This odd-looking contraption is nothing more than a strap for your cell phone or other electronic gizmo, made up to look like a blood drip, available in your blood type unless you have some wacky antigen that maybe five or six people on earth share. (My father, curiously, was one of these; my own blood, by comparison, is remarkably ordinary.)

Popgadget explains the appeal:

If you live in Japan, where some believe that your blood type is indicative of your personality, this cell phone strap can signal a subtle hint regarding your character to someone you’re trying to impress.

I’m guessing “morbid sense of humor.”

Damn telephone. Some of these people, I wouldn’t talk to if they paid me.

Or would I?

Verizon Wireless has a Web page from which a customer can send text messages to other VZW subscribers without having to go through the pain and sorrow of actually keying it in on her cell phone.

I can see how this could be a boon. But there’s more:

So if you’re in the habit of using real English words and you feel detached from the subculture, you can key your message into the box and have Verizon render it into txtspk 4 u.

Actually, I don’t think I’m any such thing. On the other hand, there’s that business about the stopped clock being right twice a day, and there are times when I wonder if my hands are moving.

In January 2007, I linked back to an item at Dean Esmay’s place (link is currently 404′d) written by Kevin D. It went like this:

Should the 2008 Presidential election come down between Rice and Clinton (and I don’t think it will) how long do you think it will be before someone notes, “Men will vote for the woman they want to have sex with most”? Someone will say it. You know it.

The election, as it happens, didn’t shape up that way at all. But this is what I said at the time:

I don’t think I’ve ever made an election choice based on this criterion, but on the off-chance that there might be some guys who do, I think I’ll start talking up Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Not that I have, um, delusions of boinkage or anything like that.

We’re busy filling up:

(Source.)

Those crafty folks at Zillow dropped me a line to let me know that the Zestimate on the palatial estate at Surlywood, in the wake of the current market slowdown / turbulence / Armageddon [choose one, maybe], has declined by about a percentage point, to $96,500, in the last thirty days.

Now I’ve mocked them before, but this time they’re hovering in the general vicinity of believability, especially since the taxman hath proclaimed said estate to be worth $94,130.

The taxman is also breaking out land values separately these days, and given the size of this plot, I conclude that actual land in this neck of the woods sells for … let’s see, carry the 1 … $107,000 an acre, assuming you could buy an acre, which you can’t.

Geez. Now I’m starting to sound Zillow-y.

We’ve had server issues most of the evening. I don’t know what’s been causing them; the site’s been up for a few minutes, down for a few more, then up again, lather, rinse, repeat. I’m in something of a lather myself as a result. In fact, there was an outage while I was typing this, which did nothing to reduce the available suds.

And how often do I get a chance to say that?

Anyway, Snot, the band — and isn’t it amazing that Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for “snot”? — will be here on the 7th of November along with 10 Years, an act I have heard of, opening for Mudvayne, another act I have heard of. (Mudvayne’s new album The New Game will be shipping shortly; I heard the first single, “Do What You Do,” at their MySpace page, and it’s not bad, if your taste runs to nonferrous metal.)

They’ll be watching you:

My town in snoburbia is soon to add speed cameras to our major commuter thoroughfare. I mean, why would people from the outer suburbs want to speed past our clipped boxwoods and Victorian cupolas on their way home from work?

Speed cameras are for our safety, because when we’re not being tracked and videotaped, we’re just not safe. The fact that speed camera revenue in the overclass suburb just to the south of us funded that town’s entire annual budget has nothing to do with it.

Not a thing in the world.

Closer to home — within a couple of miles, in fact — rather a lot of drivers on this town’s north side seem to resent the 25-mph speed limit on Pennsylvania through Nichols Hills. (If you’re headed north, it goes up to 30 once you hit The Village.) The fact that 25 is pretty consistent throughout NH doesn’t seem to make any difference. I am not what you’d call a dawdling driver, generally, but I get peevish when people speed through my neighborhood; I’d just as soon not speed through theirs.

That said, I wish they’d put up a red-light camera at Northwest Distressway and Belle Isle; there’s far more of a safety issue there, and the sheer number of violators should insure a tidy profit.

Princess Sparkle Pony brings us this L.A. craigslist item:

Looking for a Sarah Palin lookalike for an adult film to be shot in next 10 days.

Major adult studio.

Please send pix, stats etc. ASAP

Pay: $2000-3000

No anal required

Anyone want to come up with a title for this? I’m thinking Hot Iditarods. (Try to keep it hemi-demi-semi-clean, wouldja please?)

I took the long way home yesterday, and noticed in various yards a new crop of Obama/Biden signs. The first few weren’t any big deal — one name over the other, just like you’d expect — but there were some mutants in the bunch, sporting a variation in the color scheme. As always, Obama’s name is printed on a blue background; but on the mutant signs, Biden’s name is printed on a white background.

Now I can’t imagine any reason why Team Obama might be trying to hint that “Hey, we’ve got a white guy!” But what other explanation is there? Anyone? Bueller?

First, they redesign the newspaper so it looks more like a Web site.

Next, they redesign the Web site so it looks more like a newspaper.

Did I miss something somewhere?

I don’t have any particular problem browsing the fashion magazines, because there’s no way on earth I’d ever have to wear any of the deeply-weird haute couture items that end up in the features. Actual women, though, might take this stuff personally, as does Fausta:

I abhor women’s fashion magazines. Two hundred pages of anorexic teens showcasing $500 flip-flops are not worth perusing.

Hard to argue with that. And if the trend is toward styles that fail to flatter, so much the worse. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Big padded or droopy shoulders, baggy pleated pants that nip in above the cuffed ankle, disco-y sequined T-shirt dresses that blouse all over the shoulders and then squeeze in with a wide band at the hip. It all comes rushing back.

Possibly the loudest incarnation of ’80s styles in Paris this week was an orange snakeskin coat from Dior, designed by John Galliano. Huge and broad-shouldered, it could make a woman look like a football player. The flouncy yellow dress beneath just added to the shock value.

And, well, not everybody wants shock value. Fausta notes:

I still remember removing shoulder pads off my jackets back in the 1980s. As a tall woman with reasonably wide shoulders, the last thing I need are really wide shoulders paired with baggy pants (which would hide my one good feature — my legs). I nearly gagged reading this particular bit of information.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope:

Ann Stordahl, executive vice president for women’s apparel at Neiman Marcus, must consider the druthers of women across the nation. She seemed unimpressed with the trend toward the 1980s. “I don’t know if we’re ready to go back there,” she said.

Are we? In my capacity as a curious onlooker, I can say that I’m not; but then again, no one’s asking me to buy any of this stuff.

Alger’s got ‘em:

This thing is more opaque to me than DNS. I’m still waiting for the “A-HA!” moment. It’s easier to use day-to-day, but building the infrastructure is a royal pain in the ass and counterintuitive to boot. Yagah!

“This thing” is Expression Engine, about which I don’t know squat. But hatred of platform changes is, I think, baked into the bloggish experience: after you get something working, you get used to it, no matter how horrendous it is. And then to swap it out for something else again? Swiping Hippolyta’s girdle looks easy by comparison.

And after just under a month on WordPress, I have yet to detect the presence of “A-HA!”

Should be an easy guess:

(From this morning’s Sports section of NewsOK.com.)

Lou Anders has heard enough of that particular cliché:

[W]hat’s the big deal about flying cars? The future is certainly living up to my expectations without them. I carry over 7k songs around in my pocket in something smaller than a pack of cigarettes — that’s every CD I’ve bought since 1985. I talk for free every other day to my buddy George Mann in the UK, on a “videophone” called Skype, and I read all my news off the same screen, and the pictures next to the columns of words all move. If I want to know the complete lyrics to a song that’s rattling around in my head and I can only remember three or four words, I can call it up within 30 seconds on something called “Google” (and “google it” is an SFnal neologism if there ever was one), and just about anything else I need to know too. And I never get lost because my car, which admittedly doesn’t fly, plots out all my guidance routes and then tells me where to go. It also tells me when it needs service and when the air pressure in my tires gets low. My television records things it thinks I might like without being asked, and it forwards them to my laptop. There’s an International Space Station over my head right now. Meanwhile, when they aren’t trying to sell me my next communicator, there are hard-&-software billionaires falling over themselves to commercialize space tourism.

And one of our staffers at 42nd and Treadmill, turning into the corporate lot, was rear-ended this week by a trash truck on its way to our Dumpster. Had these vehicles been airborne at the time, the outcome would have been much, much worse. Damn gravity.

(Via Lynn S.)

George W. Bush (remember him?) used to prattle about the Ownership Society and all its presumed benefits. With regard to ownership of real estate, well, Andrea Harris isn’t buying:

There are a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that if I owned this apartment instead of merely renting it I’d have to pay someone to repair the air-conditioner instead of being able to call maintenance, as I did, and tell them “it’s broke, come fix it.” Another reason is the fact that once you own something, you are responsible for either looking after it or getting rid of it. Especially nowadays getting rid of unwanted real estate isn’t easy. Even foreclosure is a long, drawn-out process involving tedious things like paperwork and talking to legal departments. I am thankful that I have nothing more to worry about disposing when I move than some crappy, beat-up furniture and old books, and I plan to keep it that way.

And apparently Florence King anticipated this years ago:

[H]er theory is that Americans are encouraged to tie themselves to home ownership because that way they’ll be so preoccupied with the constant maintenance the family homestead needs that they won’t have any time to give the government any trouble. Or as she puts it: “Being a home owner transforms him from a thinking reed into a tinkering, puttering, dull, distracted, small-minded bore, and that’s just the kind of citizenry the government wants.” Governments want power, and one of the easiest ways of getting it is to get the people you want power from in debt to you.

I could argue that I was a dull, distracted, small-minded bore when I lived in the CrappiFlats™ for all those years, but I can’t deny that I had a hell of a lot less debt back then.

Francis W. Porretto has already weighed in on the financial advantages, or lack thereof, of buying a house, so I’ll direct you his way rather than repeat them here.

So you’ve decided not to vote this November. You’ve explained to your friends that you don’t like the candidates, that you don’t think there’s a dime’s worth of difference between them, that you’re fed up with the system and don’t want anything else to do with it.

Your friends scoffed, as they will. Perhaps if you tell them that you’re trying to save your life:

Sunnybrook researcher Dr. Donald Redelmeier and Stanford University statistician Robert Tibshirani have found an increased risk of fatal motor vehicle crashes on United States (US) presidential election days.

“We thought efforts that mobilize about 55 per cent of the population to vote, along with US reliance on motor vehicle travel, might result in increased fatal motor vehicle crashes during US presidential elections,” says Redelmeier, lead investigator of the study and staff physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, “indeed, we found a significant increase in traffic deaths on election days.”

The investigation looked at all US presidential election days over the last 32 years, from Jimmy Carter in 1976 to George Bush in 2004, during the hours of polling. They also looked at the same hours on the Tuesday immediately before and immediately after as control days. Their main finding was that the average presidential election led to about 24 deaths from motor vehicle crashes.

Explanations for the increased risk include speed, distance, distraction, emotions, unfamiliar pathways traveling to polls, and the potential mobilization of unfit drivers. “A 4 per cent increase in average driving speed,” says Redelmeier, “would be sufficient by itself to account for the 18 per cent observed increase in fatal motor vehicle crashes.”

The press release is here; the complete results appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association (10/1/08).

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

In the 1968 model year, Ford decided that its existing small-block V8 might be a tad too small, what with the ongoing horsepower wars and the possibility (later a certainty) of emissions regulations, and increased the stroke to 3.00 inches. The bore remained at 4.00 inches, giving a total displacement of 302 cubic inches. To this day you can buy a 302 crate engine from Ford Racing.

And to this day there have been 302 installments of the Carnival of the Vanities, the most recent dubbed “Maltese”, inasmuch as Andrew Ian Dodge is just back from Malta.

The Basketball Team Formerly Known As The Supersonics was not the worst team in the NBA last year; that was the Miami Heat, a hapless 15-67. Not that the Sonics, 20-62, had all that much hap to spare.

After ESPN picked the revised-and-edited Oklahoma City Thunder for dead last in the league, the sports staff of the Oklahoman put together their own predictions, which were scarcely less dire: 24th or 25th is about as high as they’d dare go.

The NBA, however, eschewed pundits altogether, and enlisted EA Games to play out the entire season on NBA Live 09. The result: the Thunder finish dead last in the league at 23-59, coincidentally the same record predicted by the ESPN guys. Then again, EA’s sim also thinks Miami can win 55 games (!) and the Eastern Conference (!!) this year, so I’m taking it no more seriously than I have to.

Normally, I wouldn’t have given this shoe a second look:

But the Shoe Minx, in a piece on Canadian retailer Browns Shoes, came up with this soul-stirring caption:

If you want the boy of your dreams to stare adoringly into your eyes as you cross your legs at the library, check out a pair of these Mimosa Lace Up Shoes.

I was seldom if ever the boy of anyone’s dreams, but I do know the stare; in my day, however, the object thereof was usually wearing Bass Weejuns. (To borrow a phrase, self-deprecation is literary manna for the uninspired.)

Mimosa has its charms, however. It’s purple (black and blue can also be had, and write your own joke), and it’s not as tall as it looks: 80 mm, about 3.15 inches. The price is $298 Canadian.

Chekhov’s The Seagull is back in New York. Terry Teachout reviews it for The Wall Street Journal here, and please note the last paragraph:

Footnote: Hildegard Bechtler, who designed the sets and costumes for the Royal Court Theatre’s production of The Seagull, is also working on the Santa Fe Opera’s 2009 premiere of Paul Moravec’s The Letter, an opera for which I wrote the libretto. For the record, I have never had any contact of any kind with Ms. Bechtler, didn’t recommend her to the Santa Fe Opera, and didn’t even know that she had designed The Seagull until I read the press release for the show a couple of weeks ago.

How this came to pass:

As soon as I found out that Bechtler had designed The Seagull, I e-mailed my editors at the paper to ask what they wanted me to do. After due consideration they decided that I could write about The Seagull, provided that I said nothing about Bechtler’s sets or costumes and disclosed my professional connection to her at the end of the review. Needless to say, I did just that.

I mention all this because I thought you’d like to know how such matters are handled at The Wall Street Journal, and that I take them as seriously as the Journal does.

And far more so than whoever’s running the Televised Political Farce of the Week.

At the end of the 1970s, American Motors had gone bust, and wound up being acquired by Renault, which replaced all of AMC’s old car models except the all-wheel-drive Eagle with fresh Frenchmobiles to supplement the existing Renault 5, sold here under the semi-inspiring name “Le Car.” The first of them was an Americanized Renault 9, built in AMC’s Kenosha plant and renamed “Alliance,” which did well for a time. Quality-control issues bedeviled the AMC/Renault combine, and losses mounted; the French government, which had nationalized Renault after World War II, installed Georges Besse as chairman of the company in early 1985. Besse went to work cutting costs and closing European plants, which may or may not have had something to do with his murder in the fall of ‘86.

In 1987 Renault sold its interests in AMC to Chrysler, which set up the Jeep-Eagle division to sell AMC’s Jeep line and two rebranded Renault cars. The Eagle line was fleshed out with Mitsubishi designs, and survived until 1998. Chrysler’s vaunted “cab-forward” sedans of the 1990s were basically derivatives of the AMC/Renault/Eagle Premier.

But that was it for Renault in the States, and the company, privatized in 1996 (the government retains about 15 percent), didn’t make any effort to reestablish itself here until 2006, when Renault and Japanese partner Nissan — Carlos Ghosn is CEO of both companies — had discussions with General Motors, precipitated by investor Kirk Kerkorian. Those talks went nowhere, and Kerkorian has since sold off his GM interests.

Officially, Renault isn’t planning a return to the US market, but rumors persist, mostly because of statements like this from Ghosn’s underlings:

French car maker Renault SA is still itching for a move into the U.S. automobile market — the world’s biggest, from which it has been absent for more than 20 years — and might be interested in Chrysler LLC if its owners were to put it up for sale, a senior Renault official said Thursday.

Jacques Verdonck, Renault’s vice-president for corporate and strategic planning, told Dow Jones Newswires that one option for the company is to try to establish a presence in the U.S. by itself, although this would be both “risky and costly.”

The other easier and less onerous way would be to link up with one of the large U.S. automotive companies, though this would imply that the partner is in good financial health and is sufficiently robust to carry the deal through, he said.

Inasmuch as the large US automotive companies are hardly in “good financial health,” M. Verdonck may simply be covering himself — or Ghosn:

“We have selected our priorities which are expansions in Russia, India and in South America, but we don’t have any intentions in the short term to open new markets with new investors,” said Ghosn, who has been meeting with France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy to discuss the future lay-offs in his company as a result of the economic downturn.

Indeed, Renault’s stock price is tanking, which would make any acquisitions more difficult — unless Cerberus Capital Management, which acquired control of Chrysler in 2007, is willing to pay Renault to take it off their hands.

It’s the seventh annual Blogger Boobie-Thon, going on even as I type. The six previous editions brought in over $40,000 for breast-cancer research. (Here’s how it all started.)

I have to admit, I’d forgotten this year’s start date; thanks to DaGoddess for the reminder. I’ve gotten off my duff and made my donation for the year, and I hope you’ll do the same.

$3.099 today. For premium. Regular has dropped below $2.90 at some locations — and better yet, enough locations to make sure that no one has to sit in line waiting.

If you’re keeping score, that’s a sixty-cent drop in thirty days. This does not of course mean that they’ll be giving the stuff away by spring, but the price has declined so quickly the Usual Suspects haven’t had much of a chance to start jawboning again about how cheap fuel makes Mother Gaia cry, so count this as a double blessing for now.

Exhibit A: Nancy Pelosi has apparently taken to wearing red shoes.

Original caption: “Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., center, walks to her weekly news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008.” Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh.

Inspired by this list at the all-new Swirlspice, here’s a list of the WordPress plugins being used at this here Intarwebs locale:

• Akismet: killer of spam and purger of pusillanimous pingbackery.
• Extended Comment Options: enables comment or trackback toggle on multiple posts at once.
• Live Comment Preview: just what it says, and “it helps remind folks to close your damn tags.”
• Liz Comment Counter: counts, um, comments. Named for the estimable Liz Strauss.
• Ping Optimizer: keeps WordPress from pinging all over the place just because you redid some of the archives.
• Witty Text: now handles the “It is written” function on the sidebar.
• WP-Super Cache: serves up static pages when the loads get heavy.

There are about a dozen more in deactivated status, some that came with the package, some I tried out and decided not to keep, and some I’m still trying to decipher after a month.

And you should all go visit Swirlspice anyway. It’s her sixth blogiversary, and it’s always worth the trip.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Lou Trigg’s the invisible woman — and how she got there is a four-minute animated film, but the individual pictures making up the animation aren’t drawn or sculpted or rendered by computers or anything like that.

They’re stitched.

The artist explains:

I have only fairly recently discovered my love of the sewing machine and in particular, using it for freehand machine embroidery and I love it. It’s a medium that works for me; it doesn’t have to be ‘perfect’ (I can’t do perfect!) and it isn’t meant to be perfect — but I love the idea of the thread seemingly having a life of its own. I purposely leave threads hanging loose which tend to give the stitchures more of a tactile sense of emotion.

“Stitchures.” I like that.

The images are also available in bound-book form.

(Via Million Little Stitches.)

There is no way I would dare challenge Venomous Kate on this matter:

For future reference: should you wake up one morning and impulsively decide to take a 90-minute round trip so you can get a Brazilian wax, do NOT wear one of those bodysuits that has a bazillion snaps at the crotch and rides up the instant you sit down.

I am, however, just a tad surprised that the nearest, um, wax joint is 45 minutes away. I mean, it’s not like she lives in Outer Freaking Mongolia.

Remember what I said about trying to decipher some of these WP plugins? This apparently is true, not just for the inactive plugins, but the ones that have gone live: for a few hours this afternoon I managed to kill the entire comment system.

It should be working now. Repeat: should be.