It’s time again to slash our way through the jungle of referrer logs in the hope of finding something worth a snicker or two.

what the f— is steve’s problem:  I’ll have to refer this one to Garfunkel & Oates.

koco tv announcer says chickenshit:  I’ll have to refer this one to The Lost Ogle.

nude obstacle course:  Anything that can produce splinters should be considered an obstacle.

is it bad to puke green with white dots in it:  It is bad to puke green even without white dots in it.

Do liberals have more abortions than conservatives?  Don’t know for sure, though they’re certainly more likely to brag about it.

American icon created to get rid of turkey inventory:  ”What is Congress?”

do red bulbs make me look better naked?  There’s only one way to find out.

Sometimes Reaching Noble Guys Seems Impossible Laborious Now Troubling Your Average Heterosexual Occasional Outposts Dating Obvious Toolboxes Craving Opposite Men:  I’m inclined to think this guy has spent too much time dating obvious tools.

crossdressing in scholl sandals:  Doesn’t strike me as much of a cross.

richard stallman had a girlfriend:  E-I-E-I-O. (Licensed under GNU.)

why doesn’t oklahoma bury power lines:  Something about holes not magically appearing in the earth at exactly the right spot.

Search do woman, ladies and girls ever fart in their pantyhose, when they wear them?  Certainly not when they don’t wear them.

aspergers or arrogant asshole:  Technically, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Obligatory (and literal!) Rule 34 item: rule34 pelosi.

And no, this is not a request for more snow and ice.

It was true in the days of American Bandstand, and it’s true today: you can boost the sales of your recording by a TV appearance. And yes, that goes for classical music too:

On Jan. 14, the violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on The Tonight Show. And not just any Tonight Show, but the Tonight Show during the final days of Conan O’Brien’s brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it came as no surprise that Hahn’s new album, “Bach: Violin and Voice,” debuted that week at No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts.

You knew there was a catch, right?

[S]ales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. Hahn’s No. 1 recording, after the sales spike resulting from her appearance on Conan, bolstered by blogs and press, sold 1,000 copies.

Farther down the chart:

In early October, pianist Murray Perahia’s much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

Of course, the charts show only US sales; most classical recordings are aimed at the worldwide market, and you have to figure that Perahia, at least, is a big name across the pond.

But Hahn is no slouch. This is her second debut at #1 — and the first, amazingly, was a pairing of concerti by Sibelius and Schoenberg, released in 2008. I have to admire anyone who can get anything by Schoenberg this high up the charts, especially something the composer himself described as “unplayable.”

Deborah Gibson has not been smoking in the girls’ room:

While [I was] in the restroom, the flight attendant started banging on the door saying “Miss! Smoking is NOT permitted in flight!”

I was thinking — “Is she talking to me?” So, I replied… “Sorry?” — as I’m trying to do my business in peace!

Then, I feel her hands all but coming through the side of the restroom. There must be someway they can bust in or whatever. She’s banging and I quickly pause what I’m doing, pull up my jeans, and open the door. Can you say “feeling a bit violated?”

I suspect they’d have left her alone if she’d been sporting explosive underwear.

“Why,” asks the Hyacinth Girl, “do people insist on writing ridiculous sex scenes?”

I picked up my yearly copy of Cosmo this weekend — I love Anna Faris — and paged through what seemed to be acres of cheesy sex advice and attempted bawdy talk. First of all, girls don’t do sex talk well. We tend to giggle and shy away from the proper names of things. Anyway, the back pages are reserved for excerpts of romance novels, and being unfamiliar with that particular genre, I had to read it. I don’t understand how women read those things without laughing. All that talk of “his length” and “member” and “ravishing her” is just terrible. I’ve read good sex scenes and that ain’t it. I know that if I could only swallow (ha! ha! “swallow” — I’m a 16 year old boy at heart when it comes to these things) my pride, I could make a lot of money writing that crap.

Bad sex scenes, however, are hardly confined to the romance-novel genre. Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), a memoir of a fictional SS officer, contains this howler:

Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody.

It gets worse after that. The Literary Review was pleased, or at least amused, to present its seventeenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for this very passage. The list of previous winners suggests that mere romances don’t stand a chance against the furiously-awful concoctions of ostensibly “literary” fiction.

(For your further dining and dancing pleasure: An arbitrary list of the 25 Sexiest Novels, from 2006. I expect Steve Lackmeyer to have a coronary any moment now.)

Now that insurance is supposed to cover mental-health disorders to essentially the same extent as it does other ailments, Megan McArdle has some doubts about the whole thing:

I am very sympathetic to the plight of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of the people who will tap the benefits are not severely ill people who need intensive care; they’re people who are unhappy. Unhappiness is not a condition for which psychotherapy, or antidepressants, have been shown to be very effective. (Severe clinical depression, yes. But contrary to the belief of people who felt awfully down the time their boyfriend left them, these two conditions are not the same thing.) Since the moderately unhappy and dissatisfied are much more prevalent than those with serious disorders, that’s most of what we’ll be paying for: someone to listen to complaints. That’s what Senators are supposed to be for.

On a more serious note, I feel like we could have achieved the laudable goal of ensuring that serious mental illnesses are not left untreated (at least, in cases where the patient wants to get treatment), without guaranteeing cheaper psychotherapy for America’s ennui-laden affluent classes. Of course, then we’d have to recognize the fact that this stuff has to be paid for, rather than pretending that benefits can somehow be magically generated for free with just a wave of the regulatory pen.

Laden with ennui as I am, I’m not anywhere near affluent, and I struggle with something that is more than mere unhappiness but perhaps less than clinical depression. (I know from clinical depression: I had it through most of the 1980s. It broke up two households, including one with only one person living in it, and landed me in the Home for the Bewildered for a month and a half.)

Treatment for this particular inchoate ailment consists of one tranq and ¾ to one full sleeping tablet, daily. Estimated costs before insurance: $1,000 a year. This will buy — what, five, maybe six sessions on the couch with Dr Sturmunddrang?

And besides, since when do Senators listen to complaints?

M. Simon catches the AP in some New Math:

Although President Barack Obama’s push for a health care overhaul has stalled, conservative lawmakers in about half the states are forging ahead with constitutional amendments to ban government health insurance mandates.

Lawmakers in 34 states have filed or proposed amendments to their state constitutions or statutes rejecting health insurance mandates, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit group that promotes limited government that is helping coordinate the efforts.

So now thirty-four is “about half.” Have we gone from 57 states to more than sixty all of a sudden?

Anyway, someone jostled the AP, a calculator was located, and now the current version reads:

Although President Barack Obama’s push for a health care overhaul has stalled, conservative lawmakers in more than two-thirds of the states are forging ahead with constitutional amendments to ban government health insurance mandates.

See? Math isn’t so hard.

Because some kind soul was asking for it, Marko explains the Writer’s Bump:

The Writer’s Bump is a little callus on the middle finger of the writing hand of someone who writes with a pen a lot. As people have largely switched to computers for composition, the Writer’s Bump has gradually been replaced by new professional trademarks: the Writer’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and the Writer’s Extra Thirty Pounds From Sitting On One’s Ass Near A Fridge All Day Long.

I must point out here that my desk and my fridge are more or less in opposite corners of the house. Then again, no one’s likely to accuse me of being a writer, either.

Now this is hilarious. “Democracy Dollars,” they call ‘em:

The answer to the disproportionate influence of big money is to give ordinary citizens the financial capacity to compete effectively in the political marketplace.

The place to begin is with a tax cut. Each American should get a refundable federal tax credit of $50 that they can use to make contributions to federal candidates during presidential years, and a suitably smaller sum during off-year federal elections.

“Big money,” they say. I figure, if the likes of ExxonMobil and SEIU want to piss away their treasuries in an effort to change my mind on something — which effort, incidentally, will not even come close to succeeding — let ‘em.

In fact, I said so back in 1996:

No more restrictions on contributions, coupled with full disclosure of the list of contributors.

To pick an example entirely at random, if some neofascist newspaper publisher from some provincial backwater wants to pour his fortune into getting a kindred spirit into one of the seats of power, he ought to be able to — and the public should be able easily to identify the anointed one as “Mr _________’s lackey”.

Meanwhile, Rachel asks:

Didn’t whatshisname — you know the guy who took the hallowed Kennedy seat — raise a boatload of money from a boatload of little guys within hours of his debate appearance? And all of those people decided to make a contribution without first waiting for the government to give them their yearly campaign allowance. Imagine that.

You want to get “big money” out of campaigns? Get the government out of the business of granting favors.

Rand Simberg is probably not going out to eat tonight:

I don’t go out to eat, generally, unless there is some compelling reason, because I don’t intrinsically enjoy it. I think that restaurants are intrinsically overpriced (not relative to their costs of doing business, but relative to their value to me compared to cooking at home), I don’t know for sure what’s in the food, and can’t get it exactly the way I like it, the portions are too large, particularly on the carbs (again, for economic reasons), and I really don’t enjoy other people serving or waiting on me, particularly when a tip is expected. I really prefer to do it myself (I have the same annoyance with luggage in hotels).

To me the only reasons to go out to eat are a) to eat something that I couldn’t make myself due to lack of time or ingredients (which is why I almost never go to a steak house), b) as a social occasion with others or c) I’m travelling away from home and have no other choice. But it’s not something about which I ever think, “Boy, I’d sure like to go out to eat in some fancy restaurant.”

I’m definitely a b and/or c type myself, albeit closer to c: I pretty much have to eat out when I’m on the road, but I have few social occasions otherwise. (The best of both worlds, of course, is to meet up with someone for a meal while I’m on the road, but this is not the most common of events.)

Along such lines, I said back in ought-six:

Of course, you’re paying for expertise and atmosphere; I can grill up a sixteen-ounce ribeye for $11 and eat it at the breakfast bar, or I can go someplace nice and pay three or four times as much. As a practical matter, though, I’m not going to worry until the Wendy’s Classic Double hits $5.

Last ribeye I bought, come to think of it, was $10.99 a pound.

Cindy Crawford says that she’s experimented — with Botox:

“There’s a doctor here in London who I’ve gone to for Botox,” she said.

“I did a whole skincare line with him. But I haven’t done Botox for ten years. And I didn’t do collagen, I don’t think.”

Wouldn’t you remember your collagen days? Then again, they probably didn’t look like this:

Not exactly Denis Leary’s dream come true, but what the hell. And forget about hotdots, the magazine; it’s dead.

A gadget called OhMiBod, as explained by Agent Bedhead’s sidekick Mr. Atoz:

[B]asically a wireless vibrator that will tap into your iPod and buzz along with the music while you’re doing whatever you’d do with a vibrating cylindrical gizmo that’s slightly over eight inches long.

I’m assuming it won’t work with my Sonicare.

Yours truly, on the 18th of January:

There’s a lot to like in a titanic defensive struggle that goes right down to the wire.

The Hawks-Thunder rematch proved to be exactly that: tied after the first quarter, tied at halftime, and tied again halfway through the fourth on a Mike Bibby trey. Then the hammer came down, and the Thunder outscored the Hawks 17-10 in the last 5:50 to post a 106-99 win, sweeping Atlanta 2-0 and moving to six games over .500.

Then again, Joe Johnson outscored everyone: seemingly everywhere at once, he rolled up 37 points. Three other Hawks recorded double digits. (Bibby finished with 12.) And the Hawks shot a creditable 48 percent, 2.3 better than the Thunder.

But OKC got the boards, 45-35 (17 off the offensive glass), and Kevin Durant, en route to 33 points, collected 11 rebounds and sank 14 free throws in a row. During those last six minutes, Russell Westbrook was serving up assists left and right; he finished with nine of them, nine boards, and 12 points. Jeff Green was good for 19. But this is the startling figure: only seven turnovers. There have been nights when [fill in name of player] got that many all by himself.

So ends the four-game homestand, with a creditable 3-1. Tomorrow night, a visit to New Orleans, albeit without Chris Paul, then off to Golden State (Saturday) and Portland (Tuesday).

Dr. Weevil’s just back from Acronyms R Us:

If FNMA is pronounced ‘Fannie Mae’ and FHLMC is pronounced ‘Freddie Mac’, shouldn’t IPCC be pronounced ‘Ipecac’? Reading about the IPCC and its chairman has much the same effect on me as drinking syrup of ipecac.

Well, somebody had to bring it up.

Google has decided that FTP is no longer worth the bother to them:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Apparently they’re not planning to outsource it to China, either:

[W]e will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users.

That much, at least, is true.

The Law of the West, unsurprisingly, honored the laws of physics:

When physicist Niels Bohr watched westerns, he noticed that the cowboy who drew his gun first and so had an advantage, was often the one shot.

The Nobel laureate’s favoured solution to his “gunslinger’s paradox” has now been confirmed in part: people move faster when reacting than when they initiate the same actions.

Such reactive responses are about 21 milliseconds quicker than planned actions, according to research. It means that the gunslinger who draws last, draws faster.

This does not mean, of course, that you should wait:

While drawing and shooting might take less time, any advantage is lost by the 200 milliseconds it takes the brain to notice that the enemy has gone for his gun.

Han Solo was not available for comment.

(Via Scribal Terror.)

Attention, baffled shoppers:

One thing that is always helpful when cruising the supermarket is to have a really good confused expression. I’ve got this down pat. I never know when to give up and bother an aisleperson to ask to locate something. I don’t know how busy they are. But if you walk around with a good confused expression for a little while, they’ll find you! Incidentally, eyes made uncomfortable with contacts and the squinting that bad contacts require really helps you out in this regard. You can have the confused expression even when it’s not your intent.

I’m good at confused expressions, but grocery clerks leave me alone for the most part, no matter how befuddled I appear. On the other hand, someone at Lowe’s will always ask what I might be needing; I suspect this is because I look like I’m too dumb to be operating power tools.

Sexual-reassignment surgery is expensive, I am given to understand. At least it’s deductible:

The U.S. Tax Court ruled Tuesday that a Massachusetts woman should be allowed to deduct the costs of her sex-change operation, a decision that could have broad implications for transgender people.

Rhiannon O’Donnabhain, who was born a man, sued the Internal Revenue Service after the agency rejected a $5,000 deduction for approximately $25,000 in medical expenses associated with the sex-change surgery.

The IRS said the surgery was cosmetic and not medically necessary.

O’Donnabhain’s lawyers argued that the surgery was a proper treatment for gender-identity disorder, generally accepted as a disorder, and that the deduction should be allowed.

Not all of her expenses qualified, however:

The tax court said O’Donnabhain could deduct as a medical care expense the costs associated with treating her gender-identity disorder, including sex-reassignment surgery and hormone therapy. But the court said she could not deduct the costs of breast augmentation surgery because it found that she had achieved breast enhancement through hormone treatments.

Recap: Do not include breast-augmentation costs on Schedule A.

(Seen at Interested-Participant.)

The Hornets swept the Thunder last year, swept the Sonics the year before that, and won the first of three games this season. You have to figure that sooner or later this would have to come to a halt, and tonight in New Orleans it did, to the tune of 103-99.

In the absence of Chris Paul, who’s out for a month or so, the Bees deployed a rookie backcourt: Darren Collison and Marcus Thornton. They were up to the challenge: Thornton had 22 points, and Collison served up nine of the Hornets’ 31 (!) assists. Emeka Okafor held down the middle nicely enough — 14 points, 12 boards — and you have to figure that sooner or later Peja Stojakovic is going to nail a trey. (He was three-for-eight.) What you don’t figure, though, is for Peja to be a defensive stalwart, and he caught the Thunder napping: four steals, one blocked shot.

But the Thunder were actually making most of their shots: 42 of 73, for 57.5 percent. (Nenad Krstić made seven of eight for 14 points.) The Big Three were big again: Jeff Green, who seems to get more minutes than anyone of late, picked up 14, Russell Westbrook double-doubled with 26 points and 10 assists (and 8 rebounds), and that Durant fellow, averaging a hair under 30, put in exactly 30, including the last two free throws to ice the game. OKC had a slight advantage on the boards, 43-37, though the Hornets got twice as many offensive rebounds.

What mattered, though, was opening up some space. The Thunder, 8th in the West, were one game up on the Hornets; now it’s two, and the season series is tied at one each. (There are only three games in the series this year.)

Only two more games, both on the road, before the All-Star break.

In class-action suits, the plaintiffs receive something nominal and the lawyers receive a bundle. And don’t you dare mess with that system:

A retired Los Angeles County judge who ordered that a lawyer be paid in $10 gift cards from a women’s fashion store as part of a legal settlement was censured Tuesday and barred from presiding over future court cases.

The Commission on Judicial Performance accused Brett C. Klein of showing bias, abusing his authority and “grandstanding to the press” in a class-action lawsuit that he briefly presided over last year.

The lawsuit was brought by a woman who accused a clothing store chain of violating privacy laws by asking for personal identification information when customers used credit cards to make purchases. As part of a settlement, which had been given preliminary approval by a different judge, the two sides agreed that Windsor Fashions would pay the customer who brought the suit $2,500 and her attorney $125,000. Other customers who came forward as part of the suit would each be given a $10 gift voucher.

Fark attached a HERO tag to this one, and rightfully so.

And no, she’s not even joking:

On Sunday, we went to Antarctica.

What’s more, she has pictures.

You tell me about unintended acceleration, I’m likely to snap back: “Hell, I have enough trouble trying to come up with intended acceleration.”

That said, there are people who think Toyota has truly screwed the pooch with this little scandal. The Autoextremist, for instance, weighs in:

The Toyota implosion marks a definitive shift in the American automotive landscape. After dominating the hearts and minds of the American consumer public for the better part of three decades, we are now witnessing the end of Toyota’s reign over this market.

With Toyota unable to avoid the kind of national and now international scrutiny — and notoriety — that has humbled lesser companies, we will see Toyota eventually fall back from the top tier in this market, eclipsed by a host of savvy competitors led by a dramatically rejuvenated Ford and an increasingly aggressive Hyundai.

Maybe. I’m hearing from people wondering if they should unload their Toyotas now while there’s still time. (Answer: No.) Having survived a bout of unplanned wide-open throttle, I continue to believe that anything automotive is ultimately fixable.

It was late one night, and I was heading home in my ancient Celica from a swing shift at what may be considered a moderate speed. And then it wasn’t quite so moderate. I glanced at the tach, which was way up by the 5500-rpm redline. Okay, fine: if we have to do this in second gear all the way home, we shall.

The next day, the problem was diagnosed: broken throttle spring. Replacement part: $2.

Nowadays, of course, you can’t get anything diagnosed for under three figures. J. Random Camryite almost certainly has a slushbox and no idea how to take it out of gear. (“Won’t it hurt the transmission?” Well, maybe. On the other hand, crashing into something will hurt a whole lot more than the transmission.) And most of the time, popping the hood won’t tell you a damn thing unless there’s been major engine trauma.

The point, though, is that this kind of incident is survivable, provided you don’t suddenly dissolve into a puddle of fear.

Received in the mail:

My name is Lia Betourney and I am working in conjunction with the American Red Cross to raise money for the Haiti earthquake victims. As you know, the Haitians are in desperate need of food, water and clothes. As I looked through my closet, I saw potential for a really amazing and fun way to raise money. That’s how I came up with Haiti Fashionista, a consignment sale where 100% of the proceeds will go to the American Red Cross. This event will take place at the Hilton Garden Inn Oklahoma City North/Quail Springs from February 20th-21st, 2010. We are looking for any items that can be donated in the form of gently worn clothing, shoes and accessories that can be sold to the general public. All the donated items will be sold at the consignment sale and hand picked items that are in great condition and fashionable will be used for the fashion show. Later these items will be auctioned off as full outfits.

I doubt anyone would want anything out of my closet, unless they’re running short of tarp (as opposed to TARP), but I’m happy to pass this along.

Dates: February 20th and 21st
Time: Saturday 5:00pm for the Consignment Sale and 8:00 for the Fashion Show; Sunday: 10:00am-3:00pm Consignment Sale
Venue: Hilton Garden Inn Oklahoma City North/Quail Springs, 3201 NW 137th St, Oklahoma City, OK 73134

The organizers have a Facebook page with more information.

The Professor gets a note from Susanna Cornett:

Just send those reporters who don’t get the difference between “libertarian” and “conservative” to me. Because…

I’m a conservative. Conservatives are friends of mine. And you’re no conservative. Heh.

“Indeed,” he said.

Normally I wouldn’t mention this sort of thing, but my one encounter with the lady has proven to be a lot more memorable than I might have anticipated. If you hate following links:

I had lunch today with blogger Susanna Cornett at a diner in East Newark. Now if “East Newark” strikes your brain cells with exactly the same impact as, say, “Calcutta Heights”, well, there’s more to a community than whether it gets a feature section in Architectural Digest. As for the lady herself, she is an intriguing mixture of Southern charm (see earlier references to Kentucky women) and the don’t-mess-with-me attitude that presumably comes from living around New York City, which virtually guaranteed a splendid time for all — I managed to suppress Klutz Mode with incredible precision for once — and after last night, it was nice to have a huge lunch for not much over ten bucks.

Of course, she has long since left New Jersey, and her blogging is a lot more sporadic than it used to be, but as the phrase goes, you can’t have everything.

Or something like that. The misnamed “stomach flu” claims another victim:

Found out the hard way that you shouldn’t drink water when you’re sick. Couldn’t keep down Pedialyte or apple juice; ended up drinking Sierra Mist for the entire day.

I was always told to swig some 7-Up under these conditions — ginger ale is supposedly better, but I never was too fond of ginger ale — so apparently some things never change. Much.

Andrew Ian Dodge is apparently “Baarking mad,” judging by his title for the 363rd Carnival of the Vanities, and indeed I’m about to go mad looking for some way to come up with my usual excessively-cute description. Believe me, I looked; I looked everywhere between Barking, Essex and Baar, Switzerland, which is way over 363 miles, and, says Google Maps, a seven-day walk. By the seventh day, I would need at least a day of rest, a notion sort of consistent with the findings of the Council of Laodicea, which established Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, way back in, oh, 363.

Don’t take your Rails to town: now we have COBOL on Cogs.

(Decompiled from the Identification Division by David Fleck.)

If you seek a distinctive motor vehicle, take heed. The March Automobile Magazine has a feature by Georg Kacher on great Porsche 911s, in which he mentions as one of his favorites the 1987 Clubsport, a variant lacking several creature comforts — radio, glovebox lid, power windows, rear seats — in the interest of saving weight, always a concern of track fiends. Some of that weight was inevitably regained, alas, by the addition of a whale tail seemingly large enough for an actual whale, but 2555 lb is downright feathery by today’s standards.

By ’87, though, says Kacher, “Porsche’s increasingly comfort- and convenience-hungry clientele failed to see the attraction,” and only 329 of the Clubsport coupes were sold over a three-year model run.

And yes, there was a Targa version, of which they sold exactly one. You can’t get a whole lot more distinctive than that.

From left to right: Abigail Adams (John Adams, 2008, played by Laura Linney), and Joan Berkman (The Squid and the Whale, 2005, played by Laura Linney).

The thinking man’s sex symbol? How would I know?

Anyway, happy mumbleth birthday to Laura Linney.

In fact, we often don’t even know when it’s happening at all:

The King demoiselle (Chrysipetra rex) is not just one type of fish, but three distinct groups that recently split from each other, according to a new study.

Samples from three separate populations were sent to Joshua Drew, a marine conservation biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and this is what he found:

In his lab, Drew analyzed the samples for three genes — one that has evolved slowly, and two that have changed rapidly through time. His results showed a clear pattern: The genes that have changed quickly look different from one geographical group to the next, indicating that the groups only recently began to split.

“That means that this little fish we thought was broadly distributed has a mosaic of individual populations and each one is genetically distinct,” said Drew, whose study has been accepted for publication in the journal Coral Reefs. “That highlights how little we really know about how biodiversity on Earth is distributed.”

Question: Since coral reefs generally seem to be in suboptimal condition these days, does this mean we have maybe three times as many species with endangered habitats as we thought we did?

(Seen at Jenn’s.)

Robert Stacy McCain is reporting in from Birmingham, Alabama, and he notes in passing:

785 miles in 15 hours, including a two-hour nap in the car this morning at a rest area near Bristol, Tenn…

Which, of course, means 785 miles in 13 hours, including at least one, maybe two fuel stops, unless he’s bolted some Mondo Mobil auxiliary gas tank into that Kia Optima of his. I’m guessing he took I-81 down to Bristol and picked up US 11 there.

Relevant only to me: One of the first assignments dished out to me when I was a newlywed was to get rid of my devilish six-cylinder ’66 Chevrolet. One of the replacements under consideration was a three-year-old Mercedes-Benz 240D with just about six figures on its odometer: the owner, a physician in a small city up towards Kansas, had retrofitted it with just such a tank. At the Benz’s typical 30 mpg, we were told, the car could do over 1300 miles on a single fillup of diesel. Downside: half the trunk space had been recouped for fuel storage, and zero to sixty was quoted in fortnights. We wound up with, of all things, another Chevy, this time with a proper small-block V8. It became her car; I wound up with a Toyota I’ve mentioned before.

Still, can you imagine McCain with a thousand-mile range? Because he can, you damn betcha.

Syaffolee would like an explanation: “What is the rationale for putting a facial expression in parentheses?”

Putting (grin) or (smile) at the end of a paragraph or sentence does not make one look more literate or correct. True, both (grin) and : D are shorthands for those who are afraid that all readers will take them the wrong way*, but I would argue that writing an expression within parenthesis is also an indication of pretension and being not with it. At best, one could assume that the browser had a hiccup when trying to render an emoticon. At worst, it’s like claiming a porcelain toilet as po-mo art or orange Kool-Aid as the nihilist’s Minute Maid.

* Rule of thumb: Always assume that your words will be taken the wrong way.

Most of the nihilists I know prefer Tropicana, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway:

This type of written affectation is pointless. Get rid of the wordy facial expressions in your communications and I’m sure people will still get the general gist of your comment. If you really want to smile and grin your way through the internet, upload a video of yourself to YouTube.

Note to self: “Hitler discovers the emoticon.”

Oh, wait…

In Friday morning’s email:

This letter is from World Fund Discovery Management And Payment Bureau inaugurated by the World Financial Service Authority United States Of America/United Kingdom.

This body was set up to discover an outstanding fund being owed to Governments or Individuals all over the world through Contract Payment, Inheritance and Lottery Winning Prize Awards.

This body has been authorized to investigate and make the subsequent payment to any government, organization or individual, to whom its services apply. During our investigation, we discovered an outstanding sum of money in favour of your name and a mandate has been given to this body: World Fund Discovery Management And Payment Bureau to ensure that this fund gets to you without any further delay.

And you’ll have funds, funds, funds, till the scammers take your dollars away.

The only really distinctive aspect of this attempt is the name fabricated for the Director: Dr. Richard McWealth. Seriously. This is about as believable as a male-enhancement product being offered by Miles O. Johnson.

Excerpts from Megan McArdle’s Quarterly Plea for Comment Thread Civility, not necessarily in the original order:

Many people wander into the other half of the Blogosphere having carefully nurtured a plethora of witty responses to the straw man arguments that flourish in the echo chambers of both the liberal and conservative press. They are therefore expecting that as soon as they have shone the cold light of reason on the ridiculous notions of those rubes on the other side, all but the mean-spirited and vicious among them will immediately see the error of their ways. When they find out that those people have real live reasons for believing as they do, often bolstered by real live facts, they are hurt. This is not what they expected. They feel surprised, and somehow betrayed. At this juncture, they often choose to go on the offensive, name calling and writing sarcastic, bombastic screeds which often seem to center around the silliest and most biased material available to their side, yet are shocked to find out that libertarians are, for some reason, unconvinced by the latest publications from the CSPI. Often, defending their initial assertions against angles they hadn’t, in their previous hothouse environment, really considered, leads them to take increasingly extreme positions in defense of their original unnuanced view, until having found themselves arguing that in order to, say, prevent abortions we should take down the name and phone number of anyone who ever paused in front of a Planned Parenthood Clinic and then hunt them down and shoot them, they flounce away after declaring that everyone on the site is a bunch of ignorant [expletive deleted] who kill babies for fun. If you find yourself caught in this cycle, I have news for you: they’re not the ignorant [expletive deleted] here.

Other behavior by said ignorant [expletive deleted]:

No one gets to pick some time in the distant past when everyone was right, and declare that they draw their moral authority from the denizens of that halcyon era. The fifties and the sixties are over, folks. If your idea can’t stand on its own now, its popular history won’t help it.

So are the thirties, now that I think about it.

And finally:

And fer gosh sakes, will you get out a little more? The sureness of your own ineluctable moral superiority, of the venal stupidity of the other side, of the patent weakness of the opposition’s arguments and moral fiber, is a little tiresome. Cruise around and see what the other side has to say. Then attack them. Nicely, of course. Really, it saves a lot of trouble putting words in the mouths of straw men when you can probably find some idiot somewhere who said pretty much the same thing, and think of how much less typing you’ll do.

Despite its TL;DR capacity, I urge you to read the whole thing — and the subsequent comments, which for the most part do not sound the least bit chastened.

The first time I saw this, it set off my Misandry Alert: “Is this sexist or what?”

After a second look, I’m not so sure. I mean, if that young fellow is being oppressed, he certainly seems to be enjoying himself. Although we can’t tell for sure what’s going on outside the frame, I think it’s a safe bet that she’s not actually standing on his head. And it’s not like he’s looking up her skirt, either.

Compared to the general run of fashion advertising, this is a bright spot, says the intrepid correspondent for ShoeBlog:

I am weary of the pouting, leggy girl, wearing nothing more than lingerie, heels and a come hither look, sitting or laying on a sofa/chair, with soft focus. Virtually every shoe, handbag, fragrance, lingerie, and cosmetic advertisement features at least three of these components. Snore.

The shoe, incidentally, is from Giuseppe Zanotti’s Spring 2010 collection. I have a basic philosophical disagreement with stuff like this — boots, to me, imply protection, utterly contradicted by the open toe — but it does seem to satisfy one of my criteria for interesting footwear, which is “Can I imagine someone wearing this to XO, assuming XO were still open?” (Snarkists who question my urban-hipster credentials, and that should include all of you, are directed here.)

Last time we heard anything about Crossroads Mall, on the city’s south side, was when word got out that it had become the property of the Fed. At the time, I said basically one word: “Bulldozers.”

Now I’m not so sure. As is often the case with malls, while smaller stores paid rent to mall management, the anchor stores owned their sections outright. And one of the departed anchors has managed to find a buyer: Macy’s last month spun off its share of the property to something called Crossroads/150 LLC, for a tidy $1.5 million.

This particular something, reports OKCBiz, is managed by Richard Tanenbaum, who says he plans to retain it as an investment property. And I can’t really argue with him on this:

“It’s not the time to be buying anything,” Tanenbaum said with a laugh, “but, my goodness gracious, at 10 bucks a foot … It’s just one of those deals that you just can’t pass up.”

So: one down, three to go. Crossroads Maiden Lane LLC, the Fed’s entity, owns two of the anchor slots — JCPenney and Montgomery Ward (later Steve & Barry’s) — while Dillard’s retains their location.

I still can’t imagine what might happen to this place that would make it profitable, but I still am loath to bet against Richard Tanenbaum.

It’s gotta be the halftime instructions. The Thunder trailed Golden State by one after the first quarter, managed to squeak out a two-point lead after the second, and then went up 36-23 in the third en route to a 104-95 win in beautiful downtown Oakland.

Or maybe not. Neither team shot especially well (around 42 percent), and rebounds were pretty even (49-48 OKC). Or you might look at this statistic: the Warriors pulled off a respectable seven steals. Russell Westbrook, all by his lonesome, came up with eight. His teammates had eight more. Golden State, a team which is renowned for its ability to force turnovers, gave up 23 of them, one every two minutes; the Thunder, which isn’t known for brilliant ball control, turned it over only 16 times.

Certainly most of Golden State’s offense was present and accounted for. Monta Ellis was bottled up a bit — thank you, Thabo Sefolosha — but Stephen Curry and Corey Maggette split 47 points between them, and eight of the Warriors’ 23 trey attempts paid off. Inexplicably, they missed eight of 21 free throws.

And here’s a sentence that seems a bit astounding: “Kevin Durant had a below-average 29 points.” Kid Delicious was slow to get started, and only hit 7 of 21 from the floor, but he contributed eight boards to the cause. Westbrook had seven rebounds, 21 points and 10 assists. OKC was 22-24 from the charity stripe and bought six treys in 14 tries. Nick Collison pulled down 10 boards.

So that’s five straight wins for the Weather-Related. There’s one more game on this road trip, against the Frail Blazers (bless you, Basketbawful), who somehow keep winning despite the absence of Greg Oden, Joel Przybilla and Brandon Roy. Either they have the world’s greatest bench or there’s a Rose Garden curse. I think the Lakers believed the latter up until tonight.

Mmm. Pass the fried chicken.

“These statements,” says the label, “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

This particular boilerplate, or variations thereof, appears on all those nutritional supplements they sell in the mall or at the health-food store; if the stuff did make claims, it would be considered a drug and would therefore be subject to tighter FDA scrutiny. And the FDA, cruel and heartless bastards that they are, will expect things like clinical trials and actual evidence of efficacy.

We ourselves are not always so skeptical, it seems:

I love my husband, but he’s so susceptible to believing “medical” advice… EXCEPT what his doctors tell him.

If I stop eating tomatoes and potatoes, my arthritis won’t go away. If my husband starts taking alpha lipoic acid, his type II diabetes won’t be cured. Homeopathic remedies and the people who sell them are worthless.

If it were just my husband, I wouldn’t worry much. But it’s not. It’s seemingly everywhere I turn recently. And so much of the misinformation calls itself science, that one really has to be careful not to be misled.

This calls for a disclosure.

I mentioned last summer that creeping neuropathy was leaving me a tad numb at the toes; I noted at the time that there was no cure.

What I didn’t mention was that I’d been reading all that same quasi-medical stuff, and I decided to try out, just for the hell of it, a bottle of what looks like ground-up shagbark and stray bits of linoleum compressed into green ellipses, the particular combination of which — including, not incidentally, the infamous alpha lipoic acid — is suggested (never “claimed,” of course) to have a salutary effect on such nerve damage.

From Wikipedia:

Lipoic acid has been shown in cell culture experiments to increase cellular uptake of glucose by recruiting the glucose transporter GLUT4 to the cell membrane, suggesting its use in diabetes, although these findings are controversial as lipoic acid worsened the condition of type 1 diabetes induced rats.

Of course, type 1 and type 2 are different as night and, um, well, twilight.

After about 180 of these tabs, I don’t think things have really gotten any better. But they also haven’t gotten any worse, which must be considered a boon for someone with a degenerative disease. Inevitably, this suggests a question: how much of this is due to the actual efficacy of the compound, and how much to the placebo effect? That, I can’t tell you. But if the next question is “Would you pay thirty cents a tab for a really good placebo?” the answer, I suspect, is Yes.

I suppose the next step is the homeopathic route: dissolve one tablet in forty-eight gallons of water, and then take a couple of sips every day.

Way better than those “Click It or Ticket” harangues.

(Via Autoblog.)