Listed chronologically:

“A civil dung” (7 January)
“Harshing your melanoma” (13 January)
“Tales WAGD” (27 January)
“Carpal diem” (2 February)
“The evolution will not be televised” (5 February)
“Well, hello, Dalek” (9 February)
“The squids are alright” (18 February)
“Cheese-heating render monkeys” (10 March)
“Aetna sunshine when he’s gone” (19 March)
“Cataract ranch” (30 March)
“Never say diuretic” (9 April)
“No shirt, Sherlock” (14 April)
“Cheddar homes and gardens” (24 April)
“As tiers go by” (10 May)
“Blue screen of Dodge” (17 May)
“We will, we will, tax you” (2 June)
“Feces, don’t fail me now” (12 June)
“FIFA, fo, fum” (22 June)
“They blanded her with science” (23 June)
“Trench mouthy” (2 July)
“Let slip the clogs of war” (4 July)
“Take this, Jobs, and shove it” (12 July)
“Turrets syndrome” (26 July)
“Hey la, hey la, my boyfriend’s Beck” (9 August)
“A man’s reach should exceed his grass” (24 September)
“Fainting with damn praise” (22 October)
“Edifice wrecks” (27 October)
“Hammond cheese” (11 November)
“Won’t you be my Niebuhr?” (13 November)
“Chix nix dix flix” (16 November)
“Sith happens” (26 November)
“Never mind the balljoints” (3 December)
“Whippet good” (8 December)

(Total number of 2010 posts: 2,056. Also: Worst Titles of 2009; Worst Titles of 2008; Worst Titles of 2007; Worst Titles of 2006.)

All things considered, I’d say it’s about average.

This showed up on Yahoo! Answers last night:

How can I ban liberals from my blog?

is this impossible. its through blogspot. would an htaccess file do the trick if blogspot allowed it

Well, it’s not like they’re cluttering up his comment section; as of the last time I looked, he had nine posts and no comments at all.

And no, you can’t do this in .htaccess. (What would the server look for to identify a liberal? Text styled as justified left?)

I am disinclined to give this guy a link, but if you read the question link and pull up his profile, you’ll get the URL.

You may recall that I actually moved the registration of this particular domain for reasons having to do with the desire to save a few bucks, and by “a few” I mean twenty-five over the course of a year.

Which doesn’t stop some enterprising operation with manifest contempt for its customers from offering me a far more expensive deal:

Domain Name Registration Price Term
DUSTBURY.COM Dec 20, 2010 – Dec 20, 2011 $75.00 1 Year

Say what?

Turns out that this really isn’t a domain-name registration at all. From the finer print down the page:

This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your search engine registration for DUSTBURY.COM.

Failure to complete your search engine registration by Jan 4, 2011 may result in the cancellation of this offer (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Your registration includes search engine submission for DUSTBURY.COM for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by Jan 4, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register DUSTBURY.COM for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.

Their links go to something called domregistrat.com, which evidently hoovers up email addresses from actual registry lists and then hopes to hit on someone who isn’t paying attention.

Incidentally, I’m probably easier to locate on the Web than they are. PageRanks, per Google: dustbury.com, 6; domregistrat.com, zilch. I would get better results holding my wallet open over the toilet. (How do I know it’s better? The wallet contains only $51 at the moment.)

This is one of those tracks that’s been kicking around in the back of my head for several months now; I only just found the video last week.

This is from her 2008 album Hello…x, one of the more inscrutable titles I’ve seen lately. Also, she’s just now (as in the last week or so) engaged to Jason Mraz. (If you’d followed my Twitter stream, you’d have known that.)

And there was twelve minutes of garbage time, as San Antonio won its twelfth game in a row at home in the face of a massive display of what can only be called Thundersuck. In three of four quarters, Oklahoma City failed to come up with as many as twenty points — they did manage 21 in the fourth — losing to the Spurs to the tune of 101-74, the sort of tune you don’t want to hear too often against a conference rival. This one was in doubt for maybe three seconds after tipoff.

In the face of this level of futility, the Spurs didn’t have to do much more than show up, but they turned in a worthy performance, shooting an okay 47 percent and grabbing 52 rebounds. Tim Duncan was his usual solid self, dropping in 21 points; Tony Parker had 14 points and 10 assists. (Telltale statistic: The Thunder in aggregate came up with only 10 assists.) The Spurs weren’t too wonderful from beyond the arc, but they didn’t have to be.

When your most impressive line belongs to Serge Ibaka, you had a rough night. The OKC bench scored as much as the starters — 37 points each — which should tell you how badly the starters were doing. Ibaka, though, kept his chin up and his fouls down, recording 14 points, 13 rebounds and four blocks. Kevin Durant (remember him?) was held to 16; James Harden had 12, and that’s it for the double figures.

Mullens Report: Byron put in nearly eight minutes in the final frame, hitting one shot (of four) and one free throw (of two) while reeling in one offensive rebound.

Neither of the next two road games — at Memphis on Tuesday, at Dallas on Thursday — is exactly a gimme, and then the Grizzlies show up in OKC for a Saturday game. It’s going to be a long week, I suspect.

Lurking in the Oklahoman’s real-estate recap yesterday: Girl Scout-Western Oklahoma Inc. has bought an office building at 6100 North Robinson for the not-inconsiderable price of two million dollars, or about 816,000 boxes of Thin Mints. (Before you ask: I’m figuring $3.50 per box, of which 70 percent goes back to the local council.)

This building is over 20,000 square feet, more than five times bigger than the old GSHQ at 121 NE 50th, which was sold off for $330,000. I’m guessing that the Scouts don’t need all that space, and that some of the tenants currently leasing at 6100 will continue to do so.

The Met Office in the UK reports:

As December draws to a close, early provisional figures from the Met Office suggest that this December is very likely to be the coldest across the UK since the national series began in 1910.

This December the average temperature for the UK has been -1.5 deg C, 5.7 deg C below the long-term average of 4.2 deg C.

The current coldest December was in 1981, with a mean temperature of 0.1 deg C.

That 1981 figure wouldn’t get you into the top (bottom?) five in Oklahoma City. And even -1.5° C is shruggable; the monthly record here (going back to 1891) is 25.8° F, which is -3.4° C. Which is pretty cold for a place at almost the same latitude as Crete, fercrissake.

But start heading north from here — Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Manitoba — and those Oklahoma City numbers, cold as they are, look increasingly laughable. So I suspect the Brits aren’t going to get a whole lot of commiseration from these parts, although I’m rude enough to suggest that they might consider looking into increasing their carbon footprints.

(Found at Steven Goddard’s Real Science.)

A couple of years ago, you may have read about this Ford feature:

Ford Motor will roll out a feature on many 2010 models that can limit teen drivers to 80 mph, using a computer chip in the key.

Parents also have the option of programming the teen’s key to limit the audio system’s volume, and to sound continuous alerts if the driver doesn’t wear a seat belt.

Technology marches on, and now Ford’s MyKey system has a few more features of this sort:

[P]arents can now block their children from listening to certain radio stations — say, for instance, Howard Stern or Playboy Radio on satellite. In fact, there are a dozen stations listed as explicit by Sirius, and all of them can be blocked using MyKey starting in 2011.

Also seeing an upgrade for 2011 is MyKey’s speed-limiting technology. Previously, the top speed of a properly equipped Ford vehicle could be capped at 80 miles per hour (with chimes sounding at 45, 55 and 65). Now, users can preset a desired speed limit at any of four different settings — 65, 70, 75 or 80 mph.

In other news, there’s a Playboy Radio on satellite. (Question: Do you have to turn the car 90 degrees to hear the centerfold?)

Alas, the feature most desired by parents — the ability to deny entry to their teens’ dubious acquaintances — is probably still a long way off.

After two and a half weeks, during which it was either on my desk or in the car, I figured it was probably time to file Freezepop’s Imaginary Friends (reviewed here) on the appropriate shelf, which is the big CD tree (it’s five feet high but not presently rising) in the living room.

Filing rules:

• Pop (as distinguished from classical) is (mostly) filed by artist.
• Various-artists compilations are filed more or less at random, though they’re all on the same face, and series — Time-Life, Rhino’s Have a Nice Day, anything from ERIC — are grouped together. Pop soundtracks from films also go here, near the bottom.
• Classical discs are filed by composer. If there are two, I pick the one for which I bought the disc. Multiple-composer compilations are (mostly) filed by artist.
• The Beatles get a shelf to themselves. It holds all the canonical albums, the two Past Masters discs, the Live at the BBC set, and all three Anthology sets. It does not, however, have room for the greatest-hits disc 1, and I have bought no Beatles stuff since then.

So where does Freezepop fit in? Right between Aretha Franklin and Jane Froman. Yes, that Jane Froman. There are other acts who’d fit in there, but they’re on the vinyl shelf.

Severian (in a comment at Freeberg’s) describes someone you also might know:

I have a good friend who, like all liberals, wants “Wall Street” to be “regulated.” I tried the old “which specific regulations would you like?” bit and he came back with stuff about executive compensation. Sad, but not surprising, since “not understanding how the labor market works” is just one phase of the grand liberal project of misunderstanding everything about basic economics until the end of time.

What was surprising, though, was his total lack of even the most basic financial knowledge. I’m not talking about the ability to price derivatives or discuss credit default swaps; I’m talking basics — as in, he really couldn’t understand how, if I bought a share of stock at $1 and sold it for $3, someone somewhere wasn’t getting screwed out of $2.

Although he’d happily tax you on that $2.

Executive compensation is based on the uncomplicated concept of “What can we get away with?” Always has been. TARP sought to correct this by imposing salary ceilings on recipients; recipients busted a nut to pay back TARP as quickly as possible to get out from under those ceilings. (This is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, Serendipity Subclause: it’s not common, but occasionally something stupid produces an acceptable result, or at least a result that wasn’t as bad as you could have predicted.)

Besides:

I doubt that Alex Rodriguez, for example, really generates $300 million or whatever in revenue for the Yankees. But as a conservative I know that free markets include the right to make stupid decisions in the marketplace.

Or it could simply be that A-Rod is worth that much to the Yankees just to make sure he doesn’t fall into the hands of the [fill in name of hated rival team, probably the Red Sox].

There was a discussion locally to the effect that NBA players could not possibly be worth the amount they get. (The lowest-paid player on the Thunder roster, reserve forward D. J. White, makes $1,108,680 a year, and Oklahoma City is not known for overpaying people.) In vain it was argued that these dollars go to extremely few people — the NBA has no more than 450 roster spots — that the highest-paid players got that way because of perceived superiority, and that those salary levels exist because of collective bargaining between team owners and the Players’ Association. “Too high,” insisted the hardliners. I’m guessing they subscribe to the theory that at some point you’ve made enough money, and I infer that it’s okay with them if Washington tells you so — until the time that Washington tells them so, anyway.

For the record: I don’t really give a flying fish how much (or how little) someone is paid, except in the specific instance that “someone” = “me.” If some hedge-fund manager pulls down nine digits, how does that affect me in the slightest? If the answer is “Well, he doesn’t deserve that kind of money,” the only proper response is “Sez who?” Eventually, you find out who: what they want, evidently, is some sort of Federal Compensation Board, where “appropriate” salaries are determined, and from whom they presumably expect a raise, inasmuch as they’re so deserving and all. This is a slight variation on a theme previously noted by social critic Steve Sailer:

The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

As a rule, there are only two types of elitist: those who are part of an elite and believe they deserve to be, and those who are not part of an elite yet believe they deserve to be. And you can take that to the bank.

It’s shoveling time, and while you’re clearing cold and damp unpleasantness from your driveway, we’re digging into the site logs in search of stuff that isn’t necessarily cold and damp, but which might be just as unpleasant in its own way. At least we don’t have to wear gloves — mostly.

legalarity:  A condition occasionally sought by George W. Bush before a strategerical imperative.

“the playboy advisor” body odor:  He’s against it.

papers of strom thurmond:  Typically, white, 8½ by 14. Nothing unusual for the period.

milfs for christmas:  Sorry, Mommy was busy kissing Santa Claus at the time.

manu ginobili looks like squidward:  Well, it all works out, since Russell Westbrook vaguely resembles Sandy Cheeks. Minus the helmet, of course.

“defend against plagiarism:”  Don’t write anything. It’ll be that much harder for them to copy.

backyard nudity legal in oklahoma:  It’s the third of January. You do not want to try to find this out for yourself for several months yet.

Dick van patten hairy:  It is not for you to speculate as to the hairiness of Dick Van Patten, or indeed of any other Dick.

I couldnt possibly hope to disagree with you:  Sure you could. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can’t have everything.

Comments left on newspaper sites tend to be, in my estimation, about 1.5 standard deviations less readable than blog comments, for reasons we probably don’t have to go into here. No one, up to now, seems to know quite what to do about this without paying someone to moderate everything, or buying something to half-moderate everything.

Freedom Communications, owner of the Orange County Register, is trying a different tack at its northwest-Florida outpost. The news story here isn’t so important, but the comment policy is decidedly different:

From the editor: Many of you have expressed concerns about some of the harsh anonymous comments from readers. To remedy that, we are introducing new features. You can create your own blog, publish your news and share your photos with the community. Once you fill out a simple form and leave a verifiable e-mail address, you can set up your profile page. It will display all of your contributions and allow you to track issues and easily connect with others.

We want our site to be a place where people discuss and debate ideas that foster stronger communities. We built this for you. Please take care of it. Tolerate broad thinking, but take action against obscene or hateful material. Make it a credible and safe place worth preserving and sharing.

Upside: you can see if J. Random Dunderhead has basically the same reactions to everything with just a couple of clicks.

Downside: sooner or later, every offer of free blog space turns into a base for spammers.

Melissa Joan Hart, the live-action Sabrina for seven seasons, is now thirty-four. Still has a certain, um, magical appeal, though:

She and hubby Mark Wilkerson have been together seven years; they have two boys. (This is consistent with Robert Stacy McCain’s contention: “It is vitally important that beautiful people have babies, because otherwise the human race would become progressively uglier with each succeeding generation.”)

Lauren Harger tweeted this earlier today:

Notice how “green” car names sound so wimpy? Prius sounds like Prissy and Wuss. And the Leaf? Can you get more inanimate than that?

Jonathan Richman’s Dodge Veg-O-Matic was pretty inanimate, despite its industrial-sounding name.

Still, you have to figure that this is a case of Know Your Audience: no one in the history of the world ever cross-shopped the Prius against, say, the late, lamented Mercury Marauder. And you can be sure that John Q. Hypermiler isn’t buying a Prius to go hooning around.

Besides, none of Toyota’s vehicle lines, from misty Avalon to lumpy Yaris, carries a name that sounds the least bit menacing, with the possible exception of the home-market Harrier, which came here as the Lexus RX. (Nissan, which issues vehicles with such names as Armada, Titan, and Rogue, is apparently less concerned with appearing more concerned.)

And suppose we’d had the technology much earlier. Could there have been, say, a ’62 Buick Electrodyne?

The Tapeworm is a drink made from vodka, Tabasco sauce, black pepper — and, um, mayonnaise.

Expect a complaint from McGehee in 3 … 2 … 1 …

(Complete recipe here. Via TYWKIWDBI.)

There are times when you look away from a book for a moment and think “Damn, I wish I’d said that. In fact, I think I could have said that.” You’ll quickly amend the thought ever so slightly, perhaps suspecting that the Karma Police will put you on a watchlist for thinking yourself on par with an author you admire, but the passage will stick in your mind. My own practice is to stop at that point and reread the passage out loud, just in case I missed something while jumping to whatever my conclusion might be.

Author Lionel Shriver is keenly aware of this sort of thing:

I’m convinced that it’s not so much that I’m so perceptive, but that occasionally I’m able to put into words what most of us think. That’s what makes it seem perceptive, but the talent is the getting it into words. Because when you say that your friend felt I had a direct pipeline to her head, that means that she had thought these things herself. One of the great satisfactions of fiction, when it works, is that you come across a passage that somehow articulates what you have already thought yourself, so that the author’s not ahead of you exactly, but has simply given you the facility to give the thought form.

It would have taken me several paragraphs, I think, maybe even several pages, to capture this:

[I]t had always been frustrating: if you put the two of them together — Lawrence’s discipline, intellect, and self-control, Ramsey’s eroticism, spontaneity, and abandon — you’d have the perfect man.

“I’ve sometimes wondered whether it really matters all that much, whom you choose to live with, or to marry,” she mused. “After all, there’s something wrong with everybody, isn’t there? Ultimately, we all settle.”

“Oh, it matters,” he snorted readily.

Were I to tackle this subject I’d be wandering all around Robin Hood’s barn without actually getting anywhere.

That quoted passage, incidentally, is from Shriver’s 2007 novel The Post-Birthday World, which I finished reading over the weekend, and from which I quote the preface, in full:

“Nobody’s perfect.” — KNOWN FACT

Only Osgood Fielding III could have said it better.

You know who else wanted you to look good?

Not to be confused with this place.

(Via FAILBlog.)

Charles Branch writes to Motor Trend (2/11):

With the ubiquity of sophisticated electronics and driver information display capabilities in modern cars, why do we still have “idiot lights”? Wouldn’t it be much more useful if the car told you the oxygen sensor was malfunctioning rather than turning on the check engine light? Is it some sort of conspiracy to get us to spend more money taking our vehicles in for service or buying some device to tell us what error code is causing our dashes to light up like Christmas trees? I know I’d feel much better if my car just told me that the fuel cap wasn’t screwed on rather than displaying an ominous warning that any of hundreds of problems might be going on. So what gives? Why don’t new cars just tell us the problem?

Similarly, this.

MT, for their part, informed him that There Is No Cabal and attempted to buy him off with a copy of Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3.

Lynn’s advice about the perhaps-overused descriptor “epic”:

[I]f you’re tempted to use it you should remember that if the Big Four networks don’t interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to tell you about it, it’s probably not epic.

Then there’s Epic Records, founded in 1953, mostly as a drain for recordings Columbia didn’t want to release on its own but didn’t want anyone else to get. (I blame Mitch Miller.) If I remember correctly, originally Columbia didn’t even bother to distribute Epic, which had to rely on independent distributors to get its product into the stores. Epic’s poor-relation status ended in the 1960s when it became a major vendor of British Invasion imports; Epic album 38112, issued in 1982, has outsold every other record on the face of the earth. At the time, it was indisputably epic. Today, maybe not so much.

Addendum: See also here.

The other day, I griped about pharmaceuticals whose names contain X and Z, and the potential for confusion that theoretically could be derived therefrom. It did not occur to me to complain about their mythic nature, which is where Brian J. steps in:

[W]hen I hear about Uloric, immediately I think of a giant blond man with a horned helmet, bearing the mighty four-bladed Xanax in his quest to defeat the unhuman Prinvil and their allies the demonic Zestril and to defend the mighty artifact the Zocor from the predations of the Norvasc and their tyrannical warlord Zithromax.

Zithromax, if I remember my mythology correctly, wields a mighty autoharp.

At left: Picture of what a four-bladed Xanax might look like. Note the tri-scored handle at the center, which presumably makes the four-bladed Xanax more easily grasped by your Valium warriors.

O. J. Mayo was a no-show tonight: bronchitis. Turns out, the Grizzlies didn’t really need him: Tony Allen filled in brilliantly, and on-again off-again Memphis was on and then some, utterly blistering the Thunder on the glass en route to a 110-105 win.

And it wasn’t just Allen, though he posted a season-high 19 points. Both Zach Randolph (31 points, 16 rebounds) and Rudy Gay (27 points) pretty much had their way with a porous Oklahoma City defense. Memphis grabbed 42 rebounds, twelve offensive, while OKC managed only 31, with three off the offensive glass: the Thunder were the very definition of “one and done” much of the night. (Second-chance points: 18-8.)

The Westbrook-Durant combine had 28 points on each side, and James Harden added 17 from the bench. Technically, OKC outshot the Griz, 51.3 to 51.2 percent, but Memphis hit four more shots. The Thunder, as usual, were hot stuff from the stripe — 22 of 25 — but Memphis also managed 22 points from the line, albeit with five more attempts.

I am not exactly looking forward to seeing this bunch of Grizzlies again. Unfortunately, they’ll be in town Saturday night. Between now and then, there’s a trip to, um, Dallas. I have to figure, if the Mavs can compensate for losing Dirk Nowitzki, they can certainly compensate for losing Caron Butler.

Addendum: Bronchitis? Maybe not so much.

Including Dr B, Dr Extreme, and Dr Fizz.

And, oh yes, a couple of civilians, though Mr Pibb has pretty much given up his title by now.

(Via Mr Consumerist.)

The American Association for Nude Recreation now has its own iPhone app, including a directory of AANR-affiliated clubs.

However, you can’t actually click on the club sites: you’ll have to enter those URLs on your own, Apple being disinclined to allow anything in an app that runs the risk of showing more than trivial quantities of flesh with a single click. I’m guessing that Apple is still steamed about that whole Garden of Eden thing.

Terry Teachout was kind enough to quote David R. Dow:

[T]he day I decided to propose was the day I realized I would never run out of things to talk to her about and I would never get tired of looking at her.

Similarly, these.

Those of you who pay attention to the shoe stuff around here might possibly remember that a few days back, I wandered onto Zappos.com and noticed that they had recommendations for me, one of which I posted here to see what kind of reaction it might get. I decided to wait a while, then go back and see if they had something new for me.

Which they did:

Before you: Stuart Weitzman’s “Whirl,” a sandal which meets my definition of “insubstantial”, in a color called Bronze. There’s also an Oyster version, which you might find more useful if you’re visiting the Neutral Zone, though I should point out that one reviewer took exception to the color descriptions and returned both pairs. The heel stands a moderate (for these days) 3¾ inches; the upper is kid; the price, for the moment, is almost 50 percent off, albeit still too close to $200.

I’ll go back in a week or two and see what else they’ve cooked up.

Search-engine optimization, I said once upon a time, is the 21st-century version of phrenology. Not that this discourages folks from attempting to game the system. For instance, here’s Mickey Kaus:

Why does this item have a cheesy headline like “Krugman vs. the Whippersnappers!”? Hey, you try to Search Engine Optimize an item like this. Google is the enemy of forthrightness, and of good humor. In the future, every headline will have the words “Sarah Palin” in it.

Hmmm. Nobody reads my Sarah stuff, unless there’s a photo involved. Then again, I’m not exactly running a Mickey Kaus operation here.

(Suggested by Fishersville Mike.)

Somewhere around half the population pays somewhere around none of the income tax, and Fausta sees this as a disparate-impact issue:

This means that a lot of people do not have their earnings directly decreased and seized by the government the way the earnings of the tax-paying minority are. Abstractions like federal deficits don’t hit you in the gut directly; having half (or more) of your yearly earnings taken away does. Until and unless each and every wage earner is taxed, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is going to change.

They might actually be paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, which are not exactly insubstantial, but the government persists in the fiction that somehow those taxes are different, despite the fact that everybody (well, okay, not everybody) knows that it all ends up going into the same bucket, and that the ostensible Trust Funds contain, at best, a fistful of dusty $2 bills and a stack of freshly-issued IOUs. We would be better served by an end to this particular fairy tale.

And since “OMG they’re going to tax poor people!” will not sit well with overpaid editorial writers and political hacks, I propose we invert Fausta’s insight: “Until and unless no wage earner is taxed, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is going to change.” Hey, it worked through 1912.

It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the road, and it might just make you a worse driver:

If you’re bored during your drive to work, there’s a greater chance you’ll speed, a new study from Australian researchers says.

The [Newcastle University] study, which looked at 1,563 drivers, found people are willing to take more risks behind the wheel if they aren’t enjoying the ride.

Well, of course; we want to get it over with quick, because it’s so dreary, drab and dull, and besides, we have to get around that rolling chicane from the Anti-Destination League who proclaims to the world how moral he is by going 58.5 in a 60 zone in the left lane.

Besides, it’s not like we have to spend 90 percent of our time avoiding lift-throttle oversteer:

“As cars come fitted with more gadgets to make driving easier and planners remove more of the distractions, it comes as no surprise to me that people are finding the pleasure of driving has become rather a chore. With that comes an increase in the risks drivers take as they mentally switch-off instead of focusing on the road,” professor of transport Edmund King said in a release about the study.

“Oh, I’ll just answer this one text, and —”

“We may need to start considering some radical schemes such as putting bends back into roads or introducing the concept of shared space as it would force motorists to think about their driving and pedestrians to think about cars,” [lead researcher Dr Joan] Harvey said.

There’s no scheme more radical than forcing people to think, especially since so many of them would rather not.

(Via Autoblog.)

“Harper Valley P.T.A.” came up on the shuffle during the commute, and for just a moment I flashed back on the killer line: “And then you have the nerve to tell me, you think that as a mother I’m not fit.”

And I remembered hoping against hope that in the next line Jeannie C. Riley would have sung, um, something else to rhyme with that. Wasn’t going to happen, of course — it was 1968, after all, and writer Tom T. Hall, iconoclast that he was, still wasn’t about to break an AM-radio taboo — but to this day, I find myself thinking up more forceful denunciations of that little Peyton Place.

For some time, Ferris O’Brien has been buying quarter-pages in the Gazette to promote The Spy; last week’s ad said simply “We are The Spy.”

This week’s ad says: “We are The Spy™.”

I have a feeling things are about to get interesting.

(If you haven’t heard them lately, they’re at TheSpyFM.com.)

Fark blurb:  Toni Braxton might unwear her dress for Playboy.

She tweets:

New Year, New opportunities. So I have been considering taking up Playboy’s offer to feature me on their cover this year. What you think?

Well …

You won’t see me complain, although I’m pretty sure Hef isn’t running out of twentysomethings just yet. (Besides, it’s just a cover; it’s not a pictorial, fercryingoutloud.) And anyway, she could use a few extra bucks right about now.

Last Thunder/Mavericks clash, Dirk Nowitzki played barely a quarter before retiring to the locker room with a sprained knee, but the Mavs won that one anyway. This time, Dallas was still Dirkless, and Caron Butler, poor fellow, is out for the season with a ripped tendon. Despite that, the Mavs jumped out to an early lead and were up 55-51 at the half, at which time Scott Brooks gave the Thunder a spelling lesson, emphasizing the letter D. OKC outscored Dallas 22-15 in the third quarter, and ran out to a double-digit lead in the fourth. Then in the last minute, DeShawn Stevenson rolled out two consecutive treys and nearly pulled off a steal on the next possession; Kevin Durant nailed two free throws, the Thunder got a stop, Rick Carlisle wandered out onto the court for some reason, Durant handed him the ball for no apparent reason, and Stevenson put up one more trey before the horn, making the final score 99-95.

All the Dallas starters posted double figures, except Jason Kidd, who didn’t score at all but did get ten rebounds. Shawn Marion, who’s been shooting over 50 percent most of the season, had an admirable 25 points; Tyson Chandler, ever ferocious, got 14 points and 18 boards. Were Nowitzki and Butler missed? No doubt; but there’s also no doubt that the Mavs know how to step up.

Telltale statistic: Oklahoma City pulled off 13 steals. (The Mavs had four.) This was a game of ball movement, first and foremost: 41 assists (OKC 23, Dallas 18), and only three blocked shots. Durant finished at 28, about his average; Russell Westbrook and Jeff Green returned to form, and Serge Ibaka had eight rebounds and hit six of six shots in 24 minutes — and accumulated, again, six fouls.

So the Mavs win this series 2-1, but I suspect we’re not done with these guys just yet. In the meantime, the Grizzlies will be in town Saturday; next week, it’s an odd back-to-back, at Houston on Wednesday, followed by a visit from the Magic on Thursday.

Andrew Ian Dodge, who knows about such things, advises that we’re CoTVing into the 112th Congress with this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Vanities, the 407th in the series.

Of course, the 112th Congress hasn’t done a whole lot yet. I suspect, though, that it will be a lot like its predecessor: anxious to put its stamp on things which won’t particularly arouse the electorate. For instance, there was a measure to designate May as National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month. (If you’re not aware of either asthma or allergies, raise your hand.) More than a hundred co-sponsors signed up for H.Res.407.

The Man of the West tells us of the resignation letter he’s actually going to send, and then of the resignation letter he feels like sending. Scissored from the latter:

I have to be on good terms with the rich and the poor, with the native and the foreigner, with the saints and with the wickedest of the reprobate. I have had to extract information from people who do not speak the language and from people whose illnesses render them no longer able to speak at all. I have had to communicate with people who cannot hear and with people who cannot see.

Possession of these characteristics, alas, does not apparently pay well:

I don’t begrudge you the cost-saving moves; that’s just business. I am just saying that effectively cutting my pay doesn’t really constitute an incentive for me to stay.

Traditionally, one quotes Johnny Paycheck and/or David Allan Coe at a time like this, but sometimes it takes Jello Biafra.

Ready for the Federal government to be shrunk to a more manageable size? Don’t hold your breath while you wait:

Remember that money is at stake. If, for example, a federal Cabinet department were deemed unConstitutional, it would open the way for claims that the funding for that department had been illegally appropriated and must be returned via a tax rebate. But governments give no refunds, now or ever. It would be the height of absurdity to imagine that the trillions of dollars poured into the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, would be returned to American taxpayers, even if it could be raised.

On the other hand, seeing it declared defunct, its regulations vacated, its facilities emptied, and its personnel scattered to the four winds, would almost make up for not getting a check for the proceeds, wouldn’t it?

No one in federal office will vote for any diminution of Washington’s power to tax and tyrannize us — certainly not with retroactive effect. Any vows of fidelity to the Constitution made by Congress over these next two years will be tactical only.

Which is likely true, but as tactics go, we’ve all seen worse.

As most of you have noticed by now, I have long been mystified by the appeal of fishnets, and by “long” I mean for at least seven years, even at those moments when I’m inclined to celebrate their presence.

Sienna Miller, in this clip, explains the process to Steve Buscemi:

Well, okay, if you say so. I’d like to think there’s a bit less BDSM to it, but what do I know?

(Via Ferdinand Bardamu.)

When you say that the electrical system of a car is “flatly insane,” it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that said car is some misbegotten British box whose electrons are flowed sporadically at the whim of Lucas, Prince of Darkness. “With a monopoly in place,” says the anonymous Wikipedant, “Lucas proceeded to supply electrical equipment that was commonly cited as the best reason not to buy a British car.”

Yet somehow, without buying from Lucas, the Americans managed to duplicate the experience, as Ric Locke explains:

The electrical system is quite flatly insane. Things work or not according to some scheme I have not yet identified, probably having to do with the phases of the moons on some planet in the Andromeda galaxy. For instance, the turn signals — which are driven by the computer, not anything simple like a flasher module — are supposed to have an audible signal, a soft beep each time they flash. That started working one afternoon last September, worked perfectly for a day and a half, and hasn’t worked since.

Most annoyingly, from time to time it just stops. While traveling down the road the engine quits as if the ignition had been turned off — no coughs and spits like fuel starvation, no “run down”, no nothing; just one moment running, the next moment not. So far it has not yet failed to start again once the transmission lever is set in Neutral and the ignition is switched off and on to reboot the computers, but it’s annoying as can be. (No, I don’t think it’s a Windows operating system. That’s barely possible for the time period, but the logo doesn’t show up anywhere.)

Early-90s Mazdas showed signs of this latter, which was eventually traced to thermal overload in the ignitor. This part was theoretically available separately, but part places in general and dealers in particular would rather have sold you the entire distributor.

On a car of a Certain Age, however, I tend to suspect that the wiring harness has assumed the general shape and inscrutability of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pasta be upon him), and only divine intervention can save it.

This is why you (and by “you,” I mean “I”) shop where you do:

I try to get the shopping done before noon on Sunday. Mostly to avoid human interaction. Which means I will have to avoid Whole Foods for a good 2 years after construction is complete. The only other shoppers at Homeland on Britton and May at such an early hour are old people.

Such is not the case after 5 p.m. Do all hot little 20-somethings go to yoga class immediately preceding a trip to the grocery store? Or is the constant parade of tight behinds covered by painted-on black stretchy pants just a ruse to cause me certain embarrassment and a potential sexual harassment lawsuit?

As a practicing old person — not that it requires a hell of a lot of effort to keep up the practice — I can testify that around 3 pm on a Saturday, that very same store is a hotbed, so to speak, of highly-observable forty- and fiftysomethings. I assume that the men in their lives are at that moment glued to the sofa, remote in one hand, brewski in the other.

And you thought your workplace was retarded for using IE 6:

I have just learned, to my astonishment, that half the lawyers in New York create their documents in WordPerfect. That is not a typo.

I may as well admit here that I still have a copy of WP 5.1 for DOS; the executable (a mere 213k) is dated 6 November 1989. Apparently the last time I used it for anything was in 1999; I have a ZIP file of correspondence that was created in 1991.

Alas, I gave away my copy of WordStar, which I acquired along with a brace of Osborne 1s back in the Jurassic period.

Now to do something about those pesky IE 6 users.