The explanation is in the title: what follows is a collection of actual search strings that landed Web surfers on this very site last week. And yes, we’ve done this several times before, hence the number in parentheses.

is columbus oh bigger than new york city:  Not unless Bloomberg sells Queens to the Chinese.

do people talk less to one another then [sic] they did ten years ago:  Um, did you say something?

Loose mama with truly mind-blowing enormous melons:  If your mind is that easily blown, you don’t stand a chance of tightening up a “loose mama.”

kim “ill-hung”:  Yeah, like your Pyongyang is so great.

invisible woman permanent:  It’s tricky to give her a quick style, let alone a perm.

thinking proactively:  Nut-uh. It’s summertime. I’m thinking anti-actively.

psychology pedophile knee to the groin scenario:  Sounds like an aversion-therapy technique to me.

meaning of “dinner at eight”:  ”Well, it’s just past 7:59. Let’s eat.”

roughly when was silicon invented:  A few nanoseconds after the Big Bang.

As a professional journalist, I pride myself on my ability to fabricate a thesis out of any three random pieces of data:  You’re overqualified for The New York Times, then. What can you do with one random piece of data?

Does Jim Cantore have A Big Weiner:  Now there’s a random piece of data.

Snot and Feces live at the Grunt Festival:  Who’s the opening act? Drööl?

You’re getting in the way of the New Urban Playground.

The problem with young people today? Among other things, it’s their goofy nicknames:

Back in my day, young people had sensible nicknames like “Shorty” or “Red” or “Spanky” and “Buckwheat.” Solid, dependable nicknames that you could count on to see you through the good times and the bad. Nicknames that would last you a lifetime.

But these young people today, they have nicknames like “DXMST,” “DJ Ice Dam” and “Pee Diddly.” God damned ridiculous names that sound like acronyms for the space program, chemical compounds or the tail end of a rude limerick.

On the other hand, there once was a hermit named Dave. [Probably NSFW.]

And I can’t imagine anyone this side of Eddie Murphy wanting to hold on to “Buckwheat.” Still:

Sorry kids but changing your name from Greg to “Tre Fierce” doesn’t make you a gangster or change the fact that you’re a 110 pound lactose intolerant sophomore with acne, no girlfriend and a lateral lisp.

Any relation to Sasha Fierce?

Watch your municipal nomenclature, all you tony little towns:

If you live in snoburbia, your neighborhood must have a quaint appendage like “village” or “town” — the Village of Scarsdale, the Town of Darien, Chevy Chase Village. This is to distinguish your neighborhood from the nouveau one with a similar name a half-mile away.

Big frakkin’ deal. We have The Village. Says so right on the seal. The rest of you dilettantes can just go pound sand.

Perspicacity from Tam:

The funniest part of the whole drawn-out Sotomayor root canal thus far has been hearing newscasters chewing through their teleprompters in their tall-corn Midwestern drones only to pop out a perfect sophomore Spanish 102 “soe-toe-my-YORRR“ in mid-twang, before turning to the weather in PEE-roo.

NPR has been doing this for years: newsreaders, with or without Latino names, will exhibit almost no trace of accent through 90 percent of the story, and then they’ll reach a proper name and suddenly sound just like they’ll be right back as soon as they finish parking the taco van.

Do not, however, believe that this is an essential byproduct of Respect For One’s Ethnicity. As Tam notes:

I’ll remind you that you probably pronounce Deutschland as “JER-muh-nee”.

Even Carl Kasell does that.

We all thank Marko for asking, but I’m not in a position to list the five most embarrassing albums on my iPod, for the following reasons:

1. I don’t have an iPod. I have a Sony MP3 Walkman and a couple of iTunes installs, the bigger of which is on my work box.
2. No actual albums were uploaded to the Walkman; it’s all singles.
3. That large iTunes install (4,563 tracks) is mostly singles. Apart from classical sets, there are only six complete albums:
   • Ory Chalk, Queen of Hearts
   • Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
   • Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick
   • Local H, Twelve Angry Months
   • Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells
   • She & Him, Volume One

I don’t find any of those particularly embarrassing. Then again, this comes from someone who owns four Enya albums.

Aside: I did an experiment last week during the commute: two days with Enya on the stereo (Watermark and Shepherd Moons), followed by two days with Nine Inch Nails (both discs of Ghosts I-IV). If my driving was at all affected by what was playing, I didn’t notice.

(Suggested by Mark Alger, who has even more Enya than I do. Then again, I still have all those Debbie Deborah Gibson albums.)

If you’re a person of a certain age, you recognize “bad,” “worse” and “worst”; “badder” and “baddest” fit the scheme for comparative and superlative, kinda sorta, but they just seem wrong. Wronger than usual, even.

Then Jim Croce told his little tale about “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” who, you’ll remember, was “the baddest man in the whole damn town,” or at least on Chicago’s south side. I’m sure Mrs Muckenfuss, who had labored to teach me some semblance of English some years before, was thoroughly appalled. But Croce’s hit came in 1973; we’re almost a decade into another century now, and “badder” and “baddest” are everywhere except maybe The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Um, scratch that last reference.) I blame Frank Sinatra, who actually had the temerity to cover the song.

What brought on this outburst was the arrival of the July Automobile Magazine, upon the cover of which appear the following words:

DREAM BIG!
31 PAGES OF THE FASTEST AND BADDEST CARS ON THE PLANET

Which obviously doesn’t mean “worst” cars, unless you’re Michael Moore and think GM ought to be making trains, fercrissake. I’m almost prepared to accept the idea that two different definitions of “bad” with two separate sets of inflections have resulted in two different words that happen to be spelled the same. Mrs Muckenfuss, rest her soul, would tell me that I’m lying, or at least lying down on the job.

Oh, and if you look up “worst” on Wikipedia, it redirects you to “superlative.” Go figure.

In this age of diversity Flavors of the Month, it’s time for McGehee’s Rule for Contemplating Candidates:

[Y]ou really need to stop and ask yourself: If this person were a 50-something white male Protestant, would I be anywhere near as enthusiastic about supporting him?

If the answer is not a brutally honest “Oh, hell yes!”, you need to step away from the candidate and go bash yourself over the head with a board full of rusty nails until you regain your senses.

Please note that slicing a couple of decades off John McCain wouldn’t have helped him any.

When reporting on a pair of shoes, I generally give a price point. Some people will shrug; others will stare in disbelief that anybody would spend that kind of money on something that obviously isn’t going to be worn regularly.

The latter group, should they happen to be within the general vicinity of Boise, Idaho, will find that particular concern addressed by One Night Stand, which actually rents shoes for $6 to $12 a night plus a refundable deposit. They stock stuff like this, and each pair is given a round in the decontamination chamber, or something similar, before it’s turned loose on a customer.

Shoeflyer likes the concept:

Most women wear their formal shoes only one or two times before relegating them to the back of the closet. If you’re like me, your rhinestone-studded prom pieces are gathering dust, taking up space, and remotely guilting you out for not wearing them more often. Assuming the shoes are thoroughly sanitized and in good shape, I’d definitely be willing to take a rental pair out for a test drive. I also like the idea of renting shoes as a way to figure out whether a certain pair is comfortable enough for a whole night on the town. If the rental audition went well, I’d gladly buy a pair.

The drawback, of course, is that you have to be somewhere near Boise or this makes no sense. Will there be franchises some day?

The City of New York will be needing a sixth area code shortly, although Cindy Adams doesn’t think so:

We’ve finally memorized 212 and 718 and 646 and now anyone just across the street will have yet a different three-digit prefix?

Whoever concocted this plan to section off New York City like a pizza is brain-dead. Probably buys his hats at Forest Lawn. Question: What do you call a phone-company executive with half a brain? Answer: Gifted. Which brings me to this phone-company executive who bought 100 bottles of aspirin. And why did he do that? Because he needed the cotton.

Another area code for what? So more 5-year-olds can put their own personal cellphones in their own pencil boxes to bring to Mommy-and-Me class? So more 25-year-olds can Twitter during a sit-down, black-tie dinner party? So more 35-year-olds can discuss their sex life aloud while walking on the street? So more 45-year-olds can annoy a whole theater when they don’t turn off their brain cells and cellphones? So more 55-year-olds can text wives in Connecticut while fondling mistresses on an airplane bound for the Bahamas? So more 65-year-olds in a restaurant can ring their doctors to discuss intimate symptoms of burping, belching and whatevering while the waiter’s serving your veal cutlet? So more 75-year-olds can actually pull out these toys and ask their grandchildren how does this newfangled f—ing gadget work?

Incidentally, she forgot (or never knew) 347 and 917, and 917 has been around since 1992.

If you’re wondering about TEmpleton 8, it was in this general area.

(Via Fark.)

Gwendolyn gets a steady diet of premium, which here in the Quarter-Mile-High City is posted as 91 octane; it’s not required — Nissan says only that it’s “recommended” — but while this car is smart enough to recognize when it’s been fed cold soup and adjust itself accordingly, it’s also smart enough to punish you for your miserliness: based on other people’s experimentation with this same powertrain, I expect about a ten-percent hit in fuel economy with the cheap stuff, which costs at the moment about, yes, ten percent less than the preferred diet.

The logical question: what happens with even higher octane? World Tour ‘07 took me to places where 93 octane is more than just a curiosity, and while the price wasn’t so different, the mileage was: I had several tankfuls over 30 mpg, which isn’t too shabby for a car on the high side of mid-sized with a honking V-6 and an A/C compressor that never entirely shuts off unless you’re in the middle of a blizzard.

To me, therefore, using premium is a no-brainer. (And in cars that don’t benefit from it, which is most of them, not using premium is also a no-brainer.) Not everyone is as sanguine about it, though, says Motor Trend’s Arthur St. Antoine:

Judging by the letters we receive, for many of you a “premium only” sticker on a new car might as well say “radioactive.” “No way I’d buy a car that runs on premium,” some write. “Who do you think I am, Bernie Madoff?”

Such responses baffle me, because often the cars that use premium — say, those with turbos or high-compression engines — are also the most entertaining. And aren’t we, as enthusiasts, ever in search of — and willing to pay for — maximum driving delight?

Maybe not. I wonder if the ‘09 Nissan Maxima, Gwendolyn’s energetic niece, is getting any buyer backlash because it requires premium. In fact, if you must fill up with regular, says the manual, you should fill the tank only halfway and “avoid full throttle driving and abrupt acceleration.” No one, though, is likely to ask the question I can’t resist: “If you can’t afford premium gas, how the hell are you buying a $35,000 car?”

Exene Cervenka has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis:

“After some months of not feeling 100% healthy, I recently had some medical tests run and the prognosis is that I am suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. Apparently, it has been affecting me for quite some time.”

For some reason, I’ve always had the quaint, if scientifically unsupportable, notion that attitudes on the punkish side of the ledger ought to ward off even the most deadly diseases: if you’re not dead at 27 from an overdose, you ought to live forever. (The last life forms on planet earth, WALL-E notwithstanding, will be cockroaches and Keith Richards.)

That said, Cervenka isn’t voluntarily slowing down:

While this diagnosis will most certainly mean some changes for me, personally, it will not affect my commitments to the current X U.S. tour, nor will it affect my solo album that is slated for release this fall on Bloodshot Records.

My focus will certainly be on maintaining my health — many people remain strong and continue to live their lives as productively as they had before an MS diagnosis and I plan to be one of those people.

Here’s to you, Exene.

(Via Rolling Stone.)

Green products, even if they cost a smidgen more, can be justified, provided they at least meet the baseline standards for the genre. Most of the time, they succeed. Sometimes they miss by a little:

["Green" brand name is] not, however, getting the contract for trash bags: in two successive boxes, the little plastic welds, which are supposed to keep the drawstrings in place, didn’t.

And sometimes the fail is epic:

I’ve been rerunning my dishwasher loads twice since I bought this crappy soap, they just weren’t coming out clean after one cycle. This morning was the worst, my glassware was caked in grease and the plates were coated in slime. I pulled the innards of the dishwasher apart and found gunked up grease clogging the screens and filters and a white crystallized stain covering the bottom of the unit around the drain. I had to scrub everything, made the husband check the lines for clogs and then I took a look at the detergent. It was phosphate free, which means it doesn’t actually clean a damn thing.

Incidentally, this is the sort of thing you’ll be getting next year in Washington state, whether you like it or not.

The instructions for this stuff apparently have the temerity to suggest that you hand-wash the dishes before loading the machine, which I need hardly point out defeats the whole purpose of having the machine in the first place.

I don’t own a dishwasher myself; I do this particular task by hand. But it would almost be worth it to buy one just to boycott this brand.

Wisdom from Doc Searls, which I’m filing away for future reference:

When we went looking for an apartment here a couple years ago, we had two primary considerations in addition to the usual ones: walking distance from a Red Line subway stop, and fiber-based Internet access. The latter is easy to spot if you know what to look for, starting with too many wires on the poles. After that you look for large loops among the wires. That means the wiring contains glass, which breaks if the loops are too small.

“Here,” I’m assuming — since it’s the Red Line — means Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We have a fiber connection between the two halves of 42nd and Treadmill, and sure enough, there’s a large loop. I had always assumed it was just a strain-relief technique. Shows you how much I know.

And if Doc comes on here and explains that no, you pinhead, it’s the other end of the Red Line, we live in Quincy — well, so does that.

We’ve all been in this position:

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The beat of the car next to you rips a hole in your eardrum as the excessive bass punches into your chest. Next to you is a car equipped with SPL Champion Edition Subwoofers and custom spinners designed for that perfect mix of gangsta and douche.

It’s a headache to many drivers, but not anymore.

The Irritated Tulsan is proud to announce:

Introducing The Barry Man-iLow: the revolutionary application that switches the aggravating sound of an inconsiderate driver’s loud bass to Barry Manilow. Finally, an iPhone app worth the purchase. Here’s how it works:

• Plug your Barry Man-iLow into your cigarette lighter.
• Aim it toward any car within a 30-foot radius.
• Push the button
• The driver’s music instantly switches from gangsta rap to the music of Barry Manilow.

I really believe Barry himself would approve.

Question for all and sundry:

While poking around in the back room here, I determined that approximately 18 percent of the comments since the 9/06 database upheaval were posted by me. Is this too high, too low, or a Goldilockean “just right”?

This is, of course, a blatant effort to shave a couple of thousandths of a percentage point off that ratio.

Maybe. I’m not entirely sure what Jill Wagner’s trying to blow away here, but I am definitely paying attention:

Picture from wallpaperez.info via Steven Lang, possibly assisted by the House of Chthon.

AANR reports on a fall TV debut [link safe for work, rest of site perhaps less so]:

[O]ne ABC show features a character billed as a “semi-nudist.” The show, The Middle, is produced by Warner Brothers and stars Everybody Loves Raymond star Patricia Heaton. The plot centers around a Midwestern family whose parents try to manage life with three children — a teenage son (the semi-nudist), a teenage daughter and a seven-year-old son. No word yet if the show will portray an accurate view of nudism, but it’s progress that a nudist will be featured in a mainstream, prime time show.

Of course, the real disappointment here is that Heaton will be keeping her clothes on.

But I suspect the really scary aspect of that kid is not so much that he tends to go around in the (semi)buff, but the fact that he’s named Axl — and if this writeup is to be believed, there’s a reason for it. And if such things encroach further on the FCC’s threshold of apoplexy, so much the better.

Otherwise known as the old technology. Trini found this blurb with the CD of Goodbye to the Machine by HURT:

“Goodbye to the Machine” was recorded using 2″ analog tape and mixed down to ½” analog tape. It was mixed by hand without the aid of a computer. This technique was utilized to further accentuate the honesty and integrity of HURT’s music. Great care was employed to maintain the highest fidelity possible. It was also cut to vinyl directly from the analog ½” master tapes to avoid digitization of the pure analog sound.

Although this much is new, sort of:

As part of your purchase and to fully experience the music the way it was recorded we are pleased to offer you 320 bit mp3s taken from the vinyl cut of the album.

I’ve heard only one track (“Wars,” now playing on iTunes) from this album, and it does not remind me of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.”

State Treasurer Scott Meacham has announced a revenue shortfall.

This means something more than just the obvious dearth of funds, as Mike McCarville explains:

The state constitution requires the legislature to appropriate no more than 95 percent of the state’s estimated revenues. If actual revenue collections are less than the amount appropriated, there is a “shortfall” and the constitution requires that all appropriation allocations be reduced across-the-board by the amount of the shortfall.

The amount of the shortfall: $6.8 million. Meacham says he’s hopeful:

“Fortunately, the shortfall is relatively small — only 0.1 percent on an annual basis. I am hopeful most agencies will be able to minimize the impact by using unspent funds from earlier in the fiscal year.”

For those who live in Certain Other States, “unspent funds” are funds that have not yet been spent, hence the name.

This week’s edition of Carnival of the Vanities, the 337th, has been designated by Andrew Ian Dodge as “Brownout CoTV.”

The trouble with brownouts is that if something isn’t done about them, you tend to wind up with blackouts, which have some serious disadvantages. And if you’re checking continuity in narrow and dark conditions, you might find a top-of-the-line clamp meter like Fluke’s 337 useful.

The biggest problem with this amigurumi Valkyrie, I think, is that once you see it, you’ll never be able to listen to Wagner’s Ring with a straight face ever again: the moment you hear Siegfried’s perplexed “Das ist kein Mann!” you’ll see him in your mind’s eye pulling little Brünnhilde’s yarn, and you’ll bust out laughing.

Disclosure: I do, in fact, own a copy of the complete Ring: Solti’s, on Decca, on rather a lot of vinyl discs, bought the year I turned twenty-one. I also have Deryck Cooke’s Introduction, which is likely the only reason I comprehended as much of it as I did.

(Found at Finestkind Clinic and fish market.)

Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, has written to NBA Commissioner David Stern protesting the so-called “19-plus-1″ rule, which requires that NBA players be at least nineteen years old and one year past high-school graduation. Says Cohen [pdf], the rule has proved to be of little or no benefit:

I firmly believe in the value of a college education, but I do not believe that the 19 plus 1 policy has benefited those students who briefly attend college solely because they are not permitted to join the NBA. Instead, a “one-and-done” system has developed, whereby athletes attend college only for the mandatory year and then join the NBA as soon as they are eligible. This system does far more to serve the financial interests of the universities at which the students play than the educational interests of the students themselves.

In a conversation with a reporter from The New York Times, Cohen got a tad less reserved:

“It’s a vestige of slavery,” Cohen said Wednesday in a phone interview, noting that most of the players affected by the rule are African-American. “Not like the slavery of 150 years ago, but it’s a restraint on a person’s freedoms and liberties.”

The NBA draft mechanism itself may contribute to Cohen’s woes, since there are only two rounds, in which sixty players are selected; hundreds of players are competing to be among those sixty, and if a kid thinks he might make it into the first round, which means a million-dollar salary if he’s signed, he has plenty of incentive to blow off the rest of his college career.

Although I don’t think you can accuse Cohen of being a starry-eyed idealist like the rulemakers at the NCAA. Noting that constituent Thaddeus Young, a star at Georgia Tech, was also affected by the rule, Cohen said:

“He could have gone straight to the pros. I don’t think he’s going to be an engineer. It’s just kind of a mockery.”

David Stern, on the other hand, has been pushing for an age limit of 20 for several years now.

I know this feeling entirely too well:

“Well, maybe I should just try to bluff my way through a back up before anything goes really horribly wrong.”

And then, of course, everything went really horribly wrong.

So yesterday morning, when I couldn’t so much as post a comment here, my heart sank, not that it was all that elevated to begin with — I never could get the hang of Thursdays — and the first thing I did, once I managed to crawl into the WordPress Dashboard, was to start the backup routine.

Which crapped out at 2 percent complete.

I fired up a machine that goes Ping, turned in a trouble ticket to the seriously-green surfer dudes who host this site, grat my teeth, and started the backup routine.

Which crapped out at 3 percent complete.

This was progress of a sort, but I had a feeling I’d see Fiats built in Canada before I got the backup finished.

And then I heard from one of the surfer dudes. There are, as is not unusual with shared hosting, ten users on this particular machine; one of them — not I, you may be sure — was sucking up ten thousand percent* of the available CPU slices. The offender was dealt with in some unspecified fashion, and things quickly returned to normal.

I still did the backup, though. Just in case.

* More precisely, 10,176. Srsly. I didn’t come near that the day I got 13,000 hits.

Fashion designers, in case you were wondering, aren’t necessarily any more prescient than the rest of us.

Then again, the absurd-looking shoes at the 56-second mark don’t look so absurd anymore.

(Poached from Megan McArdle.)

It’s official: Roger Penske’s Automotive Group will acquire the Saturn brand from Government General Motors for a price believed to be somewhere north of three dollars and a sackful of kittens.

Saturn’s five-vehicle line is being pared to three — the Sky roadster and the compact Astra sedan will be put to sleep — and GM will continue to build the remaining vehicles (the Vue SUV, the Outlook crossover, and the mid-sized Aura sedan) for two years. All of these, I note, are bigger than the models being deep-sixed.

The deal is expected to be completed in October.

So Moses went down unto the people, and spake unto them: “The Lord thy God hath given unto thee the following Ten Commandments, which thou mayest now receive on thy cell phones.”

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

E. M. Zanotti explains to the President that there are different ways to die:

I ride public transportation to work in a major city. Every. F**king. Day. And yes, I live in that major city. And yes, that major city is a terrorist target. Granted, the last group of yahoos to target the Sears Tower (or “Big Willie” as it’s now known, apparently) were about as competent at being terrorists [as] you are at foreign policy, but listen. I don’t want to die in a fire. I don’t want to die in an explosion. I want to die after being hit by a speeding bike messenger when I’m like, 90, and the bike messenger is wearing a silver unitard and riding on a hoverbike because it’s the future. Or I want to die after eating so much chocolate it allows my soul to transcend my body. I, repeat, I DO NOT WANT TO DIE in a terrorist attack, by some coward who thinks he’s going to get 72 virgins by shoving C4 and some nails into a backpack and rigging a cellphone into one of those big red cartoon detonators and boarding the El.

What worries me about this is the likelihood that the single result of this screed will be a law prohibiting the operation of hovercraft by bike messengers.

1. Trini’s out of town for the next eight or nine days.

2. I just installed Internet Explorer 8 on my notebook.

So far, the only noxious thing it did was reposition the Language Bar, which I don’t much need, on the Windows Taskbar.

Justifications I plan to offer:

• I wanted to see if you could install IE 8 directly over IE 6 without ever going through IE 7. (Answer: Yes.)
• It never hurts to check out one’s coding in other browsers, and, well, I already have Safari.

Then again, she also warned me against Windows XP Service Pack 3, which I have now installed on three machines without incident. Maybe she’s just more cautious than I am — or maybe she’s sufficiently disillusioned by end users that she doesn’t trust anyone to be able to deal with this sort of thing. Having met some of those users, I can certainly understand why.

Jen picks up her pen, and comes up with an idea for online shoe shopping:

A while back, I was sandal shopping for the kiddos and got supremely frustrated trying to separate the open-toed chaff from the covered toe wheat. Stupid school rules. I tweeted Zappos’ CEO the suggestion that it would sure be handy to be able to pull up all the sandals that cover tiny little toes with one fell click. @Zappos_service tweeted me back the same day with a cordial thanks for the suggestion. A few days later, @Zappos (Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos) followed me and direct messaged me to apologize for the delay (he was traveling) and thank me for the suggestion. Now, as far as I know, they haven’t actually incorporated the suggestion. But, I still thought that was some pretty sweet service.

And if subsequently they do incorporate the suggestion, we’ll know whom to thank.