The kinks, and not the ones who were the Village Green Preservation Society either. Except, of course, when they are.

If this sort of thing is actually going on, my faith in the human race, never particularly high, decays just a little bit more:

The car salesman at the local Ford dealership says I must sell my Toyota, cause in the future any parts I buy for Toyota truck will have radiation on those parts. Sounds like a sales scam to scare me into buying a new Ford truck. Its sad at what happened to Japan with the earthquake and tsunami. I’m sicken to hear this dealership is using the disaster as a sailing point to the us car buyers. Is this true about radiation can be on any car parts imported from Japan?

If the car salesman is sacked for such tactics, at least he has a future in politics, where scaring people is de rigueur.

As is my wont these days, I spent part of Saturday on YouTube looking for fresh takes on Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” and halfway up the list was the legendary Stephen Colbert/Roots collaboration on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from the first of April, which was, you’ll remember, a Friday.

I was surprised to see it there, given NBC’s and Hulu’s assiduous policing of the scene, and perhaps even more so to see it reversed on screen. The uploader explains:

For those who still wonder why this video is flipped as a mirror image it is due to copyright reasons. YouTube scans all videos upon uploading for copyrighted material and without mirror imaging uploading this video would not have been possible.

I wonder what will happen when Hitler finds out.

So Les Griz came to town, and they dominated the proceedings: the Thunder never quite got on track, and Memphis scored a surprisingly-easy win at the Raincatcher Arena. Darnell Mayberry had tweeted that the Thunder were lucky to be down only ten at halftime, and he wasn’t kidding. The final was 114-101, and it could have been a lot worse than that.

In a way, this was reminiscent of how the Griz disposed of the San Antonio Spurs, winning the first game and thereby negating all that home-court advantage stuff. The things Memphis does best — scoring in the paint and collecting turnovers — they were happy to do today, to the tune of 52 points and 18 Thunder turns, which latter became 23 Grizzlies points. About the only thing Memphis didn’t do well was shoot the three-ball, and they didn’t have to: it was too easy to get into the lane.

Thirty-four points for Zach Randolph, who was apparently still on the same roll that finished off the Spurs Friday night. He also grabbed 10 rebounds. Next door, Marc Gasol had 13 boards and 20 points. Three other Grizzlies posted double figures. Memphis controlled the boards, 45-42; they even outdid the Thunder at the stripe, sinking 23 of 28. (Telltale statistic: the Griz turned the ball over only 7 times.)

The usual Thunder suspects got their usual numbers: Kevin Durant and Serge Ibaka had double-doubles, Durant rolling up 33 points. Russell Westbrook had 29 points and eight rebounds and six assists — and seven turnovers. The Thunder in aggregate came up with only 16 assists, meaning that they weren’t moving the ball as well as they needed to. (The Griz managed 21.) And the OKC bench contributed only 16 points to the cause.

Game 2 is Tuesday night. The general consensus has been that the Thunder wins this series in six or seven; right now, I’m thinking the Griz pull this one out in six. If the Thunder have another game like this, maybe five.

“We know our customers.”

Now that’s using the old noodle.

(Via Engrish Funny.)

If you live in New York, everything else is Podunk, and they’ll happily tell you so:

“oh, Dallas — what do they have there — cows?” “oh, Miami? seedy nightclub joints, bland condo towers and garish boardwalk crowd” “oh, Chicago? its best days are over, and besides it’s terribly chilly” So in a sense, it did me good — the reality exceeded my lowered expectations threefold. Same happened this time. Just yesterday somebody told me “oh, St. Louis? Spread out Big Nothing. Nothing to see after you climbed that Arch”.

“Spread out” is a common term of opprobrium among those who would prefer that everyone be stacked vertically, for whatever reasons.

But you can immediately sense — this city is very different from NY. Reminds me of Dallas’ center, actually: same vast space, pristine streets (wide!) paved sidewalks (king-size!) benches everywhere (big!), dirt-cheap parking ($60 a MONTH!), amazing courthouses and municipal buildings (my favorite: Deco monumentality and 1920′s classicism), plenty of space between those skyscrapers to see each and every one, alley (like in Chicago!) gorgeous City Center Sculpture Park (that’s the one I read about in Metropolis; I’ll talk about it later); and amazingly — no people!

Not to put the knock on New York, generally, but the Apple is pretty much sui generis: other cities do not look much like New York, nor can they be expected to. If St. Louis had the density of Manhattan, you’d have seven million people in its 60 square miles. And you wouldn’t have “dirt-cheap parking,” either.

It’s time once more to thumb our way through the week’s logs and see what the search-based community thinks is important. As is the case in real life, the weirdos get all the attention.

muskrat bit dogs tongue:  And yet people insist that there’s something called “muskrat love.” Dogs know better.

is 2001 mazda 626 the same as 2002 mazda 626:  Most of the time, the only part that doesn’t match up is going to be the one part you need.

“the injection” panties:  Much easier to take them orally.

can a humvee climb a mountain:  I do hope you’re not in a hurry.

nudist resorts for african americans:  Good luck persuading them that they’d look better with a tan.

“we sell bladeless knives without handles:”  It’s like carbon credits, only more substantive.

how to get checkers to stop a naked indian induced trance:  Jump three rows, receive your king, and then throw a bladeless knife with no handle.

smart man smattering woman affair:  I can’t help you there; my experience with affairs is a smattering at best.

pat robertson donated out of personal wealth:  Mostly from funds donated from other people’s personal wealth, I’d expect.

how is climate change detected:  There are two accepted indicators: (1) when the weather seems different; (2) when the weather seems exactly the same.

Bizarre Search Engine Searches:  You’re soaking in them.

This won’t make me feel any better about it:

Must be all that botulism.

(Via Criggo.)

It’s a “customer-service nightmare,” says danah boyd, but it’s also the harbinger of something that has the potential to be far nastier:

I threw a public hissy fit when I found out that Tumblr’s customer service had acted on a trademark request from a company called Zephoria who had written them to ask that they release my account to them. (Tumblr has since apologized and given me my identity back.) In some ways, I feel really badly for Tumblr — and all other small social media companies — because brokering these issues is not easy. In fact, it’s a PITA. Who has the legitimate right to a particular identity or account name? What happens when the account is inactive? Or when the person who has the account is squatting? Or when there are conflicting parties who both have legitimate interests in an account name? Or when the account owner has died?

Trademark law, of course, is an impenetrable thicket in and of itself, and J. Random Blogger, or whoever, is not likely to be able to thread her way through it. And the result is fairly predictable:

There are all sorts of people roaming around the internet, building their reputations and associating them with nicknames, handles, and pseudonyms. They aren’t necessarily building businesses or engaging in commercial acts, but they are building a public reputation no less. And there are also all sorts of companies out there operating as individuals to give their consumers a sense that they are “authentic.” And these two practices are colliding online. When is a Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook/YouTube account an individual? When is it a company? When is it an individual at a company? They’re all meshed into one TYPE: account. So then who has precedence?

Time was, I wrestled with the temptation to register on every new service that pops up, just to reserve the name, or more precisely to keep it out of the hands of Someone Unworthy, lest said someone’s antics tar my reputation. This thinking almost certainly informed my decision to set up my official Backup Blog at WordPress.com. But I eventually figured out that there’s no way I can keep up with everything that comes along, and I really don’t want to go through life with the ™ — or worse, the ® — affixed to everything I say and everything I do.

In fact, they won’t even let me tell you who I am:

An Arab banquet waiter at the legendary Waldorf-Astoria hotel says he was forced to wear different name tags at work to prevent guests from being frightened by being served by someone named Mohamed.

Mohamed Kotbi, born in Morocco, has worked for the Waldorf for twenty-six years, and this apparently wasn’t a problem until shortly after 9/11. After complaining to the EEOC, he was given a tag with his last name: “Kotbi.” And then:

This past November, however, he was given a name tag that said, “Edgar.” Kotbi said he complained and was told by a manager, “It’s better to be Edgar than Mohamed today.”

You’d almost think the Waldorf was outsourcing their banquet work to Bangalore, home of Steve and Debbie and a whole lot of other people who don’t sound like they’d be named Steve or Debbie.

Kotbi is now suing, charging that the hotel’s finagling has created a “hostile work environment” in which co-workers are regularly mocking him.

(Via Fark.)

HelloGiggles.com is the project of these three excellent babes:

More specifically:

Founded by actress/musician Zooey Deschanel, producer Sophia Rossi and blogger/web personality Molly McAleer, HelloGiggles.com is the ultimate entertainment destination for smart, independent and creative females. Everything hosted on the site will be lady-friendly, so visitors need not worry about finding the standard Boys Club content that makes many entertainment sites unappealing to so many of us.

There are moments when I revel in fratboy humor, and moments when I am utterly appalled by it. (And sometimes, yes, those moments are adjacent to one another.) Their first piece, a three-minute spot for Teleflora, is cutely whimsical, and I have a high tolerance for whimsical cuteness, which gives me another excuse to keep an eye on HelloGiggles.

A reader sends a question to Glenn Reynolds:

I just do not get it. For how long have Americans known about Tornado Alley? For how long have they known that a typical house would not withstand a once-in-20-years tornado, much less a worse one?

And yet houses are still built of clapboard and a couple of two-by-fours. Just like New Orleans is being rebuilt just where it used to be, because that worked out so well the first time around.

To which the Instant Man replied:

Even in Tornado Alley, the likelihood that any particular house will ever be hit by a tornado in its lifetime is pretty low. (Also, brick and stone construction, while good for tornadoes, is bad for earthquakes; wood-frame buildings actually do better there.) And basically nothing except quasi-fortified structures will withstand an EF4 or EF5 tornado.

The most significant storm of the 1999 Oklahoma outbreak, which sent funnels as far east as Tennessee, was a single F5 that started near Amber and didn’t lift until Midwest City, still packing F4 winds. (By the time it got to my neighborhood, I think it had just barely dropped into the F3 range.) The storm took out about 8,000 buildings, which sounds like a lot, but that’s over a sixty-mile stretch.

I am reasonably certain that another F5 would scrape my little frame house right off its slab. As it stands, though, the worst I’ve seen so far was from a hailstorm last year, which caused about $10,000 damage to the roof but left the house pretty much intact. Certainly nothing that happened then would have motivated me to move away.

Will the peasants finally be revolting?

I wonder if public support, such as it ever was, for the more intensive security practices at airports and courthouses, will begin to evaporate altogether after this. You and I know bin Laden’s now-documented assumption of room temperature doesn’t eliminate the danger, but the checkpoints and scanners and patdowns are 99% theater anyway and the improvement to safety isn’t anywhere near proportional to the extent to which it annoys people and makes them less likely to subject themselves to it.

The airlines, of course, can go perform various unnatural acts with my blessing, and perhaps yours as well. But government buildings are a different story:

A free country in which people are discouraged from attending public trials or the meetings of legislative bodies, isn’t a free country.

Normally this is where one inserts the “or the terrorists have won” boilerplate, but I’m going to exercise a modicum of restraint. I might even refrain from sending a Maxim gift subscription to Ayman al-Zawahiri.

When it gets down to zeroes and ones, X and Y don’t matter:

Computer Science is about the flow of information, especially as represented in binary form. There are precisely zero hormones involved. If it happens that fewer daughters are inclined toward the study, Then So Be It. If I ever have a daughter who wants to hack, I’ll cheerfully do a Linux From Scratch project with her.

Having hung out a lot on Slashdot before drifting into blogging, I can say that the gender bias actually favors any interested women. Actual skillz demonstrated will crush the occasional bit of chauvinism.

Having seen such skillz in action, I must concur. When Trini left us for warmer, or anyway more sanitary, climes, she won a promotion over several hardware guys for the simple reason that she was better at it and could prove it. For that matter, she was better at it than I was. And being more interested in getting the job done than in finding ways to prop up my ego, I had no problem deferring to her judgment. I suspect that the men she passed on the ladder have gotten used to it by now — and too bad if they haven’t.

Young Naturists and Nudists of America will be holding a Booze N Schmooze on Saturday night, May 14, “9:30pm-2ish,” in the Financial District.

The dress code:

Enough clothes to get yourself there! Just make sure you don’t go naked on the subway. They don’t like that.

The thought of being nude on any form of mass transit, with the possible exception of a private rail car, tends to push my squick buttons. Still, I have to wish them well, and I hope that wherever they land, the A/C isn’t cranked up to the max.

(From Refinery29 via this TravelingAnna tweet.)

The Sacramento Kings, next year, will be called — the Sacramento Kings:

The Sacramento Kings will remain in town for at least one more season to give Mayor Kevin Johnson a chance to follow through on his promise of a new arena.

The Kings had been considering a move to Anaheim, Calif., after several failed efforts to build a new arena in Sacramento, but they decided to give Johnson one more shot.

“The mayor of Sacramento has told the NBA relocation committee that he will have a plan for a new arena within a year,” co-owner Joe Maloof said Monday. “If not, the team will be relocated to another city.”

State government has no money, but announced they’d step up to help:

Four California lawmakers, including the leader of the state Senate, sent a letter to NBA Commissioner David Stern last week pledging to work with local leaders over the next year to try to build a sports and performing arts complex to replace the Kings’ outdated arena.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat from Sacramento, said he would use his clout to make sure his district gets its share of state bond money that could go to build the complex.

Personally, I think Lakers owner Jerry Buss ought to kick in a few million: the longer he can keep the Kings from moving to Anaheim, the more his cable-TV contract with Time Warner will be worth.

Andrew Ian Dodge, declared candidate for the Senate, knows he can’t just breeze into the seat — which is a shame, since the title of the current Carnival of the Vanities, the 419th, suggests that there’s a gale going on.

Far from Dodge’s perch in Maine is the Roanoke Valley of Virginia, where Lewis Gale Physicians operates a clinic on Route 419.

(Sorry to disappoint those of you who were expecting aspersions to be cast upon Nigerian scammers.)

María Celeste Arrarás hosts a daily Telemundo program called Al Rojo Vivo, which means, more or less, “Red Hot.” It’s technically a reference to the news being covered, not the person covering it, but you couldn’t prove it by me:

At eleven, she won three medals at the seventh Central American and Caribbean Swimming Championship; a case of mononucleosis kept her out of the Olympics. And that’s the 1976 Olympics; she was born in 1960. You can do the math if you like.

So the game plan seemed to be this: confine Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol, and otherwise let the chips fall. Inasmuch as Z-Bo and Marc came up with fifty-odd points on Sunday, this made a whole lot of sense on paper, but the hard part would be actually delivering. Not a problem: with six and a half minutes left, the Thunder were up by 21, and while the Griz weren’t about to let that go unanswered — Memphis went on a 22-7 run to close to within six — Randolph and Gasol were held to 28, mostly from the charity stripe. (Between them, they shot 5-22.) So the Thunder even the series at 1-1 with a 111-102 win, with God knows what kind of street fight looming at the FedEx Forum Saturday night.

Mike Conley, noting that he wasn’t getting much attention, responded with a barrage of treys and long twos, finishing 10-15 with 24 points. And O. J. Mayo, apparently becoming used to his new sixth-man role, led the Griz bench with 16. Memphis did some serious rebounding — 38, 13 offensive, versus 34/7 — and collected 17 points from 16 Thunder turnovers. But they had sixteen of their own, giving up 20 points.

The Thunder somehow shot 52.8 percent, despite taking seven fewer shots than the Griz; even more inexplicable, they hit eight of 14 treys. (Eric Maynor got three of them; the only one he missed was a midcourt last-second shot to end the first half.) Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook showed a little more efficiency tonight, 17 of 38 for their 50 points, but the bench picked up 48 points, about three times what they got on Sunday. James Harden, despite not hitting the long ball, still rolled up 21.

So there will be a Game 5 at the Round Barn. But two games in Memphis come first, and Memphis crowds, now that Memphis has crowds, can be quite intimidating. We shall see.

Sister Wolf finds some Tumblr profiles in which people describe themselves as “eccentric,” and that’s just wrong:

My feeling is, you don’t describe yourself as eccentric. That’s a conclusion made about you by someone else. It just seems unseemly. Like calling yourself ‘classy,’ it’s kind of a self-negating word.

Indeed.

Naturally my husband failed to see the problem. I explained that actual eccentrics would not describe themselves as such. They tend to take no notice of how odd they are, but rather to find others baffling. The most eccentric people I’ve ever known would never describe themselves that way. Therefore, almost by definition, these self-described eccentrics are just being pretentious.

Now while I was growing up — perhaps this was a regional variation — people were dubbed “eccentric” if (1) they met the criteria for eccentricity and (2) they were tolerably well-off; “eccentric” plus “impecunious” equaled “weird,” or worse. Describing oneself as eccentric, however, was simply not done; instead, the, um, wackjob would point to his “eclectic interests,” and if he invoked the old square-peg metaphor, his intonation would drip with contempt for those mundane old holes, round as they were. So “pretentious” does seem to fit.

Which leaves me without a word for me, but I figure that if I need one, all I have to do is ask.

Update: Minor insertions here and there, but mostly there.

Mark Alger proposes a most timely new drink:

The Osama: two shots and a splash.

Badump-bump.

What, too soon?

Motor Trend’s Jonny Lieberman, on a vehicle I have yet to see in the flesh sheet metal:

I was in New York when Caddy revealed the CTS-V Sport Wagon last year. I remember popping my head inside the vehicle, spying the six-speed manual, turning to a P.R. flack, and saying, “A manual? Are you nuts? You’re going to sell 17 of these.” His straight-faced reply: “Oh, 17 would be great — we’re projecting four.”

This wouldn’t be the lowest-selling version of a production model by any means, but it seems just slightly disheartening — until it dawns on me that if the supply is that limited, more than perfunctory demand will force the transaction price up a bit.

“In groups, with children, or by themselves,” says Julie, “women are often weird with food,” and she offers this example:

A woman came in to get something to eat, a woman who seems to be successful, confident, attractive, and lacking in the ever-growing typical princess-diva behavior. She was mature and put-together and came up to the counter and looked at what was available and flatly stated that she’d just have a sandwich because, she said as she gestured to the desserts, she didn’t deserve it.

She didn’t deserve it?

What does one have to do to deserve a brownie? Are there brownie prerequisites?

I suppose the most obvious question is “Was she wearing L’Oréal?”

Being neither mature nor put-together, I spotted a brownie at the bakery section of the supermarket, a brownie about the size of an iPad. Five bucks. Took me half a week to finish it off. Did I deserve such a thing? Probably not. Am I going to agonize over that? Just until the end of this sentence.

My own dentist has not quite advanced to this stage just yet:

At my dentist’s office, there’s now a full-time person there whose entire job appears to be discussing your bill and how you “wish” to pay for it. I don’t have dental insurance, but from what I hear, insurance pays only a pittance (if that) for most procedures anyway.

After years of doing without, I broke down, so to speak, and bought a dental policy. It covers two annual cleanings, except for the fluoride treatment I usually get, on the basis that I’m too old for that sort of shenanigans; the dentist himself has quipped that if all you need is routine maintenance, the insurance costs more than the treatments. I really haven’t sat down to figure out exactly how much is paid for each type of service, though as is usually the case with health insurance, there’s a maximum price, of which they will pay some defined fraction. Still, the uninsured, to some extent, subsidize the insured, since that maximum price doesn’t apply to folks without the magic plastic card.

GPS manufacturer TomTom seems to have run up against the Law of Unexpected Consequences:

Users of TomTom GPS navigation systems unwittingly helped government officials identify locations where speed cameras would issue the maximum number of citations.

TomTom’s latest units feature a SIM card that enables two-way communication with a central server. The idea is to have millions of users transmit real-time speed and location data to a central server creating an up-to-the-minute picture of traffic conditions. This allows other users to know where jams are occurring and allows the navigation device to route around trouble spots.

TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn was apologetic:

We learned today that police in The Netherlands are using that information to identify road stretches where people in general and on average are driving too fast. They use that also to put up speed cameras and speed traps. And we don’t like that because our customers don’t like it. We will prevent that type of usage of our data in the future.

Viewers of Goddijn’s video have been generally unsympathetic to the company. Said one:

I understand that the collection of data for advancing GPS technology, travel times, and route optimization is VERY valuable, but what is much more valuable is the trust of your customers, which you lost, plain and simply, by being greedy, and playing both sides of the fence. All TomTom devices have already been replaced in my home, and the terrible iphone app has been deleted. Now please, take a hike.

And this was found in TomTom’s 2010 annual report [pdf]:

Concerns about privacy may result in users choosing not to employ all of the features of our product. If these or other public opinion issues arise in connection with our products or across the industry, our business, our brand, results of operations or financial condition could be materially adversely affected.

Can I get a “duh”?

It’s the Japanese who have come up with this remote-smooch device:

The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo has unveiled its latest invention: a robotic tongue that lets you kiss people over the Internet.

Well, not everyone. (Not that you’d want to, particularly.) Like Star Trek’s transporters, the first is useless until there’s a second one:

Designed for “communication in the mouth”, the invention consists of a motion-sensing receptacle that records your tongue’s movements. The saucy information is then transmitted across the Internet to a corresponding machine in your partner’s mouth.

Theoretically, I suppose, it could be placed, um, elsewhere; or, as SteveF says: “[D]ifferent strokes for different folks. And, speaking of strokes, I wonder when the obvious next step will be taken.”

The Space Pope was not available for comment.

Another find from the Zappos.com heat map, this is “Rachel” by Ara:

Half a dozen colors are available, including something called “lava,” but this is the beige suede/sort-of-crocodile version. For some reason, I read this as the shoe for a woman who wants to look like she plays golf without having to suffer the indignity of actually showing up at the first hole. At an inch and three quarters, it’s not exactly flat, but it’s not going to tilt you forward at an alarming angle either.

Reasons why I looked at this shoe: (1) I wanted to see what it costs, which is $145; (2) I wanted to see if it had anything to do with Ara Parseghian, which it doesn’t.

Why do we have all these twentysomething pundits? Because a bunch of sixtysomethings can’t let go of the past:

The ’60s generation remembers when the pronouncements of “youth leaders” like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd were taken very seriously and so, now ensconced in executive positions, they keep looking for the next generation of “youth leaders.”

You want to slap them and say, “Hey, wake up: The Sixties sucked!”

What really sucked, of course, was that the likes of Hayden and Rudd were taken seriously. Hoffman, at least, had a sense of the theatrical; it’s no accident that Sacha Baron Cohen was originally cast as Hoffman in Steven Spielberg’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, currently on an extended holiday in Development Hell.

Eventually, we’re supposed to put away childish things. I can’t claim to be entirely successful in so doing, though I have gotten myself to the point where if someone says “Chicago Seven” I can come back with “That’s the one with ‘Wishing You Were Here,’ isn’t it?”

I have, however, a partial solution to the Baby Boomer nostalgia for its preening teenage leftism. Since the generation which followed the Boomers is universally known as Generation X, we should give the Boomers a properly-alphabetized redesignation: call them Generation W, a reference to one of their own, and see how fast they shut up.

In a fairly-blatant example of contemporary doubleplusungoodthink, California Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D-Whittier) apparently got it into his head that Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye (photo to right) is sorta hawt, and was foolish enough to say so within earshot of Senator Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa), who immediately cranked out a nastygram criticizing Calderon for saying such “harmful and detrimental” things about the Chief Justice, who’d never done anything to deserve that kind of treatment.

Good thing for Calderon that Nicole Parra ran up against term limits, say I.

TTAC’s Murilee Martin utters the dreaded M-word — malaise:

[Jimmy] Carter dared to suggest that Americans couldn’t always have everything they wanted, cheap, and for this — plus his reluctance to turn the residents of Tehran into clicks on a Geiger counter after a bunch of beardo Islamo-loons took advantage of the power vacuum resulting from the CIA’s man losing control of our oil-soaked real estate and taking US embassy personnel hostage — conventional American wisdom regards him as The Worst President Of All Time, Except For Maybe That Guy That Did The Teapot Dome Thing. The idea that things were always going to get worse took root in America sometime between Walter Cronkite revealing himself as a paid agent of Vo Nguyen Giap and a Georgia preacher getting whacked by some asshole while supporting a bunch of Memphis trash collectors; the inflation resulting from the Vietnam War’s endless kidney-shots to the federal government’s budget (and Nixon’s resulting desperation moves) coupled with the Saudis finally figuring out that they were the pushermen feeding the West’s oil jones and that withholding the sweet black horse gave them power, and Southern Californians getting sick of several hundred “shelter in place” Stage 1 Smog Alerts per year meant that, by the early 1970s, the era of cheap horsepower, chrome-and-Naugahyde-slathered luxury, and general automotive optimism was deader’n Jimi Hendrix. The muscle cars of the late 1960s were essentially marketing creations — their symbolism as mighty-fisted avengers of perceived slights against the American Way Of Life came later, during the period of Southeast Asian Conflict historical revisionism that got rolling in the mid-1980s, and if you think there’s a link between the auction value of the ’70 Chevelle SS 454 and the level of certainty of the Silent Majority that we were stabbed in the back by the media in Vietnam, you’re right — and the once-vaunted quality of Chrysler, Lincoln, and Cadillac had already begun its long drop off a cliff long before the insurance companies, the NHTSA, and the State of California ended the cheap-horsepower-and-chrome party.

On the off-chance that you don’t click over (warning: Jimmy Carter video, although it doesn’t autostart, praise heaven), be advised that the motor vehicle that incurred Martin’s wrath was a Ford Granada.

And while we’re at it, be sure to mention the word “scratch”:

A St. Paul bowling alley was evacuated this morning and the police department bomb squad was called after a man allegedly said he would set off a bomb in his backpack if he lost another game of pool, according to police.

Srinivasa Koosmann, 35, left his backpack on the landing, halfway up the stairs by the front door of Midway Pro Bowl at 1556 University Ave., said Andy Skoogman, police spokesman. The bomb squad analyzed it and determined no explosive device was inside, he said.

Skoogman — a name every bit as cool as “Koosmann” — concluded that alcohol was a factor in this incident. Gee, ya think?

Disclosure: I’m a lousy pool player after several drinks, only a few drinks, or even no drinks at all.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Must life be so gosh-darn difficult?

All I ever wanted in life was for WordPress to update both Facebook and Twitter whenever I posted new blogs. You hear that, universe? You can take back the money, the fame, the women … okay, there haven’t been that many women, but point being, this should be unbelievably simple to do! It’s just text!

I have never tried to automate FB updates, and if there’s going to be wailing and/or gnashing of teeth if I try, I can do without.

More to the point, I see the blog readers, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers as three separate audiences — although obviously there’s some overlap here and there — and I’m not sure I want to give them exactly the same stuff. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.)

One major difference: the people at whom I tweet might occasionally look at a blog post, so I duly send up (via an automated tool, natch) a “Newly posted” tweet at the appropriate moments. There are Facebook friends who have no idea that I even have a blog. And why spoil it for them at this point?

And Sunday comes afterwards, so there’s no better time to squeeze in a Rebecca Black update, right?

Three million viewers have looked at the “official video” for “Prom Night,” allegedly the follow-up single to “Friday.” By YouTube’s count, dislikes are outpacing likes by fourteen to one, a ratio not even “Friday” can touch.

Anyway, it’s bad enough that Rebecca Black herself felt compelled to denounce it as a “poser song” which she had nothing to do with. There exists a rumor that the version of “Prom Night” going around was Ark Music Factory’s demo, allegedly offered to her, but she turned it down. I’m not buying that tale either.

Green Canary’s new digs are fabulous, but there’s just this one little problem:

One of the unfortunate outcomes of my move to the B’More Big Girl Apartment is the rearrangement of my furniture and subsequent placement of my antique vanity perpendicular to my bed. This means that there is a set of mirrors — A SET OF MIRRORS! — facing my bed — FACING MY BED! — my sanctum of sheets and blankets and other body-covering fabric swaths — MY SANCTUM AND SWATHS, OMFG!

You think I’m overreacting. You think I’m making mountains of mole hills. Well, let it be known that I’m not talking about a regular ‘ol mirror, plain and simple. I’m talking MIRRORS. Plural. Three of them. At angles to each other. Catching every. little. thing. From every. which. way. Imagine Dakota-sized thighs from three different angles and you’ll start to understanding my mirror-y meltdown.

She doesn’t specify whether it’s North or South Dakota, but I get the picture. Which is one reason why I have, literally, no mirrors in the bedroom: I have no reason to want to look at me, and it’s not like I’m expecting visitors.

Decorating suggestion: That old Headless Woman carnival illusion is done with mirrors at carefully-placed angles. Perhaps a bit of geometry will hide everything this side of, say, Sioux Falls.

It goes like this: (1) shoot first; (2) ask questions later. On the question of whether Osama bin Laden was armed at the time he was taken down, Mickey Homsey says basically “Who cares?”

I would argue that it doesn’t matter one bit. Osama Bin Laden was a terrorist and arguably one of the worst this world has ever known. He has thousands of deaths attributed to him and were he to have been left alive, thousands more would have died. Media outlets are concerned about the “rule of law.” Well, I would submit to you that Osama Bin Laden was a law unto himself, a man who felt that the only “law” he believed in was that which he created for himself and tried to force on the rest of the world.

I, for one, have adopted the Brooksian stance, best illustrated here:

Bart: Go for your gun.
Hedley Lamarr: Wait, wait, wait. I’m unarmed.
Bart: All right, we’ll settle this like men, with our fists.
Hedley Lamarr: Sorry, I just remembered … I am armed.

I have to figure that those “media outlets” are mostly concerned with their phoney-baloney jobs.

Well, what would you call it? This is Todd Rundgren’s album of classic Robert Johnson blues:

It gets better. Before the April release of that album, a three-track teaser download was offered:

Which presumably casts a whole new light on Rundgren’s 1983 album The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect.

(I owe Brian Ibbott of Coverville for this one.)

Consumer Reports showed up yesterday, and one of the smaller articles had to do with women’s razors, which are apparently exhibiting the same sort of multiple-blade madness that men — other than yours truly, anyway — presumably enjoy. (I have stuck stubbornly to a twin-blade setup all these years, except for a brief period when I regressed to a single blade.) The progress, if progress it be:

• Gillette bolts three blades into the Venus;
• Schick responds with a feminine variation on the four-blade Quattro theme;
• Gillette upgrades Venus to “Embrace” with five blades.

The leading-edge technology, for the moment, comes from Korea and is sold by places like CVS; it has six blades. Target.com has a six-bladed razor with its own built-in supply of shaving cream, be nice and clean, shave every day and you’ll always look keen.

The CR testers, for their part, were evidently unimpressed by this constant hardware escalation.

Rainfall in these parts, since the first of the year, is running at about one-third of normal: yes, we had 19 inches of snow in February, but its actual moisture content apparently was somewhere around what you’d get from a box of moon rocks. This has had the expected effect on the lawn: the actual grass is still more or less dormant, but the weedier sections — and wouldn’t it be nice if they were actual sections instead of random outcroppings? — have more or less flourished.

So I hadn’t brought out the mower until yesterday evening. Part of that was good old fear: my knees have been most unkind to me this year, and doing the entire lawn involves a walk of a bit over a mile, plus several jumps to avoid a hundred-foot extension cord and, inevitably, a trip or two over something I didn’t see. I vowed, for this first attempt, to do just the weedier zones, which means the west side of the front yard and the east side of the back, and to do no more than half an hour’s work. I did trip once, and it wasn’t fun, but I wasn’t in any particular pain after 35 minutes or so, which should alleviate at least some of that anxiety. Downside: the conditions prevailing yesterday between 5 and 6 pm — middle 80s, 30-percent humidity — are not likely to recur in, say, mid-July.

Memphis, at the moment, is beset by rising waters, no thanks to the Mississippi River, which has been having a bit of a problem keeping within its banks lately. On the other hand, the Oklahoma City Thunder, in town for Game 3 of the Western Conference semifinals, found themselves thirsty for points in the fourth quarter: in 11:56, they scored all of ten points on 4-18 shooting — that’s 22.2 percent, kids — as what had once been a double-digit lead turned into a tie at 86-all. Zack Randolph got the last shot, but he didn’t get it to go, and the game went into overtime.

And did OKC recover from this dearth of scoring? They did not. Overtime was half gone before their first bucket — by Nick Collison, Kendrick Perkins having just fouled out — and they’d make only two more in the game. Memphis 101, OKC 93, and the Griz are up 2-1. Not what anyone expected seventeen minutes before, with the Thunder up by thirteen.

So what happened in that fourth quarter? Failure to make shots, obviously, though the Grizzlies’ defense deserves much of the credit for that; Tony Allen stuck to Kevin Durant like one of those dollar-store mouse traps. Perhaps more important, Memphis drew fouls all over the place: they put up 44 free throws and made thirty. Not a great percentage, but the Thunder, which specializes in drawing fouls, went 21-23: great percentage, but nine fewer points. Neither team shot particularly well, though OKC was a hair worse: 36.6 percent. (Only one player of the twenty who played hit more than 50 percent: Memphis guard Mike Conley, who went 8-15.) The Griz won the battle of the boards, 55-53.

Weirdly, the Forum was littered with double-doubles. Russell Westbrook had 23 points and 12 assists before fouling out; Durant managed 22 points and 12 rebounds; but you want spectacular, you go to Z-Bo, who had 21 points and 21 boards.

And let’s not characterize the Grizzlies as some sort of Cinderella team. Those aren’t glass slippers they’re using to stomp the opposition. If they win this series, I expect them to dispose handily of the Mavericks and go right into the Finals.

Back on Tuesday, I put up a photo of María Celeste Arrarás, current host of Telemundo’s Al Rojo Vivo. It did not occur to me at the time that Al Rojo Vivo, like many news-ish programs, had once had a weekend version, which was titled Al Rojo Vivo: Fin de Semana con Candela Ferro.

“Fin de semana,” of course, means “end of the week.” And who is Candela Ferro? This is Candela Ferro:

Ferro, thirty-seven, is between gigs, as they say — I didn’t see any references to current work on her Web site — but I’m willing to bet she’s a long way from being washed up.