You don’t give a damn about us, but we’re your biggest customer:

The broadcast networks have grown older than ever — if they were a person, they wouldn’t even be a part of TV’s target demo anymore.

According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets’ median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo.

Add in the “live plus 7″ numbers, to allow for the TiVoists, and it goes all the way down — to 49.

“The median ages of the broadcast networks keep rising, as traditional television is no longer necessarily the first screen for the younger set,” Sternberg wrote.

Over on cable, Nickelodeon and Noggin have the 10-year-old demographic locked up.

Of course, if you want 65-year-olds, you advertise on Fox News, which has the greyest audience of them all. I figure it’s because it’s loud and we’re hard of hearing.

You know, maybe we’ve been too hard on the poor girl all these years:

In its latest campaign, Peta — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which became infamous for dousing fur-wearers in red paint — has launched an attack on the singer Jessica Simpson.

Ms Simpson was singled out for ridicule after she was spotted wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Real Girls Eat Meat”, believed to be a light-hearted dig at her boyfriend Tony Romo’s vegetarian ex-girlfriend, Carrie Underwood.

For lunch, I think I’ll pop open a can of Tuna of the Land in her name.

Disclosure: I once paid actual cash money for a copy of “I Wanna Love You Forever.”

The last time I rented a car was 2006, between the Bambi incident and the arrival of Gwendolyn. I was not particularly impressed with it, and described it thusly:

As a temporary measure, I am sliding around town in a Dodge Stratus SXT in Frigidaire White. Despite the jumble of letters, this is the bottom-feeder of the line, with a nothing-special four-banger driving the front wheels. It’s an acceptable grocery-getter, but not the least bit amusing to drive, and while the seats are better than average, their adjustment range doesn’t include any position in which I’m comfortable. I am contemplating returning it to the rental yard and asking for something I can actually deal with. Inasmuch as I’m having to pay for it myself, I can’t think of any reason why they’d object.

Obviously I would have welcomed an upgrade, had one been offered. But that was then, and this is now:

There was a time when most rental car customers would have welcomed an upgrade to a midsize or sedan, a minivan or an SUV, but that was before gas was “upgraded” to $4 a gallon or more.

Now some customers say rental car companies increasingly try to pressure them to take the gas-guzzling bigger vehicles, even when they have reserved a compact. Car rental agencies apparently can’t keep enough of the smaller, more fuel-efficient cars on lots to meet demand.

I need hardly remind you that if you bring back the Grand Marquis de Sade with a half-empty tank, they’re going to charge you a lot more than four bucks a gallon for your insolence.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Apparently Russian cheerleaders — or their fans, perhaps — really go for those fishnets.

Which gives me a chance to recycle this screed from 2003:

I may be quite alone among the world’s skelophiles in this regard, but I have never, ever grasped the appeal of fishnets. I have been fortunate enough over the years to have met a small number of women with incredible legs, and not once have I found myself thinking, “Gee, I wonder what she’d look like if you overlaid a pattern of polygons upon her.”

(Aside: This is probably the only context in which I’ll ever be able to use the term “overlaid”.)

(Spotted first by Lynn.)

The iTunes installation on the work box, set to shuffle through 3,236 tracks, managed to put these two together:

• P. J. Proby’s “Niki Hoeky,” from 1967, cowritten by Pat and Lolly Vegas.

• Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” from 1974, written and sung by Pat and Lolly Vegas.

As the phrase goes: “What are the chances?”

They’re so, well, pervasive, and they tend to scare off bloggers of the feminine persuasion, even hardy souls like Jacqueline Passey:

[A]nyone — including stalkers and creepy strangers — can read what I post here, so I have to censor myself much more than I would if I was writing only to people I know. My husband doesn’t want me posting pictures of him because he doesn’t want weirdos stalking him in the poker room and/or outing him as a professional gambler to the fish. My more privacy-oriented friends and family members don’t want me to blog about them at all. I often start to write about my plans then delete it when I realize that I’m giving out too many details about where I’m going to be when (I’ve had some bad experiences with creepy men showing up places to pester me after finding out where I was going to be from my blog).

She’s contemplating moving to Facebook, where at least the creeps will be creeps she already knows.

File this under “Let’s call this song exactly what it is”:

I’ve noticed that a hugely disproportionate number of my blog “friends” are single heterosexual males (SHMs). Perhaps this is just an innocent correlation due to a combination of my primarily “male” interests and the additional free time that singles have available to spend socializing online. But I suspect that in many cases it’s because their interest is more than friendly. This was flattering when I was single, but now that I’m married I’d prefer that my friends not fantasize about having sex with me.

I realize that sexual attraction is not every SHM’s motivation for befriending me (so no need to leave ego-deflating comments about how much you don’t want to have sex with me, thanks :) ) but it’s the motivation of enough SHMs that it makes me suspicious of all of them. Especially since I am apparently not very good at reading people in this area — I’ve been surprised by how many of my SHM “friends” suddenly stopped speaking to me after I got married. (Many of these former “friends” also used to pretend that their interest was only “friendly” when I was single, so I’ve stopped believing SHMs about their true motivations for friendships with women.)

Self-preservation in action, I’d say. I hate to bash my half of the species, but I suspect the rep we have is pretty much the rep we earned. I just went back through some of my outgoing email, and I noticed that more than once, when writing to a female blogger, I’ve included a line to the effect that “I promise not to hit on you.” Unless, of course, I was actually hitting on her.

And I hasten to add that I’m not generalizing from a single example, either. We call Moxie to the stand:

Just wanted to thank Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom … for noticing — since I mentioned that “boyfriend” word — my male readers have moved on out!

I’m trying to think of any instances where I quit reading someone upon discovering she was off the market.

Update: Ace-alanche!

Further update: Facebook it is, and the old blog (not to be confused with the older blog) is now closed.

Car songs had one Golden Age (think “Shut Down” or “Dead Man’s Curve”) and one Silver Age (think “Born to Run”). Today we’re hard-pressed to come up with so much as zinc.

Ezra Dyer corroborates in Automobile (8/08):

Since the rock world decided, post-Beach Boys, that it was no longer cool to sing about cars, these days the car-as-muse belongs mostly to the rap and country genres. And country is sort of limited, since country singers are prohibited by law from mentioning any vehicle that’s not four-wheel drive, American, and a pickup.

So the bulk of the automotive name-dropping occurs in rap, because many rap songs hew to a basic thematic structure that hinges on the dichotomy of two main ideas: One, that I have lots of things; moreover, you do not.

What’s more, my things are better, or at least more expensive, than yours:

I’m sick of hearing about Bentleys and Phantoms, Range Rovers and Navigators, Bimmers and Benzes. Do you know how many times “Lexus” has been rhymed with “Texas”?

Then again, blingophiles hungering for street cred aren’t about to let you know about the Corolla they borrowed to get around town after they couldn’t afford to fill up the Slade’s tank anymore.

Back in ‘02, Chevrolet ran an ad campaign featuring Chevy-related song lyrics, and some genius came up with this tagline: “They don’t write songs about Volvos.” To this day I still get searches for variations on that string. I think I’ll just start referring them to Everclear.

But that’s the only quarrel I have with this T-shirt for the dedicated bicyclist.

(Found at Swirlspice.)

I’m sure this is happening to someone, though not to me:

You know, of late, I’ve noticed a disturbing sexist pattern of behavior in some readers of blogs I visit. Swooning, crying and apparently, in some cases, fainting. Pass the smelling salts, will you? Said swooning and likewise super girlie behavior can usually be found on the blogs of men. Hence the sexist aspect of this widespread epidemic. And frankly, this has me a little flooped out.

I mean, what am I, chopped liver? Yes, it’s true, I’m jealous and feel more than a little left out. There is nothing more disheartening than visiting one of my buddies’ blogs only to see an inordinate amount of female commenters, swooning, moaning and fanning themselves. It’s just not fair.

Maybe that’s my selling point for the future. “Visit dustbury.com, now with 70 percent less vapor.”

Actually, I don’t have an issue here. There isn’t a whole lot of swoonage in the comment box here, but then again, the sort of person who is actually going to read the sort of stuff I write on anything resembling a regular basis is, I suspect, not given to fainting spells. Besides which, I have a fair number of female blog friends, and I have no reason to assume that their interests are largely prurient.

This question, though, I’ll have to pass on:

Can men only safely express their emotions during the Super Bowl and gut-wrenching sex?

To those of you who have managed to have gut-wrenching sex during the Super Bowl, my congratulations.

The city of Seattle and the basketball team formerly known as the Seattle SuperSonics have apparently settled their differences. I’ve been listening to the radio pickup from Seattle’s City Hall. They’re putting the best possible face on it — and it’s a pretty good face, considering they’re getting rather more of a concession from Clay Bennett and friends than had been previously offered: $45 million up front to get out of the lease, which would more than cover the amount still due on KeyArena, and conceivably another $30 million [see below]. It’s a big chunk of change, but I’m guessing it’s probably about what Bennett expected to lose in two lame-duck years in Seattle.

The separate Schultz lawsuit has not been settled, but I expect it will wither away shortly.

And note that word “formerly”: Seattle retains the rights to the name “SuperSonics” and the team colors, which is fine with me.

Meanwhile, upgrades to the Ford Center will begin this summer.

Update: Here’s the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article on the settlement.

Addendum: Commissioner David Stern weighs in:

[I]f an opportunity arose in the future for an NBA team to be located in Seattle, we would support that team playing its home games in a re-built KeyArena, if it wished. However, given the lead times associated with any franchise acquisition or relocation and with a construction project as complex as a KeyArena renovation, authorization of the public funding needs to occur by the end of 2009 in order for there to be any chance for the NBA to return to Seattle within the next five years.

And if the funding is authorized, today’s settlement calls for Bennett et al. to ante up $30 million unless Seattle gets another team within five years.

But what the heck:

(First seen Anywhere But Here.)

The casualty list following two days of Guitar Hero Aerosmith:

• one broken whammy bar

• one stuck green button
• one wrist wrapped as a direct result of long-term game play
• four fingers requiring alternating ice and heat to be able to unclench
• ten packages of eye drops to re-hydrate two very dry eyes
• three packages of AA batteries

Maybe it’s just as well I never got much past the old text adventures.

Samples from a list of the 10 Scariest Cities in America:

Baltimore [#3] is the most rat-infested city in America. I recommend that you keep one eye open while sleeping, or you might end up with a rat’s nest in your hair.

A recent study done by Hallmark showed that El Paso [#4] has the worst sense of humor of any other place in the country. They also have the lowest greeting card sales numbers. I wouldn’t dare crack a joke in this town.

[Los Angeles — #10] The city with the largest class stratification in America, complete with plenty of slimy millionaires and tons of boob jobs. Enough said.

Let it be known that at one time I was considering a Pacific Northwest loop for a future World Tour. However, at the moment I don’t think it’s a good idea to show up anywhere near Seattle with Oklahoma plates.

The next step for an NBA-less Seattle, says Costa:

Instead of embarking on a mad dash for another shot at big-league hoops, the Emerald City should take its parting gift, and promptly graft it onto the next National Hockey League team that wants to move into KeyArena.

Why not? Hockey is a missing link for the Pacific Northwest’s sports scene (the cross-border Vancouver Canucks notwithstanding). Reviving the Seattle SuperSonics as an NHL team would nicely fill the void. That green-and-gold color scheme would look great fitted with skates and hockey sticks. The Sonics logo would have to be reworked a little, but it can’t be too hard to airbrush that basketball into a puck.

Now I’m worried. This is starting to sound almost logical.

Spring 1988. I’m in the express line in a supermarket just off the Pacific Coast Highway south of Los Angeles, pretending to be verifying that I indeed have ten items or less (which should be “ten items or fewer,” but this is in a store that probably ought to have an apostrophe in its name and it doesn’t), when what I’m really doing is sneaking the occasional peek at the person in front of me: five foot eleven or twelve, hair a color that might exist in nature but nowhere I’ve ever been, wearing a fairly skimpy swimsuit and a white top notable for its lack of opacity. No spring chicken, this; she’d clearly been around the block a few times, but this being Southern California after all, I’m probably guessing too low. Thirty-nine? Let’s try forty-six. “Seven, eight, nine,” I mumble, trying to avoid being caught in the act.

And as she’s pulling currency out of a billfold, I am taken aback by something else I’m seeing: one of those senior-citizen discount cards, of necessity printed in LARGE TYPE. Aphrodite here, it seems, is somewhere on the far side of fifty-five.

Cut to me peeling out of the parking lot, windows open, singing a couple of choruses of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” O brave new world, that has such women in ‘t. Then again, I’m a guy, and this is to be expected. Women might not be so forgiving.

I have an actual reader request for a piece about the FitFlop, which, it says here, is “engineered with a multi-density mid-sole that stimulates your muscles more while you’re wearing them.” A lot to ask of a shoe, I suspect, and not everyone is enthusiastic:

A British invention, FitFlops are purported to help work and tone the muscles of the thighs and calves so that women can burn even more calories and reduce the dread fat and cellulite — all for a pittance of $49.95. One reviewer said she found them comfortable, but added that it requires 15 percent energy than ordinary walking and that other wearers have reported discomfort. Other reviewers also reported discomfort, as well as a dismal lack of sandal-sculpted legs. But not only are such diet shoes not likely to give you the legs of a supermodel, they can actually throw you off your stride resulting in lower leg and feet pain.

As can any flip-flop, probably. Far be it from me to complain about the prospect of supermodel legs, but there’s more than a faint hint of hype here. Still, if you wear them and are willing to defend them, now’s your chance.

Unevenly distributed, of course.

I changed out sleep medications last night, opting for the old and formerly reliable instead of the new and possibly habit-forming. I was paid back for this decision by the most bizarre dream I think I’ve ever had.

I’ve driven somewhere to visit family, and I’ve timed my arrival poorly: no one’s home, and what’s more, it’s been raining. There’s something wrapped in plastic on the walk, which turns out to be a Sunday New York Times, already beginning to disintegrate from all the water. I toss it aside, and suddenly I’m somewhere else: the yard looks the same, but the street is totally different. The most salient difference to me, though, is that my car is gone.

I pull out the cell phone: no bars. Figures, I grumble, and start walking. Nothing looks familiar. In about half an hour, I arrive at Shea Stadium, which at least tells me where I am: in the city of New York, borough of Queens. Which explains why nothing looks familiar, since the only time I’ve ever been to Queens was to change planes at JFK, there being no direct flights from Istanbul to Oklahoma City in 1975. Or today.

There’s no reason for me to hang around Shea, so I veer off at an angle, and eventually encounter an expressway of some sort. Traffic is not so heavy, but not moving so quickly either. Across the road, I find what appears to be a bizarre psychological experiment: people are throwing coins onto the shoulder to see if anyone will bother to stop. On foot, I manage to scoop up around $4.

The second storefront on the cross street appears to be a travel agency. I wander in and ask if anyone’s seen my car — they haven’t, of course — and how I can get back to the address I was supposed to be visiting in the first place. After some heated discussion, and a mistake in the production room (“You made how many copies of the itinerary?”), a woman from the agency walks me the first couple of blocks, and says, “From this point, you’re on your own, but it gets easier.” It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier to me: for one thing, I seem to have lost my shoes.

I walk about another quarter-mile, or so it seems, and end up in what looks like an airport gate. For a moment, I sit down, and someone yells something untranslatable yet easily interpreted: “There he is! SEIZE HIM!” Seize this, pal, I say, but no words come out, and so I flee.

Beep! I pull the cell phone from my pocket: incoming text message. I’m in no mood to read a text message, what with goons, or whatever, on my trail, but it occurs to me that if a text message can come in, I must have connectivity of some sort. So I duck into a storefront and push buttons. When finally I get an answer, it’s my ex, and in fact I can see her answering: she’s right across the room.

“What are you doing in New York?” I ask. She looks puzzled. “This isn’t New York.” “About time you two showed up,” says a third voice, and we are confronted by someone who looks like Ralph Edwards, circa This Is Your Life. Worse yet, he has books, and opening one of them, he demands an explanation of an incident.

She speaks first. “That never happened.” I look over the materials, and realize that they pertain to a relative, but not to me. I attempt to say so, but again, no words come out. Ralph continues to press, and I manage to come up with “Enough. We’re leaving.” Which we do; and we get about 50 yards before I am set upon by goons.

I am taken to a warehouse of some sort, and there’s this contraption suspended from the ceiling, a scary blend of M. C. Escher and Rube Goldberg which turns out to be an animated timeline, a simulation of just about everything dumb I’d ever done, in chronological order, complete with badgering voices and the occasional wooden stick to push me back into position. At about age 16, I see an opportunity, and I jump; they of course give chase, but I’m already out of the building.

But not out of the woods. I’m near the bottom of a bowl, an ancient sinkhole that eventually quit sinking. Grass has already grown along the slopes. I can’t possibly make it up those angles. There is, however, a tree; if I can make it halfway up the tree and then along one horizontal branch, I will eventually end up at the original ground level. So I start climbing. The goons aren’t pursuing; they’re watching, waiting for me to fail. Once I reach that horizontal branch, though, the possibility occurs to them that I might not fail at all. But they have further tricks up their sleeve. First, the bark begins to peel off; I have difficulty getting a grip. There is no wind to speak of, but the tree starts to sway just the same. Finally, the very rim of the bowl starts to dissolve into nothingness, random chunks of green just falling away, a cartoon effect that, were you to see it in real life, would not even remind you of cartoons.

It is at this point that the brain commands “That’s it, we’re done,” and I wake up. You wouldn’t think 50 mg of diphenhydramine hydrochloride would cause this much delirium.

You couldn’t prove it by me, but Allstate Insurance says that Oklahoma City drivers, compared to the national average, are 4.9 percent less likely to be involved in a collision; the Big Breezy ranks eighth among cities between 500,000 and 1 million population, and 54th out of 193 cities surveyed. (Tulsa is 74th, 0.7 percent better than average.) The average driver, says Allstate, has a collision every ten years; it’s 10.1 in Tulsa, 10.4 in Oklahoma City, and a whopping 14.6 years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The press release wasn’t unkind enough to mention the bottom of the list; after poking around Allstate’s Web site, I turned up a PDF file of the complete list, and all by itself at the bottom is the District of Columbia. Washington drivers average one crash every 5.4 years, 83.6 percent worse than average.

Disclosures: Allstate does not calculate figures for states in which it does no business — in other words, Massachusetts. And in 33 years of driving I have had, you guessed it, three collisions.

Jesse Helms, for thirty years a Senator from North Carolina, acknowledging — hell, probably boasting — that he was something of a polarizing figure in his home state:

They [Democrats] could nominate Mortimer Snerd and he’d automatically get 45 percent of the vote.

In fact, the Democrats sent out an assortment of Snerds to face Helms, and at no time did Helms poll more than 55 percent.

Helms, arguably the last actual Republican in the Senate — certainly among the last few who didn’t feel compelled to embrace “bipartisanship” — died today at the age of eighty-six.

Note: Last paragraph rewritten for clarity, or at least less obfuscation.

A couple of years ago, Gnarls Barkley put out a cover of “Gone Daddy Gone,” a 1982 song from the Violent Femmes catalog, and actually, the Gnarly Ones didn’t do too badly: they didn’t quite convey Femmes-level menace, but they didn’t turn it into a farce either. (At least on the record, that is; the video is another matter.)

The Femmes have now returned the favor, and I can’t describe it any better than this:

Like a Morricone-style dirge recorded by The Mamas and The Papas, Violent Femmes’ cover of Gnarls Barkley’s infamous “Crazy” is like nothing you’ve heard from the legendary alt-rock trio before. Their oft-imitated folk-punk sound is flavored with surf-rock guitar and Theremin, creating a tranquility that is somber and otherworldly.

You can hear it here. And if the whole idea disturbs you, be grateful you missed the Femmes’ take on the SpongeBob SquarePants theme.

(Via belhoste.)

There was a lot of flapdoodle in the Oklahoman this week about the inevitable Big Boom downtown to follow the arrival of the Oklahoma City Subsonics, or whatever they’re going to be called.

The Prohibition Room restaurant in the Gold Dome, two miles up Classen, doesn’t want to be left out, so they’re setting up a shuttle service: “Park your car here and we will take you to the game.”

This could work, if 9:30 or so — figure on a 7:00 start time and a 7:12 tipoff — isn’t too late for your idea of dinner, or if you want to celebrate a victory (or wash away the stench of losing) with libations. I expect other eateries in town will follow suit.

This may or may not be good news, depending on whether, as is common these days, we can expect the public-health drones to backpedal or even reverse themselves in a few months. For now, though:

A flurry of recent research indicating that Vitamin D may have a dizzying array of health benefits has reignited an intense debate over whether federal guidelines for the “sunshine vitamin” are outdated, leaving millions unnecessarily vulnerable to cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other ailments.

The studies have produced evidence that low levels of Vitamin D make men more likely to have heart attacks, breast and colon cancer victims less likely to survive, kidney disease victims more likely to die, and children more likely to develop diabetes. Two other studies suggested that higher Vitamin D levels reduce the risk of dying prematurely from any cause.

Of course, too high a level of anything isn’t likely to be good for you either:

“We call it a vitamin, but it’s really a steroid,” said Trevor G. Marshall, a molecular biologist at Murdoch University in Australia. “It’s not something we should be playing with.”

Specifically, it’s a secosteroid: the ring structure has some open sides, unlike the case with “ordinary” steroids.

Still, I don’t think I’m lagging in my Vitamin D levels, unlike many of my peers:

With people spending more time indoors surfing the Web, watching television, working at desk jobs, and covering up and using sunblock when they do venture outdoors, the amount of Vitamin D that people create in their bodies has been falling. Milk and a few other foods are fortified with Vitamin D, and it occurs naturally in others, such as fatty fish, but most people get very little through their diets.

“Humans evolved in equatorial Africa wearing no clothes,” said Robert P. Heaney, a leading Vitamin D researcher at Creighton University in Omaha. “Now we get much less direct sunlight, and so we don’t make nearly as much Vitamin D.”

I’m doing my part to soak up those rays — in moderation, of course. Of course, clinical overexposure and legal overexposure are two different concepts, but that’s another matter entirely.

(Swiped from here.)

Of course, it’s July and it’s hot, which some people might find makes them a bit angrier, but if you really want to pinpoint an aggressive driver, you might watch out for bumper stickers:

[A] study published in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology suggests that drivers with bumper stickers, window decals and personalized license plates are more likely to succumb to road rage.

Paul Bell, the Colorado State University psychology professor who co-authored the study, said it was based on the theory that there are three types of territory: primary, secondary and public. When an area is private, the person will go to lengths to protect it and may become aggressive, according to the theory.

The more personal a driver makes his or her car, the more likely that driver will feel the need to defend it when someone gets in the way, even though the road is a public area, Bell said.

“They take it as an offense against their private territory,” he said. “They get confused about the social norms about defending a primary versus a public territory.”

It does not seem to matter which type of personalization is used, Bell said.

I have no stickers, not even AAA Plus, and I’m not particularly aggressive on the road, but the more I think about this premise, the more I think it’s a load of dingo’s kidneys.

Speaking of AAA, Chuck Mai of the Oklahoma branch has his doubts as well:

Mai said he thinks people are willing to be more aggressive in their vehicles than in public because vehicles more or less hide the aggressor.

“The problem with the motor vehicle is it offers a certain amount of anonymity,” he said. “Remember, driving is not a contest.” He said one of the reasons he thinks drivers have become more aggressive is because most people are in a hurry while they are driving.

I will state that one almost-infallible way to irk me while I’m on the road is to try to slow me down. Austin, Texas is just jam-packed with road warts aimed at “traffic calming.” Still, my primary concern at those moments is less “I oughta punch out the guy who approved this crap” and more “To whom do I address my lawsuit when my suspension parts go?”

Most frightening: this was the lead story in the Oklahoman this morning, proving that there really is such a thing as a slow news day.

The question now becomes: How does Seattle get back into the NBA ranks? Maybe like this:

There will be a team in Seattle, and it will most likely be the former Grizzlies. Professional sports in Tennessee, other than the Titans, have not been particularly successful. The [NHL Nashville] Predators might be on the way out as well. The Grizzlies will go back to the Pacific Northwest, where they started just across the border, and then they can realign the divisions so that they make sense again (put the Grizzlies/New Sonics in the Northwest and the OKC TBDs in the Southwest — them playing in the Northwest next season will be ridiculous, but can’t be avoided).

I think the best option would be to take the Clippers away from [Donald] Sterling. That guy is such a loser, with his absolute obsession with being the No. 3 client in Staples when he could be top dog in the Honda Center but refuses to go there. The best thing for the league would be to get the Clippers the heck out of Staples — it’s so moronic that they won’t at least go to Anaheim. But I don’t think Sterling would let his toy go to Ballmer or anyone else.

They won’t move the Hornets because attendance went way up at the end of the season, and poaching K-Ville would look even worse than Bennett’s shenanigans. They already lost the Jazz way back when, and another team won’t be taken from them.

Grizzlies it is. No real history in Memphis, no devoted fan base, nobody who really cares much about them. Mark my words, Ballmer poaches the Grizzlies. With the OKC TBDs down in the area, that covers the Tennessee/Arkansas market anyway.

Expansion can’t be ruled out out completely either. Vegas and KC are itching for a team, and I just can’t see the Maloofs moving the Kings after all this. But for the New Sonics, I really do see the Grizzlies as the most likely quarry for Ballmer. I just don’t see a whole “Save Our Grizzlies” grassroots movement happening, so it’s really no comparison.

A couple of years ago, Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley attempted to sell out, but the deal foundered, perhaps because it was contingent on, among other things, the team staying put in Memphis for four more years. (Where have we heard this before?) There was, in fact, a “Save the Grizzlies” grassroots movement — but it was in Vancouver, before the Griz abandoned the Northwest for the Mid-South. (Where have we heard this before?)

Prying the Clippers out of L.A. is a new one on me, but it makes a certain amount of sense: the Lakers dominate that market, and likely always will. The Clippers are no longer the doormats of the NBA — it’s unlikely they’ll ever again have a season as bad as 1986-87, when they lost 70 games out of 82 — but middling success insures they’ll never have a national constituency the way the Lakers do. And certainly the Hornets aren’t going anywhere, for exactly the reasons given.

So: the Grizzlies. Not an impossible scenario. But it’s worth remembering that the Griz departed the 20,000-seat Pyramid Arena in 2004 in favor of the smaller but more lucrative FedEx Forum. What happened to the Pyramid? It’s about to be turned into one of those Bass Pro Shops. Fans of Seattle’s KeyArena as it is should be shuddering about now.

File this under “As if”:

(Poached from Lois E. Lane.)

The corporate name is “Remarkable Results, Inc.” Sounds like your basic Silicon Valley startup. It is, however, nothing of the kind:

A new clothing brand may be born out of the Texas raid on a polygamous sect.

FLDS women for the first time are offering their handmade, distinctive style of children’s clothes to the public through the Web site fldsdress.com. Launched initially to provide Texas authorities with clothing for FLDS children in custody, the online store now is aimed at helping their mothers earn a living.

The venture, which has already drawn queries from throughout the U.S., is banking on interest in modest clothes, curiosity and charity to be a success. “We don’t know what to expect on demand but we have had a flood of interest,” said Maggie Jessop, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “Our motive is not to flaunt ourselves or our religion before the world. We have to make a living the same as everyone does.”

The clothing is pricey — it’s handmade, after all — and conforms to LDS scriptural references such as this (Doctrine and Covenants 42:40):

And again, thou shalt not be proud in thy heart; let all thy garments be plain, and their beauty of the work of thine own hands.

Says Kathleen Fasanella of Fashion-Incubator:

I wish them all the best. I’d send them a book if they’d think it’d help. They certainly have the patterns down and they’ve got the workforce. What an exciting experiment to witness: barn raising a manufacturing company overnight. I wish I were closer and had an invite.

And who knows? This may turn out to be the Next Modestly-Big Thing.

Not such a great idea, notes Mister Snitch:

We should also put a stake in the heart of bloggers being ‘more honest’ than commercial writers. That was a nice warm fuzzy comforting blanket for the first wave of bloggers, but it just ain’t so. There’s actually nothing inherent in blogging that dictates it will attract more honest citizens than other forms of written expression. There are honest bloggers, and dishonest bloggers. No one is without agenda, and as with most human endeavors, it’s the crusaders and reforms you really have to watch out for. They’ll get you whether they’re leading a church, ’saving’ you from dishonest politicos, or writing a blog. Ultimately, you’ll have to make up your own damn mind about where the truth lies.

Reminder: “Reform” and “deform” are even closer to each other than they look.

1. An actual name. I’m starting to lean toward “Scissortails,” just because it seems so implausible.

2. An actual shooting guard. Yeah, Kevin Durant’s been playing there, but he just seems like a natural small forward, and the team is short on guys who can consistently hit from the perimeter. Still, Sam Presti’s goal during this year’s draft seemed to be bolstering the defense, and I’m not about to knock a solid D if we can get one. And if everyone who was appalled at the thought of playing out on the prairie were dealt elsewhere, there’d be cap space the likes of which no one would believe. (Not gonna happen, though, especially since one of the dismayed was Durant.)

3. A TV guy. The long-time Sonics play-by-play man, Kevin Calabro, has already said he’s not moving. (Matt Pinto, who was hired by the Sonics last year to do radio, will be here.)

4. Someone to carry those TV games. I suspect Cox has the upper hand over FSN Southwest, but no deals have been announced.

5. Someone to carry those radio games. We can probably eliminate the Renda group, since they have serious OU obligations. This leaves either Clear Channel (any number of stations) or Citadel (probably the Sports Animal).

6. A temporary practice facility. When the Hornets were here, they practiced at Southern Nazarene University in Bethany; SNU has said they’d be happy to make arrangements for the, um, Scissortails, and Oklahoma City University reportedly would be amenable to the idea. It was suggested on an Oklahoman comments page that they practice at Casady School in the Village, home of Bennett Athletic Center. No points for guessing which Bennett.

7. A place for a permanent practice facility. Steve Lackmeyer is taking suggestions for the location; the general feeling seems to be that it should be somewhere outside the city’s core, lest it conflict with other development goals.

8. An estimate of ticket prices. This is so I can start haranguing MasterCard for a higher credit limit.

9. Some locally-based blogs to cover the team. Given the generally excellent work done by Supersonicsoul and Sonics Central, whoever takes on the job — no, not me; I have too many irons in the fire already — has a hard act to follow.

I don’t really believe that the FCC, by killing off analog television over the air, is trying to force us into buying cable or satellite service, but this report by Doc Searls doesn’t reassure me:

For a variety of arcane technical reasons, many (perhaps most) digital signals are directional. That is, they operate at their full licensed power in only a few (or perhaps only one) direction, and have big dents or “nulls” in other directions. In the old analog days directionality was the exception rather than the rule, and was usually intentional, to protect other signals on the same or adjacent frequencies, or to pull back on the signal in the direction of a mountain that might cause unwanted reflections or places (such as the sea) where nobody lived anyway. Not the case with DTV. Lots of new DTV signals are directional just anyway.

How does this work out in real life? Not so great from Doc’s place in Santa Barbara:

On my old roof antenna and its rotator, I got just about every analog TV station between Santa Barbara and San Diego. That included both VHF and UHF signals. With that antenna (the top one from Radio Shack) I even got little K35DG, a low-power UHF station at UC San Diego with a signal that puts a deep null in our direction (west-northwest, nearly 200 miles across the Pacific Ocean). I sent them emails reporting reception and they were amazed.

In our new house (next door to the old one with the big roof antenna) I anticipated the digital switchover and installed a very high-gain Winegard HD-9032 UHF antenna. (Here’s a pdf.) It’s an outstanding device that’s even better on UHF than the old all-channel one. For analog reception it got every UHF in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana. In nearly all weather, at nearly all times of year. But that’s analog. What about digital?

For DTV, the Winegard does the best it can, but it’s not enough. The slight terrain shadowing between here and Broadcast Peak (where out local TV stations come from) makes them almost impossible to receive. KEYT on Channel 3 was (and for now still is) a powerhouse that we could get with rabbit ears. KEYT’s digital signal on Channel 27 is barely there. In fact it’s so bad that the one time I got it the signal didn’t stay visible long enough for me to shoot a picture of it. Meanwhile we get nothing from anywhere but the only place that provides a fairly clear signal path, even if it’s across the curved ocean. That’s San Diego/Tijuana. All our HD viewing of over-the-air TV is from there. At one time or another we’ve been able to get all the HD signals from there, and add them into the memory of our Dish Network box, which also has an HD receiver. As you see here and here, the reception is either perfect or screwed. It’s the latter most of the time. Fact is, we’re lucky to get anything at all. Such is the nature of the new system.

As a cable subscriber, I presumably will be spared this particular brand of agony. But I worry: if Searls, an experienced broadcast engineer, can’t do much of anything to bring in local television channels, what’s going to happen to John and Mary and their not-so-free DTV converter box and their ten-dollar rabbit ears?

(Explanation of title.)