The Truth About Cars’ Curbside Classic series veers into Rule 5 territory with this subtle item: 1967 Buick Electra 225 — The Jayne Mansfield of Convertibles. It makes perfect, if slightly gruesome, sense.

And since Rule 5 is all about trying to hype traffic with babeliciousness, here’s a shot of Mariska Hargitay, Jayne’s daughter.

Maybe not so much larger than life, like her mom or like a Buick Electra, but who’s going to complain? Not I.

Dodgers 4, Cubs 3, on April 29, 1983. Wrigley Field fans made with the boos, and manager Lee Elia spoke with the local media after the game.

Okay, maybe “spoke with” describes the situation inadequately.

(Neither the audio nor the written transcript comes close to “safe for work.”)

Tam goes through the drill, baby, drill:

Personally, while most people are wringing their hands about getting oil on their seabirds, I’m freaking out because they’re getting seabirds in my oil. A couple of baby albatross feathers will clog up a fuel filter like you wouldn’t believe.

Keep in mind, this woman is not easily gulled.

Every Saturday, the Oklahoman prints a list of recently-issued city building permits, in descending order of cost. Down at the far end, you see storage buildings and storm shelters and such and price tags in the $1000-$3000 range.

By the time I’d gotten there, though, my eyes were bugging out from the very first entry, which reads, prosaically, “Flintco Inc., 333 W Sheridan Ave., office, $380,743,000.” The person who transcribes these was helpful enough to note parenthetically, “Devon tower.”

Which answers one of my questions, anyway:

I’m still wondering if there’s a street address assigned to the Tower. Wikipedia says 280 West Sheridan, but that can’t be right: that would put it on top of the north end of the Myriad Botanical Gardens. 289 or 301 or 333, I’d believe.

So 333 it is, apparently.

Cue Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters:

Good times, cheap wine
Young chicks, so fine
Ain’t no better place to be
Than rockin’ and rollin’ in Three Thirty Three.

I am reasonably certain this is not what Devon had in mind.

And not as perturbed about it as you might think, either.

Not coming soon to a theater near you: Magic 8-Ball: The Movie.

An unfortunate side effect of a scientific experiment: the Magic 8-Ball grows to astonishing proportions, and when a warehouse door is left open, the ball rolls away, continues to grow, and flattens entire towns in its wake.

Of course, if you happen to be in proximity to the ball, you can ask if your town is next, and you will get an answer. By the time you finish reading it, though, you’ll be a smear on the landscape.

(Idea cribbed from Dawn Summers.)

You gotta love this: the Scottish play in twenty-seven panels.

(Tweeted in my general direction by Adam Gurri.)

I got a note from Flickr to the effect that Mazda USA had added me as a contact, which struck me as exceedingly odd, since I don’t currently drive a Mazda. I’ve owned two of them, and I wouldn’t mind having another one — a five-door Mazda3, and not necessarily a Mazdaspeed version, looks rather appealing these days, apart from its doofus grin, which I can’t see from the driver’s seat anyway — but my current status as Nissan not-quite-fanboy would seem to argue against this sort of thing.

Then it occurred to me that they were simply looking for “Mazda” tags all over Flickr, in which case they’d surely have found this picture of The Wreck.

Since I’d presumably still be driving that Mazda had it not been for The Wreck, I figure there are worse things to be linked for.

Stan Geiger finds something, um, fishy:

The latest drug advertising craze has to do with a prescription fish oil called Lovaza. Really? You can get a patent on something found naturally in fish? Really?!

I did some quick Google reading on the drug. I found one site that said the pills can cost up to $2 each, and are prescribed at 4 pills a day. That comes to $240 a month. And that cost doesn’t include the constant monitoring by a doctor. The list of side effects of such heavy doses of fish oil is lengthy.

I checked the nearest bottle of 1000-mg fish-oil softgels (about 20 cents per), and they don’t pack quite the same punch: EPA plus DHA content was 300 mg, versus 870 mg for Lovaza. And Lovaza, as befits an actual prescription drug, is presumably produced to higher standards than a mere dietary supplement.

As for that patent, it runs out next month, which suggests a last-minute marketing blitz before the inevitable generics show up.

Now snake oil, it never seems to go down in price.

By now, the demotivational posters far outnumber the motivational posters that spawned them.

Then again, scratch that word “spawned”:

(Poached from Dodd Harris’ Facebook page.)

Stories are now circulating that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will run for Governor of Arizona:

[KNXV-TV] is reporting that Arpaio already has made the decision to take the plunge and will announce his candidacy on Monday.

According to “several high-ranking sources within the Sheriff’s Department,” all the necessary paperwork “has been filled out and is ready to file.” These sources say Arpaio has spent the last two weeks meeting with Republican brass, and several of those meetings have been to discuss Arpaio running for governor.

Given the fact that roughly 60 percent of Arizona’s population is in Maricopa County, Arpaio would have no trouble with name recognition, even if he hadn’t spent the last couple of decades burnishing his reputation as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”

But can he win? Not out of the question:

Unfortunately, he may well win. There are two things an outsider needs to know about people in Arizona:

1. They have an insane, irrational fear of Mexican immigrants, who they see as disproportionately made up of gang lords who make Tony Soprano look like a pansy. Of course, no one seems to have any actual personal experience with such violence or to be an actual victim, but they heard that the lady who put her cat in the microwave was threatened.

2. They believe that only Joe Arpaio has been standing between them and total annihilation at the hands of the brown-skinned hordes.

Out here in Soonerland, the immigrant gang lords seem to be from places farther away than Mexico, but let that pass.

I suspect some of Arpaio’s detractors are actually hoping he will run, if only because he’d have to resign his position as Sheriff.

So basically, we opened up the server logs, and suddenly all this data came spewing out. We did our best to stanch the flow, but inevitably some of it washed into the Web.

skirt “without underwear” “whenever possible”:  Who knew that Britney Spears had a mission statement?

blythe lifts with her tiny babysitter:  Not everyone can say that. Or should.

“sinister, humorless, and vain”:  What is the political-consulting firm upstairs from Dewey, Cheetham and Howe?

sludge and tripe:  And the ad agency on the third floor?

you porn vith rabbit:  I have no idea what you’re talking about, so good luck finding a picture of a bunny with a strap-on.

what is a hotty spirit:  For instance, Elvira Condomine in that Noël Coward play, although the widower might have disagreed with that sentiment.

haul bituminous anthracite dingbat:  This is not, incidentally, the situation that inspired the Bee Gees’ “New York Mining Disaster 1941.”

“naked in phoenix”:  Hey, it’s hot out there.

cool nightwear:  I’ve found the best way to keep it cool is to leave it in the dresser. Even in Phoenix.

10 most irritating things women do during sex:  ”Not being here” has always been first on my list.

You know, something like this could make a body question the value of those “service plans”:

They futz around with it, determine that it works with a direct connection to the router (which I knew) and that they couldn’t get it to work with the wireless (hence the REASON IT IS THERE) and said they couldn’t do anything but that for $130 they could do a system restore.

Now we wouldn’t put up with this from a car dealership. “We can’t fix it, but we can install a new engine for $7500.” But we’ll endure all manner of crap from someone who claims to be able to fix computers, especially if we’ve already paid him $200 for a service plan.

It’s a good racket, if you can get in on it. You bank on people not knowing what to do with computers.

Still, as anyone who’s ever been paid to fix these contraptions can tell you, the most serious system damage is caused, not by your everyday users who don’t know much about how they work, but by the people who think they know more than they actually do. Those folks need to be made to fork out $130 or so now and again, just to give them a sense of humility.

If the official seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia strikes you as excessively erotic, you just might be the Attorney General:

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli apparently isn’t fond of wardrobe malfunctions, even when Virginia’s state seal is involved.

The seal depicts the Roman goddess Virtus, or virtue, wearing a blue tunic draped over one shoulder, her left breast exposed. But on the new lapel pins Cuccinelli recently handed out to his staff, Virtus’ bosom is covered by an armored breastplate.

When the new design came up at a staff meeting, workers in attendance said Cuccinelli joked that it converts a risqué image into a PG one.

It appears to me that Mr Cuccinelli has missed out on an opportunity here. Virtus, the name, is derived from “vir,” which means “man”: the virtues implied are those which were perceived as deriving from masculinity, and when it became necessary to personify them — but no, let’s not go there. Besides, the Greek version (“Arete”) definitely wound up as a goddess, and anything the Greeks did, the Romans thought they could do better.

The issue here, though, isn’t Roman history, but boobage, which will not win the AG any Brownie points:

The joke might be on him, said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.

“When you ask to be ridiculed, it usually happens. And it will happen here, nationally,” he said. “This is classical art, for goodness’ sake.”

I’m happy to do my part to make Dr Sabato’s prophecy come true.

If everyone wanted the same car, all the cars would look the same, act the same, cost the same. Despite the best efforts of various governmental yahoos, though, they don’t, and therefore we have to establish our criteria carefully, as did Bride of Rove:

[M]y Miata has finally zoomed her last zoom and is on her way to the parts depo in the — well — somewhere. My husband and I, anticipating the demise of my beloved car, have been arguing about what to buy next. In all practicality I should buy something that gets better gas mileage, but all of the cars that get better gas mileage are miserable to drive. In my final arguments to D I implored him, if I must live under the shadow of “O”, I NEED a fun car to drive. Life simply cannot be wasted on practicalities in these days of impending doom and chaos. As the nation falls to rack and ruin, let me slog the 80 miles into the office in a bubble of zoom zoom sunshine. Let me race home with Mark Levin blasting on the radio through Overtown after dark with the top down.

Heh.

He bought me another Miata.

Actually, 21 city/28 highway, which is about what it said on my car’s sticker (and about what I actually get), doesn’t strike me as all that bad, especially since any current Miata should be able to leave me in the dust.

Nobody in his right mind is actually shouting “Mr. Obama, tear down that Wall Street!” Still, there are lessons to be learned, methods to be adopted. First, a lesson, from Sonic Charmer:

Suppose you bought into a Ponzi scheme this year, and got $100k back, and were able to support yourself this year on that amount. Not only that but you made a bunch of purchases and plans premised on the idea that $100k would keep flowing to you yearly from Ponzi schemes. But then the next year rolls around and the Ponzi scheme stops paying, and you’re unable to find a new one that pays that $100k.

Do you have a grievance against the Ponzi arrangers for “causing a crisis”? Do you have the right to be self-righteously angry with them for your financial hardships?

Hardly. You made out like a bandit. You got $100k passed to you from Ponzi suckers further down the chain. Among these suckers were IKB and ACA Capital, the investors in Abacus 2007-AC1, who handed over $1 billion for nothing. They were at the bottom of a giant pyramid. If you’re a homeowner who borrowed “bought” a nice house you couldn’t really afford, you were in the middle, not the bottom, of a Ponzi scheme. You have no grievance against anyone. If anything, people have a grievance against you.

And a proposal, from Steve Sailer:

The rating firms’ old school culture of honesty carried them along fairly well, but eventually it broke down under the lucrativeness and complexity of Housing Bubble mortgage-related instruments. Lots of street level petty fraud was going on between borrowers and mortgage brokers, but nobody — the clients, the feds, the media, the GOP, the Democrats — wanted to hear that “underserved” borrowers weren’t going to be able to pay back their mortgages. So, instead of doing things like hiring private detectives to check for fraud, the ratings agencies just rubber stamped the crud concocted by the people paying their bills.

Here’s a simple suggestion for fixing the ratings firms: barter. Only allow them to be compensated by the sellers of financial instruments in those exact financial instruments they rated.

Would this eliminate sub-junk “assets”? Maybe, maybe not. But there’s a lot to be said for putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.

A bit of wisdom tucked into Marko’s Search Term Safari:

As a general rule, you shouldn’t ever buy anything that’s offered on TV between the hours of 10pm and 6am. Sleep deprivation and credit card access don’t mix well.

Although I’d keep a few dollars open on the MasterCard just in case I happened to catch Popeil’s Pocket Sniper.

Any of us can think of a handful of things government ought not to be spending money on. (Several handfuls, for some of us.) Here’s a modest list from Brian J.:

Advertising for tax increases. I mean, they’re showing profligacy and poor money management with the existing tax revenue they have if they throw it into four color mailers and neat signage. I notice that Greene County [MO] has started putting up signs along roads it would improve if the quarter cent sales tax wasn’t sunsetting. Please. Spend the existing money better.

Around here, they usually partner with some interested private-sector party.

I remember one City Council candidate who put up signs with his name along the worst roads in the ward. He didn’t get elected; I’m wondering if maybe some voters thought he was already in office and therefore was to blame for the miserable conditions.

Lobbying for more share of revenue from higher governments. The whole game of getting “free” money from the state or Federal government is unseemly as it is. Spending money to get that money is a bit like gambling.

The Feds, of course, are happy to see the states, hat in hand, offering to do this, that, and maybe even the other thing, just give us some money, wouldja please?

Worst recent example: the high-speed rail initiative announced last year by the Obama administration. Most states didn’t have a chance in hell of dipping into this slush fund, but most states tried.

Suing other governments or taxing districts for a bigger share of money. I hate it when the taxpayer is on the hook for all three sides of this story (two sets of attorneys plus the actual judiciary). Win or lose, taxpayers lose.

Surely there’s something we can sue Arkansas over.

Advertising their services. I listen to radio on the Internet, so I get a steady diet of PSAs advertising the services of various agencies, but I also hear them on the regular radio, too. If you have to advertise for your service, it’s probably superfluous. And the regional drinking-and-driving ads drive me crazy. The state gets money from the Federal government to spend on the ads, so instead of a single PSA, you get your state highway patrol cutting its own ads. Which takes a cop out of a car or from behind a desk for a day in addition to inefficiently spending money to let citizens know that the government will enforce a law.

Of course, the agencies need new clients; in this age of austerity, it’s the only way they can avoid getting their budgets cut.

Darnell Mayberry had a good piece in yesterday’s Oklahoman [warning: gratuitous autostart video] about bang for one’s NBA salary buck: the Thunder, for instance, won 50 regular-season games while spending $55.9 million, while the Lakers won 57, albeit with a payroll of $91 million.

And it’s actually worse than it sounds, since L.A.’s Purple Gang is well into the luxury-tax zone, so spending $91 million on payroll will actually cost them more like $113 million when all is said and done.

Shed no tears for the Lakers, though. One commenter on the paper’s Web site:

If the new CBA has a hard cap, then OKC would be in the same financial ball park [as] New York, Chicago, Boston, etc. But that ain’t gonna ever happen.

This current soft salary cap is ridiculous. It’s more complicated than the Federal Tax Code. And only benefits the Lakers of the world, who can sign any player they want and pay no attention to the cap.

Which is not precisely true, but an owner who’s willing to write extremely large checks does have more options than one trying to live on the NBA-recommended budget. The cap for this season was $57.7 million. Of thirty teams, twenty-eight were over the cap.

And there are lots of exceptions to the cap, which is why it’s “soft.” Even the low-budget Thunder have used exceptions on occasion: center Nenad Krstić was retrieved from Europe with the “mid-level” exception, which allows a team to sign a free agent to a salary no greater than the average NBA salary. (The NBA does not release salary figures, but Krstić’s three-year contract was worth approximately $15.5 million.)

The biggest prize, they say, in this year’s crop of free agents is LeBron James, who has an early-termination option in the fourth year — next season — of his approximately $60-million contract with the Cavaliers. No combination of exceptions will enable the Lakers to buy out LeBron. It is theoretically possible that Cleveland could re-sign King James and then immediately trade him, but there’s no reason to think that the Cavs would consider such a thing. (And incidentally, James wasn’t the highest-paid player on the team this past season: that was Shaq.)

Besides, the Thunder’s actual cap room is apt to be eaten up in the next few years as the younger guys get ready for their second contracts. For 2011-12, the price for Kevin Durant’s services, and for Jeff Green’s, will go up markedly; in addition, there are seven players whose options will either have to be picked up or dropped. At this time, the only player on the team who is definitely signed for that season is Thabo Sefolosha, who is under contract through 2013-14. Could the Lakers, or someone else, swipe Durant? Be assured that Thunder ownership will do their damnedest to see that they don’t.

The “Better Marriage Blanket” contains a layer of activated charcoal for odor absorption, essential if, for instance, you wind up married to Jessica Simpson. At $120 to $180, though, it’s pricey, and WalletPop recommends some alternative measures at varying price points:

You can’t put a price on love, but sanity is another story. And while cheaper alternatives exist (a can of Lysol, nose plugs, cork), so do more expensive ones: marriage counseling, bigger beds, and the Lasko 3135 30″ Oscillating Industrial Pedestal Fan. We don’t know if the Better Marriage Blanket will work, honestly. But just like marriage itself, it’s a bit of a crap shoot. Let’s not take that metaphor any farther.

One thing that will definitely not work: getting a dog, and then blaming it.

The New York Times reports on next year’s hippest vacation spot:

Better known as Jonestown, where more than 900 Americans committed suicide or were murdered one night in 1978 at the behest of the cult leader Jim Jones, the site yields few signs of remembrance. Rains, termites and scavengers have laid waste to its buildings. Vines camouflage its rusting vehicles, including an old flatbed truck and a tractor.

But while nature seems intent on erasing the utopian experiment that went tragically awry here, some enterprising souls in Guyana, South America’s only English-speaking nation, have another idea. They want Jonestown reborn as a tourist destination and are even getting some tepid help from the government, which spent more than 30 years largely trying to live it down.

There seems to be no indication that Kraft Foods is interested in setting up a Kool-Aid booth on the site. (Not that they’d have any reason to.)

Inspired by the lovely Miss Cellania, who unearthed “The Colorectal Surgeon’s Song” by Canadian cut-ups Bowser and Blue, I decided we’re overdue for a revival of their 1986 classic “Polka Dot Undies,” which goes something like this:

Just a trifle Dylanesque, I think, and possibly even safe for work, despite their best efforts.

Who would have thought it needed any help?

Nicole, “They should make a Bacon Helper”

My husband’s eyes lit up and he got this dreamy look on his face, “Wow, just imagine TWO pounds of crumbled bacon!”

Danielle, “What would you put with it?”

My husband, “What else is needed to achieve nirvana?”

(Poached from The Lemon Stand.)

In the NBA’s Western Conference, Oklahoma City Thunder coach Scott Brooks, who led his team to the 8th seed in the playoffs, was named Coach of the Year and had his option picked up for another year.

In the NBA’s Eastern Conference, Chicago Bulls coach Vinny Del Negro, who led his team to the 8th seed in the playoffs, was fired.

Lifetime records as head coach: Brooks 72-79; Del Negro 82-82.

It’s been a while since I walked to or from school, and generally I was alone; the parental units were otherwise occupied, and besides, conventional wisdom holds that it was much safer back then.

But it’s still doable in some parts of the country at some times of the year, though one must expect the unexpected along the way, especially if you’re taking a shortcut:

Shark had a half-day yesterday, and so we decided to walk. Of course, I forgot that Monday is traditionally laundry day at the Convent. Behind the Convent is a laundry line. Most houses in the area have them, right? Who doesn’t love sun-dried sheets?

Well, yesterday, the Convent laundry line was laden with very sturdy and staid foundation garments. Parachute-sized, rebar-reinforced; fluttering mightily in a stiff spring breeze. All in shades of blue and white, as it IS an IHM Convent, after all.

Shark’s eyes were as big as teacups as we walked past. While he’s fairly sure that Sisters (for the most part) are human, too, it had not occurred to him that they might wear UNDERWEAR. He was not entirely sure that even seeing Sister’s squirrel-covers wasn’t a grave sin requiring extra Masses, Confession or possibly Last Rites. Certainly it was more embarrassment than one small boy could bear!

I remember, circa 1968, when one of the orders staffing our high school adopted a habit that didn’t actually sweep the floor: the new hemlines were actually several inches above the ankles, revealing something we’d never so much as imagined. Inasmuch as our female classmates were constantly having their hemlines inspected, lest we boys be unduly provoked, this was wholly unexpected, totally far out, right up there in implausibility with the flying cars we were supposed to own by, um, let’s say, 2010.

And Sister, of course, was aware of our perplexed state. “What were you expecting? Wheels?”

While watching his P’s and Q’s, Eric Scheie finds himself frustrated by A’s and B’s:

Sometimes I think that most of what we call “politics” consists simply of Alphas trying to convince Betas that they can actually be Alphas, if only they vote for the right Alpha leaders! It’s a total con routine, played by both sides, and it relies on convincing the Betas that they are not what they are, by Alphas who know the dirty truth. And in another variation, the Betas are always encouraged by the Alphas to think that their leaders are actually Betas, just like them, while the “real” Alphas are the malevolent leaders of the poor duped Betas on the other side. Alphas on both sides pretend to be Betas, accuse each other of being Alphas, while Betas imagine that by voting for the right Alphas, they’re better Betas than the other Betas, and they might even be “good” Alphas. It goes in endless circles — much to the delight of the Alphas.

I sidestep this particular conflict by assuming that everyone, until proven otherwise, is Gamma, and not a particularly high Gamma at that.

Each year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presents an award to “Distinguished Women in the Arts,” and this year’s honoree was conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, whom I remembered for one of the BMW Art Cars, which was titled “Protect Me From What I Want.” (Whether this has anything to do or not with the song of the same name by Placebo, I couldn’t tell you.)

I brought this up, though, to show you this picture of Sela Ward, who was at the presentation, wearing quite the niftiest dress I’ve seen all year:

Haven’t been able to land an ID for the dress yet, though after seeing this, I’m pretty sure no one else needs to wear it ever again.

Rabbi Tzvi Rosen considers biodiesel in the context of Jewish dietary laws:

In an energy driven world with limited fuel resources, and a public that is totally enamored with its automobiles, industry is constantly looking for inexpensive new sources of alternative fuel. Biodiesel fuel is one answer. Biodiesel is a chemical process that separates vegetable oil or animal fats into two parts: methyl esters — which is another name for biodiesel, and glycerin. The biodiesel is then blended with alcohol to make biodiesel blends that can be used as a substitute for diesel fuel or other fuel substitutes.

Sources of vegetable oil that can be used for biodiesel include rapeseed (canola), soybean and even waste vegetable oil, such as frying oils or trap grease from restaurants, as well as animal fats such as tallow or lard.

Nothing here you didn’t already know. But here’s where I got caught by surprise:

If biodiesel production will skyrocket, and a natural resource of raw material will be spent restaurant oil, vegetable glycerin will have to be even more carefully monitored.

Moreover, of greater kashrus consequence is the potential introduction of naturally produced biodiesel propylene glycol in the marketplace. Propylene glycol has always been assumed to be produced synthetically for commercial use and has been accepted as a kosher ingredient. Propylene glycol has a myriad of uses, as well as endless non-food applications. Although the kashrus status of propylene glycol has never been questioned, propylene glycol can also be produced from glycerin. As biodiesel production grows, thus making the production of propylene glycol from glycerin more economical, this status quo is subject to change.

The pivotal factors, apparently, are where the original fats were obtained and what wound up being fried in them.

(Via Autoblog Green.)

“More spam,” came the prediction after this news:

Nigeria’s ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua, who gave amnesty to armed militants in the troubled oil-rich Niger Delta region, died Wednesday, the country’s information minister said. He was 58.

Yar’Adua had not been seen in public since November, when he went to Saudi Arabia for treatment of an inflammation of tissue around his heart. He was diagnosed with that condition, acute pericarditis, last fall after he complained of chest pain.

Actually, that wasn’t the punchline. This is:

Vice President Goodluck Jonathan has served as the country’s acting leader since Yar’Adua fell ill.

The name is no fluke: in 1999 Jonathan was elected deputy governor of Bayelsa State, and after the governor, one Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, was impeached on corruption charges, Jonathan took over the top slot. There’s a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time.

Still, here’s the Fark headline:

Nigerian President dead. Widow makes plea for help in getting his money out of the country.

Gonna be a long time before that meme subsides.

It’s been a couple of years now since people started wondering when Whole Foods would locate a store in Oklahoma City. A few of us in the Scoff-of-the-Month Club doubted any such thing was in the works, though I did mention the subject last year and pointed to Blair Humphreys’ complaint that the store would probably locate on the Classen Curve, a location he considered suboptimal.

WF is not yet confirming the location, or even the opening date, though the summer of ’11 has been hinted at. The Oklahoman’s Steve Lackmeyer is pretty sure that the store will be on the Classen Curve. One thing, though, has changed since my last post. Back then, I said:

Classen Curve is a downer only if you had your heart set on seeing it downtown, in which case you were dreaming. Besides, the closest competing grocer would be a Walmart Supercenter, and nobody worries if the Lamborghini showroom is too close to a Kia dealership.

Norman’s famed Forward Foods now has an OKC location, at 51st and Western — within a mile of almost any point on the Classen Curve. Walmart may be a hair closer geographically, but it’s a world away.

All (well, most) should be made clear next Wednesday, when presumably the gory details will appear in WFMI’s earnings report.

But with 90 degrees outside and pushing 80 inside, I decided I’d go ahead and crank up the A/C. This is, I note, about three and a half weeks later than usual; it helps that the weather has been (relatively) cooperative.

Tomorrow, a cold front arrives; Monday, if not earlier, they’ll read the electric meter. I figure I’ve done my best.

Except, of course, everyone:

A TSA worker in Miami was arrested when he “lost his mind” and attacked a colleague who repeatedly made fun of his small penis after the security screener walked through a high-tech scanner that showed his genitalia, according to Miami-Dade police.

Rolando Negrin, 44, was arrested at Miami International Airport Wednesday morning following an altercation with a fellow screener, Hugh Osorno, Tuesday evening. Negrin is facing assault charges for allegedly beating Osorno with a baton in the airport’s parking lot, NBC Miami reported.

Inevitably, this means that anyone searching the Web for “small penis” or “diminutive genitalia” or “Who do you expect to satisfy with that?” will, sooner rather than later, be presented with results containing “Rolando Negrin.” There aren’t enough batons on earth to beat them all.

(Snagged from Venomous Kate’s Facebook wall.)

Fishersville Mike drops by the local post office, and something’s missing:

All of the newspaper boxes. No more News Leader. No more News Virginian. No more USA Today, Richmond Times Dispatch or Washington Post.

Even the boxes for the local freebie papers were gone, with one exception:

That had the note that the boxes needed to be removed by the end of April.

You’d think the American press would be encouraged to sell papers on Postal Service property, given its self-inflicted blindness of late.

The response to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, says Little Miss Attila, is driven almost entirely by emotion:

[T]he “thinking,” if you can call it that, is that drilling is icky, and since icky drilling led to an accident, we are better off not drilling at all. (And if you don’t think it’s the ick factor, please consider the overlap between those who are scared of guns and those who are scared of petroleum development that they can see, or know about, or suspect might be going on. The difference being that they tend to avoid owning firearms, but have no compunction about filling up their tanks with fossil fuels a couple of times a week. The theory, I suppose, being that gasoline appears magically at the filling station, ready for our consumption — perhaps driven by the same benevolent forces that place meat at the butcher’s section at Ralph’s without any animals getting killed.)

And yet the same people who push for less drilling don’t seem to hold back on taking road trips, or on consuming foods that weren’t locally produced (or were locally produced — but with tractors, seeders and harvesters, and then brought to market in trucks).

My own thinking, not entirely unemotional: I hope somebody figures out from this that minimum safety requirements tend to be, well, minimal, and that spending a few extra dollars up front is far preferable to spending several million on cleanup.

California has what’s called a modified-closed primary system: there’s no crossover voting, technically, but parties have the option to allow unaffiliated voters to participate. In the 2008 Presidential primary, both the Democratic and American Independent parties took this option.

Proposition 14, on the June ballot, would replace this system with an entirely-open single primary, at least for statewide offices: all candidates would appear on a single ballot, and all registered voters could participate regardless of party affiliation. The candidates finishing first and second would then meet in a runoff.

Six years ago, a similar measure (Prop. 62) was defeated. I don’t know how this one is going to fare. I’m not even sure what I think of it. I’m used to the closed primary here, and, as Roberta X says, “a party’s actual members ought to be the ones influencing its direction and picking its candidates.” Then again, given some of the candidates we’ve seen in recent years, there might be reason to question those members’ judgment.

So I’m throwing this one open. How would you view a system like this?

The title of this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, the 372nd in the series, explains it all: “CoTV in the middle of the British GE (hence it’s late)”.

Politics will do that to you. Well, not to you, maybe, but some people take it far too seriously. It didn’t exactly kill the late Emperor Jianwen of Jin, who died in 372, but his rule was marked by “effectiveness … compromised by his over-dedication to philosophical discussions of Taoism and other related philosophies.”

A tweed upper on a shoe? Why not?

This particular slingback is “Curtsy” from Charles by Charles David. (“Charles,” says the promo material, is “an affordable diffusion” of the Charles David collection.) The color is camel; there are black and cognac versions as well. That ¾-inch platform is pretty well concealed; the heel is four inches, leaving you 3¼ inches up in the air. The bow, though, is what sells it, I think: it’s big enough to be noticeable, not so big as to make a spectacle of itself. I didn’t see it at Zappos, presumably because it’s old news by now, but Amazon still has some of these at wildly-varying prices.

(Spotted first by ShoeperWoman, who says, “What’s not to like?”)

Stacy McCain was kind enough to reproduce a photo of a teenage Ann Althouse, which picture was discussed briefly at lunch today, with the following observation offered by someone other than myself:

“We were all cute as teenagers. Even I was.”

Well, I wasn’t. Not even Mary Quant fake eyelashes would have helped me. On the upside, this means perhaps I haven’t deteriorated all that much in forty-odd years. (Then again, neither has Althouse.)

I’ve got my doubts about this new idea of Joe Lieberman’s:

Lieberman’s law would amend an earlier statute that details other things that can cost you citizenship: Serving in the army of a foreign state, pledging allegiance to a foreign state, and so on. In those cases the State Department decides whether your disloyalty merits loss of citizen status. Lieberman’s law would add involvement with a foreign terror organization — as opposed to a foreign state — to this list.

Who would determine whether you’re involved with a foreign terror group? The State Department. It already decides what is and isn’t designated as a terror organization. Lieberman’s law would also empower State to determine whether you are in league with one of these groups.

On a sentimental level, I’m with Joe: this adds one more tool to the box. On the other hand, given Washington’s tendency of late to impute terrorist tendencies to everyone other than, well, actual terrorists, I’m not so sure I’d want to give State this much discretion.

Jenn is sure she doesn’t:

If they want to change the law to make forfeiture of citizenship part of the punishment for conviction that’s fine, but to make it a decision made by some bureaucrat is not only wrong, but I would think it is unconstitutional.

Before long, they’ll be wanting to deport terriers.

Today is World Naked Gardening Day, and if your situation permits, you might want to give it a try.

Which is not to say that there aren’t drawbacks to so doing, but such is life.