In a lifetime of klutziness, I’ve broken lots of light bulbs, even a socket or two, usually with no ill effects other than finding that one last shard of glass three weeks later. Of course, those were normal light bulbs, as distinguished from the compact-fluorescent light bulbs (they’re not even bulbous, fercrissake) that are being forced upon us. Truth be told, I’ve made my peace with the CFLs, and I have six of them installed at the palatial Surlywood estate. But sooner or later I’m going to break one, and let me tell you, that little trace bit of mercury is genuinely nasty stuff, so I’m trying my darnedest to be careful.

Some people, however, aren’t trying quite so hard:

A man and woman in southern Oklahoma were hospitalized with mercury poisoning last week after engaging in what officials said is a rare and dangerous science experiment — using mercury to pull gold from electronic equipment, apparently for profit.

Geez, and I thought I was a loose cannon in chem lab. Get a whiff of this:

Gold is found in small amounts in some electronic equipment. To isolate the gold in the circuit boards, the couple put the boards on a frying pan on their kitchen stove, said Eric Delgado, on-scene coordinator for the EPA. They poured mercury over the electronics. Mercury attached itself to the gold and helped the couple separate the precious metal from the circuit boards. The couple then heated the gold-mercury substance until the mercury evaporated, leaving only the gold behind.

And being a vapor, the stuff went straight up their noses, and they wound up in the hospital. As Darwin Award contestants go, these folks are pretty run-of-the-mill, although they might score difficulty points: this was a lot more mercury than you’ll find in even half a dozen CFLs. As for their house, redoing the interior with lead paint might actually be an improvement.

Update: The man has died, and the house has been deemed “uninhabitable.”

Not that I have anything against Twitter — I don’t — but geez, I put out enough material in a day as it is without having to liveblog my entire life, as it were.

For people even less prolific than I appear to be, there is dawdlr. What’s great about it is that there’s no rush: updates are sent via snailmail (dawdler, 77 beak street, london W1F 9DB) and posted every six months.

So: what are you doing, generally?

(Via Popgadget.)

John Hawkins, evidently because he’s John Hawkins fercrissake, got six of the prettier members of the dextrosphere to comment on dating and such, which of course prompted a semi-rebuttal from Ace.

I wasn’t going to weigh in on anything here — I did once have dinner with Dawn Eden (no, we weren’t dating), and I did get mentioned in her book, and not as a bad example either — but I feel compelled to mention that the individual in Ace’s 51st comment, by tachyonshuggy, is actually someone other than myself:

I have a very close friend who is a 100% beta, or perhaps another Greek letter further down the alphabet.

This man has not gotten laid since The Contract with America. He’s a very smart guy with some crippling social problems (not jokey/confident, a homebody, watches Stargate Atlantis, etc.).

I know that I should have said/done something like ten years ago, but I don’t know what to do. I’d be game for winging with him except that it would be like dragging a dead body.

How does the labouring ubernerd find love, and can I help?

I don’t think I’ve ever watched Stargate Atlantis.

On the other hand, they might actually have Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying.

Actually, I have no idea where the former governor of New York stashes his cash, nor do I care, but for some reason I got this from my bank today and I wonder if it’s fallout from the Adventures of Client #9:

As part of our continued effort to enhance online security, we’ve changed the way we process online payments or transfers, and have updated our online terms and conditions to reflect those changes.

The updated terms and conditions will be available online and will take effect April 13, 2008.

Here’s a summary of what we’re changing:

We may delay or cancel a request to transfer or charge money back to the Pay From or other account at our discretion including if the payment:

• Looks suspicious or fraudulent

• Appears to have incorrect amount or recipient information
• Seems to duplicate another payment

Don’t you be structuring, y’hear?

I’m starting to think these little redbud trees — one of them is not so red, but so be it — are eventually going to fuse themselves into one big tree.

They obviously didn’t suffer much during the ice storm, though.

(Embiggened version at Flickr.)

The handful of Alfisti who have been waiting with bated breath for the return of the Cross and Serpent to these shores are apparently going to be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams: not only is Alfa Romeo going to sell cars in the States again, but they might actually build them here.

A number of possibilities present themselves: acquisition of an existing plant that’s been closed; expansion of one of Case/New Holland’s tractor plants — CNH, like Alfa, is a part of the humongous Fiat empire — for automotive use; even a facility in Mexico has been considered.

Whatever the decision, you can credit it to, or blame it on, the weakness of the US dollar. Alfa isn’t going to make any money over here by shipping us Eurocars at anything like the current exchange rate.

But since I didn’t, here’s the official word:

When preparing Quaker Oatmeal in the microwave, we recommend using a bowl with sides that slant outwards, such as a pasta or soup bowl. This will prevent the steam that develops when cooking the oatmeal from pushing it up and over the edge of the bowl.

Anyone got a bowl with sides that slant inwards? I see a Questionable Experiment suggesting itself.

Fire and ice make a deadly combination.

During the December ice storm, Jones High School was destroyed by a fire. Fighting that fire had been more difficult than usual: during the ice storm, electrical lines were down and water pressure was unusually low. Classes resumed in January, mostly in portable buildings on the edge of the campus.

Yesterday Jones school-district voters passed, 669-176, a $12 million bond issue to help rebuild the school on the original site, with construction to begin this fall. Superintendent Mike Steele is happy:

“It’s gone from terrible to great,” Steele said. “These students definitely needed a shot in the arm and this overwhelming support on this vote for the students is just going to do wonders for their morale and attitude.”

Construction should be complete in 18 to 24 months.

Dram is a sandal for guys, by Reef, and it looks like, well, yet another flip-flop.

Until you notice this:

polyurethane encapsulated canteen in heel with screw cap opens with included exclusive Reef church key / fin key

Yep. You can store three ounces of liquid in the heel. Whether you’d want to drink it after that — well, maybe they can sell it to a drunken fart like René Descartes.

“Dram” sells for $45 at retail.

(Via Shoewawa.)

Disclosure: Reef is a nominal sponsor of this site I run, or at least of the theme it uses.

This sounds ominous:

The federal government is investigating whether the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety violated the civil rights of Iranian immigrants by refusing to provide them with driver’s license tests in their native Farsi language.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched the investigation in March after a complaint filed on behalf of two Iranian nationals living in Bartlesville accused the state agency of unlawful discrimination based on their national origin, according to a letter from the NHTSA to Public Safety Commissioner Kevin Ward.

One’s immediate response might be “So they can’t read? Where are they going to go?”

But there’s a bit more to it than that:

The complaint was filed on behalf of Fardha Sharifi and her husband, Alireza Sanghinmanesh, who immigrated to the United States with their young son, said Hassan Sharifi, Fardha Sharifi’s cousin and a restaurant owner in Bartlesville. He said the couple wanted to get Oklahoma driver’s licenses last year but did not understand English well enough to take the Oklahoma test.

“They wanted to go to work. And I had to drive them around almost everywhere they went,” said Hassan Sharifi, who immigrated to the U.S. 30 years ago. “It seemed like my life was interrupted.”

He said he contacted state driver’s license officials to see if the test could be provided in the couple’s native language, Farsi. “They didn’t answer me,” Hassan Sharifi said. “I feel bad. No one wants to take the responsibility.”

Finally, the couple went to the neighboring state of Kansas, located less than 25 miles north of Bartlesville, where they each passed a Kansas exam that tested their driving skills using graphic symbols rather than language, Hassan Sharifi said.

Two points:

• Somebody in the DPS should have taken Mr Sharifi’s call, if only to tell him that they couldn’t help under existing law.

• How hard would it be to adapt that Kansas test to Oklahoma?

The standard argument against this sort of thing is that it costs money, and of course it does. Rep. Randy Terrill (R-Moore) has his own idea: a bill that requires all state business be conducted in English. This, at least, is consistent with Terrill’s standard Go Away stance. Let’s see what he says after the investigation is completed.

Some of this is distressingly familiar:

Not Good Enough. Ever feel that way? I know I do. Often. Too often. In fact, it is quite possibly the bane of my existence. Well, maybe not the bane of my existence but it is the thing that I have the hardest time shaking and always has been.

When that feeling hits me, I do a little internal search. Why? Why do I feel that way? Is there some deep, dark secret or a devastating buried memory that makes me feel that way? But then, logic never helps when it comes to things like that, does it? It seems the bad feelings, the feelings of inadequacy and non-deserving-ness (yes, I just made up a word) don’t come from a place of logic. They come from a place of feelings. Bad feelings.

Sometimes we’re our own harshest critics: we fail to live up to some obscure, possibly subconscious, criterion, and suddenly we find ourselves ready to eat worms.

I am, I need hardly point out, no less susceptible to this sort of thing. I cope by compartmentalization: my inability to deal with things is not a fixed quantity, so I try to focus on the things I do comparatively well and distance myself from areas in which I perform poorly. One reason I’ve worked at the same job for so long is that it provides no support for an inferiority complex: should I find myself feeling vaguely inadequate to some particular task, all I need to do is wait a few minutes and I will be presented with an example of true, sometimes even spectacular, inadequacy. This generally doesn’t help my mood of the moment — the transition from self-pity to disgust is not the easiest to manage — but it takes some of the strain off my sense of self.

I am at the age where the gap between where I am and where I thought I wanted to be is presumably at its widest. I console myself with the fact that I am not actually on my deathbed, and therefore things can change. “Go with the flow” is a notion utterly foreign to my nature, but there are times when I have to concede that it’s easier to swim with the current. And then I remember that I don’t swim that well anyway, and the cycle starts anew.

Once upon a time, for reasons long since forgotten, I engaged an astrologer to do a frighteningly-detailed natal chart for me. Early on, she explained some of the angular momentum, giving special attention to the square, superficially the most negative of all the aspects. “But people with no squares at all,” she noted, “never have to struggle, never have to overcome obstacles, and often as not never amount to anything worthwhile. If you have a square or two, you’re perfectly normal.”

This was before she discovered I had eleven of them, but that’s another matter.

I don’t get it. Every other credit card I have, be it Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCPenney fercrissake, can process an online payment from my bank in 24 hours. But not Washington Mutual.

I’m at a loss to explain this. I paid three bills last night after closing time (8 pm). Two of them are noted as withdrawals effective 3 April for payments on 4 April. WaMu, paid at the same time, is effective 3 April for a payment on the seventh. (And it’s not one of those situations where the bank has to cut a check and send it on: those take five days and are clearly identified as such.) This won’t make me late or anything, but it’s perplexing.

This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is dubbed “Fools,” no doubt after the first day of April, arguably the highlight of this week. I doubt seriously Mr Dodge was making reference to the fools who go zipping down US 277 (which is, at least in my neck of the woods, also US 62) in the dead of night at ridiculous speeds.

One way to make sure Trini reads this site is to throw in something about the Nissan GT-R, which is hitting dealerships even now at a price that will make your nose bleed. Car and Driver actually managed to hook up its test gear to one of Nissan’s engineering mules, and they titled their review “Big, Heavy, and Incredible.” I was reading over the spec sheet, and one number jumped out at me: 232 cubic inches (3.8 liters), within 2 cc of the Ford Essex V6 that had been dropped into my old Mercury Cougar. So how does today’s oversized two-door compare to the oversized two-door of twenty-five years ago? We’ve got numbers:

Horsepower:

• Cougar: 120 hp @ 3600 rpm

• GT-R: 480 hp @ 6400 rpm

Zero to sixty:

• Cougar: 11 seconds

• GT-R: 3.3 seconds

Top speed:

• Cougar: 105 mph (though speedo quits at 85)

• GT-R: 191 mph

Gas mileage:

• Cougar: 16 mpg

• GT-R: 16 mpg

Price (2008 dollars):

• Cougar: $23,050

• GT-R: $70,475

Oh, well, you can’t lose them all.

The raw Census numbers say that my home town has slightly more females than males, 51.1 to 48.9 percent. However, substantial percentages of both camps are Off The Market, so this one factoid doesn’t really address the availability of datables.

Richard Florida, he who is constantly hawking the Creative Class as the solution to all our urban ills, has now done some figuring and calculated, or guessed, or something, the breakdown for singles 20-64, and the Big Breezy seems to have a deficit of eligible females, approximately equal to the surplus in Tulsa. (Remind me to send this to the Stroud Chamber of Commerce.) The West generally is a boyzone; girls proliferate in and around Boswash and other Eastern metropolises. Jan and Dean never anticipated this.

Yeah, I know: all you need is one, right?

I have no idea what that might mean, although I suspect there are those who are fulvier than I.

But for one brief, shining moment, the term did sort of actually exist:

Coming soon: The Fast and the Fulvy-est.

Addendum: Just to prove I take pedantry very, very seriously, we present the LOL Fulvous Whistling Duck.

Never say “Bite me” to Ted Turner.

Pat Riley, on the likelihood of his being named to the Hall of Fame:

I look at it this way: I don’t belong there.

I never coached a [Catholic Youth Organization] team. I never hauled a group of wannabes in the back of a truck to Central Park and worked them out from dawn to dusk. I never took a kid home in my car and treated his athlete’s [foot] in my house when I was in high school. I never did the 8 million hours of work that a student-manager/assistant coach did. I never did any of that stuff.

I was pushed through a door and a silver spoon was shoved in my mouth, that had Kareem and Magic and Worthy and McAdoo and Scott and Cooper and Nixon. I mean, that’s how I got my start. And most of the guys that are in [the Hall] did it the other way. So that’s how I look at it.

“Scott” is Byron Scott, currently coaching the New Orleans Hornets, and he begs to differ:

No matter what the team he was given, somebody still has to coach them, discipline them. Somebody has to still earn their respect, which he’s done over the years.

This is Riley’s first year of eligibility for a spot in Springfield.

There are still a few people who get all bug-eyed when they see what I’m driving these days, and I endeavor to make them less impressed, usually by explaining that yeah, it’s an Infiniti, but when you get right down to it, it’s a Nissan with an overlay of glitz. Depending on how technical I want to get, I characterize this as either “badge engineering” or “platform sharing.”

Which, of course, suggests a question: where’s the line between the two? The infamous (and at the time ubiquitous) Chrysler K-cars were clearly badge-engineered: the difference between a Dodge Aries and a Plymouth Reliant was next to nil. On the other hand, there’s not so much resemblance between the Lincoln MKZ (formerly Zephyr) and the Mazda6, generally accepted as an example of a shared platform. Somewhere in between, Gwendolyn has the same floorpan and powertrain as a Maxima, but different sheetmetal at each end — the doors and roof are the same, I think — and a more extensive array of gadgetry. (And five extra horsepower, due to a larger two-stage muffler. Big deal.)

Still, this isn’t the sort of clear delineation I might have hoped for. Jonny Lieberman tossed out this question to TTAC readers, and this, I think, is the winner:

If my mom can tell that two related cars share parts, that’s badge engineering. If only the lunatics who discuss cars on the interwebs can tell, that’s platform sharing.

Of course, as one of the lunatics in question, I maintain that we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

What is it this time? Global slowing?

It has long been known that natural phenomena on Earth’s surface, such as tides and winds, affect its rotation speed. Now scientists are investigating how events in a mineral layer at the core-mantle boundary, 1,615 miles (2,600 kilometers) deep, similarly affect the planet’s spin.

“The length of a day … is changing due to the interaction between the mantle and the core in the very deep Earth,” said study co-author Kei Hirose, a geoscientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. “This is basically because the bottom of the mantle has very high electrical conductivity.”

Finally, a reasonable argument for Daylight Saving.

(Via Scribal Terror.)

Advice from Neil Kramer:

Every day, I receive an email from a different male blogger, always with the same complaint, “No women ever read my blog. How do you get so many hot chicks to read Citizen of the Month?”

Men, take note. This is the most important post that you will ever read. My female readership is no accident. It took years of experimentation and market research. Most men make one major mistake when wooing a woman online: they act as if they are wooing themselves.

Actually, a reader emailed me once to suggest that I woo myself, though not exactly in those words.

I don’t think my female readership is accidental either, though I’m darned if I know what the trick is. (Surely it can’t be the occasional shoeblogging; there are plenty of people who do it better and/or more often.) My current best guess is that I appear to be able to distinguish between real life and beer commercials.

I’m still reeling over our state vegetable, so I shudder to think what would be considered an appropriate rock and/or roll number to celebrate at the Oklahoma History Center, and indeed my first look at the nominees list so far did nothing to ease the twitch.

So, prodded by Jason Bondy, I sent in the one and only song that makes sense to me in this context: Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love” (Capitol 4553, 1961), which offers not one, not two, but three connections to this state:

1. Wanda’s from Maud, and today lives in Moore.

2. The tasty guitar licks are provided by latter-day Tulsan Roy Clark.
3. What could be more Oklahoman than Tornado as Metaphor? I mean, really.

I hope someone on the committee at least has heard of it.

Don Mecoy writes in this morning’s Oklahoman:

About one of every four vehicles on Oklahoma roads is uninsured, and there’s not much that can be done to improve that, state officials say.

Oklahoma lawmakers have proposed and adopted a number of measures designed to punish uninsured motorists, but the state’s rate of uninsured motorists has remained steady in recent years, said Lonnie Jarman, driver compliance director at the state Department of Public Safety. “In the 50 states and the District of Columbia, there is no one that has found the perfect solution,” Jarman said.

Many motorists who fail to carry auto insurance do so because they can’t afford it, Jarman said. “Most states have found regardless of what they try to do, it doesn’t change that rate very much. The reason why that is, is because it’s a social issue, the social issue being, ‘I can’t afford it’.”

And this differs from health insurance — how, exactly? Yet you don’t see anyone calling for government-operated Universal Auto Coverage.

Being considered for the Occasionally Asked Questions file: “How come this site looks exactly the same, year after year?”

The answer would be something like this:

[M]y favorite layout and color scheme ever and he’s had the good sense to keep it for something like six or seven years.

Close enough. This particular template, slightly modified over the years, was implemented in August 2002. One reason I haven’t jumped on the Movable Type 4 bandwagon is its lack of support for the pop-up comment box, which I prefer to the new-and-unimproved method of dropping you directly onto the individual archive page. The color scheme was originally sort of a lark: I resisted traditional black-on-white, which in some variations causes me eyestrain, and after twiddling with literally dozens of color schemes from various suggested palettes, I decided to select from the blandest possible colors that had names assigned by Netscape. (You remember Netscape, don’t you?) The background color is something called “floralwhite.” The 2000-2002 pre-MT pages were done in a shade called “antiquewhite.” (Before 2000, there was neither rhyme nor reason nor any consistent design around here.)

I did, for a brief period, swap the left and right columns, but that didn’t last.

The cover story in the paper’s Real Estate section today begins this way:

Metropolitan Home magazine took a rare trip into the heartland for its April issue — “Renovation Goes Green & Gorgeous!” — and landed at the home of Cara and Robert Barnes in Oklahoma City.

The Barnes’ mid-century home at 2532 Pembroke Terrace garnered eight glossy pages in the prestigious chronicle of modern design.

Here’s the piece, by Brian Libby; the floorplan looks something like this. And I wrote about this house myself last year:

George Seminoff, just out of OSU’s School of Architecture, designed this house in 1957, and it’s just undergone a golden-anniversary facelift. A classic ranch, roughly 2700 square feet, this house shows that Seminoff was a major Frank Lloyd Wright fan but open to a wide range of influences. The rooms aren’t the least bit square: 30- and 60-degree angles are everywhere. There’s what was described as the True In-Law plan: a wing with a bedroom, a bath, and an actual kitchenette (since removed). One place we dared not venture was into the library, which has cork wallpaper (!) and a leather floor (!!). Look up in the living room, and there are redwood beams; the cabinetry is ash. The walls are Venetian plaster and utterly gorgeous. And for fans of sunshine, as I am, there are new floor-to-ceiling Arcadia glass windows along the back of the house (a great view of the pool).

Bill Quick would probably love this place.

Keeping in mind, of course, that “today” is at least as open to interpretation as “and the evening and the morning were the first day.”

• Oh, that Iggy Pop, always the student-council type.

• The semicolon is doomed; or is it?
• They say we’re young and we don’t know, won’t find out ’til we grow.
• In all probability, no parrots were involved in your most recent root-canal work.
• “Yes, I know I was speeding, Officer, but you must understand: I have two wives.”
• The Gaylords must be spinning in their graves.
• Learning everything you can about a tree kills the tree.
• But what if you want a discontinued model of car stereo?
• Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, rice, furikake, nori, spam, spam, spam, and spam.
• North Dakota hunters must receive 14 hours in instruction before licensing.
• James Bond: Boy, do we need him now.
• A homeschooler wiki is born.
• Today is the anniversary of the invention of warp drive, 55 years from now.

More eventually.

Coming soon to eastern Kansas, the Mustang Church of America:

Charles Ales loves Mustangs and doing good to others, so he’s putting it all together and starting the Mustang Church of America and Museum.

“There’s not another one like it in the world,” said Ales, lifelong car collector. “I’ve been around car nuts all my adult life. You can mess with their wives, you can mess with their dogs, but you can’t mess with their cars. It borders on a religion with them, so I built them a church.”

So far, the only automaker actually named after a god is Mazda.

Top Ten new religious movements of an automotive nature:

10. The Porschetarians

9. Chevrolaity
8. Seekers of Infiniti
7. Office of the Archmitsubishop
6. V-Sikhs
5. LaSallevation Army
4. Gnashticism
3. Subarutherans
2. GTOrthodoxy
1. Society of St. Prius X

Jesus, we may assume, was partial to Hondas; in Acts 2, the disciples managed to get to the first Pentecost in one Accord.

(Via the heretics at Autoblog.)

Back in the pre-industrial days when I studied the concept of “word salad,” it was considered to be a possible byproduct of schizophrenia, depending on who was doing the analysis at that particular instant. Its application to spam came much, much later.

Since just about anything that can be done in spam can also be done in blog, it was inevitable that I would happen across something like this spectacular example of complete and utter nonsense which inadvertently contains some tiny shards of reality amidst its links to similarly-bogus bloggage. One paragraph is quite enough:

The most common cantonese ringtone remains to have male plug on cable, and female socket mounted in a piece of equipment, which was original intention of design. It would be cantonese ringtone to specify a new ripping location, too, so ripped song doesn’t end up dirty hippo ringtone in rest of your collection.

[One link — under "dirty hippo ringtone" — removed from original.]

Maybe someday Google Almighty will figure out a way to shred this stuff before it gets shoveled at you from under the sneeze bar.

This Valleywag piece describes the OkCupid user base as “the Web’s most normal pool of singles,” a dubious claim to the extent that said pool includes me. (Then again, as just one among a million or so, I figure I’m not doing much damage.) I’ll be the second to tell you, though, that the system has its drawbacks. Here’s the first:

Married Guy was looking for a little adventure with or without his wife, who had approved the whole thing. He signed up at OkCupid, and got a teaser email with photos and opening profile quotes of a few available women in his area. He recognized one as Single Girl, a professional colleague of his wife. Out of curiosity, he clicked Single Girl’s profile.

What he didn’t realize was OkCupid notifies its members as to which other members have checked out their profiles. Single Girl, unbeknownst to Married Guy, found his profile in her inbox and realized omigod he’s cheating on his wife what do I say to her? She had specified “no married men” in her preferences, so she presumed he had listed himself as single. He, on the other hand, presumed she was into married guys, since OkCupid sent him her profile. Cue mutual embarrassment.

I’ve explained how this system is supposed to work once before.

Left unsaid in this whole semi-sordid saga is whether Mrs Married Guy also has a profile on the site.

I mention in passing that those folks who look me up are either around my age or very much younger: a lot of fifties, a lot of twenties, and not much in between. I have no idea what to make of this. (Is this pattern at all representative of the user base? And if so, can it truly be called the “most normal”?) Twentysomethings had no use for me when I was their age, fercryingoutloud. And should they be seeking sugar daddies, you’d think they’d be looking for somebody with, you know, money.