“But our business model requires that we stick it to our customers!”

Um, no, actually, it doesn’t. Especially if you’d like to retain any of them after this cute little recession of yours is over.

Members of blind and deaf community upset that one of their own won’t play Helen Keller on Broadway; authorities baffled as to how they found out.

(Linked to this.)

Daylight Saving is over at last, saints be praised: the old VCR dug out of the catacombs, the one that spent the summer futilely blinking “12:00,” is now futilely blinking “11:00″ instead.

One thing that doesn’t adjust itself, however, is WordPress. Under Settings/General/Timezone you find this:

Unfortunately, you have to manually update this for Daylight Savings Time. Lame, we know, but will be fixed in the future.

Since this text has been there as long as I can remember (14 months, in this case), I conclude that they’re waiting for the same thing I am: for the government to recover from its rectal-cranial inversion and put an end to this semi-annual clock-blocking.

Cracked.com inadvertently hits on some of the truth of the matter:

While men often don’t get women’s almost religious zeal for footwear, women often fail to grasp why men often times are incapable of giving one single shit about them, and sometimes, somehow, inexplicably don’t notice shoes at all.

Shoes are easy for men to miss because they’re as far away from the eyes as possible. Let’s say an attractive woman enters a room with several men in it. (This has happened before.) In noticing the girl, the men will tend to go for the eye contact first and work their way down. But the path a male eye must follow between a girl’s eyes and her feet is loaded with detours. If his eyeline makes it to the knee, that’s typically a bad thing since there are several parts of a girl that male eyes are eager to explore. This is what makes the female obsession with shoes so troubling for self-centered males. A woman could win the man of her dreams while wearing clown shoes over bulging hobbit feet. Guys won’t notice.

Actually, they’d probably notice the atrocities being represented as footwear by the likes of Alexander McQueen, and they’d much prefer the clown shoes, believe me.

And if I’m self-centered, my center is decidedly off-center, so I might not go for eye contact at first: I might look as far away as possible without actually leaving the scene. Which puts me exactly where you think it does. (These particular shoes are being worn by Kate Snow, co-anchor of the weekend edition of Good Morning America, who so far as I can tell in no way resembles Bilbo Baggins.)

This tendency perhaps was exacerbated by three years in a Catholic school, where all the girls dressed alike and most of them were far more mature (in several senses) than I, a period during which I learned some of the meanings of “humility” and almost all of the fine detail points of Bass Weejuns. But not even Weejuns are sacrosanct these days, so those of us with eyes cast downward are forced to adjust.

Received earlier today from whitehouse.gov:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for your message. On behalf of President Obama, we appreciate hearing from you. The President has promised the most transparent administration in history, and we are committed to listening to and responding to you.

In order to better handle the millions of electronic messages we are receiving and respond more quickly, we have implemented a new contact form on our website:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Please note that this web form has replaced comments@whitehouse.gov. That email address is no longer monitored, so we encourage you to resubmit your message
through the link above. Thank you for using the web form and helping us improve communications with you.

Sincerely,

The Presidential Correspondence Team

Which seems reasonable enough, except that I’m pretty sure I didn’t submit a message to the White House in the first place. The email headers seem to check out, so I’m guessing that this is a legitimate response to someone’s form letter onto which my email address was slapped. This surprises me hardly at all — I seem to have been signed up for several dozen mailing lists, some on the political left, more on the right, without my knowledge — but it’s still somewhat startling to see correspondence of any sort from the White House sitting in my inbox.

Incidentally, in terms of Quality of Autoresponder Boilerplate, this one seems to rank pretty high compared to most of the ones I’ve seen lately, so my congratulations to the members of The Presidential Correspondence Team.

This figured to be yet another titanic defensive struggle, and for the most part it was: neither the Thunder nor the Trail Blazers shot particularly well. But Kevin Durant had a really bad night, hitting only three of 21 from the floor, and the Blazers managed to put together enough offense in the fourth quarter to pull away, winning it on a flurry of free throws at the end, 83-74.

That lack of scoring shows you just how hard-nosed both defenses were, but the Blazers were just a little harder: the Thunder were held to a mere six assists, worst ever for the franchise and three away from the league record for futility. Then again, they blocked seven Portland shots. Russell Westbrook, who fouled out in the last minute, scored 23 points; KD, despite his shooting woes, still squeezed out 16; Jeff Green had a double-double with 19 points and 11 rebounds. The bench contributed more defense than offense, with Etan Thomas pulling down nine boards; overall OKC shot a seriously-subpar 34.3 percent.

Portland didn’t hit much either, shooting 40.6 percent and managing only 16 assists. And LaMarcus Aldridge departed early with a bone contusion. Steve Blake led five Blazers in double figures, with 18 points. Greg Oden came up with a double-double, 12 points and 10 boards.

Attendance was reported at 16,920, about 93 percent of the new, shrunken Ford Center capacity. Everybody seems to be waiting for the Lakers, who are due in Tuesday night. By then, perhaps the shooters will have remembered how to shoot.

If you’ve never seen this before, either you haven’t been paying attention or you’re very new to this site. What happens here: I poke around in the week’s referrals, and the goofiest-looking search strings are posted here for the amusement of the readership. Sometimes it even works.

are scholl sandals bad for your feet:  Not as bad as, say, dancing over hot coals barefoot.

they hate me because i’m thinner:  No. They hate you because you keep reminding them that you’re thinner. And keep in mind, you’ll fit into the woodchipper a lot more easily.

This I ain’t made for putzing:  But that ain’t what it do / One of these days some I / Is gonna putz all over you.

out of date fudge:  Don’t even think about handing it out next Halloween.

when to not wear socks:  ”When wearing sandals” comes most immediately to mind.

convert into txt spk:  WTF4?

i cant make a living working at kmart:  Lately, neither can they.

can a woman drive with no power steering:  Sure. It’s easier, though, to drive a car that never had it than to drive a car that had it up until a couple of minutes ago.

anti anti lock brakes:  Offered as a package with nonpower steering.

grape nuts is cattle feed:  Cattlemen won’t spend four bucks a box for feed, you may be sure.

chat room all naked “no models”:  This idea is useless without webcams, and sometimes with.

can trees kill themselves:  Some of them, despairing, have wanted to, after hearing those bipeds yammering about deadly carbon dioxide.

charles hill and flight attendant:  It never happened. If it had, I’d have been escorted to the exit somewhere over the Continental Divide.

Obligatory Rule 34 item: Meredith Vieira toe cleavage.

If I’ve figured this correctly — here’s the preliminary F-6 report, and here’s the records page — we just finished up the second-coldest October in recorded history, keeping in mind that “recorded history,” for this purpose, goes back no farther than 1891.

Dammit, I knew I wasn’t burning up enough hydrocarbons.

Where Blythe will make the millions she so richly deserves:

Developing a very special, very new product: the home Pap smear. Seriously, every effing time I turn around, I’m making an appointment (six months in advance) to see my gyno so she can charge me a bajillion dollars to swab my bajingo. I’m over the two hour wait and am all set answering awkward questions about my sex life and lady parts. Hence the home Pap smear. A medical degree is not required to successfully carry out a smear. Mainly, one only needs to be comfortable with her own body and voila! Dollar dollar bills saved, y’all. Send it off to a lab and you’re good till next year. I am so serious about this.

I think this is a brilliant idea, though I’m unsure whether I’m looking forward to the inevitable follow-up: the home DRE kit, which might be a bit more involved than bajingo-swabbing.

Perhaps the best thing in the December Automobile is a Q&A with Bobby Hitt, the PR face of BMW’s plant in Greer, South Carolina, between Greenville and Spartanburg along the I-85 corridor. You might think that there might be a mismatch between your languid Southerners and your clipped, efficient Germans, and Hitt will tell you that you just might be right about that:

The first time I worked with a German colleague, he said to me, “We should have a plan.” So I wrote a plan and brought it back. He looked at me and said, “This is not a plan.” We Americans think differently. The Germans plan more, pay more attention to detail. They consider every eventuality. We Americans like to plan for practically none of them and go running down the road.

Needless to say, this couldn’t go on, and it didn’t:

The cultures started to merge. We got more cautious and detail-oriented; they got a little of our cowboyism. I’m told by some of our German colleagues that it’s a trait they have to lose when they go back home, but they enjoy it while they’re here.

“Jippie-ki-jay, Mutter Farber!” [Not even slightly literal, so don't write in.] Or something like that. Volkswagen has been here once before, but in Pennsylvania; it will be interesting to see how they fare in Chattanooga.

We remember the Great Oil Bust of the early 80s. A lot of cars sported a bumper sticker like this: PLEASE, GOD, JUST ONE MORE BOOM / I PROMISE NOT TO PISS IT AWAY THIS TIME. Oklahoma City is not exactly the World’s Boomtown at the moment, but we’re doing pretty well compared to some parts of the country, some of which have been hurting for all the years between then and now. A Twitter friend wrote this up:

I work as a reference librarian at a public library in Lorain, Ohio, located about 30 minutes due west from Cleveland. Lorain is a smaller version of the Rust Belt cities you’ve all heard about: Cleveland, Youngstown, Buffalo, Toledo, Detroit. Lorain once made ships — George Steinbrenner of Yankees fame (or infamy) owned the local shipyard — cars (Fords), and the steel that went into them. Lorain no longer makes cars or ships things. One of the two steel mills is on “warm idle” (mill lingo for the cooling of the blast furnace used for making bar steel), which means that about two-thirds of its 1,000 employees are on indefinite layoff.

The recession of the early 1980s hit here hard and really never went away. The official county unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent and foreclosures are a huge problem as elsewhere in Ohio.

And so it was that the library became more than just the local book depository:

[M]y library held a “recession resources fair” to help people find out how they could perhaps better “survive” in the current economy.

If someone approached my table, I greeted them and explained what the library could offer — books on all aspects of the career search and job hunting process, computer access. I gave them handouts on resume help and offered my business card. If they seemed interested in that assistance, I then walked that person to the state employment agency table and introduced them to the counselor at that table, where they would then be told about what that agency could do for them — job training, classes on interview skills and resume writing, referrals to GED and English language classes and more computers for job searching.

Which, if you think about it, is not so far removed from what libraries usually do:

It was a concentrated version of what librarians do every day — tell people about what we have and where else they might go for more help. But this time, the additional sources of help weren’t a phone call away, but were maybe waiting for them inside a public library meeting room. I will likely never find out if anyone in that room received information or assistance that will make any kind of real difference in their lives. All any of us there could do was to try and help.

Incidentally, tomorrow (3 November) several Ohio libraries will have bond and levy issues on local ballots: since most of the Buckeye State’s libraries are funded by the state, and Columbus is broke, a lot of libraries face major cutbacks or worse. I’m not from around there, but I’ve made friends up thataway, and I’d hate to see this sort of thing happen to them.

(For comparison purposes, libraries in Oklahoma County get a levy through the local property tax, about which more anon.)

Addendum: “Man, nobody moves to Youngstown.” Oh, yeah?

Last year’s Oklahoma County property-tax rate, in my particular sub-district, was 106.08; this year it’s going up a little more than a tad, to 113.44, which is the highest it’s been in a quarter-century, though barely more than it was in 2002, at 113.33.

This will push the tax on the palatial estate at Surlywood to just over $1000. (It was a shade under $900 last year.) The rate two years ago was 110.42.

Percentagewise, I’m getting about the same hit as Jerry “Iceman” Butler: about 11 percent. Then again, he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I’m not.

The arrival of the Twitter List will mean — well, nothing useful, really:

Ultimately, lists are nothing more than filters, built-into the service instead of achievable through TweetDeck or other clients. They’ll further devalue the following/follower numbers, and give numbers-gawkers something else to track. That’s the extent of it.

As a TweetDeck user, I haven’t had much occasion to play with the list function, which is called Groups therein; this is mostly because I couldn’t think of any reasonable criteria for setting up groups. Ultimately I outlined — but never actually implemented — the following scheme:

• Women I lust after greatly;
• Women I lust after somewhat less greatly;
• Guys.

And TweetDeck’s Groups function, I suppose, will be ultimately supplanted by Twitter Lists, simply because they’re supported by Twitter. I have noticed that TweetDeck, since 0.31, has dropped support for tr.im and has added features for bit.ly, which has been anointed as The Official URL Obscurer Of Twitter.

Meanwhile, I muddle through the best I can, without Groups or Lists or What-Have-You.

“How much do you want for the puppy?”

The child thought for a moment, then briefly channeled Dr. Evil. “One million dollars.”

A frown, and then: “How about two kittens at $500,000 each?”

And so a deal was made in the neighborhood, and everyone was happy.

It’s going to take something like that for the taxpayers to recoup their quite-involuntary investment in the American auto industry. From a new GAO report [pdf], we find this little jewel:

Equity value of company necessary to recoup investment:
Chrysler: $54.8 [billion]
GM: $66.9 [billion]

By comparison, Ford, an automaker not owned by the government, which is for the moment marginally profitable, has a market capitalization around $24 billion. How in the world is Chrysler, maybe half the size of Ford in a good year, ever going to be worth $55 billion? Somebody’s going to need an awful lot of high-priced cats.

It’s a book, and this may not be the final title, editorial types being, well, so all-fired editorial and all, but I think it’s just fine the way it is: Gen X-tinct: The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends That Raised a Generation, by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper and Brian Bellmont.

Regular readers of my site may recognize Ms Cooper as proprietor of Pop Culture Junk Mail, from which I’ve been cribbing links for the better part of a decade.

The book is due out in 2011 from Perigee, an imprint of Penguin. Here’s some of what you might expect.

This takes a certain temerity:

The Annual Fee is billed to the Account in full, in advance. For each subsequent year, the Annual Fee will be divided by 12 and billed to the account on a monthly basis.

So they get one year’s worth up front, and then after 30 days they start collecting on the second year. Geez. I get a better deal from the taxman. Then again, I had no reason to expect anything better.

If a book be an ocean, the Internet has turned our reading habits into a series of small wading pools.

That’s the sense I get from this not-quite-a-lament by Carrie Frye:

[T]he Internet for all its virtues — and let me interject here and say that I love the Internet, some of my best friends are the Internet, etc. — has given me an overly inflated sense of my own ability to learn and appreciate new things. I’ve always liked to read several books at once (do you want to read a book about volcanoes tonight, or a novel? Who knows? Better have them both with you!), but this weekend I counted and I had some twenty books in different stages of being read around the house, ones I felt I couldn’t bear to return to the library or put back on their proper shelves because “I’m reading it.” I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing a stack of three to four into bed with me at night — picking them up from around the house as I turn off lights like a grocery shopper ambling through the produce section picking whatever pretty fruit strikes the fancy. On the one hand, thus has it always been — people who like books will have books in their bed, will have far more books on their reading list than they will ever finish, etc. On the other, I think when you casually read a couple hundred little news items, interesting posts and articles online in day, it get frightfully easy to carry a glib sense of engagement away with you from the computer — to want to click along to the next book whenever you’re bored. And on some deeper level, I wonder if the Internet with its ready and immediate access to anything I want to know, has given me a false sense that I’m capable of knowing it, i.e., that I can suck in all that knowledge like Evil Willow draining books at the magic shop. Even as my reading habits have gotten sloppier, have I come to think I’m someone who’s capable of reading three or four books before bed? That I’ll wake up and suddenly be the man who knew everything? Put another way: If the Internet is infinite, has it made me forget that I’m finite?

I keep two or three books going at any given minute, and I’m not always sure which one I’ll pick back up next. As for the inflated sense of one’s learning capacity, I’m relying on it: the moment I start letting the brain zone out is the moment I transform from merely old and decrepit to old and decrepit and demented, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not.

The stack of stuff beside my bed — books, magazines, newsletters, what have you — is now at least as high as the bed itself; to put something away and shut myself down for the night requires a pronounced stretch.

Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix had the Thunder #12 in his Power Ratings Monday, four behind the Lakers. At the time, I thought he was kidding.

Then the Lakers showed up at the Ford and ran off the first nine points. Things looked grim. But OKC fought back, down only one at the half, and after 48 minutes the game was tied at 90. What did not happen: the return of Kevin Durant’s mojo. Kid Delicious had knocked down 28 points in three quarters, which was heartening, but he went scoreless in those last 17 minutes, and L. A. took advantage of his silence to squeak by with a 101-98 win.

One thing about the Lakers: their legendary depth, well, isn’t, at least not this year. Phil Jackson sent up six reserves, who scored all of six points, and Josh Powell had four of them. All the starters except Derek Fisher put in way over 40 minutes out of a possible 53. They made the numbers — Kobe turned in a 31-point night, and both Andrew Bynum and Ron Artest broke into the twenties — but they couldn’t have gone on too much longer, Bynum and Bryant each committing five fouls.

Big Poet Etan Thomas was a major factor in keeping the Lakers bottled up: he played nearly 35 minutes, scored nine points, blocked three shots and hauled in 11 rebounds, more production than the entire L. A. bench. (James Harden also scored nine.) Jeff Green rattled home 18 points, with Thabo Sefolosha and Russell Westbrook recording 12 each. Assists were back up to par, OKC out-diming L. A. 23-19; rebounds were about even.

So my apologies to Chris Mannix. On this night, anyway, the Thunder were almost as good as the Lakers. And it’s not like we’ll never see them again.

Off to Houston on Friday night, followed by a single home game (the Magic on Sunday) and a three-game road trip. It would be nice to finish that stretch at 5-4 or even 6-3, but it’s gonna take some work — and a bit more mojo.

Not that it’s any fun to mock Frank Rich — on the “shooting fish in a barrel” scale, we’re talking lasers aimed at tortoises — but John Salmon will not be thwarted:

I understand that a GOP Stalinist is a lot like an illiterate novelist … or maybe a purple cow.

Oh, come on. Lots of people read Dan Brown.

As for that other creature, I have, of course, an anecdote from the archives:

[This] reminded me of a prank once pulled by the late James S. Moran, described by Steven Phenix as “The Last PR Samurai.” Phenix recalls that “to help a dairy get a cow into print, he dyed it purple,” which is true, but it’s only half the story. H. Allen Smith, a friend of Moran’s, recounted the rest: after the paint job was complete (including metallic paint on the udder), Moran heard that [Gelett] Burgess was in New York. He tracked him to his hotel, led the cow into the lobby, had Burgess paged, and when the poet appeared, Moran simply pointed and yelled: “THERE!”

Okay, it’s not exactly planting a poem in Joyce Kilmer’s yard, but it’s funnier than anything Frank Rich ever imagined.

Suzette turns up a new wrinkle in lawn care: plastics. Immediately this pushed my OMG NO WEEDS button:

In southern California, there are quite a few private residences with advertising … boasting about the artificial turf used as lawns. I did find one or two places that do the same thing in NV — how cost effective is this, really?

Well, there’s a lot to be said for low maintenance. God knows I spend enough working on my lawn. But a testimonial brought me up short:

I have to thank Leisure Lawn for my outstanding yard. My backyard looks incredible. I wouldn’t have believed that artificial grass could look so realistic until I saw Leisure Lawn’s samples. I chose the plush and only paid $6 per sq. foot … installed. No extra or hidden charges like I found with other companies.

A hell of a lot cheaper than Karastan, yes, but I have over 6,000 square feet of yard around here. And I can buy an awful lot of weed killer for forty thousand dollars.

Chatty Cathy was never like this. “Baby and Me” by 505 Games is, for lack of a better description, an infant simulation for Nintendo’s Wii console, and Kotaku’s Owen Good seems, um, unimpressed:

[I]t takes doll-playing to the next level by incorporating motion control (and balance board support!) into 18 game modes designed to test even the most darling little girl’s resistance to saccharine depictions of parenting.

Not only that, this hellspawn will actually cry through the Wiimote’s speaker. You quiet baby down by rocking, burping and teaching him/her/it to walk. There’s even a feeding exercise. I’m sensing a Wiimote breast pump attachment down the line.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that some of the people actually playing this simulator, which is due out next week, might not be “darling little girls.”

(Via Popgadget.)

Last semi-substantive thing I had to say about Newt Gingrich, about three years ago:

Newt Gingrich has always been, as the newspaper guys used to say, “good copy,” not least because, well, he was named “Newt Gingrich”: were Booth Tarkington alive today, you’d find a list of names like “Newt Gingrich” sitting in a file on his computer. (Also, if he were writing Seventeen today, he’d have to call it Eleven, but that’s another matter.) David Letterman once listed ten ways to mispronounce the name, the best of which was Number Three: “Newtros Newtros-Gingy.” But whatever you thought of ol’ Grinch Neutron — political revolutionary or ethically-challenged weasel — he was always the Idea Guy, the man you went to if you wanted a sound bite that didn’t sound like it came from the five hundred-odd political hacks at the Capitol.

In light of more contemporary political events, a case can be made that maybe Newt Gingrich isn’t all that damn smart after all:

I keep hearing about how “smart” Gingrich is — from what I’ve seen, this involves sponsoring “enterprise zones”, school vouchers, free computers, Greeeeen Jorrrrbs and the rest of that rot. No one really thinks any of this will do squat for the urban poor. It’s all about making Republicans look nice to the Stuff White People Like set. Which is how Jack Kemp proved such a boon for the Bob Dole ticket in 1996.

While we’re on the topic of Gingrich’s sooper geniosity, Michael Moore (yes, Michael Moore) managed to pwn him on TV Nation: about all the pork / federal spending Gingrich was bringing back to his district. If you let yourself be Alinskyed by Michael Moore then, for all I am concerned, you don’t deserve a spot on any media outpost this side of FailBlog.

There’s certainly no shortage of results for Newt Gingrich Fail.

“Write Thrilling Love Letters,” promises this 1952 book (just 98 cents!):

No longer need your letters be dry, awkward or uninteresting. HOW TO WRITE LOVE LETTERS is a complete book that shows you how everyday things can sound thrilling. It helps you to express your personality in every letter you write.

Funny. I thought the “personality” was what was scaring them off.

(Found in Mom’s Basement.)

Seven-foot tattooed wonder Robert Swift made upwards of $3 million last year mostly riding the Thunder bench; he disappeared from the roster approximately twenty seconds after the season ended, and turned up a couple months later in the Celtics’ summer camp.

Well, the mighty Bosstones didn’t sign him, so where is he now? Gone home to Bakersfield, where he hopes to play with the Bakersfield Jam of the NBA Development League.

Swift occasionally showed flashes of brilliance during five years with the Sonics and the Thunder, though just as often he showed signs of fragility: he sat out the entire 2006-07 season after rupturing an ACL sixty seconds into the preseason.

Top pay in the D-League is somewhere around $24k a year, so let’s hope Mr Swift has saved up something of a nest egg.

I am not quite old enough to remember the 1811-1812 earthquakes centered on New Madrid, Missouri, though I do know this much: there have been literally thousands of smaller quakes within the New Madrid Seismic Zone, and “Madrid” is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: “MAD-rihd.” (Yes, I have offspring living in Missouri. Why do you ask?)

What I did not even suspect, though, is that those recent rumblings may be aftershocks from The Big Ones:

The small earthquakes that sporadically rattle the central United States may actually be aftershocks from a few extremely large quakes that occurred in the region almost 200 years ago, according to a new study.

Seismically speaking, this sounds awfully slow. And yet:

For one thing, “there’s no motion across the fault now, so nothing’s going on, but yet there are still small earthquakes there,” said Seth Stein, the study’s lead author and a professor of geological sciences at Northwestern University. The small quakes also occur on the same fault plane that researchers believe is responsible for the big quakes. Furthermore, the present-day temblors are getting smaller with time, which is a characteristic of aftershocks, Stein said. And when larger quakes do occur, they happen at the corners of the fault section that scientists think broke during the 19th century earthquakes, a pattern that suggests these are aftershocks, Stein told LiveScience.

A comparison to The Other Big One works out this way:

[T]he San Andreas Fault in California, which moves at the relatively fast speed of about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) per year, will only have aftershocks for about 10 years after a large quake, Stein said. The fast motion essentially “reloads” the fault, wiping out the effects of a previous earthquake and suppressing aftershocks.

On the other hand, the New Madrid faults, known as the “Reelfoot Rift,” move more than 100 times more slowly than the San Andreas fault, allowing the aftershocks to last much longer. The researchers found a similar pattern in faults around the world.

The most recent quake reported in Oklahoma was Monday afternoon. The epicenter was located west of Okemah; the quake’s estimated magnitude was 2.7.

Stan Geiger catches a detail on The Andy Griffith Show:

Goober had lost his job at the filling station and taken a job as a cashier in a Main Street store. A customer made a purchase which the Goob rang up. Back then there were no bar codes or fancy scanners; a cashier looked at a price tag and pushed buttons. The purchase rang up at $8.98. Then the Goob added the tax. The tax came to 13 cents.

Using the above information, I calculate the Mayberry sales tax rate in the day was 1.5 percent.

At the time — no earlier than 1965, since this particular episode was in color — Oklahoma, says Geiger, was already charging 2 percent. You don’t want to know what the rate is today. (And if you do, it’s somewhere around here.)

Atypically for an all-American bullet-headed not-even-slightly-Saxon mother’s son, my favorite novel for the last four decades and odd has been Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which I discovered in high school and which I still reread once a year or so. I admit up front that I was scared spitless when they made a movie out of it, but Tim Fywell’s film was true to the spirit of the book, and Romola Garai won me over as the young Cassandra Mortmain, described thusly at the end of the third paragraph: “I am no beauty but have a neatish face.”

Like hell.

(Photo from InStyle Australia, 11/07.)

The Bill of Rights, as ratified, comprises ten Amendments.

Whoever is running the White House Web site understands, at most, two of them.

Slightly ahead of Congress, but still not good.

Der Kommissar’s in town, but not to worry too much:

[S]omewhere in the 60s we invented the concept of the Cuddly Commie, someone who was either amusingly harmless, a blowhard with a bagful of reheated cliches, or the world-weary literate fellow who was really just as free as us, in a way, and thus an argument for the fatuity of a bipolar world. This idea took a long time to expire, and was last seen in a Star Trek: Next Gen episode, where Picard says “can you believe that people once went to war for different economic systems.” As if that was the small sticking point.

The current version of same — Cuddly Commie, not Star Trek — aspires to world-weary and literate, but quickly descends into clichéd blowhard once he realizes that you’re not buying the premise.

They never quite explain how Roddenberry’s vision of a future without money or religion evolved, or worked, or managed to fill the needs in the human spirit that find manifestation in, oh, things like money, or religion. Trek characters were allowed religion if was based on a non-divine dead guy, be he Surak or Ka’less, but eventually they got old-time religion X 10 with the Bajorans — who started out as sorta-kinda Palestinian stand-ins, but turned into your basic New-Age guys with a priest class and a doctrine built around omniscient, distant god-types who lived in a wormhole and could make anything happen, except granting Avery Brooks the power of personal warmth.

And thus were imagined the Ferengi, 24th-century entrepreneurs incorporating 16th-century Jewish stereotypes. (Well, except that whole wardrobe thing.) Had Shylock survived Venice, you just know he’d be running a Dabo wheel somewhere in the Alpha Quadrant.

I am minded of Quark’s reaction to terrestrial root beer: “so bubbly, and cloying, and happy … just like the Federation.” At least he didn’t say “cuddly.”

It’s a “Caravan of CoTV,” says Andrew Ian Dodge about the 355th edition of Carnival of the Vanities, the first (and still the oldest) of the blog carnivals.

A caravan, generally, implies picking everything up and moving it elsewhere, something like what a chastened Athens was forced to do after Artaxerxes III of Persia basically ordered Athenian forces out of Asia Minor, effectively ending the War of the Allies in 355 BC.