For a change, this isn’t from my life, but from the life of someone I follow on Twitter: “You should not shave your legs when you’re angry.”

The payback, apparently, is swift. Not to mention sharp.

And really, the risk of poisoned apples is pretty small:

Luke, tagging along with his mom on her errands, saw the display of girls’ Halloween costumes, sniffed out the Snow White ensemble, rejoiced, and insisted on trying it on. The surprise of finding the costume, the low price tag, the flattering fit: It was the perfect storm. What mother could say no?

Besides, it’s a major character. Nobody wants to be Just Another Dwarf.

(Via Miss Cellania.)

I was young (twenty-four) and horribly immature when I got married, so I was wholly unprepared to discover one of the Primary Purposes of a Wife, which is to advise her husband that he is a bonehead. John Phillips of Car and Driver explains how this works, during a three-week vacation in Montana:

Items observed: four feet of snow at 2:30 p.m. on June 21 in blinding sunlight at a site called Valieaux Spring. When my wife saw me shift our red Chevy Silverado into 4WD low, she said, “You know what? Feel free to get out and walk ahead to see if it’s passable.” I did. I can’t express the unalloyed joy on her face when I sank to my crotch in wet snow. I was wearing khaki shorts, and my groinal region instantly triggered a phalanx of DEFCON 1 synaptic klaxons that all males understand intuitively. Then I performed a Gerald Ford-quality face plant.

Phillips does not record whether she pointed out that they’d actually strayed into Idaho.

It’s real! It’s imaginary! It’s two numbers in one! And it’s how our days are numbered. Maybe.

It’s the highly-underrated Padma Lakshmi’s 40th birthday, and since I have no idea what she’s doing tonight, here’s a photo from the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, in which she’s apparently wrapped in a layer of unobtainium foil.

I admit here that I’d never seen The Scar before. The Grauniad told me where it came from:

At the time, she had been very unwell and had just spent three weeks in hospital before being diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, caused by hypersensitivity to an infection or to certain medicines. “I got out of hospital on a Friday and on that Sunday my mother, who is very religious, took me to temple so we could thank God for making me better.” Driving home from the Hindu temple in Malibu, the car was caught in a collision that sent it spinning off the freeway and 40ft down an embankment, hitting a tree. Paramedics had to cut open the car roof, on to which the tree had fallen. Lakshmi, her mother and stepfather ended up back in the hospital she had left two days earlier. All three recovered, but Lakshmi was left with a seven-inch scar along her right arm.

I suspect she probably doesn’t refer to it as “road rash,” either.

A promotion earlier today by Allied Arts:

GIVEAWAY: 1st to tweet their fave Shakespearean line wins 2 tickets to OK Shakespeare in the Park! Romeo & Juliet this weekend!

I missed out on that, because I was contemplating this:

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

And I was contemplating that because of this: “I don’t have any girl names.”

Because, you know, she wasn’t expecting a girl, except in the sense that (1) she’d been expecting and (2) it was in fact a girl.

And after that, things got complicated.

This clip from Zillow pretty much redefines the term:

That’s a little over 10,000 acres, or about 15 square miles.

Comparison: the present-day Biltmore Estate covers about 8,000 acres.

I have Joanie to thank for introducing me to Chris James and Patrick Rynn, whose first collection of traditional Chicago blues, Stop and Think About It, was a heady mixture of originals and reimaginings, of solid instrumental chops and worthy words.

She’s since reviewed the second album, Gonna Boogie Anyway, which gives me the opportunity to express a bit of gratitude for that introduction by pointing you all to Blues Lens, her new music site.

The FDA is worried about your cough suppressant:

Federal health regulators are weighing restrictions on Robitussin, NyQuil and other cough suppressants to curb cases of abuse that send thousands of people to the hospital each year.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday posted its review of dextromethorphan, an ingredient found in more than 100 over-the-counter medications that is sometimes abused for its euphoric effects. The practice, dubbed “robotripping,” involves taking more than 25 times the recommended dose of a cold medicine and is mainly associated with teenagers.

Twenty-five times?

The alarm is being sounded because something is unsafe if you take more than two dozen doses at once? Hello, McFly? Twenty-five doses of anything is risky. And the riskiest of all, I’m starting to believe, is listening to the government gin up threat noises.

Sarah notes:

Out here in The Sticks, there’s no such thing as an open pharmacy at three a.m. You can go into the pharmacy section at Wally World and buy whatever’s on the shelves, but you can’t get your hands on anything that’s either locked up or a prescription drug. Put medicines like Robitussin and NyQuil out of our reach and we’re going to suffer for it. We already pay the price for meth cooks when we have sinus problems; when I go to buy a box of meds, my photo ID is put into the record books along with the amount of sinus medicine that I purchased. The state treats me with undue suspicion because I dare to properly use a sinus treatment that used to be an OTC product. Oh, the horrors.

My own best guess here: some clod at GS-whatever level figured out that you can’t spell “dextromethorphan” without “meth.”

Universities, with few exceptions, want new students, and Drake has come up with a campaign to attract undergraduates. The “Drake Advantage” reads well enough:

At Drake, learning doesn’t just take place in a classroom. Nor is traditional learning the only goal. Sure you’ll get an excellent education here, but you’ll also be transformed by an experience that puts opportunity into action and gives purpose to your passion.

Okay, maybe not that well enough. Let’s see some of the next paragraph:

Every moment at Drake is one that has the power to educate, to transform, to open minds and to unleash potential — to introduce who you are, to who you hope to become.

To whom did this appear to be correct English?

Were this one of those lolcat-obsessed sites, you’d see the simple word FAIL. But technically, this isn’t a FAIL at all:

See what I mean?

(From Sheena Dooley of the Des Moines Register, via Nancy Friedman.)

There are two left turn lanes at Northwest Distressway and Penn; I first saw him between them, sandwiched between me and someone else’s truck. He wasn’t taking up a lot of space, to be sure, but it did mean an extra bit of caution when the light changed and we started through the intersection.

Or so I thought. The second the green appeared, he was gone and halfway across before any of us lowly motorists could do the lateral move from brake pedal to gas.

And then he hung a right on 50th westbound, precisely where I was headed — except that he was going right down the center strip.

The guy was doing an honest 20 mph, which, all things considered, is fairly speedy; the SUV in front of me hung back so as not to crowd him off the road, and then exited to the side. I slowly pulled even with him, and then left him behind.

This experience left me with two thoughts:

• We really could use more bike lanes in this town;
• But where would you put one on this stretch of 50th? It’s one of the narrower two-lanes around.

I’m assuming he got home, wherever home is, okay.

The 389th Carnival of the Vanities is titled “Last fight of summer,” and indeed summer is drawing to a close in the Northern Hemisphere.

On the other hand, fighting goes on, some of it near the US/Mexican border, which extends for 389 miles west of the Rio Grande.

Although it’s hard to see where any value is being created:

Some enterprising youths have made a killing on eBay with my son’s TI-83 calculators — four stolen in two years. My husband is convinced he has bought back the exact same calculator four times.

Three times, I’d believe. (First time it was new, right?)

Then again, this might be the result of a limited pool of equipment. Halfway through the 1975 model year, Toyota apparently changed the starter design on the Celica — and then changed it again for the ’76 models. Which meant that starters for the 1975½ (for lack of a better term) were few and far between. In 195,000 miles, I went through three starters; I’d bet the third one was the first one with a coat of paint and a fresh Bendix.

Ric Locke projects the political future on the right side of the aisle:

The Tea Parties have said repeatedly that they don’t want and won’t support leaders, and conservatives don’t have any real national leadership. If Palin provides both with somewhere to go, she can be a mover and shaker without subjecting herself to a full-court MSM push in a run for office — and my reading of her indicates that she’d think that just delightful.

If the process continues, Michael Steele could wake up one morning and find himself in charge of a near-irrelevant rump. There’s no reason to support a centrist Democrat Lite if a real Democrat is available, and the only reason conservatives do business with them at all is to plump up the numbers a bit.

There’s only one piece of that with which I’d take issue: “Michael Steele could wake up.” Not a chance.

My toaster is somewhere around thirty years old; it bears the ancient symbol “Montgomery Ward” on its base. It looks like, well, a thirty-year-old toaster, with two parallel slots, one of which is labeled “SINGLE SLICE”.

While toasting a single slice last night — in the proper slot, you may be sure — I got to wondering just what the hell difference it makes. My mother had a similarly-configured toaster, and she couldn’t explain it either. Is there a difference? Or is this just a ruse to keep us OCD types from agonizing over it? “Let’s see, I used the left slot all during August…”

Expert, texpert. “Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?” asked John Lennon. Walter Russell Mead says we’re all laughing at ‘em:

Expert, prizewinning Democratic economists now tell us that without more Keynesian stimulus the economy is doomed. Expert, prizewinning Republican economists tell us that more Keynesian stimulus will ruin us all.

The mining experts said that deep water drilling was OK. Then the environmental experts said that the oil in the Gulf was an immeasurable disaster that would drag on for years. The clean up experts then used dispersant that, other experts now tell us, may have worse consequences than the original oil. Then experts warned us that huge plumes of underwater oil were drifting murderously through the Gulf. The last I looked the experts were now saying that a previously undiscovered microbe had been eating the oil. The only thing that the public is sure about at this point is that the experts are likely to be surprised and confounded several more times before this whole ghastly fiasco plays out.

The score so far: Complexity and unexpected consequences 1000, experts zip. Public skepticism in “experts” is off the charts.

Even among the choking smokers, I’d bet.

Robert Stacy McCain is in Wasilla, Alaska, which he describes thusly:

For a town with an official population of 5,468, Wasilla is a bustling community. It’s by no means the backward rural outpost you might imagine. I’m filing this post from a coffee shop that serves organic fair-trade coffee from Columbia, Guatamala, Peru and Bolivia. They’ve got Ethiopian coffee, too, but evidently the “organic fair-trade” craze hasn’t taken hold among East African coffee-growers yet.

Actually, the Census Bureau guesstimated over 10,000 in Wasilla in 2008, which is a heck of a growth rate.

And it could have been more than that, government being the growth industry (for nonstandard definitions of both “growth” and “industry”) that it is. From 1994:

For the fifth time in two decades, a measure to move the state capital from Juneau, a waterfront city of 26,000 people, to Wasilla, a frontier-like town of 4,000 people, failed, partly because of voter concerns about the cost of the move. This time, 54.7 percent of the voters said no while 45.3 percent were for the change.

This is slightly misleading, because while this indeed was the fifth attempt to move the capital, different initiatives had different destinations in mind. In 1976, for instance, Alaskans actually passed a measure to move the capital to Willow, not far from Wasilla, but they subsequently defeated a measure that would have paid for the move.

Every year, Allstate ranks the biggest cities in order of traffic-accident likelihood, and this year Fort Collins, Colorado, last year’s #2, claimed the top spot, bumping (so to speak) Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Oklahoma City is sixty-eighth out of 193, though statistically, I find it more interesting that OKC is the closest to the national norm: we have, says Allstate, 0.2 percent fewer accidents than average. In its numero-uno spot, Fort Collins has 31.2 percent fewer accidents than average.

Tulsa placed 92nd, 4.8 percent above average in accident frequency. At rock bottom: the District of Columbia. Washington boasts (if that’s the word) 95.5 percent above average; next-to-last-place Baltimore isn’t all that close, at 79.4.

Allstate also reports on “years between accidents,” which is 14.5 in safe, secure Fort Collins and 5.1 in wild, woolly D.C. (Oklahoma City comes in at 10, Tulsa at nine and a half.)

Something of a wee improvement at the Magic’s new home court:

In an event billed as the “Drano Royal Flush”, Orlando Magic president Alex Martins, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and students from Nap Ford Elementary school will simultaneously flush 443 toilets at the new arena at 10 a.m., Sept. 8. The team says more than 150 people will be involved in this task of tasks.

That’s almost three toilets per person. Good luck with that.

Then again, you have to consider what they’re used to:

The old Amway Arena only feature four men’s and women’s restrooms apiece. Lines were long. Bladders were challenged.

No worries. Amway Center will feature 19 women’s restrooms and 18 men’s restrooms … a change we can all believe in.

Indeed. For comparison, The Facility Soon To Be Formerly Known As The Ford Center claims 48 restrooms, 12 of them unisex. I have no idea whether this is #1 in the NBA.

(Via TrueHoop.)

Is it possible, or is it not possible, to ride a bicycle while wearing high heels? We’ve had this discussion before, with perhaps inconclusive results.

Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog weighs in with his own observation:

Single impression I will hold from Milan: Very attractive women dressed to the nines in chic outfits wearing 5-inch heels — all while riding a bicycle. They are all over the place.

The definitive answer to this question probably will not be forthcoming any time soon. I suppose I should have asked Zooey Deschanel when I had the chance.

Then again, it’s not like she’d have been happy to see me.

Back in 2003, Norm Geras started profiling bloggers, and the results have always been interesting, not least because of the way the profile is constructed: everyone selected will answer 30 questions, but they’re not the same 30 questions every time, even though everyone gets the same questionnaire.

In the seven years since, there have been more than 360 normblog profiles; the list is practically a Who’s Who of Blogdom. Some of these folks I know from various online encounters, but only one of them has split a pair of pizzas with me on a summer evening: the estimable Dr. Weevil. His own comment — “I’ve just been profiled” — actually sounds a little bit like something I might say.

We tell ourselves that, anyway, when the truth of the matter might be more like this:

There are some, after all, who believe in this “destiny” and “soul mate” business. Which is fine, I suppose, as long as nobody believes that I’m their soul mate. I’m a rather practical (and cynical) sort of person so my view on the subject matter is that there are several people compatible with you, considering the billions of people who have lived on or are on this planet. The only problem may be that it may be difficult to impossible** to meet them — they’re living in an inconvenient place, the wrong age, haven’t been born yet, or are already dead.

**Depending on the case, you might need a time machine.

Out of those four possible Bad Outcomes, I can personally vouch for approximately two.

(Previous discussion along similar lines.)

I really need a theme song here, preferably by Oingo Boingo, but we’ll get by for now.

You’ll remember this from earlier in the week, perhaps:

While toasting a single slice last night — in the proper slot, you may be sure — I got to wondering just what the hell difference it makes.

It was, of course, the last slice on hand, so Rigorous Scientific Testing would have to wait for the arrival of another loaf of bread.

Test conditions:

• Time and date: 5:20 pm, 4 September 2010
• Atmospheric data: 73 degrees Fahrenheit, 47 percent relative humidity, pressure 30.02 inches of mercury
• Bread used: Home Pride Butter-Top Wheat
• Toaster setting: Halfway between “Light” and “Dark”

The first slice (the heel will be saved for a sandwich) was placed in the “wrong” slot. The lever engaged normally. After 42 seconds, the toast popped up. However, it was barely warm and hardly darkened.

The second slice was placed in the correct slot. After 53 seconds, the toast popped up. It met the criteria established by the toaster setting.

The third test involved both slots. After 52 seconds, the toast popped up. Both slices met the criteria established by the toaster setting.

Conclusion: There is a reason for specifying a single-slice slot, though the motivation for constructing it that way remains unclear. I lean toward a variation on Dolly’s feedback-device explanation: the thermostat, or whatever it is, ended up closer to one slot than to the other, presumably for packaging purposes, and if the “correct” slot is not filled, the gizmo is designed to eject a bit early, lest burning ensue.

Of course, they could have fitted a device to both slots, but that likely would have driven the cost above twenty 1982 dollars.

This has been dustbury.com, answering the questions you had no intention of ever asking. (I should adopt that as a sub-slogan.)

Addendum: So I conducted a further round of timings, and photographed the results. The “wrong”-slot toast is on the left, the “right”-slot toast on the, um, right.

There is, of course, enough left over to buy a palliative for your conscience.

(Tweeted by John Salmon.)

The text goes on from there:

“She comes from the Land of Snow and Ice. She will wrinkle your tie and tousle your hair. Your friends won’t understand. Turn away. She is stark and glorious and chilled. Her body is high-speed tooled from a solid billet of pure adrenaline. She will scar your soul if you don’t back down.”

This actually appears in a current ad for Saab’s 9-5.

Admittedly, Saab USA sold only 290 cars last month, so they have to move some metal, but if this pitch actually works, Ford ought to revive Mercury and bring back a specially-equipped Grand Marquis — de Sade Edition.

“Bad Romance” goes to college:

How this came about, from the original YouTube page:

Tin-Shi Tam, Iowa State University carillonneur and associate professor of music and theatre, performed Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” on the carillon at noon on Aug. 27, 2010. Brad Riley, senior in journalism and mass communication, started a Facebook group and asked people to send Tam emails requesting that she play the song.

I realize that this pretty much constitutes admitting that I know a Lady Gaga song, but that’s a chance I’m going to have to take.

(Via Steph Mineart, who calls it “awesome,” and of course she’s right.)

If you’re bound and determined to shuffle off this mortal coil, says Rand Simberg, the least you can do is to avoid getting other people involved in the shuffle:

It is an almost intrinsically inconsiderate and selfish act to kill yourself. The only way to do so in a considerate manner is to make sure all your affairs are in order, with clear instructions, and to not make a mess to clean up, or leave yourself where someone, particularly a loved one, will be traumatized by finding you (e.g., disappear into the wilderness and do it there). When you do it in such a way as to endanger others or cause property damage, I have zero sympathy for you, whether you survive or not.

Especially, you know, if it’s somebody else’s property.

While I am in general agreement with Mr Simberg, philosophically speaking, there are a couple of problems with trying to use this approach as a deterrent:

• The potential suicide does not think in terms of “loved ones,” except to the extent that he does not consider himself one of someone else’s; nobody likes him, everybody hates him, he’s going down the back to eat worms fall on his sword.
• If he’s buttoned every button, crossed every T and dotted every I, like as not it’s going to look like an attempt at insurance fraud.

Having occasionally, at unusually-low points in my life, found myself fantasizing about crashing into a bridge abutment at 150 mph, I have at least a vague idea of where these poor shlubs are coming from, though I have, perhaps wisely, made a point of owning motor vehicles that won’t do 150.

Less impertinently, it’s possible to defend one’s right to do something — in this case, end one’s own life — without implying that it’s in any way a good idea.

How to recognize the infamous October Surprise? Marcel suggests some indicators, which we will assume will actually be indicating, so to speak, some time beyond the 30th of September:

Nancy Pelosi might sponsor a bill to provide gay wedding receptions for the poor (it wouldn’t be her worst idea). The Department of the Interior might veil the Statue of Liberty for Eid. The EPA might mandate waterless toilets, or ban serrated knives. If it shows tone-deaf contempt for middle America, it’s probably the Democrats’ October Surprise, or else it’s Michael Steele’s latest attempt to do whatever it is he’s trying to do.

Be very suspicious, incidentally, of anything labeled “bipartisan”: it generally means that the fix is in on both sides.

“Seek, and ye shall find.” — David Axelrod, as quoted on the new White House rug.

what the text messaging abbreviation for “much obliged”:  There doesn’t have to be a txt version of everything. Now ESADYFA.

“drudge” “boasts” “95 percent accurate”:  Well, some of that is true.

raygun “clothes vanish”:  Marvin the Martian carries one of those on Ladies’ Night.

snarking japanese women without panties:  Some people place too much faith in Rule 34.

ohio state buckeyes boobs:  See what I mean?

fillyjonk “rule 34″:  Tove Jansson would never countenance such a thing. So all you guys lusting after the Snork Maiden can just cool your jets.

i detest mimi spencer:  She probably wouldn’t be too enthralled with you, either.

when my mazda 626 gets hot the transmission won’t work:  I presume you’re sending this from the side of the road, then?

“spite fence” massachusetts:  New Hampshire is probably ordering one now.

Debbie Gibson turns 40:  Last week, in fact. The Electric Youth has definitely kept the voltage up.

let’s buy some drugs:  Great idea! Is the drug store open?

the couple bought on credit novy chic and they wanted to check whether he stand anal tension:  Hey, let’s buy some drugs!

“french equivalent of spam”:  They call it “pourriel,” but it’s the same old “Hey, let’s buy some drugs!”

Melon-farming Samuel L. Jackson was not available for comment.

(Via Switched.)

This starts out pretty much like any public-health campaign:

Large amounts of sugar are excreted on a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients especially amongst the upper end of our aging population. As a result of this diabetic patients toilets often have unusual scale build up in the basin due and rapid mould growths as the sugar put into the system acts as nutrients for mould and bacteria growth. Is it plausible to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance?

Short answer: yes. Until you see the product of this harvest:

Sugar heavy urine excreted by diabetic patients is now being utilized for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export. The Whisky market is growing faster then any other alcoholic beverage worldwide. With a prevalent genetic weakness being exposed in the northern hemisphere leading to a sharp rise in type two diabetes, economists have found a new exportable commodity to exploit and are keen to capitalize on this resource quickly.

Gilpin’s “whizky” is not likely to be a hot seller, I suspect, though vast quantities of its “secret ingredient” have been sold in the States for decades as [enter name of some brand of beer you can't stand].

(Via this Syaffolee tweet.)

American Traffic Solutions is highly incensed that the voters of Baytown, Texas will be voting on a measure that could change their contract with the city. They’ve filed a suit to cancel the election for several self-serving reasons, but this is the one which doth chap the hide of this particular reader:

“By permitting an unauthorized ballot proposition to be placed before the voters, the City has created a scenario whereby voters who oppose the Safety Camera Program — a group that historically tends to vote in a conservative manner — will vote in greater numbers than would otherwise have turned out for a November 2, 2010 election. This change in voting practices and procedures results in the potential for minority voting strength to be diluted through the inclusion of an unauthorized ballot measure.”

Got that? Unless you support the company’s position, you’re some kind of racist.

It’s probably a good thing the President is calling for more spending on rail, since we obviously need to run these bozos out of town on one.

Update: It’s not just Baytown.

An odd question, perhaps, but apparently a timely one, from Mandi Bierly at EW.com’s PopWatch:

Reading that CBS is developing a sitcom about a single female Chicago architect (based on the upcoming Susan Brightbill book The True Adventures of a Terrible Dater, Variety reports) got me thinking: Do men find that as attractive a profession as women do? I can’t tell you how many female friends I’ve had over the years, with whom I agree, describe their ideal man as an architect because he’s creative but focused, and good with his hands. George Costanza was right to pretend that he was one to impress the ladies.

Now they tell me.

Anyway, EW.com, for the moment, is polling its readers on this very question. I did cast a vote, although you may be certain that it was based purely on theoretical considerations.

It’s been a while since the last World Tour, but when the power went off here at the Estate at 6:20 or so, I was packed and ready to go in my standard thirty minutes, ready to check into the nearest hotel (which did, I verified, have rooms, despite the widespread power outage).

Well, there was one little hang-up, and it’s one I presumably wouldn’t encounter on the road. I pulled the rip cord on the garage-door opener so I could back the car out — taking a taxi just didn’t seem budgetarian enough — and raised the door. I then came back through the house and went out to reconnect the beast so it would be working when the power came back on, whenever that might be.

And failed. Miserably. In fact, I knocked the door off the track during one attempt. It took me all of twenty minutes to get the thing reconnected, and as I was putting the ladder away, power was restored.

This is, I must point out, a very old opener, and newer ones may be easier to reconnect. Still, I suppose I’m slightly reassured that my Quick Pack routine still works.

“Terrorism on four hooves,” says Robert Stacy McCain of the attack on his vehicle by a cervine villain late Sunday night. “The deer hate us for our Korean sedans.”

Regular readers of this space will remember that one of said four-footed fiends took out an American sedan with a Japanese nameplate four years ago. And after looking at the damage photos, I think we can make a pretty good case that the farging deer are indeed conspiring against us:

At left, my 2000 Mazda 626, turned into a heap of slag in the summer of 2006; at right, McCain’s 2004 Kia Optima, undergoing mirror-image slagification in 2010.

Same angle of approach, same age of vehicle, same amount of damage — call it $6000, and call it totaled. The only difference is that McCain’s buggy was rendered KIA, as it were, by a buck; ’twas a doe that did mine in. (The women never did like me.)

The visiting Omaha Royals defeated the RedHawks Sunday 9-1, and then defeated the RedHawks Monday 9-1. (The Royals had 15 hits on Sunday, 14 on Monday.) Were this not the end of the season, I’d be worried about a pattern developing.

As it is, the Birds did manage to clinch the PCL American South over the weekend and will be heading into the playoffs, the first two games of which are on the road.

Which is just as well if things like this are going on at home:

Just from that headline, you might think, “Holy flurking schnitt, the poor guy comes in to watch a ball game, and some fool opens fire on him.” Of course, what actually happened is that Mr Prior, fighting his way back to The Show, earned a look from the Rangers, who sent him to their top farm team. (The version in the actual newspaper, incidentally, says: “Prior gets another shot in OKC,” which seems a bit less likely to be misread; the Web site sort of explains this in a subhead.)

The Rangers, incidentally, will not be a factor around here next year; they’re shifting their Triple-A affiliation to Round Rock.

A Nevada gubernatorial candidate has come up with a way to fill the state’s depleted treasury, partly at the expense of out-of-state visitors (of course):

Nonpartisan candidate Eugene “Gino” DiSimone believes people would pay for the privilege to drive up to 90 mph on designated highways.

First, vehicles would have to pass a safety inspection. Then vehicle information would be loaded into a database, and motorists would purchase a transponder.

After setting up an account, anyone in a hurry could dial in, and for $25 charged to a credit card, be free to speed for 24 hours.

DiSimone thinks this could bring in $1 billion a year.

I’m not so sure. Last time I was in Nevada — admittedly, 22 years ago — highway traffic was moving at close to 85 mph already. The ability to go 90 with presumed impunity is no big deal if you’re not likely to be busted for 84.

Which means that for this privilege to mean anything, it will have to be more substantial, and priced higher: say, $50 for 110 mph. And at that level, there will be complaints: not just the usual whines of the Safestaffel, but grumbles about discrimination, inasmuch as not everyone’s motor vehicle will do 110, and it’s just not fair, you know?

It occurs to me that this might go over well in New Jersey, perhaps by evoking the memory of Chuck Berry and “You Can’t Catch Me.” Based on the hours I’ve spent on the New Jersey Turnpike, however, an easier sell might be a license to shoot at beach traffic.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

There are exactly two things memorable about Sinkin’ in the Bathtub, a 1930 cartoon short by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising (“Harman-Ising,” get it?) featuring an uninspired schmoe named Bosko: it was the very first in the long series of Looney Tunes at Warner Bros., and Bosko’s girlfriend was voiced by this lady:

This is Rochelle Hudson, a youngster from Oklahoma City, whose first on-screen work was this off-screen non-appearance as a teenager. Eventually she grew into ingenue roles, although there was a minor hitch involved: her studio bio gave her date of birth as March 6, 1914, which meant she was only seventeen when she played a wide-eyed innocent in 1931′s Are These Our Children, a pre-Production Code drama just jam-packed with sexual innuendo. Studio bio was wrong: Rochelle was born in 1916, making her fifteen at the time.

Still, she did the Good Girl well, in the Claudette Colbert version of Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1934), and as Shirley Temple’s older sister in Curly Top (1935). She died of pneumonia in 1972.

Turns out the US Army has a Twitter feed. The French army has one too, but they only use it to retweet.

(Linked to this.)

So Hurricane Inconvenia is threatening your neck of the woods, or the beach, or whatever, and it dawns on you that you may have to evacuate. Where do you go? There’s an app for that:

Open Shelters provides easy mobile access to shelters that are currently open in response to a crisis such as a hurricane, flood or earthquake.

Some local (Tulsa) TV coverage:

Open Shelters requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later. (And yes, I know this guy. He’s commented here for a while, in fact.)