Listed chronologically:

“Hoosier daddy?” (6 January)
“Dead man hawking” (16 January)
“May I have this Dansk?” (17 January)
“Just a Falcon minute” (6 February)
“Dugong show” (25 February)
“When the levy brakes” (17 March)
“Downholstery” (1 April)
“Nothing could be finer than the feeling of angina” (21 April)
“Philately will get you nowhere” (1 May)
“Bjørn under a bad sign” (6 May)
“The pained, it’s plain, look vainly at the mains” (2 June)
“Hot funds in the summertime” (19 June)
“La belle dame sans culottes” (19 July)
“Jeep thrills” (29 July)
“Something Wiki this way comes” (17 August)
“Icahn has cheezburger?” (16 September)
“Tanks for the maladies” (22 October)
“N2 the mystic” (31 October)
“Got the Mercedes bends” (4 November)
“Living in debasement” (6 November)
“And just ice for all” (9 December)

(Total number of 2007 posts: 2,021. Some marginally-acceptable turns of phrase are recounted here.)

We’re going on a diet, says Mayor Cornett.

Well, let’s see: one million pounds divided by 540,000 people equals one pound, thirteen and a half ounces per person. I ought to be able to manage my share.

Prius, the name given to Toyota’s first hybrid vehicle, is supposed to be derived from Latin. Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe quoted a Toyota spokesperson as follows:

“Prius is a Latin word meaning ‘to go before’,” he explained. “Toyota chose this name because the Prius vehicle is the predecessor of cars to come.”

Well, no:

But prius can’t be a Latin infinitive; “to go before” would have to be a verb, like, say, precedere. Actually, prius is just the neuter form of prior, the comparative adjective, meaning “earlier, anterior, superior.” As a noun, it would mean “earlier one” or “superior one.”

And if there’s one thing Toyota does well, it’s neuter.

Now what’s the plural form? Priuses just doesn’t have that classical zing. At long last, the question is answered, once and for all:

I put the question to Harry Mount, author of the new book Carpe Diem, a paean to the joys of Latin.

“Yes, it’s Priora,” he told me, “because it’s neuter plural. But if you cheated a bit and made the car masculine or feminine — and I do think of cars as female — then it would be Priores. And Priores has nice undertones of grandness — Virgil used it to mean ‘forefathers’ or ‘ancestors’.”

So if your hybrids are named for the dames of ancient Rome — Drusilla, Octavia, Agrippina — you’re granted poetic license. Otherwise, Priora is the Latin plural you’re looking for.

I expect Dr. Weevil may have something to say about that, in which case I’ll ask him about Lexuses. (“Lexi”?)

(Inspired, if that’s the word, by The Truth About Cars.)

People who bought Random Crap Calendars from Woot — this would include me — have received the following notification:

We know the selection of calendar subjects was exceedingly lame, as usual. That’s why we dropped the c-bomb: we ain’t just whistling “crappy”. But to mitigate your family’s crap exposure during the upcoming year, we’ve commissioned a series of original illustrations that will be offered for download every month.

And how does this work?

Just print out our custom-illustrated crappy image and tape or tack it over the crappy image on the calendar. Easy, right? But don’t feel obliged or anything. If you prefer staring at the same image of “Motivational Zen Fairies” or “Ireland’s Most Adorable Cats” for a month at a time, we certainly can’t stop you. What kind of sick individuals would profit by selling people such horrible calendars — oh, right, that was us.

“Besides, one does get tired of aging flight attendants with their clothes off,” he lied, possibly under the influence of a Motivational Zen Fairy.

I suppose I should be surprised by this:

A drug that could do for women what Viagra has done for men is being tested at the University of Virginia. The drug is a testosterone-laden ointment called LibiGel and it’s intended to boost the libido of women who have lost interest in sex. It will be prescribed at UVa in coming months to women who are suffering from hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The condition is believed to affect one-third of American women.

Three points, if points they be:

• The call girl-turned-author in George Axelrod’s novel Where Am I Now — When I Need Me? at one point turned out an essay in which “ointment” is revealed to be the dirtiest word of them all. I have no idea whether this was related to Axelrod’s theory of the seven-year itch.

• In my admittedly-limited experience, the most effective treatment for low female libido is to stop dating me. (Disclosure: Sample size is too small to be considered statistically significant.)
• What happens if some Viagra-enhanced fellow (think Hugh M. Hefner) has an encounter with, say, a twenty-year-old blonde with a couple extra tubes of LibiGel? Will the results be measurable on the Richter scale? And in which state will the survivors be buried?

(Via Protein Wisdom.)

Update, 6:45 pm: The Fark thread on this subject notes: “Still no cure for flannel nightwear.”

The last time I did this, I didn’t do so well, and I have no reason to think my crystal ball is any less murky after two years in the closet, but what the hell. That last time, I confined myself to things which seemed at least somewhat probable. This time around, not so much. And if these things don’t happen, you didn’t hear about them from me.

• The Bush administration will get one last crack at the Supreme Court, and will botch the nomination.

• The Cuban embargo will be ended, whether or not Fidel Castro survives the year.
• Senator Clinton will remain Senator Clinton.
• The Republicans will lose five Senate seats and seven House seats.
• Condoleezza Rice will resign as Secretary of State by midyear.
• The Supreme Court will rule that yes, you do have the right to bear arms, even in the District of Columbia.
• The weather nationwide will be largely uneventful, which will be blamed on global warming.
• In Oklahoma, the Democrats will gain one Senate seat and break the 24-24 deadlock, though the House will remain in the hands of the GOP.
• In the hope of turning out Jim Inhofe, state Democrats will launch a “Draft Brad Henry” campaign. The Guv, smiling, will decline.
• New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will launch his independent Presidential bid with a Super Bowl ad.
• The SuperSonics will open the 2008-09 season in Seattle’s KeyArena.
• Katie Couric will ask to be let out of her CBS contract after the November elections.
• KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City will begin phasing out all its 4-related imaging.
• Another delay will be announced in the Crosstown Expressway project, and the projected cost will rise to $1.2 billion.
• The announcement will come less than one week before the city holds a sales-tax election to finance improvements to the Ford Center.
• Kansas and Oklahoma will discuss making their automated toll-road systems compatible with one another, but will reach no agreement.
• A group of interrelated spam blogs will be blocked by Technorati and frozen out of Google AdSense, and the spammer will sue, citing the First Amendment and charging restraint of trade.
• N. Z. Bear, pressed for time, will offer to sell the TTLB Ecosystem.

Conversely, if by some fluke I called more than one of these right — well, we’ll worry about that later.

Gawker Media’s Valleywag blog has gone public with a memo from Gawker management — specifically, from Noah Robischon, who presumably sitteth at the right hand of Nick — announcing a new pay plan for the blog staff. Some of its points, I think, are worth noting by those of us who don’t get paid by the pageview:

It’s only on the internet that a writer’s contributions can be measured. At newspapers, a reporter’s reputation depends on the opinion of their editors, which can be fickle. Some people get on because they play the office politics well. Or simply because they’re more aggressive in lobbying for more prominent jobs, or pay increases.

Advertising people say that the internet is special, because the audience’s engagement is so much more measurable than that of newspaper readers, or television viewers. Which makes it so bizarre that most writers, on the internet as in print, are paid for the sheer brute quantity of their output.

“Don’t knock sheer brute quantity,” said some character who put up over two thousand posts in each of two consecutive years.

In short, we have repeated the bad habits of traditional media organizations: leaving remuneration to the arbitrary will of upper management; and, by treating words as if they were Soviet steel output targets, encouraging quantity over quality…. [W]e now really are reaching the limits of sheer volume. Readers can’t take any more. And the proliferation of blogs, and social news services such as Digg, has changed the rules.

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there’s now a surfeit. And what’s in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find.

I daresay, three, maybe even four percent of my stuff thus qualifies.

To be fair, I can see Robischon’s point, and it’s been all too visible throughout the Denton Empire, which at times has come off as a, perhaps the, leading vendor of snark qua snark. (Major exceptions: Lifehacker, because it’s firmly anchored in reality, and Fleshbot, because it’s firmly anchored, um, somewhere else.) So paying these folks a flat monthly rate plus bonuses for pageviews, as the new plan ordains, actually makes a certain amount of sense.

Although there’s this, from a commenter:

Gee, that’s a great idea. I’m sure no one would ever once consider using zombie PCs to increase their monthly bonus.

But it was always thus: there exists no system that cannot in some way be gamed.

I just hope they’re not relying solely on Sitemeter numbers to pay these folks.

One of those stories almost too good to be true, as recounted in Wikipedia:

In the final stages of the album’s production, a studio technician renamed the [Jimi Hendrix] album “Electric Landlady.” The album was almost released under this title until Hendrix noticed it, which upset him considerably. Kirsty MacColl later used this alternate title for an album of her own.

I picked up Electric Landlady when it came out; it was not much of a hit — neither “Walking Down Madison” nor “My Affair,” released as singles, charted in the States — but it spent a lot of time in my CD player, and still gets the occasional spin. Would I have bought it were it not for the Hendrix twist? I’m not really sure; I knew who she was, and I was familiar with Tracey Ullman’s remakes of MacColl songs, but the title probably sealed the deal.

On the other hand, Kathy Shaidle would have sold me a copy of her e-book even if it hadn’t been titled Acoustic Ladyland: Kathy Shaidle Unplugged. It’s always fun watching the words go by when she’s on a tear, and these “B-sides and rarities,” as she describes them, were new to me; I wasn’t reading the Toronto Star back then, and God knows I don’t have any reason to read it now. She’ll set you up with a sample chapter, even. The motivations here are clear:

Well, the chances of me ever publishing a “real” book again are pretty slim. E-book-ing lets me control everything and keep most of the revenue (instead of the 7% or so most “real” authors get in royalties).

Now I’ll have to hunt down a copy of God Rides a Yamaha, a title worthy of a Highway Chile.

There’s something a tad askew when somebody writes to Dear Abby with a tale like this:

Is it normal for a 16-year-old boy to walk around the house naked, in plain view of family members? No one seems to notice or care. There are no looks or comments.

In the morning he gets up around 6:45. He walks into the kitchen and fixes a bowl of cereal. Then he stands at the counter, watching the morning sports shows while eating his breakfast in the nude. There is absolutely no evidence of arousal of any kind. When the bathroom becomes available, he goes in for a shower.

I have never seen any of the other family members naked. This boy has no compunctions about being seen by his father, mother, sister or next-door neighbor. He’s been nude in my presence dozens of times. I know it’s common for little boys to run around without clothes on sometimes, but, Abby, he’s not a little boy anymore. — CLOTHES-MINDED IN WISCONSIN

Sounds like something’s missing from the narrative, right? Right:

Lessee … I’m a sixteen year old boy who walks around the house naked. It’s 6:45 and I’m lumbering around my parents’ kitchen with my dongle dangling, pouring myself some cereal. Now, the bathroom is not yet available so I’m waiting around … in my birthday suit … neighbor watching me, somehow, the entire time. Actively? Passively? “There is absolutely no evidence of arousal of any kind.” That’s just disturbing. I can just see her removing her eye from a powerful telescope and turning to a camera, a la Marvin the Martian, and commenting “No evidence of arousal of any kind” and then plastering her face right back on the telescope again, twiddling the focus dial for a sharper view, licking her lips maybe.

You have to wonder how she defines “in her presence”: although she says that she and the lad’s family are “good friends” elsewhere in her letter, at no point does she mention any actual encounter other than watching him from a distance. Abby herself confounds the issue:

[Y]ou should hang curtains on your windows that face the Smiths’ kitchen — and before dropping over there, call to ask whether he’s presentable. If he’s not, then don’t go over.

I have to admit, my sympathies are with the kid, if only because (1) this is a fairly typical wardrobe for me and (2) I was coming up on sixteen when it occurred to me that pajamas were superfluous at best. (I am still so persuaded, despite the fact that it got down to about 20 degrees — call it -7 Celsius — last night.) I do a better job of keeping the shades in position, though.

Apparently the fact that CompUSA is liquidating has not motivated them to mend their ways on their deathbed. Witness the following:

I saw a pack of DVD-R blanks with a couple of different price tags on it. There was one that said $4.99, and partially on top of that, one that said $9.99. The shelf signs offered another 15% off of that.

Upon taking it to the register, I was told that it was in fact $9.99. When I inquired, I was asked how they couldn’t tell if I’d applied the $4.99 sticker myself. I pointed out that it had the same item number, and was partially underneath the higher price tag.

“Oh yeah. I guess you couldn’t have done that then.” The girl informed me that she was unable to give me the lower, marked price.

I remarked how good a deal it was for them — do a 100% markup on the product, then offer a 15% discount. Nicely done guys.

Heck, they could double the price, then mark it off 40 percent, and make it look even better.

Then again, these are the folks who once tried to sell me a service contract on an SD card.

I truly hope this turns out to be fiction:

OnStar: Hello, OnStar.
Customer: Hi, I have a problem.
OnStar: How can I help, sir?
Customer: I’m … umm … 27, and still a virgin.
OnStar: How old are you really, sir?
Customer: Twenty-nine?
OnStar: Sir?
Customer: Thirty-six.
OnStar: [partially off mike] Holy shit!
Customer: [muffled crying]

On the upside, it certainly speaks well of OnStar’s remote diagnostics.

The City Manager’s report on ice-storm response is out, and the price tag looks pretty stiff: 6649 hours of overtime by city crews and 2588 tons of salt spread.

On the question of debris removal, the two lowest bidders (around $70 a ton) have been put to work gathering up what’s stacked at curbside. The city has been divided into thirty-four sectors for this purpose, and so far nine, all in the middle of town, have been assigned. How this is supposed to work:

Once an initial pass is completed through each sector the contractors will be assigned an additional sector in which to begin work. The contractors will be required to make a second pass through all of their assigned sectors no sooner than two weeks following completion of their initial pass.

So if you didn’t get everything to the curb by the time the truck comes through, you’ve got at least 14 days to finish up.

No one seems to be speculating as to how long it will take to clean up all the debris, though I’ve got my money on the third of March.

The Oklahoman ran a partial list of Oklahoma-related earmarks in that huge federal-spending bill, and as pork goes, we seem to have gotten mostly rinds. This is the one, though, that really gets me:

$500,000 for the I-40 Crosstown Expressway project.

Half a million bucks for a project that’s going to cost over a billion? What is this, National See If Tom Coburn Is Sleeping Day? Five hundred Gs wouldn’t build one good onramp — not that we have any real experience in this state when it comes to building good onramps.

CFI Care [not its real name], our insurance plan at 42nd and Treadmill, has been taken over by a new group of weasels, duly replacing the old group of weasels, and I am not exactly delighted to report that I will be expected to shell out a $60 copay for a drug that costs at retail — wait for it — $65.33.

Which makes me wonder how much the premiums would be if someone had had the temerity to say “Screw the drug plan, just cover the expensive stuff.”

Four years from now, assuming I haven’t been nickel-and-dimed to death, the drug goes off patent; an application to produce a generic formulation is already in hand at the FDA.

So what did I do to deserve spam in German?

Ich Liebe dich!
Die Liebe wird gewinnen!
Ohne dich bin ich nur ein halber Mensch!

There’s a lot more, and it all links back to myigla.net, owned by S-H-F E-Marketing, in a place called Shimshit, Israel. Feel free to write your own jokes; I’m sure Mr. Half A Man there won’t mind.

All that’s left of the Cincinnati Post and its across-the-river sister Kentucky Post is this: kypost.com, billed as “life in the 859.”

The Posts were put out to the online pasture after the Joint Operating Agreement under which the Post and the rival Enquirer expired at the end of 2007. It wasn’t a surprise — Enquirer owner Gannett had advised that the JOA would not be renewed way back in 2004 — but fans of actual paper held out hope that Scripps could keep the Post going. (And Scripps is the weak sister in three other JOAs: in Birmingham, Albuquerque and Denver.)

Consultant Peter Krasilovsky assesses the prospects:

For kypost.com, it is a good idea to take advantage of existing brands and resources, possibly retaining cars.com. In particular, it can feed off of a promotional tie with WCPO-TV, which is Scripps’ metro station. But its prospects, long term, probably don’t approach what a “real” newspaper brings to the table. While online versions of newspapers claim margins in 50 percent range, far higher than 18-21 percent margins of many newspapers, most of the costs of online personnel and sales aren’t included in the tally (technology usually is).

I took a look at the offerings, and while the overall package is reasonably attractive, I wonder why there’s no RSS feed.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: weight is the enemy of fuel economy.

Nissan, which has no particular reason to agree with me, has apparently come to the same conclusion: the Home of the Hamburger vows to slice vehicle weight across its entire fleet. By 2015, the company says, Nissan vehicles will average 15 percent lighter than their 2005 counterparts.

Were I cynical, I could suggest that they could pull this off simply by dropping the Brobdingnagian-sized Titan truck and its SUV spinoffs: the Infiniti QX56 in its two-wheel-drive form (add another 300 lb for 4WD) presses down upon the earth to the tune of 5700 lb, a heavy piece indeed. But if they can scrape a few pounds out of the actual passenger cars, so much the better; my current ride (a Nissan product) weighs about 13 percent more than the one it replaced (which wasn’t), and I can feel the bulk on every tight curve, to say nothing of every visit to the gas station.

This week Andrew Ian Dodge has thoughtfully prepared a Caucus Edition of Carnival of the Vanities. As before, it’s text, no video, so no MPEG-4 compression using the H.264 standard.

Mark Kleiman takes two factoids about the Great White North, and finds a worthy conclusion:

• The average Canadian walks 900 miles per year.

• The average Canadian drinks 22 gallons of beer per year.

Canadians have a right to be proud: they’re getting 41 miles to the gallon.

Which works out to better than 5.7 l/100 km.

The last vestige of the Soviet empire: a bust of Lenin in the remote Antarctic.

Easy to explain, actually:

The Scientific Traverse this week made it to the Inaccessibility Pole for New Year’s Day and found a one-time Soviet Union base buried under the ice.

The group’s website says Soviet scientists first visited the Pole in December 1958 and built a small cabin there. After several weeks they left, putting the bust of Lenin on top of the chimney facing Moscow.

“Today the bust is clearly visible from many kilometres away, and remains as they left it on the chimney, although the cabin itself is buried under the snow,” the explorers say.

With an eye toward the future, the Soviets built this weather-resistant icon out of — space-age plastic.

By two guys who were half in the bag, so at least the bag’s full, right?

• Women who are old enough to get banged by Bill Clinton voted for Obama

• If you’re Born again you really do give a Huck
• 495 people outside of San Diego are willing to vote for Duncan Hunter — even though half of them confused him with Duncan Hines
• John Edwards is willing [to] ride the wave to the White House, even if it includes slapping Hillary’s thigh
• Romney learned the hard way not to run on good hair in a state full of farm wives that home perm
• Ed Rollins is a very angry man
• Hillary Clinton has a bad poker face
• Hillary’s advisors will like have a poker taken to their faces
• If two old white pasty lefty northeastern Senators drop out of a White House race, no one cares
• The CIA should use Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and that old fat bald guy who looks like Gorbachev without the splotches on his head to get confessions out of terror detainees. Spending four hours with this group without liquor protection would break the will of just about anyone.

And now, off to the primaries, where New Hampshire will be taken for Granite.

Up to now I’d been fairly impressed with GM’s Chevrolet Malibu advertising, but the new print ad (with the obligatory green background) for the Malibu Hybrid is a serious misstep — to anyone who ever took a physics course, anyway.

Here’s the goofy bit:

[The Malibu] has a 36-volt battery that consists of 6 modules and generates 10,000 watts of peak power.

This sounds impressive until you do the math: 10 kilowatts equals 13.4 horsepower. As hybrids go, this is pretty darn mild.

The pitch for these Chloe sandals at Intermix calls them “bondagesque,” presumably a reference to the humongous buckles across the back. I dunno. And I’m still wondering why there’s a two-tone heel — and why these two tones? I’d like to think these would look good on someone, but they seem awfully clunky to me, and at $645 that’s a couple of bucks each and every time you clunk.

(Via Shoewawa, which is looking for people to coordinate with these shoes.)

By most standards, Aubrey McClendon’s Chesapeake Energy expansion has been more boon than blight, but I have to wonder: where will it end? Wilshire Boulevard? The Broadway Extension? Penn Square? Saugatuck, Michigan?

A decision to possibly allow development on the Denison Dunes in Saugatuck Township has been delayed until the spring.

Oklahoma billionaire Aubrey McClendon bought the property with plans to develop it for high-end residential use. Environmentalists are battling him in an effort to preserve the land.

McClendon’s development company is considering a lawsuit against the township over a zoning change that reduced the number of homes allowed on the site. The township board is considering an agreement with the developer. The settlement would, in effect, prevent a lawsuit from being filed.

Last summer, the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance wrote McClendon and asked him to reconsider his plans, even offering to buy him out. No sale.

The township board is now waiting for McClendon to lay out his development plan in detail; it’s expected by June.

(Via Seattlest.)

An Alaskan legislator has prefiled a bill to move the state capital from Juneau to Anchorage. Rep. Kevin Meyer (R-Anchorage, what a shock) says that contact with the legislature is difficult for most Alaskans because there are no roads to Juneau — you can only reach the city by air or by boat — and that that the expense of traveling to the capital is considerable.

Oddly, neither Ted Stevens nor Don Young offered to build a bridge.

I recognize, though, that isolation of a legislature has its consequences, and therefore I suggest that someone introduce a bill to move the Oklahoma capital to Guymon. Or even Juneau, if there’s room.

If your ZIP code is anywhere between 90001 and 96199, you might consider stocking up on HVAC thermostats right away before Big Brother gets his fat fingers on the controls.

Come to think of it, given the tendency for dumb California ideas to spread elsewhere, we might all be wise to snag a couple of the old Honeywell rounds while we still can.

(Via Darleen Click.)

Oklahoma is planning to redesign the standard state license plate again, and the Oklahoman is running a poll featuring six of the preliminary designs. Of the versions shown in the poll, I lean toward #1, which has an asymmetrical design — something we’ve never had before — and a decent rendering of Allan Houser’s “Sacred Rain Arrow” sculpture.

Still, given the current emphasis on our collective chunkiness as a people, I’m thinking that a more accurate plate might look something like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Steph Mineart offers a radical redesign of the election cycle which addresses both efficiency and voter fatigue:

The U.S. would have five days of political primaries, each a week apart, starting the last week of March. The first primary day would consist of the 10 states with the smallest voting population; the rest would increase upward until the fifth week when the largest voting states would hold their primaries in the final week of April. Then there would be a month of campaigning before nominating conventions in May.

The campaigning would be compressed into a shorter cycle that would make it easier for people to follow, and something would actually HAPPEN regularly, rather than endless shots of candidates’ tour buses and baby kissing. The primary wins would actually be representative of the various states and we wouldn’t be unduly influenced by states that don’t really affect the election cycle.

Apart from her rather cavalier dismissal of the smaller states, this makes sense to me. If nothing else, it would call a halt to ever-earlier primaries. (The New Hampshire primary in 1968 was on the second Tuesday of March, fercrissake.) Iowans will probably object, but I suspect that apart from the inevitable activist types, Hawkeyes might be faintly embarrassed by that whole caucus thing and the attention it gets.

A radio horror story that somehow made me smile:

I worked for a beautiful music station that [ranked] dead last in the market and the operators were convinced that no one listened including the advertisers. It wasn’t a Bonneville or Schulke station.

We decided to prove the point by playing the same 2 half hour reel to reel tapes until someone called to complain. It went on for months and finally after 11 weeks someone called in to ask if we just played that same song yesterday. It played every hour for weeks!

(Note: Bonneville and Schulke/SRP were major syndicators of “beautiful-music” formats, which have largely fallen by the wayside these days.)

Or at least more entertaining. I spent a good forty-five minutes assembling a ballot for the 2008 Bloggies, and I think I did a reasonable job of it, all things considered.

How it works:

From now until 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) on Friday, January 11, 2008, anyone can nominate their favorite weblogs.

That Sunday, January 13, three panels of 50 voters will receive an e-mail. It will list the weblogs that have received the most nominations in ten categories. They will have until 10:00 PM EST on Friday, January 18 to privately submit their five favorites (six for Weblog of the Year) for each category. The five (or six for Weblog of the Year) receiving the most votes will become finalists.

Finalists will be announced on the 22nd; the winners will be announced in March.

And no, I did not vote for myself: there was no category for Least Improved.

Update: An otherwise-rational man has nominated me for the Lifetime Achievement Award. Doesn’t this require me to, like, achieve something?

Sure you do. In fact, there’s probably still storm debris stacked by the curb. (I did see a truck actually picking up the stuff along NW 50th east of Independence yesterday.)

This being Oklahoma, though, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that yesterday Oklahoma City basked in the warmest 5th of January on record — local records go back to 1891 — and that it will be even warmer today: the low this morning was 57, about ten degrees above a typical daytime high for this time of year, and this afternoon we’ll see 75 or so. This is the sort of Epiphany I can deal with.

Oh, yes, the bottom falls out Monday night. You knew it wouldn’t last.

When Internet Explorer 4 was launched in 1997, Chairman Bill issued the following drone:

IE4 will move more and more people to think of the Web as part of their everyday lifestyle. It will become as mundane as the car or TV culture is today.

That was for official consumption. Behind the scenes, something entirely different was going on:

At the IE 4 launch event, which was held on the waterfront in San Francisco, there were these two big plywood and fabric “E”s that were like spotlights. The folks on the IE team who were present at the event were obviously relieved, elated, and well, maybe overly dorky (me included). At the end of the night, we inquired about shipping these really cool Es back to Redmond. No-can-do. They were built in place, and are wider/taller than a truck can be. It would have to be an oversized load. Too expensive, not expense-able.

I don’t remember who, but someone had the brilliant idea of “delivering” it to Netscape. Purely as a memento. Purely. We are nice guys you know.

So, after bribing a tow driver (it was a little WIDE), we had it loaded up (with the participation of two notables from Wired Magazine, who will go unnamed).

We stopped at a local Safeway on the way, and one of the participants got our Netscape buddies a card (crying baby on the cover, saying “It’s so sad when…” Inside: “Bad things happen to good people.” We signed it — “Love, the IE team.”) and a sympathy balloon.

The record shows that Microsoft took one last shot at Netscape — in an “Easter egg” hidden in IE 5.

Now, of course, Netscape is dead and IE isn’t quite the monolith Microsoft had hoped, and I have to wonder: how could people who were tacitly allowed to have fun, as the merry IE 4 pranksters were, ever go on to develop nasty stuff like Genuine Windows Advantage? Must have been a different team, I guess.

I get a lot of search-engine traffic for “nude old farts” and variations thereof, not so much because my own flatulence is especially mature — at least, I don’t think it is — but because there’s a perception that people who doff their duds at vacation time tend to be people who knew Methuselah personally.

Tom Mulhall, who runs the Terra Cotta Inn, acknowledged as much last summer:

It is true many nudist clubs in the US have aging guests. Solair campground [in Connecticut] has a median age of 55. I would bet most nudist campgrounds and clubs are the same way.

I have yet to verify this empirically — and 55, for me, is less than a year away anyway — but I have reason to believe there is indeed an abundance of older folk in this, um, industry. Exhibit A: renewal notice from AANR, rendered on a dot-matrix printer. Not even in near-letter quality, for Pete’s sake. And I thought I had creeping Luddite tendencies.

Your search giants, your Googles and Yahoos and such, don’t really have time, or at least don’t bother to make time, to go through the logs looking for sick and twisted stuff.

Me, on the other hand….

Shoplifting Policy Lowes:  They’re against it.

“blade ruiner”:  I suppose you’ll have to go to Lowe’s for a new one.

what size condom should i wear with a 5 inch penis:   I’d avoid anything with a picture of the Incredible Hulk on the box.

i used to be a tree:  And before that, a nut?

what man could do six hundred years ago in entertainment:  Well, some prince or other made some noises about partying like it’s 1399.

One Ounce of Silver buys five gallons of gas:  Although you have to pay inside, as the pumps aren’t calibrated to accept precious metals.

fun looks like google:  But does Google look like fun?

what’s wrong with Diane Rehm why does she sound like a Hepburn:  Why would this be a problem? (Unless it’s the late Canadian weightlifter Doug Hepburn.)

scuzzbuckets aforethought:  Because you don’t want spontaneous scuzzbucketry.

“joe biden” flatulence:  ”All right, that’s it, out of the caucus. Now.”

silly string breast augmentation:  I suppose it would work at first, but the stuff tends to migrate.

“ring cycle” wagner “dance mix”:  The Rhinemaidens can really shake that thing.

lance cargill caught by cleaning crew:  So that’s what those “100 ideas” were all about.

I’ve seen this at I See Invisible People and at The Motley Oklahoman, and I figure I’d give it a shot.

Premise: bold each of the statements that applies.

Original source: The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.

So acknowledged. Here we go:

Father went to college
Father finished college
Mother went to college
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children’s books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Notes: Most of my college costs were covered by a scholarship; there were five kids, so a room to one’s own was something that existed only in dreams; I was the oldest, so there were no hand-me-downs available; I once calculated the volume of the oil drum out back, but I never looked into the price of filling it up.

Update, 8 pm: The estimable John Scalzi sees a problem with the methodology in use here:

[F]or probably any person, there are things on this list meant to signify privilege that don’t, or are meant to exclude privilege that could be signs of substantial privilege — just ask the boarding school student driving dad’s old Beemer to the vacation house by the shore while his middle-class friends are stuck in an SAT review session. For nearly all of the “privilege markers” in this exercise, one can come up with excellent reasons why they are not an issue of privilege or class at all.

Which means that for the purposes of this exercise — showing indicators of privilege and class — this list is not actually useful, and indeed counter-productive. In this exercise, it’s entirely possible for someone of a lower social class to appear more “privileged” than someone who is of the “rich and snooty” class. This doesn’t create awareness of privilege; it does, however, create awareness of the essential lameness of this particular exercise.

“Privilege” itself is a buzzword these days, and should be approached warily in any event. Maybe I should say simply that I was damn lucky to get what I did when I did.

Lileks discovers news via Nintendo:

I felt a little ill upon noting the Wii News Channel. It’s fast and succinct. There’s no good reason to have a news feed in the Wii machine, but there’s no good reason not to have one. It’s a reminder that news is just a feature, not a destination or a place; it’s part of the stuff that falls from the cloud.

If gaming machines have news, shouldn’t newspaper websites have games? Seriously: papers run comics, so they’re not above something “funny” and trivial. Why not provide addictive time-wasting flash games? They wouldn’t have to be based on the news, although I suppose they could be — Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich have been buried under a ton of corn in an Iowa silo! Click the falling cobs to keep them from dying, and click on the fallen cobs to clear a path! Between levels, an ad, some headlines.

I like it, but it wouldn’t fly: some nitwit would complain that his candidate is being mocked, and this will not stand.

On the other hand, Kucinich fans might find it amusing.

Contents of my most recent Bag O’Crap:

6 2Wire PC Port Phoneline 10Mbps USB Adapter [$144.00]
1 MGM Grand “EFX” Plastic Dragon w/Castle Figurine [$5.00]
1 “Flying Thing” #7 — Monstermobile [$0.49]
1 GI Joe Dog Tag/Bracelet set [$2.27]
1 Elgee Water Blaster [$0.29]
3 Faded Glory Pink Butterfly Luggage Tags [$11.64]
1 Tenba D-Series Prodigital Cable Management/Accessory Organizer Set [$19.99]

Total $183.68

Previous crap here. Other recipients have listed their, um, items at BagsOfCrap.com.

This place has been littered lately by nondescript TrackBacks from Thorny Path and Blog Bookmarker, which bill themselves as “social bookmarking” services: think Facebook plus StumbleUpon.

Blog Bookmarker seems to exist only to draw people into something called Hey! Nielsen, as in “Nielsen ratings,” an extension of the company’s research into Web 2.0, or at least 1.5. I’ve picked up a smidgen of traffic here and there from them, but only a smidgen; then again, most of the stuff I write is of scant interest to the sort of people Nielsen would like to research, and come to think of it, it’s not impossible that this sentence could have ended quite a bit earlier. Thorny Path at least will let you look at some of the tagged items.

I had high hopes for sk*rt, a sort of Digg for dames, if you will, which hasn’t taken off quite the way I’d expected despite its palpable No Boys Allowed vibe, a major selling point in some circles. Still, I’ve been known to hunt down stories through sk*rt, knowing that (1) I have a fair number of female readers and (2) there’s a lot of stuff down that way to which I’m otherwise quite oblivious. If only one of these services should survive, this is the one I consider the keeper. Besides, they don’t clutter up my database with TrackBacks.

This one sounds simple, ends up less so. The idea: create a fake band and their first album. Here’s how it works:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
   The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

I admit to having fudged a bit on the last item. Not wishing to step on some photographer’s copyright, I took the third photo in the current list with a suitable Creative Commons license.

Anyway, here’s the Wikipedia entry, here’s the quote (from its own page), and this is the original photo. Behold:

Not available on iTunes.

(Via Steph Mineart.)

The ol’ work box hadn’t been that much of a sluggard up to that point. At the heart of it is an AMD Sempron 2800+, despite its name a 1.6-GHz CPU, not a speedster but not a boat anchor either. And usually it runs with some small degree of enthusiasm: for some reason it opens one database (this particular solution is based on FileMaker Pro, not that that should make a difference) substantially faster than my P4 dual-core box at home ever does.

In an effort to diagnose the problem, I first fired up Control Panel / System, with the intent of poking into Device Manager. The usual System Information stuff fell into place at subsonic speeds, and it ended with “192 MB RAM.”

One ninety-two? Holy substrate, Batman, did someone steal a DIMM? This box, when I got it, had two units of memory: a 256-megger and a 512. Total 768, minus 64 for the integrated video. The only explanation: the 512 stick was stuck.

I powered down, spat in the general direction of the power switch, and restarted. BIOS screen shows 768; all is well. Until the next reboot, of course.

Under the circumstances, I did what any reasonable person would: I whined to supervisory personnel. New RAM should be arriving presently.