Listed chronologically:

“There’s no place like Nome” (5 January)
“Debris, or not debris?” (10 January)
“5150 or fight” (2 February)
“Rancid transit” (12 February)
“Backstage at the Grendel Opry” (24 February)
“We come to Barry Obama, not to praise him” (2 March)
“Natural mail enhancement” (28 March)
“Longoria in excelsis” (10 April)
“They also surf who only stand on waves” (16 April)
“Endorse is endorse, of course, of course” (24 April)
“Equally yolked” (27 April)
“Icon has cheez” (31 May)
“Living gravida loca” (29 June)
“Gluten for punishment” (7 July)
“It’s not just a job, it’s indenture” (8 July)
“There’s no base like foam” (19 July)
“People who need peepholes” (29 July)
“With mallets toward some” (5 August)
“Dilated to hear it” (28 August)
“Insects and the city” (16 September)
“No sheets, Sherlock” (21 September)
“Easily suede” (22 September)
“A man of constant borrow” (9 October)
“This is no time to be shellfish” (16 October)
“Collagen dropout” (12 November)
“Tenants, anyone? (18 November)
“Snoozeweak” (17 December)
“Pseu, pseu, pseudio” (26 December)
“Formulary, Moe and Curly” (30 December)

(Total number of 2008 posts: 2,063. Also: Worst Titles of 2007; Worst Titles of 2006.)

And on that basis, I should be just about due for a song.

Lisa over at Left Coast Cowboys will be busy this year: she’s participating in Flickr’s Project 365! and vows to post one new picture every single day, which you can see at A Year of Pix. (She did this last year, and came up with over four hundred shots, and, well, she strikes me as an overachiever.) I anticipate being fascinated, instructed, and delighted, sometimes in the same set of pixels.

Lynn figures that free calendars are pretty much worth the price:

I don’t expect free calendars to be especially attractive. My dentist always gives out free calendars that have photos of perfectly manicured formal gardens. Pretty but very boring. All the pictures look the same. I’ve never taken one. Some people say, “Why would you pay for a calendar when you can get them for free?” I say, why settle for free calendars when, for around 10 to 15 dollars you can have art on your wall all year?

Like, maybe, Art Frahm.

I’ve seen this issue addressed only once: in 2007, Woot sold a vast number of “Crappy Calendars” — that’s how they were billed — and during the following year issued Replacement Art which you could print out and then paste over the “pretty but very boring” picture in the original product.

Me, I’m waiting for my insurance man to cough up the usual Photos of Classic Cars calendar, as he has the past three years — or, lacking that, I’ll dig through the archives for a 1981 calendar. Calendar buffs will note that 2009 follows the same pattern as 1981, except that REO Speedwagon isn’t on the radio every 45 minutes.

Turns out, there was a reason everyone’s 30GB Zune turned into a brick on the 31st of December:

The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.

The Apple iPod, which synchronizes to the Bajoran year, was not affected by this issue.

“Oh it’s 2009?” says Andrew Ian Dodge on the occasion of the 315th Carnival of the Vanities, the beginning of a whole new year and perhaps for some the beginning of a whole new look.

If that whole new look involves wardrobe updates, it will also involve Apparel Manufacturing, which is North American Industry Classification System number 315.

Gwendolyn has a pop-up box on her dash which, in later model years, would have accommodated a navigation system. I once looked into the possibility of retrofitting the device, but inasmuch as the price was way on the wrong side of a thousand dollars and the data disc was likely to be several years old, I decided that this was not such a great idea.

And that was before I read this:

So I bought a new car this summer. When I bought it I really thought I needed a navigation system. I haven’t used it in months, and then when I turned it on recently, it found me. In the middle of the ocean. I thought this odd, but my old nav system would lose me on occasion so it wasn’t a big deal. However every time I turn the damned car on now I’m in the middle of the ocean and I need to “realign” myself in the world.

I think it’s safe to assume she’s not in fact in the middle of the ocean.

I am, however, somewhat distrustful of this sort of machinery. I have an MP3 player which, once connected to the PC for download, resets the shuffle and puts Abba’s “Waterloo” at the head of the queue — whether or not any tracks were in fact downloaded; it will do it on a recharge cycle, even. This isn’t quite as scary as being lost on some side road in the Adirondacks, but it serves as a reminder that electronic servants all rely on software, and all software has bugs of some sort. (Ask anyone with a 30GB Zune.)

I haven’t yet gotten to the point that my mood swings can be synchronized to my site traffic, but I definitely recognize this particular neurosis:

SiteMeter Fever — A neurosis typified by obsessively refreshing your SiteMeter to see if your traffic has increased since the last time you checked it, seven minutes ago.

There exists a Yahoo! Widget which sits on your desktop and monitors your SiteMeter. I actually installed this thing once, but after discovering that I was spending too much time looking at it, I ordered its banishment.

And there’s this:

Bloggernoia — This psychotic disorder involves the suspicion that other bloggers have malevolent motives for not linking you.

I seem to have a high level of immunity to this one for some reason. Then again, there have been things I’ve written which made me wonder if I ought to give them links. Besides, as I’ve noted before:

By now, just about anyone who is interested in Oklahoma blogs is either reading me already or has made a conscious decision not to read me.

This is not to say that I’d complain if traffic climbed back to 2005 levels, which were roughly 50 percent higher than today’s, but a reduced visitor count hardly constitutes The End Of The World As We Know It.

IBM’s David Laux, in charge of games and interactive entertainment at Big Blue — and doesn’t that sound weird? — dismisses the notion that avid gamers make less-than-ideal employees. And what gamers would make good employees? Why, World of Warcraft players, of course:

“The game produces tremendous leadership skills among players. It teaches you how to evaluate risk, build teams for specific tasks and it also teaches individuals not to over react if they are not selected for a specific task.”

The reason Mr Laux says is because these players “understand their skill set might not be right for the overall success of the whole team. This is about putting the group first and achieving a common goal.”

Not that HR types necessarily comprehend this:

A member on F13, a forum for game-related news, recounted a recent conversation with an Australian online media recruiter about his hobby of playing online games like World of Warcraft: “I happened to mention I’d spent way too much time in the early 2000s playing online game… He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100 percent because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc.”

You can’t tell me that a quest which requires you to secure items from corpses on the battlefield, often at the behest of a non-playing character, isn’t the perfect preparation for wasting away in Corporationville.

(Via Fark.)

As reported on Tech Support Comedy:

My primary desktop PC at home is a Mac Mini, which I have connected to my HDTV. I use a wireless keyboard and mouse with it. Anyway, I was working late the other night, and had left the keyboard on the floor as I often do. I had just opened up iTunes to download my daily podcasts, when I went off to do something else. Meanwhile, my rambunctious cat comes in meowing for attention. I turn around in just enough time to see him flop over and lay down on the keyboard. Somehow or other, he makes iTunes start flipping through my libary, and starts a song.

As the furry one looks up at me, I hear “We’re no strangers to love… You know the rules, and so do I…”

Mac Mini: $499
iTunes download: $0.99
Being rickrolled by your cat: Priceless

Well, kinda sorta:

Mainstream Media International, a sports marketing company based in Clearwater, Fla., which has an Atlanta office, is seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

MMI filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Middle District of Florida Monday, reporting assets of up to $500,000 and liabilities up to $10 million.

(Via BizzyBlog.)

But making your own deodorant does require a Degree of ingenuity:

The ingredients:
¼ cup corn starch
¼ cup baking soda
1-2 tbsp coconut oil

Mix the dry ingredients first and slowly add the coconut oil mixing with your hands. The coconut oil is the bonding agent and you do not need too much to make the deodorant the same consistency as store bought.

This presumes, of course, that you’ve used up a container of the store-bought stuff and kept the empty for just such an occasion; you then fill it up with this not-exactly-goop, and you’ve done the trick for rather a lot less than $2.49.

Bob gets a look at where the line might be:

A customer came up to my cashier stand at my weekend job with a dozen brown organic eggs costing $4.50. The woman informed me, without prompting from me, “These are worth every penny of what they cost!” I agreed, and told her I live on a farm where some of our hens are still giving us 4 to 6 eggs a day, even in the cold winter months. She was impressed, until I told her how delicious the goats’ milk is. She quietly backed away.

I suspect a lot of us would just as soon not think about where some of our foodstuffs originate — even the obvious ones, like goats’ milk. On the other hand, I am sometimes possessed of the notion that rather a lot of our processed “convenience” foods are actually produced at a chemical plant outside Secaucus, New Jersey, and require hazmat treatment all the way to the supermarket.

It was the biggest collection of points the Thunder had accumulated all season, and yet somehow it wasn’t enough: Carmelo Anthony sank a trey in the last fraction of a second to win it for the Nuggets, 122-120, in front of a stunned Ford Center crowd.

It should have been easier for Denver, the Northwest leader. They had all the pieces: a healthy Nene, who rang up 27 points while missing only one field goal all night; Chauncey Billups was seriously hot in the second half and finished with 24, including four treys; and ‘Melo, who had 31, never misses in the clutch.

But this one was in doubt right up until that last shot by Anthony. The Thunder generated tons of offense, with six players in double figures and Kevin Durant, who’d gotten a trey with 2.7 seconds left, had 33 points and nine rebounds. OKC shot an unheard-of (for OKC) 58.4 percent and sank 22 of 26 free throws. Robert Swift made it through 23 minutes: he scored only three, but he blocked three shots. And the Forgotten Men, Earl Watson and Damien Wilkins, combined for 31 points.

It would have been nice, but it wasn’t meant to be. I suspect the Thunder will take out their frustrations on the Knicks, who arrive Tuesday.

Ezra Dyer’s notes on the audio system in the Pontiac G8 (Automobile Magazine, February 2009):

Here are some audio components that have more power than the G8′s door speakers: Hearing aids. Audio greeting cards. Teddy Ruxpin. A Speak & Spell. Two cans connected with string. Two cans connected with nothing.

Get the message? Well, there’s more:

The last time a speaker sounded this tinny and artificial, it was producing the voice of Thomas Edison saying “Mr. Watson, come here!” This might fly in Australia, but not in the U.S.A. Here, stereos have names like Shaker 1000 and Monsoon. That’s right, we need to appropriate the names of natural disasters to describe the power of our stereos. If the G8′s stereo were named for a weather phenomenon, it would be called Partly Cloudy. Or maybe Steady Drizzle. Actually, scratch that: steady drizzle might make a pleasant noise.

He could go on. And he does:

The stereo has so little bass, it makes Barry White sound like Bindi Irwin. Bindi Irwin being chased by dingoes.

I note for comparison that Gwendolyn’s Bose stereo, with its occasionally-rattly subwoofer, rates as Distant Thunder on the meteorological scale.

And finally Dyer comes to his senses:

Then I fiddled with the settings and realized that someone had put the G8′s stereo into baby-asleep-in-the-back-seat mode, i.e. the fader cranked all the way to the front. I adjusted the fader, discovered that the Blaupunkt’s sound quality was actually fine, and I capped my page of vitriol with a subdued, “Oops — never mind.”

Miss Litella, your car is waiting.

Add this to your wish list:

Apple’s iClaudius by Robert Graves
Pocket-sized, remote-control Roman emperor that invades Britain and is easily manipulated by scheming women.
Pros: Smarter than it looks.
Cons: Snivels and stutters in standby mode.

Eventually, of course, it will be an iPhone app.

There exists a social-networking operation for persons of the unclothed persuasion, called Skinbook, and as would seem inevitable in an environment where all the members are, or shortly will be, nude, steps have to be taken to keep Certain Elements out.

Hence the vetting system:

In an attempt to filter our members signing up for the wrong reasons (i.e. here looking for sex or just to come and spy on people) new members will have to wait for “approval” from our admins; something which can only be attained by meeting the following criteria…

1) Posting some kind of profile picture (it won’t have to be a face picture, but it cannot be a random torso image or anything pornographic) just something representative of their personalities.

2) Filling out certain parts of their profile to a satisfactory standard.

Under the circumstances, you can hardly blame them. The length of time required for approval is no doubt highly variable, though six hours seems reasonable enough to me; being in a hurry sounds suspicious in its own right.

And I’m sure this has something to do with parent site Ning’s decision to discontinue its “red-light district” this month: what better way for Skinbook to preserve its status than by proving to Ning that they are not in fact riddled with pervs?

Not that Ning is suddenly turning nanny on us:

Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs.

By having legal adult social networks on Ning, we’ve seen a rise in volume of illegal adult social networks.

Adult social networks on Ning receive a disproportionate number of DMCA take down notices creating additional work for our team.

I don’t even want to imagine what sort of “illegal” networks were being (im)propagated.

And Skinbook’s action seems consistent with naturist-organization practice, which calls for keeping things squeaky-clean and keeping the swingers and such at bay.

From Newspaper Death Watch, without further comment:

In May, Mike Koehler launched Praying for Papers, a blog whose stated purpose was to encourage “anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.” On July 11, the author said he was going on vacation. The blog hasn’t been updated since.

The gap between perception and reality is wide, and there are times when I think it’s growing wider yet. For the vendors of motor vehicles, it’s downright painful:

Every brand, every model, every trim level is sold to two buyers: the imaginary buyer and the real one.

The impossibly beautiful and perfect forty-year-old woman who fairly bubbles out of her Christmas-morning negligee upon spotting a red-ribboned new Lexus SUV in her driveway; the square-jawed, Vacheron-Constantin-wearing man’s man who attentively pilots his Nine Eleven down a rainy autobahn; the quartet of twenty-something models without which no Jeep Wrangler would be complete — imaginary buyers, all of them.

None of them, however, sign the checks. These people do:

Real buyers are far less interesting. They’re primarily concerned with the cheap shine of perceived prestige, the dimly understood terror of major mechanical difficulty, and the hard graft of discounted pricing.

Now: to whom is the following pitch, well, pitched?

“If you were designing a new luxury car, how would you make it stand apart from the crowd? Would you give it the most powerful V6 engine in its class? Would you create the most spacious cabin in its class? Maybe you’d offer luxury touches and a level of ingenuity that you couldn’t find anywhere else. Surely, laying claim to any one of these achievements would set you apart from today’s crowd of luxury automobiles. Imagine how special you’d be if you could claim all of them.”

The guys who design cars in their heads, or during study hall, don’t design luxury cars; they design track stars, cars with maybe a gesture or two toward creature comforts but which are primarily intended to complete a road course 3.5 seconds faster than the other guy. And they never, ever say “in its class,” unless they mean an actual racing class.

So your Real Buyers here — and this model did sell fairly well — are largely responding to poseur bait. What’s weird is that this particular line is devoted to upscale cars with plenty of go-fast bits, but the manufacturer seems to be assuming their owners are basically badge snobs. I suspect they’re hedging their bets, just in case the cynics on staff were right.

(Disclosure: I drive the very car advertised in that “luxury-car” spiel. Go figure.)

It looks like two thousand and nine,
And let’s hope that the year will be fine;
   For now, I am thinking,
   Gratuitous linking
Is a possibly-favorable sign.

• General anesthesia: not your friend.
• Thankless child needed for comparison purposes, though for no other.
• Improve your films: include more machine guns and dead Nazis.
• Abominable Snowman in the market.
• Minotaur in the china shop.
• Beware of pus inflection.
• Whether or not Roland Burris is seated as Senator from Illinois, he already has his monument.
• Kansas: still flat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
• Better brush up on your Cosmo quizzes.
• Also your zombie plans.
• New Jersey actually cutting the budget?
• The word “school” now has negative connotations, or something.

Look for this feature to recur sometime this year.

Adam Gurri, doing a guest spot at Chris Anderson’s Wired sub-empire, mentions this statistic I’d heard but forgotten, and repeated it at one of his own sites:

[I]f Clay Shirky is to be believed, much of the time spent online will come and is already coming from the time we used to spend watching TV.

I don’t have any trouble believing Shirky: my television viewing has dropped to nearly zilch, despite my having bought an HDTV in anticipation of the coming demise of analog television as we know it. What’s more, most of what I still watch is either DVDs or basketball. If your experience is similar, or if it isn’t, I’d like to hear about it.

Well, mostly. And it proved to be trickier than I thought, not to mention what it did to McGehee’s head, inasmuch as he put in half a dozen comments while I was making incremental changes.

This is probably not the most radical respray ever done on the PhoenixBlue theme, but I suspect it’s close. And I felt compelled to keep at least some blue in it somewhere.

The new Norwegian law against prostitution concentrates, not on the providers, but on the purchasers:

Norwegian citizens caught paying for prostitutes at home or abroad could face a hefty fine or a six-month prison sentence, authorities say. The prison sentence could be extended to three years in cases of child prostitution.

The Norwegian authorities say they want to stamp out sex tourism and street prostitution by targeting clients rather than prostitutes.

As for the hookers themselves:

Prostitutes will be offered access to free education and health treatment for those with alcohol or drugs problems.

What? No unemployment compensation?

(Via DollyMix.)

I have no particular urge to see the final bloody dismemberment of what used to be Chrysler Corporation, but if it happens, I take comfort in knowing that this dealership goes with it:

I purchased a new 2009 Chrysler 300 SRT8 a few weeks ago from dealer stock. The rear license plate was on, but the front wasn’t. The plate bracket was in the trunk, but I was told that nobody was available to install the front plate. I was told not to worry because I wouldn’t get pulled over and it looks better without the plate. If I wanted, I could bring the car back to get the plate installed.

When I got home, I looked at the bracket to see whether I could install it and found that Chrysler changed the grille on the 2009 300 SRT8. The directions show the bracket is made to attach to the old grille. The parts department said the bracket is the correct one for my vehicle.

I took the car back to dealer, and they agreed it couldn’t be installed, but there was nothing they could do. They said I should display the license plate on my dashboard. How can Chrysler produce a car that doesn’t and can’t conform to the state law, which requires a front plate?

In 1988, I moved to southern California, where front plates are mandated; my car, a ’75 Toyota, having been originally sold in a state that didn’t have such things, didn’t have a bracket. I took my brand-new Golden State plates to a Toyota store in Torrance, which said that they didn’t have the part in stock right this minute, but not to worry.

And while I waited, the service manager dispatched a runner to Toyota national HQ, just up the road a piece, who returned 15 minutes later with the appropriate bracket, which they then installed. Elapsed time: maybe half an hour, tops.

This is, of course, a single isolated incident. But here’s a dealership that was willing to work with a guy with a 13-year-old beater — and halfway across the country, a dealership that blew off a guy who’d just bought a $40,000 car. What do you bet that this Chrysler store was boasting the fabled Five Stars?

(Seen here.)

Does the arrival of a new year herald the arrival of a new set of weird inquiries? Why, yes it does.

sophia loren poses nude Pirelli calendar:  A vision of which I shall never tire.

Donna worked at seven eleven in oklahoma city at SE 44th and Bryant and then moved to texas. Where can I find her:  I’d say a 7-Eleven in Texas might be a good start.

penis shaped fish tattoo:  Is this a tattoo of a penis-shaped fish, or a fish tattoo shaped like a penis?

new orleans woman naked except for panty hose came up to her neck:  I believe that’s called a “body suit.”

what was it like in 1709:  About like this, except that Google took six weeks to answer a query.

percentage of men who wear bikini underwear:  Their own, or someone else’s?

girl that can remember everything:  Women develop this skill after becoming wives.

i bounced a child support check:  So how are things in jail?

Patricia chamless:  Funny, to me she always seemed to have lots of cham.

women nudecar driving:  Is that like, um, with the top down?

i suck at writing:  So get a blog. Who’ll know?

difference between buckshot and shot:  Obviously you’ve never been buckshot.

Martin Luther flatulence:  I blame the Diet of Worms.

If you thought Terry McAuliffe was going to spend the rest of his days slinging hash in Snake’s Navel, Kansas, you might want to think again: the former DNC chairman and Friend of Bill is mounting a gubernatorial campaign in Virginia.

Why do I get the feeling that the Clintonistas are surrounding the castle?

Now this is some strange writing:

If the Teenage Death Song wasn’t dead itself by 1965 — and it wasn’t — it certainly wasn’t because Jimmy Cross didn’t do his darnedest to put the last few nails in its coffin, so to speak. A preposterously funny sendup of the genre in general and of “Leader of the Pack” and “Last Kiss” in particular, Cross’ one chart record, written by Perry Botkin, Jr. and Gil Garfield, is impossible to describe without giving away the joke, but I assure you, he does get his baby back, one way or another.

The last time I saw something like that was, let me see now, oh, yes, here.

According to this unimpeachable source, $932.99. Presumably not including shipping and, uh, handling.

[Probably will not get past your workplace filters.]

Or so it seems, anyway:

Hyundai is the first automaker to offer a vehicle return program in the U.S. that allows you to walk away from your loan or lease without having to worry about negative equity. It lets you return your vehicle in case of certain life-altering circumstances.

Which could come in handy if next week you go buy that Elantra Touring you wanted and next month they ship your job to Mumbai.

This isn’t unheard of — in fact, Hyundai is adapting a package called “Walkaway” which has been offered by individual dealerships before — but between this and their 10-year warranty, Hyundai is presumably wanting to be your no-sweat car company.

(Seen here.)

Disclosure: I bought the four-year Walkaway package as part of the Gwendolyn acquisition, at a price of $489; I could have had the one-year deal as a throw-in. I have no idea what Hyundai is paying for bulk one-year coverage, or whether vehicle price is at all a factor.

Actual advertisement by Chicagoland’s Leather Creations:

I’d bet Blago isn’t about to take this sitting down.

(From WLS radio via Michelle Malkin.)

Suggested by Steph Waller:

Go into your archives and post the first sentence from the first post you made each month last year.

Okay, will do. Let’s see what sort of crumby stuff I’ve been casting on the waters:

January: “Worst titles of 2007″ contains no full sentence until the very end: “Some marginally-acceptable turns of phrase are recounted here.”

February: “The City Sentinel broadsheet is adopting a time-honored method of hyping sales: they’re cutting the price.”

March: “Space is precious in Japan, which has five times the population of Texas in about half the area.” [On unusual farming techniques.]

April: “In a lifetime of klutziness, I’ve broken lots of light bulbs, even a socket or two, usually with no ill effects other than finding that one last shard of glass three weeks later.”

May: “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.”

June: “Patterico recommends Michael J. O’Gara for Office No. 94 of the Los Angeles Superior Court.”

July: “You don’t give a damn about us, but we’re your biggest customer.” [By "you," I mean "television."]

August: “In my opinion, the 45 rpm record is the greatest invention in the history of popular culture because it meant that for the first time in history, anyone — especially kids — could buy art — real art — with just the change in their pockets.” [This was a blockquote from elsewhere.]

September: “I started doing this about three years ago, and it proved to be relatively popular among the readership, by which is meant that not one of them has commanded me to cut it out or face the Wrath of [insert name of presumably wrathful entity].”

October: “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.”

November: “Yes, it’s time for another DST rant: not mine, though.”

December: “If you were wondering ‘When’s the next time we get to look at some more weird search strings?’ the answer is ‘Right about now.’”

And it’s probably as well that I do this myself from my position at the very Heart of Obscurity, for no biographer would get within three meters of this unfocused detritus.

CD sales in the US are down about twenty percent. If you’re thinking “Oh, that’s bad,” Bill Wyman says no, that’s good:

Why is this good news? Because the record industry is built on three pillars of corruption, on which it built an edifice (the manufacture and promotion of physical CDs) that is no longer needed. One of the unappreciated side effects of the digital revolution in the media space is its contribution to a drop in white-collar crime.

In the radio world, the record industry used payola for decades to get radio airplay; with radio’s influence waning and industry earnings dropping, those days seem to be over. In retail, price-fixing was the norm; now the prices are being fixed (lower than what they might otherwise be) for a format (the single) the industry stopped selling to force people to buy full-length CDs, all by a guy (Steve Jobs) who doesn’t even work in the biz!

But it’s not all unicorns and teabiscuits just yet:

The third pillar is relations with artists, whom the labels have screwed on royalty payments, virtually with impunity, since the dawn of the modern industry. I assume this activity continues.

There really isn’t a whole lot of reason to think it doesn’t.

Things were downright complicated when I was a student, but a bit of applied creativity could work wonders: judiciously-chosen margins, innovating page-numbering (nobody ever reads page 6), and careful choice of fonts (the replaceable Selectric ball was truly a godsend) could yield a ten-page paper from a thousand words or less.

Today, you just turn in a file that won’t open:

File Destructor … is a tool that should only be used for emergencies. Basically, it’s a tool that creates a fake file that you can send to your teachers. You can choose the extension as well as the size of the file, and when your professor can’t open the file up, you can just blame it on your computer. Of course, many teachers are starting to not accept these excuses, so be careful when using this.

Especially since you can’t claim that your robot dog ate your homework.

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

The General is moving some battery-powered hardware these days: for 2008, GM sold 14,439 hybrid-powered vehicles, including a heady 2555 in December. This was only 1.15 percent of their December volume, but I’d hazard a guess that barely 1.15 percent of actual auto buyers — I’m told there are some left — are aware that GM even has hybrids.

That said, the more industrial-strength hybrids, the Two-Mode trucks, are the bigger sellers: of those 2555, 1729 were the Tahoe/Yukon/Escalade monsters that still weigh two and a half tons yet somehow get 20 mpg. And that’s good: getting 20 mpg instead of 12 cuts your fuel bill by 40 percent, not an inconsiderable amount even in these fleeting times of cheapish gas, and a major virtue when prices turn back upward. GM’s hybrid cars, which use lower-end technology and realize smaller gains, are selling a bit less energetically. (26 mpg over 22 isn’t such a big deal.) And I suspect that they’re holding back a bit, lest they cannibalize sales from the Chevy Volt once it gets here.

The blessed fog of forgetfulness has settled over most of the therapy sessions I had in the late 1980s, though I haven’t yet cleared out all the memories about that one afternoon with the Holtzman inkblots, ostensibly an improvement over the workaday Rorschachs. Think “frustration coming to a sudden boil” — and a story very much like the story of this T-shirt design at Woot:

The irony could’ve killed him, if the boredom didn’t get him first. Here he was, a “snowman” in a “snow globe” full of “snow”, and he’d never touched real snow in his life. He’d never know how it feels on his plastic skin. He’d never construct a stalwart snow fort, or whiz a lethal snowball through the air, or catch the lacy flakes on his tongue. All he could do was watch it fall. And wonder. And wish someone would come by and shake his globe, just so he could pretend for a moment that a blizzard raged around him as powerful as the one inside him.

The mere fact that I could see something like that in an amorphous blob of whatever suggested, to me and maybe to the therapist, that I was seriously screwed.

This does not mean, incidentally, that I am today frivolously screwed.

So the Knicks, fresh from beating the tar out of the Celtics, fall to the Thunder. What kind of world is this?

It’s not that the New Yorkers brought a knife to a gunfight, either: the Knickerbocker trey was deployed 34 times, with 11 successes, and Al Harrington, off the bench, contributed 21 points, mostly in the second half. But the Thunder had something going here, running to a 23-point lead in the third quarter, watching it shrink to a mere two, and then gutting it out the rest of the way to a 107-99 win.

New York shot a feeble 39.8 percent, but they put up so many shots that some of them had to fall, and indeed six Knicks landed in double figures. And OKC had the D: the Thunder blocked eight shots — Joe Smith got four of them before fouling out — and pulled off nine steals. Furthermore, the Thunder outrebounded the Knicks, 46-35, shot 52.7 percent, and apparently they’ve been working on moving the ball around: they recorded 23 assists, including nine from Russell Westbrook and six from Earl Watson.

Kevin Durant sat for a whole 2:21 tonight; he spent the rest of the time scoring 27 points and pulling down 12 boards. Jeff Green also banged down 27; Westbrook had 22. New guy Nenad “Krispy” Krstić, having just gotten his work visa, was on hand but did not play.

So two for four on the homestand. And I remember telling you this:

I suspect the Thunder will take out their frustrations on the Knicks.

Consider them taken. Now it’s off to Minnesota.

Dr. Weevil finds a recurring anomaly:

Four times in the last week, the National Weather Service has displayed a current temperature for my town higher than the expected high for the day. Surely if the current temperature is 68° F, the expected high cannot be 62°, it must be at least 68°. Is there any programming language in which that cannot be fixed with a single line of code?

Today the expected high was 49°, while the reported temperature around noon was 63°, which is what it felt like. A fourteen degree discrepancy is impressive, even for government bureaucrats.

Regional phenomenon, I suggest: out here, the expected high has been too high three days running and was scaled back on the fly. (Yesterday, the forecast called for 48; by noon, with the predicted clearing not happening, they dropped it to 43; only briefly did it touch 40.)

I cannot, however, fully explain this:

Tomorrow’s expected high (or “hi”) is 34°, while tomorrow night’s expected low (or “lo”) is 35°. Is that mathematically possible? Surely a nightly low cannot be higher than the high in a directly adjacent day, either before or after? I don’t know when the official switchover from day to night is (sunset?), but if the temperature in the last minute of day is 34° or less, can it really be 35° or more in the first minute of night? If anything, we would expect a relatively sudden drop in temperature at sunset, but today’s forecast implies a sudden jump.

In my neck of the woods, anyway, we tend to expect the lowest temperature of the day right around sunrise, and forecasts for “tonight” often include the qualifier “after midnight” if significant events are anticipated at such hours. But we’ve had rising temperatures overnight many times; all it takes is a wind shift at the right moment. And it’s warmer now, half an hour before the sun, than it was at 8 pm last night.

(With apologies to Victor Borge.)

While noting this trend toward tooth retention by us older folks, Michael Blowhard recounts a couple of stories:

An old lady once told me that back in the 1920s, when she was a child, you just assumed that anyone over 40 was wearing dentures. A dentist recently explained to me that one reason teeth-whitening has become such a big business in recent years is that people’s teeth are generally so good these days that dentists otherwise don’t have many services beyond cleaning to sell to most patients.

Of my original thirty-two, I still have twenty-six, including one of the often-troublesome wisdoms. I do, however, get a couple of cleanings every year, and in the last five years I’ve had to replace three outdated fillings. (One of them is now officially unfillable: I am informed that if it goes again, it’s root-canal time.) Spacing has always been dubious, however; I have a Lettermanesque gap up front, and it’s not getting any narrower.

Obvious question: Do I want to fork over 30 cents per track to strip the DRM off my iTunes purchases?

I dunno. It’s not an enormous bill staring me in the face — maybe fifteen bucks — but pretty much everything I’d want to move around outside Apple’s FairPlay has already been burned to unprotected CD-Rs.

The Oklahoman’s Mike Baldwin floated this curious statistic:

Oklahoma City shot 52.7 percent from the field [against the Knicks]. Oddly, the Thunder is only 2-7 when shooting 50 percent or better.

Yeah, but they’re 3-23 when they miss more than they hit. Compared to that, “only 2-7″ sounds downright wonderful.