You’d think a feature like this couldn’t survive for five years. Then again, look how many government programs with far less merit, not to mention far fewer jokes, have managed to hang on for even longer periods of time.

is maureen dowd a lesbian:  I have gotten some variation on this nearly every week for five years. Unless you’re actually dating her — and it’s a pretty safe bet you aren’t — it’s none of your damn business. (This applies equally to the three dozen other women of whom similar questions were asked.)

give me a spot:  Wait a few months and you can have a whole Dalmatian.

on tv the nanny aka fran drescher wore the cutest clothes who made them?  I wouldn’t be surprised were it someone who was deaf, or who eventually wanted to be.

ugly nude midget women forwards:  Nobody’s forwarded any such stuff to me, for which I am grateful.

Secretary Legs:  Well, actually she was hired because of her typing skills, hard as that may be for you to believe.

“lou gehrig dying of lou gehrig’s disease” movie quote:  Well, actually he was hired because of his baseball skills, hard as that may be for you to believe.

kwtv right-wing slant:  So far as I can tell, Gary England treats all the thunderstorms the same way, no matter which side they come in from.

jacket with fluff in them:  Often worn on camera by KWTV staff.

not everyone wants a car with a bud vase:  Certainly not if it blocks the view of the tach.

massachusetts “spite fence”:  New Hampshire is drawing up the blueprints even as we speak.

women wearing penny loafers being hypotized videos please:  And I thought my fantasies were overly specific.

How do you safely shoot heroin?  Mount it in an airtight container near the center of the target. If it’s in the wild, you’ll just have to improvise.

kirsten gillibrand in thong panties:  Just step away from the keyboard, Senator Reid.

In fact, you can pretty much take anything the government calls “the moral equivalent of war” and give it a 90-degree twist on the way to Colonville.

We all had to read Shakespeare in high school (assuming we’re of a certain age; I suspect they don’t bother anymore), and sometimes we had to read it out loud, presumably to impress upon us the Bard’s structural practices, whereupon someone would inevitably point out: “If this is supposed to rhyme, why doesn’t it?” Occasionally someone would be prescient enough to note that Shakespeare’s Globe was almost half the earth and almost half a millennium away, and pronunciation does change over time and distance, but no one was really satisfied with that answer.

Until, perhaps, now:

Like an archeologist reconstructing the fossilized skeleton of an ancient species, a University of Kansas theatre professor has pieced together the bones of a form of English that has never been heard in North America in modern times — the original pronunciation of Shakespeare.

[Paul] Meier is staging Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in November, and it will be the first time in North America that a Shakespeare production is being performed entirely in the original pronunciation.

To pull this off, Meier worked with linguist David Crystal, who in 2004 advised the very first original-pronunciation production since the days of the original pronunciation. Here’s a taste of what it’s like:

Crystal, not incidentally, is persuaded that regional versions of English will continue to diverge, and eventually there will have to be some sort of World Standard Spoken English, which may or may not sound like you or me.

(Via All Manner of Thing.)

Duesenberg, as an automotive brand, has been effectively dead since 1937 despite a couple of revival attempts; I never saw one myself until a World Tour ’03 visit to the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana.

Over the weekend, The Truth About Cars tapped its readers for suggestions of dead brands that ought to be revived, and a Brit (I think) named “The Guvna” makes the case for Duesenberg:

The one nameplate I would love to see resurrected among all others is Duesenberg, but sadly I don’t think that even a clean-sheet, all-American $2 million Bugatti-fighter would be enough to overcome the overwhelming disdain that most Americans seem to have for anything quite so conspicuously extravagant these days. In the 1920s and 30s, they were aspirational icons. Were a similarly outrageous car brought to market today, it would likely get gobbed on the first time the owner left it parked in public. “It’s a Duesey!” has become “Look at that rich douchebag with more money than taste. Douche”. Can’t drive, small wang, probably stole it, etc., etc. The sort of people who would buy a Duesenberg likely wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about what the bitter, grasping lower orders think of them or their car, but I can’t think of a single other reason that the ultra-wealthy American isn’t being catered to at home. It’s a damned shame, really. Arguably the best cars ever built, and they’re American. They’re something to be proud of. And they will probably never be duplicated on your shores again.

Never seen a Bugatti around here, so I have no idea what our homegrown chavs would think of it, but I suspect that resentment of the upper-est crust is more a political than a cultural statement in the States.

That said, we’re certainly not going to get a Cadillac in this class so long as GM remains a ward of the state, so someone will have to buy the rights to the Duesenberg name from the current owner, whoever that might be. (Descendants of E. L. Cord? Did he even have any?)

By the way, if you asked me what dead brand I’d like to see raised up, I’d vote for Checker, maker of taxicabs and the odd civilian vehicle, which withdrew from the market in 1982 and then struggled along as a parts supplier until 2009.

On the off-chance that you missed it, here’s Patrick’s interview of yours truly on The Lost Ogle Radio Show on Halloween (no matter what the city said) night, all eight minutes and eight seconds of it.

Warning: Largish (3.9 MB), despite the low bitrate (64k), MP3 file.

I here admit to having read Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes, a fairly sophisticated work of Jewish-American literature pretending to be chick lit. (I also read Weiner’s Good in Bed, which I thought was slightly better.) I never did get around to seeing the movie made from In Her Shoes, but for some reason (oh, sure) the poster stuck in my mind, and when Toni Collette’s birthday rolled up, suddenly I had an excuse to put it up here.

Incidentally, Weiner doesn’t disdain the “chick lit” tag:

“[Y]ou don’t have to love the term chick lit, but if you’re smart, you’ll realize the practical implications of that kind of labeling. Female protagonist, urban setting, smart, sarcastic voice. I don’t see why it matters if you’re thrown into this category. Unless you think you’re the next coming of Virginia Woolf, and then I guess it would be a problem for you.”

And I’m sure she doesn’t object to selling an occasional book to a guy-type person, either.

The blog and the May fly have one thing in common: a relatively-brief lifespan. Professor Burke explains why:

No matter what alternative venues might come into existence, many blogs were going to have finite lifespans. Even group blogs are not really publications with an identity that stands apart from their authors, into which new authors can come and old ones depart while the blog continues steadily along. Any blog makes sense only at a particular time in its author’s (or authors’) life. They’re hard to maintain. At some point, either the author either moves on to some other kind of writing or publication, gets too busy to maintain it, or simply feels worn out by the exposure and repetition involved in long-form online writing.

Similarly from Steve Lackmeyer in Twitter’s #blogchat:

@DanGordon Books are forever. Blogs (Dustbury maybe the exception) are fleeting

Of course, nothing, not even the May fly, is as fleeting as Twitter. But the Professor is quite right: it’s hard to maintain one of these. I haven’t moved on to some other form, because I’ve always believed that what modest talent I have is pretty much restricted to forms of a thousand words or less, and because I don’t really have the time to do long-form work. (I do have a day job; despite the varying hours that appear in the timestamps, almost all this stuff is written at night and on weekends, and released as I get around to it.)

About that “repetition” issue, though:

The repetition used to worry me a lot. It still does sometimes, but I’ve come to realize that there are always new readers who haven’t read me holding forth on some subject that I’ve written about before. Or sometimes I find in writing something that I’ve discovered a new angle or emphasis on an old theme.

And as you all know, I’m not above pulling something out of the archives, slapping some Nu Vinyl on it, and giving it another few hours in the sun.

Smitty, no fan of the Seventeenth Amendment — this is the one that took selection of Senators away from the state legislatures — once came up with a scheme to correct the presumed imbalance of power caused by the Seventeenth. It went something like this:

Every Congress must win approval from two thirds of the state legislatures in the 18th month of the Congress, or none of the members of the Congress are permitted to run for re-election for their current seat.

Let’s see. What’s two-thirds of 57?

I have some qualms about this proposal in the current environment: a Congress bent on austerity — yeah, like that’s going to happen — might be marked for extinction by states overwhelmed by deficits and desperate for handouts, or a small number of staggeringly-unpopular individuals could bring down the whole system.

Let’s test the latter premise. Would you, as a state legislator, vote to dissolve a Congress just to get rid of [fill in name of Congressional pariah]?

1. Yes
2. Hell, yes

I thought as much. So apparently this idea has some redeeming social value after all.

I decided to pass up the delights of a one-hour wait in line at the polls, so instead of going right before work or right after work I went during work, while things were not being piled into my inbox at the usual alarming rate. At 8:40, a hundred minutes into the day, I cast ballot #175, which tells me that there will probably be close to a thousand by the time things wrap up at 7 pm.

Fortunately for me, I already knew what marks I was going to make, so I was out of there in less than three minutes, which is fairly impressive given a ballot the size of a cookie sheet, and a two-sided cookie sheet at that. (Do not try to bake on the underside. The results will not be encouraging.)

This is what happened when Roger Ebert wrestled with a question of propriety:

I hesitated just a moment before including Miss June 1975 in my piece about Hugh Hefner. I wondered if some readers would find the nude photograph objectionable. Then I smiled at myself. Here I was, writing an article in praise of Hefner’s healthy influence on American society, and I didn’t know if I should show a Playmate of the Month. Wasn’t I being a hypocrite? I waited to see what the reaction would be.

So he waited, and this is what he got:

At first no one at all objected to the photo, even though the entry was getting thousands of hits. It went online early on Sunday afternoon. But Monday was a workday, and a reader asked if it had occurred to me to label it NSFW (“not suitable for work”). The thought may have crossed my mind, but come on, would anybody be surprised to find a nude somewhere during a 2,200-word piece on Hef?

This thought crosses my mind: does it make any sense to optimize one’s Web postings for someone surfing when he should be working? “Oh, right, you’re on your lunch break. Carry on.”

But things ended up about where you’d think they would:

I went in and resized the photo, reducing it by 2/3, so that it was postage-stamp 100 pixel size and no passer-by was likely to notice it. This created a stylistic abomination on the page, but no matter. I had acted prudently. Then I realized: I’d still left it possible for the photo to be enlarged by clicking! An unsuspecting reader might suddenly find Miss June 1975 regarding him from his entire monitor! I jumped in again and disabled that command.

Roger Ebert, of course, is no prude; you can’t very well be a prude and work with Russ Meyer. But if you insist upon wrapping a towel around Miss June, well, Ebert has already thrown it in for you:

In the future I will avoid NSFW content in general, and label it when appropriate. What a long way around I’ve taken to say I apologize.

Interestingly, he’s titled this piece “To NSFW or not to NSFW? (NSFW)”, which pretty much says it all.

Smitty, once again reading HuffPo so I don’t have to, pointed me in the general direction of yet another fashion dust-up, which I present here on the honorable basis that I need material.

In this particular instance, Swedish Crown Princess Victoria is presumably committing some fashion faux pas, not so much for wearing white after Labor Day — take a look at the link to see what I mean — but for finishing off the ensemble with the shortish bootlet you see at right. “Shoulda worn pumps,” complains the majority of the respondents to HuffPo’s inevitable poll.

I’m not so sure this shoe is all that terrible, though the name they gave it — “shooties,” a portmanteau of “shoe” and “booties” — is horrid in the extreme. At least it’s not open at the toe, which to me contradicts the very nature of a boot.

But there was a time when the dating service made you write an essay:

A contemporary search of 4554 North Broadway, Chicago, Illinois 60640 turns up the headquarters of Inspiration Corporation, which “helps hundreds of homeless and low-income individuals gain the skills to succeed in the workforce and increase self sufficiency.” I’m guessing they don’t try to marry ‘em off.

(Via Miss Cellania.)

The only thing that puzzles me, really, is that State Question 750, which would have reduced the number of signatures required for initiative petitions, just barely squeaked by; I can only conclude that people saw that and ten other questions on the ballot and decided that they wanted fewer such things in the future. And I’m hoping they didn’t decide that because the other ten went my way.

(Yes, I know: most of those questions originated with the Legislature, not with the electorate. I suspect most people don’t care one way or another.)

Otherwise: a little above meh, but way below happy happy joy joy.

Were there a specific genetic pattern which produced klutziness, I’d be a (marginally) happier man: I could blame my utter lack of grace on previous generations. And I wouldn’t feel compelled to stare longingly at stuff like this:

[T]hough I don’t watch it often, I do kind of like the couples’ figure skating or the ballroom dancing competitions. I think I figured out why. It’s the fantasy that it presents, and it’s a very “girly” fantasy I think: the fantasy is that you have a partner, and he understands you and you understand him to the point that you can execute these complex moves without even talking. It’s like it’s this pure communication, or something. Oh, I know, in reality, it takes many agonizing hours of working through choreography to make it look good, and some “couples” are not only not actual couples, they don’t necessarily like each other all that much. But still. It’s an appealing fantasy, to have someone strong enough to lift you up and dip you and who will hold your hand and not be embarrassed about it.

It’s not exclusively girly.

Then again, I have, all by my lonesome, enough communication barriers to relationship-proof the New Jersey Turnpike, so it’s probably just as well that I can’t dance worth a flip.

When Billy Durant created General Motors back at the Dawn of Automotive Time, he had exactly one brand name to work with: Buick. In the next few years, he added Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac, in that order, before he was forced out of the company. During his absence, Durant partnered with Louis Chevrolet, subsequently buying him out; eventually, Durant was able to retake control of GM, integrating the Chevrolet brand into the GM mix.

After Durant was dethroned a second time, Alfred E. Sloan formalized the GM hierarchy: Cadillac at the top, then Buick, Oldsmobile, Oakland, and Chevy at the bottom. The idea was to have a car at every conceivable price point, so you had no excuse for not buying from GM. By the middle 1920s, though, the General detected space for even more in-between brands. For a time, GM had nine nameplates; Chevrolet was still at the bottom of the hierarchy, but each of the other four marques was assigned a “companion” make to fill those gaps.

This worked about as well as you think it would, which is hardly at all. Cadillac’s kid brother LaSalle ran great through most of the Depression, but was expelled in 1940. Buick and Oldsmobile barely got to know their Marquette and Viking siblings. And it’s no wonder, really; between mid-priced Olds and top-line Cadillac, GM was trying to push four separate brands.

And then there’s Oakland, which had to share its room with something barely above a Chevy, fercryingoutloud. Worse, that something was paying all the bills for the division. GM saw the writing on the cylinder wall, and euthanized Oakland after a brief run of ’31s. Junior — otherwise known as “Pontiac” — was on the endangered-species list in the early 1950s, but lived to the ripe old age of 84 before being deemed nonessential. At the time, it was outselling Buick by about 50 percent.

See also “Gutless supreme,” some thoughts on the death of Oldsmobile (1897-2004).

Tam tells us what it’s like, though I suspect we’ve all been through it more times than we’d admit:

The brain tells the fingers to type “capitol” or “principal”, and they wind up typing the much more frequently-used “capital” or “principle”, and the brain never notices because it’s halfway into the next sentence. I usually catch this in proof-reading, but sometimes it’s early and you haven’t had any caffeine and you just want to get something up on the blog before you’re off to do other, more chore-like things, and you walk away from the keyboard leaving a hanging curve belt-high over the plate. Sigh.

The operative phrase here, of course, is “I usually catch this.” Which makes it that much worse when you don’t. And you may be certain that your spearchucker spellchecker won’t notice; it’s the wrong word, but by damn, you spelled it correctly.

If I had a dime for every horrible thing I saw on this page after hitting the Publish button, I could probably pay my hosting bill for the next year.

Missouri had amendments to its Constitution on the ballot yesterday, and this one, Number 1, struck me as curious:

Official Ballot Title:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to require the office of county assessor to be an elected position in all counties with a charter form of government, except counties with a population between 600,001-699,999?

It is estimated this proposal will have no costs or savings to state or local governmental entities.

Apparently it passed. Brian J. Noggle explains that this was a measure to force St. Louis County to elect its assessor, which I suppose would be a Good Thing, but I’m perplexed that this apparently requires all 114 counties plus the City of St. Louis to pass judgment on the matter. Then again, it’s probably wise to assume that every state constitution has at least some bizarre provisions.

Meanwhile, how come Jackson, the only county meeting those population requirements, gets a pass?

With 4:30 left in the third quarter at the Staples Center, the Thunder were down by 21 points (73-52), and radio guy Matt Pinto solemnly reported that the Clippers had at that point made seven of twelve treys, OKC zero of twelve. He didn’t have to mention that this was a difference of, yes, 21 points.

It wasn’t technically over then — right after that timeout, Daequan Cook actually sank a three-ball, and Russell Westbrook got one on the next possession — but Oklahoma City never pulled within ten points again, and the previously-winless Clippers hung a 107-92 loss on the punchless Thunder, who once again failed to break 40 percent shooting.

Oh, yes: Blake Griffin. Definitely puts the “power” in “power forward.” In 32 minutes he contributed 18 points and hauled in nine rebounds, four of them off the offensive glass. Eric Gordon had the game high of 27.

Who led the Thunder scoring? Jeff Green, with 19 points and nine boards. Kevin Durant had sixteen on 6-24 (!) shooting, including an amazing 0-10 from beyond the arc. I’m starting to think that Mathias Murphy is starting to get to him.

The occasionally-erratic Fail Blazers aren’t about to lose to this bunch tomorrow night, especially at the Rose Garden.

Few things are quite as disconcerting as a letter from a utility company that arrives the day after payment is due; I invariably go into “Did I forget to pay them?” mode, even though I don’t think I’ve ever been late on this one and they sent me back my deposit half a decade ago.

But no, this isn’t an accounting matter. Yet. OG&E wants me to know that my current electric meter is too stupid to live:

For the next few months, OG&E employees and contracted personnel will be crisscrossing the community to install smart meters on virtually every one of our customer’s homes and businesses, including yours.

I wonder who that one customer with all the homes and businesses might be.

This is the first step toward the so-called “smart grid,” which for right now will support modest enhancements like remote connection/disconnection and meter reading, but which somewhere down the line, I assume, will be used to make sure I’m paying as much as possible for running the A/C on an August afternoon when it’s actually needed, and not so much on an April morning when it’s not.

OG&E says this will enable them to “delay the building of a new power plant until at least 2020.” Whether this affects the plan to quadruple the amount of wind power they produce is yet to be determined.

Once in a while, someone wanders in here looking for shots of former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and hey, who am I to turn him away?

This was scissored out of a screenshot from Dr. Rice’s appearance on The Late Late Show last month; Craig Ferguson, obligingly, has uploaded the video. (Two parts, approximately 16 minutes.)

There’s a vague but palpable sense of exhilaration after you’ve completed your ballot, and apparently this is why:

People spend a lot of money to get elected to public office. They buy ads, they buy signs, they pay campaign staffs, and so on. And yet, for free, you and I get to tell more than half of them, “Bite me.”

You can’t get much more American than that.

Indeed.

So this five-year-old boy wanted to go out on Halloween as Daphne from Scooby-Doo, and parts of hell — not “all hell,” fortunately — broke loose. “Inappropriate!” clucked various Moms. (For some reason, the local Dads weren’t heard from, or at least weren’t quoted.)

I find myself falling into the Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That camp, for the following reasons, and perhaps some others:

• He’s already once portrayed the Scoobster, which suggests he’s well-versed (for a five-year-old, anyway) in the series canon.
• Not everyone can aspire to Velmahood.
• What’ll you bet he has his very own Mystery Machine?
• If some girl dressed up as Shaggy or (God forbid) Fred, nobody would have said a word.

Besides, as his mom notes, the kid rocks that costume, especially the wig.

I have often been perplexed by the world’s Climate Worriers, mostly because I never could figure out just what was behind their insistence that every single weather event, blazing hot or freezing cold, was a manifestation of exactly the same alleged phenomenon.

Then Roberta X got her gas bill, and now the game’s been given away.

Tam sat through the President’s post-election prattling, and filed this report:

At best I fear yesterday’s election was a band-aid on a sucking chest wound, and at worst they’ll go right back to getting all knotted up in rearranging the “family values” and “law’n'order” deck chairs while the USS Dollar continues to slip beneath the waves… But while I was eating lunch I watched the Brat Prince keep trying to strike his favorite chin-uplifted Mussolini pose, with its haughty “Who farted?” moue of confident disdain, but it wouldn’t stick, and his facial expression kept drifting back to one that looked like a man chewing on a cat turd.

I suspect they’re required to keep John Kerry — who, by the way, served in Vietnam — at a safe distance from him, lest there develop a singularity of self-absorption so powerful it might actually disrupt a taping of Oprah, half a continent away.

You may remember this from the Clippers game 24 hours ago:

The occasionally-erratic Fail Blazers aren’t about to lose to this bunch tomorrow night, especially at the Rose Garden.

Well, the Thunder weren’t quite as inept as they were against the Clips, and in fact turned downright competent in the final frame, but the Blazers were a long way from being erratic, and after several minutes on the teeter-totter, regulation time finished at a 100-100 tie.

And in overtime, things got ferocious. Four minutes through, it was only 103-100 OKC; with six seconds left, Russell Westbrook dropped in two free throws to put the Thunder up, 107-103; Armon Johnson made a trey at the buzzer to make it 107-106.

Is this the turning point for Oklahoma City? Who knows? But here’s the line: Kevin Durant, 28 points, 11 rebounds; Russell Westbrook, 28 points, 11 rebounds. And we’re still seeing the Good Jeff Green (19 points).

And now, back home to the Unsponsored Arena for a four-game homestand, and I won’t have to stay up so darn late for a while.

Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., seeking an explanation for California’s continuing sojourn in the wilderness, decides that it’s not entirely a partisan problem:

The national GOP should spend a little more time thinking about the philosophy, and a little less time being impressed by the wallets of, potential candidates they will throw their weight behind. Quick thoughts on Carly Fiorina. Her company HP sold technology to Iran and outsourced high-tech jobs to China. Her best buddy in Congress is the uber-rich Democrat Jane Harman, whose company Harman Industries also sold technology to Iran and outsourced jobs to China. With friends like that…

Carly Fiorina was not a Republican, any more than Jane Harman is a Democrat. They are instead members of the Shakespeare Theater Donation Big-Wigs in Washington D.C. They run for Congress like the Jersey Housewives show off their cleavage on t.v.

They need something to do.

This explains much about Meg Whitman’s bidding war for the governorship.

The next Oklahoma House of Representatives will have 70 Republicans and 31 Democrats. If this sounds like a rout to you, you ain’t heard nothing yet:

[Rusty] Farley ran for this seat in 2008, and lost to Democrat Dennis Bailey 56.7%-43.3%. House District 1 contains (and only contains) McCurtain County in far southeastern Oklahoma. A whopping 11.8% of voters are registered Republicans, and 5.2% are Independents. This time, Farley received 50.83% of the vote against Bailey.

Did I mention that Bailey spent over $20,000 on his reelection bid, while Farley spent … $100? Yes, Farley spent $100 and won the race.

In Little Dixie, yet, where “Republican” used to be a dirty word on the level of “grit-eating, scum-sucking, pencil-neck geek.”

Google’s been playing around with the Apache Web server, and they’ve announced a new module:

[W]e’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

Well, we’ll just see about that. I actually installed it last night, and about half the time it sped up the load time considerably, and the rest of the time it refused to load at all. I’m still testing on some smaller sites, but I’ve pulled it from here for now.

Judging by the title of the 398th Carnival of the Vanities, Andrew Ian Dodge is “back from DC.”

I’m pretty sure he had to travel more than 398 miles to get home, though within that distance you can find nifty spots like Oak Island, North Carolina. (From my house, 398 miles will land me in the parking lot at Waterloo Records.)

The Nissan Leaf is an electric vehicle; it has no pistons, no cylinders, no valves.

It does, however, have a valve cover:

David Vespremi sees a cultural precedent for this sort of atavistic throwback:

When the television was introduced, and for literally decades afterwards, it was not uncommon for them to be housed in wooden cabinets or, in later, years, to come with faux wood finishes. The thinking was, the TV was something new and alien. So, to integrate it with our lives and, indeed, the fabric of our society, it needed first and foremost to integrate with our living rooms. Ergo, the TV became a piece of wooden furniture.

So the Leaf, inevitably, is a bit closer to Studebaker than to Star Trek. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. If this is the powerplant of the future, it seems like it ought to look futuristic, but I hate it every time I pop the hood of a car and nothing looks familiar. So maybe this is Nissan’s sop to saps like me.

This “comment” landed in the spam trap, probably for a high Insincerity Score:

Man, talk about a fantastic post! I?ve stumbled across your blog a few times within the past, but I usually forgot to bookmark it. But not again! Thanks for posting the way you do, I genuinely appreciate seeing someone who actually has a viewpoint and isn?t really just bringing back up crap like nearly all other writers today. Keep it up!

Question marks in place of apostrophes don’t delight me either. And I’m being sincere when I say so.

Another one of those odd juxtapositions that occasionally turn up on my sort-of-randomized playlist:

Somewhere out there, one assumes, is the female equivalent of Cee Lo Green.

The very word “justice,” says Tony Woodlief, has jumped the shark:

We already have economic justice, social justice, global justice, environmental justice, climate justice, housing justice, transportation justice, even — no kidding — judicial justice … the game seems to be that when you want to force other people to adjust their lives to better suit your preferences, you slap the word “justice” on the end of your slogan and it’s transformed into a golden ticket on the rail car running straight to the tippy top of Moral Mountain.

Most of these ostensible justices are invoked in the name of “fairness,” which gives me an excuse to trot out once more this observation from Marcus Cole:

You know, I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

Cole, it must be said, was an incurable romantic, which just goes to show you.

For some reason, I find this report to be highly disturbing:

When I quoted Ben Franklin’s “He who would sacrifice freedom for security deserves neither” adage on a friend’s FB page, a friend of hers responded with “Ben Franklin is irrelevant because he lived before the Great Depression.” Nice.

In which case, surely we can knock it off about the Peculiar Institution that was, or was not, the cause of the Civil War Between the States for Southern Independence, which also happened rather a long time before the Great Depression.

In the process of defending the seemingly-ubiquitous “Coexist” bumper sticker, Dave contemplates the sticker and its sartorial cousin the T-shirt as cultural phenomena:

Some display simple messages that are seem to be designed to simply express an opinion (the “I Vote By the Book” and yellow equal sign stickers come to mind) and some seem to be designed to be antagonistic (like the old “Impeach Clinton and her Husband Too” sticker). I have a friend that used to have a sticker on her car that said “annoy a leftist.” Now she is a super nice and intelligent person and a staunch conservative (more so fiscally speaking than socially). Well one day she was starting a new job and got berated by some guy for being a “knuckle dragger” (among other things). He didn’t know her from Adam but made the assumption based on the sticker on her car. That sticker is one that I would call antagonistic. Sure it is funny but it is also meant to get under peoples skins more than express an opinion (at least that is my assumption since I don’t know what the person who made it was thinking). Sometime I wonder if these antagonistic stickers and t-shirts do more harm than good. They spread divisive messages into an already divided populace and do nothing more than dig people in and squash dialogue. Then again maybe I’m giving these things more power than they deserve.

I think he could be giving these things more power than they deserve. The populace would be divided even if everyone had unadorned bumpers and strictly solid-color Ts. I haven’t displayed a bumper sticker since 1995, not even the one AAA sends me every year. This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions; it means I have an outlet for them other than the back of my car. (This site went up in 1996. Hmmm…)

But I’m inclined to believe that most people shrug off these little bits of free speech unless (1) their particular buttons are being pushed and (2) at that specific moment they’re in the mood to go off on somebody for something, relevant or not.

And I’m in the mood to point you to this parody of the “Coexist” sticker, because that’s just how I roll.

Funny thing: you don’t get them at Kia prices.

Friday night, this site had a few seconds of downtime because of network maintenance at the Web host. (I posted a warning at the backup site.) For some reason, when there’s any downtime at all, the host gets a flood of complaints, usually along the lines of “This is costing me lots and lots of money!”

I usually don’t respond to these things, but there are two factors which must be taken into account:

1. Hardly anyone is actually making lots and lots of money off the Web, and
2. Those who are, you can bet, are paying a lot more than ten bucks a month for their sites.

And then there’s this:

My google ranking has gone to hell this month. My website has been down for a total of seven times, more than an hour each time, this month alone.

Yeah? I checked our corporate site, which was down for the better part of two days this past month for maintenance. It’s still carrying the same old 4 out of 10. (It’s been as high as 5 on occasion, though not recently.) And you don’t want to know what it costs us for hardware and bandwidth.

I suppose it would be nice to have double and triple and fourple redundancy, but at this traffic level — 0.5 GB per day at most — it’s absurd.

I pulled into the self-checkout line with a basket of twenty or so items. The guy at the nearest machine was just leaving, but the second-nearest machine was empty, so I headed in that general direction, pausing for him to pass by.

And then I saw it: a ten-spot, left in the currency bin. Evidently he’d bought nine dollars and odd worth of stuff, shoved a twenty into the slot, carefully retrieved the coins (which land elsewhere), but forgot about the tenner.

I grabbed it and shouted in his general direction, but he was gone. On the basis that maybe he’d come back, I handed it to the nearest clerk, who stuffed it back into the machine through the Coupons slot. Never seen that before.

Oh, well, thought I, and started scanning. The last item was a bunch of bananas. (I wanted it on top of the bag, for reasons which should be obvious.) I paid via check card, and as always, looked at the bottom of the receipt to verify the dollar amount. But I also saw this:

NUMBER OF ITEMS . . . . . 21

There is, as it happens, a sign at each terminal which says NO MORE THAN 20 ITEMS. Evidently the gizmo isn’t programmed to reject that twenty-first item. But I still felt weird: attempted good deed canceled out by apparent peccadillo. “Modern guilt,” as Beck says, “is all in our hands.”

For years now, the Tampa Tribune has had a Web presence at TBO.com. As is apparently de rigueur these days, they’ve come up with a custom URL shortener: tbo.ly.

There has been some rumbling in the Twitterverse about why one shouldn’t use those wicked .ly domains, which are issued by the General Post and Telecommunication Company of Libya, a public firm chaired by Muhammad al-Gaddafi. (You probably know about his dad, the Colonel.) I’m not in a position to complain about this, since I have been known to squish down URLs through bit.ly, which is not owned by the Libyans but which pays the stiffish price for one of their domains. But tbo.ly bothers me for a different reason, the same one cited by Costa Tsiokos here:

Because, somehow, tbo.com is too damned long, with that extra letter “m”?

I guess “Hey, ain’t we cool? We have our own shortener!” is believed to be worth something in goodwill.

The role model for contemporary extrapolation from scientific models is apparently Mark Twain, who wrote in Life on the Mississippi back in 1883:

The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.

Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and ‘let on’ to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! … Please observe:–

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.

Oddly enough, we covered this process in middle-school science: the formation of oxbow lakes.

(From Old Grouch, riffing off an observation by Roberta X.)

Then again, it was a plumbing issue, not a shoe.

A friend on Facebook (as distinguished from “a Facebook friend”) put up this picture and asked: “Would you pay $300.00 for this shoe?” I, of course, simply had to take a look:

This is “Ode” by Diane von Furstenberg, which Nordstrom describes thusly:

Antiqued studs trim the beautiful cutout leather upper of a nature-inspired clog balanced on a tiered wooden wedge.

At 4½ inches high, less one inch for the platform, presumably “balanced” is the operative word here. I am not much of a clog fan, though I do like the design on the upper, and the vaguely-rustic look means no one’s going to try to match this up with gold lamé and shoulder pads. (I hope.) It would work, though, with a long-enough skirt in something resembling earth tones; I just hate the idea of encouraging longer skirts.

Is it worth $300? Maybe. At this writing, it’s on sale for 40% off, and I think it makes a better case for itself at $180.