During a one-hour period yesterday, someone’s botnet planted about 100 bogus TrackBacks here, connected to a whole link farm full of Yahoo! 360 blogs which were probably created by a botnet.

Not that I’d tell you to ban everything incoming that mentions Yahoo! 360, but until such time as they can come up with some semblance of security — don’t hold your breath — you might want to think twice about anything that shows up with their domain on it. (I did leave them a nastygram, which so far has garnered only an autoresponse.)

Update, 9:30 am: Yahoo! responds:

Yahoo! has evaluated and taken the appropriate action, as determined in Yahoo!’s sole discretion under our Terms of Service, with regard to the Yahoo! 360 account you have brought to our attention.

Their definition of “appropriate” probably differs from mine — I doubt that broadswords even occurred to them — but I suppose we can consider this matter closed for now.

The May Day edition of Carnival of the Vanities is, as you’d expect, hosted by Dodgeblogium, a well-established WordPress blog which is not using Paul Stamatiou’s 281 theme.

And be prepared to weep:

While looking for a meal replacement bar, one must be careful. I generally lean towards Kashi or Clif/Luna because they contain better ingredients. For example, the Balance Bar claims it does not contain high fructose corn syrup. However, if you read the label, it contains: fructose, corn syrup. Granted, it wasn’t high fructose corn syrup, but it was corn syrup. I don’t know if I’d call attention to the lack of high fructose corn syrup with those not-much-better ingredients. That is, unless people don’t read the ingredients anymore.

The current state of things: you could probably sell a bar made from feldspar and duck droppings so long as it has zero grams of trans fat.

Seriously. A local paint store once advertised “100% CARB FREE PAINT”. Sold like hotcakes. With some form of syrup, I presume.

It’s the fifth anniversary of BatesLine, and, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here’s a look at the first month’s worth of posts.

And there’s no arguing with this:

[F]ive years of fairly consistent and continuous blogging is pretty impressive in a world where blogs start and end at an alarming rate, if I do say so myself.

And he does say so himself, which is why I’ve read Michael Bates for about 4.95 of those five years: you know where he stands, and he has a pretty good idea where the bodies are buried.

Each week I put together a collection of strange search-engine queries, and I discard rather a lot of queries which aren’t strange at all but do perplex me somewhat: some folks appear to believe that there exist nude photographs of everyone on earth, and if they word their search strings carefully enough, those photographs will be found.

The Academic Naturist argues that privacy is being sufficiently diminished by technology that those of us who occasionally don’t bother to get dressed will eventually be Googlable, or worse. One substantial threat comes from Microsoft Windows Live:

To compete with Google’s street view, Microsoft decided to fly planes and capture a “bird’s eye view” with pretty good resolution. You can see people, and you can easily identify campers and cars. Plus, this doesn’t stop at the street — it’s a close view into private property! This view covers a surprising amount of the US.

But it’s nothing compared to this:

Polar Rose … is a Firefox plugin that detects people in pictures. If people know the person in the picture, they can tag a name to them. Then, Polar Rose uses face recognition technology to identify that person in all future photos. For example, someone tags John Smith in their family reunion picture. Later on, someone else cruising Flickr maps sees that picture of four people in the nudist hot tub, and Polar Rose happily points out John Smith. That’s not good!

I knew there was a reason I’d never bothered to unpack, let alone connect, my webcam.

Oklahoma City, says Forbes, is right now the most “recession-proof” town in the land:

Did someone say something about a recession? With falling unemployment, one of the strongest housing markets in the country, and strong growth in agriculture, energy and manufacturing, Oklahoma City might not have received the recession memo, and it looks best positioned of the nation’s metropolitan areas to ride out the current crisis. Booming valuations of Oklahoma City’s largest companies, like Devon Energy and Chesapeake Energy, suggest the energy sector is the right place to be.

On the other hand, AskMen.com says you might not want to drop by for a visit:

The weather is frighteningly unpredictable, with blizzards often descending on the city and winds that could knock a high rise clean off its feet. It is, after all, located in the direct path of “Tornado Alley.” The worst time to visit would be from March to August, when the severe weather season makes Dorothy’s Kansas look positively calm. One of the most powerful tornadoes on record — an F5 with wind speeds of 320 mph — devastated much of the city in 1999.

Unpredictable, certainly; frightening, not after you’ve been here a little while. And I was here for the 1999 twister: do I look devastated? Don’t answer that.

Emalyse reports on potential problems at the low end of Britain’s wage scale:

James Lowman, head of the Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) worries that low paid workers in retail will may claw back their losses if the government chooses to reform the minimum wage as a way of making up for the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

There are already plenty of part time and full time workers who need to rely on additional state benefits in order to top up their low wage packets and the rates are already due to increase in October. The hourly rate for 18 to 21-year-olds will increase from £4.60 to £4.77, while the statutory wage for 16 and 17-year-olds will go up from £3.40 to £3.53. The rate for those ages 22 and over will increase by 21p to £5.73 per hour.

I found it interesting that the UK’s minimum wage varies with the age of the wage-earner; we used to have a so-called “training wage” in the States, but the primary criterion was lack of experience, not age, and anyway it was allowed to die in 1993.

But what was fascinating about this was the backstory on the “abolition of the 10p tax rate.” The Guardian (yes, yes, I know, I know) put out a Q&A page on the matter, and get a load of this:

The 22% tax rate is coming down to 20%, and the 10% tax rate for lower earners is being abolished altogether — forcing more than five million workers up into the 20% tax bracket.

There’s only one other bracket: forty percent, which kicks in at £36,000.

Dr. Weevil’s secret to jazzing up ramen:

Add a handful of bean sprouts, some fresh basil and cilantro leaves, and a dash or two each of lime juice and tabasco. In other words, add all the easily-procured ingredients of pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) except the beef. The result is only half as good as the pho at a Vietnamese soup kitchen like Pho Cali in Raleigh, but that’s still approximately four times as tasty as plain ramen, and it takes roughly three minutes to put together.

The disadvantage, of course, is that the improvements bring up the price of the meal, from “darn near nothing” to “not a whole lot,” which may make a difference to the stereotypical Starving Student who subsists largely on ramen. Still, even real pho isn’t that pricey, at least here in the Big Breezy, which has a substantial resident Vietnamese population.

It occurs to me that if she’d boinked, oh, let’s say, Jesse Helms, that would be news.

It’s a tie, and it could have been even more of one.

I had three different excerpts scissored out from this Kathy Shaidle update, and finally narrowed it down to this one:

Listen: if these Muslim students and their puppet masters don’t like the imaginary Islamophobia they accuse Maclean’s of stirring up by publishing negative reviews of Little Mosque on the Prairie, wait ’till they get a load of the real Muslim-hating they unleash when they de facto shut down Canada’s oldest magazine…

A magazine, I’d like to remind them, that was started by Lt. Maclean over 100 years ago, using his own goddamn money without any goddamn taxpayer subsidies and postal breaks and whathaveyou.

That’s what intelligent, resourceful people do when they want to “make their voices heard.”

Of course, these aren’t intelligent, resourceful people we’re talking about. These are parasitical victocrats with fifth rate minds, determined to destroy their host nation one magazine, one taxpayer sponsored nuisance suit, one welfare harem, one OHIP-paid-for genital mutilation at a time.

Easier than flying airplanes you could never have invented into buildings you never could have built.

This is the sort of ferocity for which God stops His Yamaha so He can hear it better.

Meanwhile, David Freddoso glances at the current conventional climate wisdom:

So Global Warming will pause for a decade, just in time for the world’s economic superpower to debate over what to do about it. A very convenient truth indeed.

This means that the scientific consensus for the next decade will be that Global Warming is not happening, but man is causing it. Ever heard the one about the Yemeni Communist who declared, “There is no God, but Muhammed is his prophet?”

See the Yamaha reference, supra.

Someone who had to fight with IBM’s PCjr would probably not think so: Junior shipped with some weird plastic slab to which someone had superglued sixty-two pieces of Dentyne.

On the other hand, you can still touch-type, sort of, on Junior, which you can’t do on a vintage-2008 Dell Vostro 1310:

The whole of the bottom row of letters (Z, X, C…) is one too far to the right. The Z should be below and between A and S, not S and D … [The] keys are all there. Shift, \|, Z, X … it’s just that the left shift is too big, forcing everything over too far. The Z has to be between the A and S … look on ANY other keyboard and that’s where it sits.

(Via Megan McArdle.)

Even if you think you want to convert some YouTube nonsense to QuickTime, trust me: you really don’t want to.

I’m just saying.

An incident in Tulsa:

Prosecutors will decide whether charges are warranted against a Tulsa surgeon who is accused of chasing down a carload of teenagers and bashing their vehicle with a baseball bat.

Richard Lee Cooper, 41, was arrested during the weekend on seven counts of assault with a dangerous weapon after the teenagers reportedly knocked on his door several times and then ran Saturday night, Officer Jason Willingham said. Cooper and his wife told police that they thought someone was trying to break into their home.

And so Dr Cooper reportedly defends the perimeter:

According to the investigation, Cooper chased down the carload of teenagers, blocked their Nissan Xterra and then drove his vehicle into theirs. He then reportedly got out of his car with a baseball bat and beat their vehicle, breaking several windows.

You see, Doc, this is why we have guns: so we don’t have to go after people with a mere baseball bat.

Dr Cooper lives on Erie south of 101st. I recommend that you stay off his lawn.

I suspect the boffins at Chevrolet are pleased with the results of this Popular Mechanics road test, in which a 2008 Malibu with a four-cylinder engine and a six-speed automatic returned almost 30 mpg over a 500-mile trip.

And I was fairly impressed myself — the best I’ve done on a World Tour was 30.7 mpg in 2005 — until I got to the very last paragraph:

Remember, our Malibu was a fully loaded 3700-pound, five-passenger sedan with OnStar, satellite radio, all the normal power accessories, heated seats, tilt-and-telescope steering wheel, leather seating and remote starting. And it returned nearly 30 mpg on a brand-new engine with only 473 miles. That’s quite good, indeed.

Thirty-seven hundred pounds? Christ on a Krispy Kreme, as Rachel Lucas might say. In 2005 I was driving a Mazda 626, a car in the same size class as the Malibu, admittedly lacking some of the Chevy’s features but still with “all the normal power accessories,” and it weighed less than 3000 lb. My current ride is replete with electric servants, has ten percent more interior room, and comes in around 3400. Are they putting ballast in these things, or what?

(Via Autoblog Green.)

It was another day in the yard, this time to trim back some of the shrubbery, and about thirty gallons of cuttings into the process, I noticed that the ol’ ticker was running about 50 percent faster than normal. I wasn’t exactly out of breath or anything, but I could feel the beat, which is usually the sort of thing I find alarming.

This spring, though, I’ve had quite a few incidents like this, and I’m starting to think that this raggedy old body is laboring under the delusion that it’s getting some real live exercise. What’s more, there’s a chance that it actually might be. Consider: I own an electric trimmer, but I did all of today’s work with hand tools, and besides the shear motion, there’s a fair amount of stretching and bending involved. Even mowing with the electric constitutes a workout of sorts: apart from the acrobatics connected with dodging the cord at every turn, doing the 5500-square-foot back yard in 18-inch strips results in a walk on the far side of half a mile. (The front yard is smaller, but it’s also steeper.)

Recovery time has been at most a couple of minutes, and at no point — except, well, now — have I felt that omigod I’m setting myself up for a myocardial infarction or anything like that. Then again, it was only 65 degrees this afternoon, about ten below the seasonal spec. Ask me in August when it’s a hundred and four in the shade if I feel just the same.

Matt Stone, in the June ’08 Motor Trend:

If we have a problem with [Maserati's] elegant GranTurismo, it’s that it may be too gentile.

It’s Italian. Duh.

One small bit of serendipity yesterday: I’d earned a 10-percent-off day at Target, due to vigorous use of my Red Card at their pharmacy, and they had my choice of HVAC filter for $8.99, a buck off the usual, so I wound up shelling out $32.36 for a year’s worth.

This is a standard-sized filter, nominally 14 x 25 x 1. In practice, it measures more like 13.7 x 24.7 x 1. Also in practice, it’s apparently still too wide for its slot: it takes some serious bending and wedging to get the darn thing into place, and it’s a good thing I only have to do this every 90 days or so. Curiously, the vents where I work take this same size, and it simply slides into place with no issues.

I should point out that when I arrived here in 2003, I found a so-called “permanent” filter which looked like a giant Scotch-Brite pad; it appeared to have been there since the Devonian period. I duly vacuumed up the crud and returned it to duty, but the first time I had the system serviced, the technician gave me that “How could you?” look and installed what he considered a proper filter, which was indeed labeled 14 x 25 x 1. And he didn’t work up a sweat in so doing, either.

The next width down is a nominal 12, which means about 11.6, which will fall through the mounting and into the Phantom Zone, so that’s out. Is it just me, or do other people have to wrestle with this minor detail?

Mick Jagger asked that about forty years ago, and neither he nor we did a very thorough job of it: they crawl out of the woodwork every time some character who imagines himself a man of wealth and taste decides he needs to relive his younger days one last time.

About three years ago, Emilio Estevez started work on a dramatization of RFK’s life, which appeared the following year as Bobby. And the new Vanity Fair offers a brand-spanking-new hagiography this month. On the cover: Bobby Kennedy: The Hope, The Tragedy, And Why He Still Matters. Inside, an excerpt from Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008]. Inasmuch as nothing really has changed on this front, I have no qualms about reprinting what I said about the Estevez project:

Christ on a crutch! The. Kennedys. Are. Dead. Get over it.

Yes, I know Ted’s still there, looking and sounding more like Jabba the Hutt every day, still with his “My Other Car Is Underwater” bumper sticker, way past self-parody and long since descended into blithering irrelevance. Doesn’t change a thing: The. Kennedys. Are. Dead. Estevez would have you believe that the killing of RFK was a watershed event in world history; it wasn’t even the most important thing that happened in the summer of 1968. (Among other things, James Earl Ray, assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was taken into custody, the French were trying to recover from general strikes that had turned violent, eventually returning Charles de Gaulle to power, and Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae.) “Culturally, we all unraveled after that tragic night on June 5.” Yeah, right. Exactly one cultural phenomenon can be attributed to this event: it gave Eric Boucher one hell of a name for a band.

And, well, there’s always room for Jello.

Meanwhile, how much does the Real World, the sort of people who couldn’t get into Graydon Carter’s restaurant, give a damn about this? Not much: they’re busy fuming over Hannah Montana’s shoulder blades. This was to be expected: when given a choice between two utter trivialities, it’s fairly normal to select the newer one, and as Mr Jagger has already noted, all the sinners these days are saints.

From last fall:

I had to run a MySpace search on my major high-school crush. Worse, I think I found her: the name is right, the age is right, the location is right. Fortunately, it’s a dead page: she set it up a couple of years ago for whatever reason and then left it lying fallow, with only Tom to keep her company.

And if the age were right, it would have to have incremented yesterday.

Which it did. Damn.

However, this still applies:

Before you ask: no, there’s no reason she should want to hear from me. She got married after college, and among other things, she’s been bringing up three very lovely girls. (More of that RootsWeb stuff.) I am no more relevant to her existence than is the French and Indian War.

Now if it should turn out that she wrote her thesis on some aspect of the French and Indian War, well, dumb luck on my part, but I’m still not sending a friend request.

I seem to have lost my “B” set of keys. The “C” set is where it always is, and the “A” set is with the car keys and such, but the “B” keys, which are the ones I usually carry for working in the back yard, have disappeared. Oddly, yesterday I didn’t pick up this ring, as I already had the “A” keys with me.

I am just paranoid enough to want to get the locks changed — there are three — but not enough to call out a locksmith on a weekend. (Any local folks who can recommend one, please do so; I haven’t had to do this sort of thing in ages.)

It’s hard to add anything to this:

The Sioux Falls Canaries and Dakota Provisions are teaming up this summer to bring Fowl Balls to concession stands at the Birdcage. The venture makes Sioux Falls Stadium the first sports venue in the country to offer their fans a chance to enjoy turkey testicles.

Fat chance, say I. Says Rocket Jones:

The local poultry processor has some 32,000 extra Tom-bits left over at the end of each day, and someone became a marketing legend by convincing folks who should know better that nothing says baseball quite like a piping hot basket of Fowl Balls.

It would take an awful lot of Cracker Jack^® and brewskis to wash that down.

Received this weekend from, it says, irs.us (ha!):

Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as part of President Bush program to jumpstart the economy.

Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the 2008 Economic Stimulus Refund.

The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

Please follow the link and fill out the form and submit before May 10th, 2008 to ensure that your refund will be processed as soon as possible.

The link, I need hardly point out, doesn’t go to the government; it goes to a site in South Korea.

This last touch, though, is almost charming in a cynical sort of way:

NOTE: If you received this message in you SPAM/BULK folder, that is because of the large amount of e-mails we are sending out or because of the restrictions implemented by your ISP.

© Copyright 2008, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.

It is to laugh.

What are today’s World Citizens seeking? Hell if I know. All I get is stuff like this.

my bose cube speaker fell and split in half. How can I fix it?  Hint: You have to bring the separated halves back together.

video sound warrants real name criminal records fringer prints photos of all court officials state an federal level of statecourt hampton county even accademy memebers of norman c roy’s death in july 5th 1992 docket 92-1993:  There is such a thing as Search String Overkill, and this is Exhibit A.

just show me how too replace frigging halfton dash lights:  This is Exhibit B.

disagree on compact fluorescent bulbs:  Too late now, Bunkie.

pathetic car tax oklahoma excise:  Yes, it is true: you buy a car in Oklahoma, no matter how pathetic it is, you will pay an excise tax.

mccain condoleeza rice romulan durst:  One of these things is not like the other. I hope.

can you bake crystal meth in an apartment and other people cannot smell it?  They’ll smell it when you burn the building down, for sure.

i want to sue kellogg for severe pop tart burn:  Smelled like crystal meth, did it?

“kim jong il” defecation lawn:  The Dear Leader can crap wherever he pleases.

how to make furniture look antique:  Just wait a few decades.

flying termites does listerine works:  Has bad breath been a problem for termites?

invisible women in pantyhose on youtube:  Um, did you consider searching at YouTube?

I can’t imagine any way I could ever fill up all the Web space I’m paying for, and no doubt this is one reason why I clutter up the archives with an additional 150 pages or so every single month. (Another is sheer packratitude, a tendency I exhibit in Real Life, despite the urgent need for occasional decrapification.)

Not everyone is quite so indifferent to the load. For example:

Up to now, it’s all been contained in a single MS Access database file. That file peaks out at 100+MB and takes fifty minutes for City Desk to publish. Eventually, I will have to devise or buy a better method of handling the thing. But for now, I’m taking the view that no archive file past two years old is so worthwhile as to need to be preserved online. I have, accordingly, cut off the archive at the beginning of June, 2006. Anything older than that will not be accessible for a while. And, if I find it’s no loss, that “while” may become permanent.

My own database is only about 16 MB right now, but it got up close to 75 before it crashed in September ’06, and I shudder every time I go through a mass rebuild. Still, all the old pages remain in stasis, which is helping to choke the life out of everything:

Now there’s 8 million people building their Google-fu, with their tags and their five-way archive systems and their carefully-coddled text.

Everything archives now! The internet is a vast disaster. Is there any conceivable reason that Twitter needs to keep all our stupid-precious text messages forever?

What the internet needs is a great big server wipe. The ephemeral is way more important. If you want to keep it forever, get a Moleskine and a fireproof safe and put that in a concrete bunker. What good is it doing you anyway?

Which brings us back to packratitude (packrattery?). A vicious circle, this.

That’s about the only way I can explain how the same design house — Roberto Cavalli — that came up with this lovely little sandal…

… also came up with this monstrous clunker:

Even the Manolo seems perplexed.

CQ Politics has come up with something called VP Madness, in which you get to select John McCain’s running mate, kinda sorta. (A similar scheme for the Democrats will be rolled out “once the nominee is set.”)

It will be interesting to see how the results compare with the suggestions in Baseball Crank’s GOP Veepstakes.

(Swiped from the California Yankee.)

Sk*rt, a sort of Digg for Dames, is changing its name for some reason. Of the finalists, I’m partial to “Lemonade,” if only because they’ve suggested that they’d go to the trouble of snarfing up a German domain for it: it would perforce be lemona.de. I think “Kirtsy” will win, though.

Update: Geez, I was right.

Trini sent me a download link for the newest Nine Inch Nails project, The Slip, which was offered as a Zip file full of variable-rate MP3s or, if you do torrents, Apple Lossless, FLAC or actual .wav files. I don’t do torrents, so I opted for the MP3s, which sounded decent enough.

Somewhere during the download, I found myself with a horrible thought: What if I actually met NIN’s Trent Reznor and he turned out to be your genial, neighborly, 1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero sort of guy? Surely he can’t be this angst-y all the time, especially after having cleaned up 100 percent following some industrial-strength substance abuse.

Or maybe he can, and after some reflection (and listening to the tracks on The Slip), I figured out just what it was I’ve been responding to in NIN’s music. Reznor isn’t even close to monochromatic, tonally or emotionally; but his reaction to emotion, as I perceive it anyway, is binary: he confronts it, or he wallows in it. This is very like me, except that I do way more wallowing than confronting. I tossed this notion at Trini, who is more of a NIN fan than I am, and she said that it made sense to her. Then again, I suspect she’s still a bit surprised that I, barely on the near side of fifty-five, pay the slightest bit of attention to Nine Inch Nails, especially given my affinity for the Dawn Eden dictum “I don’t consider myself legally bound to know about any music past 1968.”

Speaking of 1968, Kim du Toit has a nice overview of some choice albums of that year, not all of which have been played to death in the subsequent four decades. Trent Reznor, I note for no particular reason, was three that year.

Note the clever use of the word “improve”:

The Netherlands has decided to improve the country’s road tax by taxing according to the vehicle type, usage, hour and roads the vehicle is using. The system uses GPS, a car transmitter and a standard cell phone GSM network to send this information to a central computer that processes the information. Once these figures are calculated, the driver is charged. Congestion and the environment are both taken into consideration in the rate scheme. Using a highway that enters a city in peak hours while driving an SUV will be taxed more than driving a small car in a rural area where private vehicles are more of a necessity.

This, of course, could not possibly have anything to do with the fact that the EU mandate for more fuel-efficient cars means less fuel tax flowing into the Dutch treasury. (See, for instance, this Oregon proposal from five years ago.)

“Full deployment” of the system is expected by 2016.

I don’t do a lot of grocery shopping at Target, mostly because the Target nearest to me is a couple of rungs short of Super-hood and therefore lacks a lot of grocery-store essentials, but I did have that 10-percent-off card, so while I was picking up stuff like furnace filters at a Target of greater Superness, I poked through the food aisles and turned up a curiosity: “New York Vanilla” ice cream, under their Market Pantry house brand.

One has to assume, given the price of real vanilla, that the flavoring is largely synthetic, but it’s a darn good synthetic. The yellowish color hints at the presence of eggs, which I am given to understand are an essential component of true New York Vanilla, but if they’re on the ingredient panel, they’re concealed behind something science-y. Target HQ being in Minnesota, maybe this is New York Mills Vanilla. It’s still pretty good.

I have two cell phones (one Nokia, one Motorola), each of which has its own charging cord, which is always in the last place I look.

That in itself is almost an argument for this gizmo sold by National Geographic:

Cameras, cell phones, or any device with a USB cord can be plugged into this unit and recharged by cranking the handle when you’re in the field or via power deposited through the included AC adapter when you’re at a hotel. It helps travelers pack lighter by eliminating the need for separate chargers.

The device comes with “adapters to fit most Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, and LG phones” and sells for $40. I have some doubts as to whether it will fit my Nokia 6133, but then it has nonstandard everything.

(Via Popgadget.)

I hesitate to say “Now I’ve seen everything,” but there can’t be much left on the list beyond four-hundred-dollar flip-flops.

Not only are they more expensive than Crocs, but apparently they’re (partly) made from crocs.

(Spied at Gawker.)

This, at least, you can’t blame on Saul Alinsky:

(Heisted from HeatherRadish.)

Think you can change the world with your blog? You’re deluded, says Professor Bainbridge:

[W]ith the exception of a few professionals like [Kevin] Drum or Andrew Sullivan, most of whom are sponsored by traditional journalism outlets, blogging tends to be the hobby of people with full-time jobs who do it because it’s more fun than stamp collecting.

I do in fact have a day job: 45-50 hours a week, most weeks. And while at one time I had a box full of nice (if not exactly mint) uncanceled stamps, I learned early on that philately would get me nowhere.

(Oh, come on. You knew this was coming.)

A fellow riding shotgun in a BMW X5 in Northumberland apparently mooned the speed camera, causing wailing and gnashing of teeth for at least one minion of Her Majesty’s Nanny State:

Jeremy Forsberg, of the Northumbria Safer Roads Initiative, said: “This behaviour is simply ridiculous — it’s clear what he was thinking with what he had on show. Not only is it disrespectful, but distasteful and offensive, particularly to children who may have been exposed to this nonsense. This prank could have been a real distraction from the driver and that is not something to laugh about.”

Get a grip, Jer. The camera could have gotten shot at.

(Via Nice Deb.)

Swiped from Fillyjonk, this premise (the explanation apparently originated elsewhere):

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (note 1)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (note 2)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (note 3)
The Three Musketeers

Notes:

• How I finished Atlas Shrugged and not this is amazing.

• With apologies to Jim Steinman and/or Meat Loaf, one out of three ain’t good.
• This is David Copperfield with two Ps by Charles Dickens, not David Coperfield with one P by Edmund Wells.

And I could swear I’ve read Emma, but I can’t remember where I picked it up, so I left it off.

Update: First paragraph redone to clarify credits.

The Harley-Davidson guys ran this in a print ad last week in USA Today, and since I would dearly love to see this turn into a cry for a rally, I’m copying it over here. (Because I need the occasional reminder myself, doncha know.)

We don’t do fear.

Over the last 105 years in the saddle, we’ve seen wars, conflicts, depression, recession, resistance, and revolutions.

We’ve watched a thousand hand-wringing pundits disappear in our rear-view mirror.

But every time, this country has come out stronger than before.

Because chrome and asphalt put distance between you and whatever the world can throw at you. Freedom and wind outlast hard times. And the rumble of an engine drowns out all the spin on the evening news.

If 105 years have proved one thing, it’s that fear sucks and it doesn’t last long.

So screw it, let’s ride.

Words to live by. (With thanks to Peter Michael DeLorenzo.)

I took just enough physics to know that air (or whatever) doesn’t leak into tires, so after a particularly rocky ride down a spectacularly godawful stretch of alleged pavement — NE 36th from Kelley to Lincoln, if you’re curious — it didn’t occur to me to check the tire pressures.

And when I did, they were way the hell out of spec. Nissan calls for 33/30; the fronts were 35, left rear 34, right rear 32.

Now how did this happen? My best guess, and it’s not so great, is that the last time Gwendolyn got a spa day, someone thought the Dunlops had done flopped, and gave them an extra shot of air. This strikes me as slightly unlikely, since I’d carefully deleted the “rotate tires” bit from the to-do list, and they certainly didn’t rotate them. (The JWL mark is your friend.)

Anyway, after correction, the same stretch of road proved much less likely to bang my head into the sunroof, so I’m assuming that my gauge, despite its age (about five cars now), is still reasonably accurate.

Tip #3409: You’re on the drive home and you can’t hear the tornado sirens going off because the wind is too loud.

Seriously. On 39th west of Classen I saw a city trash bin, once full of yard waste, upended. And the operative word here is “on”: the bin dropped across one lane of traffic, forcing motorists to detour around it, provided of course that they even saw it, black shapes being fairly indistinguishable when the skies have next to no light to give.

As severe thunderstorms go, this one was pretty routine — except that I was actually out in it, which made it look a whole lot worse.

Update: Damage reports are coming in, and apparently the worst of it hit just a couple miles west of me.

Australian writer Bob Ellis, apparently wounded by a Tim Blair taunt, actually comes back with this:

I was made Columnist of the Year in 2003 for regular pieces I wrote on subjects of morality. Does he have a similar award? Can he show it to me?

I have 18 other major awards for television drama, theatre and feature film writing, including three Premier’s Awards.

What prizes does Tim have in these areas?

Regular readers of these pages will recognize this particular gambit as Playing the Rob Schneider Card. Background, early 2005:

• Patrick Goldstein, in the Los Angeles Times, took a shot at Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, to the effect that it was “sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.”

• Deuce Bigalow star Rob Schneider subsequently took out a full-page ad in Variety attacking Goldstein’s credentials: “Well Mr. Goldstein, as far as your snide comments about me and my film not being nominated for an Academy Award, I decided to do some research to find what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind, Disappointed, I went to the Pulitzer Prize database of past winners and nominees. I though, surely, there must be an omission. I typed in the name Patrick Goldstein and again, zippo — nada.” And so forth.

Which would have been the end of that, except that six months later, Roger Ebert stepped into the fray:

Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

Were I Bob Ellis, I’d be listening carefully for another shoe to drop. Just in case.