If I were actually watching HBO these days, I’d like to think I’d have picked up on this, but I suspect I wouldn’t have. From the files of Thumbelina Fashionista:

Last night I finally went to see the last production of Euripides’ The Bacchae, playing at the Delacorte Theatre (Shakespeare in the Park’s second play of the summer). The parallels between that gruesome play and my HBO addiction True Blood are uncanny! And what’s particularly odd is that someone screamed in the audience after the character on stage did — only to ask for help. A commotion ensued, and when we were exiting the theatre, we saw an ambulance on its way. I can only hope that that person was okay.

Operative word: “Maenad.” More than that, deponent saith not.

And to tell you the truth, you’d be much happier if you’d just RTFM already.

Real estate, not just as a commodity with a price tag but as a way of life, has taken a beating over much of this decade, and even if prices were favorable, there are good and sensible reasons to rent instead.

Still, the intangibles count for something:

I am bullish on home ownership. I think it gives homeowners a sense of security, a blanket of protection that may or may not be a mirage. Economists, who see the world in a “cash nexus”, do not understand this; planners, believing they know a better way, don’t realize that a rental apartment in a dense development does not usually provide our peaceful havens from the cruel world like a single family home or a townhouse that we have a stake in.

Once in a while you’ll meet up with someone who insists that the proximity of said cruel world is a feature, not a bug, that “socialization” is of dire importance. Try not to laugh too hard.

Homeownership may be precarious, but it does provide a greater sense of permanency for families and communities. Home ownership also stimulates the economy. Consumers never buy as much as they do the first few days in a new home — countless trips to Lowes, Home Depot, Bed, Bath & Beyond, the Container Store. A tenant or landlord may buy for their place, but perhaps never with the care and fervor that comes with homeownership. Apartments are built with, at the most, 30 year life spans. I’ve seen enough Section 8 housing to tell you — you don’t want to live in them at the end of their life-cycle. Apartments are considered temporary, places for people who are in transition or not really sure they are going to stay, one reason why they drive higher crime rates.

The downside of Section 8 is covered here.

Of course, it hasn’t all been Skittles and beer for those of us who are buying:

The problems came when we started using our homes as slot machines or banks. Home equity lines of credit were illegal in Texas until 1997 as a consumer protection, and the banking industry led the charge to loosen that law with a constitutional amendment. In Texas, the total of all mortgage debt on your home (including HELOCs) is limited to 80% of the home’s fair market value, among other stipulations.

I must mention here that I borrowed rather more than 80 percent of the price when I bought the palatial estate at Surlywood, which was a theoretical risk factor even outside Texas, but I survived; the ratio is now around 70 and dropping. Not everyone has been so diligent/fortunate [choose one].

Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter has donated his papers to the New Hampshire Historical Society, and while there’s always a good reason to drive up to Concord — I’ve managed to get there twice this decade — seeing Souter’s papers isn’t going to be one of them, unless you’re going very slowly: public access will not be opened for a period of 50 years.

Executive director Bill Veillette:

We’ve had a very long relationship with Justice Souter and, as with any donor, it’s their stuff. If they have wishes or conditions they want to place on it, we’re not going to talk them out of it.

Greg Hlatky, however, is disappointed:

I was looking forward to reading something like this: “July 25, 1993. Came across a book at a second-hand store entitled The Constitution of the United States. I’d never seen it before. I flipped through it and found nothing relevant to my present job.”

This would not be, I suggest, particularly damning, since Washington is just chock full of people who have never so much as flipped through it.

As part of the ongoing process of denouncing David Brooks, Stacy McCain points to a much manlier man:

However much I disagree politically with our Kenyan Marxist progressive president, I’ll grant him this: He smokes Marlboro Reds.

You’ve got to reserve some measure of respect for the daredevil who risks death by firing up a Marlboro Red — a real tough-guy smoke. Marines and truck drivers and Nick Nolte smoke Marlboro Reds.

Take a look at [Michael] Gerson and Brooks and try to picture them puffing Marlboro Reds. You can’t. They don’t have it in them. It would irritate their allergies.

To cloud that picture a bit further, here’s a bit of largely-forgotten history:

In 1924, Philip Morris introduced Marlboro as a women’s cigarette.

A 1927 Marlboro ad published in Vanity Fair Magazine targeted affluent society women with text describing her as, “Women quickly develop discerning taste. That is why Marlboros now ride in so many limousines, attend so many bridge parties, repose in so many hand bags.”

After World War II, the brand was revived, but with a different focus. From CigarettesPedia:

It was thought that Marlboro cigarettes, with their filter, might offer smokers the illusion of a reduced health risk. However, the filter was regarded as effeminate by many men, who made up the bulk of the market.

In 1954, the Leo Burnett Company, a Chicago advertising agency, was given the task of making Marlboro cigarettes appealing to men. The result was the “tattooed man” campaign. It involved a series of print ads showing a man with a tattoo on his hand holding a Marlboro. The man would be one of several “manly” types, such as a policeman, a firefighter, a construction worker or a cowboy. The agency studied consumer response, and the cowboy figure proved to be the most popular. By 1957, the cowboy had replaced all of the others.

Still, you probably shouldn’t count on seeing A Pinky to the Right: The David Brooks Story, starring Nick Nolte, at the local dodecaplex.

There was something of an outage here this afternoon. I turned in a trouble ticket right before I left the office, and by the time I got home, the following explanation had been proffered:

A MySQL admin has just reported that there was a bit of network saturation on the hosting server that had to be cleared up, since one of the customers was offering a download that was getting hit really hard.

Somebody else on a shared machine. Been there, experienced that.

Of course, had it been yours truly offering that download, I presumably would have gotten a much nastier communication. I go through a fair amount of bandwidth — a shade under half a gigabyte a day — but it’s well within the limits of what I pay for.

I remarked after installing Windows Live Mail this past weekend:

WLM doesn’t have a database structure; it saves each item as an individual file. I’m guessing that this will make life easier, at the expense of disk space.

Maybe not. The Retained folder, which is usually my largest, took up 74.1 MB as an Outlook Express .dbx file.

With the same number of items (5,702) stored as individual .eml files, as WLM is wont to do, total space used is 67 MB.

We will not entertain questions as to why I am retaining 5,702 emails. (Actually, there are way more than that, but this is the generic retention folder; there are others.)

The shopping cart debuted in an Oklahoma City supermarket in 1937, the handiwork of Sylvan Goldman, and I’m guessing the first one probably wasn’t left out in the parking lot.

Nowadays stores often have dedicated spaces to leave your cart, so you don’t have to trudge back to the entrance with it after you’ve loaded up the truck, but not everyone understands the concept:

Guilty: The idiot who left a shopping cart in the middle of a parking space rather than push it ten extra steps to the cart corral in the next spot over.

Sentence: To wake up with a shopping cart in his bed — the one with the square wheels — dripping wet from having been left out in the rain.

The German-owned ALDI chain has a kinder, gentler approach: you want a cart, it will cost you a quarter, which you’ll get back after you return it to the place you got it.

Pontiac sales in August were up 23 percent from a year ago, the only General Motors brand to post a gain over 2008; Buick and GMC, its erstwhile brethren at the dealerships, both dropped sharply, which might make you wonder why it is that they’re being kept on while Pontiac is getting its feeding tube pulled.

That said, if you had your eye on one of the remaining Ponchos, you’d better get in gear: GM says there are only about 17,000 Pontiacs left in inventory. Even at the dismal 2008 sales rate, that’s less than a month’s worth, though you have to figure that the least desirable examples of the breed will probably languish on back lots for many months to come.

Well, maybe not so much “Only a Northern Song.” But I’d really have to rack my brain to come up with ten favorite Beatles tracks, and Steven Roemerman, who actually did do that, probably didn’t have too easy a time with it either:

On my first pass through the collection I came up with 20 songs, which I easily whittled down to 15. I then listened to each song, if I felt compelled to skip it I’d move it to the bottom of the list. I was able to get the list down to 12 and I thought about giving those last to songs honorable mention, but that seemed like a cop-out so I went through the list one more time and pared it down.

There are 785 songs on my MP3 Walkman. The Beatles are responsible for 23 of them. And rather than pare down that list to a Top Ten, I’m just going to list all the ones I thought enough of to copy over to the OMGAudio folder (dates are for UK release):

“Love Me Do” (1962)
“She Loves You” (1963)
“I Saw Her Standing There” (1963)
“Twist and Shout” (1963)
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1964)
“Can’t Buy Me Love” (1964)
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)
“I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” (1964)
“I Feel Fine” (1965)
“Eight Days a Week” (1965)
“Ticket to Ride” (1965)
“Help!” (1965)
“We Can Work It Out” (1966)
“Day Tripper” (1966)
“Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967)
“Penny Lane” (1967)
“I Am the Walrus” (1967)
“Lady Madonna” (1968)
“Hey Jude” (1968)
“Get Back” (1969)
“Come Together” (1969)
“Let It Be” (1970)
“The Long and Winding Road” (1970)

In the case of “Get Back” and “Let It Be,” these are the single versions, rather than the versions from the Let It Be LP.

The reader will notice a definite bias toward 45s; in fact, all these tracks came out in the US as singles, even “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” which was the B-side of “I’ll Cry Instead” (Capitol 5234) and charted in its own right at #95. In part, this reflects the Beatles’ own practice of recording the singles and the albums as separate entities, a practice which was pretty much thwarted in the States, and which became moot after the White Album, which produced no singles until “Helter Skelter” (!), issued for some reason as the B-side of “Got to Get You Into My Life” in 1975.

Still, I could easily have included two dozen more, including some cherished non-singles like “What You’re Doing” and “Drive My Car.”

(For comparison purposes: There are 51 Beatles recordings on my iTunes install, counting the entire “You Never Give Me Your Money,” etc. medley from Abbey Road as one. Total number of tracks: 4,864.)

Or something like that. Actual Fark headline:

WKRP gets the porn treatment. WKY coming to a porn store near you soon

Linked to this. I’m assuming the WKY reference has something to do with a, um, common lubricant — “She don’t use jelly!” insists Wayne Coyne — but I figure, if any radio station around here gets transmogrified into porno, it would have to be KTOK, simply due to the presence of news director Jerry Bonin’ Bohnen.

Last couple of years, I’ve had a early-fall eruption of roses in the front flower box — see here, for example — and I’m always surprised by this, what with the general nature of summer in these parts. (Two words: “hot” and “dry.”)

But we had about triple the usual August rain this year, so Rosa recalcitransia is back early, and looks something like this:

Those in the back are actually about a foot behind and a foot lower, the result of a carefully-chosen (yeah, right) camera angle. And as you can see, more are coming.

(More sizes at Flickr.)

Few things get under my hide quite so quickly as a bad chair:

About 216,000 office chairs are being recalled after 35 reports of the chair backs or posts breaking, leading to lacerations, muscle strains, contusions and concussions.

The OfficeMax Task Chairs were sold in OfficeMax stores nationwide, online, in catalogs and by direct sales to businesses from September 2003 to July 2008 for between $40 and $65.

Allow me to point out the obvious: There is no such thing as a good under-$100 office chair. Anything at the $50 price point is basically a wheeled bar stool that’s been cut off at the knees: the only way you can make it bearable is to keep drinking. Something that adjusts to your needs costs at least $100, and by “at least $100″ I mean, at least in my case, somewhere around $350. Unless, of course, you like the idea of having to get a new chair every 18 months or so.

A late-1999 ad piece for the 2000 Infiniti I30 — regular readers will recall that I actually drive one of those critters — makes a fuss about comparative ephemera like this:

The 7-speaker Bose^® system with CD uses a new Nd woofer whose neodymium iron boron magnet has ten times the magnetic energy of conventional speakers, for richer sound and no audible distortion.

With (in)judicious selection of program material, I can get all the audible distortion I can stand and then some. But the weird-sounding bit is “neodymium iron boron,” though it turns out that NdFeB is pretty much a commodity these days, magnet-wise, and you have to figure that actual neodymium, one of the vaunted Rare Earths that hangs out of the middle of the periodic table, is probably not the major contributor to this alloy.

You want a lot of neodymium, don’t think Bose; think Toyota. As in Prius:

Jack Lifton, an independent commodities consultant and strategic metals expert, calls the Prius “the biggest user of rare earths of any object in the world.”

Each electric Prius motor requires 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of neodymium, and each battery [pack] uses 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum. That number will nearly double under Toyota’s plans to boost the car’s fuel economy, he said.

As it turns out, the rare earths aren’t all that rare, but they are difficult to mine — and worse, the Chinese dominate the trade, which means that new supplies will have to be developed if we’re to have lots of hybrid cars. Or, for that matter, nonhybrid cars with hotly-hyped stereo systems.

(Via AutoblogGreen.)

The quality of this video is seriously strained, but given the subject matter, this might be an advantage.

Feel free to ignore the “How I Made Zillions” plugola throughout.

(Discovered at Style Spy.)

This time I’m confused. It says it’s the Carnival of the Vanities, which would make it the 347th, but it’s titled “BtS BoMS.” Is Dodgeblogium consolidating the Best of Me and the Carnival? It would certainly make sense. And it’s not like I’m going to call on the Air Force to send the 347th Rescue Group to find out what happened.

Jim’s not talking politics this time. He’s talking wristwatches:

I have always worn mine on my left wrist. Being right-handed and being old enough to remember when one had to wind a wristwatch, it seemed to make sense to leave one’s dominant hand with easy access to the watch’s stem to permit the regular need to turn the stem back and forth to put the tension in the mainspring that permitted the gadget to function.

Which is where I started wearing mine: I am a northpaw, and for most of my poorly-timed life I wore a watch that required the occasional wind.

Now, I’ve noticed lots of people wearing their wristwatches on their right wrist. I doubt as many people did this when watches had to be wound, but I lack empirical data. Is this the case, because regular winding is not longer necessary? After all, one needs access to the watch’s stem only twice per year to accommodate daylight saving time changes and, for watches with a date function, only five times per year to account for those months with fewer than thirty-one days.

These days, I wear an electronic. (Actually, it’s the same one I’ve worn since the middle 1980s.) It needs updating twice a year (DST on, DST off), and its date function fails only on the 29th of February. On the other hand, it keeps fairly lousy time, so I sync it manually, at least three times a week, to one of the two atomic timepieces I have at home. And once in a while, you may see it on my right wrist, as an effort to equalize the tan lines on either side.

There was one instance when I wore it, um, somewhere else, to the utter displeasure of the woman of the house, but you don’t want to know about that.

Diane Sawyer, host of ABC’s Good Morning America since 1999, will be taking over the network’s World News Tonight program in January, replacing Charles Gibson, who is retiring. This reaction was tweeted by OpenBookJen Wednesday night:

Diane Sawyer never struck me as anchor material. She’s a great interviewer/long narrative journalist. But anchor?

At the time, I suggested that the two skills didn’t necessarily overlap, and I’ll stand by that statement, although somewhere in the back of my mind, trying entirely too hard to scoot forward, was this thought: “Do I want someone who looks like this stuck behind a desk?”

Although her appearance wasn’t the issue, continued Jen: it was “demeanor appropriateness.” And I can see that: she maintains distance, but perhaps not enough distance for the anchor chair.

Bill Quick says it doesn’t matter one way or another:

I am much less concerned about the nature of the sexual dangles attached to the bodies of these news anchors than I am about the ideological appurtenances.

Well, yeah, if you’re watching for content.

“Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women,” asserts the Telegraph:

[R]esearch shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.

Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or ‘cognitive resources’ trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.

This sounds like an extension of that old story about only being able to use one head at a time, and unfortunately is probably just as true. I’m somewhat tongue-tied normally; the knots achieve near-Gordian complexity in the presence of a Major Babe. And if she’s paying attention, she’ll know: my speaking cadence, ordinarily a trifle irregular, becomes downright ragged.

Does this work in reverse? Of course not:

Psychologist Dr George Fieldman, a member of the British Psychological Society, said the findings reflect the fact that men are programmed to think about ways to pass on their genes.

‘When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call ‘reproductively focused’.

‘But a woman also looks for signs of other attributes, such as wealth, youth and kindness. Just the look of the man would be unlikely to have the same effect.’

It’s a comfort to know I have deeper disqualifiers.

Finally, something faster than a winter cold front:

German researchers have shown that bombarding high-pressure gas with a laser can produce dramatic cooling, dropping the temperature as much as 66 degrees Celsius (about 119 degrees Fahrenheit) in a matter of seconds.

The researchers say laser cooling of dense gases could work as a new kind of refrigeration, and might even be able to achieve temperatures close to absolute zero. They reported their findings Wednesday in Nature.

In terms of cold fronts, the one that hit here on the 11th of November 1911 (how auspicious can you get?) was pretty dramatic: a drop of 66 degrees Fahrenheit (37 Celsius). This set a record low for the date, which is made even more remarkable by the fact that the record high for the date was set that morning. (High 83°F, low 17°F; no November 11th since has matched it at either end.)

Laboratory work is wondrous enough, but we civilians want practical applications. For example:

[I]t would be great to be able to go buy pop, bring it home and put it in my fast laser refrigerator and have a nice cold one in just a minute or two. I’m not holding my breath though. I’m betting this will be something strictly for the boys in the lab for a long, long time. On the other hand, if it turns out to be more “environmentally friendly” maybe they will rush it to the market. We can dream right?

I have my doubts, but I figure I have, in this very room, at least two dozen items that I couldn’t possibly have imagined thirty years ago, none of them particularly expensive.

Do you suppose there are any drinking establishments out there with big banners proclaiming NO GAS IN OUR ETHANOL?

Similarly, but posted a day earlier, this observation by Roberta X:

They’re always setting phasers on “stun,” but nowhere in TV and film SF have I encountered any of ‘em setting stunners on “phase.” Not even in print. This is an asymmetry that really should be rectified.

And I’d bet she can build a rectifier circuit to do it, too.

Well, it showed up on the online-payment system at okc.gov earlier this week, and I duly paid it; yesterday the actual bill showed up.

Of interest: the time elapsed between meter readings was nearly six weeks (23 June to 3 August). Usage was what I might have expected for a month and a half. And the due date is the 11th.

Still unknown: if this is due to a change in the billing cycle, or just a temporary glitch; whether this has anything to do with the new $3.65 charge for ambulance service.

The title track to Welcome to the Monkey House by the Dandy Warhols contains the following verbiage:

Wire is coming back again
Elastica got sued by them
When Michael Jackson dies
We’re covering “Blackbird”
And won’t it be absurd then
When no one knows what song they just heard
Unless someone on the radio tells them first
So come on come on come on
Come
Come on come on come on
Come on
Come on come on come on
You monkeys

Well, Michael Jackson has indeed died, and here are the Dandy Warhols with a cover of “Blackbird”:

The Wire-Elastica, um, connection is explained here.

(Via This. That. No Other.)

Walter Matthau, as a crusty Supreme Court Justice in First Monday in October: “The telephone has no Constitutional right to be answered.”

In keeping with this ruling, I tend to avoid picking up the landline: Caller ID is now ten bucks a month, but the combination of it and this handy device, despite the expense, is definitely preferable to listening to someone trying to separate me from the rest of my dollars. And yes, that includes organizations I support otherwise:

A few seconds after Jared picked up the phone, he gestured wildly to me to come over and listen to the craziness and hilarity he was hearing. A woman with a heavy hickish Texan accent had introduced herself as a representative of the NRA and asked him if he was willing to listen to a short recording. Of course he said yes. We were both intrigued at that point. I sat quietly, listening and giggling to myself, all the while making dramatic LMAO gestures to Jared and letting him do all the talking.

The 2-3 minute recording was basically a scare-fest about how we, as fine upstanding gun-totin’ Amerucuns, should be terrified that some sort of shady conspiracy business is going on right now whereby 3rd world Mexican dictators (or dictators of some other countries — I don’t remember which ones) are trying to control United States gun policy. Lest that not be enough to make you shake in yer cowboy boots, that gun-hating she-devil Hillary Clinton is also personally going to come to your house and take away your guns.

Dictators, I reckon, are dictators, First World or Third; neither the location nor the accent matters a whole heck of a lot.

Still, it’s not like the NRA doesn’t have other, less annoying outreach methods. In fact, since I’m an actual member, I suspect I might be subjected to even more of them.

There are several things I do fairly well in the dark, and a few I may not have done especially well but greatly enjoyed while they were going on. Except as prelude, however, none of them involved going out to dinner:

Imagine a San Francisco dining experience like no other. In a pitch-black dining room, each flavor and texture greets enthusiastic senses hungry for an awareness once brought by sight. This is Opaque, San Francisco’s first dark dining restaurant.

A brilliant experimental dining concept that originated in Europe, dark dining allows food to stir the senses in the most unique way. Each burst of spice, each hint of sweetness, each touch of tang stands out, yielding an entirely new appreciation of fine cuisine. Under the expert guidance of Chef de Cuisine Mike Whang (of the popular Indigo Restaurant), the menu at Opaque in San Francisco cultivates a multi-sensory adventure with an array of options woven into a three-course prix fixe meal.

And a good thing it’s prix fixe, too, because I’d hate to pore over the menu under those conditions.

But maybe I’m just missing the point:

Upon arrival at their allotted reservation time, guests will begin their journey into depravation by turning off all cell phones and checking any purses or bags with the hostess in the lounge, since they’ll not be needed in the dark dining room. Guests are welcomed to relax in the lighted lounge, order a round of specialty cocktails and select the three courses that will make up their prix fixe menu. Once they have ordered, they’ll be guided into the darkened dining room for a dining experience unlike any other. While not all patrons dine at the same time, great care is taken to make sure that the seating of other tables does not disrupt the experience for those who are already seated. Guests will be guided and served by visually impaired individuals that have been specially trained to serve in the dark and tend to the varying needs of each patron in a comfortable and reassuring way.

Okay, that explains the menu. But where do they find “visually impaired” waitstaff? Do they advertise on craigslist or in the Chronicle? And how long does it take them to figure out if you’re a rotten tipper?

Still, as the saying goes, you knock out one sense, the other four compensate:

A highly sensual experience, dining at Opaque challenges the way patrons perceive their surroundings and cuisine. Feeling for a fork, running fingers along inviting tabletops, recognizing only the voices of companions, drawing in sweet and savory aromas, identifying each ingredient and spice as they eclipse the palate.

“Oh, lord, what did I just dunk the end of my tie into?”

Maybe I’ll just order a pizza at sunset and forget to turn on the lights.

(Via John Rosenberg.)

“Now” seems a bit premature, but still: the October Car and Driver has an interview with Ralph Nader.

Seriously. It’s on the back page, in their “What I’d Do Differently” section, conducted by Steven Cole Smith, a former executive editor of C/D who still occupies a contributing-editor slot, and who serves as automotive editor of the Orlando Sentinel.

On a hunch, I checked Smith’s back pages, and by gum, there’s an interview with Nader, conducted this past July. Magazine lead times being what they are, this would just about fit — though there’s essentially no duplication between the Sentinel article and the C/D piece, which suggests that Smith had a lot more material than he had space for in the paper, and he managed to talk editor Eddie Alterman into taking it.

I have to wonder how this sits with columnist (and two-time C/D editor) David E. Davis, Jr., who once argued that Nader was in fact dead.

Thirteen years, in Web terms, seems close to an eternity: people look at that “Founded 9 April 1996″ date on the sidebar and they wonder if that Dolly Madison cake on my desk was baked by the actual Dolley Madison. (Short answer: no. The preservatives aren’t that good.)

You want some serious tenure, though, you have to go back to a time when the Web didn’t exist, but The McCarville Report did. Imagine, if you will, the technology of 1979, the ancient art of print, a form of movable type that predates Movable Type.^[1] On the Web scale, this is like having live-blogged the Epic of Gilgamesh; the only way you’re going to beat that is to dig up Izzy Stone and put him on WordPress.

^[1] I owe Sean Gleeson for this comparison.

I should probably go to this Lowe’s (3801 North May) more often; the place was absolutely awash in Major Babes today, all the way from Plumbing Supplies to Lumber. (I needed light bulbs and furnace filters, if you’re curious.) I’m not sure if this was an anomaly due to the impending holiday or what, but I bought half my usual quantities, with the intention of following up on this matter.

The gripe at Mayfair Village has been that the new out-of-state ownership has been cranking up the rents something fierce; a couple of fairly unique stores — Two Sisters and Blue 7 — have fled for points north, and there are more empty spots than I’d like. Unfortunately, one of them has now been filled with one of those payday-loan joints, which inevitably generate mixed emotions for me: I defend their existence, generally, as part and parcel of a free market, but I can’t deny the considerable Ick Factor they generate for me. (Possible future project: Actually visit one of these places and see how justified said Ick Factor really is.)

A few months back, it looked like they were actually going to repave NW 23rd west of May. They dug out the old roadbed on the eastbound lanes and hauled away a mixture of paving material and potholes — I’d guess about a 50-50 ratio — but that’s as far as they’ve gotten. I’m hoping that City Hall has finally gotten fed up with the halfassed paving jobs they’ve been getting out of contractors and have now started demanding something that won’t wear out in a year and a half, but at this point it’s impossible to tell, because nothing’s happening.

Oh, and apparently nobody got the white pages from AT&T this time around, so evidently it wasn’t just me and a passel of Georgians. I think, for the moment, I’ll just borrow Steve Lackmeyer’s copy.

No need to answer, Comic Sans.

Those of you who were here in the fall of ‘06 may remember rather a lot of font rants on this very site, and at the time I thought maybe it was just me.

But you know who else didn’t like crummy fonts? Hitler:

I should have known. (Possibly not safe for work, if someone is looking over your shoulder.)

Okay, maybe that’s a bit much to hope for. But Dr. Ellen Brandt has noticed some encouraging trends:

Equal numbers of Followers and Following: More and more often, we see users whose Follower-Following ratios are just about dead-even, meaning they are shunning the concept of following Celebrities or Big Media pundits and choosing to connect more naturally and equally with potential friends the way they do on Linked In and Facebook. There are now some applications that allow you to see if any Followers have recently dropped you, in which case you can easily drop them, too.

I’ve tried one such application, and haven’t been able to get it to work. That said, I’m among those folks with about the same number of followers and following. (Dr. Brandt, last I looked, was literally dead-even, so she manifestly practices what she preaches.) I do follow a handful of celebrities. Then again, I tend to define “celebrity” as “anyone more famous than I am,” which makes for a pretty broad spectrum. And I of course follow Diablo Cody, who is a pretty broad, but that’s neither here nor there.

Reluctance to Retweet — Or Blindly Recommend — Pieces of Information On Somebody’s Say So: As a lifelong member of the Media, I find it absolutely appalling that anyone should agree to Retweet a link to an article, blog, or any other kind of commentary without first reading it themselves and agreeing it is worth recommending. I don’t want people to Retweet my articles and blogs unless they like them and believe they might be informative and enjoyable to others. And I would not consider Retweeting other people’s work I didn’t like and find interesting. Thankfully, more Twitter users are beginning to agree.

I tend to practice the same rule for retweets that I do for long expropriations of other people’s blog material (such as this): when possible, add value. If you had a good one-liner, I may RT it as is, but if there’s room (light editing is a consideration), I’ll tack on something of my own. And I won’t RT a link unless I’ve actually looked at it.

Refusal to Follow Someone Without Making the Choice Oneself: It may be profound heresy to say so, but I think Twitter’s popular Follow Fridays are essentially silly. It’s bad enough that Twitter’s one- or two-sentence profile bios tell you next-to-nothing about candidates you might want to connect with. But at least they tell you something. (Buffy the Cat’s says she’s a astrophysicist who plays the clarinet and reads Proust.) More Twitterers are passing on the chance to add folks to their Following roster because that fella with the beard in Pensacola — how the heck did he get into my network? — says they should.

I’ve picked up a handful of followers on Follow Friday, I think — at least, there are some people out there who have willingly promoted my name — and I appreciate the gesture. But I have the same sort of ambivalence about #followfriday that I have about blog awards and such: I’d almost rather be one person’s absolute favorite than be widely acknowledged as, um, acceptable. But maybe that’s just me.

The 160-character bios, though (and why not 140?), are indeed fairly (read “extremely”) limited.

Shunning the Concept That the More Followers You Have, the Better Off You Are: Not only is Twitter ineffective when viewed as a popularity contest, but networks patched together randomly can easily harm their amassers. Take a look at virtually any politician’s Followers list on Twitter, and you’ll find crowds of Ladies of the Night, Tooth Whitener salesmen, Stock Tip purveyors, and Trump Network groupies. Opposing politicians could have a field day publicizing these lists, if it weren’t for the fact that theirs are probably just as bad.

Indeed. I’ve purged my own list several times. Fortunately, I’m far enough below the radar that I attract relatively few skanks, soi-disant social-media experts, and skanks. (There are a lot of skanks.)

Dr. Brandt, incidentally, deserves kudos for this delightful post title: I Don’t Like What You Wrote. You Should Be Poisoned, Garrotted, Stabbed With Stiletto Heels, Thrown Off A Tall Building, and Have Vultures Eat Your Liver. Some of us can only aspire to incurring that level of wrath.