one amortizes this in the expected fashion:

Guess I can’t expect that cat to run for 300,000 miles. I expect to drive this for at least another 150,000 miles and at 1500 bucks, that’s about a penny a mile.

I’m shooting for 200,000. Maybe I’m insufficiently ambitious. Then again, I drive only about 11,000 miles a year, which means I have a bit less than nine years to go. (And really, I just want to beat the mileage on my old Celica, retired at 194,500 miles.)

The demands of those who would manage our energy are occasionally absurd. For instance: for years, manual-transmission Corvettes have incorporated something called Computer Aided Gear Selection, which is a gizmo that, once you’ve started off in first gear, twiddles the shift gate so that your first upshift is to fourth. This was done for one reason only: to buy an extra point or two on the EPA fuel-economy test, city portion, and thereby escape the dreaded Gas Guzzler tax. (The Vette scores well in highway fuel consumption, owing to tall and taller overdrives.) Actual Corvette buyers hate it, of course, but ultimately it’s a tradeoff: save the thousand bucks or so in tax, and use $20 of the savings to buy a kit to bypass the gizmo altogether.

But what if there’s no tradeoff? What if one factor cannot be offset in any way, shape, size or form? And yes, there is such a factor, as Mark Alger explains:

The office where I work — the Patch Factory — uses devices (HP Color Laser Jet printers) which were produced under the Carly Fiorina regime and bear the Energy Star label. That is, they are engineered to serve the agenda of the EPA and not to meet the needs of the human beings who paid for the machine with bits of their lives. The machines thus, in myriad subtle ways, steal more bits of their users’ lives in service to the aforementioned agenda.

For example, they are programmed to enter a sleep cycle after a set period of time. The period can be adjusted, but it is limited to a maximum of 8 hours. Thus, the machine is frequently in sleep mode when it is needed. And the user must therefore wait for the machine to wake up, warm up, calibrate and adjust — in short, all of the functions it should perform in downtime so as to be ready to serve human needs.

And, because the machine is starved for power, it must stop work periodically to re-adjust its condition, rather than performing diagnostics and corrections on the fly.

This is a waste of time.

I have a LaserJet in my office. Its behind-the-scenes machinations don’t bother me, particularly, but then there’s only the one, and it’s called upon to do relatively little work: most days, it’s asked for a hundred pages or fewer. Were it expected to produce thousands, I might start yelling at the grey box to get on with it already, fercrissake.

But that’s the point: there is no substitute for time, and any device or regimen that wastes it has its priorities seriously screwed up. In a just universe, all those years in which we had to endure a 55-mph speed limit would be subtracted from our terms in purgatory.

Sing it, Marty:

Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl.
Night-time would find me in Rosa’s cantina;
Music would play and Felina would whirl.

This song dates from 1959, when they were still saying “country and western,” and while Marty Robbins never mentioned a timeframe in “El Paso,” the very sound of it, Spanish guitar and all, recalls the Wild West of legend, where five mounted cowboys might indeed be standing guard. This has been one of my favorite songs since ever, and I have to admit that not once in the intervening years has it ever occurred to me that Rosa’s cantina might actually have existed.

In 1959, it had existed for two whole years, a few steps north of the Rio Grande: cross the railroad tracks and the river, and you’ll find yourself in — well, New Mexico, actually, since this is west of Juárez, where the Mexican border straightens up and turns into a line across the land. That much, at least, I comprehended:

South El Paso touches the Mexican state of Chihuahua, and west El Paso adjoins the American state of New Mexico. El Paso also borders a bygone time. There is no edge of El Paso that doesn’t touch something very different from El Paso, a diagnosis that might account for either maddening schizophrenia or a certain charm. Whatever El Paso is, in its heart, it is also Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas, with a dose of old western thrown in.

So at least Marty Robbins knew what he was doing when he set his song in El Paso and not in any of the other fabled cities of the old West; you can’t imagine Felina whirling in Dodge City. Whether he ever went to Rosa’s himself, or just saw the sign and liked the name, we’ll never know for sure, since Robbins died in 1982. Son Robby, though, says that the family often stopped in at Mexican restaurants on the road: “We didn’t have anything like that in Nashville.”

I’ve never been to the West Texas town of El Paso; it was the last place my sister Brenda had lived, but it never occurred to any of us that it would be the last place. Perhaps it’s time I dropped by. I haven’t sketched out World Tour ’08 yet, though an all-Texas version has been kicking around in the back of my mind, and this would fit in nicely. The Mexican girls, of course, will pay me no heed.

As Johnny Carson used to say, I did not know this:

In reading the packet I got in the mail about a month ago from Dr. O, one instruction besides the normal when to eat, when not to eat surgical instructions stood out.

“No Chinese food for three days before surgery.”

This instruction puzzled me and Anh. Must be the MSG. Nah, maybe it’s the fried food. Noodles? Can’t be the noodles, it’s just flour and water. What about Vietnamese food? Hmm….

Dr. O cleared this up right away. Turns out that a little varmint called “Black Tree Mushroom” can be a strong anti-coagulant — causing uncontrolled bleeding if you eat it before surgery. Using the Internet for fun and profit, I searched trying to find this — nothing on Wikipedia, and search engines didn’t come up with much…. I did find one restaurant in SF that served said evil bleeding-causing mushroom, but nothing much else except for the list of Chinese exporters that would bring it in.

Dr. O says that the mushroom is a common ingredient in Chinese food, one that’s often undisclosed. So, just say no to Chinese food if you are about to have surgery!

I did find this reference, which doesn’t address the health issues but which does give alternate nomenclature:

Wood ear (tree ear, black tree fungus): This is another mushroom for which many health claims have been made. They are usually sold dried but are now becoming available fresh. They are very crunchy and work well in stir fries, casseroles and stews.

Of course, calling it “black tree fungus” cuts down on its perceived desirability, at least to me. Still, I will keep this in mind, since I’m at an age where I can’t dodge surgeons indefinitely.

Last month I brought up the 2006 Bollywood feature I See You, noting that it was an adaptation of Marc Levy’s novel If Only It Were True, albeit without actually crediting Levy. This was in fact the third time I’d mentioned this film, once on this site and twice elsewhere, so at the very least, I reasoned, I ought to see the darn thing.

The story starts with Raj Jaiswal (Arjun Rampal), your basic Charming Rogue who has a TV talk show in London with the cheeky title British Raj. He’s done well for himself, with a lovely high-rise and a Porsche Cayenne, and he thinks himself prepared for anything, with the exception of the arrival of a young woman on his balcony who explains that it’s really her balcony.

Dr Shivani Dutt (Vipasha Agarwal), the lady in question, is having an extended out-of-body experience, while her flesh-and-blood body is being kept on a ventilator in a West London hospital after an auto accident — except that it wasn’t actually an accident: she discovered staffers engaged in a grisly organ-harvesting scheme, and as far as they’re concerned, a comatose witness is the best kind. And while normally Raj would greatly enjoy the prospect of a beautiful female visitor, Shivani upsets all his plans. It doesn’t help that apparently he’s the only person who can see or hear her.

If you saw 2005′s Just Like Heaven, with Reese Witherspoon, you’ve pretty much seen this story already, except that this being a Bollywood film, there are semi-spectacular production numbers at regular intervals. Despite their inclusion, I See You runs a mere two hours, fairly short by Bollywood standards. This being a romantic comedy, you expect a certain number of punchlines, and I See You does not disappoint. Agarwal is almost scarily beautiful in her screen debut — Rampal said in an interview on the DVD that they were looking specifically for a newcomer — and the supporting cast seems to be having a good time, especially Michael Maloney as Inspector John Smith, who’s properly suspicious throughout and never once says “What’s all this then?”

Is I See You as good as Just Like Heaven? I think so. But I have to dock it points for concealing its origins.

(Review copy acquired by me at retail.)

The City Manager has prepared a report to Council on resource-saving measures [link goes to PDF file] undertaken by city government, including biofuels conversion of city vehicles and wastewater reuse for golf-course maintenance, and I spotted this little surprise near the end:

Mayor Cornett received an inquiry about electric cars and the availability of charging stations in the downtown area and at malls in Oklahoma City. We are working with Downtown OKC [Inc.] and COTPA to determine whether OG&E would have an interest in providing these stations.

My guess: they would, if the city would pony up the startup costs for the first few. The number of actual electric cars around town can likely be counted on the fingers of one hand, but as Ron Gremban, believed to be the first person to convert a privately-owned Toyota Prius to plug-in operation, once said:

The use would be marginal, but the attitude that it would promote would be much more valuable. Basically, the town is saying that electric propulsion is a good thing.

How much it would cost to recharge a vehicle remains to be seen; however, I suspect it’s going to be rather a lot less than a tank of unleaded, even allowing for the difference in ranges. I spent $36 just the other day for enough gas to go about 270 miles; an electric with a 30-mile range will come in ahead of the game if it can be recharged for less than $4. It also remains to be seen whether that electric can be juiced up in anywhere near the five or six minutes it takes me to fill up Gwendolyn’s tank.

In previous World Tours, I had noticed some distressing gaps in cell-phone coverage, and eventually I was able to trace some of them to the fact that while most GSM networks in the States run on 1900 MHz, some of them run on 850 MHz, and my very old phone (acquired before World Tour ’01) didn’t support the 850-MHz band. I made a note to do something about this after World Tour ’07, and in the interim, acquired a TracFone from a Wal-Mart store for eighteen dollars and change, plus one airtime card.

I had to put the TracFone to work in the Carolinas, where I couldn’t reach even what was represented to me as a 1900-MHz area. Taking advantage of current promotions, I was able to leverage a 90-minute, three-month airtime card into two hours and five months.

When I got home, the old phone was acting up, and I scrapped it in favor of one of those new four-band jobs with a camera of sorts, which theoretically would have made the TracFone obsolete. But after thinking it over, and noting that I can get actual reception in my office with the TracFone but not on the new phone, I decided to keep it and give it a reload, a ridiculously easy process except for one gap in the tracfone.com user interface: when you log in, it gives you the serial number of the phone on your account page, but if you subsequently jump to Buy/Add Airtime, it doesn’t carry the number forward. Of course, this is why God invented cut and paste. Taking advantage of current promotions, I was able to leverage a 60-minute, three-month airtime card into an hour and a half and five months.

And besides, it’s consistent with one other inconsistency in my life. The TracFone, since it was activated in North Carolina, has a 919 area code, rather far from my digs here in 405, but then my fax number — I subscribe to one of those fax services that emails you the stuff — is in 509, in far-off Spokane.

This simple but appealing heel is Diva by “Emilio Luca X,” which seems to be a store brand of Brantano, a Belgian firm operating stores in the suburbs throughout the United Kingdom. They call this “purple,” which might be pushing it a bit, but they also have a pink which is closer to fuchsia. I like the purple better, though: it seems to have greater potential for drama. “You can do anything, but don’t step on my non-blue shoes.” (Disclosure: I have turned up the brightness slightly on this picture so you can more clearly see the ribbon-y thing across the front.)

This is, incidentally, the very first time I’ve seen a shoe pitch with the heel height specified in metric: 85 mm, about 3.3 inches. The price from Brantano is £38, about $78 these days.

(Via Shoewawa.)

Ford, acutely aware that “Fix Or Repair Daily” was becoming more than just a catchphrase, has been beavering away at quality issues for several years now, and Consumer Reports has already noticed the improvement.

Now, so has Dearborn’s bottom line:

Ford Motor Co. may save as much as $300 million on warranty costs next year because of improved design standards and manufacturing technology, the company’s top quality executive said Friday.

That will be in addition to $900 million in expenses Ford trimmed this year because of fewer dealer repairs after cars and trucks leave the factory, Vice President Bennie Fowler said in an interview.

To see how this was working out among actual buyers, Ford ordered up a survey, and the numbers looked promising:

The survey of 60,611 new Ford car or truck owners from September 2006 through February 2007 found 1,427 reports of “things gone wrong” per 1,000 vehicles, 159 fewer than last year, Ford said in June.

The survey, by RDA Group in Bloomfield Hills, found Toyota owners reported 1,362 problems per 1,000 vehicles.

Another RDA tabulation puts Honda at the top, with 1,313 problems per 1,000 vehicles.

If you’re looking for a grain of salt to take this with, here you go:

[I]f automakers were truly interested in determining the quality of their products, they’d survey owners long after the new-car honeymoon had ended. They’d ask for feedback on reliability, fit and finish, repairs, out-of-pocket expenses, performance and how well the vehicle held up overall. If the buyer no longer owned the vehicle, they’d find out why their customer got rid of it.

Which means, generally, that it’s going to take more than a year or two to erase a reputation for slapdash construction. But I submit that nothing is quite so convincing to automotive management as actual cash in the till, and that’s what Ford has here.

(Via Autoblog.)

Yes, buoys and gulls, it’s time for yet another installment of the blog feature that gives you Actual Search Strings leading to this very site. Buckle up, and be sure to keep both hands inside the browser.

libertarian right to die:  Absolutely. Just don’t expect the county to bury you.

where’s the oil pressure gauge in kia sedona:  At the parts place, waiting for you to buy it and have it installed.

tuck the wei lu:  Oh, damn, it’s showing again.

would you turn down a seven inch dick:  At the very least, it ought to be tucked.

emotions related to the new beetle:  ”Remember when these used to be economy cars?”

florida toyota dealer willing to export:  Curiously, this came from Canada.

do I have 4 or 3 speed transmission:  At least it’s not a 2.

indecent exposure and location of genitalia male versus female:  Technically, it’s not the location that creates the indecency.

ask jeeves auto erotic death:  This doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing Jeeves would do.

dip scrotum in yogurt:  This doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing Jeeves would do.

apologize when someone sees you naked:  I think they should, if only because they shouldn’t be peering over my fence.

why is milk put in cereal:  Because putting it in chili makes people want to hurl.

Pics of Women with massive glutes:  You don’t do much shopping on weekends, do you?

Michele will even draw you a map:

I have what I refer to as mallergy. I am allergic to malls, large departments stores and the crowds and traffic that come with them. I do about 90% of my holiday shopping online, but sometimes you have to get in your car and go out. If I just want to go food shopping, I have to deal with the fact that my grocery store is in the same lot as Wal-Mart. Ever been in a Wal-Mart parking lot at Christmas time? Imagine a place where everything that is bad in the world converges in one giant sea of evil, and it’s all vying for that one last parking space. It’s like Death Race 2000 meets some level of hell Dante never imagined. Horns blaring and people cursing as some man who is so old he’s damn near zombified takes twelve minutes to pull into a parking spot that could fit a truck, while a crazed soccer mom in her ginormous Expedition hell-bent on getting the sale price on the Bratz “How To Make Your 12 Year Old Daughter Look Like a Two Dollar Whore” doll for her special snowflake barrels through the lot as if she were the only person on the planet and all these fat, lazy fuckers are idling in the middle of the damn lanes, stalking shoppers whose cars are parked within 20 feet of the store, even though there are 50 empty spaces at the end of the lot available but no one wants those spaces because, my god, the extra little walk may make you miss the blue light special on the cheese and cracker spectacular you’re buying for your dad — for the eighth year in a row, even though he’s on cholesterol medicine. Why don’t you wrap up a carton of Lucky Strikes and a 40 of malt liquor while you’re at it?

This is the time of year when I use the cutesy term “brick-and-mortar,” normally used to describe actual (as distinguished from virtual) storefronts, to acknowledge a vague, inchoate desire to point artillery at the structure. Should I have to go to one on the 24th, it will be decidedly less vague.

I knew when I bought the 6133 that T-Mobile, avaricious to the last, had directed Nokia to rig the phone to play MP3s, but not to allow their use for ringtones unless they came from T-Mo itself. Being an old hand at screwing around with filetypes, and having noticed that WMAs actually will work, I am trying to locate a suitable conversion tool. Alternatively, I could do a CD full of potential tones, and then rip them with Windows Media Player.

I mention this now, in early December, inasmuch as I’m currently wrestling with the idea that the B. C. Clark jingle might make one heck of a ringtone.

AT&T is giving up on pay phones:

AT&T Inc. announced today plans to exit the shrinking pay phone business by the end of 2008. Existing contracts and customer service commitments will continue to be honored during the period that the business is being phased out.

The company plans to phase out both public pay phones and phones provided under contracts at government correctional facilities through the end of next year. All customers will receive advance notification of specific plans as well as information on other potential providers and product options.

The move affects AT&T pay phones in the company’s traditional 13-state service area only. BellSouth Corp., which was acquired by AT&T Inc. in late 2006, had previously exited the pay phone business in its nine-state service area. AT&T’s wholesale pay phone services are not affected.

Clark Kent was not available for comment.

The fabled Deutsche Grammophon label has opened the DG Web Shop, which sells downloadable tracks from DG’s vast catalog of classical music. This is very much in line with Universal Music Group’s desire to get out from under Apple’s thumb, and there are some distinct advantages to dealing directly with DG:

• Bit rate of 320. Constant, yet.

• No DRM.

I priced a DG reissue: piano works by Debussy, including both books of Images, the Children’s Corner, and seven of the Préludes, played by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. (I bought this stuff years ago on vinyl.) Individual tracks are a buck twenty-nine; however, the entire set — nineteen tracks — is only $10.99. And though this isn’t one of them, a number of albums are offered with liner notes of a sort, in PDF format.

Best of all, this isn’t limited to items in print: according to DG, some 600 out-of-print albums are available for download.

(From Create Digital Music via Consumerist.)

The Federal Reserve, says Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), should get into the business of rating credit-card offers on a 1-to-5-star scale. For some reason, this hasn’t made it to his Web site yet, but the Minnesota Daily published this overview of the proposal:

The Credit Card Safety Star Act of 2007 would allow the Federal Reserve System to rate credit cards on a scale of one to five stars, with five being the safest for customers.

Credit card companies that raise interest rates without informing customers might receive a one-star rating — more stars means less risk for consumers.

In a press release about the proposal, Wyden said he believes confusing credit card agreements can disguise requirements that result in higher payments and fees.

John Hall of the American Bankers Association is doubtful:

“We feel this proposal may be premature because the Fed Reserve is undergoing a two-year project to improve the regulations that banks must obey regarding disclosure of credit card terms and fees and rates,” he said.

Credit card disclosures are typically full of legal jargon, Hall said, because banks’ lawyers recommend they follow the regulations set by the Federal Reserve “to the letter” so they aren’t legally responsible for any problems. He said if the Federal Reserve changes the regulations, disclosures might become less confusing.

And I wonder how long it will take before Crappy Bank and Trust Company (Member FDIC) starts looking for a way to sue the Fed after getting a star and a half — ten, twenty minutes?

Back in May, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) came up with an industrial-strength rewrite of the credit-card regulations, which I mentioned briefly here; last I looked, Levin’s bill had never made it out of committee. Quelle surprise.

(Suggested by Fark.)

Yes, it’s true: the Cleavers can’t make it on Ward’s salary anymore. What can be done about this dreadful situation?

Answer: not a farging thing.

[T]his is not to say people don’t spend too much money on things they don’t need. It’s just not my place to request the state to keep them from doing so. In any case, I suspect that the impulse to bring all these untidy unhelpful examples of flagrant individualism under the steady hand of the Ministry of Rational Allocation has something to do with that fretful busybody insistence that people are simply not living right. If we had Star Trek replicators in every house that would conjure goods and meals out of boundless energy produced by antimatter teased from a three-micron fissure that opened into a universe populated entirely by unicorns who crapped antimatter in such abundance they were happy we used it up, and used their shiny pointy horns to poke more of it through the aperture into our dimension, columnists would bemoan the disconnect between labor and goods, and the soul-corrupting influence of endless ersatz vegetables. You can’t win. Because you shouldn’t.

This makes a great case for Omaha Steaks as the ultimate Christmas gift: it will piss off the maximum number of the Perpetually Outraged. (Especially if you order the Spiral Sliced Ham.)

Tim does some coupon scanning:

Well, it is December, after all.

I have to admit, this looks a lot less hazardous than the classic PIT maneuver:

Eureka Aerospace, a company from Pasadena, Calif., [has] developed a device that shoots a microwave beam at a speeding car, frying its electrical system and stopping the car dead in its tracks.

To disable cars, the device generates energy that is amplified by a generator, and then converted to microwave radiation. The radiation is then focused with a special antenna into a narrow beam.

ZAP!

A pulse lasting just 50 nanoseconds is enough to overload wires or damage the car’s central microprocessor. At a high power of 300 megahertz (compared to 2.45 gigahertz in a microwave), the radiation energy is above common radio frequencies, and isn’t harmful to humans.

Um, hertz, mega or otherwise, has next to nothing to do with power.

Will we start seeing old Sixties relics pressed into service as getaway cars? They don’t have microprocessors.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Copied from my mid-February post:

Subject to final Court approval, a settlement has been reached in In re Foreign Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litigation (MDL 1409). This web site supplies information about the litigation and the settlement, and provides links to relevant documents for Members of the Settlement Classes and others interested in the settlement.

The lawsuit is about the price cardholders of Visa-, MasterCard-, or Diners Club-branded payment cards were charged to make transactions in a foreign currency, or with a foreign merchant, between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006. Plaintiffs challenge how the prices of credit and debit/ATM card foreign transactions were set and disclosed, including claims that Visa, MasterCard, their member banks, and Diners Club conspired to set and conceal fees, typically of 1-3% of foreign transactions, and that Visa and MasterCard inflated their base exchange rates before applying these fees. The Defendants include Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club, Bank of America, Bank One/First USA, Chase, Citibank, MBNA, HSBC/Household, and Washington Mutual/Providian.

I did turn in a claim form at the time: the Administrator has now sent out a letter explaining three options for receiving payments from the settlement fund, and I took the one requiring the least paperwork.

With one day to go in the filing period, five Democrats and eight Republicans have entered the Oklahoma Presidential primary, which is scheduled for the 5th of February and which will not move no matter what Iowa and New Hampshire do. Signed up for the Democrats so far: Clinton, Edwards, Kucinich, Obama and Richardson. GOP entrants include: Curry (who?), Giuliani, Hunter, Keyes, McCain, Paul, Romney and Tancredo.

I suppose we’ll hear from Huckabee and Biden later today. The official list at the Oklahoma State Election Board will be here [link goes to PDF file] and will be updated as necessary, with the complete list available at the close of business this afternoon.

This is not, incidentally, a bid for linkage from Wonkosphere, which has been picking up my feed all along.

Addendum: If you’re looking for Fred Thompson, BatesLine reports that the paperwork has been filed but corrections of some sort are being made.

Update, 5 December, 5:25 pm: No Biden. Thompson is in place, as is Huckabee. We have seven Democrats and eleven Republicans. And Jim Rogers, about whom more later, is back.

Nina has requested the following:

Devise a list of 5-10 courses you would take to improve your life. It’s more fun to be in classes with friends, so include one class from the person who tagged you that you’d also like to take.

Actually, having time to take 5 to 10 courses would in and of itself improve my life, but there are obvious areas where I need to brush up my skills — or, in some cases, find enough skills for the brush to reach. The next couple of semesters should look something like this:

• Business 812: Knowing What To Shred, And When
  A check from the insurance company should not be on this list.

• Nutrition 1tsp: How To Persuade Someone Else’s Girlfriend That You Can Actually Cook
  Requires lab: Not Every Meal Should Incorporate Cream Of Mushroom Soup.
• Nutrition 82/2: Passing Up The Second Plate Of Spaghetti
  To hear the doctor tell it, I should pass up the first plate instead.
• Plumbing 5/8: Repairing Things More Complicated Than Toilet Flapper Valves
  This is not to say that I would like to be able to, oh, replace a water heater, but I’d just as soon not feel as though I’m at the mercy of the guy (or girl) with the big wrench.
• Psychology 4Q2: Anger Management for Management
  No, wait, I should be teaching this one.
• Psychology I2I: How To Disengage Yourself From Unproductive Bullshit
  Also on Nina’s list. I suspect this will take more than a single semester.
• Botany 500: Predicting Which Plants Will Die Before Spring
  Requires 421: Not Killing Them In The First Place.
• Media 559: How To Vent Less In Your Blog
  Also on Nina’s list. I do it here instead.
• Auto Mechanics 427: Knowing At Least As Much As The Service Manager
  Which is important if you’d prefer not to write large checks on a regular basis.
• Women’s Studies 101: Introduction
  Because obviously I don’t know a damn thing about that half of the human race.

I suspect I’ll get five people to do this even if I don’t call them out by name.

The One Laptop per Child initiative is doing okay, I suppose, but it’s not exactly setting the world on fire, and just getting production started has proven to be somewhat problematic.

Josh Jones suggests a different approach altogether: one Nintendo DS per child. And he actually makes a reasonable case, noting that the DS is inexpensive but built well, that loads of educational software can be had already, and that the machines are easily networked for classroom use.

Now if only I could be sure that he was serious.

Disclosure: I pay Josh Jones’ employer, which does not necessarily endorse the proposal, for this Web space.

For the second time, Alabama State Rep. John Rogers (D-Birmingham) has introduced a bill to repeal the Heart of Dixie’s nine-year-old ban on sex toys:

“A shower head could be considered a sex toy,” [Rogers] said. “It’s just bringing the state into the 20th century.”

I guess the 21st might be a bit much to hope for, and here’s one reason why:

Dan Ireland, executive director of the Alabama Citizens’ Action Program, a Baptist group, said it would oppose any effort to overturn the law.

“Laws are made to protect the public,” he said. “Sometimes you have to protect the public against themselves.”

Sometimes you have to protect the public against Citizens’ Action Programs, too.

In the meantime, I will continue to make sure that when I drive through Alabama, which I do rather a lot since I’m rather fond of the place, I will take my cell phone off Vibrate. Just in case.

(Via Bitter Bitch.)

We know one thing: he ponied up the filing fee to run in the 2008 Presidential primary as a Democrat.

Two years ago, he ran for Lieutenant Governor, and sent this biography to KFOR-TV. Background stuff:

I was born in Atoka County, OK and graduated from Atoka High School. I earned a Bachelors of Arts Degree at Oklahoma Baptist University and I earned Master of Science Degree at Wyoming University. I have an Educational Specialist Degree from Wyoming University and was an Honors Graduate there.

I have had further graduate studies at OSU, UT, KSU and NOSU.

I operated a small cattle heard in Atoka County when in high school and college. I was a teaching assistant part time at OSU. I taught at Connors College, Eastern Oklahoma State College, Western Wyoming College, Seminole State College and part time at Oklahoma Baptist University.

I ran for U.S. Senate for Oklahoma in 2002 and 2004. I think I came in third place for the democrats, but you might check with the election board records.

I am unmarried and currently living in Midwest City. It is a great city to live in, by the way, as is all the metro plex, Tulsa, and all of Oklahoma City and rural areas.

I did, of course, check with the election board records, and he did place third in both those primaries. His better showing was in 2002, when he got almost ten percent of the vote. In the ’06 race for Lite Guv, he ran fourth with about 13 percent.

No campaign Web site yet.

The USB Plasma Ball doesn’t care if you give it a crummy old USB 1.1 connection; it works just the same.

(Source of crummy old USB 1.1 connection: Toshi, my faithful Road Warrior notebook, age six, which apparently is not upgradable to 2.0.)

Presenting the B. C. Clark jingle, arranged for guitar. (And why not?)

Mark Woods blogs for NBA.com from the United Kingdom. The following is excerpted from his 3 December post (no permalinks that I could find, alas):

I cannot believe, deep down, that [NBA Commissioner David] Stern wants to facilitate moving the Sonics to what is, in American terms, the back of beyond. From a large-ish media market which represents all that is exciting about Uncle Sam’s 21st century aspirations to a small-ish city which has always been a college rather than a pro town. A team which, like the Hornets of Charlotte before it, was woven into the fabric before a renegade owner began to unpluck the stitches.

It would, in truth, provide the worst example of the cold corporatism of sport if the Commish did not intervene, somehow, to halt this trade. The NBA is, and always shall remain, a business. With owners, shareholders and a mighty bottom line. Any business, though, is only viable if it has customers who trust in the product. And in sport, there is another range of factors: affection, identification and passion. Forget that, and a team becomes as much a commodity as a tin of baked beans.

And if that is sport in the modern era, it will not last. The links will be broken. The kinship will decay. Who wants to place their trust and loyalty in a friend who is here today but maybe gone tomorrow? If the Sonics decamp, the sanctity of the game will be chipped away once more, another blow in an age where the ties that bind are being yanked to breaking point by players who are ever more distant from those who cheer them on. It is a tremor which will not only be felt in Seattle but elsewhere too. And when that call comes, and the news breaks, the cries will be loud as faith turns to disbelief.

I like it here in the “back of beyond,” myself, and I don’t believe that it will always remain such, but let me repeat that line:

Who wants to place their trust and loyalty in a friend who is here today but maybe gone tomorrow?

Do Seattle fans still trust the Sonics ownership? As far as they could throw them, maybe. Then again, the Sonics are still selling a lot more tickets than the New Orleans Hornets are.

Pass the beans.

(Via TrueHoop.)

Right about now, they’re bringing down Tulsa’s Camelot Hotel.

The Camelot’s Arthurian pretensions included a drawbridge over the moat and a pool shaped like a spearhead. Heady stuff for the 1960s; dead weight in the 1980s, and deteriorated “beyond repair” in subsequent years. It will be replaced with, among other things, a QuikTrip, should Guinevere need a pack of smokes late at night.

The title of the paper: Diversity and Educational Benefits: Moving Beyond Self-Reported Questionnaire Data. Here’s the abstract:

Effects of ethnic/racial diversity among students and faculty on cognitive growth of undergraduate students are estimated via a series of hierarchical linear and multinomial logistic regression models. Using objective measures of compositional, curricular, and interactional diversity based on actuarial course enrollment records of over 6,000 students at a public research university, the study finds no patterns of positive correlation with objective measures of cumulative academic achievement (i.e., final graduating GPA, GRE/GMAT test scores, graduate school enrollment) net of academic preparation at college entry and socio-demographic background, and with or without accounting for academic major, college curricular experience, and financial aid. Results are consistent with student self-assessed level of critical thinking skills after graduation, but not with self-assessed level of understanding of racial and cultural issues, both affective outcomes showing a positive correlation with curricular diversity. As the findings contradict most of the higher education literature on survey-based cognitive benefits of ethnic/racial diversity, the study calls for use of objective measures to advance the research in this area.

John Rosenberg translates:

If I’m not mistaken, this says that “diversity” does nothing to improve what students learn, as measured by objective criteria, except for their self-assessed “understanding of racial and cultural issues.”

In other words, “diversity” helps students understand … “diversity.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with “understanding of racial and cultural issues,” so long as it’s an actual understanding rather than the rote regurgitation of the talking points demanded by the Perpetually Aggrieved, but let’s not pretend that its effect is extensible beyond its own little sphere: no amount of cultural sensitivity will make someone a better engineer.

Should you enter “wamprat fruitcake” into Google’s search box, you wind up back here, and that’s as it should be, since I’m one of the few people fortunate enough to receive baked goods from her this time of year. (She’s also diversified into fudge in recent years.) While it plays hell with my waistline, it’s good stuff; I really think she could make a living at this stuff were she so inclined. (Which, I am quite certain, she is not.)

In addition to various other goodies, she also presented me with an upgrade to the infamous Big Ball O’ Lights that’s been hanging by the garage door the last week or so; the new version offers a multitude of colors instead of just Classic White.

I note in passing that at the moment the aforementioned Google search coughs up eight Sponsored Links on the subject of fruitcake. I think the one I get is better than any of the ones being offered.

Arthur St. Antoine remembers an old friend:

André Idzikowski, road-test editor at Car and Driver, passed away on October 11 after a decades-long battle with leukemia. He was 47.

André was a colleague and a good friend. I’d known him since 1984, when I filled in as C/D’s “road warrior” while André underwent the first of several radical treatments that prolonged his life for another quarter century. We were close ever since. If attending the same press trip, André and I always shared a car — most memorably, the 2005 launch of the Ferrari Superamerica in France. We drove like thieves through the hills above Venice, then celebrated in the Casino de Monte Carlo, where we spent the evening smoking Montecristos, drinking whisky, and admiring the bejeweled ladies at the baccarat tables. Not once did André mention his worsening illness (“why me?” wasn’t his style). Instead, he savored the view and his cigar and shared his many plans.

What I liked about this is not so much the Eurostory, but the fact that this appeared, not in Car and Driver at all, but in rival Motor Trend, St. Antoine’s home base — he is Editor At Large — for the last few years. (One of the reasons I started reading MT again was to catch up with the guy.) I always try to appreciate gentle, unexpected gestures.

The committee charged with drumming up support for the Oklahoma City bond issue, which will be voted on next Tuesday (mark your calendars), has already sent me two flyers; what’s more, I got a phone call suggesting that since the weather is expected to be ghastly next week I might consider filling out a ballot early under the absentee procedures. Each of these reminders, you may be sure, mentioned that there is no tax increase involved, which is more or less true: the existing millage will be continued for eight years or so, but it won’t go up.

On the other hand, when there is a tax increase involved, you might not hear about the election at all:

Northeast Tech Center (you may know this better as NE Vo-Tech) has a 400% tax increase on the ballot in Rogers County, but they don’t want anyone to know about it.

Thanks to the watchful eyes of the Oologah Lake Leader, we do know about it.

From the Leader’s story:

The NTC board voted on Oct. 1 to call the election but issued no public notice until Nov. 28, school spokesman Gary Fox confirmed Tuesday.

The only announcement made last week was a legal notice in the Pryor Daily Times — the smaller of the two legal newspaper in Mayes county. Neither it nor its larger weekly competitor, The Paper, makes any claim to be a regional newspaper (such as the Tulsa World or The Oklahoman).

By law, NTC is required to publish a notice in a newspaper “of general circulation in Northeast Technology Center School District No. 11.”

And why did they keep this quiet?

Monday — just eight days before the election and after the deadline for some newspapers in the district — the school issued a press release to some news organizations.

That statement did not disclose the amount of money the tax increase would generate, $4.4 million, or that the largest payment — $1.8 million — would come from Rogers County. The figures were provided to the Leader Tuesday following a written request.

The statement also did not disclose that the increase represented a 400 percent increase in the building levy, from 1 mill to 5 mills. That means that the tax from this one levy on a $200,000 house would jump from about $20 to $100 a year.

I am normally a serious supporter of vocational education, but I have to hope that this measure — the election is Tuesday — goes down in flames, and that it takes some of the NTC higher-ups with it.

(Via BatesLine.)

This is one of Trini’s current catchphrases, and inasmuch as I seem to have developed a knack, or knacklet, for producing the things, I figured it probably wouldn’t be a bad time to hone my technique.

Or techniques, more precisely, since what works on my phone won’t necessarily work on hers. My little Nokia (which, a T-Mobile rep informed me night before last, is a very “manly” phone, whatever the hell that means) likes WMAs and doesn’t much care how long they are; hers (which is bigger, if that means anything) prefers MP3s and demands they be kept short.

I’m not at the point where I can knock them out in a couple of minutes. Yet. But it’s still better than forking over coin of the realm, particularly for recordings she or I already paid for in one form or another.

News Item: Microsoft has asked the designers of a low-cost Linux laptop intended for children in developing nations to redesign the system so it can accommodate its Windows XP operating system.

Also on Microsoft’s agenda for the coming year:

• Release of a suspiciously Apple-esque application called “mZune”

• Require buyers of new PCs who request XP instead of Vista to pay for licenses for both
• Redesign of Windows Update to erase Firefox when detected
• MSN butterfly replaced by velociraptor
• New video service called “WeTube”
• Diversification into the lucrative field of baby gear

Meanwhile, Chrysler chairman Bob Nardelli has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to require Toyota to retrofit the popular Prius with the rear axle and leaf springs of a Dodge Ram truck, on the basis that the battery pack is heavy and could fall through the lightweight sedan’s body structure, causing a toxic spill. When it was pointed out that the extra 300 lb of weight would seriously impair fuel-economy figures on the Prius, Nardelli simply smiled.

My current ride has a quartet of air bags (two front, two side), antilock brakes, a dashboard with no pointy protrusions, and bumpers that theoretically will shrug off a 2.5-mph impact.

Like many of you of a Certain Age, I spent most of my driving life in cars that lacked most or all of those attributes. (I learned to drive, in fact, in a VW Microbus, which lacked some other things: a radiator, air conditioning, and anything resembling acceleration.) Which leads to a question: does having all these safety gewgaws — newer cars than mine have a lot more of them — give me a false sense of security, making my driving less careful than it could be?

Don Norman, author of The Future Design of Things, thinks it can:

One major problem with the design of cars today is that you can be driving at 100 mph — which is quite dangerous — and the experience is comfy, smooth, and accompanied by nice music on the stereo system. Of course it’s impractical to design a car so that driving it feels dangerous and shaky. But why not put passengers in the warm, smooth, comfy situation but have natural signals that give cues to the driver in terms of being alert?

Wait a minute. A hundred is dangerous?

I don’t see these technical advances as being anywhere near as much of a problem as ill-trained, incompetent drivers are. Consider, for a moment, a cruise control, such as the Mercedes-Benz Distronic, that slows you down if it thinks you’re getting too close to the car in front of you. If the road is that crowded, using cruise control at all brands you as a complete and utter idiot, and the only “natural signal” you should be getting is digital: the upraised middle finger.

As for the passengers, I seldom have any, but in general, passengers’ interests must be kept subordinate to the driver’s. (Finally, an advantage to the three-row SUV: back-seat drivers can be pushed back even farther.)

That said, I’ve mostly gotten over my distrust of airbags, mostly because I’ve never had one explode into the middle of my torso like Alien in reverse. Come to think of it, I’ve never had one deploy even when I expected it to. Hmmm…

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Fifty percent of the population is below-average in appearance, which suggests that there might be support for tax breaks for the unattractive.

The movement, such as it is, begins in Argentina, with author Gonzalo Otalora:

He planted himself in front of the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada or Pink House, to harangue [then-]President Nestor Kirchner to change the law.

It’s not fair, he said. The beautiful people get all the breaks. Beauty is a natural advantage and he wants the good-lookers to be taxed to finance compensation for the ugly people.

Otalora’s book ¡Feo! (Ugly!) explains the premise further. Me, I’m wondering if the folks who show up here could qualify for some sort of rebate.

(Via Jezebel.)

Basil gets email from his Chevrolet:

[T]he OnStar thing is all set up and all. And one of their features is they’ll send a monthly maintenance report on the car. Well, the first monthly maintenance report came … Tuesday, 2½ days after we got the car.

So what did Vlad the Impala have to say?

[I]t told me the tire pressure in the left front tire was a little low. It’s supposed to be 30 PSI. It was 26.

So, the car emailed me and told me about it.

Geez. And I passed up a tire-pressure monitoring system on Woot yesterday.

February 2007: CompUSA closes approximately half its stores.

February (approximately) 2008: CompUSA closes the rest of its stores.

An orderly liquidation is sought by the new owners, Boston-based Gordon Brothers Group, who acquired the company from Grupo Carso, the holding company of Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim Hélu. Slim has gotten rather a lot of my money over the years; apart from CompUSA, at one time he owned Prodigy, the one-time online service turned ISP that was eventually folded into SBC, and he still controls América Móvil, which operates the TracFone wireless service in the US. And I have to figure Slim didn’t become one of the richest men on the planet by holding onto properties that lose money.

The fate of other CompUSA properties — the Web storefront and the tech-support division — remains to be seen.

Carver County, Minnesota, is facing a budget crisis, and they’re blaming it on a typo:

[T]he trouble began in August when a clerk went into [Eric] Mattson’s file to change the designation of the property … from homestead to non-homestead to reflect its change in status after its sale.

The clerk filled in the $18,900 proposed valuation, but then mistakenly hit the key to exit the program. The computer added four zeros to fill out the nine numerical spaces required by the software, thus indicating the value was $189,000,000.

Not a problem in and of itself, except that:

[N]o one is laughing at the assessor’s office, where the problem started. Neither is anyone at the Carver County Board, the city of Waconia or the Waconia School District.

Those three entities — which were counting on the $2.5 million in increased property tax collections — now face the daunting task of raising taxes or cutting budgets to make up for the shortfall.

And you just know they were gleeful at the prospect of spending that money. Now they’re going to have to rely on that expatriate Nigerian minister-without-portfolio whose financial adviser has promised them a cut of his Swiss bank account.

(Via buzz.mn.)

If you’ve come looking for the “Not even the buffet” post, it’s here. It’s scheduled to scroll off the front page today, and this is easier than just bumping it back up.

(Ms Wallent mentions the item in a Rant.)