Okay, they’re probably not all that random, but they are short, which ought to be worth something. Or maybe not.

After miles and miles of cookie-cutter C-stores, you might just marvel at this: a service station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright based on his Broadacre City concept, built in 1958 in Cloquet, Minnesota, southwest of Duluth, and recently restored. The owner put a quarter-million into the restoration project, so if you stop by, please fill up with premium.

(Via The Glittering Eye. Title swiped from Paul Simon.)

Advice to women, from Michele Catalano:

You are not your job, your kids, your husband. You should not be defined by any of those things. Any woman who identifies herself as a mother, wife, or lawyer puts herself in a position to be unhappy because she is not living for herself. I’m not saying women should lead utterly self-centered lives. I am saying that we should define ourselves as more than the things we do that involve other people.

It occurs to me that while women dwell on this issue more than men, and Maureen Dowd seemingly more than anyone, the same basic premise is applicable on my side of the aisle. It seems to torment us less, though, and I attribute this to the ease with which we pigeonhole every aspect of our being: this goes here, that goes there, and none of it is quite big enough to jar us out of our cheerful complacency. (Well, sometimes it is, but we can’t stand that. At all.)

Saturn, meanwhile, is dead:

General Motors will close Saturn and wind down its dealership network after a deal to sell the faltering brand to Penske Automotive Group collapsed, the automaker said on Wednesday.

The breakdown of a deal that had been widely expected to close this week will force some 350 Saturn dealerships to close and could cut 13,000 U.S. jobs that would have been preserved under a plan by auto magnate Roger Penske.

Penske had been negotiating with Renault SA to acquire vehicles for the Saturn brand once a production agreement with GM had expired. Those talks collapsed, scuttling the Saturn acquisition by Penske.

If Roger Penske, one of the smartest guys in all of cardom, can’t make something work, it’s not going to work. Period.

Final burial of the brand will be approximately one year from now.

It might not have surprised C. S. Lewis:

“What are all these animals? A cat — two cats — dozens of cats. And all those dogs … why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”

“They are her beasts.”

“Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”

“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”

Of course, it was all a dream. (“Of course”?)

Then again, Will Rogers once said: “If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” Maybe they’re in some place parallel to where the cats are: “…where there are endless birds to chase, cans of tuna to eat, and sunbeams to sleep under.”

This is admittedly more sentimentality than theology, but I’m okay with that. I think.

Sacramento’s NBA team is not moving anytime soon:

Owners of the Sacramento Kings said Wednesday they have “no deadline” for finding a new arena and the team has no intention of leaving town next year.

Responding to rising fears, team co-owner Gavin Maloof said the team won’t file for relocation by the NBA’s deadline of March 2010.

“No, no, no. There’s no way,” Maloof told The Bee Wednesday, waving his arms emphatically. “We love the market. We love our fans. This is the only place we want to be.”

One of the people sounding the alarm was Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson:

Alarmed by the NCAA’s decision to reject Sacramento’s bid to host a regional round of the men’s basketball tournament at Arco Arena, Johnson said he feared the Kings might leave town if progress isn’t made soon on a new arena.

Maloof subsequently met with Johnson and told him that the team “is not going anywhere.”

And that would seem to be that, at least for this season, which begins for the Kings on the 28th in, um, Oklahoma City.

Some well-meaning schnook once informed me, a worried, impressionable child, that someone had screwed up Cinderella. Instead of the canonical glass slippers, the poor little kid with the big dreams, in the original 1697 version by Charles Perrault, had actually worn something else decidedly less remarkable, and some fool Englishman botched the translation: instead of pantoufle de verre, slipper of glass, it was supposed to be pantoufle de vair, slipper of fur. This sounded plausible, and my French was terrible, and the time was way before Snopes, so I rejiggered the memory accordingly.

And the schnook was wrong: they were so glass. I have no idea if they looked exactly like these, but these have the advantage of being, um, real. From Maison Martin Margiela, a mere $2580, pumpkin and coachmice not included.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

For the many shall suffer, that the few will appear to be deterred. At least, that’s the argument made by the state’s Drug Czarlet:

Legislation requiring consumers to obtain a prescription for cold and allergy medicines containing pseudoephedrine is the best way to crush illegal methamphetamine operations, which are reaching epidemic numbers in the Tulsa area, the state’s top drug enforcement officer told a legislative panel Thursday.

“The cornerstone is pseudoephedrine,” said Darrell Weaver, director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control. “We’re constantly battling folks who want this product.”

Especially folks who don’t have any plans to produce meth but are sneezing their fool heads off:

Phil Woodward, executive director of the Oklahoma Pharmacists Association, said the state’s pharmacists are willing to continue to work with law enforcement on trying to prevent the illegal use of pseudoephedrine, but they are concerned about the effect a prescription mandate would have on consumers. “We’ve got folks who need this for colds,” he said of pseudoephedrine. “It’s really the only decongestant out there that’s really effective for consumers. We feel like the patients come first.”

Emphasis added.

Requiring a prescription for this stuff will drive up health-care costs — you have to see the doctor to get that prescription — and it will increase the demand for fossil fuels, because the dumbasses who want to turn their brains into tapioca will drive to the next state, or to the ends of the earth, to get their fix. By no stretch of the imagination is there any win in this proposal.

Besides, if this rule were to be enacted, and it should fail to eradicate the meth plague, as it almost certainly will, what’s the next step? You guessed it. The state would evidently prefer that you live with your misery — and spread it to others, because you can’t do a thing about the symptoms — so that Johnny Wayne Addlepate appears to have less of a chance of blowing himself to smithereens. Me, I look upon his timely demise as a boon to the gene pool.

As mentioned here back in the spring, BMI was trying out a new system of compensating composers, which didn’t sit well with songwriter Artie Wayne:

Up until the last quarter, if a songwriter earned less than $50.00 BMI wouldn’t issue a check until the amount owed exceeded that minimum. Now they have raised the minimum amount to $250.00, FIVE TIMES THE AMOUNT IT WAS A FEW MONTHS AGO, before they issue a check!

Are they crazy? Yeah crazy like a fox, it sounds like someone in accounting came up with this brilliant idea to hold onto millions of dollars of the songwriters diminishing royalties for as long as possible … and who’s going to complain?

Wayne, among others, did complain, and apparently something has changed:

Last week I got a check from BMI for $115 for a song I wrote 40 years ago, and I felt proud that I was able to help in a small way to change their ridiculous practice that was probably created by some low management bean counter.

There exists a BMI service called FastForward, which enables members to draw against future earnings, but you have to be making at least $5000 a year in royalties to qualify. That’s a lot of $115 checks.

Update: Wayne has backpedaled a bit:

I’ve had a dozen e-mails which basically say the same thing …

“Please note that BMI did not change their policy. The September quarter will always bring a check. They will not pay through the other three quarters unless you earn $250. Nothing has changed.”

Well, damn.

I dunno. I want to sympathize, but there’s still an undercurrent of “What were you thinking?” to this story:

A York, SC woman was arrested Tuesday for cutting her lawn topless, according to an incident report from the York County Sheriff’s Office.

Angela Jonas, 50, is charged with indecent exposure after a neighbor called and complained the woman was mowing her yard [address redacted] naked from the waist up. The neighbor said Jonas has done this on several occasions.

Isn’t this, like, discriminatory? They wouldn’t bust (sorry) a guy for this, even if he had substantial moobage.

Then again, she may have damaged her own case:

When deputies arrived to investigate, they found Jonas walking nearby. According to the report, Jonas admitted she liked to cut the grass nude and was walking on the street topless.

(Tweeted in my general direction by Jeff Quinton.)

Tony Quiroga in Car and Driver:

A Michelin engineer who tests driver behavior once told me, “Most people, when faced with cornering beyond 0.4 g or hitting a tree, choose the tree.”

Well, I guess a tire guy would know, right?

Judging by typical cornering speeds on public roads, and my mother-in-law’s reaction to me pressing way beyond 0.4 g, I’d say he’s probably right. Usually, the g-force, or gravitational force — by definition, gravity is 1.0 g — is felt in the downward direction as one’s weight; it’s what keeps your feet in contact with the ground. A lateral g-force such as what one experiences in a car that is cornering is also measured in the same units (g). Most cars today can corner at more than 0.8 g; 0.4 g translates to about 45 mph on a freeway entrance ramp marked at 35 mph.

Not having an accelerometer handy — geez, another argument for an iPhone — I can’t verify this personally, but somehow that seems awfully modest. Or maybe I’m driving harder than I think I am. The ramp from I-44 eastbound to I-35 southbound, which I use five days a week, sometimes six, is about a 75-degree curve that I routinely take at 60 mph unless it’s wet or the 6:30ish traffic doesn’t permit. (I’m going from a road where the speed limit is 60 to a road where the speed limit is, um, 60, so 60 seems like the most logical speed.) In fact, I consider this a test of car and/or tires: if there’s any squeal, it’s a fail. Hardly anyone else pulls this sort of stunt, which makes me wonder if I’m pushing too hard.

Presumably recommended by Wile E. Coyote, though he bought his from rival Acme Corporation.

(Found in a heap of rubble by Jeffro.)

Stacy McCain looks ahead:

The suspiciously Flemish-looking Michelle Malkin says to “prepare for recriminations.” Yeah, liberals are already trying to blame Republicans, but if I live to be 56, I’ll be enjoying the recriminations with bikini-clad cuties on the beach in Rio, covering the 2016 Olympics. (Just warning regular readers, so you can get ready for the Mother Of All Tip-Jar Rattles.)

If I live to be 56, which requires me to hang on for about seven weeks more, I don’t expect to be hanging with any bikini-clad cuties, largely because it will be freaking winter.

Then again: Won’t the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the topic of all this, be held in winter anyway? I mean, Rio is south of the equator. (It doesn’t get cold there — apparently the record low is a mere 5°C, which is hardly my idea of low, inasmuch as it was 7°C here this morning — but it’s the principle of the thing.)

Yours truly, a long time ago:

The first Boobiethon was last year, and I ignored it, thinking it was silly. And maybe it was. Yet it raised over a thousand dollars for breast-cancer research — perhaps not an enormous sum considering all the work that needs to be done, but if you check any bucket, you’ll realize that it’s filled with individual drops.

Last year’s version produced donations of $9,300: lots of drops, as the phrase goes. As an incentive to get you to open up your wallet, dozens of volunteers are giving you a peek into their frontal zones. (Yes, there are some men among them: guys can get the very same cancer, and they’re a lot less likely to be thinking about it.) As DaGoddess would say, “Friends are like bras: a good one never lets you down.” I’m happy to have been a friend to this not-so-silly venture for seven years now.

Much has been made of President Obama’s “amazingly consistent style”, which apparently never seems to change; says the chap who assembled the evidence of same, “no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.”

I demur. And as evidence, Exhibit A: Paris Hilton.

(Via Steph Mineart, who also noticed the similarity.)

Mayor Cornett’s new day job at ad agency Ackerman McQueen caused some consternation hither and yon, mostly because of potential conflicts of interest: talk-show host Mark Shannon said flatly, “His very employment with Ackerman McQueen creates the appearance of wrong-doing.” I submit that anywhere The Mick might put down his briefcase would introduce at least some theoretical potential for mischief, but A/M’s sheer ubiquity multiplies the potential several zillion-fold: if you graphed everywhere the agency has influence in this town and connected all the dots, you’d come up with something you could sell on eBay as Japanese tentacle porn. Nobody is saying that either Cornett or A/M is actually up to something, but as Paul said to the Thessalonians: “Avoid even the appearance of evil.”

Michael Bates was all over this earlier; I mention it here because there’s a question which logically proceeds from the comments, beginning at the point where I noted that last year Oklahoma City voters turned down a charter change which would double the salaries of the Mayor and the Council. Hizzoner currently makes a whopping $24,000 a year in his official position. (God only knows what Cornett is being paid as an executive VP of A/M.) To which Bates replied:

It’s difficult to know how much to pay an elected official. It needs to be enough for them to make it a full-time job, but not so much they want to make a career of it.

Council members get $12,000 a year, basically minimum wage. By comparison, state legislators, who are explicitly part-time — they’re supposed to have the year’s work wrapped up by the last Friday in May — pull down $38,400, plus per diem during session.

My own thinking here is something like this: I don’t want these guys paid so much that I’d want to quit my own job and run for office purely for financial reasons. (Unless, of course, I thought I’d actually win, which I probably would not; Sam Bowman is pretty popular here in Ward 2.) And I suspect my response to graft is typical: I want less of it, unless I have an opportunity to participate. I suppose I should be expecting a letter from Paul any day now.

It’s the Hello Kitty ice pack:

Also noteworthy as a rare shoeless appearance by the Shoe Girl.

Commenter “JT” at The Truth About Cars:

[B]eing first (or loudest) on the InterTwitterGoogleWeb doesn’t necessarily make you right and it rarely makes you valuable.

Just ask the nearest elder statesman in these parts.

If you watched any early episode of Cheers, you had to wonder why those two were dating. As a Wikipedia contributor notes:

Though bright and witty, Diane Chambers was also often pretentious, snobbish and woefully lacking in street-smarts.

And what would a down-to-earth guy like Sam Malone want with someone like that? If you have to ask, you’ve probably never been a guy:

I once saw Shelley Long at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. I think. I can’t be sure. I was too busy turning away to make sure I wasn’t staring. Which tells you far more about me than it does about Shelley Long, but such is life.

We’re now up to the 350th edition of Carnival of the Vanities, appropriately titled “Leaves turning.”

Leaves, of course, are the one aspect of trees you’ll notice most this month on this side of the equator: either they’re changing color or they’re accumulating on the ground. Or both. The trees don’t care; they’re used to it. One wonders what they think about efforts to curb atmospheric carbon dioxide, as advocated by organizations like 350.org.

I could swear I’ve heard something like this once or twice before:

There is a secret to charming women into bed. A skill to loosening bra straps and inhibitions. A technique which drives normally sensible women to take risks. What is more enduring than a man’s rippling six pack? More effective than the tightest set of buns? This secret weapon, if deployed correctly, gives men direct, unimpeded access into the underwear of the female of the species.

A man lucky enough to possess this magical element will find the process of wooing women far less traumatic than his more modestly endowed contemporaries.

It’s called a “sense of humour.” Never mind hoo-ha stimulation, if you can massage her funny bone in just the right way, she’ll be begging you for more.

As news goes, this isn’t. I wrote back in ‘07:

[W]omen, almost unanimously, demand men with a “sense of humor,” which undoubtedly explains all the girlfriends Gilbert Gottfried has stolen away from Eric Bana.

And while I have no doubt that some women pay more attention to hee-hee than to hoo-ha, the number of same camped out on my porch has remained at zero for the last decade or so, which tells me that either my implementation of said sense is woefully short on eptness, or we’re being bullshot for some reason. (Please note that this poem was not written to Andy Richter.)

Subaru has amped up the advertising this year, and a current single-pager for the Legacy sedan — I spotted it in Motor Trend — boasts an interesting feature called “Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive.” All four wheels get equal amounts of torque.

This is, in fact, the simplest, cheapest, least-complicated true-AWD system there is; buggies with scarier price tags than the Sube’s — think “Audi quattro” — have computerized hardware to apportion the torque as needed based on speed, road conditions, and, for all I know, the pH of the Bonneville Salt Flats.

But Subaru’s genius here is selling a low-end feature as something greatly to be desired, and I can see non-automotive potential with this technique. Consider that higher-end cars now seem to have actual analog clocks instead of a digital display through the audio system, and that sales of vinyl records are increasing, at least partly because some audiophiles are convinced that they sound better than CDs. What’s to stop a local Baby Bell from boasting about its “pure analog” telephone service?

Apparently there exists carbon-free sugar:

TYWKIWDBI points out:

Let’s see … sugar is C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Subtract the carbon…

That leaves H₂₂O₁₁ = H₂O.

In retrospect, I should probably be grateful I gave up the idea of becoming a chemist.

Of course, what they’re trying to say is that they bought enough indulgences from some medieval Pope carbon credits to offset the production, but someone else can mock them for that.

(Seen in TJICistan.)

I trashed 88 comments today, all from me.

Actually, what I did was disable the WordPress gizmo that sends a ping back to a previous post on the same site, mostly because I thought it looked like clutter, and self-important clutter at that. (I want pings and trackbacks from the rest of you, not from me.) This has bothered me for some time, and now apparently it bothers Google:

Linking back is always good, however WordPress displays these links using the “nofollow” attribute. So is it good to allow a nofollow linkback to your own website? Considering Google’s new policy changes with regards to nofollow links, and how you might eventually lose ranking over it, adding an additional linkback to your own blog with a nofollow link definitely does not gauge well.

Not that I’m especially concerned about my PageRank, which has been 5 for several years, except for about an hour and a half when it was 6. But I figure I have nothing to gain by appearing to game the system even if I’m not.

So I installed this plugin, which coincidentally is three years old today, so there shouldn’t be any more of that self-referential stuff in the comment listings. I do enough of that in the actual posts.

I had few enough items at the supermarket yesterday to justify going through the self-checkout, but two of the four terminals were hors de combat: one had a large OUT OF ORDER sign on it, and the other was, um, rebooting.

When you see something like that, the temptation is to look around for evidence of Microsoft, and it didn’t take long to find. I got onto that machine after it was readied, and along with my register tape, I found a bootlog, headed “NCR Self Checkout / SCOTApp System Initialization.”

SCOTApp apparently is written in C++ using Microsoft’s Foundation Class Library, and when it fails, it looks something like this.

I am not fond of this particular implementation anyway: the scanning zone seems to be wildly variable, and it may refuse your can of tomato sauce right in front of its frickin’ laser beam because it’s worried about something it thinks you tried to sneak into a bag without scanning at all. After that, finding out it’s running on some form of Windows merely elicits a “That figures.”

This recurring feature was eliminated in the first round of balloting by the International Blog Post Committee, for reasons I am not at liberty to discuss.

how can I help itunes genius work better:  Get lots and lots of songs. Apple prefers, of course, that you get ‘em from them.

kay bailey hutchison’s sexy legs:  Only because I’m a generous soul. The chap on the left is Charles Frank Bolden, Jr., director of NASA. (Source.)

pictures of male transvestite sluts in women’s underthings:  Then again, I’m not that generous.

prius smells bad:  Check for rotting arugula in the vents.

do i like jeeves:  Of course you do. He’s amazingly efficient, unfailingly polite, and he keeps the arugula from falling into the vents.

does larry king wear shoulder pads:  No. That’s a supplemental-restraint system: suspender-mounted airbags.

consarn it:  Some of us are not overly consarned at the moment.

does physics require lab coat:  And the stylish matching lab bag.

where can you not wear socks:  I have a suggestion, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others, would politely disagree.

Relate the “shoot the Geek” scene as a metaphor for Moore’s main point in the context of school violence and cultural understanding:  Nothing like having Google do your homework for you, huh?

Anent the above, here’s an actual photo from the Jersey shore, circa 2001:

“How close did you actually get with that last round?”

The Hillbuzz guys don’t have anything against McDonald’s. However, they don’t think it’s such a great idea for them to open a store in the Louvre, either.

So they came up with this idea, which perhaps might drop the dudgeon level from High to Medium:

If McDonald’s was smart, they’d create a stealth brand of restaurants that would run with the same efficiency but not carry the golden arches. Something along the lines of what Marriott does. Most of you probably don’t realize that Marriott owns Ritz-Carlton. When you stay at a Ritz-Carlton, you don’t realize that Marriott is calling the shots, and you think you are in an independent luxury brand. You’re not. Marriott controls the purchasing, the human resources, the vendor contracts, you name it. But, Marriott is smart and knows not everyone wants to stay at a Marriott … and there are others on the opposite end of the spectrum who can’t afford that mid-level brand, and instead stay at a Courtyard, which is also owned by Marriott, or a Town Place Suites, another Marriott brand, or the FABULOUS Residence Inns.

For some reason, this works a lot better in service industries than it does in manufacturing (cf. any of the recently-shed General Motors brands).

McDonald’s could very easily create something like “La Nod’s”, for lack of a better word, and use their same supply chains and vendor agreements to provide the support to a high-volume, upscale concept that would be more appropriate in places like the Louvre, or close to other historic sites that McDonald’s wants to cash in on because of all the foot traffic, but might avoid public outcry and resentment by not using those arches.

“Might” falls fairly short of “will,” as Walmart, which for the first few months didn’t put its name on its Marketside stores in Arizona, will tell you. Not to mention the stealth Starbucks stores that are starting to appear.

Still, the proposal has merit, if only because you don’t want the Winged Victory of Samothrace assaulted by the Hamburglar.

Hitherto-unheralded watchmaker Jorg Gray got a boost when Barack Obama was spotted wearing one of his 6500 series chronographs, and in true capitalist fashion, the Presidential Watch Company has been organized to sell the heck out of this timepiece.

Obama didn’t pick this model out himself: according to GQ, it was a gift from a member of his security detail. And the agent, I suggest, knew his man: the Jorg Gray, while hardly a Timex, is not really a status symbol either, much like the Chrysler 300C Obama used to drive before Axelrod or Emanuel or somebody told him he’d shore up his green bona fides if he were henceforth seen piloting around a hybrid rather than a Hemi.

The Presidential Watch will set you back $325, a fair sum to those of us wandering around loose with twenty-year-old Casios, but a pittance compared to the price tag of the Really Good Stuff.

(Via Bill Quick, who has long since amortized the cost of his watch.)

This time, from an actual former Saturn owner:

It seemed to me that around 2002 Saturn lost its focus in a race for short-term profit. Instead of improving the small cars they knew how to build, they started making larger cars, sports cars, and an SUV. Everybody wants an SUV, right? Maybe it could have been Saturn that sold the first popular hybrid. Instead they came to be, de facto, another division of GM.

I blame GM management too. The original idea was that Saturn would be an independent company, owned by GM. When it was making money operating on its own, GM should have spun it off, issuing stock to GM shareholders and/or Saturn employees.

GM’s arcane financial reporting being what it is, who knows for certain whether Saturn turned any kind of profit? Most of your automotive pundits are saying that Spring Hill never made a dime for the General.

The argument made for the L-Series was that people just naturally want to trade up, and Saturn didn’t give them any “up” to trade to. Had they put the S-Series on a constant-improvement cycle, instead of just facelifts now and then, they might have held on to their buyers. (Then again, this was an endemic problem at GM: the hapless Chevy Cavalier was kept on for over two decades. It’s hard not to conclude that GM just didn’t understand, or simply couldn’t stand, small cars.)

And it was indeed 2002 when the Vue showed up. I’m not an SUV-hater by nature, but the Vue seemed antithetical to what Saturn was supposed to stand for.

I ought to try to talk Trini into doing a Saturn piece. She’s owned a S-Series, and currently drives an Ion.

From Puck, an American humor magazine of the late 19th century, these appeared in 1881, a hundred years before Scott Fahlman came up with :-) and :-(, though there’s always someone else to blame.

(Spotted at TYWKIWDBI.)