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.)