You might quite reasonably question the need for an automobile that costs as much as a house, but clearly the demand exists.

Now comes a pair of shoes that costs as much as a house:

Luxury jeweler House of Borgezie has created stilettos that cost $155,000 per pair. Dubbed the Eternal Borgezie Diamond Stiletto, the bespoke shoe, which comes with a 1,000 year guarantee, is comprised almost entirely of diamonds and gold.

Each shoe is first handcrafted by a goldsmith and then handed off to a diamond setter, who encrusts the shoe “with over 2,200 individual sparkling diamonds.” Total diamond bling factor: 30 carats.

It looks like this:

Now who’s going to buy these? The Daily Mail hazards a guess:

Cheryl Cole, Victoria Beckham and Paris Hilton, whose excessive tastes are funded by a bank balance to match.

Posh had a bad case of bunions recently; she might actually be able to resist these, though frankly I doubt it.

(Via the Consumerist, which dismisses them as “an overpriced pair of hooker heels.”)

Bostonians, it is alleged, talk a lot about paaking the caah in the yaad. But
don’t even think about it in Oklahoma City:

In an effort to reduce blight in neighborhoods and keep home property values from declining the City is increasing the fine for yard parkers from $10 to $100.

“Yard parking is a persistent problem in a number of Oklahoma City neighborhoods,” Code Enforcement Manager Charles Locke said. “The practice is an eyesore and can quickly become a neighborhood epidemic. If we can stop yard parking, we can dramatically enhance the way our community looks.”

More than 8,400 yard parking complaints were logged by the City’s Action Center in 2009. Most violations occur in aging neighborhoods with one-car garages.

I live in such a neighborhood, though we haven’t had a lot of this sort of thing recently, perhaps because we’re an Urban Conservation District and we all have the Action Center on speed dial.

No, it’s not Google. It’s someone pretending to be Google, and they sent out something called “Security Confirmation Code GUK/877/798/2010,” which means — well, nothing, actually.

Claimed email address is “Google@[24.210.55.233],” which seems unlikely, inasmuch as that particular IP resolves to a RoadRunner account in Columbus. I’m thinking the alleged “Google Promotion Award Team” pulled that number at random, since the actual email, assuming there’s anything at all believable in the header, originated from the Middle East.

And oh, there’s a 36k Word document attached, which I don’t think I’ll read.

I will, however, point you to “Google Eye,” a song about a fish (not a phish) written by John D. Loudermilk and recorded by the Nashville Teens (not teens, not from Nashville).

Is it possible to withdraw? (Cameo by Jean-Luc Picard.)

The Gazette has an interview with Steve Howe, inasmuch as the current touring version of Yes is due in town next week (Howe, Chris Squire and Alan White, along with vocalist Benoît David, found in a Yes tribute band called Close to the Edge, and keyboardist Oliver Wakeman, whose surname may seem familiar), and I found this bit about the set list interesting:

“One of the regulars is always going to be ‘Roundabout.’ We never think the show is really ended properly until we’ve done ‘Starship Trooper’,” Howe said of the set list. “For the most part, the wealth of it comes from ‘The Yes Album, Fragile and Close to the Edge… I don’t think Yes is about ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart.’ I think Yes is about Relayer or ‘The Gates of Delirium’.”

While I am fond of “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” I can’t blame Howe for his indifference to it: he’d left the band before the 90125 sessions and had nothing to do with the recording. Still, he’s willing to play it:

“Yes is Yes. It isn’t only Yes when I was there. It isn’t only Yes when (singer) Jon (Anderson) was there.”

Which seems fair enough. I mention in passing that the Wings Over The World tour in the middle Seventies managed to find room for a couple of non-McCartney songs: Jimmy McCulloch sang his own “Medicine Jar,” and Denny Laine took the lead on “Go Now,” the early Moody Blues hit, which he’d sung way back in ’65.

Of course, what really knocks my hat into the creek was the revelation that there was actually a Yes tribute band. This is not the easiest group to emulate, if you know what I mean.

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, and they’re just as godawful as always, but this particular Dishonorable Mention caught my eye:

As the under-appreciated autumn evening faded into yet another soft black velvet fall night, all creatures large and small had settled in except for one, Loupy, the Schipperke, whose job was to keep Anatoly, the night watchman, informed of all things pertaining to the property with her signature uninterrupted warning barks which at this very moment would not subside until her master explained, “We don’t know anyone named Timmy and we don’t have a well.”

This was submitted by Karen Arutunoff, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and while anything that makes fun of Lassie is fine with me, this is here because it gives me a chance to mention Tulsa racing legend Anatoly Arutunoff. (Toly drove the infamous Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash twice; in the last one, he and two co-drivers made the New York-to-Redondo Beach run in 40 hours, 33 minutes.) He’d be about 71 now.

I hadn’t given any thought to Arutunoff in many years, but apparently I still have a few memory locations functioning, despite my advanced age.

There pretty much has to be Hello Kitty swimwear, right?

I suspect not all of it is quite this abbreviated, though:

Our model here is actress Hayden Panettiere, who is almost (seven weeks to go) twenty-one, and we won’t discuss those faint traces of orange peel. This is her second appearance here, though the first time we were just showing you her shoes.

Julie writes to her Congressional delegation:

Thank you for your excellent work on passing the healthcare reform. Thanks to the new laws, my health insurance has been restructured and now costs $40 more per month. This means I can’t afford it and will now, for the first time in a decade of paying for my own health insurance, have to drop health insurance and be uninsured. I understand there’s even the possibility of being penalized for not having insurance. Thank you for covering all the bases! This is a fabulous Catch 22 you’ve provided for your constituents.

It’s really great, this fine work you’re doing for our state and country. I hope the fact that our hospitals will get better Medicare reimbursements than before will make this all worth it. Whatever the case, it’ll make for a great blog post. Have a nice day.

I expect my own safety net to be cut out from under me no later than the second of January.

Duplication of services you already have? “Don’t need ‘em, thank you very much.” Sometimes this works. As LeeAnn can tell you, though, sometimes it doesn’t:

Every week, they call. Every week, when I bother to answer, I tell them I’m not interested, back off, leave me alone, take me off the list … over and over and over. Since the calls show up on ID as “unknown caller” (yes, sometimes I’m stupid enough to answer such things … WHY DO WE DRILL?)… well, you never know, right?

So yesterday I got good and pissed. Way way pissed. And I wrote a pissy email to the corporate offices of Bigstate, promising to cancel our policies, badmouth them to all our friends, all the usual threats to the real thing that matters to them … money … if they ever ever call me again.

This got the desired response, sort of:

“We have completed our investigation regarding your concern and would like to provide you a summary. Please allow me to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Per your request I have responded to your request and put your name and the address you’ve provided us on the Bigstate Do Not Call List. Please note that Bigstate’s Do Not Call List is limited to marketing and sales solicitations. This may take up to 30 days for processing.”

And now the punchline:

“In an effort to continue to improve our processes you may receive a survey call asking you about how well I handled your concern.”

Okay, what’s the over-under on the number of days before the “survey call” comes in? Because you know the earliest the Do Not Call entry can be made is late on Day 29.

Back in December 2008, I replaced the search box in the sidebar (Google, natch) with a box that invoked Scroogle, which was a sort of Google proxy: Scroogle submitted the search, but it intercepted Google’s attempts at data mining.

Until this week, anyway:

Scroogle users saw a Scroogle page that said, “Google returned no results for this search,” when in fact Google returned results but our scraper was unable to deal with them. Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

And no, it’s not a question of just adapting to a new Google API:

It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google’s main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, too bloated, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

I suspect this is now Google policy, and have reinstated the old search box, mostly because I need it to cross-reference things now and then, and there are over 8,000 pages on this site that are not now and likely never will be in the WordPress database.

I did, briefly, experiment with a Bing box, but I don’t much like their defaults.

Yours truly, in an aside from a couple of summers ago:

[T]he new I-40 alignment is supposed to be several feet below grade level — except for the minor detail that there’s not enough support for the actual roadway that far down.

I left it at that, but Nick Roberts has the gory details:

Basically, this whole I-40 project has turned into a disaster. Not only is it experiencing un-Godly cost overruns, but it was supposed to be an entirely depressed freeway like the Connector through Downtown-Midtown Atlanta. Well, surprise, there’s a water table. So now it will only be 8 feet depressed, which means that I could stand up against the edge and easily touch the grass up on the ground. There are trucks that are at least 12 feet tall, and my suv is about 8 feet tall — to put into perspective how “depressed” this highway will be. The result is that we basically have an at-grade freeway and not a depressed freeway, which may cause this Core to Shore thing to need some complete rethinking. So much for removing a “barrier.”

I’m depressed just thinking of the cost overruns. We’re not at Big Dig levels yet, but we’re working on it.

You’re looking at Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano, Princess of Asturias, spouse to the heir apparent to the Spanish throne, here resplendent in white and blue.

The HuffPo fashion maven, whoever he is, got all huffy about this ensemble, especially the flats: “Seems like someone has a case of the summer style blues!” Last I looked, the poll was running in Letizia’s favor, something like seven to one, so my response to the maven is simply this: “No dice, son.”

(Via Smitty, who was working late or something.)

Dave D’Alessandro of the Star-Ledger is wondering about all these NBA owners crying poverty:

We were talking to a general manager presently sitting out the market (so far) about the absurd numbers being thrown around on Day 1 — notably, at Rudy Gay ($82M), Darko Miličić ($20M), Drew Gooden ($32M, thanks to bloody genius Dan Fegan) — and he made a point that his owner and commissioner probably should heed pretty carefully.

“One of the most interesting dances we’re going to see after this orgy of spending,” the GM said, “is that when you give these run-of-the-mill free agents substantial contracts, how is David (Stern) going to go in front of the union when this CBA expires [in 2011] and say, ‘Uh, we’re broke.’

“Broke, my butt — you just gave Darko $20 million? You just gave Rudy Gay, a third-tier player — talented, but not really driven to succeed — more than $80 million? And now you’re telling the players we need a new business model, when owners are giving money away like candy on Halloween? Lots of luck with that.”

Well, it doesn’t sound like Sam Presti, anyway.

By the power invested in me by, well, me — and a questionable investment it is, I dare say — I hereby proclaim this the Independence Day Weekend Open Thread. Do unto it what you will, within reasonable limitations. (In other words, easy on the vuvuzelas.) This will remain near the top of the page for a day or two.

I’ve been asked this several times, and I actually answered it once in the OAQ:

Think of it as a broadening of scope. I grew up surrounded by lots of gorgeous legs, by dint of attending a Catholic high school during a period when skirt lengths were becoming, um, less conservative, and shoes are a logical extension of that interest. (So are underpants, I suppose, but those aren’t on display. Usually.) Besides, they always invite comment, even if it’s only “Yech, I wouldn’t wear that.”

But you perhaps weren’t asking me specifically; you might have been posting a grandly-general rhetorical question. Fortunately, there’s an answer for that, too:

When it comes to status, shoes win approval in ways shirts cannot — [a] Daily Express study stated that four out of every 10 women judge other women based on their shoes. It Bags had only a moment, and it’s not like there’s a Tumblr devoted to pants. What makes shoes so special?

Not that I have any real statistics to base this off of, but perhaps part of it is that shoes are so object-y (Colorful Adjective Usage: “It’s Summer and I’m Tired” Edition). Whether you want to invest in something special or are simply yearning for a quick fashion fix, a good, chunky thing is more satisfying than fabric. They stand on their own, they’re more 3D, and while other accessories have these qualities, none of them are quite as trophy or collectible-like. Advertising genius and fashion obsessee Cindy Gallop has hers showcased alongside an entire wall of her apartment, framed by twinkling lights. Jane Aldridge, of the popular fashion blog Sea of Shoes, owns around 85 pairs, and has said the fun in collecting comes from their art-like, sculptural quality. I have to agree — my pair of Miu Mius sit on a shelf in my room, next to a foot-tall Stephen Jones hat and a rare early Warhol book.

Another possible explanation is that shoes are easy. As Browns founder and owner Joan Burstein once said, “Feet don’t have fat days or bad hair days, which is part of the reason women are so obsessed with them.” True! Plus, a good pair of shoes can improve a lazy or boring outfit in ways other accessories can’t.

If you’d like to see her Miu Mius not sitting on a shelf, this is the link for you.

The anonymous auto-show product specialist known as The Booth Babe, before leaving for a few vacation days, put out this advice to her detractors:

If you are so upset and worked up over what I wrote, I can guarantee you that you are the person I’m writing about. You’re pissed because I just called you out on your idiocy. Frankly, everyone else — the normal, polite, engaging, non-sexist, non-racist, hygienic, intelligent people — everyone else thinks it’s funny. And they think it’s funny because they know it’s true.

The things I write about don’t just happen to me, and they don’t just happen at the auto show. Anyone who has worked with the public for any amount of time can tell the same stories. The only difference is I’m standing in a convention center when these things happen, and they are waiting tables or ringing up your purchases or writing your traffic tickets or trying to help you at the bank.

Commenter John then contributed this fascinating detail regarding subspecies Homo sphincteris:

I’ll let you in on a little secret. 99% of them don’t know their ass from a left-handed knibblin’ pin. They talk a good game but that’s because Google is open right next to the screen they are trolling on so they can seem smarter and more capable than they really are. In reality they are sitting there sucking down Mountain Dew with a bag of BBQ Fritos getting flavoring powder and grease all over their keyboard and mouse while a doobie full of skunky weed smolders away in an ashtray on the corner of the desk. Probably have orange finger prints on their worn-out tighty whities from scratching their junk every 5 minutes. They bag on you so they can feel better about themselves. It sounds so cliche but there is a truth behind every stereotype. I know this because I have had a few of them work for me and they were frustrating personalities at best.

Most of you by now have seen some form of blog trolling, almost always conducted by someone meeting the above criteria, probably living under his mother’s bridge. What’s more, approximately 30-40 percent of the individuals I encounter on Yahoo! Answers seem to fit this type. I conclude that the Internet serves as a vast social network for people who have no business being social.

(There’s a skip in the record about 4:38, during the song. Don’t let it bother you.)

Nobody questions whether the Tesla Roadster acts like a real car on the road: they assume that since it costs $120,000 or so, these matters have been adequately addressed by the manufacturer.

Nissan’s asking about a quarter of that for the new Leaf, which may explain their current print ad, apparently intended to assure potential buyers that yes, their little electric car can get out of its own way:

max torque — it’s that fleeting moment when a gasoline engine is strongest. unfortunately it takes a while to get there. wait no more: the Nissan LEAF electric motor gets 100% torque right off the line. so the moment you step on the pedal, wahooooo!

My own gas-engine car, powered by Nissan, reaches its torque peak at a relatively-lofty 4000 rpm, and it does take a few seconds to get there — though in the interest of fuel economy, unless you’re really pushing on the loud pedal, you’ll get an upshift long before you get there. An electric motor reaches its torque peak at zero rpm: it’s pretty much instantaneous.

I suppose the best thing about this is that Nissan is not going to try to sell the Leaf as an automotive hair shirt, to be worn in penance for all those years you wheeled around town in a bitchin’ Camaro, but as a car that can actually be enjoyed, provided you don’t have to drive all the way to, say, Wahoo, Nebraska in a single day. (Eventually, I suppose, there will be fast-charge stations along the highway.)

Andrea Harris, not surprisingly, notices something no one else will:

I think Doctor Who takes place in a parallel world where there are no Muslims. I’ve never seen one portrayed in any single episode of the old or new series — though the film crew did manage to miss editing out a shot of a rubbish bin (as they call them over there) with a bilingual English and Arabic sign on it. If you want to know it’s in the episode “Smith and Jones.” You’re welcome.

Speaking of rubbish, here are the Timelords (later the KLF) with the ridiculous “Doctorin’ the Tardis.” You are hereby warned of the possibility of earworm infection.

“Pure, unadulterated agony,” said Melody Maker.

A reminder from John Scalzi, newly-installed President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:

U.S. Military allows each SFWA President one and only one use of the High Energy Space Laser, so before you annoy me, ask yourself if any of my other enemies have been recently and mysteriously reduced to ash, and if the answer is “no,” reconsider.

Not everyone who has held this position — Norman Spinrad for some reason comes to mind — would give you such a warning.

Just to make a point about how tricky it is to get a site design to work, I left a comment here to the following effect:

Layouts do funny things in lots of unpredictable ways. My comment box displays wrong in Safari for some reason.

On the off-chance that someone might ask what my definition of “wrong” might be, I then duly pulled up Safari and invoked the comment section here — which displayed correctly, although the comment-preview function doesn’t actually work unless the site cookie is set.

This is the new Safari 5, so maybe they fixed something. Certainly I didn’t fix anything.

In response to that nonsense about small feet (on women, anyway) being allegedly more attractive, Glenn Reynolds offers a quick one-line squelch: “Okay, fine — but what about us men who wear 14EEEs?”

There’s already enough nonsense about us 14-and-up types, really.

(And who knew the Instapundit was one of the wore-the-box-instead-of-the-shoe crowd? Certainly I didn’t, and Dr Helen isn’t talking.)

Time once more to descend upon the shore, scrape away the tar balls, and see if anything that merits any mirth has washed up from the server logs. (Hey, it could happen, right?)

miraculous bikini:  It certainly always seemed so to me.

woman pestered by yobs:  Well, yeah, that’s what yobs do. It’s in the job description, I’m sure.

does the transmission have an electronic brain:  Sometimes I wonder if the driver has any kind of brain at all.

flirkin halle berry:  Most of us have not been favored with the opportunity to see her flirk.

how to fix a hole in a cake:  Just eat around it.

what does a screaming meme sound like?  Millions of people all pointing at you and chortling “FAIL.”

“dan rather” quote “those sons of bitches” mp3:  Keep in mind that Dan Rather grew up in Texas, where sons of bitches are only slightly less common than hot July days.

proof of one’s wherabouts:  These are called “alibis,” which are only slightly less common than hot July days.

hardassery:  The state or condition of being hardassed. See also dumbassery.

Dakota Fanning/Hand amputee:  For that, you get the finger. Guess which one.

good things about fallible memory:  That’s funny, I don’t remember any.

Patti turned up a box of these, and wondered if her local candy shop was becoming politically incorrect:

Wikipedia offers the following history:

The Yorkie bar, a chunkier alternative to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, was aimed at men. In the 1980s for example, toy lorries (toy trucks) with the Yorkie bar logo were manufactured by Corgi, and television ads for the Yorkie bar featured truck drivers. In 2001, the ad campaign made this more explicit with the slogan and wrapper tagline It’s not for girls, which caused controversy.

It did make for some amusing advertising, though.

I can tell you that at least one guy didn’t find it all that wonderful either.

A point I raised about eight years ago, in Vent #299:

If you have $26,500, a rather middling sum for an automobile these days, you can have the bottom-of-the-line Benz, the C230 Kompressor coupe with a supercharged 2.3-liter inline four; or you can have the high-end Hyundai, the XG350 sedan with a 3.5-liter V6, and about a thousand dollars left over. Of course, Mercedes being Mercedes, you can easily add another ten grand to the price, while the Hyundai is stuffed with everything in every conceivable Korean parts bin, but still, it’s possible to buy either of these cars for a price well short of thirty K.

Some will ask, “What in the world is Hyundai doing, trying to compete with the likes of Mercedes?” Better they should ask, “What in the world is Mercedes-Benz doing, trying to compete with the likes of Hyundai?”

It did not occur to me at the time to superimpose political theory on top of this premise. If it had, it might have gone something like this:

If the right tries to compete with the left in the free money game, the left has to up the ante in order to maintain its market position as the free money leader. As an analogy: if Mercedes were to drop its prices to near-Hyundai levels, Hyundai would have to drop its own prices to an extremely low level, in order to maintain its position as the low price leader (since Hyundai would not be able to quickly and credibly shift to being the prestige/luxury provider). Hyundai may not be able to achieve this level of a price reduction (as they are subject to the laws of the marketplace), but in politics, the only limit (until economic reality kicks in) is the voters’ willingness to take from their neighbors. If the right is already offering ~90% tax rates on the rich, then the left, if it wants to retain its market position, will up the ante by going to the extreme socialism that [Dennis] Wheatley rightly denounces.

Car buffs will note that Hyundai is already attempting to carve out a slice of the prestige/luxury market, having introduced the Genesis sedan and coupe; the arrival of the Equus, aimed right at Lexus’ solar plexus, is imminent. (Only downside: “EQUUS” turns out to be a lame acronym.) Meanwhile, Daimler contemplates the possibility of selling the B-Class in the States. (It’s already for sale in Canada, along with the even-smaller A-Class.)

So both sides are starting to look like one another. If that isn’t a metaphor for American politics, I’ll eat my unthrown-into-the-ring hat. But there’s this:

If the Congress consisted entirely of right-oriented Republicans, independents, Constitution party and Libertarians, then the Democrats would have to move right to survive, and the right-oriented would have to move further right, to maintain their market position.

Then again, bottom-feeders (Hyundai Accent, Henry Waxman), like the poor, are with us always.

Fillyjonk drops in on the Texas Rangers:

I am really not a sports fan but I suppose that baseball, of all the sports, is the one that interests me the most. And it’s a lot easier to follow when you’re sitting right there watching it in person than it is listening to it on the radio. (Though maybe all the times I listed to Rangers games over recent years — mainly as “background noise” while doing something else — has led to my absorption of some of the basics of the game.)

Now for me it’s the other way around: I can follow a game just fine on the radio. Of course, I was doing that as a kid, back in the Jurassic period, or at least before the Braves moved to Atlanta, by which time I’d already figured out how to pull the nighttime Cardinals games from KMOX. (What else are you gonna do in South Carolina? It’s either some team way the hell up north, or way the hell out west. St. Louis, right in the middle, was right where I needed to be.)

So inevitably my thoughts on the matter are informed by the thoughts of Jack Buck, who worked the booth with Harry Caray during my years as a nascent Cards fan. CBS eventually signed him to do their TV game of the week, a gig that lasted only two years. Buck explained:

“CBS never got that baseball play-by-play draws word-pictures. All they knew was that football stars analysts. So they said, ‘Let [Tim] McCarver run the show … In television, all they want you to do is shut up. I’m not very good at shutting up.”

And with KMOX squeezed out of the picture, if I’m wandering up around Kansas on a summer day, I’m likely to hunt down the Royals games, knowing I’ll be able to squint in the sun and imagine myself at the K.

Meanwhile in the Pacific Coast League, the RedHawks were rained out last night, so there’s a double-header tonight against Nashville. The Birds are 2½ games ahead of the Springfield Albuquerque Isotopes in the PCL American South.

Salon reviews Stan Cox’s new book Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), pointing out, among other horrible things, that we don’t go outside quite as often in the summer as we did back in the pre-Willis Carrier days, and, yes, the hotter parts of the country tend to vote Republican.

Salon, you’ll remember, is a Web site with magazine pretensions. Web sites run on servers; servers have to be kept nice and chilled. I’m sure they’re notifying their service provider even now that in the interest of saving the environment and/or preserving contemporary morality, they’d like to have the A/C on that machine shut down.

And if they’re not so doing, they can bite me.

(Via the always-cool Smitty.)

“WTF its July?” asks Andrew Ian Dodge in titling the 380th Carnival of the Vanities, which apparently had been sitting in the Draft folder for a couple of days.

Some time in July 2007, Mitsubishi Motors released a facelifted edition of its 380 sedan, the last automobile the Three Diamonds guys were building in Australia. It garnered few sales, and Mitsu eventually shuttered its Australian plant entirely. WTF, indeed.

Okay, is there anyone here who hasn’t figured these out yet?

As always, click to embiggen. For further viewing pleasure: ZP 1, ZP 2, ZP 3, and ZP 4.

This has been bothering me all morning:

I know Wonder Woman isn’t invulnerable like Superman, but she’s still pretty tough, so I’ve often wondered how she gets her bikini wax done. Superman shaves by reflecting heat vision off a curved mirror, but Diana doesn’t have this option. So how does she do it? Hmm — is the Superman-Wonder Woman relationship even closer than we think? Should someone tell Lois?

Cut to the Baxter Building. Reed Richards is fixing dinner — sometimes you need a little extra reach in the kitchen — and in comes Sue, her expression impossible to read because, for the moment, the Invisible Woman has no head.

“Sue…?”

She shrugs. “Bad hair day. Worse than usual.”

Loss of language, says Wolfgang Grassl, is inevitably followed by loss of thought:

Surveys show that the average American receives some 5,000 external stimuli per day and spends more than eight hours a day in front of screens — television, computer monitors, cellphones, gaming consoles, and so on. Where in earlier ages people worked in their gardens, played an instrument, went fishing, read books, entertained guests, or engaged in conversation with family or friends, they have become passive and speechless consumers of canned content. These screens help produce a people that is losing its language. But more importantly, these people no longer see structures in their world but rather a bewildering juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events. Vicarious living and proxy experiences are the deeper problem with our students’ loss of language.

Of course, not all students are alike: Many do excel and emerge as active thinkers and thoughtful speakers. But as a society, we are a far cry from seeing the critical thinking that progressive educators want to convey.

Being one of those old-school types, I work on canning my own content, or at least picking representative samples of other people’s content and giving it a twist. And I don’t think I’m at the point where I confuse experiences I’ve had with experiences I’ve merely heard about. Yet.

Besides, the current definition of “progressive” is utterly incompatible with the whole idea of critical thinking:

In order to think critically, one must be able to keep causes apart from effects, fact from interpretation, belief from knowledge, definitions from explanations, and much more. Critical thought requires determining the range of alternatives and applying to them a clear and consistent standard of evaluation.

But not only is such standard often amiss after years of indoctrination in relativism, even the range of alternatives is not clear.

If you’ve been on the receiving end of this indoctrination, “critical thinking” to you is nothing more than knowing when to nod your head in agreement, and when to vomit up the appropriate talking points in disagreement.

Remember that, between the Greeks and the Renaissance, the purpose of the artes liberales was defined, the list of subjects was closed, and the books to be read changed little. Of course, at the tertiary level of education, it may be too late to find remedies for the loss of language, unless universities want to be transformed into high schools. The work has to be done in the formative years of students — in their earlier teens. Forget the renaming of secondary-school “English” into “Language Arts.” We need exercises in spelling, grammar, style, speech, rhetoric, and the classics.

Not gonna happen. Too many people in positions of power who have no business being there might discover why they have no business being there, and the trauma might cause them great anguish, or worse, deprive them of the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday.

(Via Nicole. Interestingly, while we both linked to the very same InsideCatholic.com article, there is no overlap between what I quoted and what she quoted — but you still need to Read The Whole Thing.)

There are lots of reasons to not have children. You might not think yourself emotionally ready for the challenge. (I certainly wasn’t.) You might conclude that the budget does not permit this sort of thing. (However much you think it costs to raise a child, go ahead and double it.) You might simply dislike children in general.

Or you might think that you’re doing the world a disservice by increasing the population, in which case you probably ought to read this:

The demon-seed statistical projections on the carbon output of a single infant born today are based on the premise that the world’s energy use and methods will change not one iota during its lifetime. And the calculations usually include a reproductive chain over the next century or two. The assumption that the grandkids of today’s infants will be tucking AAA batteries into their toys or gassing up their Grand Cherokees isn’t — despite the impressive spreadsheets — objective or scientific.

Of course, religion, guilt, and the quest for purity have a long, shared history, with holiness as the garlic that wards off Armageddon. The urge to condemn anything short of perfection reeks of fundamentalism. The witch-hunt for hypocrisy has been relentless by critics of environmentalism who believe that dangers to the ecosystem have been exaggerated: Does anyone in America not now know that Al Gore has a big house with a lot of light bulbs, and that he flies around on (gasp) planes?

Now the annoying Puritanical fervor has been taken up [by] those who think environmental dangers have been minimized. With fundamentalist zeal, they’ve one-upped their fellow environmentalists with a soul-purifying — and seemingly bulletproof — sacrifice of the urge to reproduce. This particular fast-track to holiness doesn’t require chastity; sex is allowed for everything except procreation. And, when considering a society where reproduction is denigrated, please imagine the mental health of children raised with the philosophy that the world would be a whole lot better off without them.

Then again, if you’re really, truly convinced that the health of the planet would be improved by your departure from the gene pool, go with my blessing. In fact, perhaps you should go now, while the rates are low.

On the 30th of June, my Internet service provider (rhymes with “box”) killed its newsgroup servers. It wasn’t like they didn’t warn us or anything; I think I received four emails to announce the change, and I posted about it here.

To some extent, I don’t blame them: Usenet isn’t quite as useful today as it was when I started wandering through various groups back in ’96, and it costs money to maintain a decent NNTP server. On the other hand, I hate to give up anything I’ve been using if I can help it.

For most of those fourteen years, I’ve been using Forté’s newsreader Agent. (Actually, I started with the freebie version, which was called Free Agent, but about release 1.92, they went to a full-version-with-trial product, and I started paying for it.)

A couple of years ago, Forté began offering its own Usenet service, which at full tilt runs $14.75 a month for unlimited access. I figured I didn’t need that much, so I’m trying out their absolute-rock-bottom plan, which serves up 12 GB per month for a measly $2.95. In two weeks — not quite eight hours of connection time — I’ve come nowhere close to using half that, so I figure this will be my plan of choice. (I read about three dozen newsgroups of the 107,000 or so offered.) One reason I’m running this low volume is that I generally download headers only, and then cherry-pick the actual articles I want; I have only one group set to download all new articles in full.

The only downside, so far, is that Agent doesn’t seem to incorporate a gadget to keep track of my usage, though Forté will send me an email when I get within 20 percent of my monthly maximum. I can live with that.

The old joke says that Canadians celebrate the Fourth of July on the first of July. And indeed Canada Day has elements of our Independence Day, though there’s much more variation in the way Canadians celebrate: “There doesn’t seem to be a central recipe for how to celebrate it — chalk it up to the nature of the federation.”

This year, both sides of the 49th parallel got commemorative shoes, and if you ask me, the Great White North got the better of the deal:

To the left: E00063 by Giuseppe Zanotti, list $895 US.

To the right: Maple by Dsquared2, list $584.95 US.

Lileks has seen one too many of these scanner interfaces:

It was designed, as usual, by engineers with no taste who presume Great-gramma is trying to scan something so she can send it by the inter-mails to someone, and needs to be shown in the most obvious way possible that she is old and stupid and should not use computers. Hence it has two icons: one says DOCUMENTS, with a little badge that says “300,” and another says IMAGES, with a badge reading “200.” I assume that means dpi, but who knows? You can make custom profiles, but it never remembers them. There’s no button that actually says SCAN, which would be helpful. It’s as if the GUI team is a bunch of malicious bastiches who came up with the most non-intuitive interface ever, then said “Okay, now let’s add one more step between deciding to scan and actually achieving a scan. Johnson, you’re good at this. What would you recommend?”

“Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say have the default setting for saving put it into some proprietary image-collection program buried deep in the User’s library, so it can’t be found no matter how hard they look.”

“Excellent! Make it so.”

Of course, if you do as much scanning as Lileks — but no. No one does as much scanning as Lileks. He’s the original Scanny McScannerton. He could probably justify an industrial-strength scanner that would make Great-gramma throw up her dentures in despair, but they’d make him pay industry-level prices for it, and I suspect he’d like to feed the family once in a while.

My old Umax scanner was legal-sized, and any graphics program that spoke TWAIN could invoke it. Unfortunately, its speed was decidedly limited — it connected through the parallel port, fercrissake — and it was so old, Umax didn’t even bother to come up with an XP driver for it, so it’s been mothballed for the time being.

Entertainment Weekly is promoting the nonce word “doucheboat,” which is, as you might expect, a fusion of “douchebag” and “dreamboat”. Usage illustration:

Bradley Cooper has perfected the doucheboat role in Wedding Crashers, He’s Just Not That Into You, and The Hangover, but when it comes to TV, Josh Hopkins’ work on Cougar Town and Brothers & Sisters is the gold standard.

It occurs to me that the same two words can be joined in the opposite direction: a woman who is not particularly attractive in the conventional sense but who will win your heart anyway might be termed a “dreambag.” (Think Ugly Betty.) Not that you’ll catch me characterizing anyone that way.

Arlo Guthrie, four decades after the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, fesses up:

The 27 8-by-10 color glossy photographs with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was? They were not in color, they were actually black and white.

OMG. And that’s not the worst of it, either.

The not-quite-finished Oklahoma City Thunder practice facility will have a storm-safe room roughly the size of my house.

Center Nenad Krstić, who grew up in Serbia, is admittedly unused to this sort of thing:

“We really don’t have any of that, tornadoes, hurricanes or earthquakes,” Krstić said. “We only have wars.”

There are no plans at this time for a war-safe room.

No way I could pass this up. Angie Harmon is trying on shoes:

As always, Shoebunny has the scoop:

The Lanvin ballet flats feature nappa leather, classic round toe design, elastic throat and gold-toned chunky multi-chain ankle straps, a 20mm covered wedge, padded leather insole, and flat leather sole. They are available in black and silver. You can get them for $439.00 on sale.

Now if you or I were buying these, they’d have made us put on socks.

The class-action suit: definitely a suit, presumably involving some action, but seldom indicating the presence of any actual class.